Edvard Munch @ British Museum, London - Love and Angst

Edvard Munch: love and angst
British Museum, London
11 April – 21 July 2019

The British Museum presents a major new exhibition on the work of Norwegian artist Edvard Munch (1863-1944). Edvard Munch: love and angst focuses on Edvard Munch’s remarkable and experimental prints – an art form which made his name and at which he excelled throughout his life – and examines his unparalleled ability to depict raw human emotion. It is the largest exhibition of Edvard Munch’s prints in the UK for 45 years.

The exhibition is a collaboration with Norway’s Munch Museum, and includes nearly 50 prints from their collection, one of the biggest loans of prints the Oslo-based Museum has given internationally. Displayed alongside important Munch works from the British Museum collection and other loans from the UK and Europe, the 83 artworks on show will together demonstrate the artist’s skill and creativity in expressing the feelings and experiences of the human condition – from love and desire, to jealousy, loneliness, anxiety and grief.

A major highlight of the exhibition is Edvard Munch’s The Scream which is one of the most iconic images in art history. The British Museum displays a rare lithograph in black and white which Edvard Munch created following a painted version and two drawings of the image. It was this black and white print which was disseminated widely during his lifetime and made him famous. Few copies survive and this is the first time any version of The Scream are on show in the UK for a decade.

Other highlights of the exhibition include the eerie but remarkable Vampire II which is generally considered to be one of his most elaborate and technically accomplished prints; the controversial Madonna, an erotic image which features an explicit depiction of swimming sperm and a foetus and provoked outrage at the time; and Head by Head which is a stunning print representing the complex relationship between human beings. All three of these prints are displayed alongside their original matrix (the physical objects which Edvard Munch used to transfer ink onto paper) which have never been seen in the UK before. Matrices are usually lost, but Edvard Munch was determined to keep control of his. It is rare to be able to show these alongside the prints of such a famous artist.

The exhibition is also show how Edvard Munch’s artistic vision was shaped by the radical ideas expressed in art, literature, science and theatre in Europe during his lifetime. His most innovative period of printmaking, between the 1890s and the end of the First World War, coincided with a great period of societal change in Europe which Munch experienced through constant travel across the continent on the vast rail network. The exhibition pays particular attention to three European cities that had major influence on him and his printmaking – Kristiania (Oslo), Paris and Berlin. A small selection of Edvard Munch’s personal postcards and maps are used to give a flavour of Edvard Munch’s journeys.

Edvard Munch is regarded as one the greatest artists of the early 20th century, and was a pioneer of modern art. Born near Kristiania (today’s Oslo) in 1863, his childhood was plagued by family death and illness. His later life saw him lead a bohemian lifestyle and was marked by frequent tumultuous love affairs. Two key sections of the exhibition demonstrate his passion, but also his fear, of women. He was deeply influenced by contemporary ideas, thinkers and artists including Max Klinger, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud and Henrik Ibsen and his work would go on to influence many other artists both during his lifetime and after his death in Oslo in 1944. A number of works by other artists are displayed here to highlight these links.

BRITISH MUSEUM
Great Russell St, Bloomsbury, London WC1B 3DG
www.britishmuseum.org

Glynn Williams, Bernard Jacobson Gallery, London

Glynn Williams: Echo
Bernard Jacobson Gallery, London
December 15, 2000 - January 27, 2001

Glynn Williams’ first london exhibition for 5 years features two remarkable new sculptures. The first is a massively oversized, fragmented still life of bottle, jug and cups. Carved in Portland stone the piece covers an area of more than 3 metres square and rises to nearly 3 metres.

The second piece “Echo” is an exact full scale replication of the stone piece; cast in paper. This material, which is new to Glynn Williams, has starkly contrasting qualities to the stone sculpture and give the piece a ghost-like fragility, a physical and visual lightness.

The two pieces fill the gallery space and due to their scale appear like ancient monumental ruins.

Although Glynn Williams is predominantly known as a sculptor of the human figure he has used the image of the still life throughout his career. This exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue which includes the works in the show as well as examples of previous still-lifes dating back to the 1960’s. Simon Watney in his catalogue essay points out the associative similarity between the new still-lifes and grouped figures and in many of the still life works there is evidence of human presence or in some cases such as Still -life with Hat Coat and Shoes, absence. Glynn Williams has said himself “The human body is the centre of everything in art and most else”

Glynn Williams is professor of sculpture at the Royal College of Art. He has written extensively on sculpture over the past 30 years and has exhibited all widely. His work is in many private and public collections including the Tate Gallery.

BERNARD JACOBSON GALLERY
14A Clifford Street, London W1X 1RF
www.jacobsongallery.co.uk

Ben Nicholson, Bernard Jacobson Gallery, London - Major Works

Ben Nicholson : Major Works
Bernard Jacobson Gallery, London
29 June - 29 July 2000

To coincide with the release of the first, very revealing, biography on Ben Nicholson written by Sarah Jane Checkland, the Bernard Jacobson Gallery is showing a selection of important works from throughout the career of arguably the most important British abstract artist.The exhibition includes many works unseen in Britain for many years, rare works from the early 30’s and an important White Relief from the later 30’s.

Ben Nicholson was at the very centre of the international avant-garde of the 1930’s and 1940’s. His work at the cutting edge of abstraction. At this time he was working very closely with Naum Gabo and Piet Mondrian and it was Ben Nicholson who persuaded Piet Mondrian to come and live in London when things were looking bad in Europe.

From the forties onwards his career went from strength to strength. He represented Britain in the Venice and Sao Paolo biennales. His work was collected by every major museum in the world. He also became an influential figure on the British art establishment encouraging the, very reluctant, Tate’s purchase of abstract works.

BERNARD JACOBSON GALLERY
14A Clifford Street, London W1X 1RF
www.jacobsongallery.co.uk

David Bomberg & Peter Lanyon, Bernard Jacobson Gallery, London

David Bomberg & Peter Lanyon
Bernard Jacobson Gallery, London
3 - 27 May 2000

To celebrate the launch of the first major monograph on Peter Lanyon written by Professor Chris Stephens, a curator at the Tate Gallery, published by 21publishing, the Bernard Jacobson Gallery is exhibiting work by David Bomberg and Peter Lanyon. This exhibition features two of the greatest British landscape painters of the twentieth century. Their style and approach to landscape painting were very different, but they are united by an intensity of vision and purpose in their work and in their teaching and the influence this had on the artists who knew them and their work.

DAVID BOMBERG, once a radical modernist linked to the Vorticist group of the early teens, severed all links with what he considered a bourgeois and pretentious bunch in the early twenties and left England for Palestine where he started to paint in a topographical landscape idiom. From this new beginning David Bomberg developed his mature style. Taking a cue from Cezanne his painting became more and more about trying to get down on canvas the power and awesome beauty of the landscape of central and southern Spain where he now found himself. The work became more and more expressionistic as he tried to find what he called “the spirit in the mass”. His travels led him to Cyprus and later on in his life he returned to Ronda where he had spent perhaps his most fruitful time in the 1930’s. Time spent away from England was interspersed with less happy times back in London. It was here though that his influence was felt. He was a great teacher and through his teaching at the Borough polytechnic inspired many young artists, among them Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff. Beyond his immediate group, his influence can be seen in the work of Lucien Freud, and Euan Uglow.

David Bomberg died in 1957 tragically unrecognised by the Art establishment, despite the importance of his position to the future of British art.

PETER LANYON was a native of St Ives and a true Cornishman, this however did not stop him becoming perhaps the most internationally minded of his generation of British painters. He started his career as a pupil of Ben Nicholson and his early work is very reminiscent of his teacher. But after a major falling out Peter Lanyon rejected Nicholson and started to make paintings which were very much his own. He was in love with the Cornish landscape but very aware of its sometime violent side. His paintings deal with the mythical as well as the physical aspects of the landscape which surrounded him. He seemed to want to immerse himself into it. As his development continued Peter Lanyon's work became more abstract and often would appear to be a view of the land from above. It was this interest that led Peter Lanyon to take up gliding. This allowed him to see for real what he had been painting and also to allow him to immerse himself in the landscape of the air. Peter Lanyon like David Bomberg spent a good deal of time in other countries including Italy, Czechoslovakia and, perhaps most importantly, America where he had a good deal of success and became friendly with the Abstract Expressionists. As a teacher Peter Lanyon too was influential. He taught Howard Hodgkin at the Corsham School of art. And by his links to American art influenced peoples like Richard Smith and Robyn Denny.

Peter Lanyon’s life was cut short at 46, when he died in a glider accident in 1964.

Thousand of artists have subsequently used elements of the work of David Bomberg or Peter Lanyon as a starting point for their own work, it was these two artists who in the 1930’s, 40’s and 50’s set the agenda for British landscape painting right up to the end of the 20th Century and beyond.

BERNARD JACOBSON GALLERY
14A Clifford Street, London W1X 1RF
www.jacobsongallery.co.uk

Morris Louis, Bernard Jacobson Gallery, London

Morris Louis
Bernard Jacobson Gallery, London
5 - 29 April 2000

The Bernard Jacobson Gallery presents a group of major paintings by the American colour field painter MORRIS LOUIS.

At the age of 41 in 1953 Morris Louis was introduced by his friend Kenneth Noland to Helen Frankenthaler. Frankenthaler showed him her 1952 painting Mountains and Sea. The effect of seeing this painting was so great as to cause Morris Louis to destroy almost all of his previous work. The freedom this gave him allowed him to break away from the cubist style of his early work and to develop a technique of controlled staining which took him much closer to his professed love of colour in general and that of Matisse in particular.

In 1954 Morris Louis painted his first “Veil” paintings, as the title suggests these consisted of skeins of colour overlaying each other in a large veil like shape, being unprimed, the colour bleeds into the canvas and gives a sort of ethereal immanence to the paintings. The size of the canvas and the all over nature of the “veils” led to the term “colour field” being used to describe his paintings.

After producing the first “Veils” Morris Louis returned to a more traditionally Abstract Expressionist technique which he employed between late 1954 and 1957, he subsequently destroyed 300 of these paintings and in Winter 1957 began a second series of “Veils”.

In 1960 Morris Louis began the “Unfurleds” . These paintings used a more porous canvas which allowed greater colour saturation and the new Magna acrylic paint which had a more fluid consistency. These technical changes allowed the painting a new spareness in which the larger part of the canvas was left blank and each side has coloured stripes falling inwards towards the bottom of the canvas. In 1961 Morris Louis concluded the unfurled series and began to paint the Stripe series, these paintings were somewhat reminiscent of Barnett Newman’s “Zips” being in the main vertical columns of pure colour albeit on an unprimed field. These groups of work in which the material nature of the painting is very much apparent were influential on the minimalist artists of the younger generation who were at that time formulating their ideas.

Morris Louis was diagnosed with lung cancer in July 1962 and died that September, leaving behind some 600 paintings in his estate. Subsequently every major museum in the world has acquired works by Morris Louis. This is the first major exhibition of the works of Morris Louis in London since 1979.

This exhibition is presented in association with the estate of Morris Louis, represented exclusively by Diane Upright Fine Arts.

BERNARD JACOBSON GALLERY
14A Clifford Street, London W1X 1RF
www.jacobsongallery.co.uk

Derek Sprawson, Bernard Jacobson Gallery, London - Pale Shadows

Derek Sprawson: Pale Shadows
Bernard Jacobson Gallery, London
2 - 26 February 2000

The imagery in Derek Sprawson’s recent paintings originates from accumulations of objects which are photographed and then projected onto the canvas often at a distorting angle. Using the projected shadow as a framework Derek Sprawson loosely draws the objects into the prepared surface with a freehand, doodle like mark, removing, to varying degrees, the recognisability of the objects.

The objects used include toys and organic matter. These items seem to inhabit the desert like environment of the flat ground. Sometimes appearing totally abstract, sometimes quite recognisable, these objects exist in a sort of mediated half state between their physical self and their representation. The colours seem to have a ghostly, shadowy quality and somehow do not quite relate to the colours we are used to seeing in painting or real life.

In contrast, the paintings themselves make one very aware of their physicality. The images seem to be almost knitted into the ground, each application of colour dissolving and blending with the colours of the layered under - painting. The mixture of oil paint with wax which Derek Sprawson uses gives the surface a softness and density and produces the effect of a a faint luminous sheen. At the same time it makes the work so physically sensitive that it brings out the aspect of vulnerability, tenderness and exposure implied in the painting’s forms and images.

Derek Sprawson is senior lecturer in painting at Nottingham Trent University. He also curates exhibitions. He won the drawing prize at the 15th bienale of Drawing and Sculpture at Caldhas de Rhaina in Portugal in 1995 and in 1997 was the invited artist at the Bienale where he created an installation of large wall drawings. This is his second one person exhibition at the Bernard Jacobson Gallery. Derek Sprawson’s work is in private and public collections in Great Britain and the USA.

BERNARD JACOBSON GALLERY
14A Clifford Street, London W1X 1RF
www.jacobsongallery.co.uk