Tag Archives: Tate Britain

WOMEN AS DEPICTED BOTH BY A MAN AND BY THEMSELVES AT TATE BRITAIN

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I DO NOT KNOW whether it was deliberate or accidental that currently (until the 7th of April 2024) there are two contrasting (or, maybe, complementary) exhibitions on in the galleries of London’s Tate Britain.

On the first floor, there is an exhibition called “Sargent and Fashion”. It is a collection of paintings by the American-born artist John Singer Sargent (1856-1925), who was born in Florence (Italy) and died in London (UK). The aim of the show is, according to the Tate’s website, to show:

“… how this remarkable painter used fashion to create portraits of the time, which still captivate today.”

The exhibition includes some of Sargent’s portraits alongside a few of the items of clothing that his subjects wore whilst he was creating their portraits. In this well laid out show, the viewer gets to see that Sargent was an excellent painter, whose portraits manage to radiate the natures of the sitters’ personalities. I doubt that most of Sargent’s subjects would have been disappointed with the pictures he produced for them. Many of the paintings are portraits of women. Almost all of them were depicted wearing elegant clothes, and are superbly executed conventional portraits. They celebrate aspects of the ‘respectable’ (i.e., wealthy) society of his times.  

Beneath the Sargent exhibition, on the ground floor of Tate Britain, there is an exhibition showing how women in Britain broke out of their conventional male-dominated lifestyle during the 1970s and 1980s. Called “WOMEN IN REVOLT Art, Activism and the Women’s movement in the UK 1970–1990”, it is according to the Tate’s website, it is:

“… a wide-ranging exploration of feminist art by over 100 women artists working in the UK. It shines a spotlight on how networks of women used radical ideas and rebellious methods to make an invaluable contribution to British culture. Their art helped fuel the women’s liberation movement during a period of significant social, economic and political change.”

During a long part of the period covered by the show, Britain had its first female Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher (in office from 1979-1990). Although she fought her way through hitherto male bastions to emerge as the country’s first lady Prime Minister and showed what women were capable of doing in the world of politics, she was not a feminist icon, as Natasha Walter wrote in The Guardian (online 5th of January 2012):

“Obviously Thatcher was no feminist: she had no interest in social equality, she knew nothing of female solidarity … We should never forget her destructive policies or sanitise her corrosive legacy. But nor should we deny the fact that as the outsider who pushed her way inside, as the woman in a man’s world, she was a towering rebuke to those who believe women are unsuited to the pursuit and enjoyment of power. Girls who grew up when she was running the country were able to imagine leadership as a female quality in a way that girls today struggle to do. And for that reason she is still a figure that feminists would be unwise to dismiss.”

However, as Baroness Burt of Solihull said in the House of Lords on the 5th of February 2018:

“… my next figure is 1979, which, of course, was the date when we got our first female Prime Minister. Personally, I would feel more inclined to celebrate this milestone if she had encouraged other women to come forward, to use some of the talented women that she had at her disposal. But, sadly, she got to the top and pulled the ladder up behind her, which is a great shame, because the whole point of having representation from all parts of society is to make for better government.”

As several exhibits on display at the Tate (until the show ends on the 7th of April 2024), Mrs Thatcher was intensely disliked by artists encouraging ‘female liberation’.

Before entering the exhibition, I was a little worried that all I would see was propaganda and other polemic material. Well, there was plenty of that kind of thing, and much of it was both interesting and often visually intriguing – sometimes quite witty. The exhibition, which is excellently curated, also includes many paintings, sculptures, videos, and other artistic items. These have mostly been created by female artists with whom I am not familiar. And all of them are both visually engaging and satisfying.   Several of these were of Indian heritage, and others have ‘black’ African heritage. There are also cases containing printed material that propagated feminist ideas. Included amongst these were a few copies of the magazine Spare Rib, which I remember seeing at friends’ houses many years ago. My future wife was one its readers. Published between 1973 and 1993, its aim was to challenge the traditional roles of females (of all ages) and to explore new ways in which they could engage in society. In fact, this was the aim of many – if not all – of the works in the exhibition.

We visited both exhibitions today (the 28th of February 2024), to experience the contrast between them. Both are excellent in their own ways and achieve what the curators intended. They are both well worth visiting. However, to my taste, the exhibition on the ground floor was far more exhilarating and inspiring, that the more conventional show on the floor above it.

A memorial to a lost artist at the Tate Britain art gallery

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GRENFELL TOWER IN west London went up in flames on the evening of the 14th of June 2017. At least 72 people died in the conflagration. Amongst those unfortunates was the Gambian-British artistic photographer Khadija Mohammadou Saye (born 1992).

About a month before she died, she met the painter Chris Ofili (born 1968) in Venice (Italy), where they were both exhibiting their works.

In 2023, the Tate commissioned Ofili to create an artwork to decorate the grand north staircase of the Tate Britain. According to the Tate’s website, Ofili:

“…  considered the significance of painting directly onto the walls of a public building and wanted to choose a subject that affected us as a nation. ‘Requiem’ is a dream-like mural, resulting from his poetic reflections.”

Ofili said:

“I wanted to make a work in tribute to Khadija Saye. Remembering the Grenfell Tower fire, I hope that the mural will continue to speak across time to our collective sadness.”

“Requiem” covers three of the staircase’s large walls. On the middle wall, there is a portrait of the artist Khadija Saye. The website explained:

“Artist Khadija Saye is at the centre of an energy force, high up on the middle wall. She represents one of the souls. She holds an andichurai (a Gambian incense pot) to her ear, in a pose taken from her own artwork. This object was precious to Saye, as it belonged to her mother. It symbolises the possibility of transformation through faith, honouring Saye’s dual faith heritage of Christianity and Islam.”

At the top of the stairs, there are panels explaining the wall paintings. There is also one of Ms Saye’s photographs. Called “Andichrai”, it is from a series of photographs she created in the last year of her life. The photograph, which is a visually intriguing artwork, shows a woman holding an andichirai to her ear, It looks as if Ofili used this photograph to create his image of Khadija in his “Requiem” mural.

When I first looked at Ofili’s “Requiem”, I was reminded of the dramatic images of William Blake (1757-1827).  It is a wonderful memorial to an artist, who was cut-off in her prime. I do not know how long “Requiem” will remain on the staircase at the Tate. So, I recommend that you go and see it as soon as possible.

The artists John Mallord Turner and Mark Rothko and abolition of slavery

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AFTER BEING DISAPPOINTED by the large temporary exhibition of playful but repetitive works by the artist Sarah Lucas (born 1962) at Tate Britain, we had a coffee and then revisited the rooms containing paintings and sketches by John Mallord Turner (1775-1851). It has been many years since we last viewed these paintings, and seeing them revived our spirits after having had them somewhat lowered by the Lucas exhibition.

One of the Turner galleries contains a particularly fine painting by the American artist Mark Rothko (1903-1970). It hangs amongst a series of Turner’s often unfinished late experiments on canvas. They were mostly items found in Turner’s studio after his death. Without outlines, these almost ethereal paintings are examples of the artist’s experimentation in ways of depicting light and colour. If one did not know when these works were created, one might easily guess that they are the works of an artist working during the age of Impressionism. As an aside, many of Turner’s finished works are extremely impressionistic, and I consider him to be the pioneer of what later became Impressionism, and one of the best creators in this style. These experimental works were displayed at an exhibition in New York City at its Museum of Modern Art in 1966. That year, Rothko remarked:

“This man Turner, he learnt a lot from me”.

The Rothko painting hanging amongst the Turner experiments was created in 1950-52. Later, in 1969, Rothko donated a set of his paintings to the Tate, hoping that they would be hung close to those of Turner. They are not; they are hanging at the Tate Modern.

Moving away from the room in which the Rothko painting is hanging, I came across another Turner painting that interested me, “The Deluge”, which was first exhibited in about 1805. In the bottom right corner, Turner has painted a black-skinned man rescuing a naked white woman. On close examination, the man can be seen to have a chain around his waist. The Tate’s caption to this picture includes the following:

“Painted at a time when the cause for Britain to abolish its enslavement of people of African descent was gaining ground, this detail is significant.”

Some years after it was painted, Turner gave a print of this work to a pro-abolition Member of Parliament.

“The Deluge” is not the only painting by Turner relating to his sympathy for the abolition of slavery. His “The Slave Ship”, first exhibited in 1840, is another powerful example. This painting, now in Boston (Massachusetts), is based on the dreadful incident when, in an attempt to cheat the insurers, the captain of a slave ship, the Zong’, caused 132 slaves to be thrown overboard (in 1781).  Turner had learned about this crime from the anti-slavery activists with whom he associated. Although Turner, a liberal, was sympathetic to the abolition of slavery, he was not totally divorced from the benefits that transatlantic slavery brought to Britain, as was pointed out by Chris Hastings in the “Mail Online” on the 28th of August 2021:

“One of Britain’s greatest painters has fallen victim to woke culture, as art-lovers are being warned not to ‘idolise’ J. M. W. Turner because he once held a single share in a Jamaican business that used slave labour.”

The website of London’s Royal Academy gives more detail:

“It would be fair to assume that Turner’s views were strongly pro-abolition at the time he painted this work. However, scholars have pointed out that earlier in his career he apparently had no qualms about investing in a company that ran a plantation … In 1805 Turner invested £100 to buy a share in a business called Dry Sugar Work. Despite the name, this enterprise was a cattle farm on a Jamaican plantation run on the labour of enslaved people. The business was owned by Stephen Drew, a barrister who bought the estate from William Beckford in 1802. The firm went bust in 1808.”

Some many months ago, we saw a play at the National Theatre, “Rockets and Blue Lights” (written by Winston Pinnock). It concerns an ageing Turner seeking inspiration from a remembered incident like the awful event that took place on the “Zong”. During the play, it was alleged that because of his disgust with the slave trade, Turner gave up using sugar. Whether or not this was the case, I cannot say.

Fascinating as are abolitionist and the Rothko ‘connections’ with JMW Turner, the well-displayed paintings in the Turner galleries are all superb and well worth visiting.

The Kensington gravel pits

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JOHN LINNELL (1792-1882) painted the Kensington gravel pits in about 1811. The picture hangs in London’s Tate Britain These pits lay alongside Bayswater Road and Notting Hill Gate. They provided gravel for building projects in England and as far away as Imperial Russia.

Today, the pits no longer exist. They have been built over, but street names such as St Petersburg Place and Moscow Road commemorate the fortunes made by selling gravel from these pits to Russia.

You can discover more about this and much more about Paddington and Kensington and points further west in my book “BEYOND MARYLEBONE AND MAYFAIR: EXPLORING WEST LONDON” (see https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/B0B7CR679W/

When religious art was frowned upon

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WE OFTEN VISIT the Tate Britain art gallery on London’s Millbank, usually to see special temporary exhibitions. Rarely, if ever, do we spend time looking at the Tate’s permanent collection. However, today, the 6th of July 2023, we met some friends who wanted to see the recently re-hung paintings in the permanent collection. The paintings are arranged in rooms in chronological order. Each artwork has an interestingly informative label, which describes the social conditions of the era in which it was created and other points about it.

The first room of the series of galleries is dedicated to works created just before, during, and after the (Protestant) Reformation in 16th century England. I found it to be most interesting.  The radical rejection of Roman Catholic religious practices involved, amongst many other things, a profound disapproval of the artistic portrayal of religious subjects. A consequence of this was that artists switched from painting religious scenes to portraiture. Just as people love being portrayed in photographs today, those who could afford it in the 16th century were pleased to have themselves immortalised in well-executed paintings. What I had never realised before was that the Reformation unwittingly gave birth to the long tradition of British portrait painting. Maybe, most people know this already, but it was news to me.

The gallery dedicated to the Reformation era has many fine portraits, by artists both known and unknown. However, one of the paintings hanging amongst the portraits is a religious scene, “An Allegory of Man”, by an unknown artist. Painted in about 1596, it would have been a highly controversial subject given the Protestant aesthetics prevailing at that time.

Although the temporary exhibitions at the Tate Britain are usually well worth viewing, the permanent collection deserves many a visit, as we discovered today.

Freshly painted frescos at Tate Britain

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FRESHLY PAINTED FRESCOS

UNTIL I WAS SIXTEEN, my parents took me to Florence (Italy) every year, except in 1967 – the year after the city had been devastated by a flood. My parents were crazy about Italy, the Italians, and Italian art. In Florence, we used to view many frescos in churches and palaces and even those removed from their original locations and placed in museums.

Traditional fresco painting was a laborious process, which produced durable images on walls and ceilings. To create a fresco, first a couple of layers of plaster are applied to a surface (wall or ceiling) and allowed to dry. Then, the artist(s) sketch the image that will eventually be created. Next, a part of the sketch is covered with fresh plaster. The extent of this is the area which the artist can paint during one day. While the plaster is damp, the artist paints that section of the picture with water-based coloured paints. As the plaster dries, the paint becomes incorporated within it, producing a surface more durable than if the paint had been painted onto dry plaster. Day by day, section by section, the process is continued until the whole image has been finished.

I mentioned that some frescoes have been moved into museums. The Italians developed a method for doing this. The fresco to be moved is covered with a cloth sheet coated with adhesive, Then the cloth is pulled away from the wall or ceiling. As it is peeled away, it takes with it that layer of the fresco that contains the paint-absorbed layer of plaster. When this layer has been removed, the artist’s sketch becomes revealed. This is of great interest to historians of art, who can learn how the artist developed his final product from his original sketch. This whole process fascinated me when I was a child, and still amazes me.

Most of the great Italian frescos were created many centuries ago, and the process has fallen out of fashion. Well, at least that is what I believed until I visited a lovely exhibition at Tate Britain. On show until the 7th of May 2023, it is a display of works created by Hannah Quinlan (born 1991) and Rosie Hastings (born 1991). They have created six large, colourful images depicting, to quote the Tate’s website:


“…street scenes showing groups of people portraying various power dynamics, class and social relations and positions of authority.”


Attractive and fascinating as these works are, what really intrigued me is the way that they were made. The paintings, which have been created during the last few years, have been executed using traditional fresco technique such as I described above. In an interview recorded on the Tate website, they were asked why they used this archaic technique, and they replied:


“Fresco painting is often found in places of political, legal and educational importance and is executed at a monumental scale. Traditionally, frescos depict scenes loaded with ideology and symbolism while presenting themselves as neutral or universal. A fresco often represents the moral code of the time within which it is painted, intended as an instructional and educational medium that reinforces dominant perceptions.”


I can understand this, and like their reasoning. I enjoyed the exhibition, and encourage others to take a look. Enjoy the frescos, but do not omit to examine the lovely drawing the artists created using graphite.

Seeing the world inside out

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THE ARTIST RACHEL Whiteread (born in Essex in 1963) sees the world from an original perspective. Her sculptures depict the spaces contained within or around objects. One of her sculptures currently on show in an exhibition in London’s Tate Britain Gallery illustrates her approach well.

The artist has made a plaster cast of the space enclosed by the staircase in the building housing her studio. When you look at the artwork carefully, it can be seen to consist of sections of plaster, rather than one single piece. I am guessing that what Whiteread did was to make plaster casts of parts of the staircase, its walls, and ceiling, and then assembled them to create what is effectively the shape of the space enclosed by them. The result is something that at first glance makes one think of staircases, but after a few moments realisation, you notice that it is not what it first seemed to be.

One of the artist’s first and maybe best known works was created in October 1993. Called “House”, it was a plaster cast of the interior of a whole house, which was about to be demolished, on Grove Road in the East End of London. I remember going to see this unusual artwork during the short time it existed; it was tragically demolished by the local council in January 1994.

In addition to large projects such as described above, Whiteread has created many smaller works, such as plaster casts of the insides of containers (e.g., hot water bottles) and the spaces surrounding objects (e.g., chairs and doors). However, it is the larger works like the staircase and the house that I prefer.

Some people may criticise Whiteread’s work as being, to quote Hans Christian Andersen, the stuff of “Emperor without clothes”, but that is a simplistic view of her creations. What artists like Whiteread (and other much criticised artists such as Picasso) make us do, is to see and consider things in a new way – you might say “with new eyes”.

Art of heros

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GEORGE FREDERIC WATTS (1807-1904) was a prolific, highly acclaimed Victorian artist. Visitors to London’s Kensington Gardens can easily admire one of his works, a sculpture called “Physical Energy”. Standing across the Serpentine from a sculpture by Henry Moore, Watts’s sculpture is a bronze casting of a version of it that was sent to South Africa as part of a memorial to Cecil Rhodes. One of Watts’s less prominent works, and quite a curious one, can be seen in Postman’s Park, which is a few yards north of St Pauls Cathedral in the City of London. It is the Memorial to Heroic Self-Sacrifice.

The memorial consists of a wall covered with rectangular plaques, made with ceramic tiles commemorating heroic deeds carried out by ordinary people. For example, one bears the words:
“Frederick Alfred Croft. Inspector aged 31. Saved a lunatic woman from suicide at Woolwich Arsenal Station but was himself run over by a train. Jan 11, 1878”.
And many other examples of great bravery by civilians are recorded on the wall, which is protected by a canopy with a decorative fringe.

By Susan Hiller

The artist Susan Hiller (1940-2019) was born in Florida (USA) and died in London. Apparently, she was surprised by how few people noticed the memorial in Postman’s Park, let alone read the tragic plaques. I am one of the few, who have done so. So, as soon as I got near to an artwork displayed in a temporary exhibition in the Tate Britain art gallery, I knew it was based on the plaques in Postman’s Park. The piece consists of 41 photographs of plaques on the Memorial, which have been arranged on a wall by Susan Hiller. In the centre of this artistic array that she has called “Monument 1980-1”, she has placed a plaque which consists of a stretch of tiling on which the words “Strive to be your own hero” have been crudely written with black paint.

Susan Hiller’s interesting version of GF Watts’s Memorial is one of several intriguing exhibits in an exhibition called “Material as Message”, which was still being installed when we visited it in March 2023. There is yet one more exhibit to be unveiled. Hiller’s exhibit interested me because I am familiar with Postman’s Park, but the other exhibits were equally fascinating both visually and conceptually.

Walter and the woodlice at Whiteleys

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Painted by Walter Sickert

AT THE TATE Britain, I visited the exhibition of paintings and drawings by the artist Walter Sickert (1860-1942). Amongst these, I was interested to see one which depicts a stretch of the platform at what is now Bayswater Underground station. In Sickert’s time, this station was called ‘Queens Road (Bayswater)’. Painted in 1914-15, this station was the closest one to his then home in Kildare Gardens (off Westbourne Grove). In the painting there is a man seated on a bench beneath an advertisement for Whiteleys. This was a department store, whose history I have described in my book “Beyond Marylebone and Mayfair: Exploring West London”*. Here is a shortened extract:

“Queensway was the home of a large department store called Whiteleys. Created in nearby Westbourne Grove by William Whiteley (1831-1907) in 1863, it moved into its large home on Queensway in 1911. After going through various transformations over the years, eventually becoming a shopping mall with restaurants and a cinema, it closed in 2018 … Since 2018, developers have removed the building’s innards whilst preserving its outer walls. The aim is to create a new shopping area along with a hotel and residential units. The final product might be interesting as its architects are from the team led by Norman Foster.”

Between 1968 and 1970, I was at north London’s Highgate School studying in preparation for my A-Levels (examinations to gain admission to university). One of my subjects was biology. I decided to enter the school’s Bodkin Prize biology essay competition. For some long-forgotten reason, I chose as my essay topic the life of woodlice.  Seeing the above-mentioned painting by Sickert, reminded me of this essay. Being a keen researcher, even in my late teens, I discovered that there was a detailed book on my chosen subject, and this was available for perusal in a science library (the National Reference Library for Science and Invention), which was part of what has now become known as The British Library. In the late 1960s, when I required the book, the library’s collection was housed in a part of what had been the former Whiteleys department store on Queensway. It was a peculiar place: the bookshelves and readers’ desks were arranged on several layers of curved galleries surrounding a circular open space on the ground floor. Above the circular space, there was a spectacular, circular, large diameter, glazed skylight. The book I consulted was in French, and I spent a whole day laboriously translating it and making notes for use later. ‘cloporte’ is the French for ‘woodlouse’, just in case you are wondering. I believe that one visit was sufficient for me to collect what information I needed.

In December 1967, there was a debate about the state of the British Museum Library (now British Library) in the House of Lords. During a long speech, Viscount Eccles (1904-1999) mentioned the library where I had read about woodlice:

“Learned societies and famous men in the arts and the sciences have been shocked by the substance and the manner of the Government’s decision concerning the Library … An example of how the Act works can be seen in what has happened to the National Reference Library for Science and Invention. For years the former Trustees were frustrated by the delays and niggardliness of previous Governments in finding accommodation for this growing section of scientific material, not to mention the disgraceful shilly-shallying over the Patent Office Library. The position grew so desperate that the Trustees decided to gather together part of the material in temporary premises in Bayswater—admittedly very unsatisfactory…” (https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/lords/1967/dec/13/british-museum-library)

I visited the library a year or so after that speech. As for my essay, I won 2nd prize: 15 shillings (75pence) to spend on books, which was reasonably generous at that time. 2nd prize might impress you for a moment until I reveal that I was one of only two entrants. The 1st prize was won by my classmate Timothy Clarke. His older brother, Charles Clarke, not only became Head of School but later served as British Home Secretary between 2004 and 2006.

Returning to Whiteleys, I began visiting it regularly after 1993, when I began living nearby. Then, as described already, it had become a shopping mall. The galleries, which had once served as a library, were lined with shops and eateries, as well as a cinema. But that is all in the past, and what was once Whiteleys is now a building site.  I doubt that Sickert would have been pleased if he were able to see it today.

* My book is available from Amazon:

Throwing light into the darkness and shadows

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FOR UNKNOWN REASONS, we were initially reluctant to bother with viewing the exhibition (at London’s Tate Britain until the 18th of September 2022) of paintings and drawings by Walter Sickert (1862-1942). However, I am glad that we did because we got to know and appreciate an artist, of whom I had heard but knew little about. That little which I did know was that for a brief while Sickert had one of the Mall Studios in Hampstead, where years later the sculptor Barbara Hepworth worked and resided with one husband, and then another. Later, Sickert moved from Hampstead to Camden Town.

Sickert was born in Munich (Germany). He and his family moved to Britain when he was 8 years old. His father, Oswald Sickert (1828-1885), an artist, introduced him to the works of important British and French artists, but Walter’s inclinations led him to study acting. However, in 1882 he entered London’s Slade School of Art (at UCL) and he became a student and assistant of the artist James Abbott McNeil Whistler (1834-1903). Soon, he began spending a lot of time in France, where he met Edgar Degas (1834-1917), whose work was to have a great influence on his style.

The exhibition at Tate Britain successfully demonstrates that Sickert was a highly competent artist. His topographical paintings (notably of Dieppe and Venice) are superb, as are the many of his portraits, some of which verge on being impressionistic, on display. His depictions of scenes within theatre show his great ability to portray light and shade. A series of paintings of nude women, some of whom are shown being in the company of often disinterested-looking men in far from elegant clothing, throw light on the shady world of the poor in places such as Camden Town and its environs.

Although some of Sickert’s paintings show features that later would become associated with artists such as the impressionists, Lucien Freud, and Francis Bacon, he is not one of the first artists that springs to mind when thinking about the great artists of the late 19th and early 20th century. Why is this the case? Despite hinting at what was to become common in the works of the Abstractionists, he never broke through the barrier into Modernism as did painters such as Braque, Picasso, Miro, Kandinsky, Matisse, and Mondrian. In no way does this detract from the brilliance seen in Sickert’s work. In a way, he was born too late to be considered as distinguished as those I have mentioned. Considered alongside 19th century artists, he shines. But, although he received many commissions, he was painting during an era when the more adventurous and innovative artists were in their heyday. That said, I can strongly recommend the exhibition at the Tate, which demonstrated to me that Sickert, a master of light and shade, was an artist who deserves much more attention than he gets today.