Tetsuya Ishida. Autorretrato de otro. Retrospectiva en el Palacio de Velazquez. Madrid

La obra de Tetsuya Ishida, autor de culto en Japón y que murió muy joven y de forma abrupta, llega a Europa en forma de retrospectiva aunque algunos de sus cuadros ya se presentaron en la Bienal de Venecia en el 2015.

La alienación de los trabajadores en la crisis económica de hace unos años en Japón,  el aislamiento y la falta de horizontes se muestran  aquí en imágenes, masculinas, casi idénticas,   pesadillas kafkianas  tecnología deshumanizada y jóvenes y adolescentes perdidos y vulnerables.

 Los rostros son casi intercambiables y el sistema educativo, laboral y de ocio y consumo son opresivos y mecánicos.

El autor siempre negó que ese rostro fuera el suyo pero sí reconoció su empatía con el dolor, pesimismo y anonimato de la vida urbana.



https://www.hoyesarte.com/evento/el-museo-reina-sofia-organiza-la-primera-gran-retrospectiva-de-tetsuya-ishida-fuera-de-japon/

https://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/arts-culture/article/1381949/review-tetsuya-ishida

No puedes caer bien a todo el mundo. Francesc Miralles

En el suplemento dominical del País, Francesc Miralles comenta una nueva tendencia en Japón. Que no te importe tanto la opinión de los demás. Algo realmente novedoso en una cultura oriental.

https://elpais.com/elpais/2019/04/03/eps/1554313267_031677.html?rel=str_articulo#1555153356807

Leonora Carrington, Dorothea Tanning y Frida Kahlo. Love, friendship and rivalry.

When most people think of surrealism, men such as Salvador Dali, Rene Magritte, Joan Miro, Marcel Duchamp, Giorgio de Chirico and Man Ray, spring to mind. It’s hard not to notice the lack of female names. We celebrate the women whose work has gained the recognition it deserves.

LEONORA CARRINGTON AND MAX ERNST

Leonora Carrington, began her career as the plus one of famous surrealist Max Ernst. It is easy to become acquainted with the story of Carrington’s life. The events would make a brilliant film - her sheltered youth, the elopement with an older man, the onset of war followed by a mental breakdown, a second elopement and finally settling down in Mexico. Her life is documented as a whirlwind of romance, pain, danger and drama. 

In 1948, Time Magazine reviewed an exhibition of her work:

The walls … were hopping with demons. Feathery, hairy, horny, half-luminous creatures merged imperceptibly into birds, animals and plants. Painted with cobweb delicacy, they conspired and paraded before misty landscapes and night skies thick with floating islands. All the pictures had two things in common: an overall melancholy and the signature, Leonora Carrington …

This is an apt description of the hallucinatory world of Carrington’s paintings. When asked about the meaning behind her work, she said:

You’re trying to intellectualise something, desperately and you’re wasting you’re time. That’s not a way of understanding… [you can only understand] by your own feelings.

‘Leonora Carrington: Britain’s Lost Surrealist’, The Guardian, 2010

This response is more purely surrealist than any of the Freudian symbols or mythological references appropriated by her male counterparts. As Andre Breton wrote in his text Arcane 17,woman is a natural ‘conductor of mental electricity’. Likewise Carrington wants us to feel, not to think, and through feeling, tap into the unconscious and intuitive mind.


DOROTEA TANNING

Although his relationship with Carrington has been greatly romanticised, Max Ernst’s most successful and long-lasting relationship was with Dorothea Tanning. Here, Tanning explains her views on marriage and equality:

If you get married you’re branded. We could have gone on, Max and I, all our lives without the tag. I never heard him use the word “wife” in regard to me. He was very sorry about that wife thing. I’m very much against the arrangement of procreation, at least for humans. If I could have designed it, it would be a tossup who gets pregnant, the man or woman. Boy, that would end rape for one thing.
Dorothea Tanning, Between Lives: An Artist and Her World, 2003

Tanning’s early paintings often feature female, or simply feminine, characters in minutely detailed gothic and dream-like settings. The regular use of the female form throughout surrealist work has been an interesting playground for debate. Numerous critics, such as Susan Gubar, have argued that the surrealist’s appropriation of the female form in works such as Rene Magritte’s Le Viol can be seen as an aggressive objectification of women. Others, such as Germaine Greer, take this argument further, debating whether the female members of the group had internalised this viewpoint and perpetrated it in their own work.

Tanning’s sculptural piece Nue Couchee has also often been interpreted as a comment on female sexuality due to its limb-like protuberances and nude pink fabric, however she strongly rejects any association to gender. Neither does she want to be analysed in terms of her femininity and labelled in the category of ‘woman artist’:

I wish you wouldn’t harp on that word, ‘women.’ Women artists. There is no such thing – or person. It’s just as much a contradiction in terms as ‘man artist’ or ‘elephant artist.’ You may be a woman and you may be an artist; but the one is a given and the other is you.
Carlo McCormick, ‘Dorothea Tanning’, Bomb Magazine, 1990

Frida Kahlo is certainly no longer seen as the woman behind Diego Rivera, but at the time his fame was overshadowing. These days she has been appropriated as a feminist forerunner, stoic sufferer, Mexican national heirloom and one of the ‘Great Surrealist Artists’. People worldwide have been enchanted by her frank, intense and honest letters which give an insight into her character and opinions. The director of the Bellas Artes Museum, Roxana Velasquez Martinez del Campo, described her as ‘a woman in constant expression’ and this is what we see when we look at her self-portraits. They are instinctive depictions of her subconscious with repeated references to her physical and emotional pain:

I paint my own reality. The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to, and I paint whatever passes through my head without any other consideration.
Harry N. Abrams, Discoveries: Frida Kahlo Painting Her Own Reality, 2008 

It is this openness, which makes her remarkable and has caused so many people to respect and admire her.

Despite their rocky relationship, Kahlo’s love for Diego was insurmountable. In this explanation of her opinion of marriage, we see her fatalistic approach:

I don’t believe in marriage. I think at worst it’s a hostile political act, a way for small-minded men to keep women in the house and out of the way, wrapped up in the guise of traditions and conservative religious nonsense. At best, it’s a happy delusion – these two people who truly love each other and have no idea how truly miserable they’re about to make each other. But, but, when two people know that, and they decide with eyes wide open to face each other and get married anyway, then I don’t think it’s conservative or delusional. I think it’s radical and courageous and very romantic.
Julie Taymor, Frida, 2002

Es curioso que la galería Tate haya elegido este ambiguo  título para hablar de tres artistas, (Frida Khalo, Dorotea Tanning y Leonora Carrington) y  de sus relaciones sentimentales con otros pintores consagrados en aquel momento.
Unos meses antes de que la Tate presente una exposición sobre la larga trayectoria artística de Dorotea Tanning ya pudo contemplarse en el Reina Sofía de Madrid.

 El museo Picasso de Málaga también reunió las obras de estas tres artistas y de otras muchas con un título posiblemente menos comercial pero más respetuoso con su trabajo: "Somos plenamente libres" Mujeres surrealistas. https://www.museopicassomalaga.org/exposiciones-temporales/mujeres-artistas-y-surrealismo

Remembering Albert Camus

“Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday; I don’t know.” So begins Albert Camus’ debut novel, L’Etranger – two sentences that have come to define The Outsider (published as The Stranger in the US) for the 75 years since its seminal publication. Why? Because within them lies the novel’s central philosophical question: how do we confront the idea that human life has no meaning? And how does society attempt to impose rational order where there is none?  

Born in 1913 in French Algeria, Camus was the chief architect of the paradox of the absurd, which at its root, questions how we live with the knowledge of our own meaningless. Nihilism, for Camus, was not the answer. He would go on to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957, before dying in a car crash in 1960 at the age of just 46. With his good looks and charisma, the writer became, over the course of his life and since, an intellectual celebrity who embodied the ideas that he promoted. Though loathing the label, he gave existentialism a fashionable edge – so much so that he was shot by Cecil Beaton for Vogue in 1946.

Meursault, the anti-hero of The Outsider drifts through the novel with cold, emotional distance; he is incapable of empathy, perennially bored with life, and is unflinchingly honest about both of these things. Despite his detachment, the character of Meursault remains just as absorbing as Camus himself by embodying the sense of alienation that we all feel sometimes.

“People all over the world connect the book to their coming of age, to grappling with the toughest questions of existence,” writes Yale scholar Alice Kaplan in her new ‘biography’ of the novel, Looking for The Stranger: Albert Camus and the Life of a Literary Classic. “The absence of depth in Meursault, his strange indifference, has paradoxically drawn readers to him, since it’s natural to hunger for understanding when it’s withheld,” Kaplan continues.

But while Meursault floats through his existential angst, Camus was able to use his philosophy of the absurd as an excuse to enjoy himself with ever greater intensity. He dated a string of actresses, befriended intellectuals and bohemians, was fascinated by football, loved smoking (he even named his cat ‘Cigarette’), dressed well, and wrote essays on the importance of sunshine and nakedness. 

As he once famously said: “You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.”

Van Gogh and Britain. Tate Gallery.

Desde el 27 de Marzo la Galería Tate de Londres  presenta obras de Vincent Van Gogh y muestra la inspiración que para el joven artista tuvieron las pinturas de Constable y Millais  y la influencia que años después tuvieron las suyas sobre artistas británicos como Francis Bacon y otros pintores. 

EY Exhibition: Van Gogh and Britain presents the largest collection of Van Gogh’s paintings in the UK for nearly a decade. Some of his most famous works will be brought together from around the world – including Shoes, Starry Night on the Rhône, L'Arlésienne, and two works he made while a patient at the Saint-Paul Asylum, At Eternity’s Gate and Prisoners Exercising. They will be joined by the very rarely lent Sunflowers from London’s National Gallery.

Van Gogh lived in England as a young man for several crucial years. He walked the streets alone, dreaming of the future. He fell in love with British culture, especially the novels of Charles Dickens and George Eliot. And he was inspired by the art he saw here, including paintings by Constable and Millais which are featured in the exhibition. They affected his paintings throughout his career.

The exhibition also looks at the British artists who were inspired by Van Gogh, including Francis Bacon, David Bomberg, and the young Camden Town painters. It shows how his vision set British artists on the road to modern art.

 

.https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/vincent-van-gog







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Taboo. Tom Hardy

El que un actor, en este caso Tom Hardy, tenga claro qué papel desea interpretar y su padre colabore en ese guión que lo haga posible.

Que Ridley Soctt sea uno de los productores y que Taboo haya sido definido como un cuento gótico sobre la venganza, como una critica al colonialismo, al imperialismo, la xenofobia  y a la poderosa East India Company y al tráfico de esclavos incluso después de la prohibición ya anuncia una serie bastante fuera de lo habitual para la programación de la BBC.

Ahora pueden verse los ocho episodios de la primera temporada en HBO. Una vez superada la sensación de espanto ante un Londres oscuro y miserable y a unos personajes violentos y llenos de contradicciones la atmósfera y la intriga convierten la historia del hombre que vuelve a reclamar la herencia de su padre muerto en algo complejo y fascinante.

Los personajes literarios en los que el protagonista se inspiró para crear el suyo son la mayoría criminales, asesinos como Sykes de Dickens, aventureros enloquecidos como Marlow, investigadores  como Sherlock Holmes o personajes románticos como Heathcliff de Cumbres Borrascosas... Incluso un punto del "aburrido" Mister Darcy. Los críticos han valorado su interpretación del aventurero con comparable a actores como Oliver Reed, Richard Burton,  excesivos y geniales.

Aunque es un lacónico  antihéroe no le falta sutileza, inteligencia,  complejidad ni paradojas. A su reputación de monstruo sin escrúpulos se  une el amor que siente por su hermanastra, casada con un ambicioso oficial que esperaba heredar el terreno que le correspondía a  su supuestamente fallecido cuñado.

La guerra contra lo que acabarían siendo los Estados Unidos de América y las negociaciones para hacerse con ese estratégico territorio situado cerca de Vancouver y que interesa a ambos bandos complicarán este extraño relato sobre un periodo histórico convulso y ominoso.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/01/03/tom-hardy-wins-dream-acting-role-convincing-dad-write/

Balthus en la Thyssen

El museo presenta en 2019 una exposición retrospectiva del legendario artista Balthasar Klossowski de Rola (1908-2001), conocido como Balthus, organizada conjuntamente con la Fondation Beyeler en Riehen / Basilea donde se presenta de septiembre de 2018 a enero de 2019.

Considerado como uno de los grandes maestros del arte del siglo XX, Balthus es sin duda uno de los pintores más singulares de su tiempo. Su obra, diversa y ambigua y tan admirada como rechazada, siguió un camino virtualmente contrario al desarrollo de las vanguardias. El propio artista señala explícitamente algunas de sus influencias en la tradición histórico-artística, de Piero della Francesca a Caravaggio, Poussin, Géricault o Courbet. En un análisis más detenido, se observan también referencias a movimientos más modernos, como la Neue Sachlichkeit, así como de los recursos de las ilustraciones populares de libros infantiles del siglo XIX. 

En su desapego de la modernidad, que podría calificarse de ‘posmoderno’, Balthus desarrolló una forma personal y única de arte de vanguardia, un estilo figurativo alejado de cualquier etiqueta. Su personal lenguaje pictórico, de formas contundentes y contornos muy delimitados, combina los procedimientos de los maestros antiguos con determinados aspectos del surrealismo y sus imágenes encarnan una gran cantidad de contradicciones, mezclando tranquilidad con tensión extrema, sueño y misterio con realidad o erotismo con inocencia.

La exposición, comisariada por Raphaël Bouvier, con el apoyo de Michiko Kono, y Juan Ángel López-Manzanares, reúne pinturas clave de todas las etapas de su carrera desde la década de 1920, arrojando luz sobre las diversas formas de interacción intelectual en sus cuadros entre las dimensiones de espacio y tiempo, la relación entre figura y objeto, así como sobre la esencia de su enigmática obra.

Balthus creció en una familia de origen polaco y aristocrático. Su padre era historiador del arte y su madre pintora. Esto hizo que desde muy niño conociera a a escritores y pintores como Bonnard, Matisse, Derain, Artaud, Cocteau, Giacometti, André Gide...

Vivió en París, Berlín, pasó temporadas en Italia para conocer la obra de Piero de la Francesa, Masaccio y pasó muchos años de su larga vida en Suiza con su segunda esposa, la japonesa Sesutko a la que pintó en "la habitación turca" donde ella mira al espectador con una sonrisa, a diferencia de la mayoría de sus retratos anteriores.

Se le ha considerado el maestro de lo enigmático y él mismo afirmaba que a veces a través del ensayo y error encontraba y reconoce lo que estaba buscando y su visión se hacía realidad.
A pesar de ser contemporaneo de los surrealistas franceses su pintura siempre ha sido personal y sólo reconocía la influencia de los antiguos maestros.

A los 11 años publicó sus primeros dibujos, un relato sobre un gatito al que encuentra y al que acaba perdiendo y buscando por todos sitios. El prólogo lo escribió Rilke que fue amante de la madre de Balthus y que le animaba a ir al Louvre para aprender de los grandes artistas del pasado.

Aunque haya pasado casi un siglo algunas de sus obras en las que retrata adolescentes ensimismadas y soñadoras han escandalizado a una parte del público y en alguna exposición se ha llegado a avisar de que pueden ser perturbadoras para algunas personas. El pintor siempre consideró absurdas estas opiniones y no se preocupó mucho por ellas.