Category / exhibition reviews

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Don’t Confuse Her With the Actor

Lee Miller: A Woman’s War (Imperial War Museum, London, 15 October 2015-24 April 2016)

Do you know you are not allowed to drink beer in the Imperial War Museum? Or – given that I’m fairly surely they sell it in their café – you are not allowed to drink beer you’ve brought with you in the IWM? Also, I’m pretty sure I’ve seen themed beers in the shop.

I was forced to use a locker for the bottle of Solaris I’d bought for the train home.

I think the last paid exhibition I saw at the Imperial War Museum was Don McCullin – his fantastic war photography. Other photographers, of course, specialise in fashion, or in art, or landscapes or people.

Lee Miller (1907-1977) does art, people, landscape, fashion and war. A rare combination, especially, one might say, for a woman. I’ve seen various exhibitions of her work of late – as if her son Antony Penrose is a man on a mission – most recently her photos of Picasso and her family at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, and there’s a vast website at www.leemiller.co.uk. She’s shown up among women surrealists, too.

I don’t think I’d picked up before that she’d been raped as a young child, nor that her father had photographed her in the nude. I recalled nudes of her, including self-portraits, and some of these are on display, along with Paul Homann’s cast of her torso (1939) – an echo of Man Ray’s photo of her – and this suggests an apparent degree of bodily freedom that seems a little odd. Exhibitionism as defence?

She’d worked as a model in New York for Arnold Genthe, George Hoyningen-Huene, Nickolas Muray and Edward Steichen, before going to Europe in 1929 and working with Man Ray as muse, model and photographer. She experimented with the solarisation process – which was also to be used by Barbara Hepworth. On her return to New York in 1932, she set up her own studio, but married wealthy businessman Aziz Eloui Bey and moved to Cairo. Her photography shifted from surrealism to landscape, focusing on the desert and ruined villages in the sands. On a trip to Paris she met the collector and artist Roland Penrose, beginning a long affair with him that would eventually become a marriage. She took photographs in the Balkans, as well as Syria and Egypt, before war broke out.

In theory she should have gone back to the United States, but she had taken a job with British Vogue. Initially she was working as a fashion photographer – it was Vogue, after all – and part of the work was to keep spirits up with the keeping up of standards. But as the war went on, it intruded on the photographs. Models posed in bomb sites or wore gas masks – fashion colliding with surrealism. She took photographs of women in uniforms and doing war work, as well as nurses.

By 1944, she was accredited as a war correspondent for Vogue — there’s an intriguing photograph by David E. Sherman of her in uniform in front of the Vogue cover with a soldier, women and a stars and stripes flag – and she got more involved in the war. The way she tells it, it was almost a lark, but that might be a survivor talking.

She was meant to go to Normandy, after the landings, and to avoid trouble, but she ended up in Saint-Malo, still under German control but heavily shelled by the American army. Unlike other journalists, Miller mixed with and apparently had affairs with the military, and didn’t buckle down to follow the official itinerary. She ended up in liberated Paris – where she photographed fashion shows – and went into Germany. The photographs on display include some of Dachau and Buchenwald, the concentration camps, one being feet in boots, somewhere between a dancer and a fashion shoot. In Munich she entered Hitler’s apartment, Scherman taking a photo of her in Hitler’s bath, nude of course, her muddied boots on the mat, a photo of Hitler on one side, a statuette on the other. It is a grim jest.

That was almost it – she returned to Britain in 1946 and took more photos of Budapest, finally reconciling with and marrying Roland. In 1948, Antony was born; Picasso continued to visit and remained a friend of the family. Miller gave up photography almost entirely – there’s a 1946 photograph of Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning, with Ernst as a giant and she had photos in the 1955 The Family of Man exhibition curated by Steichen at MOMA, New York – in favour of becoming a cordon blue cook and writing about it for British Vogue.

Antony apparently didn’t know about the war photographs until after her death, which seems incredible. Miller was also focusing on helping Roland with his various biographies of artists.

But the body of work is remarkable – black and white, sharp, often square and remarkably well framed. Sometimes the fashion influence is discernible in the reportage, sometimes there is staging, but a dark humour and sense of surrealism often bubbles through. She wasn’t the only female war photographer – the exhibition mentions Margaret Bourke-White (1904-71), who was also with the US Army and had been in the Soviet Union in 1941 when the Germans invaded – but hers remains an impressive body of work.

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Bridget Courbevoie

Bridget Riley: Learning from Seurat (Courtauld Art Gallery, 17 September 2015–17 January 2016)

I tried to find the bridge (Bridge at Courbevoie (1886-87)) on Google maps but failed — the river Seine, the bridge, a distant factory, trees, fisher men, walkers. Georges Seurat’s brand of Post-Impressionism, pointillism, made up from coloured dots, half way between colour printing and cathode ray tubes. In another place, Roy Lichtenstein was to enlarge dots and make pop art of comics.

Copying is original.

Deliberately, if annoyingly, the copy and original hang either side of the doorway, challenging you to find a viewpoint from which they can be compared. You carry the memory of one to the other.
photo (2)

Bridget Riley may have seen the painting at the Courtauld – I presume it was at the Warburg Institute, Woburn Square in 1959, having recently moved from Portman Square? — but instead it struck her in R.H. Wilenski’s book on Seurat and she then decoded to paint her own version. It’s bigger, of course, but then the book may not have been clear how big the original was. I think she knew, really, so decided to make the dots larger, and so the intensity of the original is pushed even further from photorealism. The sky is curiously yellow, matching the colour in the water and the grass. He creates light from colour and that seems to be what fascinated Riley.

If the colours become abstract, then so do the shapes — triangles, poles, lozenges, anticipating Riley’s move from stripes into something more… foliated. The Lagoon paintings, for example.

sketch

And then, on an opposite wall, Pink Landscape (1960), the shimmer of summer heat in Sienna represented by dots of red and green and pink and orange and blue, and a child’s farmhouse of white walls and a red roof. The shapes of the fields form lozenges.

Wilenski writes of Bridge that “The little man in the bowler hat has missed his train back to Paris and will be scolded by his wife; the child will be late for tea and spanked, maybe, by its mother.”

Heigho.

But we would lose the narrative in Riley as the pinstripes become stripes.

Here we’re offered variants on stripes — Late Morning I (1967) with green and red and white and blue stripes insisting on length and direction, the vertical, Vapour (1970) with white, brown, purple, green stripes overlapping, question the plane and Ecclesia (1985), thicker stripes, taking on volume.

But Tremor (1962) draws the eye — black and white triables that also form curves and ribbons and you swear the painting rotates in front of you.

A painting approximates reality through strokes, dots, stripes and the pointillist returns it to dots. Riley’s insight was to occupy the geometry, to chase the relation of shape, in canvases that move both optically and emotionally, to create luminence.

Bibliography

  • Bridget Riley: Learning from Seurat (London: The Courtauld Gallery/Ridinghouse, 2015)
  • Wilenski, R. H., Seurat (London: Faber & Faber, 1949)

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Others Include Magritte and Brel

TINTIN: Hergé’s Masterpiece/The Mysteries of Marlinspike Hall (Terrace Rooms, Somerset House, 12 November 2015-31 January 2016)

photoToward the end of this exhibition is a photograph of Hergé and Andy Warhol.

One of them is an artist. The other one worked in reproductions.

Ah, but which is which?

I remember the large format Tintin books from my junior school, back in the day before graphic novels were a thing — but I don’t recall reading any. I must have done. Nothing stuck. There were cartoons, too, right? HERGÉ’S ADVENTUUUUUUUUUUUURES OF TINTIN. Oddly enough, I did read the book on Tintin by Tom McCarthy.

A few years ago, my local Waterstone’s — one of them, the one which produces authors — had a boxset of all twenty-four volumes in a medium format in a slip case at a daft price, but one which was clearly cheaper than buying twenty-four individual titles. All or nothing. And then, several months before the film, they reduced it considerably. So I bought it with the intention of reading them before so the film. I didn’t read them. I didn’t see the film.

And so when there was news of an exhibition at Somerset House, I thought that was an excuse, but I’ve still only read about five. I’ll go back now and work through. Tintin appears to be a journalist, although I’ve yet to see him file a story. There seems to be a pattern of receiving a telegram or travelling to another country and running into men with guns, and an encounter with the local police who throw him in prison thanks to the villains misleading them. Captain Haddock may turn up and the identical (non?)twins Thompson and Thomson and chaos ensues before Tintin unveils the criminals. Snowy, his dog, does the full Timmy’s-down-the-mineshaft business, but nobody listens to him.

photo (1)Hergé was born Georges Remi in Etterbeek, Belgium in 1907, so he would have been seven when the Germans invaded and devastated the country. He went to a Catholic school and excelled, although not apparently in art. More significantly, he joined the scouts, and started drawing a strip, Totor for a scouting magazine. The moral code, the respect for authority and the doing a good deed every day — along, perhaps, with Catholicism — feeds into Tintin. Hergé had found work with a Catholic newspaper, Le Vingtième Siècle, and was invited to draw a weekly strip for its children’s supplement, Le Petit Vingtième from 1929.

The new technologies of the age — electricity, cars, gramophones, telephones and cinema all contribute to the strips, with Hergé apparently taking inspiration from early cinema as much as earlier comics. Among the latter we must presumably include Benjamin Rabier’s Tintin Lutin. Hergé aspires to realism; he did a lot of research on the Destination Moon (1950/1953) and Explorers on the Moon (1952-3/1954), getting the rocketry as right as was possible then. (The former predates George Pál’s film as far as I can see, assuming Objectif Lune appeared in the serialisation.) On the other hand, the action twisting action, Tintin’s survival and the constant defeat of criminals stretches credulity. Hergé has very basic ligne clair (clear line) which is nonetheless efficient.

The initial strips — Tintin in the Land of the Soviets (1929-30/1930, Tintin in the Congo (1930-31/1931) and Tintin in America (1931-32/1932) — have a crude, conservative, xenophobic, not to say racist feel, and it’s worth remembering that Belgium was a colonial power in Africa. (See, say, Heart of Darkness.) However, on becoming friends with Zhang Chongren in 1934, he started doing more research into the background locations of his adventures, beginning with The Blue Lotus (1935-36/1936). The exhibition calls him Chang — minus his personal name — and calls him Hergé’s “spiritual guide”, which brought me up short. As I read on, I am going to have to be aware of the degree to which Hergé avoids xenophobia.

Meanwhile, the Nazis rose to power and invaded and occupied Belgium, closing Le Vingtième Siècle; Tintin continued in the Nazi-controlled Le Soir and I’ve vague memories of where Hergé was politically. McCarthy must have discussed this in his book. This is presumably at the same time as Paul de Man’s work for the same paper? There is clearly the risk of an appearance of collaboration on Hergé’s part. After the closure of Le Soir, he established his own magazine with Raymond Leblanc, a resistance fighter.

The exhibition mostly consisted of black and white panels from the original stories, mostly minus the dialogue. These were described as facsimiles — but I wasn’t clear whether this meant modern copies of the archive or these had been made in the production process. There were also small photographs — some I suspect photocopies, not all clearly labelled. And then in each room there is either a vitrine containing a three dimensional recreation of a frame from the strips or a model — Marlinspike Hall or Tintin’s flat. On the side wall were further reproductions, as well as on the windows and in fireplaces. Information boards included scans.

As scanning and printing technology has improved, I’ve noticed more and more use of facsimiles in exhibitions. Does it matter that they are copies? Am I fetishising the original with its aura of labour — Hergé’s steps in putting a strip together? Tintin was mass produced — in newspapers, in collections — and so the hand of the artist is lost in what we’ve seen. Should it be brought back? In an interview, Hergé said that not only did he have fun, he was paid to do it. And that photo of a meeting with Warhol — he of the Campbell Soup and Brillo Pads and silkscreens and chat shows as art — is telling.

I don’t think there were any examples on show, but apparently Hergé embraced abstract art in later life. In 1976 he bought a Calder mobile — coincidentally there is a show of that artist’s work at Tate Modern. There’s much more to be said about Hergé, I suspect; I seduced myself into buying the book, so no doubt I will say more.