The_Eye_of_the

VISIONS 5

Editor: D.C. Rose

Associate Editors :
Anne Anderson, Isa Bickmann, Tricia Cusack, Nicola Gauld, Charlotte Ribeyrol, Sarah Turner.
Hon. Advisor : Síghle Bhreathnach-Lynch

SUMMER 2009

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IN THE EYE OF THE CRITIC

Views and Reviews

Reviews Editor: Tricia Cusack @

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Anne Anderson on Judith Nieswander on Cosmopolitan Interiors
Isa Bickmann on Darwin and Art in Frankfort
Isa Bickmann on Munch in Frankfort
Tricia Cusack on Sickert in Venice in Dulwich
Glyn Newman on the Czech Fin De Siècle at The National Gallery in Prague

Tricia Cusack

SICKERT IN VENICE

Sickert in Venice was the title of an exhibition at Dulwich Picture Gallery (March – June 2009) curated by Robert Upstone, Curator of Modern British Art at Tate Britain, and of the accompanying catalogue, also by Upstone. Sickert is usually identified with the Camden Town paintings, so this emphasis on another phase of his painting in both exhibition and catalogue was important. His pictures of Venice resulted from a series of visits there between 1895 and 1904 and are interesting in their own right, as well as important preparation for the later work.

The Dulwich exhibition showed Sickert’s paintings of Venice together for the first time, arranged under three headings, ‘Views and Vistas’; ‘Nocturnes’, and Portraits and Figures’. The exhibition also provided an opportunity to see the picture-frames, which are diverse and often elaborately decorated. Sickert completed many of these oil paintings in Venice and further paintings in London and Dieppe based on drawings from Venice (Upstone, 2009: 9). The catalogue includes 56 of Sickert’s Venice paintings and drawings organised under the same three themes as the exhibition. It has a scholarly biographical essay on ‘Sickert in Venice’, with copious notes, including short sections on topics such as ‘the Artist as Ethnographer’ and ‘Photography’. There is an introductory page for each of the three thematic sections of paintings and drawings. The catalogue has an index and a ‘selected bibliography’. My only quibble here is that it would be useful to have a fuller list of sources: bibliographies in catalogues are too often abbreviated.

Sickert chose to focus on Venetian architecture, not figures, in his visits between 1895 and 1901 (Upstone 2009: 72). He did open-air studies in oil in Venice, although, like his friend Degas, he was not an advocate of plein air painting (Gruetzner Robins, 1988: 229). During his visit in 1903, rain and flooding drove Sickert first to don fishermen’s waders, then to give up and move indoors, when he took two local working-class women as his subject-matter (Upstone 2009: 110).

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Fig. 1: Interior of St Mark’s © Trustees of Dulwich Picture Gallery

One of the most interesting of the architectural pictures displayed is the Interior of St Mark’s (1896, oil on canvas, 69.8x49.2cm, Tate Gallery London) (Figure 1). He painted this before the subject probably without studies, and the low viewpoint suggests he was seated (Upstone 2009: 16). Sickert told Philip Wilson Steer that he was working inside on this occasion because of the cold. However, he did have particular ambitions for the painting, and advised Steer that his approach was based on Steer’s own: ‘To see the thing all at once. To work open and loose, freely, with a full brush and full colour. And to understand that when, with that full colour, the drawing has been got, the picture is done’ (quoted in Upstone 2009: 16). The ‘full colour’ in fact consists of a very muted set of browns, tans, dark orange and small dabs of white, producing the impression of a dark interior. A cross is adumbrated in orange and a small white patch stands for a window. The pale orange lines of the arches and three deep recesses give it its architectural character.

St Mark’s, Venice (Pax Tibi Marce Evangelista Meus) (c1895-96, oil on canvas, 90x120cm), by contrast, looked rather lifeless, more drawn, linear and programmatic. The picture of St Mark’s, Venice (1895, oil on canvas, 100x151cm) similarly came across as a large, linear and rather lifeless facade. In the canal paintings, the view is often dominated by a building or buildings, with little vista, and the building is often quite close to the base of the canvas, so that the area of water is reduced; skies tend to be rather uniform with little impression of cloud or wind.

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Fig. 2: Piazzetta di San Marco © Trustees of Dulwich Picture Gallery

Sickert’s pictures are more interesting when he includes figures, and one of my favourites here is the Piazzetta di San Marco (1900, oil on canvas, 40.7x50.8cm, Laing Art Gallery, Tyne & Wear Museums) (Figure 2). This shows his model La Giuseppina, a Venetian prostitute, crossing St Mark’s Square at dusk (Upstone 2009: 9, 30). She is cut off in the corner of the frame, Degas-like, which gives a sense of movement to the scene. The painting has rich colouring, with a splash of red in a flag and pink hues on the ground and also in the sky (a unifying technique of Monet’s); the red is picked up in La Giuseppina’s lipstick and the skirt of another figure behind. The wide space of the square, with figures concentrated in the corner is another technique employed by Degas from the 1870s. The painting was classified as a ‘Nocturne’ in the exhibition and the catalogue. Sickert was the assistant and pupil of James McNeill Whistler, who had employed the term ‘nocturne’ to suggest that painting, like music, should dispense with narrative. However, while Piazzetta di San Marco may lack an explicit narrative, the active presence of the figures none the less suggest the possibility. As Andrew Causey observed of Sickert’s painting, ‘the subjects are often caught in the middle of actions, there is a sense of time passing, of people having just done something and being about to do something else’ (Causey, 1987: 16).

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Fig. 3: Two Women on a Sofa – Le Tose © Trustees of Dulwich Picture Gallery

Some of the most striking, and also most disturbing, paintings under the rubric of Portraits and Figures are of solitary women, or pairs of women. A pair of portraits of 1903-04, each with the title Mamma Mia Poveretta (‘My Poor Mother’) are unsettling. One, owned by Manchester City Galleries, shows a solitary elderly lady, depicted as deeply unhappy, the floral or sun-like motifs on her headscarf contrasting with the bleak airlessness of her garb and surrounding. In the other portrait, in private ownership, the face has taken on an inhumanly skull-like appearance. In Two Women on a Sofa – Le Tose (c.1903-04, oil on canvas, 45.7x53.3cm, Tate Gallery) (Figure 3), the representation of the individual figures is played off against the patterning of stripes and the focus on sudden bright colour like the yellow skirt shining from a muted environment. The faces of the figures are obscured, and dehumanised, in dabs and stripes of pink and rose paint.

The idea of grouping Sickert’s Venice paintings was justified by his persistent use of the place and the variety of his work there, and it is a useful counterbalance to the more usual representations of his output and interests. Upstone’s catalogue remains a well-researched and most helpful reference for this enterprise.

· Tricia Cusack is part of the Culture, Society and Communication programme team in the School of Languages, Cultures, Art History and Music at the University of Birmingham. She also supervises postgraduate students in the Department of History of Art. Her research focuses on the intersections of visual culture and the construction of national identity in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Tricia co-edited Art, Nation and Gender: Ethnic landscapes, myths and mother-figures (Ashgate) with Síghle Bhreathnach-Lynch and has published various book chapters, and numerous articles in journals including Art History, Visual Culture in Britain, National Identities, and Nations and Nationalism. Her book Riverscapes and National Identities will be published by Syracuse University Press in December 2009.

References

Causey, Andrew. 1987. ‘Formalism and the Figurative Tradition in British Painting’, in British Art in the 20^th Century: The Modern Movement edited by Susan Compton, London: Royal Academy of Arts, pp. 15-30.

Gruetzner Robins, Anna. 1988. ‘Degas and Sickert: Notes on their friendship’, The Burlington Magazine vol. 130, no. 1020, pp. 225-9.

Upstone, Robert. 2009. Sickert in Venice Dulwich Picture Gallery and Scala Publishers Ltd.

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Glyn Newman

PASSAGES TO BLINDNESS AND THE INFINITE: KUPKA, BÍLEK AND THE CZECH FIN DE SIÈCLE IN THE NEW INTERPRETATION OF CZECH MODERN ART AT THE NATIONAL GALLERY IN PRAGUE.

The recently reorganised collection of Czech modern art at the National Gallery in Prague represents a new development in the interpretation of the permanent exhibition at the Trade Fair Palace (Veletržní palác) premises. Since it was reopened in 1995, this functionalist exhibition venue, designed by Oldrich Tyl and Josef Fuchs (1924-28), has notoriously presented problems for the curators of the collection, which includes examples of nineteenth and twentieth century Czech and French art, and other international art of the twentieth century. Critics have frequently highlighted the disadvantages of the exhibition space, and a particular concern has been how curators should reconcile the chronology of Czech modernism and its stylistic classifications with the vast and monolithic floor-levels of the building.[1]

Such difficulties may explain the three distinct changes which have affected the exhibition of Czech modern art at the site. Originally, the display encompassed the period 1900-1960 and occupied the third and fourth floors of the gallery. Later, when the collection of nineteenth century Czech art was moved from the St Agnes Convent site and onto the fourth floor, the third floor became reclassified as Czech art 1900-1930. In the recent reorganisation, the nineteenth century collection was given a new home at the Convent of St. George at Prague Castle with its exhibits encompassing the period 1790-1910. The third and fourth floors of the Trade Fair Palace now house the new exhibition of Czech art from 1890-1930, retaining the work of those Czech artists of the latter part of the nineteenth century considered to be of crucial importance for the development of modernist trends in Bohemia in the early twentieth century.

Thus, the exhibition begins on the fourth floor with a comprehensive selection of work by important precursors of early Czech modernism. These include representatives of landscape painting (Julius Mařák (1832-1899) and Antonín Chittussi (1847-1891)), Realism (Soběslav Hippolyt Pinkas (1827-1901) and Viktor Barvitius (1823-1901)), Neo Romanticism (Maximilien Pirner (1854-1924) and Jakub Schikaneder (1855-1924)), sculpture (Josef Václav Myslbek (1848-1922)) and the commonly acknowledged ‘fathers’ of Czech modern art, Josef Mánes (1820-1871) and Mikuláš Aleš (1852-1913). The exhibition evolves subsequently in a loose chronology, encountering the voices of the Czech fin de siècle until reaching what has been highlighted as the focal point of the entire collection, the work of František Kupka (1871-1957). It then progresses to the third floor to the displays of work by Czech artists who appropriated the dominant visual styles of the first decades of the twentieth century.

The reorganised exhibition is billed as: ‘a turning point, presenting a new view of’ and able to ‘facilitate new ways of looking at’ Czech art of the turn of the century.[2] This review focuses predominantly on the fourth floor displays. It gives an overview of the thematic concerns and key personalities of this part of the exhibition. It will discuss the effectiveness of the positioning of Kupka’s work in the exhibition and it will also propose that the display of the work Jan Preisler (1872-1918) and of the sculptor František Bílek (1872-1941) play a crucial role in the organisation and interpretation the fourth floor exhibits.

Since Kupka’s work commands the final area of gallery space on the fourth floor it is tempting to read this as both a reflection on all that has come before and as a preface to what will be encountered next. This proposition does not function chronologically. Indeed, representative works by Kupka from early twentieth century Symbolism, such as The Passage of Silence (1903) to reductive abstract works of the 1930s like Abstract Painting (1930) are shown here as steps in one evolutionary strand of Czech modernism in the visual arts, before the viewer encounters contemporaneous Czech engagements with Expressionism, Cubism and Social Realism on the floor below. Thus, the curators acknowledge Kupka’s remoteness from Prague-based avant-garde groupings such as the Expressionist Osma (The Eight) and the Cubist Skupina (The Group). Kupka had remained resolutely in Paris since the beginning of his exile in 1896. He never returned to live in his home country. Moreover, his work is pretty much unique in the context of Czech modern art. Indeed it might be suggested that his sometimes fanatical pursuit of creative autonomy which isolated him not just from Prague, but also from other artists in the Puteaux colony in Paris was partly responsible for this sense of uniqueness.

Perhaps it is for this reason that whilst the curators propose Kupka as a remarkable Czech and international voice of early twentieth century modernism, they place him on the fourth floor, implying that his connection to the Czech scene is rooted more in the late nineteenth century than in the twentieth century. Consequently, they have emphasised Kupka’s affinity with Symbolist and Secessionist trends rather than Parisian Cubism as being critical to his pioneering role in the development of abstract painting. In part, this decision conforms to what might have once been called a specifically ‘Czech’ reading of Kupka and his relationship not only to the Parisian scene, but to French art generally.[3] The ‘Frenchness’ or ‘Czechness’ of Kupka has been hotly debated and it is perhaps telling that the exhibition organisers remind us: ‘Kupka was above all a Czech artist’.[4]

Nevertheless, as a Czech artist, Kupka was typical in drawing inspiration from the Parisian art scene. He was also typical in his valorisation of Paris and his disparagement of Vienna, a view shared by contemporary critics such as S. K. Neumann (1875-1947), Karel Čapek (1890-1938) and Míloš Jiránek (1875-1911).[5] Indeed, moving through the fourth floor galleries the engagement by Czech artists with French modernist currents is frequently apparent. One might cite the influence of French Post-Impressionism and urban realism on the work of Antonín Slavíček (1870-1910) and Miloš Jiránek respectively, or French Symbolism on the work of Jan Preisler (1872-1918), a direct contemporary of Kupka. However, this engagement has a complex history and represents only part of the appropriation and synthesis of a range of influences which actually characterised the development of Czech art in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and had Czech artists often in a state of critical self-reflection about the place of a ‘home grown’ Czech art in an international context.

Any assessment of the artists exhibited in the early stages of the fourth floor display reveals the dominant role played by cultural centres other than Paris in the development of modern art in Prague, especially Vienna and Munich. Inevitably, this tradition continued into the twentieth century both directly, as artists embraced the transnational character of modernism, and indirectly as a younger generation of Czech artists looked back for influence to their own nascent modernist tradition. Indeed, by the time visitors have reached the work of Preisler and his contemporaries, there is a sense in which an important phase of resolution and introspection has been reached by this generation. Thus the viewer might be prompted to reflect on the figurative bronzes of Josef Mařatka (1874-1937) in relation to Myslbek’s work, or the work of Slavíček in relation to Mařák’s or Chittussi’s landscapes. In so doing, what becomes most apparent is the increasing psychological intensity expressed in the work of the younger generation. Slavíček’s The Mood of the Birchwood (1897) or Antonín Hudeček’s (1872-1941) Evening Silence (1900) subvert their indebtedness to French Impressionism by presenting the landscape as a means to convey subjective and psychological states, acknowledging perhaps the specific influence of Alois Riegl’s (1858-1905) writing and Central European Secessionist trends generally.

The relatively large selection of Preisler’s work is almost as dominant in its mid-way position on the fourth floor as Kupka’s work is in the final area of the exhibition space. These paintings produce an important point of reference for many works encountered previously or exhibited in the immediate vicinity, and which to some extent are subordinated to Preisler’s vision. For example, it is tempting to interpret Hudeček’s Evening Silence with its depiction of a lake and solitary figure, through the filter of Preisler’s Black Lake ‘series’ which the artist commenced some three years after Hudeček’s painting. Moreover, on encountering Kupka’s Piano Keys – Lake (1909) in the final part of the exhibition, one is again drawn back to Preisler. However, Preisler’s work though authoritative in its handling of fin de siècle thematic and stylistic trends seems trapped in a position of reflection in relation to the nineteenth century. Whilst Kupka found a way forward from the anxieties present amongst artists of the Czech fin de siècle, Preisler’s response to the stagnation which he felt characterised Czech art at that time was to cease exhibiting in his home country and work in relative isolation until his untimely death in 1918.[6]

Arguably, this is why it is not Preisler who leads the viewer into the final sections of the exhibition, but the sculptor Františěk Bílek. Bílek’s work is displayed in such a way that it forms a physical conduit which takes the viewer from those works informed by the competing philosophical attitudes of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century towards the new narratives which were to establish the equally diverse trends of early twentieth century modernism in the Czech context. It is therefore Bílek in this interpretation of Czech modern art whose work, perhaps more so than Kupka’s, presents a Janus face looking both backwards to what he considered to be a spiritually bankrupted nineteenth century and forwards, blindly and perhaps hopelessly to the twentieth century.

Hence, before entering the area devoted to Bílek’s work proper, one first encounters his three-metre tall Amazed (1907) which in the context of the exhibition space faces the past. The work depicts a figure robed in an Egyptian loincloth clutching his head while apparently succumbing to a source of energy that rains down from above. The sense of saturation and absorption of energy is arguably intensified by the repeated lines which scour the body of the figure from head to foot. In the relatively small space devoted to Bílek’s work which follows, a collection of figurative sculptures read as a physical embodiment of fin de siècle anxieties about the future both on a personal, universal and national level expressed predominantly through Christian metaphors of suffering and retribution.

The Parable of the Decline of Bohemia (1898) for example, visualises a prostrate, half-naked female figure at the feet of a broken statue of Christ. As a personification of the nation this was in marked contrast to conventional symbolism which had developed in the period of burgeoning Czech national self-confidence in the second half of the nineteenth century, when artists commonly portrayed mythological national heroines as robust classical goddesses.[7] Here she appears to have fallen from flight – cold and powerless, the detached arm of Christ’s statue appearing to have crashed down beside her, the hand still pierced with a nail. Thus, while a sense of national revivalist optimism may have been carried through by some artists into Secessionist trends at the end of the century and beyond - and one thinks of Mucha’s treatment of the mythological goddess Slavia (1907) which can be viewed earlier on the same floor – Bílek’s ‘heroine’ is destitute in an environment where religious faith has apparently collapsed through neglect and where salvation appears impossible.

In 1898, the Czech critic S. K. Neumann described Bílek as a ‘sad anachronism’ working in an environment where faith is dead and gone.[8] Arguably, this sense of hopelessness is personified by the two figures in Bílek’s sculpture The Blind (1902) which effectively ends the display of his work and leads the viewer into the final exhibition space. As a foil to Amazed, the figures here ‘look’ to the future. The positioning of the piece at the point where the gallery space opens up to display the phalanx of Kupka’s work along an entire wall works well. The male figure appears to reach forward into a metaphorical space of future uncertainty while his female companion clutches a lyre. Alongside them a Maxim machine gun[9] is also displayed and aimed menacingly in the same direction. The implication one assumes is that the future of art will be eclipsed inevitably and disastrously by global conflict.

Although Kupka’s progression to abstraction is presented as one trajectory of Czech modernism, it is one of a number heralded by Bílek’s The Blind. Indeed, the almost dogged certainty of Kupka’s development is countervailed by a group of large paintings by Karel Myslbek (1874-1915) (the son of J V Myslbek) hung on the opposite side of the room. Hitherto relatively underplayed in discussions of Czech modern art, Karel Myslbek delivers a far less celebratory response to his homeland than is apparent in the work of his father. These paintings are dark and melancholic, part socially concerned, part disquietingly expressionistic, and consequently they question Kupka’s apparently insatiable commitment to celebrating the joy of life. However, the curators have addressed the fact that Kupka’s position was not so straightforward. Some examples of his satirical print series L’argent (1902) for the anarchist publication L’assiette au beurre are also displayed and show that his journey from Symbolism into abstraction was as much propelled by political radicalism as it was by an esoteric and meditative quest for spiritual enlightenment and the expression of the cosmic infinite.

It is fitting therefore that these illustrations are placed on the opposite side of the gallery space to those Symbolist and Fauvist works of Kupka which ultimately gave way to full-blown abstraction in 1911. What is more, some resonant visual connections can be made between Kupka’s illustration Liberté and The Passage of Silence. The Sphinxes occupy a similar position to the bloated capitalist, and the hordes of workers shepherded at gunpoint to the factories give way to the solitary wanderer in search of spiritual calm. Furthermore, Kupka’s Colossus in his The Colossus of Rhodes (1906) shares the gesture of the central figure in Bílek’s, The Blind. The fact that such connections can be made is evidence of some careful and imaginative consideration by the exhibition curators, binding together aspects of the exhibition thematically and also allowing the viewer to step outside a strictly chronological engagement with the exhibits.

Alongside Karel Myslbek, a number of independent voices also find representation, including the Expressionist works of Jindřich Prucha (1886-1914), Jan Štursa’s (1880-1925) reworking of the themes of late nineteenth century Symbolist sculpture, and Josef Váchal’s (1884-1969) radical exploration of Catholic mysticism. Later in the room one encounters the semi-abstract paintings of Alois Bílek (1887-1961), reflecting the possible influence of Kupka, and finally František Drtikol’s (1881-1961) photographic nudes which bear comparison compositionally to Alois Bílek’s work. Whilst this assortment of artists is informative, it might also represent a missed opportunity to explore in more depth the darker aspects of late Czech Symbolism. Greater representation of those artists who responded to occultist aspects of religion could have played off the optimism of Kupka’s non-eclesiastical vision of spiritual fulfilment more powerfully. The work of these artists would have also referred back to František Bílek in an exploration of the spiritual undercurrents which influenced Czech art of this period. For example, the philosophical connections and disconnections between Váchal and Bílek in the context of Catholic mysticism might have informed the display of Váchal’s work. Moreover, Váchal is separated from his Sursum[10] colleague Jan Zrzavý (1890-1977) who is exhibited on the third floor. One wonders whether Zrzavý’s treatment of the crucifixion theme in Antichrist (1909) would not have been better placed in this context, alongside Prucha’s Crucifixion (1912) and in close proximity to Bílek’s exploration of the same theme in sculpture.

Such observations are little more than minor criticisms, and are arguably evidence that the new exhibition is able to provoke critical responses and a range of interpretations from the visitor. This bodes well for the new exhibition. The recent changes at the Trade Fair palace are part of a widespread reorganisation of all the permanent collections of the National Gallery in Prague. Although demonstrating a willingness to continually rethink the interpretation of Czech art generally through the National Gallery exhibition spaces, such changes may have also reflected a degree of indecisiveness and lack of clarity in how best to approach the appropriate presentation of these collections to a domestic and international public. Such problems have not been evident in the collections of the Prague City Gallery for example. Granted, given the scale of the premises any form of reorganisation is clearly a monumental task. However, one hopes that the new exhibition of Czech Modern Art at the Trade Fair Palace heralds a move towards greater stability across the National Gallery generally and is underpinned by a vision which creates exhibition spaces than can become both familiar to visitors and still offer surprises without radical periodic changes.

· Glyn Newman studied Fine Art at Birmingham School of Art (1982-86) and History and Theory of Modern Art at Chelsea College of Art (1989-91). He lived and worked in Prague, Czech Republic from 1995 until 2000, when he returned to the United Kingdom to pursue research on Czech modern art and national identity at the University of Birmingham, where he has just completed his Ph.D. Has periodically taught history of art and design at undergraduate level in Birmingham, London and the South West. He currently lives and works in Devon.

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Anne Anderson

COSMOPOLITAN INTERIORS

Judith A. Neiswander: The Cosmopolitan Interior: Liberalism and the British Interior 1870-1914. New Haven and London: Yale University Press 2008. 215 pages, ISBN 978-0-300-12490-3

Being a specialist on the construction and ornamentation of the Aesthetic House Beautiful I greeted this new volume on interior décor with enthusiasm. Books on Aestheticism that deal with the visual and material arts, as opposed to the literary heritage, are a comparative rarity. We still have to rely on Elizabeth Aslin’s The Aesthetic Movement: A prelude to Art Nouveau (1969) for an overview of the material culture of the era, including ceramics and textiles, although Lionel Lambourne’s The Aesthetic Movement (1996), also offers an introductory text with lavish illustrations.

Charlotte Gere and Lesley Hoskins have given us the best survey of the physical appearance of the aesthetic ideal in Oscar Wilde and the House Beautiful (2000).

Neiswander’s approach, despite her background in the decorative arts and curatorial work at The Harvard University Art Museums and The Minneapolis Institute of Arts, is based primarily on literary sources; in a chapter devoted to the ‘Empowerment of Women’ she focuses on Rhoda and Agnes Garrett, Mary Eliza Haweis and Jane Ellen Panton, the daughter of William Powell Frith, who forged careers as either interior decorators or as providers of advice literature. Haweis was very productive, penning The Art of Beauty in 1878 and The Art of Decoration in 1881 with, perhaps her most influential volume, Beautiful Houses appearing in 1882. Nobody can deny that the needs of the House Beautiful opened up new vistas for women, who assumed a powerful role as ‘the Director and Controller of Everything’. Provided she had the financial wherewithal and a pliable husband, a woman could now choose her own carpets and curtains, decide on the colour scheme and treatment of the walls and even select the appropriate style for the drawing room, dining room and bedrooms. Neiswander concludes that ‘by the end of the century the control of women over interior decoration was so complete that the master of the house could be chided for interference’ (87). Despite the usual reservations regarding women’s taste, still often deemed to be untutored or vulgar, the female of the species had the upper hand in home decorating. Or did she?

Neiswander’s literary sources are often countered by the surviving physical evidence; Linley Sambourne House, which graces the frontispiece, was furnished by the Punch cartoonist himself. Sambourne’s wife Marion had little part to play in the purchase of the antique furniture and blue and white china. The most famous Aesthetic interiors bear the marks of their male progenitors: Lord Leighton’s Arab Hall; Frederick Leyland’s Peacock Dining Room and Whistler’s and Wilde’s exquisite Tite Street ensembles. With a leading architect or designer often involved in their creation, notably E.W. Godwin, the male tastemaker and connoisseur maintained his commanding position; it was the artists, often Royal Academicians, rather than the architects or designers who conceived the cosmopolitan interior. Shaped by largely male cognoscenti, every artistic move they initiated was observed by female consumers who eagerly adopted peacock feathers, sunflowers, and Old Blue. In addition to all the manuals available to assist them, female buyers had new specialist shops such as Liberty’s of Regent Street to provide them with Japanese fans and Persian Carpets. Aesthetic diversity demanded the foreign, particularly exotic eastern bric-a-brac, as well as homage to historic styles; the 17th and 18th centuries provided the best exemplars. Historicism and Eclecticism both underpinned the rationale that decorating could be a form of personal expression, that any and all styles were permissible provided they were handled with flair; artistic invention was to signal refinement and sensibility, the goal being a demonstration of good taste, then as now a marker of distinction.

In ‘Individuality and Eclectic Internationalism, Neiswander rightly identifies the driving force behind the House Beautiful as Individuality; the expression of individual preferences (colours, shapes and textures) through the selection and arranging of objet d’art, denoting the personality of the homeowner. But she fails to recognise that despite claims to originality most so-called aesthetes ended up with sage green walls and vases filled with lilies, sunflowers or peacock feathers. The fashion conscious mimicked their betters; although Haweis advocated ‘doing as we like’ the majority followed a proscribed dogma, as Harry Quilter and Grant Allan realised. Moreover, the one sure way to originality, the use of antiques for their decorative effect is given little room in the volume. Instead there is a long digression into the conceptualisation of Victorian Liberalism. Moreover, the question of how antiques functioned in the House Beautiful brings us back to the issue of gender, as such specialist knowledge was still largely the province of men. The pursuit of Beauty required a deep purse and the superior eye of the connoisseur. Antiques promised lineage, rarity and uniqueness, they conferred prestige on the owner but there was the danger of clutter.

In ‘Liberal Values in Conflict and Decline’, Neiswander attempts to explain the rise of nationalism and conservatism, arguing ‘as middle class people left the cities for the suburbs, they abandoned their liberal values and allied themselves with conservative notions of protectionism and imperialism.’(145). Diversity was to be replaced with unity, the adoption of one style. Ironically the Aesthetic interior was supposed to be unified into a harmonious whole through colour- indeed the catchword of the era was ‘harmonious’. But one of the cardinal sins of the House Beautiful was clutter and over-elaboration. It could not be argued that Lord Leighton’s interiors offered too much of everything. By the close of the century the expert, the architect or interior designer, was back in control, and the amateur, whether he be male or female was brought firmly under control, in terms of his likes and dislikes. Neiswander claims ‘the intellectual leadership of women in shaping the domestic sphere’ as ‘the first step towards equality in the larger world’, but it could be argued that it was not really women who shaped the cosmopolitan, international, individualistic, elitist House Beautiful but the likes of Oscar Wilde, who capitalised on the emergence of celebrity and the professionalisation of the art critic. At the end of the day ‘life-style’ Aestheticism was just a fashion, it peaked and as it declined another vogue came into replace it.

· Dr Anne Anderson has a research fellowship at the Huntington and at the University of Exeter, while also teaching at the University of Bristol, and curating at Southampton City Art Gallery. She joined our VISIONS group as Arts & Crafts Editor in November 2008.

Response by Judith Neiswander

Many thanks to Dr. Anne Anderson for her review of my book. While reading her analysis, however, I had the odd sensation doubtless shared by many authors – the difficulty of recognizing my arguments as I wrote them. The Cosmopolitan Interior: Liberalism and the British Home, 1870-1914 is a book about books and the ideas in them, i.e., what some people thought they were doing when they selected blue & white china and antique armchairs, the values they wished to express in the creation of the home. The literature on domestic interior decoration first emerged as a popular genre in Britain during the 1870s and 1880s, as middle-class readers sought decorating advice from books, household manuals, women’s magazines, and professional journals. The interiors created from this advice have been largely swept away (the surviving homes of male artists were exceptional – this is the reason they survive) and some of the exemplars in the literature may seem over-wrought to contemporary eyes. But instead of judging Victorian parlors for “the cardinal sins of … clutter and over-elaboration,” is it not more useful to search for the significance of these very characteristics among the documents that helped form them? Although some people looked to imitate their betters, for the first time many middle-class homeowners sought models that were different from the traditional styles of the aristocracy.

Far from being a digression, the liberal values repeatedly championed in this literature —individuality, cosmopolitanism, scientific rationalism, the progressive role of a meritocratic elite, and the emancipation of women—were central to the advice about the desirable appearance of the home. In the period preceding the First World War, these values changed dramatically: advice on decoration became more nationalistic in tone and a new goal was set for the interior—“to raise the British child by the British hearth.” To be sure, many forces were at work – new consumer opportunities and marketing strategies, defensiveness about Britain’s waning industrial dominance, disillusionment with Gladstonian liberalism, and other issues that are dealt with in the text - but the display of the cheapest knick-knack by the poorest cottager is also an act of agency and an expression of identity. Interior decoration is fundamentally an art form, perhaps the only art form that is practiced by the broad mass of the population. To dismiss such a widespread shift in ideals as “just a fashion,” and therefore meaningless, is to disregard the relationship between deeply held beliefs and external choices – for our Victorian ancestors and for ourselves.

Anne Anderson replies

Is fashion meaningless? This is something I certainly did not mean to imply...far from it I consider fashion a vital component of a consumer driven society...if Oscar said buy blue china a million buyers leapt at the suggestion. But fashion is fickle and led by the fashion conscious, the great arbiters of taste, like OW. In a celebrity driven society, then as now, it mattered far more that Alma Tadema had one, whether the object in question was antique or modern. Judith is correct in supposing that interior decor is the one art we all engage in...it demonstrates our preferences, tastes and our aspirations. But it is all too easy to fall into the trap of believing that what we create signals our individuality. To a large extent, and I include myself, we are all sheep, being seduced by big brands and labels. I would suggest that Judith considers my own arguments on the matter, as relating to domestic design literature, in Design History, Winter 2005...are we really, as Mrs Haweis declared, 'Doing what we like'?

v This book is also reviewed by Antoine Capet in the summer 2009 newsletter of the Historians of British Art.

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Isa Bickmann

DARWIN AND ART

Darwin. Kunst und die Suche nach den Ursprüngen. Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, 5th February – 3rd May 2009

After visiting the exhibition and after poring over the catalogue (German edition) of nearly 300 pages, I would like to write down my kudos to the curator but also my critical remarks and the questions I still have.

Pamela Kort has written on p.24 of the exhibition catalogue, that this is the first study on that theme. It is correct that this is the first exhibition (the British Darwin-exhibit opened one week later, strangely, they require being the first, too), but there already have been examinations on individual artists in several solo studies. One example is Odilon Redon, as I will explain later on. And the text by Linda Nochlin et al. in the special issue on the ‘Darwin effect’ in Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, 2003, http://www.19thc-artworldwide.org/spring_03/index.shtml (18.6.2009)

The exhibition

The visitor was welcomed by a padded argus pheasent with his prominent feathers. According to Darwin the plumage is the proof of sexual selection, because for surviving the feathers are a hindrance. Surely this has to do with beauty, but has this padded animal something to do with art? Maybe it should go without saying after passing the following rooms with works by the American painters Frederic Edwin Church and Martin Johnson Heade, presentations of the prehistoric men in France in the late 19th century, Odilon Redon with the lithographic cycle ‘Les Origines’ (1883), Gabriel von Max, Jean Carriès, Böcklin, Kubin, reaching the installation of Erich Haeckel’s ‘Art Forms of Nature’ dealing with the beauty of animal and plant forms.

Haeckel’s universe of archetypes is definitely one highlight of the exhibition. But the installations failed! They stacked it in Petersburg hanging: that is they put it row by row so you hardly can see the pictures on top, so to speak ‘the Sistine Chapel effect’. Haeckel has made the drawings for a reader not for a huge exhibition space!

A similar mistake: Georges Méliès film ‘Le Voyage dans la lune’ (1902) based on Jules Verne’s novel, which is very funny seen with the eyes of today, but difficult to look at: They put the small screen in a wall at a corridor, so you have to stand at the opposed wall with cold air blown by the air-conditioning on your back and disrupted by visitors running through the images you wish to look at.

Definitely another highlight: the reconstruction of Gabriel von Max’s scientific collections containing a great deal of the 60.000 objects of prehistory and protohistory, bones, sculls, fossils, ethnographic finds and artefacts. The showcases were reconstructed in cooperation with the Reiss-Engelhorn-Museum, Mannheim, owner of Gabriel von Max’s private museum. In 1879 von Max began to paint apes, he keeps as pets. These pictures were very popular meanwhile the artists got more and more misanthropic. He feels more comfortable with primitive men than with the ‘verbildeten Kulturmenschen’ (cat. p.197), an attitude comparable with Paul Gauguin’s.

The presentation of works of Max Ernst is very dominant but maybe explainable because Pamela Kort has gone into his work very intensively as one can see in her brilliant catalogue essay (pp. 34-53). A very important aspect especially concerning the German reception is the perversion of Darwin’s ‘Survival of the Fittest’, which became a social-darwinist and racist attitude under the Nazi Regime (see cat. p. 231) satirized by Surrealist artist John Heartfield (Helmut Herzfeld), who is represented, too.

The catalogue

The catalogue illuminates the Darwin era with an article by Jane Goodall on the ‘missing links’, hairy ape-like human beings presented on fairs in the 19th century (pp.172-187), and a text by Julia Voss on the reception of the evolution theory in the English and German popular press showing that mass media had played an important role constituting the image of the evolution process until today (pp. 246-256).

Apart from that there is an excellent article on Haeckel and the Austrian point of view on his evolutionary monism (pp. 126-141) by Marsha Morton. Haeckel had reconciled the real and the ideal. The merging of science and religion was found in the monism and Darwin was the catalyst. Unfortunately this was only shown by works of Gustav Klimt and Alfred Kubin. A deeper European wide classification is missing in the catalogue ideally included in an intense history of ideas.

Missing Links

Leftovers of the anthropocentric world view caused a vacuum which would be replaced with compensation myths (see: Eberhard Roters, ‘Gott und Darwin’, in Le Salon Imaginaire, Bilder aus den großen Kunstausstellungen der zweiten Hälfte des XIX. Jahrhunderts, Ausstellung der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Bildende Künste, Kunstverein Berlin und der Akademie der Künste, Berlin 1968, p.19). On the one hand there were syncretistic views of the religions (see Gustave Moreau) and theosophical ideas; see Helena Blavatsky’s social-darwinist thoughts and Rudolf Steiner’s Anthroposophy with an appraisal of Haeckel’s attainments; in addition Joséphin Péladan’s diffuse spirituality borrowing the word ‘evolution’ in use of human consciousness development.

The article on the evolutionary transcendentalism of George Frederic Watts by Alison Smith enlightens aspects of the divergences concerning positivistic thoughts and idealistic/symbolist approaches by the artist.

The work of Odilon Redon is exemplary in this problem, too. But the short essay (pp. 154, 156) by Pamela Kort is disappointing, considering the findings in the Prince of Dreams Catalogue (Chicago/Amsterdam 1995, see. p. 46,63,71 et seq., 77et seqq., 81 et seqq., 104, 146, 389 et seq., 347, 426 (128), expec. 138 et seq.) and several older studies on Redon like Sven Sandström’s (Le Monde imaginaire d’Odilon Redon. Étude iconologique, Lund 1955) and Jerome Viola’s (Redon, Darwin and the Ascent of Man, in: Marsyas 11. 1962/64, pp. 42-57) and first and foremost the text of Barbara Larson, that Kort mentions, The Dark Side of Nature: Science, Society, and the Fantastic in the work of Odilon Redon, University Park, Pennsylvania 2005)

André Mellerio states after an interview with the artist in 1891: ‘It was at the Museum that he grasped Georges Cuvier’s great law regarding the correspondence of being [his ideas on comparative anatomy and the so-called ‘correlation of parts’], especially among the vertebrates. ‘I really took the idea of my monsters from there, and what is curious about them, hugely so – It’s that they could live. They are conceived according to laws for this. Thus any exaggeration of one part involves the diminution or atrophy of another; in a word, the equilibrium is broken or compensated for in another way. Thus an enormous head, a small body, or vice-versa.’’ (cit. Exhibit. Cat. Odilon Redon, Chicago 1994, p.137 et seqq.). First it was Mellerio who recognized Redon’s familiarity with Darwin’s famous book. The citation shows that Redon was interested in osteologie, like many artists of his time (Isa Bickmann, Leonardismus und symbolistische Ästhetik. Ein Beitrag zur Wirkungsgeschichte Leonardo da Vincis in Paris und Brüssel, Frankfurt etc, p. 176ff.). Eugène Carrière, who had lectured in the anatomic collections of the museum of natural history ‘L’homme visionaire de la réalité’ stated that the skeleton manifests the continuity of forms, the world’s logic (Bickmann, op.cit., p. 179). This goes along with the predilection of metamorphoses and transformations. Lautréamont (Isidore Lucien Ducasse, Les Chants de Maldoror, 1868), knew Darwin’s theory of evolution (see: Christa Lichtenstern, Metamorphose in der Kunst des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts, Vom Mythos zum Prozeßdenken. Ovid-Rezeption. Surrealistische Ästhetik. Verwandlungsthematik der Nachkriegskunst, Weinheim 1992, p.134). Lautréamont’s importance for the Surrealists is well known and the fact that the Metamorphoses of Ovid were full of images the artists used intensively, would have opened a facet on the reception that would have made assistence on this point.

With Redon you can find the first named aspect which would be of interest concerning the reception of Darwin’s studies. Douglas W. Druick and Peter Kort Zegers had elaborated the Charcoal drawing ‘The Fall’ (1872) by Redon. Here the authors find the mixed-up of spiritual and scientific thoughts for Redon shows one way to combine Catholic stance and Darwin’s revolutionary ideas. (Exh.Cat. Redon, Chicago 1994, p. 77). This is an attitude Druick and Zegers found in Alfred Maury’s ‘L’homme primitif: Les Lumières que les découvertes paléontologiques récentes on jetées sur son histoire’ (Revue des deux mondes, 1867, pp.637-38, cit. exh.cat. Chicago, op. cit., p. 389, fn. 10).

Furthermore we have to ask: If Darwin’s theory dispossessed the Lord of Creation (see Dolf Sternberger, Panorama of the 19th century, 1938) how can the artist deal with the loss of his godlike position as a creator? Camille Mauclair notes 1894: ‘[...] le Moi est dominé par le Soi, le Soi est Dieu, le Moi en est le symbole sur la terre.’ (Camille Mauclair, Eleusis, causeries sur la Cité Intérieure, Paris 1894, p. 27).

All in all, the Frankfurt exhibition showed some interesting aspects of the continuing of the evolution theory on art. But apart from the fact that most artists were already known as receptive (e.g. Redon, Böcklin, Kubin, František Kupka, Gabriel von Max, Max Ernst), the choice of artists was unbalanced with a great deal too much Max Ernst for example. It would have made sense to include Emmanuel Frémiet, Paul Klee, Edvard Munch (see R. Heller, Munch. His Life and Work, Chicago 1984, p. 63), the Impressionists (Degas liked Darwin’s Study of Expression), Kandinsky and others. The catalogue is worth reading with some excellent articles.

For our readers and connoisseurs of the Fin de Siècle I can recommend the article of Barbara Larson, ‘La generation symboliste et la revolution darwinienne’, in the exhibition cat. L’ âme au corps, Paris 1993, p. 322-41, which is not listed in the bibliography of the Frankfurt catalogue.

Some views on the exhibition and explanations by the curator Pamela Kort and the director of the Kunsthalle Max Hollein can be watched here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6tme4JLUJo (18.6.2009)

Isa Bickmann

Edvard Munch. Prints from the Städel Museum

Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main, Germany

3rd July-18th October.2009

www.staedelmuseum.de

A treasure can be discovered in the department of prints and drawings of the Städel Museum in Frankfurt: Curator Jutta Schütt has assembled a small but nice exhibition out of the stock of prints by Edvard Munch.

In 1911 former director of the “Städelsches Kunstinstitut”, Georg Swarzenski (1876-1957) had acquired the first three prints by Edvard Munch, among them the famous colour lithograph “The sick child” (1896), presenting the sister’s death that distressed Munch his whole life. The Städel Museum lost two paintings in 1937 but the print collection stayed untouched by the purge by the Nazi administration. Today the collection contains more than 80 prints by the artist, who himself has donated some to the Städel in the early 1930s.

In 1894 Munch began occupying himself with printing, so the exhibition covers the famous folder “Edvard Munch. Acht Radierungen”, edited by Julius Meier-Graefe in 1895. These eight etchings and drypoints of paintings were printed in Berlin 1894. Furthermore the exhibition presents portraits of August Strindberg, Henrik Ibsen, Stéphane Mallarmé and Stanisław Przybyszewski. The portfolio “Aus dem Hause Linde” shows portraits of the Max Linde’s family (1902), an oculist in Lübeck and collector. Beginning with woodcarving in 1896 Munch recurred to motifs he still had finished in different techniques. It is illuminating to study these techniques in comparison.

The exhibition is well presented on cold red bordeaux painted walls and includes some of Munch’s contemporary artists or later ones in a way that the visitor is able to draw comparisons directly: Edouard Vuillard’s colour lithograph “Interieur à la suspension” refers to Auguste Clot, Munch’s Parisian printer, who did printing for the Nabis at the same time.

The drypoint-aquatint “The Day After” (1894) hangs near Max Klinger’s “Awakening” (1887) and due to this it might be possible to understand what contemporaries found offensive in Munch’s work. The nearness of Munch’s “Double Suicide”, 1901, to Max Beckmann’s etching “Lovers I”, 1916, develops comprehension of Munch’s ground-breaking choice of motifs. Odilon Redon’s lithographic versions of “Yeux clos” points to Munch’s symbolist presentation of sensation and insubstantiality. But for the portraits of Linde’s children it would have been helpful to give references to Redon’s drawings of his son Ari.

Munch loved experimenting with techniques. Gauguin’s “Te Atua. Les Dieux”, woodcut from 1899 shows very thin Japanese paper in combination with crude woodcut-technique as Munch also used.

Due to the high costs of producing a catalogue the curators decided to install a webpage showing information on Munch’s techniques, prints and motifs. Unfortunately it is only in German (http://munch.staedelmuseum.de), but nevertheless it could be of value getting an impression of the collection.

· Isa Bickmann is an Editor of VISIONS. Art Historian, Author, Curator, she studied Art History, Media Studies and European Ethnology (Cultural Studies) in Marburg, Germany; her M.A. thesis addressed Odilon Redon. Post-graduate research in Paris and Brussels led to her Dissertation on the influence of Leonardo da Vinci's art and æsthetics on a range of symbolist artists and writers in Paris and Brussels. Dr Bickmann is a member of the Association of German Art Historians.

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