Tuesday 30 November 2021

A Selfie with Godot

Please find my latest contribution to New Art Examiner (Nov/Dec) via the link above: https://www.newartexaminer.net/a-selfie-with-godot-the-rarefied-reality-of-new-european-painting/

Tuesday 26 October 2021

Sacré bordel! The Lille Palace of Fine Arts, France

 

The Lille Palace of Fine Arts at night. Hot!

To me, there is nothing that resembles a brothel more than a museum.

Michel Leiris, L’âge d’homme, 1939

The ‘Capital of Flanders’, Lille, is officially the capital of the Hauts-de-France region, prefecture of the Nord departement, and main city of the Métropole Européenne de Lille. During its long history it was besieged by the Kingdom of France, the Burgundian State, the Holy Roman Empire of Germany, the Spanish Netherlands, by the Germans during the Franco-Austrian War, and in 1914 and 1940.

Famous Lillois are Louis Pasteur, Emile Bernard, Paul Gachet (Van Gogh’s doctor), Charles de Gaulle.

The reader will be delighted to learn that, for the past 77 years or so, the city of Lille has not been under siege. That is, except for its Palace of Fine Arts: right at this very moment, it is being held hostage.

My last visit dates from so far back, that I seem to have only agreeable memories: a ‘typical’ French Art museum (one of the largest in France), and historically one of the first to receive works seized from churches and from territories occupied by the Napoleonic armies. An opulent collection therefore, and supplemented over the generations by art originating from the region. The collections comprise antiquities, middle ages and renaissance, 17th-, 18th-, 19th- and 20th-century paintings, sculptures, prints and drawings.

However, the unsuspecting visitor cannot enjoy all of that, as the museum is currently undergoing a thorough refurbishment. Extremely annoying, disappointing, depressing even - but not why I described the museum as being under siege.

It is a well-known fact that the French (and francophone Belgians) have a predilection, nay passion, for what they call bande dessinée: comic books. Once an entertainment for kids, they have elevated it to ‘Seventh Art’ (or Ninth, I forget), somewhere after cross-stitch and before pornography. As infantilization knows no borders, the anglo-saxon world likewise nowadays reads ‘graphic novels’. So far so good. To each his/her/its own.

As the Palace of Fine Arts of Lille is being renovated, what have the good museum people decided? They have commissioned an overhaul of the remaining exhibits by a celebrated French comic book artist (whose name I shall not allow to defile these pages – google it, if you must). They propose a “visit to the museum through the prism of his universe, inhabited by illusions, effects in perspective or trompe-l’oeil.” He “invents settings that will surprise the visitor throughout the halls.” “His guiding principle? Thinking outside the box!”

As to inside of the museum box, anything is allowed, except thinking. Or looking at paintings. In a hall with 17th-century paintings (Rubens, Van Dijck…), the center of the floor is taken up by a Punch-and-Judy theater in which a miniature mime/ballet dancer is projected, ‘dancing with the paintings’. Some ten persons are in the room, all of them agape at the box. I try to sneak a peek at a painting hanging behind the congregation, and am met with disapproving glares.

In the next hall, the Graphic Novelist has covered the entire floor with a black and white drawing of his. Its white glare niftily competes with the baroque altar pieces on the walls.

A hall dedicated to landscape paintings is treated thus: the paintings are hung contiguously – frames touching - and so that the horizon in each painting ‘continues’ through to the next. That is not all: for the more obtuse visitor, a bright blue thread is actually stretched over the grouped paintings, at the height where the horizon is located. What an enlightening way to enjoy your van Ruisdael, Corot and Sisley!

Contiguous hanging

The blue line is a real thread, not photoshopped

There's the horizon, stupid!

Same contiguous set-up for the portraits, all periods and styles mixed. In the center of the room, a large circular construction bearing a series of mirrors in gilded frames, reflecting the increasingly startled visitor. And in each corner of the hall a soundbox emitting loudly whispered incantations. It must have a deeper meaning, but for the life of me… My intellect is lacking.

The hall dedicated to still-life painting is announced from afar by means of an installation of plastic fruits and veggies that are arranged as if flowing, cornucopia-wise, from a real 17th-century still-life. The creative intellect of this Ninth Artist!

Outside the box

The best is yet to come. In a gallery facing the atrium, are hung seven ‘abstract’ paintings by modern artists of repute: Frantisek Kupka, Maurice Estève, Jean-Michel Atlan, Serge Poliakoff, Maria-Helena Vieira da Silva, Martin Barre and Auguste Herbin. Each of the seven paintings is treated as a cut-out, i.e. the Comical Hostage Taker has ‘continued’ the paintings, as he imagines, beyond their edges, covering the entire wall with his artistic multi-colored doodles. Yet why did he stop there? Why not draw some on the paintings? Thinking out of the box?

The love of modern painting

In the middle, Serge Poliakoff and his Duckies

As if all this wasn’t enough of a display of epic ignorance and hot-blooded hatred of painting, the museum itself pays its own dues to the utter desolation of art. Smack-bang in the middle of the floor of the huge two-storied atrium, they have erected a kind of large tent. Inside, hundreds of museum visitors can gape at an ever so artistic giant projection of the paintings of Goya. This is advertised as the ‘Goya Experience’. Walt Disney has entered the museum building.

The Goya Horror Show

After all that flabbergasting freakery, the visitor enters the quiet hall of the Arts décoratifs: pottery and ceramics. Quiet? Not surprisingly, the Graphic Iconophobe has let loose his delicate sense of humor even here. Every 15 seconds or so, the visitor’s by now threadbare nerves are regaled with the noise of a heap of pottery crashing down, and following that the reprimanding vocalization of an attendant. Soundtrack on a loop – no wonder there are no flesh and blood ushers present.

In keeping with the latest trend in museology, this ‘intervention’ by the Comic Terrorist on duty, is part of the ‘Open Museum’ program, event # 7 to be precise. How many events will it take before the Lille Palace of Fine Arts, finally and permanently degrades to the ‘Lil’ Palace of Provincial Arts and Stuff’? Whose intervention is next? Lille Olympique’s goalkeeper? The winner of La France a un incroyable talent? Miss Nord-Pas-de-Calais 2022?

All over the world, curators/directors of art museums are feverishly looking for means to attract even bigger and more diverse audiences. To make their collections more ‘relevant’, because, as is well known, works of art and paintings by themselves are irrelevant. To this end, they commission ‘celebrities’ to rearrange their collections. Artists in residence, some who have never seen the inside of a museum (no hyperbole), cannot wait to invade the museum as if it were their God-given stage. Sponsors decide which works undergo restoration. And all this in the belief that they are magnanimously connecting the Public with Art. For art is hoity-toity and needs bringing down a peg or two, and the public is stupid and gullible. So turn the museum into a fairground, cash in, and cut the arts down to size. Three birds, one stone. This is not a new phenomenon, but the Lille Palace of Fine Arts takes the prize, for now.

19th-century painting: on lilac walls


Sunday 26 September 2021

A Quantum of Solace

Please find my latest contribution to the New Art Examiner on:

https://www.newartexaminer.net/a-quantum-of-solace-the-museum-of-fine-arts-ghent/ 

Disclaimer: the choice of images accompanying the article was not mine, but the editor's.

- Jan de Bray: Portrait of a Young Woman - I can live with that.

- Prosper De Troyer: With the Birds - Mwaah. There 's much better...

- René Magritte: Manet's Balcony - Me no likee: much of his painting I find stuffy, didactic, and of little painterly value. But the many of us like it!

What I had proposed: 

Jheronimus Bosch Christ Carrying the Cross ca. 1510

, even though it might be a copy.

And this: 

Gust De Smet Child's Head 1916

, one of my absolute favorites, and mentioned in the article.

Enjoy!


Sunday 29 August 2021

Virtual Exhibition of Paintings by Hilda Devos - 2021

The latest collection of oil paintings on canvas by Hilda Devos. 

Possibly even more mysterious and evocative than the previous series of paintings (see September 2020).

An incremental invention of freedom.


Now the thunder did sound like gunfire


Too many roads, chap


untitled


untitled


And so we passed through the dead land


Mesa Verde, Colorado


Ostende, on se console


Gewitter seien die einzige Abwechslung


Alles grau... Pölnischer Horizont


Comme à Ostende et comme partout...


untitled


Fairest Isle


untitled


untitled


untitled


Daher weht der Wind


Feierabend


Weather


La presqu'île


Geneigte Ebene


untitled


untitled


untitled




... and, dating from somewhere in the 1980s:

Studio interior, De Haan


Thursday 12 August 2021

Second etc., etc...

 

Same conditions as yesterday, apart from a tad less of a breeze (still too much to put up my umbrella unanchored, and I didn't feel like that, so I didn't). Air still humid and chilly, doing a world of good for my joints and bones. Hands cold. Likely the last expedition this summer.

Herons, geese, a falcon.

One dog-walker + dog, far away. Before seven, a stocky man on an electric bike whizzed by, on his way to work, presumably.

What I learned these two days:

    - I need to draw more often.

    - I still feel the need to be closer by the sea; the real thing - with a surf, a rhythm, variability and stuff like that.

    - My favorite weather is still: mist + intermittent showers + fog + low humidity + gusty wind (from the SE!) + high clouds + some haziness + low clouds + a smidgeon of sun. So, all in all, not too much to ask. 

    - I still feel the need for working longer on drawings - homework?

    - I still don't know how to draw, which is a great relief. Eye, hand and mind are still as mutually suspicious, enough at loggerheads, to prevent (total) routine. What is left from this strife, on the paper, is, I guess, an uneasy compromise, a precarious truce. May it ever be so. If not, then all-out war, der totale Krieg. And my materials are as luxurious as ever, split & hammered bamboo and Kleenex making a renewed entrance today. 

Just maybe, one last bout of summer weather soon?


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Wednesday 11 August 2021

First Drawing Expedition Since the Outbreak

 

Arrived early, 4:40. No border control. SW breeze bringing chilly humidity and dew from over the drink. Impossible to set up my umbrella. Faint smell of the sea. High tide. Quite dark; couldn't very well see how far I had to go to reach my spot. Stars out, only faint whisps of cirrus. Coffee and sandwich while awaiting the advent of first light.

Lights of cargo ships passing to the left and right, in the darkness.

At some inexact point, there is just sufficient light to not wait any longer: when the piece of white paper is just as obscure as the space around. When you don't exactly see what you're doing, just as you don't know what you're seeing. The grey area between vision and observation. La vision oblique.

Almost no people (two dog-walkers, in the distance). Few animals. Formations of geese flying in all directions, as if in training.

Back tomorrow.

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