Burlington Contemporary is the Burlington Magazine’s free online platform for reviews and research on international contemporary art.
Burlington Contemporary is the Burlington Magazine’s free online platform for reviews and research on international contemporary art.
A recent e-mail to THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE asked: 'Does the Burlington have a policy, on or off the record, on contemporary art?' In this issue, the first of the new century to be specifically devoted to art since 1900, running from considerations of works by Braque and Klee to several young British artists, it is worth pausing to consider whether we do. Modern art, a phrase now heavy with period flavour (like 'futuristic' or 'progressive'), signifies art of the twentieth century (as enshrined in 'Tate Modern', to open on Bankside next month). But the epithets 'recent' and 'contemporary' are more nebulous and are continuously on the move. For our purposes, recent art denotes that of the last twenty years or so and contemporary, the art of today by artists of whatever age. Jasper Johns is as 'contemporary' as any bright young Turk. But, by its very nature, THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE, as a journal of research and record, founded 'for con- noisseurs', has never sought to position itself as a flagship of the avant-garde. Over the near century of its existence, its attitude to current practice has tended to be avuncular and tolerant rather than partisan. Stretches of comparative neglect - most surprisingly during the 1930s editorship of Herbert Read who reserved for other publications his own commitment to the modern movement - alternated with more active engagement. In the late 1940s Benedict Nicolson began a new chapter with the publication of two perspicacious articles on Henry Moore by a very young critic, David Sylvester. But the most remarkable moment in the Magazine's acknowledgment of recent art was, of course, in its earliest years under Roger Fry's joint-editorship when, ironically, it was the Burlington with its 'arts and crafts' cover and decorated initials, that preached to the English-speaking world the new gospel of Gauguin, Cezanne and Matisse. The Burlington was by no means awash with articles on contemporary art, but its reviews nevertheless reflected much of what was happening and it made its own contribution to a change in public taste. In the early twentieth century it paid attention to much of the pioneering late nineteenth-century art that gave impetus to the modern movement.
When Georges Braque took on the commission to paint a ceiling for the Etruscan room in the Louvre in 1952-53 (see Fig. 1) he did not conceal his delight.1 As Jean Cassou wrote in the catalogue to L'Atelier de Braque held in the Louvre in 1961 (the first exhibition there devoted to a living artist): 'Au Louvre il se trouve chez lui' 2 The museum's early Greek and Etruscan collections had interested Braque since he was a young man and his encounter with the art and literature of archaic Greece had a profound influence on his later work. This was first manifest in a series of etchings made in the 1930s to illustrate an edition of Hesiod's Theogony which, although they were to have great significance for his subsequent production, have received relatively little attention in the literature. While working on the etchings, Braque made a profusion of related drawings, many of which have never been published (Figs.3-7, 12 and 13).
David Jones and Kenneth Clark were friends for forty years. During those decades Clark became the most famous art historian and museum curator in Britain, promoting the appreciation of the visual arts throughout the English- speaking world. Jones was recognised in the early 1930s as one of the country's important visual artists and, by 1960, one of the foremost modern poets writing in English. The eight letters published in the Appendix below were sent by Jones to Clark between 1944 and 1967 and are now among the Clark papers in the Tate Gallery Archive.'
Paul Klee's interest in both myth and nature was evident in his work at an early stage. It is well known that he identified with Goethe's pioneering scientific explorations of natural phenomena,1 but of particular relevance here is the extent to which Klee responded to the link Goethe made between nature and myth - a relationship which provided the basis for much of Klee's work on mythological themes. Among these is the little-known water-colour entitled Metamorphose of 1935 in the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art in Dublin (Fig.23).2 Its present location has not been known to scholars of Klee and, while it is listed in his hand- written oeuvre-catalogue of over nine thousand works, awareness of its appearance was confined to a sketch made by Will Grohmann, his friend and biographer (Fig.24).3
The large west window in St Mary's church of Upton-cum- Chalvey, Slough, contains the only stained-glass window designed by Alfred Aaron Wolmark (1877-1961). Not only is it unique in his extensive oeuvre but, more importantly, it is the first church windowin Britain to have been designed in an uncompromisingly modernist style. This article sets out the circumstances of the commission for the window and brings together contemporary and later reactions to Wolmark's pioneering design.1
The Victoria Art Gallery in Bath recently acquired an earlybronze dating from 1950 by Kenneth Armitage, People in a wind (Figs.30 and 33). Since its first public showing in 1952, the piece has been widely - and misleadingly- regarded as an archetypical work from the 'geometry of fear' group of post-War British sculptors. This note uncovers new information on the piece derived from conversations with the artist, and examines its critical reception.
In 1958, the art critic Lawrence Alloway wrote an article entitled 'Real places' in which he identified two main ways to put works of art into architectural settings.' The first, which he labelled the 'shaggy dog approach', was to use art as a contrast to the tidy geometry of a building or, as he called it, the 'real architectural scene'. Such art needed to be handmade and inspirational: it should be 'rough, lumpy or curly' in order to appear quite separate from the containing building. The second approach (favoured by Alloway) did not depend on the dissimilarity between the art and the building, but made artistic use of the materials of engineering and architecture. Alloway had in mind the work of contemporary constructionists such as Victor Pasmore and Mary Martin, who had undertaken public commissions for hospitals, universities and schools.2 This article looks at a work completed shortly before the publication of Alloway's article, and identified by him as falling into the first category - Gillian Ayres's mural for South Hampstead High School for Girls. Painted in the summer of 1957, it is a sadly neglected example of British action painting on a heroic scale.
