Dreaming of Olympia - 5 Thomas Ostenberg bronzes at the Mint Leaf

It’s refreshing to see work that doesn’t strain for effect, is straightforward, confident and comfortable in its own skin. Ostenberg’s bronzes on show at the Mint Leaf restaurant  (Lothbury, City of London) are about joy, energy and love of life. There is humour in these pieces, and a kind of circus-like exuberance.

Two of the pieces - “Wing and a Prayer” and “Leap of Faith” - depict flying gymnastic figures suspended in a circle of bronze. What came to mind was a Classical Indian, rather than a Greek or Olympian association: the Mahabharata… “The wheel of life moves on. It has the understanding for its strength; the mind for the pole (on which it rests); the group of senses for its bonds, the five great elements for its nave, and home for its circumference”.

Perhaps ’the wheel of life’ explains why these works sit so beautifully in the surroundings of the Mint Leaf, an upmarket, funky Indian restaurant. The Ostenberg bronzes enhance the restaurant no end, and if the proprietors have any sense, they will make sure they hold on to them permanently. 

The exhibition is brought to the Mint Leaf by Fraser Kee Scott and A GALLERY, where you can find out more about the exhibition and Ostenberg’s pieces.

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Royal Academy Summer Exhibition 2009

You sir! Pass my monacle.

To assert that the Royal Academy’s long standing tradition of open submission to its Summer Exhibition is a form of democracy, as the great and good would have us believe in the meeja this week, is to adopt an essentially self-contradictory position. There’s a paradox in operation.

I say so because the actual tradition of the Academy is one of conservatism, elitism, royal and aristocratic patronage, closed shops, and negative discrimination at every possible level. It has played its part in helping to build the reputation of English art as the poor man of Europe, dragging its pallid shape along in the wake of the adventurous and spunky Europeans (and Americans in the precociously recent 20th Century). Picasso, Miro, Pollock, Richter? What, when we have the St Ives school?

At this year’s exhibition, as in the past, the jury’s chosen water colourists and acrylicists rub shoulders with established artists. What’s different is that this time around, apparently it’s funky. Flirting dangerously with the 21st Century, the Academy has drafted in Emin and Hirst, like Royalty at a cup final. Britain has globally recognised stars of the art world, and here they are. We only sing when we’re winning.

This is a good mix. It is an excellent chance to compare the output of the great engine room of English artistic output, the reality of what art is for most artists (i.e. rendering approximations of observed phenomena with paint, charcoal etc), with the work of the great conceptualists of our time. Who will come off best? What will connect, emotionally or intellectually? And what will have lasting quality?

We find ourselves at a fascinating juncture in art history, entangled as never before in the reality of the market place. It’s an entertaining scramble for the Art Quid, but let’s not pretend that democracy has anything to do with it.

The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition 2009 continues until 16th August.

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The Alloway paintings - Loving the art of the near past

Not so long ago, artists lived at the margins. From shabby studios, they produced work that was difficult and abrasive - even brutal. They shunned popularity. For to be popular, one had to conform; and to conform, one had to submit to the general will.

Questions about the nature and purpose of art seldom arose, because art was what they did, come what may. While pandering to the tastes of the mass consumer was unthinkable.

The Alloway paintings, acquired and lovingly restored by Cristus, ‘Nude with Cat’ (1969) and ‘Nude Circle’ (1971), are outstanding examples of this oppositional art. Knocked up on hardboard and skinny laths - themselves an expression of the artist’s condition - they have endured the pangs and scorn of time. Indeed, it is hard to imagine that they have ever been cared for, or displayed with pride. Yet, with the gentle easing of a spirit rag, four decades of filth make way for truths. We are struck by the artist’s thoughts, his fears, his time, his rebellion, and his unquestionable skill; but we also sense that the paintings are as vital as the moment of their conception, and that they are imbued with an integrity that is beyond question.

While other art arrives and is checked for dinks, like any other merchandise, the Alloways interfuse with the viewer. Even during restoration, they were taken from the workroom, hung on walls and examined, discussed and re-examined by us Cristusians.

In these, and in the one other painting we have seen, Alloway describes an urban, modern or near-futuristic vision. Spectral figures appear, writhing in a ring of despair in ‘Circle’, while encased in specimen jars in ‘Cat’. The nude is most present on the crimson sofa, but she too is obscured by the cat and her lower limbs are fading into pools of liquid light. Outside the glare radiates into the spaces and the figures await their fate. The resignation, alienation and loss of faith runs parallel to the themes of absurdist drama. These were the concerns of the artists of the time, and that’s why Alloway painted them. He is part of a rich tradition of British post-war avant-garde artists who have hitherto been much-undervalued. But who is this Dennis Alloway, whom, we are told, attended the Royal Academy School then disappeared from view? Please let us know.

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Folkestone Collection at the Grand

The Folkestone Collection exhibition at the Grand Hotel, on the Leas, Folkestone, is an excellent and surprising example of the treasures held by many a provincial town’s art vaults.

We get Victor Pasmore, Peter Blake, Fred Cuming and Carel Weight. A mind altering, transcendental woodcut from Monica Poole, and an early 1970’s view of modern art that is all that modernism should be – hopeful for the future , vibrant, colourful and yet systematic and full of skill and craftsmanship.

The most significant thing we get though is a mighty blow for the print against the painting. Although there are some excellent paintings to be seen, it is the prints which really caught my attention.

Peter Blake’s prints – illustrations of scenes from Alice Through The Looking Glass - are like a distillation of everything good in 1970s England. I was transported into Blake’s world, which sat so beautifully with Lewis Carroll’s. I’m no Blake expert, but these seem his best works.

Weight’s massive painting of The Poet is a thing to behold. It is a game played with perspective, colour and juxtaposition of forms. I wouldn’t be surprised if it overtly refers to the poetry of its subject.

Victor Pasmore’s abstract print is a masterpiece. It has the sureness of composition and colour of his best work.

Everyone will have their favourites from this exhibition. To happen upon it is like rolling back a mossy boulder to reveal caverns of shimmering stalagmites. As someone who believes in the transformative power of art, I can say no more than that I came away inspired, resolving to apply the same levels of care, creativity and intelligence on show at the Grand to my own work.

The pieces might have been exhibited more accessibly. The tea rooms are a nice enough setting, but many of the prints are best appreciated at very close quarters, and not across a dining table.

This exhibition is highly recommended. Hurry, it runs until 5th May, 2009.

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Tate Modern: Rodchenko and Popova

In early twentieth century Russia, two great histories intersected. Revolutionaries tried to reinvent society and what it could be. Artists redefined not only what art would look like, but its purpose and role, which until then had been to decorate the living rooms of the bourgeoisie.

Into this larger-than-life, wide-screen epic, the figures of Rodchenko and Popova enter stage left. One expects their work at Tate Modern to be on the grand scale, overwhelming in the way that something like, say, Picasso’s Guernica or Rothko’s “Colour as Subject” canvases are; which is to say, somehow beyond the normal scale of things, emerging as mythic emblems or spiritual experience from far beyond the everyday.

In some ways, neither Popova nor Rodchenko disappoint. We witness some of the very earliest realisations of art as design; of design as art; of the marriages and cross-breeding of architecture, theatre and book design and art in the service of politics. Some of the poster designs manage to capture the scope, ambition and sheer numbers involved in the Revolution and its aftermath. Not to mention that Popova’s work marked the emergence of women in the avant-garde.

And yet it is the tiny prosaic details underlying the poetry which capture the attention. Most memorably, there are the constant reminders of the materials on which both Popova and Rodchenko composed. The grain of plywood re-emerging slowly over the years, as the vibrancy of oils used to compose early geometric pieces fades away. Rough drawings on card, cardboard, scraps of paper, the fraying textiles of abstract collages. All turning to dust.

Even for intellectuals, life was hard in Revolutionary Russia. Perhaps it’s fanciful to imagine these great proponents of technology-as-art scrabbling around for something – anything – to paint on. And yet Liubov Popova’s life was short and painful. She took a year to recover from a bout of typhoid in 1919, but her husband did not. In 1924, she and her son succumbed to scarlet fever. She was thirty five years old. Vita brevis, ars slightly longa.

There is plenty to see at this exhibition. For me, the early non-objectivist painting experiments and the photography and advertising posters are the highlights. In the photographs, subjects seem to want to burst forth from the confines of the frame. In the posters, the dynamism and boldness feel like they are charged with some Revolutionary life force.

What did not work for me were the agitprop pieces, extolling the virtues of trade union membership, economic plans and the like. They left me cold not on political grounds, but on aesthetic ones. They are mirrored in tone, perhaps, by some of Rodchenko’s pronouncements writ large on the walls of the Tate. These are deadening, impenetrable, over-intellectualised statements of what (apparently) Rodchenko thought he was playing at. I came away with the feeling that he was setting up a barrier between himself and the world. Given the circumstances, perhaps it was best for a Russian artist (who was marginalised during the 1930s as Social Realism became dominant), to be on his guard. Aleksandr Rodchenko died in 1956.

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