British Art News
The latest news in Modern and Contemporary British Art.
by Alex Leith
DECONSTRUCTING MARILYN | MARK LANCASTER AT THE REDFERN GALLERY
1964 was an eventful year for the Yorkshire artist Mark Lancaster. He was studying fine art, under pop-art guru Richard Hamilton, at King’s College, Newcastle. In his summer break, he went to New York, where he wangled a job assisting Andy Warhol in the first incarnation of The Factory, on East 87th Street. How? Here’s a lesson: he found his number in the phone book, and rang him up.
SOUTINE | KOSSOFF HASTINGS CONTEMPORARY
In December 1953 a 27-year-old Leon Kossoff attended the exhibition Russian Emigres in Paris, at the Redfern Gallery in London, which included four works by the late expressionist artist, Chaim Soutine. This was the first time he had seen one of the late oil painter’s works in the flesh.
DAVID STOREY | MEMORY MAN
The oil painter David Storey brings forgotten people’s memories to life, and makes them universal.
He trawls car boot sales and flea markets for old family photo albums, and uses selected images - often of individuals or family groups posing rather awkwardly for a loved-one’s holiday snap - as the starting point of his process. He works these images into miniature portraits, using egg tempera and oil on wood, attempting to ‘unlock the poetry from within’.
GILLIAN WEARING | SICKERT’S SISTER
Gillian Wearing is, of course, best known for her conceptual videos and photographs and, more recently, her sculptures. But during lockdown the Turner Prize-winning artist also turned – like other YBAs before her – to painting. And, in particular, to painting portraits.
RB KITAJ | DOMINIE AT SAN FELÍU, 1978
RJ Kitaj was taught drawing by Percy Horton, who was taught by Walter Sickert, who was taught by Edgar Degas. Is it fanciful to see the connection between the French master and the American artist?
Kitaj, who spent his formative years in England, had a big influence on British pop art, and never stopped experimenting with style, form and medium, but he was, above all, an exceptional draftsman: the critic Robert Hughes called him ‘better than almost anyone else’.
RIP PHYLLIDA BARLOW | MONUMENTAL SCULPTOR
For four decades the artist Phyllida Barlow, who died this week aged 78, dedicated her life to teaching her students at the Slade School of Art. She was, by all accounts, a brilliant teacher. Some of those students made a big name for themselves: Rachel Whiteread, for example. Tacita Dean. Douglas Gordon. Ángela De La Cruz. All this time she was making her own work, quietly, in her studio.
HALIMA CASSELL: FROM THE EARTH | WATTS GALLERY ARTISTS’ VILLAGE
Sculptural ceramicist Halima Cassell admits she had never heard of the Watts Gallery Artists’ Village, near Guildford in Surrey, before she was invited to become the first contemporary artist to exhibit there since its restoration in 2011. But as soon as she entered the Watts Cemetery Chapel, she fell in love with the eclectically styled terracotta building, realising that the artistic vision of Mary Watts, who oversaw its exterior and interior design 125 years ago, bore uncanny similarities to her own.
ARTHUR HENRY KNIGHTON-HAMMOND ‘THE FORGOTTEN IMPRESSIONIST’
‘That man is the greatest painter in watercolours of our time’. So wrote the artist Augustus John, of Arthur Henry Knighton-Hammond, in a review of an exhibition of his work in Menton, on the French Riviera, in 1926.
JEAN COOKE | WOMAN ON THE EDGE
Alex Leith is with Roberta Travers, of Piano Nobile, in front of the haunting self-portrait of Jean Cooke, completed in 1954, which opens the gallery’s new show about the painter, Seascapes and Chalk Caves.
PIPER GOES POP
John Piper was an artistic polymath, able to shift, seemingly effortlessly, from style to style, genre to genre, medium to medium. He is perhaps most famous today for his delicate, elegant, rather brooding landscapes, particularly those depicting the ruins of churches in the English countryside. But he also worked in the fields of abstract art, collage, book illustration…
PETER DOIG | SMELL THE OIL PAINT
Is it my imagination, or can you still smell the oil paint?
The Scottish-born artist Peter Doig moved back to England in 2021 after 20 years living in Trinidad, and this fine exhibition of twelve large canvases represents work that he has since created – or in most cases finished off – in his East London home-cum-studio.
THE FOOTBALL MATCH. THE BEAUTIFUL GAME, LOWRY STYLE
Lowry painted scores of football-related paintings, but was generally more interested in the fans, than the players. His paintings weren’t about the centre-forward thwacking the ball past the despairing dive of the keeper: they were about the common purpose of the crowd.
JUNE REOPENING FOR THE NPG
The National Portrait Gallery has announced its 2023/24 programme, commencing this June, after a two-year closure for the largest redevelopment in its history.
TOWNER 100 | LET GOD WAIT…
The news last summer that the 2023 Turner Prize had been awarded to Towner Eastbourne was met with surprise in certain quarters. Eastbourne? The Turner Prize? The Sussex seaside town was best known to the greater public, after all, as a genteel resort favoured by the older generation, and nicknamed ‘God’s Waiting Room’.
SAY IT WITH FLOWERS | WINIFRED NICHOLSON
‘My paint brush always gives a tremor of pleasure when I let it paint a flower’, wrote Winifred Nicholson, in her 1969 essay The Flower’s Response.
THE HORROR, THE HORROR | FRANCIS BACON
Margaret Thatcher famously called him ‘That man who paints those dreadful pictures’ and Francis Bacon’s work, always full of existential anguish, certainly divided critics throughout his five-decade career, his shocking images simultaneously intriguing and repulsing his viewers.
A TOWER? OR A PAINTBRUSH? | TREVOR BELL
When the abstract painter Trevor Bell died in 2017, many mourned the passing of ‘the last of the St Ives Modernists’.
AN AMERICAN GIRL (IN YORKSHIRE) | GERALD LAING
Until March 27 Willoughby Gerrish is holding a show of Gerald Laing’s work at Thirsk Sculpture Garden in Yorkshire.
SLEEPING GIANT | SUE TILLEY, BY LUCIAN FREUD
In a recent interview with ROSA Magazine (Review of Sussex Arts), Sue Tilley, one of Lucian Freud’s regular sitters, called the artist “a monster, but a humorous monster”.
SEASON’S GREETINGS!
We’d like to wish you a very merry Christmas, with this season’s-greetings card created by David Jones in December 1926, a very rare wood-engraving print, courtesy of Dominic Kemp in association with Austin/Desmond Fine Art. It is a proof of a card Jones was asked to design, but was never used.