02 art in europe and japan after wwii updated
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After WWII, art in Europe explored existential themes through abstract styles like Tachisme and Lyrical Abstraction. Key artists included Jean Dubuffet who coined the term "Art Brut" to describe outsider art, and Alberto Giacometti whose elongated figural sculptures reflected postwar anxiety. In England, Francis Bacon and other members of the "School of London" used distorted figures and thick paint to confront human brutality. Meanwhile in Japan, the Gutai group pioneered performances and installations using found materials and the human body to challenge artistic conventions.
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02 art in europe and japan after wwii updated
- 1. Art in Europe after WWII
- 2. • France: Tachisme (“Stainism”), aka Art Informel (Art without form), aka Lyrical Abstraction • England: School of London • Existentialism • Georges Bataille
- 3. • Jean Paul Fautrier, Tete d’Otage 1, 1947
- 4. • Fautrier, Tete d’Otage 20
- 7. • Henri Michaux, Chinese Ink Drawing, 1961
- 8. • Michaux, Untitled, 1960
- 9. Jean Dubuffet (1901-1985) • Art Brut
- 10. • Dubuffet, Large Black Landscape 1946 Grand Paysage noir
- 11. Musique Brut (Jean Dubuffet)
- 12. • Jean Dubuffet, Supervielle, Large Banner Portrait, 1945 (AIC) • Haute pate technique
- 13. • Dubuffet, The Tree of Fluids 1950
- 14. • Dubuffet, Sourire (Smile) • Coins term “Art Brut”
- 15. Alberto Giacometti 1901-1966 (Swiss/French) • Spoon Woman, 1926 • (56” high)
- 18. • Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy (1962),. "All the sculptures of today, like those of the past, will end one day in pieces... So it is important to fashion ones work carefully in its smallest recess and charge every particle of matter with life."
- 19. • Piazza, 1947-9 • Existential anxiety of the postwar era?
- 21. Francis Bacon • “School of London” (also Lucian Freud & others)
- 22. • Francis Bacon, Three Studies for the Figures at the Base of the Crucifixion, 1944
- 25. • Francis Bacon, Three Studies for the Figures at the Base of the Crucifixion, 1944
- 27. • Diego Velasquez, Pope Innocent X, ca. 1650
- 28. • Francis Bacon, Figure With Meat, 1954
- 29. • It's all so meaningless . . . • . . . we might as well be extraordinary." • Francis Bacon quoting Nietzsche
- 30. • Study after Velazquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X, 1950
- 33. Francis Bacon on Life, Death & Gambling
- 34. Art In Japan after WWII • Gutai group (concrete or embodied art) • Performative • Found materials
- 35. • Murakami Breaks Through many paper screens 1955
- 37. Saburo Murakami, Passages, 1994
- 38. • Atsuko Tanaka, «Electric Dress», 1957
- 39. Electric Dress
- 40. • Kazuo Shiraga, Challenge to the Mud, 1955
- 41. • Shozo Shimamoto Please, walk on here (in Japanese, Kono ue o aruite kudasai), 1955
- 42. • Gutai artist Shozo Shimamoto's work in Venice: "Kono-ue wo Aruite Kudasai (Please walk on top),“ Venice Bienale 2008
- 44. • UNTITLED KAZUO SHIRAGA 1959 oil on canvas
- 45. • Kazuo Shiraga, 1962
- 46. • Kazuo Shiraga, Red, 1965
- 49. Shozo Shimamoto in Italy, 2008
Notes de l'éditeur
- Art Informel tends toward the gestural and expressive, with repetitive calligraphic marks and anticompositional formats related to Abstract Expressionism [more], which is often considered its American equivalent. It eventually took root in France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and Spain, and was known in its various manifestations as Gesture Painting, Lyrical Abstraction, Matter art, and Tachisme (from the French tache, meaning a spot or stain). Art Informel. "Un Art autre" (Art of Another Kind) Art Informel (or Tachism, (‘stainism’) or Lyrical Abstraction) tends toward the gestural and expressive, with repetitive calligraphic marks and anticompositional formats related to Abstract Expressionism, which is often considered its American equivalent. A French term meaning 'art without form', this was adopted by the critic MICHEL TAPIE to describe abstract painting (similar to American abstract expressionism) opposed to the rigor of cubism or the geometrical abstraction of de stijl and suprematism, where the artist's emotions and subconscious fantasies are expressed.
- Existentialism is a philosophical movement which claims that individual human beings create the meanings of their own lives. It is a reaction against more traditional philosophies, such as rationalism and empiricism, which sought to discover an ultimate order in metaphysical principles or in the structure of the observed world, and therefore universal meaning. The movement had its origins in the 19th century thought of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche was prevalent in Continental philosophy. In the 1940s and 1950s, French philosophers such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir wrote scholarly and fictional works that helped to popularize themes associated with existentialism, including "dread, boredom, alienation, the absurd, freedom, commitment, [and] nothingness".
- Art Informel. "Un Art autre" (Art of Another Kind) Art Informel (or Tachism, (‘stainism’) or Lyrical Abstraction) tends toward the gestural and expressive, with repetitive calligraphic marks and anticompositional formats related to Abstract Expressionism, which is often considered its American equivalent. A French term meaning 'art without form', this was adopted by the critic MICHEL TAPIE to describe abstract painting (similar to American abstract expressionism) opposed to the rigor of cubism or the geometrical abstraction of de stijl and suprematism, where the artist's emotions and subconscious fantasies are expressed. Pioneers of this movement were the German painter WOLS (1913-1951) and French artist HANS HARTUNG (1904-1989), JEAN FAUTRIER (1898-1964) and Jean Dubuffet (1901-1985). After 1954, tachism was introduced as the term to describe all non-geometrical abstraction. Artists working independently on either side of the Atlantic were responding to the same social and political events. They reacted to the horrors of fascism and the Holocaust; the atomic bomb revealed further dimensions of irrationality. Artists explored the disciplines of anthropology, philosophy, and psychology, and looked to Surrealism and the power of automatism as a means of more authentic, spontaneous expression. Michel Tapié, the influential Parisian critic who coined the term art informel in1950, promoted the movement’s impulse towards gestural abstraction as a radical new beginning of un autre, or something else. In 1951, Tapié and artist Georges Mathieu organized a groundbreaking exhibition entitled Vehemences Confronteés (Opposing Forces). This was the first time that canvases by artists associated with art informel, such as Hans Hartung and Jean Riopelle, were shown with examples of Abstract Expressionism from the United States, including Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. Fautrier: and hostage series Distressed by the war and trying to find a way to vent his rage, Fautrier began painting in a more aggressive manner than before. Vegetation (1940), for instance, is an agitated composition featuring three loosely arranged horizontal bands. A dark green area at the bottom is covered with slashing black brushstrokes. In the upper portion, fluid, calligraphic white lines are scribbled on a fresco-like ground of pale yellow and green. This painting reminds one of the impact that Fautrier has had on the work of a host of artists ranging from Bram Bogart to Cy Twombly. Fautrier was arrested by the Gestapo in early 1943. The charges were unclear but some contemporaries claimed that the Nazis accused him of gold trading, while others say that his pornographic illustrations for Georges Bataille's novel Madame Edwarda,
- His studio, in Chatenay-Malabry on the outskirts of Paris, was located near a wooded area where the Nazis executed their prisoners. Haunted by the screams of the victims, which he heard at night, Fautrier conveyed the feeling of helplessness and terror in his "Otage" (Hostage) series. This group, which included sculptures and paintings, was well represented in the survey. The works caused a sensation when they were shown in 1946 in Paris, where they were widely acclaimed as some of the most radical inventions of contemporary art. Seeking a correspondingly sculptural approach for the painting, Fautrier developed his haute pate (high paste) technique, a multistage process often resulting in inches-thick surfaces. To start, he glued sheets of paper onto the canvas. Working on a flat tabletop, he covered the paper with a thick white primer and drew a preliminary design on the surface using a light oil glaze. With a palette knife or spoon, he applied thick coats of warm enduit, a sturdy plaster mixed with glue used for wall repairs that dries to a high-gloss finish. After piling the material into a mound of thick paste and manipulating the surface with various instruments, including the handle of a paintbrush, he often sprinkled crushed oil pastels or metal filings over the surface for added color and luster. In Tete d'otage, no. 1 (1943), a rounded shape in white and red bears crude lines designating a mouth, nose and eyes; it conveys a powerful sense of the abject and forlorn. Painted the following year, Tete d'otage, with a big gaping black hole where eyes should be, and Tete d'otage, no. 20, in which a thick red line down the center of the head indicates a nose and mouth, communicate an even greater feeling of despair. Malraux referred to these images as "hieroglyphs of pain." (1) Related to the series, The Gunned Down (1943) shows an area of slathered-on white paste highlighted in red and set against a dark gray ground. The sumptuousness of the surface counters its repulsive allusion to a slab of bleeding flesh. In a 1946 book on Fautrier, Ponge wrote of the "Otage" series as resulting from a kind of rapture in which the artist heroically "transforms present-day human horror into beauty." (2) (Fautrier returned to these politically charged images in 1956 and '57 in an homage to victims of the Budapest uprising against the Soviets, several examples of which were included in the show.) French term describing a wide swathe of related types of abstract painting highly prevalent, even dominant, in the 1940s and 1950s, including tendencies such as Tachism, Matter Painting, and Lyrical Abstraction. Mainly refers to European art, but embraces American Abstract Expressionism. The term was used by the French critic Michel Tapié in his 1952 book Un Art Autre to describe types of art which had in common that they were based on highly improvisatory (ie informal) procedures and were often highly gestural. Tapié saw this art as 'other' because it appeared to him as a complete break with tradition. An important source of this kind of painting was the Surrealist doctrine of automatism. An exhibition titled Un Art Autre was organised in Paris the same year as Tapié's book and included Appel, Burri, De Kooning, Dubuffet, Fautrier, Mathieu, Riopelle, Wols. Other key figures were Henri Michaux, Hans Hartung and Pierre Soulages. The term Art Autre, from the title of Tapié's book, is also used for this art, but Art Informel seems to have emerged as the preferred name
- His studio, in Chatenay-Malabry on the outskirts of Paris, was located near a wooded area where the Nazis executed their prisoners. Haunted by the screams of the victims, which he heard at night, Fautrier conveyed the feeling of helplessness and terror in his "Otage" (Hostage) series. This group, which included sculptures and paintings, was well represented in the survey. The works caused a sensation when they were shown in 1946 in Paris, where they were widely acclaimed as some of the most radical inventions of contemporary art.
- Head of Hostage sculpture This work belongs to a series of paintings and sculptures, known collectively as the ‘Hostages’, made in 1943-5. Fautrier spent most of this period in a sanatorium on the outskirts of Paris. At night, he could hear the Gestapo torture and execute prisoners in the nearby woods. The pitted and scarred surface of Head of a Hostage suggests both individual features and the anonymity of bodies found in mass graves. Versions of the piece exist in bronze, but this cast is made from lead, carrying with it connotations of weight, toxicity and mortality.
- Baby Mine 1947, published circa 1960-4Les Seins et le sexe de la femme Etching and aquatint The first state of P77140 was published in Fautrier l'enragé, Paris 1949 as ‘Les seins et le sexe de la femme' (p.11). The title ‘Baby-Mine' first appeared in Engelberts. If the title is a French expression it would mean, literally, ‘baby appearance' and is radically different from the original title which translates as ‘the female breasts and sex'. Indeed this image was one of a sequence published in Fautrier l'enragé concerned with the female body (see in particular Mason 1986, pp.110-1 nos. 230-2 repr.). The most closely related printed image to P77140 is ‘Sweet Baby' which, in its first state, was known as ‘Les seins et le sexe' 1949 (Mason 1986, p.111 no.232 repr.). The title of P77140 and ‘Sweet Baby' may, however, refer to the popular expression in which baby implies a female lover, hence ‘Baby-Mine' or ‘my baby'. Of the female nudes which Fautrier painted after the Second World War Michel Ragon wrote that ‘the nudes of Fautrier are exaggeratedly nude because they are principally breasts and rolls of flesh, gigantic pairs of buttocks (Michel Ragon, Fautrier, Paris 1957, p.33). Such a description applies to P77140. The title ‘Baby-Mine' was also used by Fautrier for a painting of 1956 (repr. Ragon 1957, p.43 in col.) in which the principal shape is more head-like than in the print, where the image is foetal and vulvar. The features of the face in the painting are described by markings reminiscent of the Cross of Lorraine suggesting a link with the ‘hostage' works
- Henri Michaux Used mescaline & hallucinogens to try to get to the subconscious. Also traveled extensively in asia and was inspired by asian art. Chinese ink drawing born out of that experience. (Explain). In 1930-1931 Henri Michaux visited Japan, China and India. The result of this travel is the book A Barbarian in Asia. Oriental culture became one of his biggest influences (the philosophy of Buddhism and the Oriental calligraphy later became the principal subject of many of his poems). \ Michaux was both a poet and a painter, but he spoke of drawing as a release from words: 'a new language, spurning the verbal'. His drawings are, nevertheless, calligraphic in character, often suggesting indecipherable writing. Between 1954 and 1962 he experimented with working under the influence of the drug mescaline. The early results were obsessively detailed, while the ink drawings show an intense repetition of slashing marks. Michaux described fighting with these blots, likening them to 'insatiable desires or knots of force, which are destined never to take form'. The French writer, painter and graphic artist Henri Michaux was born in the Belgian town of Namur in 1899 and spent his childhood in Brussels. He wanted to become a priest, but followed his father's wish and began to study medicine in 1919, but soon abandoned this plan and signed on as a seaman. After reading works by Lautréamont he began writing in 1922. His acquaintance with Paul Klee, Max Ernst and Giorgio de Chirico, whom he met in Paris in 1925, inspired him to first painting and drawing attempts. Between 1927 and 1937 he travelled through South America and Asia. Afterwards Michaux sketched and painted his Phantomisms. He had his first exhibitions in Parisian galleries, followed by important shows abroad. In the mid 1950s Michaux began experimenting with hallucinatory drugs, particularly with mescaline, letting his experiences inspire his writing, painting and drawing His ink drawings evoke scriptural elements and calligraphic symbols which are a seismographic reflection of the artist's inner emotions. The two systems of word-language and sign-language pervade each other The artist's intention was not to flee from the world, but to expand the world by changing the awareness. The real world was to be enhanced by additional levels of perception
- The French-Canadian painter Riopelle was one of the artists included in the 1951 exhibition in Paris, 'Véhémences Confrontées' (Opposing Forces). He had been living in Paris since 1947, and brought to his work both a North American background and a distinctly European sensibility. In the early 1950s Riopelle had experimented with dripping and splashing paint, creating densely covered canvases in vivid colours. He went on to develop a distinctive technique using a palette knife to apply the paint in quick, sharp strokes all over the canvas. This resulted in a thickly worked surface, or 'impasto'. This painting was executed in this way. The marks are suggestive of the painter's action in applying the paint.
- Impressed by the raw quality he found in the work of untrained artists, Dubuffet rejected conventional artistic techniques and values. Sylvester saw wider significance in what he called Dubuffet''s ''hatred of style''. ''His preoccupation with style arises ... out of his recognition of the decadence of our culture, his feeling that the styles we accept are all played out, his disgust at an art that feeds on art ..., and out of a desire to create an art that might rise above it all, above all the fancy nonsense, in spite of everything
- Dubuffet: The 1950-51 cycle of paintings titled Corps de Dame (literally "lady's body," rather than "woman's body") includes his best-known works, and is perhaps the most iconoclastic. Their object is the nude female body: not as an emblem of canonic beauty, but as tough, dense matter, highly worked yet impenetrable, flattened down and spread across a canvas that barely contains her. These works share the same blocky contours, small heads (sometimes frontal, sometimes in profile), tiny round breasts, and long, thin arms--either scratched into the body at an angle, or raised above it. The schematic rendering of buttocks and genitals is similar throughout the cycle. Most notable are their varying textures of thick paint, and the painter's innumerable ways of spreading, scraping, and scoring the rich pigment : "[Ideas] strike me as...a kind of outer crust formed by cooling...I try to sieze mental motion at the greatest possible depth of its roots, where I am sure the sap is far richer It was in 1946 that Dubuffet first developed the haute pâte technique--the mortarlike mixture of pigment, paint, sand, and tar (and sometimes pebbles, glass, and string as well) that gives his paintings an immensely tactile, encrusted character. 6 In the Corps de Dame series, the pâte, though thick, has the appearance of a flat, scraped down, or excavated territory: a substrata of graffiti signs and marks of an enigmatic human presence and intent. The so-called primitivist points of reference of Dubuffet's painting and writing seem similar to those of the Abstract Expressionist paintings in New York during this period, most obviously Willem de Kooning's Women series (begun in 1950 and first exhibited in 1952), although neither artist was then aware of the other's work on the theme of Woman
- This is one of a series of paintings by Dubuffet in which women’s bodies are flattened and exposed, subverting accepted ideals of female beauty. The distinctive surface of these works was created by applying a special paste that repelled oil paint. As the layers of paint and glaze dried, they continually reassembled themselves into new patterns and textures. Dubuffet wrote that these patterns ‘have transported me into an invisible world of fluids circulating in the bodies and around them, and have revealed to me a whole active theatre of facts, which perform, I am certain, at some level of life.’
- The outline figure in this work is roughly gouged into the thick paint, the face and body scarred and crumpled. The title identifies it as a caricature of the poet-painter Henri Michaux, whose writings featured ‘Monsieur Plume’, a semi-autobiographical comic character. It belongs to a group of unconventional portraits made from memory of Dubuffet’s artistic and literary friends. The series was exhibited under the title ‘Portraits with extracted Likeness, with Likeness cooked and confected in the Memory, with Likeness exploded in the Memory of Mr Jean Dubuffet’.
- Alberto Giacometti 1901-1966 (Swiss) In 1922 he moved to Paris to study under the sculptor Antoine Bourdelle, an associate of Auguste Rodin. It was there that Giacometti experimented with cubism and surrealism and came to be regarded as one of the leading surrealist sculptors. Among his associates were Joan Miró, Max Ernst, Pablo Picasso and Balthus. From 1936 to 1940 Giacometti concentrated his sculpting on the human head, focusing on the model's gaze, followed by a unique artistic phase in which his statues became stretched out; their limbs elongated. Obsessed with creating his sculptures exactly as he envisioned through his unique view of reality, he often carved until they were as thin as nails and reduced to the size of a pack of cigarettes, much to his consternation. A friend of his once said that if Giacometti decided to sculpt you, "he would make your head look like the blade of a knife." After his marriage his tiny sculptures became larger, but the larger they grew, the thinner they became. Giacometti said that the final result represented the sensation he felt when he looked at a woman. Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy (1962), argues that the attenuated forms of Giacometti's figures reflect the view of 20th century modernism and existentialism that modern life is increasingly devoid of meaning and empty. "All the sculptures of today, like those of the past, will end one day in pieces... So it is important to fashion ones work carefully in its smallest recess and charge every particle of matter with life.“ Spoon Woman, one of the artist’s first mature works, explores the metaphor employed in ceremonial spoons of the African Dan culture, in which the bowl of the utensil can be equated with a woman’s womb. But Giacometti’s life-size sculpture reverses the equivalence. As the art historian and theorist Rosalind Krauss has noted, “By taking the metaphor and inverting it, so that ‘a spoon is like a woman’ becomes ‘a woman is like a spoon,’ Giacometti was able to intensify the idea and to make it universal by generalizing the forms of the sometimes rather naturalistic African carvings toward a more prismatic abstraction.
- in Nose there is something of the Surrealist tendency toward the fantastic in the incredible proboscis. In this work, Giacometti suspended a head from a cross bar in a rectangular cage, thus implying that the pendant head could be prodded to swing, the nose further extending beyond the confines of its prison. There is a vague threat in the shape of the head: the configuration of nose, skull, and neck recalls the barrel, chassis, and handle of a gun. However, the wide-open mouth suggests a scream of anguish, and the cord attaching it to its cage evokes the gallows. Nose should be seen within the context of postwar existential angst that was voiced by Jean-Paul Sartre, a friend of the artist. the Surrealist techniques of shocking juxtaposition and the distortion and displacement of anatomical parts to express the fears and urges of the subconscious. The aggressiveness with which the human figure is treated in these fantasies of brutal erotic assault graphically conveys their content. The female, seen in horror and longing as both victim and victimizer of male sexuality, is often a crustacean or insectlike form.
- Existentialism is a philosophical movement which claims that individual human beings create the meanings of their own lives. It is a reaction against more traditional philosophies, such as rationalism and empiricism, which sought to discover an ultimate order in metaphysical principles or in the structure of the observed world, and therefore universal meaning. The movement had its origins in the 19th century thought of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche was prevalent in Continental philosophy. In the 1940s and 1950s, French philosophers such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir wrote scholarly and fictional works that helped to popularize themes associated with existentialism, including "dread, boredom, alienation, the absurd, freedom, commitment, [and] nothingness". Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy (1962), argues that the attenuated forms of Giacometti's figures reflect the view of 20th century modernism and existentialism that modern life is increasingly devoid of meaning and empty. "All the sculptures of today, like those of the past, will end one day in pieces... So it is important to fashion ones work carefully in its smallest recess and charge every particle of matter with life."
- The psychological torment and the sadistic misogyny projected by this sculpture are in startling contrast to the serenity of other contemporaneous pieces by Giacometti, such as Woman Walking. only of the life-size height of Standing Woman, but also on the miniature scale of the figures who inhabit his Piazza of 1947–48. Four men stride across a wide plaza, each moving toward the center, yet none apparently directed toward an encounter with one another. A single woman, whose stiff posture recalls Standing Woman, stands isolated and motionless near the center. The featureless figures exist independently within their haphazardly grouped unity, their multiple, nonconverging paths suggesting individual ambitions and absorptions. The flat bronze slab on which the figures stand serves both as base and as the plaza setting. Such a tabular format first appears in The Palace at 4 a.m., 1932–33 (Collection The Museum of Modern Art, New York), a highly theatrical work of Giacometti’s Surrealist period. Giacometti began placing individual figures on large bases as early as 1942, but only in 1948, in Three Men Walking, did a group of attenuated figures appear on a thin square bronze base that also suggests a city square. Giacometti’s scene derives from modern urban experience. He states: “In the street people astound and interest me more than any sculpture or painting. Every second the people stream together and go apart, then they approach each other to get closer to one another. They unceasingly form and re-form living compositions in unbelievable complexity. . . . It’s the totality of this life that I want to reproduce in everything I do. . . .”1 There are five different casts of this work, and a somewhat larger version with the figures placed in slightly different positions exists in five casts as well. In all of these sculptures, an eye-level examination of the work alters the scale of miniaturization first perceived by the viewer. The vastness of the empty piazza and the anonymity of the figures are revealed by such closeup scrutiny.
- the term School of London applies essentially to a group of artists living in the capital in the 1950s who were committed to renewing figurative painting throughout the rise and dominance of abstract art as abstraction became the dominant mode: they followed each other’s work closely and exhibited in the same West End gallery . Francis Bacon . . . was much concerned by human condition using derision to depict human figures always shown distorted so as to express anguish and solitude. Contrary to Bacon's nudity of the soul, Lucian Freud seems fascinated by the nudity of bodies and proves to be a master in expressing sheer intimacy with no restrictions.'" Socially connected, the Colony Club of London (where the YBAs hung out in the 90s) Lucian Freud, grandson of Sigmund Three Studies: the subjects are anatomically and physically distorted, and the mood is violent, foreboding, and relentlessly physical Figures based on the ancient Greek legend of the Furies
- They were the goddesses that avenge the violations of the natural order, avenging inhumanity. The most popular myths refer to patricide and oediphul encounters. They rose from the blood of the mutilated Uranus, when it hit the mother Earth (Gaea). They were called the Eumenides - "the kindly ones" - by the ancients, if they had refered to them as the Furies - Erinyes - "the angry ones" - insanity would befall. There were three Furies: Alecto The unresting Megaera The jealous Tisiphone The avenger They are often seen as being hideous old women with bloodshot eyes and snakes for hair. They punish people by arousing frenzies of remorse. The very sight of them dives a guilty man insane. They are driven by revenge. "It was a thing that I did in about a fortnight, when I was in a bad mood of drinking, and I did it under tremendous hangovers and drink; I sometimes hardly knew what I was doing. It's one of the only pictures I've been able to do under drink. I think perhaps the drink helped me to be a bit freer.“ Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion" seems derived from Picasso's Cruifixion, but further distorted, with ostrich necks and button heads protruding from bags - the whole effect gloomily phallic, like Bosch without the humour. These objects are perched on stools, and depicted as if they were sculpture, as in the Picassos of 1930. I have no doubt of Mr Bacon's uncommon gifts, but these pictures expressing his sence of the atrocious world into which we have survived seems [ to me ] symbols of outrage rather than works of art. If peace redresses him, he may delight as he now dismays." Raymond Mortimer New Statesman and Nation,14 April 1945
- the term School of London applies essentially to a group of artists living in the capital in the 1950s who were committed to renewing figurative painting throughout the rise and dominance of abstract art as abstraction became the dominant mode: they followed each other’s work closely and exhibited in the same West End gallery . Francis Bacon . . . was much concerned by human condition using derision to depict human figures always shown distorted so as to express anguish and solitude. Contrary to Bacon's nudity of the soul, Lucian Freud seems fascinated by the nudity of bodies and proves to be a master in expressing sheer intimacy with no restrictions.'" Socially connected, the Colony Club of London (where the YBAs hung out in the 90s) Lucian Freud, grandson of Sigmund Three Studies: the subjects are anatomically and physically distorted, and the mood is violent, foreboding, and relentlessly physical Figures based on the ancient Greek legend of the Furies
- "I've never known why my paintings are known as horrible. I'm always labelled with horror, but I never think about horror. Pleasure is such a diverse thing. And horror is too. Can you call the famous Isenheim alter a horror piece? Its one of the greatest paintings of the Crucifixion, with the body studded with thorns like nails, but oddly enough the form is so grand it takes away from the horror. But that is the horror in the sense that it is so vitalising; isn't that how people came out of the great tragedies? People came out as though purged into happiness, into a fuller reality of existence". Francis Bacon Interviews with Francis Bacon; David Sylvester, edt. 1993 Bacon's feelings about meat - about the butchered carcasses of animals, and also about tortured and mutilated human flesh - were ambivalent. On one hand, these things fascinated him by their seductive beauty, yet on the other, they served as a solemn reminder of his own mortality. "Well, of course, we are meat, we are potential carcasses. If I go into a butcher's shop I always think it's surprising that I wasn't there instead of the animal." crucifixion in Bacon's work is 'a generic name for an environment in which bodily harm is done to one or more persons and one or more other persons gather to watch'. Bacon himself is referred to the Crucifixion as an 'armature' serving to make emotions manifest: "Well, there have been so many great pictures in European art of the Crucifixion that it's a magnificent armature on which you can hang all types of feelings and sensation, it may be unsatisfactory, but I haven't found another subject so far that has been as helpful for covering certain areas of human feelings and behaviour. Perhaps it is only so many people have worked on this particular theme that it has created this armature - I can't think of a better way of saying it - on which one can operate all types of level of feelings."
- Georges Bataille was a member of the extremely influential College of Sociology in France between World War I and World War II. The College of Sociology was also comprised of several renegade surrealists. He was heavily influenced by Hegel, Freud, Marx, Marcel Mauss, the Marquis de Sade, Alexandre Kojève and Friedrich Nietzsche, the last of whom he defended in a notable essay against appropriation by the Nazis. Agreed to be a part of a secret society that would do human sacrifice; volunteered to be victim, but no one agreed to be the executioner. essays, novels, and poetry expressed his fascination with eroticism, mysticism, and the irrational. He viewed excess as a way to gain personal “sovereignty.” From very early in his career, Bataille felt that the sacred belonged to the same order of experience as eroticism and death, and he became fascinated with the extremes of religious ritual. He wrote extensively on human sacrifice and orgiastic frenzy, acts of transgression that he felt were powerful enough to effect intimate communion with the Divine.
- “Intellectual despair results in neither weakness nor dreams, but in violence. It is only a matter of knowing how to give vent to one's rage; whether one only wants to wander like madmen around prisons, or whether one wants to overturn them.” “To place oneself in the position of God is painful: being God is equivalent to being tortured. For being God means that one is in harmony with all that is, including the worst. The existence of the worst evils is unimaginable unless God willed them.” Bacon was kicked out of his house at age 16 by his Irish-Catholic dad when he learned his son was gay. Bacon has become ‘hot.’ In Feburary of 2007 the AP reported that one of Bacon's paintings, "Study for Portrait II," sold for $27.6 million. Christie's auction house said it's a record price for the artist, who died in 1992. Also a record for postwar art. Ron B. Kitaj first refered to the School of London in his catalogue introduction to the exhibition titled " the Human Clay" at the Hayward Gallery in 1976. Kitaj noted that while abstraction, happenings and transformations were triumphant there was a special trend towards figurative painting as well as a kind of obsession for the human figure among most London painters."
- Mr. Bacon says he admires almost nothing contemporary in art. Abstract painting is to him a version of wallpaper. He insists he is a realist, that he re-creates the violence of everyday life. "The creative process is a cocktail of instinct, skill, culture and a highly creative feverishness. It is not like a drug; it is a particular state when everything happens very quickly, a mixture of consciousness and unconsciousness, of fear and pleasure; it’s a little like making love, the physical act of love." Francis Bacon Quote About the Study after Velazquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X PaintingFrancis Bacon often referred to other artists and used photographs as reference material for his paintings. This portrait is a distorted version of the Pope, from a painting by the Spanish artist Diego Velazquez that was painted in 1650. The scream of the Pope may also be referencing the famous painting by Edvard Munch, "The Scream".Bacon was quoted as saying "We are born with a scream; we come into life with a scream, and maybe love is a mosquito net between the fear of living and the fear of death." It is not a quote that relates directly to this work, but has some relationship with it.
- Bacon was fascinated by extreme forms of facial expression, and the mouth stretched open to full gape was his favourite. One day he amused me by saying, in an apologetic tone: "You know, I think I've got the scream, but I am having terrible trouble with the smile."
- Gu instrument, Tai tool Jiro Yoshihara, born in 1905 in Osaka, can be considered as the founder and theoretician of the movement, but he said: "I am a teacher who has nothing to teach you, but I will create a climate for optimum creation” Gutai group and Mono-ha, the two most important vanguard movements in postwar Japan. The Gutai group, formed in 1954 in Osaka and considered to be akin to Abstract Expressionism, were pioneers of later directions in art such as "Happening" performance art, "Environmental Art" and Conceptual Art. Mono-ha, on the other hand, a movement that emerged in Tokyo in the late '60s, was more limited in scope and favored a material-based approach that bore an indirect relationship to Minimalism. Mono-Ha is the name given to a number of artists working in Japan in the late 1960s and early 1970s– although radically different, their work shared certain fundamental characteristics. Using mostly found or natural materials, their works sought to question not only the traditions of Western art the East had so recently inherited but by extension to challenge conventional notions of art. our definition of the movement as being a group of artists who ventured to bring out the artistic expression of things and their functions, bare and undisguised, giving those things a starring role. Mono-ha, literally ‘school of things', is the name given to a group of artists who came to critical attention in Japan in the late 1960s. These ‘things' refer not only to the material things from which their work is made, such as oil clay, stones, glass, iron plates, ropes, wood and earth, but also to the strangeness of the works themselves. Neither quite sculptures, nor installations, their very existence appears to confound traditional artistic genres. Although fiercely critical of Western modernism, their use of natural materials, and their radical attack upon traditional assumptions about the work of art, seem to share many affinities with Minimalism and Arte Povera. Through this process, the Mono-ha artists aimed to abandon the 'creation' of 'things' and instead 'rearrange' 'things' into art works, drawing attention to complex relationships between material, space and viewers. [Save this for land art]
- Murakami Breaks Through many paper screens 1955 Gutai was formed in the late 1950s in the Kansai region by such distinguished figures as YOSHIHARA Jiro, KANAYAMA Akira, MURAKAMI Saburo, SHIRAGA Kazuo, and SHIMAMOTO Shozo. The group's activities anticipated the great changes that Western art underwent in the early 60s, such as happenings and action painting. Shimamoto may have been the first composer of the period to work with concrete sounds. In this article, the artist, who is still based in Kansai and has become ever more active, introduces his sound work Gutai Japanese avant-garde group. Gutai Bijutsu Kyokai (Gutai Art Association) was formed in 1954 in Osaka by Yoshihara Jiro, Kanayma Akira, Murakami Saburo, Shiraga Kazuo, and Shimamoto Shozo. The word has been translated into English as 'embodiment' or 'concrete'. Yoshihara was an older artist around whom the group coalesced and who financed it. In their early public exhibitions in 1955 and 1956 Gutai artists created a series of striking works anticipating later Happenings and Performance and Conceptual art.
- 1955 Murakami created his reportedly stunning performance Laceration of Paper, in which he ran through a paper screen. At the second Gutai show in 1956, Shiraga used his feet to paint a large canvas sprawled across the floor. From about 1950 Shimamoto had been making paintings from layers of newspaper pasted together, painted and then pierced with holes, anticipating the pierced work of Lucio Fontana. In 1954 Murakami had made a series of paintings by throwing a ball soaked in ink at paper. In 1956 Shimamoto went on to make works called Throws of Colour by smashing glass jars filled with pigment onto canvases laid out on the floor. The art historian Yve-Alain Bois has said that 'the activities of the Gutai group in the mid-1950s constitute one of the most important moments of post-war Japanese culture place at the entrance to an exhibition of paper screens that will be torn from the opening, with the passing of the first visitor ... All these practices show the diversity of modes of creation. Murakami Saburô
- During the first Gutai exhibition in 1955, Shiraga dove into a pile of mud and wrestled, kicked, and thrashed the clay mound to create an artwork sculpted by physical action. In this painting, Shiraga used his body as a tool--this time a large paint brush. Swinging from a hanging rope, he used his bare feet to apply paint onto a canvas on the floor. The finished work depicts his random spins, swirls, and slips. “Technique will change to free and wild action, and it ignites my passion. Passion turns into action, and it fills my flaming heart “ Shiraga's Challenge to the Mud 1955, in which the artist rolled half naked in a pile of mud, remains the most celebrated event associated with the group. Also in 1955 Murakami created his reportedly stunning performance Laceration of Paper, in which he ran through a paper screen. At the second Gutai show in 1956, Shiraga used his feet to paint a large canvas sprawled across the floor. From about 1950 Shimamoto had been making paintings from layers of newspaper pasted together, painted and then pierced with holes, anticipating the pierced work of Lucio Fontana. In 1954 Murakami had made a series of paintings by throwing a ball soaked in ink at paper. In 1956 Shimamoto went on to make works called Throws of Colour by smashing glass jars filled with pigment onto canvases laid out on the floor. The art historian Yve-Alain Bois has said that 'the activities of the Gutai group in the mid-1950s constitute one of the most important moments of post-war Japanese culture'. Ashiya City Museum of Art and History in Japan holds a large collection of Gutai work and archives. The group dissolved in 1972
- President and founder of AU (Art Unidentified), a group of over 200 Japanese artists who create works without any limitations or constraint (Unidentified Art) At the first Gutai Exhibition he presents a revolutionary work to be experienced and enjoyed by the body: “Please, walk on here”. 1996Shimamoto is proposed as a candidate for the Nobel Prize for Peace in recognition of his numerous pacifist activities since meeting Bern Porter, the physician who made the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima
- This photo shows the striking performance Shimamoto did in 1956 using a 5-meter long cannon to throw the paint onto a huge canvas. The cannon was set in an almost vertical position and the paint described a parabolic trajectory before reaching the canvas. Due to this, the impact was not so violent.
- UNTITLEDKAZUO SHIRAGA1959oil on canvasbut is uniquely influenced by its own time and place--postwar Japan. Established in the summer of 1954, the group formed around artist Jiro Yoshihara in Osaka and sought to create a new art "never known until now." Coming out of Japan's surrender in World War II, Gutai artists desired an art free of social criticism or political implication. Their first exhibition was in 1955 and featured a performance wherein Shiraga dove into a pile of mud and wrestled, kicked, and thrashed the clay mound to create an artwork sculpted by physical action. Unlike Allan Kaprow's Happenings in Europe and America--which weren't to emerge for another two years--Gutai artists intended their performances to result in the creation of sculptures and more prominently, paintings. Shozo Shimamoto threw bottles of paint onto paper spread on the floor. Saburo Murakami thrust his body through packing paper stretched over frames, and painted by throwing paint-covered balls at the canvas. In this untitled painting, Shiraga used his bare feet to apply the paint onto a piece of canvas on the floor. Grasping a hanging rope, he dipped and swung himself through the thick, wet oil paint. The finished painting depicts his random spins, swirls, and slips.
- Shiraga specialized in Japanese-style painting at school, switching later to oil painting. By the time he joined the "Gutai" group, a Kansai-based avant-garde art group, in 1955, he had begun to paint directly with his hands and feet, abandoning the brush all together. For this work too, Shiraga suspended himself from ropes and painted this work with his feet, using the canvas as a brush. Shiraga has commented that, through this method of painting, he wanted to display "traces of action carried out with speed." Indeed, the flow and build-up of pigment in this work create a dynamic effect resembling the violent movements of a massive beast, and the surface of the painting preserves the raw movements of the artist challenging the canvas.
- A 2006 performance/painting done in Italy (Florence)