May 8 to September 30, 2018
Avenida da República, 300
2750-475 Cascais, Portugal

Any given work by Paula Rego has an electric charge at its core. No matter how familiar one might be with the individual piece, or how long ago it was made, it remains alive and ready to shock. Folktales and Fairy Tales spans five decades, from drawings made in the 1970s found recently in a drawer to Sophie’s Misfortunes, a painting completed six months ago. This large, freely exuberant work is the fruit of a lifetime in the studio. The museum devoted to Rego’s work is in Cascais, a tranquil seaside town outside Rego’s native Lisbon. The building itself is a masterpiece by prize-winning architect Edouardo Souto de Moura, an elegant fortress in gorgeous rusty pink set among trees, its pyramidal roof structures echoing historical Portuguese palaces and monasteries.

The exhibition, curated by Catarina Alfaro and Leonor de Oliviera, is a feast of originality, with paintings, pastels, drawings, collages, and extra treats like a life-size papier maché pig in satin clothes, used as a studio prop; a collection of Rego’s exquisitely sewn grotesque figures; and the actual heavy volume of fairy tales by Charles Perrault, illustrated by Gustav Doré, which first captivated and, she has often said, terrified the artist as a child.

Brought up for a while by her grandmother and a nanny, Rego was exposed in her formative years to stories that have had a life-time’s grip on the artist’s imagination. Her parents sent her to London in her teens to get her away from Salazar’s repressive regime of ‘unquestionable certainties’ which demanded either fascist values or turning a blind eye to torture and pervasive dishonesty. In London, where she still lives, she met her future husband, the painter Victor Willing, then a star student at the Slade and friend of Francis Bacon. In an extraordinary, highly praised film made by their son Nick Willing, Secrets and Stories, Rego tells how everyone knew that all the men in Portugal went to brothels. Two piercingly good drawings of a procuress with her clients and a prostitute enjoying a rest show indolence and mercenary calculation, sleaziness and irony. Seen through Rego’s eyes, they are ultimately working women.

I asked Nick whether he thought that his father was his mother’s Muse. According to Rego, she adored and couldn’t help obeying him from the start, and when he died in 1988, aged 60, after years of suffering from multiple sclerosis, her first fear was that she wouldn’t be able to paint without him. She almost never directly drew him – although he made many beautiful nude paintings of her – but there is one portrait of him in the exhibition, sitting at a family meal. But a great deal of Rego’s work is, actually, about caring for him, and watching him being cared for by others, in paintings of strong young women vigorously dressing a limp soldier, father or brother figure, nearly suffocating him with their arms and pushing themselves up against the male figure’s crotch. And when the weak male figure is depicted standing alone with his bag, waiting to leave on a journey, he represents the dying Vic. But Nick pointed out that a female artist’s male muse is very different from, say, Picasso’s egoistic passion for a piece of flesh on the beach, and that all his mother’s work is imbued with the presence of his father and her feelings for him.

Rego’s use of myth and folktale is quite similar to Jung’s analytical approach: For both, the stories are a way to confront the self and access the unconscious. Rego’s practice is based in drawing from life. People pose for her in the studio, often having to hold extremely demanding positions. According to Nick, the living, changing presence of the model is important to her. In 1985, Lila Nunes came from Portugal as an au pair for the family. For years, she has been not only Rego’s model but a kind of alter ego. Paintings of her can be viewed, almost, as self portraits.

Snow White and her Stepmother (1995), despite its title, could as well be a procuress with her novice. Or else, in line with the original story, it could represent a jealous stepmother trying to prevent her stepdaughter from growing up. Two strong, coarse-featured women are involved in an act of strange intimacy. The more sophisticated elder, wearing a tight dress and high heels, takes charge, stooping to help the other remove, or perhaps put on, a sensible pair of white knickers. The younger one is a simpler and more compliant type—in fact it is Lila, wearing a shapeless version of the dress from Walt Disney’s “Snow White” and a child’s rumpled white socks on her large feet. Facial expressions are hard to fathom in a work charged with sexuality. Violence is in the air, but what exactly is happening is anybody’s guess.

Rego’s work defies explanation. Even the Abortion series of paintings and prints from 1998 – not included in the exhibition, these are among her most explicit and strongly focused works, made as a passionate protest against Portugal’s anti-abortion laws – extends far beyond its subject, and is intrinsically ambiguous. The small prints were easily portable and widely shown around the country, and did indeed help sway public opinion and ultimately change the law. Together with images that protest human trafficking and female genital mutilation, these are the works, according to Rego, of which she is most proud. But although they have earned her a following among feminists and human rights activists in Britain and Portugal, the crouching, writhing, agonized women she has depicted, she has observed, could as well be opening up to a lover as to the abortionist’s knife.

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February 28 to August 27, 2018
Millbank, London SW1
tate.org.uk

No matter how big the curator’s umbrella, some of the artists huddled under it in “All Too Human: Bacon, Freud and a Century of Painting Life” seem destined to slip on London‘s rain-soaked pavement. In Tate Britain’s blockbuster summer show, which revolves around London-based painters, there’s an unruly range of representational imagery. So missteps are not surprising. What is surprising is how much power huddles beneath this exhibition‘s leaky umbrella.       

One huddler is a Swiss artist who never lived in Great Britain. Why is this show’s only sculpture even here? Granted, Giacometti inspired several key players in All Too Human, but so too did many other artists who are not included. Perhaps  Woman of Venice IX (1956), whose feet are almost ten times larger than her head, kicked and stomped her way in.

There’s a high voltage figure/ground sizzle jolting many of the paintings in this show. It runs from the group of complex compositions of R. B. Kitaj, an American expatriate who lived in London for almost forty years, to the turbulent canvases of Cecily Brown, a Londoner presently living in America. A more probable justification for including Woman of Venice IX, therefore, is that she melds place and person. Textured like tree bark, earth, and rocks, she is landscape incarnate. I never thought about a standing-straight-up figure so clearly in this way before — with an earthy surface, a faraway head, a middle ground body, and foreground feet.

Giacometti’s figure-ground “Woman” stirs the center of a gallery filled with portraits by Francis Bacon. Eyeing her, a prowling, ravenous Dog (1952) growls beneath its breath and saliva. Female as food. I couldn’t decide if the erect figure was scared stiff or impervious.

Mostly, Bacon’s cast of characters are “not only far from divine but all too human,” a phrase of  Friedrich Nietzsche’s that provides this exhibition with its title. Curator Elena Crippa’s choices are often grippingly rude and unpredictable, as are some of the nonhuman subjects included here, like Bacon’s dog and a bloodthirsty baboon.

While there are no feral animals in Brown’s Teenage Wildlife (2003), two youths – the male  dressed, the female naked – peek out amidst tangled flora. The zestful rhythms juicing the painting’s skin revel forward and back, as shapes and spaces pop and recede, a marked difference in speed and spirit from Bacon’s downbeat Portrait (1962), where a physiological figure/ground flip-flop prevails. Internal organs of Bacon’s sometime muse and lover, Peter Lacey — who once, in a fit of fury, flung the artist through a plate glass window — appear outside the man’s ripped-open body.

Emotional darkness colors Jenny Saville’s Reverse (2002-03). Saville literally overturns conventions of self-portraiture. The bruises and blood — even coating her teeth — make you want to look away. But her unblinking, glassy-eyed stare is riveting. After getting used to seeing this battered, in-your-face face in magazines and on computer screens, it was good to be reminded  how overwhelming this nearly eight-foot visage can be when viewed in person.

Celia Paul’s self-portrait, Painter and Model (2012), like Saville’s Reverse, breaks from traditional, male-gaze norms in respect to its gray, utterly unflattering portrayal. We sense blood and bruises beneath the skin rather than on it. Freud’s more comely portrait of her graces the front cover of the exhibition’s catalogue.

The psychological bruise of loss is the subject of Paul’s Family Group (1984-86), painted shortly after her father’s death. Highlighted in her checker-patterned skirt, the mother looks the same age as her daughters, and there are no younger or older sisters; this is time viewed through the prism of grief and gobs of pigment.

Family crowds a small bed. Survivors on a life raft, mom anchors the middle. Each remains in her isolated space, not sharing so much as a glance or word. Yet the group feels closely knit, drawing aid from its strength-in-numbers union.

Many of the artists in All Too Human were good friends. Some painted one another. Lucian Freud and Celia Paul were lovers. Others enjoyed a teacher/student relationship: Sickert taught Bomberg; Bomberg taught Auerbach and Kossoff; William Coldstream taught Paula Rego, Euan Uglow, and Michael Andrews; Freud taught Paul. It’s an impressive litany of begat-ing, biblical-sounding lineage. Yet, while friends like Auerbach and Kossoff are of like mind, brush, and chops, how they relate to the brilliant Sir Stanley Spencer and Walter Richard Sickert, or the lesser lights of F.N. Souza, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, and the one photographer in the show, John Deakin, beats me.

I appreciate that Auerbach and Kossoff were inspired by (among many others) the Belarus-born Soutine, who lived his adult life in Paris — never in Great Britain. Was he Giacometti’s plus-one? Or vice versa? Neither RSVP’ed. Either way, for me, these great artists are welcome party-crashers.

This show boasts a trove of first-rate works by first-rate artists, Paula Rego and her multi-figure narrative compositions ranking high among them. They are overwhelming in scale, skill, and heart, her stories breathtaking, even as they keep us guessing.       

Despite the “figure painting” way All Too Human is being promoted, there are numerous still lifes, as well: Examples by William Coldstream and Euan Uglow stand out. So too do the landscapes and (rainy) cityscapes of painters who seem not only to have traded in their smocks for raincoats, but their brushes for shovels, slathering simple recognizability into scabrous mystery in the process.        

Accordingly, the subject of  much critical attention is what Freud said he wanted paint to work like: flesh. That’s where inside meets outside. Psychic skin. Where  figure and ground merge.

Freud’s Sleeping by the Lion Carpet (1996) is a case in point. The artist seems smitten by his model’s nuanced skin colors. We’re seduced by the sensuousness of the encrusted pigments, as well as the savage scrutiny of the painter’s scientific eye.

The dozing Sue Tilley (or Big Sue as she is also known) and the huge canvas she commands are part of a delicate public/private blend playing out in a small chair. The model looks unfazed by the queens or kings of the jungle lounging behind her like kittens on a rug. (Or are they a pair of wild beasts poised to attack a pair of gazelles?) There’s a raw beauty of raw form here, dignity free of pretense. 

While Freud’s reclining, little-footed Big Sue and Giacometti’s standing, big-footed, skinny Venetian represent different visions and looks, they share as much as they don’t. Forty years apart, both are ephemeral and earthy at once. Making their way through the museum’s rooms, they nod at other artistic sisters like Lynette Yiadom-Boakye and Celia Paul, who display little family resemblance.

Grand and idiosyncratic, this show includes all too human inconsistencies. Yet, a slew of powerful, brave, and unruly umbrella huddlers sometimes rise to realms not far from divine.

The post A Big Umbrella: “All Too Human” at Tate Britain appeared first on artcritical.

April 6 – June 18, 2011
10 River Terrace, between Murray and Barclay streets,
New York City, (212) 431-7920

Poets may be the unacknowledged legislators of the world but they also serve as the equally unacknowledged binding agents, conduits and couriers, if not social cement, of a larger culture, especially that of the visual arts. Grace of light baggage, worldly and literal; fleetness of foot and phrase; obligatory diplomacy allied to a natural penchant for poverty and sprightly sense of survival: the poet often plays a crucial, though naturally unpaid, role in the art world.

The very epitome of this position might be the life and career of Alberto de Lacerda, a Portugese poet whose friends and supporters included the widest possible swathe of painters, sculptors, publishers, editors, fellow writers and thorough bohemians, stretched across as many continents as professions. Born in Portugese Mozambique in 1928, Lacerda spent the majority of his working life in London, whilst regularly shuttling between England and America where he taught at several universities, including Boston to and Columbia.

This roaming existence traversed several particularly fertile decades of creative change, from the relative austerity of 1950s London, to the narcotic wonderland of  ‘60s America. Lacerda profited richly from these shifting times, places and mores, happily exploiting his obviously abundant talent for friendship.

Indeed, what is fascinating about the exemplary exhibition – entirely drawn from his Estate – at Poets House is the sheer range of his connections spanning such seemingly disparate cultures and cities.

Laid out in a series of vitrines is a selection of utterly delicious ephemera tracing his society trajectory, from a luncheon seating plan in the hand of Dame Edith Sitwell, along with a telegram inviting him to eat with T.S. Eliot and William Walton, to snapshots of Lacerda with such friends as Ocatvio Paz, Martha Graham and Stephen Spender.  There are manuscripts and dedicated books given to him by the likes of Anne Sexton, Robert Duncan andMarianne Moore.

On arriving in London in 1951 Lacerda began to work for the BBC but was soon publishing his own work, not least in the Times Literary Supplement.  His first book, 77 Poems, was translated in conjunction with none less than Arthur Waley, the fabled sinologist and expert on Chinese verse.

Amongst his other achievements, Lacerda drank with Dylan Thomas, introduced Fernando Pessoa to the English-speaking world, and traveled to the newly built Brasilia with its architect Oscar Niemeyer. Having, as it were, conquered postwar London, Lacerda moved in 1967 to Austin, to take up a position at the University of Texas. Here, to general surprise, not least his own, the entirely cosmopolitan sophisticate found himself equally happy, even if eventually moving back to his fabled abode at Primrose Mansions, Prince of Wales Drive where he died in 2007.

Through these peregrinations Lacerda maintained long associations with as many visual artists as writers, which thanks to these vagaries of time and place, resulted in his forming an eclectic and truly international collection, shown at its best throughout the generous length of Poets House. Part of this private collection was exhibited at the Gulbenkian in Lisbon in 1987, and its re-appearance here in Battery Park seems a fortuitous, if somewhat improbable, blessing.

Perhaps the most striking works are by two rightly celebrated Portugese women artists, Vieira da Silva and Paula Rego, both of whom are well represented here, with drawings and prints stretching from 1943 to 1997.

Likewise some of Lacerda’s more celebrated friends such as David Hockney, R.B. Kitaj, Patrick Caulfield and even Henry Miller here make their mark. But there are equally impressive works by Arpad Szenes, Pavel Tchelitchew, Victor Willing, David Jones and Alan Davie, artists all too rarely shown in New York, and now making a welcome appearance in the city entirely, ironically, thanks to their poet colleague.

A good many of these works are, naturally, images of the poet himself, including a charming parchment portrait by the late lamented Rory McEwen, but there are also portraits that Lacerda collected of other poets by other artists, among them François Villon’s Rimbaud and Manet’s Baudelaire.

And here we understand Lacerda as part of precisely such a lineage, an archetype almost, the poet who knows everyone and everything yet always lives in the shadow of the wealth that threatens his artist-friends, a sort of ‘Zelig’ of the zeitgeist. They always have archives, saving every scrap of their possible posterity, and for some reason always make collages themselves, that medium being somehow specific to every poet. Lacerda is represented by one such work from 1990. If ideal exemplars might be Mallarmé or Eluard, then Manhattan is oddly well stocked with such characters, from Charles Henri Ford to Rene Ricard and Max Blagg, collector-collagist-catalysts of the culture all.

This welcome presentation of Lacerda’s collection makes clear the sheer continuity of the poet’s place amongst artists, at least since the Romantic era, an indefinable yet vital creative presence whose continuation is devoutly to be wished.

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