ArtToday Picasso would be called a misogynist and Gauguin a paedophile. But how does it influence how we see their works?
The scope of Russia’s power in the world is often measured in terms of military might but Masters of Modern Art from the Hermitage, an exhibition now showing at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, is a fine example of the state’s soft power.
Culled from the collection of modern French painting at the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg, the exhibition represents the vision of two Moscow-based merchants, Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov. Their vision of what constitutes a modern master is – as you may have guessed – a largely male affair but, with works from artists such as Monet, Picasso, Cézanne and Matisse, there’s still plenty of space for debate. From bizarre backstories to questionable ethics, here are some notes to get you talking.
Is this painting racist?
Black Square by Kazimir Malevich
After working as a set designer on the opera Victory over the Sun in 1913, Malevich invented an approach to painting made up entirely of shapes and colours. He called this Suprematism. When Black Square was unveiled in St Petersburg two years later, the artist declared: “Up until now there were no attempts at painting as such, without any attribute of real life. Painting was the aesthetic side of a thing but never an end in itself.” Like James Joyce’s novel Finnegans Wake, Black Square poses the question: how can another work of art possibly succeed this?
The legacy of Black Square has since been upended by new technology. Using a binocular microscope, a research team at the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, which houses one of the painting’s four versions, discovered an inscription on the painting’s border that reads “Battle of negroes in a dark cave”. The team concluded that it is a reference to a 1897 work by the notorious French humorist Alphonse Allais called Negroes Fighting in a Cellar at Night. The discovery raises an ugly question about a work considered a masterpiece: is it racist? If so, what do we make of artworks that appear to us as morally repugnant?
How to be a woman in a man’s world
Prose of the Trans-Siberian Express and of Little Joan of France by Sonia Delaunay-Terk and Blaise Cendrars
Of the 66 works in the exhibition, this is the only one produced by a female artist: Sonia Delaunay-Terk. Prose of the Trans-Siberian Express is an early example of the artist’s book. Although illustrated books have been produced since the advent of the European printing press in 1440, the book as an art object came into its own in the early 20th century.
When Delaunay-Terk met the poet Blaise Cendrars in 1912, they made plans to collaborate on a “simultaneous” work that would incorporate colours and text as one. When it was published, Cendrars remarked: “Mme Delaunay has made such a beautiful book of colours, that my poem is more soaked with life than light.” The poem’s style is based on rapid changes of imagery that Cendrars believed had the power of hallucination: “Take flight / In the gaps / Whirling wheels mouths voices / And the dogs of disaster howling at our heels.” Prose unfolds vertically, accordion-like, to measure two metres long. When each of the 150 copies were laid out the idea was that it would equal the height of the Eiffel Tower, which can be glimpsed in the work’s lower left corner. The work not only contributed to revolutionising the book as a form but it’s also a highlight of Delaunay-Terk’s long overlooked oeuvre.
Please forward all correspondence to Tahiti
The Month of Mary (Te avae no Maria) by Paul Gauguin
In 1891, Paul Gauguin abandoned his family for life in Tahiti. Nine months after his arrival on the island, he wrote to his friend Georges-Daniel de Monfreid: “My life is now that of a savage.” He lived in a hut at the foot of a mountain, toward the rear of the village in Papeete, and began painting portraits of the local population, choosing almost exclusively nude or semi-clothed young women as his subjects, setting them among vivid landscapes, as in The Month of Mary (Te Avae no Maria). He took mistresses, and married a 13-year-old girl named Teha’amana, who fell pregnant to him by the summer of 1892. He also had syphilis, which he shared around.
As Geoff Dyer puts it in a hilarious essay on the artist: “Many of Gauguin’s most famous paintings are of Tahitian babes who were young and sexy and ate fruit and looked like they were happy to go to bed with a syphilitic old lech whose legs were covered in weeping eczema.” The Month of Mary shows one of these women standing by an exotic plant looking forlornly at a fruit tree. Although the painting represents Gauguin’s attempt to combine Christian motifs with elements of Buddhism, perhaps the more interesting aspect of the work is that we are seeing through the eyes of a man who would, these days, be called a pedophile. He was 44 when he married Teha’amana. How do we square this with the painting’s beauty and formal craft?
You really don’t have to like Picasso
Nude Boy by Pablo Picasso
“I don’t like Picasso, I fucking hate him,” declared comedian Hannah Gadsby in her recent Netflix special, Nanette. “He’s rotten in the face cavity. You can’t make me like him.” Gadsby takes aim at what she sees as the artist’s misogyny, particularly his affair with 17-year-old Marie-Thérèse Walter, who became pregnant with his child in 1935.
If the jury is in on Picasso’s treatment of girls and women, what of young boys? Nude Boy comes from the artist’s Rose Period, named after the heavy use of pink tones in works from 1904-1906, which variously feature clowns, harlequins and horses. The boy’s pose is reminiscent of the Greek Archaic sculpture Picasso studied in the Louvre, drawing inspiration from antiquity’s idealised figures. While there is historical precedent for depicting nudes of all ages, Picasso’s boy is striking in his prepubescence. Unlike the sculpture he’d studied, Nude Boy is drawn from a live model, meaning a child of perhaps 10 years old stood before the artist for hours, if not days. There is no evidence Picasso mistreated his model but what parent today, in our culture of paranoia around the use of nude children in artworks, would consent to have their child pose nude for a painter?
‘And here is where I keep my beef carcass…’
Self-Portrait by Chaim Soutine
Roald Dahl used Chaim Soutine as a character in his 1952 short story Skin, in which Soutine tattoos the back of a drunk old man named Drioli. It’s a macabre tale that, if included in an official biography of Soutine, could easily pass as fact.
In 1913, at the age of 20, Soutine left Lithuania for Paris to live among a group of aspiring artists in a derelict building known as La Ruche (The Beehive). He was known for starving himself to save money for materials and spent hours in the Louvre copying still-lifes of rich food he could never afford. Shortly after painting Self-Portrait in 1921, he managed to secure several large carcasses of beef from a slaughterhouse and kept them in his room until they were rotten.
The smell was so foul his neighbours called the police, fearing the artist himself may have died. Self-Portrait pictures a starving bohemian, his waifish form cloaked in the garb of a tramp. The artist’s flesh appears to have been burnt off, as if by holding his face over a small stove. Built up in heavy snarls of paint, it is the image of a deeply vulnerable man. Art critic Clement Greenberg, no fan of the artist, described his work as “more like life itself than visual art”.
Masters of Modern Art from the Hermitage is showing at the Art Gallery of New South Wales until 3 March 2019
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