Now You See Us: Buried Treasure and Hidden Gems

Mary Grace - Self portrait 1760’s . Oil on canvas

'Now You See Us’ at the Tate Britain, London (until 13 October) celebrates over 100 women artists who worked in Britain between 1520 and 1920. The exhibition presents paintings, pastels, needlework, photography and sculpture, that for the most part have been little known and rarely seen.

Here you’ll find Mary Beale’s glamorous depictions of 18th century society ladies, and a rather tender sketch that she made of her young son, his curly tresses tumbling to his shoulders. And there’s Mary Grace, whose only surviving painting is a self-portrait. In a fine primrose silk dress, she sits bolt upright, a palette resting on one arm, and regards us with stern authority.

Through the Looking-Glass, by Louise Jopling, 1875, acquired by the Tate. Photograph: Tate

In the 19th century rooms, Rosa Bonheur takes us to the Highlands, to mournful sheep grazing under a stormy sky. Elizabeth Forbes presents a naturalistic image of a farm labourer, head turned to the floor, in quiet conversation with a young woman at the edge of the woods - terribly romantic. And with its bold brushstrokes and flat appearance, Louise Jopling’s self-portrait suggests a Mancunian Manet.

There’s a good deal of buried treasure here, and many hidden gems.

Elizabeth Forbes - The Edge of the Woods

As we progress through the galleries, we also learn of the many hurdles women artists had to overcome.

For the most part, they were subject, first to their fathers, and then their husbands, limited to the domestic sphere. Having no access to apprenticeships, art was a private, amateur pursuit, one that was only available to the higher social orders, or those related to male artists. Their lives and work were poorly documented.

In 1768 Angelica Kauffman and Mary Moser became founding members of the Royal Academy (along with 32 men). However, when Johann Zoffany memorialised the new institution with a group picture of the Academicians at a life class, Kauffman and Moser were reduced to two indistinct portraits on the back wall - women were barred from life classes on the grounds of propriety. It would take more than 150 years for the next woman to be elected to membership.

Johan Zoffany - The Academicians of the Royal Academy, 1771-1772

There was a commonly held view that women were best suited to ‘imitation’ rather than invention. Miniatures, pastels and watercolours, sectors in which women thrived, were treated dismissively as ‘lower arts’ by the establishment. In 1770, the Royal Academy banned from its exhibitions ‘needle-work, artificial flowers, cut paper, shell-work, or any such baubles’. Joshua Reynolds, the Academy’s President, remarked that working in pastel was ‘just what ladies do when they paint for their own amusement.’

Nevertheless, they persisted. Between 1760 and 1830 some 900 women exhibited at public shows.

Flower painting was considered an appropriate artform for women. Mary Gartside created sublime floral watercolours, whilst at the same time pioneering colour theory. Mary Delany’s collages of spider lilies and flowering raspberry - made with coloured paper placed on black backgrounds (what she called her ‘paper mosaicks’) - are exquisite.

Mary Delany Rubus Odoratus 1772-1782 The British Museum

Gradually in the Victorian era women artists found new galleries, exhibition spaces and events that were less conservative than the Royal Academy. At the same time, they campaigned for access to training, governance and awards. Florence Claxton’s ‘Woman’s Work’ of 1861 shows some women fawning at the feet of a pompous man who sits under a false idol. Other women meanwhile are confined behind ‘the ancient wall of Custom and Prejudice,’ and the door to the medical profession is locked. Only one female artist, Rosa Bonheur, has climbed a ladder to view the ‘forbidden fruit’ beyond.

Florence Claxton, Women's Work, 1861

Founded in 1871, the Slade School of Fine Art in London offered women an education on equal terms with men, and, at last, access to life classes. Soon women students outnumbered men by three to one.

As we enter the 20th century rooms, and the progress towards broader freedoms, we see work from artists who have become more familiar to us: Gwen John, Laura Knight, Vanessa Bell, Nina Hamnet, Helen Saunders. Still, some of these magnificent painters have taken a century to receive proper recognition.

Leaving the exhibition, one can’t help thinking about wasted talent. So many remarkable artists unseen and unacknowledged. So many great works neglected and ignored.We may also be prompted to reflect on the world of work. Are our biases blinding us to untapped abilities and underutilised expertise? Are we failing to realise the true potential of the human capital at our disposal? Are we still missing out on buried treasure and hidden gems?

'I believe talent is like electricity. We don’t understand electricity. We use it. Electricity makes no judgment. You can plug into it and light up a lamp, keep a heart pump going, light a cathedral, or you can electrocute a person with it. Electricity will do all that. It makes no judgment. I think talent is like that. I believe every person is born with talent.'
Maya Angelou

'The most as you'll ever go
Is back where you used to know.
If grown-ups could laugh this slow
Where as you watch the hour snow,
Years may go by.
So hold on to your special friend.
Here, you'll need something to keep her in:
"Now you stay inside this foolish grin"
Though any day your secrets end.
Then again,
Years may go by.’

Rickie Lee Jones, 'On Saturday Afternoons In 1963’

No. 475

‘Will It Paint?’: John Singer Sargent and the Semiotics of Style

John Singer Sargent - Lord Ribblesdale

I recently visited an exhibition considering the importance of clothes and costume in the portraits of John Singer Sargent. (‘Sargent and Fashion’ is at the Tate Britain, London until 7 July.)

The show is a celebration of sensuous silks and satins; of long buttoned bodices and pleated organza skirts; of Chesterfield coats, velvet jackets and crimson dressing gowns. Sargent captures the play of light and shadow across garments, their undulating creases and folds. He revels in the detail of a black tulle dress, a scarlet cape and a mauve sash; the elegance of a Chantilly fan, an antique lace collar and a Kashmiri shawl.

The exhibition prompts us to reflect on the coded language of fashion, the semiotics of style.

Sargent was born to American parents in Florence in 1856. As a child he lived in several European countries, before training and establishing his artistic reputation in Paris.

In 1882 Sargent was so taken with fellow American-in-Paris, the beautiful Virginie Gautreau, that he convinced her to pose for a life-size portrait without a commission. He presented her in a long black evening gown with a plunging neckline, her arms and neck bare, her face turned to one side in a classical pose – and with one of the jewelled dress straps slipping from her shoulder.

French society was scandalised by the ‘indecency,’ and both Sargent and his sitter were stung by the criticism. The artist repainted the strap in an upright position and left Paris soon afterwards. He kept the painting, subsequently called ‘Madame X’, until after Gautreau’s death.

‘I suppose it is the best thing I have done.’

John Singer Sargent - Madame X (with a vintage photo of the original portrait)

In 1886 Sargent settled in London, joining a social circle of actors, artists, composers and writers. His studio on Tite Street in Chelsea had previously been home to the painter James McNeill Whistler, and Oscar Wilde lived opposite. 

Although Sargent painted a number of British aristocrats, for the most part his clientele was international new money. Their wealth derived from finance, commerce and industry, and they were set on securing social status – by buying grand houses and estates; by keeping the right company, hosting magnificent parties and making appropriate marriages. The clothes they wore and the portraits they commissioned all contributed to the process of assimilation. A striking portrait would attract large crowds at exhibition. It would be much discussed and broadly reproduced. And a full-length Sargent could cost around $120,000 in today’s money. The exhibition curators term this phenomenon the ‘economy of images’.

Almost half of Sargent’s female sitters wore black gowns. While black retained its association with mourning, in the late 19th century it became fashionable for women of all ages, not least because new synthetic aniline dyes enabled an intense pure depth of colour. When, on a visit to his friend Claude Monet, Sargent discovered that there was no black paint to be found, he declared that he simply couldn’t work.

John Singer Sargent - Lady Sassoon

This period also saw the rise of haute couture. Name brands like Paquin or Doucet provided their clients with what novelist Edith Wharton described as ‘social armour.’ Many of Sargent’s sitters wore outfits from Charles Worth, an English designer who dominated Parisian fashion, and catered particularly to British and American customers. A Worth gown would cost between $10,000 and $30,000 today.

‘I have Delacroix’s sense of colour and I compose. A toilette [a complete ensemble, from the French word toile, cloth] is as good as a painting.'
Charles Worth

In the exhibition, Sargent’s work is displayed alongside examples of period fashion, including several original garments featured in his paintings. Although the artist claimed that ‘I only paint what I see,’ throughout the gallery we can observe where he has adjusted a strap here, removed a bow there. He clearly styled his sitters, pinning, draping, tucking and folding their gowns to create new shapes and textures. For his portrait of Lady Sassoon, he pinned her black silk taffeta opera cloak, so that the bright lining was more visible, creating a dramatic river of pink.

Foreshadowing today’s Instagram culture, one French critic noted, ‘there is now a class who dress after pictures, and when they buy a gown ask ‘will it paint?’’

Sargent was just as interested in painting fashionable men as women.

The surgeon Samuel Pozzi stands proud in a red dressing gown and Turkish slippers, one hand on heart and the other toying with the cord of his robe.

John Singer Sargent - Dr Pozzi at Home

The debonair Lord Ribblesdale looks rather superior in a long dark velvet-collared coat, buff breeches and polished black boots. Sporting grey kid gloves and a hunting whip, the elegant outfit is completed with a top hat and flamboyant silk muffler tied to one side. It was said of Ribblesdale that ‘he never stepped out of his picture frame.’

Sargent painted the young illustrator and designer W Graham Robertson holding a jade-topped walking stick and wearing a long, black wool Chesterfield overcoat. Robertson recalled that, during the sittings, the artist would ‘pull and drag the unfortunate coat more and more closely around me until it might have been draping a lamp-post.’ Sargent subsequently declared:

‘The coat is the picture.’

John Singer Sargent - W Graham Robertson

All in all, it’s a splendid exhibition, full of glamour, performance and personality.

Whilst marvelling at the flamboyance of the fashions featured in Sargent’s portraits, we may imagine that the sartorial codes and social values of late 19th century high society are a million miles away from our own. Surely we live in a more liberated, egalitarian world of informal attitudes and casualised style.

But clothes continue to signal something about our individual identity and sense of belonging. 
In the first half of my career, I dressed casually for work. Until my clients donned trainers, chinos and Ralph Lauren Polo shirts. I promptly switched to city suits, keen to create some distance and differentiation. I was amused to learn that Sargent played a similar game. While painting his clientele in their elegant finery, he himself tended to wear a sober business suit.

On encountering the artist in 1899, the poet Wilfred Scawen Blunt described him as ‘a rather good-looking fellow in a pot hat, whom at my first sight I took to be a superior mechanic.’

Whether we like it or not, we are constantly judging and being judged.


'When you wear your high-heeled boots with your hip-hugger suit,
It's all right, you're outta sight.
And you wear that cute mini-skirt with your brother's sloppy shirt,
I admit it, girl, that I can dig it.

When you wear your bell bottom pants,
I just stand there in a trance.
I can't move, you're in the groove.
Would you believe, little girl, that I am crazy about you?

When you wear those big earrings, long hair and things,
You got style, girl, that sure is wild.
And you wear that cute trench coat and you're standing and posing,
You got soul, you got too much soul.’

Brenton Wood, 'The Oogum Boogum Song’ (A Smith)

No. 474

Expressionists: The Creative Melting Pot

Franz Marc, Tiger

I recently visited a splendid exhibition of Expressionist art at the Tate Modern, London (until 20 October).

‘We were only a group of friends who shared a common passion for painting as a form of self-expression. Each of us was interested in the work of the other…in the health and happiness of the others.’
Gabriele Munter

The Expressionists were a loose community of artists based around Munich in the early 1900s. Originating from Eastern Europe and North America, from Russia and Austro-Hungary, they endeavoured to convey subjective interpretations of the world around them; to express the meaning of emotional experience rather than the physical reality. Painting simplified forms, in bold colours with carefully framed compositions, they sought stimulus from folk art and foreign cultures; from spiritualism and child psychology; from colour theory and other media. They were true creative pioneers.

‘After a short period of agony, I took a giant leap forward, from copying nature – in a more or less Impressionist style – to feeling the contents of things, abstracting, conveying an essence.’
Gabriele Munter

Gabriele Münter Portrait of Marianne von Werefkin 1909 Lenbachhaus Munich, Donation of Gabriele Münter, 1957 © DACS 2024

At the exhibition we see vivid representations of couples debating at the dining room table; promenading in the park; reclining on a hillside in the sun. There are mystical skating rinks, circuses and stage shows; woozy street scenes and dreamy landscapes. With bold outlines Gabriele Munter presents elegant society women with purposeful stares – here’s a benign lady in a broad bright hat and purple shawl; and another with neat hair, sharp eyebrows and almond eyes. Franz Marc paints animated wildlife - a sinuous yellow tiger in the undergrowth; two brown deer playing in the snow; a sweet-eyed doe looking up to catch the light. And most radical of them all, Wassily Kandinsky gives us kaleidoscopic interiors, the milking of a psychedelic cow, and mysterious sacred visions - staging posts on the path to pure abstraction.

‘[Art has the power] to awaken this capacity for experiencing the spiritual in material and in abstract phenomena.’
Wassily Kandinsky

Bavaria provided a relatively liberal and open environment for the Expressionists to work. There was a prosperous middle class and a thriving academic and scientific community. They visited galleries and museums, studied Islamic art and purchased Japanese prints.

Some of them were fascinated by children’s creativity and toys; by recent psychological studies suggesting that kids had spiritual inner lives. Maria Franck-Marc painted children captivated by flowers; a girl in the garden cradling a toddler.

They explored colour theory - the impact of colour on mood - and investigated synaesthesia - experiencing one sense through another. In ‘Impression III (concert)’ Kandinsky, a skilled cellist, created a chromatic visual response to a musical performance by Arnold Schonberg.

‘Kandinsky paints pictures in which the external object is hardly more to him than a stimulus to improvise in colour and form and to express himself as only the composer expressed himself previously.’
Arnold Schonberg

Wassily Kandinsky - Impression III (Concert), 1911

Often members of the group went on sketching holidays to Murnau, a rural town in the foothills of the Bavarian Alps - swimming in the lake, skiing in the mountains, designing their own gardens. As they created work, they also debated ideas.

‘In every house one found at least two ateliers under the roof, where sometimes not so much was painted, but where always much was discussed, disputed, philosophised and diligently drunk.’
Wassily Kandinsky

The Expressionists were as much engaged with the past as the future. A rather beautiful Kandinsky image depicts a mythic knight riding along the river’s edge with a noblewoman in his arms and the luminous walls of a Russian town in the distance. They collected Bavarian folk craft and religious artefacts, experimenting with the traditional technique of reverse glass painting - by which an image is created on one side of a glass panel and viewed from the other.

The movement was also interested in pre-Christian faiths, Hinduism and Buddhism; in the emergent theories of Theosophy and spiritualism.

‘I’m striving to intensify my feeling for the organic rhythm of all things, trying to feel myself pantheistically to the quivering and flow of blood in nature, in trees, animals, the air.’
Franz Marc

The Expressionists teach us to break down boundaries wherever we see them; to seize inspiration wherever we find it. Theirs was a true creative melting pot, encapsulated by the Blue Rider Almanac - from which they took their group name, Der Blaue Reiter. Published in 1912, this volume of collected images and academic texts, included folk, religious and children's art, and featured works from all over the world.

‘Blue Rider…will be the call that summons all artists of the new era and rouses laymen to hear.’
Advert for The Blue Rider Almanac, 1911

Sadly, with the outbreak of the First World War, the collective dispersed. Marc was killed in combat, aged just 36. Kandinsky returned to Russia, others fled to Switzerland. This optimistic, outgoing, internationalist movement seemed suddenly out of step with the times.

‘In our case the principle of internationalism is the only one possible… The whole work, called art, knows no borders or nations, only humanity.’
Draft preface for The Blue Rider Almanac, 1911

Riding Couple by Wassily Kandinsky, 1906-1907
LENBACHHAUS MUNICH; DONATION OF GABRIELE MÜNTER, 1957; TATE MODERN

‘Where do you end?
Where do I begin?
Start over again,
Feels like we're melting, melting.
That's when I melt into you,
I melt into you.’

Kehlani, ‘Melt’ (N Perez, A Wansel, K A Parrish)

No. 471

John Craxton: The Heroic Hedonist

Still Life Sailors (1980-85) Estate of John Craxton

I recently took the train to Chichester to see an excellent exhibition of the art of John Craxton. (Pallant House Gallery, until 21 April 2024)

Though born and raised in England, Craxton produced much of his work in Greece. There he portrayed an Arcadia of ordinary folk living under a hot sun, amongst olive trees and asphodels, wild cats and frolicking goats. He painted young men smoking in the morning, sleeping in the afternoon and dancing into the night. His art is full of colour, light and movement. It is a joyous celebration of life, and prompts us to consider our own attitudes to work and play.

‘As a child I enjoyed a happy, near-Bohemian home life in a large family.’

Craxton was born in London in 1922. When his father, a pianist and composer, scored his only hit - ‘Mavis,’ sung by the legendary Irish tenor John McCormack - he took his wife and six children down to Selsey on the south coast and bought a shack above the beach.

Craxton had an idyllic childhood.

‘In what now seems like a succession of endless, if not cloudless, summer days, I ran barefoot, rode ponies, shrimped at low tide, collected fossils from the Bracklesham Beds, went to the movies, carried milk from the farm (which still had a working windmill) and had family picnics on the beach.’

Craxton decided as a young boy that all he wanted was to be an artist. He attended various schools, but emerged with no qualifications. A naturally independent spirit, he didn’t fancy the discipline of formal creative training either. And so he was largely self-taught, occasionally dropping into art schools to pick up equipment and a little drawing tuition.

Boy on a Blue Chair, 1946 John Craxton

Having failed an army medical, Craxton was excused war service. Always rather charming, witty and spontaneous, he fell in with various sponsors, lovers and artists, and one patron funded a studio in St John’s Wood that he shared with Lucian Freud.

His early work featured quiet country lanes, twisted trees and dead animals; solitary souls in melancholy, menacing landscapes. During the war years he was given his first solo exhibitions in London, and was commissioned to produce book designs – a line of work that served him well for much of his life.

But Craxton was keen to get away from Britain. As a teenager he had been enchanted by the ancient Greek figurines and pottery he encountered at the Pitt-Rivers Museum in Dorset. He aspired to a Mediterranean idyll.

‘The willow trees are nice and amazing here, but I would prefer an olive tree growing out of a Greek ruin.’

John Craxton by Felix H. Man
bromide print, 1940s© estate of Felix H. Man / National Portrait Gallery, London

Immediately after the hostilities ended, there were still strict restrictions on travel. So Craxton and Freud embarked on a painting expedition to the Scilly Isles, and then stowed away on a Breton fishing boat bound for France. They only got as far as Penzance. 

The following year Craxton made it to Zurich, where he met the wife of a British ambassador at dinner. She offered him a lift to Athens in a bomber she had borrowed for a curtain-buying trip. 

And so, aged 23, Craxton arrived in Greece and immediately fell under its spell. He settled first in Poros, and then Crete, and he would stay there, on and off, for the rest of his life.

‘It’s possible to be a real person – real people, real elements, real windows – real sun above all. In a life of reality my imagination really works. I feel like an émigré in London and squashed flat.’

In Greece Craxton created romantic landscapes populated by shepherds, peasants and a pipe-playing Pan. He painted the azure sea and cyan sky; bare footed young men in white cotton trousers and striped tee shirts - working, relaxing, dancing arm-in-arm. His art has vibrant colours and a gentle cubism. And by contrast with his previous work, there’s an exultant spirit, a dreamy languor, a warm conviviality. We meet a rugged herdsman, a smoking butcher, a grey-bearded octopus fisherman. Here are moustached mariners tucking into a meal of seafood and salad at the local taverna. A sign on the wall behind them warns against breaking plates.

‘The most wonderful sound in the world is of people talking over a good meal.’

Craxton was fond of saying that 'Life is more important than art.’ He relished the freedom he had on the Greek islands - to ride his Triumph Trophy motorcycle along dirt roads and mountain tracks; to talk and laugh at the dockside bars, as he drank ouzo and feasted on cuttlefish and calamari; to lead an openly gay life. 

At the time Greece was a more tolerant place than Britain - although Craxton's interest in young men in uniform did prompt the authorities to suspect he was spying. When homosexuality was decriminalised in the UK in 1967, he sent the Home Secretary, Roy Jenkins, a picture.

As well as painting, Craxton designed book jackets for the travel writer Paddy Leigh Fermor; and created stage sets for Frederick Ashton at the Royal Ballet. But he was not particularly industrious. His friends joked that he suffered from ‘procraxtonation.’

Pastoral for PW John Craxton

Craxton suggests that a creative life need not be fuelled by anxiety and pain. It doesn’t have to be all about struggle and denial. Rather we can choose to follow our dreams; pursue our passions; seek out the sun. 

Craxton, who was made a British honorary consul in Crete, was never concerned by artistic fashion or the opinions of the establishment. He carried on painting in his own individual style into his later years, and he rode his motorbike until nearly 80. When he died aged 87, his ashes were scattered in Chania harbour. 

His biographer Ian Collins described him as ‘a heroic hedonist.’

 
'My life, my life, my life, my life in the sunshine.
Everybody loves the sunshine.
Sunshine, everybody loves the sunshine.
Sunshine, folks get down in the sunshine.
Sunshine, folks get 'round in the sunshine.
Just bees and things and flowers.
My life, my life, my life, my life in the sunshine.
Everybody loves the sunshine.
Feel, what I feel, when I feel, what I feel,
When I'm feeling, in the sunshine.
Do what I do, when I do, what I do,
When I'm doing, in the sunshine.
Sunshine, everybody loves the sunshine.'

Roy Ayers, 'Everybody Loves The Sunshine' 

No. 453

Sarah Lucas: ‘Everything Is Language’

Sarah Lucas. From left: Sugar, 2020; Bunny, 1997; and Cool Chick Baby, 2020

I recently visited a retrospective of the work of artist Sarah Lucas. (‘Happy Gas’ is at Tate Britain, London until 14 January.)

'My maxim would be: Do what you like… It’s not always easy to know what that is though.'

Lucas emerged as one of the key players in the Young British Art scene of the 1990s. This movement had a lot in common with advertising – the good and the bad. It was bold, immediate, funny and accessible. But it could also be vulgar, simplistic and shallow.

Lucas’ current show provides an opportunity to step back and take a broader look at her work over the Britart period and the decades that followed.

'I don’t tend to preach in my work. It’s more about having a look around at what’s going on…Very surprising when you open your eyes.’

She has spent her career considering consistent themes: sex, swearing and smoking; food and toilets; the expressiveness of ordinary things.

Sarah Lucas: Self Portrait With Fried Eggs, 1996

In the exhibition there are blown up photos of crude tabloid stories; of Lucas eating a banana and holding a huge salmon. There are naked body-casts and erect penises; a masturbating mechanism and a pair of chicken knickers. There’s also a big concrete sandwich. And each piece is given a wry, playful title.

Lucas clearly has had a fascination with smoking and mortality. A crash helmet made of fags sits on a charred armchair. Cigarettes poke out of navels and backsides. They decorate a burnt-out car, broken in two.

‘When I first started using cigarettes in art, it was because I was wondering why people are self-destructive. But it’s often destructive things that make us feel most alive.’

© Sarah Lucas, Courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London. Photo: © Nick Turpin

Over the years Lucas has returned again and again to her chair sculptures - which she calls her ‘Bunnies.’ Stuffing tights with shredded newspaper, kapok, cotton or wool, she created faceless female figures with writhing limbs; with multiple, saggy and lightbulb breasts. She gave them daft names - like Fat Doris, Honey Pie and Zen Bomb - and arranged them in platform shoes and kinky boots, perching on armchairs, side chairs and office chairs. They are insolent, saucy, suggestive. And seen together, they have their own distinct characters.

‘The purpose of chairs (in the world) is to accommodate the human body sitting. They can be turned to other purposes. Generally as a support for an action or object. Changing light bulbs. Propping open a door. Posing. Sex.’

Lucas encourages us to interrogate objects for their meaning. Things derive associations and resonances from their various functionalities; from their use and abuse; from their physical similarities to other forms; from their constituent materials, their ownership, history and location. Everything means something.

‘Everything is language, including objects. There’s an infinity of ‘stuff.’ How to invest any of it with meaning?’

Sarah Lucas: Is Suicide Genetic?
helmet, cigarettes, burnt-chair, cigarette packets. 1996

Of course, Lucas is coarse. You need a robust constitution to navigate her work. Nonetheless I left the exhibition reflecting on the artist’s big themes.

For all our complexity and sophistication, we are united in our basic instincts: our carnal drives and emotional impulses. These appetites can be disturbing and contradictory, uplifting and amusing; and they can often surprise.

‘It’s a paradox that happiness reminds us of sadness, and that a sad story can be uplifting, or that something magical can come about through something mundane. I suppose that, when I’m making things, I’m looking for some kind of transcendence from everyday stuff into something surprising.’

'I'd work very hard, but I'm lazy.
I can't take the pressure and it's starting to show.
In my heart you know that it pains me,
A life of leisure is no life you know.
Waking up and getting up has never been easy,
Oh, I think you should know.
Waking up and getting up has never been easy,
Oh, I think you should know.
Oh, I think you should go.
Make a cup of tea, and put a record on.’

Elastica, ‘Waking Up’ (B Duffy / D Greenfield / H Cornwell / J J Burnel / J Frischmann)

No. 447

Edward Hopper: The Lonely City

Edward Hopper - Automat (1927)

'All I ever wanted to do was to paint sunlight on the side of a house.’
Edward Hopper

I recently watched an insightful documentary about the artist Edward Hopper. (‘Hopper: An American Love Story’ (2022) by Phil Grabsky)

Hopper painted beguiling pictures of ordinary folk and everyday lives - individuals lost in thought; groups of people, each isolated and remote; private dramas played out in public places. He created a brooding world of alienation and ennui, and distilled a truth about the modern urban experience: that we can be living and working in a vibrant, bustling city, surrounded by entertainment, community and opportunity – and yet still feel terribly empty and alone.

'In every artist’s development, the germ for the later work is always found in the earlier. What he once was, he always is, with slight modifications.'

Hopper was born in 1882 in Nyack, New York, the son of a dry-goods merchant. He grew up in an affluent, intellectual Baptist household, and from an early age he was encouraged to draw by his mother. Having enrolled at the New York School of Art and Design, he subsequently took up a career in commercial illustration, a job he detested.

‘Well, illustration really didn’t interest me. I was forced into it by an effort to make some money, that’s all.’ 

Edward Hopper - Office At Night (1940)

In his early 20s Hopper made three trips to Paris, where he pursued his studies in literature, language, architecture and art. Naturally conservative, while in the French capital he avoided the avant-garde. He was a tall, shy, awkward young man, whose first romantic encounters were overwrought and frustrating. In 1910 he returned to the United States, and thereafter never left.

'I am very much interested in light, and particularly sunlight, trying to paint sunlight without eliminating the form under it, if I can.'

From the outset Hopper was fascinated by light and shadow, and he often painted urban and architectural scenes - stairways and window frames; porticos and pavements; turrets, towers and mansard roofs. His city pictures were sparsely populated, or devoid of people entirely. They had an eerie stillness.

Hopper’s early work was poorly received, rarely exhibited and seldom sold.  He remained on the margins for many years. This was all to change in 1923, when, on a summer painting trip in Gloucester, Massachusetts, the 41 year old encountered Josephine Nivison, whom he had known at art school. She was his opposite - short, talkative and sociable - and she set about taking this intense, introverted man in hand.

Nivison persuaded the Brooklyn Museum to include some of Hopper’s work alongside her own in a forthcoming show. One picture was purchased by the museum for $100, and from that point on he was set fair. 

Hopper and Nivison married in 1924 and settled into his Washington Square apartment in Greenwich Village, where they resided for the rest of their days. He was at last able to give up his job as an illustrator.

'The only real influence I've ever had is myself.’

Edward Hopper - Room in New York, 1932.

Hopper’s most celebrated paintings present seemingly mundane moments in the lives of ordinary people. They have a voyeuristic feel and sometimes their subjects are as if spied from a distance. (In his youth Hopper had enjoyed observing life in the streets, offices and residential buildings as he travelled by train into New York.) The viewer is invited to speculate: Who are these characters? What are they thinking about? What is really going on here? 

A bald fellow in a white shirt with sleeve garters sits on the sidewalk smoking a cigar, absorbed in his own private world. A middle-aged man methodically rakes the lawn of the garden adjoining his clapboard house. It’s 11-00AM and a woman with long dark hair leans forward in her armchair to stare out of the apartment window. She is naked but for a pair of flats. At the automat a lady in a cloche hat and jade green coat concentrates on her coffee. A woman in a pink slip perches on her bed and soaks up the morning sun. A pensive female usher, in smart blue uniform, leans against the wall of the movie theatre, her blond hair illuminated by a side lamp. 

There’s a cinematic quality to Hopper’s work. No surprise perhaps as he and Nivison often took trips out together to the movies or the theatre.

'When I don't feel in the mood for painting I go to the movies for a week or more. I go on a regular movie binge!'

When Hopper paints more than one subject, the characters rarely interact, touch or look at each other. We see them assembling in the hotel lobby, dining at the restaurant, reading on a train. They are together, but apart. An executive works at his desk, while nearby his assistant silently gets on with her filing. Three customers sit at the cherry-wood counter of a diner. Drinking coffee, eating a sandwich, smoking a cigarette. Each seems preoccupied. A smartly dressed couple relax at home. He reads the paper intently, she half-heartedly plays a few notes on the piano. 

There’s a melancholy sense of disappointment in these images; of boredom and bewilderment. What has happened? How did I get here? Is this it?

'Great art is the outward expression of an inner life in the artist, and this inner life will result in his personal vision of the world.’

Edward Hopper - Self-Portrait (1925–1930)

In the mid-1930s Hopper and Nivison built a summer-house in South Truro on Cape Cod and they went on field trips for fresh material in their 1925 Dodge. They had a troubled, but enduring marriage. She subordinated her career to his, managing his appointments and sharing his reclusive life-style. He was generally withdrawn and aloof, and was rather dismissive of her art. He nonetheless used her as the model for all his female characters - just changing the faces.

Hopper was a slow, meticulous painter and he made many compositional sketches before he was comfortable with a scenario. His output could be as low as two pictures a year.

‘One good picture is worth a thousand inferior ones.’

He didn’t like interviews and he avoided explaining his work.

‘The whole answer is there on the canvas. If you could say it in words, there would be no reason to paint.’

Once, when asked what his artistic objective was, he simply replied:

‘I’m after me.’

It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that this silent, secretive, introspective man was presenting us with his own sense of alienation and isolation; his own interior sadness.

'So much of every art is an expression of the subconscious that it seems to me most of all the important qualities are put there unconsciously, and little of importance by the conscious intellect. But these are things for the psychologist to untangle.'

Edward Hopper - New York Movie (1939)

It struck me that in the world of work we make many assumptions about our colleagues’ wellbeing and state of mind. We imagine that - because ours is a youthful, vigorous, convivial industry; because the city is such a dynamic, inspiring, populous place – our fellow employees are fulfilled and satisfied, content and connected. We put on parties, inductions and talks to fuel their enthusiasms. We send upbeat missives and promote unifying values. We celebrate success. But we too often fail to understand that many of our colleagues feel remote and detached. They are lost in the lonely city.

'I have tried to present my sensations in what is the most congenial and impressive form possible to me.'

Hopper died in his Washington Square studio in 1967. Nivison passed away ten months later. One of his last paintings simply presented sunlight and shadow falling across an empty room.

'Mother, I tried, please believe me.
I'm doing the best that I can.
I'm ashamed of the things I've been put through,
I'm ashamed of the person I am.
Isolation, isolation, isolation.’
Joy Division, ‘Isolation’ (S Morris / I Curtis / B Sumner / P Hook)

No. 435

Female Abstract Artists: If You Want To Change the Product, Change the Process – And If You Want To Change the Story, Change the Narrator

Helen Frankenthaler, April Mood, 1974 © 2023 Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: courtesy ASOM Collection

I recently attended an excellent exhibition of the work of women abstract painters from the 1940s to the early 1970s. (‘Action, Gesture, Paint’ is at the Whitechapel Gallery, London until 7 May.)

On entering the gallery, you’re greeted by Helen Frankenthaler’s ‘April Mood’, a joyous choreography of colour: royal and pale blue, purple and radiant pink, set against a base of sandstone and tangerine.

‘A really good picture looks as if it’s happened at once. It’s an immediate image.’
Helen Frankenthaler

There follows a selection of work by some 80 artists from all over the world. Big, bold, vibrant canvases. Audacious expressions of raw experience: joy, awe, anger and despair. Emotional responses to a world in crisis and to the beauties of nature.

'I paint from remembered landscapes that I carry with me - and remembered feelings of them, which of course become transformed.’
Joan Mitchell

These artists were liberated from the constraints of tradition and convention. As Ida Barbarigo declared, they wanted to ‘unlearn painting,’ to forget academic teaching.

I was particularly struck by the inventiveness of their working methods.

Some layered the paint on thick. Some scraped it and scratched it. Others spattered, splashed and sprayed; and liberally added dribbles and stains. Their gestures were occasionally spontaneous and occasionally controlled. Some mixed their paint with other materials: sand, sawdust, cigarette ash and cement; lacquer, chalk and carpenter’s glue. 

Work, 1958-62, by Yuki Katsura. Image: Courtesy Alice and Tom Tisch, New York © Estate of Yuki Katsura

‘My paintings are collaged bits of time from my past and present experiences.’
Wook-kyung Choi

Frankenthaler achieved her fluid, organic effects by thinning her paint and applying it to unprimed canvas. Gillian Ayres worked at speed, pouring paint straight from the can, or squirting it directly from the tube. Lee Krasner integrated into her work cut-up fragments of newspapers, burlap and discarded drawings. Yuki Katsura placed wet washi paper on painted canvas and then overpainted it. Franciszka Themerson tilted her paper so that the enamel flowed in loose, curving calligraphic forms. Janet Sobel trickled pigment from a pipette (well before Jackson Pollock adopted his celebrated ‘drip technique’). 

The exhibition repeatedly confirms a truth that pertains to any creative endeavour: if you want to change the product, change the process.

‘To me, art - colour in art – is wonderfully indulging… I don’t see why you shouldn’t be filling yourself up, making yourself happy. Enjoying yourself. Feasting on beauty. I want an art that’s going to make me feel heady, in a high flown way. I love the idea of that.’
Gillian Ayres 

Lee Krasner, Bald Eagle, 1955 (Credit: The Pollock-Krasner Foundation)

One wanders through the exhibition with a faint sense of recognition. Many of these ideas, themes and approaches are familiar to us. But, with a few exceptions, the works and the artists are not.  

The story of Abstract Expressionism, the art movement that emerged in New York in the late 1940s is classically written around titanic male figures like Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko. 

There were women artists on the scene, but it was a notoriously machismo culture. Corinne West painted under the name Michael West so as to disguise her gender. Elaine de Kooning signed her work with her initials to evade comparisons with her husband. Grace Hartigan became George and Lena Krasner became Lee.

'It’s quite clear I didn’t fit in. With relation to the group, if you are going to call them a group, there was not room for a woman.'
Lee Krasner 

Elaine de Kooning The Bull 1959 (1) - Whitechapel Gallery

Over time the women abstract artists were marginalised or written out of the movement’s history. Recent retrospectives have included few females.

The Whitechapel exhibition endeavours to right this wrong. Regarding the past through a different lens, it changes our perception of something we thought we knew. And in so doing it has quite an uncanny effect. It is at once both familiar and fresh. 

The show demonstrates that if you want to change the story, you should consider changing the narrator.

'… Sitting at this party,
Wondering if anyone knows me,
Really sees who I am.
Oh, it's been so long since I felt really known.
… Living in the wake of overwhelming changes,
We've all become strangers
Even to ourselves.
We just can't help,
We can't see from far away,
To know that every wave might not be the same,
But it's all apart of one big thing.
… Oh, it's not just me, it's not just me,
It's not just me,
It's everybody.’ 

Weyes Blood, 'It’s Not Just Me, It’s Everybody’ (N Mering)

No. 409

Glyn Philpot: It’s Never Too Late to ‘Go Picasso’

‘Acrobats Waiting to Rehearse’ Glyn Philpot

Royal Pavilion & Museums, Brighton

I recently visited a fine exhibition of the work of artist Glyn Philpot. (‘Glyn Philpot: Flesh and Spirit' is at Pallant House Gallery, Chichester until 23 October.)

Philpot was a successful society portraitist who, at the age of 46, shook off convention to embrace modernism. He was a model of mid-life reinvention.

Born in Clapham in 1884, the son of a surveyor, Philpot grew up in Herne in Kent. Having studied at the Lambeth School of Art and the Académie Julian in Paris, he first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1904. 

Philpot painted the elite of his day: aristocrats, ambassadors and actors. He had a talent for making his subjects look rather elegant and refined, beautifully dressed and coolly composed. His style was influenced by the Spanish and Italian Old Masters, whom he greatly admired. 

‘I am not one of those who think we should begin by striking out methods of our own. I feel that is a gift which only comes afterwards – if it comes at all.’

Mrs Henry Mond by Glyn Philpot (1884-1937)

In 1923 Philpot was elected the youngest Royal Academician of his generation. And by the end of the ‘20s his endeavours had earned him a grand London studio on fashionable Tite Street, a chauffeur-driven car and a country house in Sussex. 

Philpot could afford to travel to France, Italy, America and North Africa, and to explore other artistic avenues beyond professional portraiture. He painted classical and biblical images; scenes from the street, the theatre and the circus. And, exceptionally for an artist at that time, he painted sensitive studies of Black subjects, never characterising his sitters as either stereotypical or subservient. 

Perhaps, as he approached his mid-40s, Philpot felt he needed a change.

In 1930 he served on a panel judging an art competition in Pittsburgh that awarded the Gold Medal to Pablo Picasso for his ‘Portrait of Olga.’

On his return from America Philpot hired a studio in Montparnasse, Paris and furnished it with chrome Bauhaus furniture. He set aside the rich colours and traditional glazes that had characterised his work to-date. Employing a cool, dry colour palette, his brushwork became loose and light, sparse and spare. He was a convert to modernism.

‘I am evolving a new way of painting to meet the new things I want to do.’

Philpot gave up the lucrative society portraiture that had made his name. Instead he embraced a broader range of subjects and themes. 

Henry Thomas, Glyn Philpot (1884–1937). Pallant House Gallery

In a mood of mystical calm, two muses stand at the tomb of a poet. A doorman, dressed smartly in red coat and white top hat, ushers his customers into the nightclub with a sideways glance. A Jamaican man sits in profile, like a Florentine prince, against a batik backcloth. A group of women in Marrakech, wrapped in their big burnous cloaks, blend into the blue and pink background - almost abstract shapes. Two male acrobats waiting to rehearse, one with his arms folded, regard us in silence.

The critics of the time, confused by Philpot’s change of direction, thought it a serious mistake. The Guardian observed that: ‘a studio in Paris among the wild men of art is disturbing to an Old-masterish painter.’  A 1932 review of a Philpot exhibition in The Scotsman was headlined:

‘Glyn Philpot ‘goes Picasso’.’

Group of Women, Marrakech. Glyn Philpot (1884–1937). Jerwood Collection

Sadly Philpot’s modernist phase did not last long. He died from a stroke in 1937. He was just 53. 

As tastes evolved and his celebrated sitters receded into history, Philpot lapsed into obscurity. Only decades later did the art establishment reappraise his work and recognise him as a key figure in British modernism.

Philpot teaches us that, whatever age we are, wherever we are in our career - if we are open to stimulus and alert to inspiration - we can still adjust our style and transform our output. We can ‘go Picasso.’ 

It’s never too late to change.

'It's never too late
For rainbows to shine,
For whispering violins
And bubbles in the wine.
Let your heart stay young and strong.
Just one note can start a song.
So don't worry about how long
You've had to wait.
It's never too late.
It's never too late.’
Tony Bennett, ‘Never Too Late’ (R Evans / J Livingston / D Rose)

No. 385

The Aftermath: How Postwar Artists in Britain Responded to Collective Experience

Full Stop (1961) The Estate of John Latham/Tate 

‘Am I standing on my head, or is the world upside down?’
Franciszka Themerson

I recently visited an excellent exhibition of art created in Britain in the wake of the Second World War. (‘Postwar Modern’ is at the Barbican, London until 26 June.)

The show features the work of 48 artists: paintings, sculpture, photography, collage and installations. We witness how, over a twenty-year period, a creative community responded to the world around it - initially with shock and horror at the recent past, and then with growing confidence about future possibilities.

On entering the first gallery, we are greeted by a sombre symphony in black. There’s an agonised Christ on the cross by Francis Newton Souza. There are the vaporized heads of Eduardo Paolozzi. And there’s a big bleak ‘Full Stop’ by John Latham – like a bullet wound or an eclipsed planet or a black hole. 

It’s grim stuff.

Perhaps that’s entirely understandable, given the upheaval and destruction that people had witnessed. The war had blitzed cities and blown away certainties, leaving an anxious world under a nuclear cloud. Britain had become a home for refugees from Nazism and migrants from its now crumbling empire.

‘The 1950s found most of us in London, each of us independently examining the images left in our minds and souls in the aftermath of World War II. In some sense we felt that new images might help us to prevent the repetition of the inhuman and unseemly past. It was with some excitement, then, that we approached the new and tried to erase the old.’
Magda Cordell

Artists depicted the dereliction, damage and decay that they saw all around them. William Turnbull, who had been a fighter pilot, created desolate relief landscapes in bronze. Bill Hardy photographed kids playing in urban bombsites. Elizabeth Frink sculpted strange, monstrous, menacing birds. 

‘They actually became something else…They became like bits of shrapnel and flying things…with very sharp beaks.’
Elizabeth Frink

There are not many portraits of people here. Rather artists reconfigured the human body from abstract shapes and machine parts. Magda Cordell painted pulsating internal organs in bold crimson. Inspired by television and science fiction, John McHale imagined a family of wired cyborgs. 

‘We extend out psychic mobility. We can telescope time, move through history, span the world through visual and aural means.’
John McHale

First Contact, 1958 by John McHale

Some sought a completely new visual language, experimenting with industrial materials like sheet metal, Perspex and household paint. Mary Martin created pure white reliefs, austere, abstract geometric forms. Victor Pasmore abandoned figurative painting and threw himself into work prompted by science, geometry and mathematics. 

‘Today the whole world is shaken by the spirit of reconstruction… In painting and sculpture, as also in architecture, an entirely new language has been formed.’
Victor Pasmore

In time artists began to document the budding new society that was rising from the rubble. Jewish refugees Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff presented the city under construction, in thick layers of earth-toned paint. Eva Frankfurther portrayed ordinary workers at the Lyons Corner House, weary and pensive. Shirley Baker photographed the street life of multicultural Manchester and Roger Mayne celebrated London’s emergent youth culture – poor, but cool and fun-loving. 

‘West Indian Waitresses’ by Eva Frankfurther c1955. Photo Courtesy of the Ben Uri Gallery.

And there was a spirit of righteous rebellion in the air. Francis Bacon and David Hockney referenced their homosexuality in their work, despite the fact that it was still illegal.

‘What one must remember about some of these pictures is that they were partly propaganda of something that I felt hadn’t been propagandised… homosexuality. I felt it should be done.’
David Hockney

Gradually colours became brighter and bolder. Patrick Heron painted radiant abstract landscapes. Gillian Ayres produced intense organic shapes, full of feeling and possibility.

‘A shape – a relationship – a body – oddness – shock – mood – cramped – isolated – acid – sweet – encroaching – pivoting – fading – bruised.’
Gillian Ayres

Detail of Gillian Ayres, Break-off

And so we arrive in the ‘60s, a decade of fearless innovation and wild experimentation; of mobiles, installations, auto-creation and rotating sculptures. The shadows of the war have for the most part departed.

We often characterise artists as solitary individuals, ploughing their own furrows, expressing their own unique perspectives. But what struck me about this exhibition was the extent to which the creative community was responding, together, to the times in which they were working. These artists were challenging social norms and being challenged by collective experience. They were fully immersed in their environment.

In the sphere of commerce, brands sometimes seem to exist in their own secluded space; articulating their own particular point of view, untouched by cultural or competitive forces. This show suggests to me that brands must breathe the same air as their consumers; they must feel their anxieties, share their enthusiasms. Brands must participate in society, not stand aloof from it. 

‘Postwar Modern’ deals in the aftermath of war. Aftermath is an appropriate word. It was originally an agricultural term: ‘a second crop or new growth of grass (or occas. another plant used as feed) after the first has been mown or harvested.’(OED).

Aftermath suggests rebirth and renewal. Even in the darkest times, there is hope.

'Yes, we're different, worlds apart.
We're not the same.
We laughed it away
At the start, like in a game.
You could have stayed
Outside my heart,
But in you came.
And here you'll stay,
Until it's time for you to go.’
Buffy Sainte-Marie, 'Until It's Time for You to Go'

No. 370

The Fertile Metaphor: Louise Bourgeois and ‘The Woven Child’

Louise Bourgeois: The Good Mother (detail), 2003 © The Easton Foundation/VAGA at ARS, NY and DACS, London 2021. Photography by Christopher Burke

'I always had the fear of being separated and abandoned. The sewing is my attempt to keep things together and make things whole.'
Louise Bourgeois

I recently attended a fine exhibition of the fabric art of Louise Bourgeois. (‘The Woven Child’ is at the Hayward Gallery, London until 15 May.)

The show collects the textile-based work Bourgeois created in the last two decades of her life: a multiplicity of sculptures, installations, collages and embroidery that revisit the traumas of her childhood and her complex feelings about her family. It is all the more powerful given the age of the artist and the distinctiveness of her chosen media.

‘My subject is the rawness of the emotions, the devastating effect of the emotions you go though.’

Bourgeois, born in 1911, grew up in the Parisian suburb of Choisy-le Roi, where her parents ran a workshop that repaired antique tapestries.

‘My mother would sit out in the sun and repair a tapestry or a petit point. She really loved it. This sense of reparation is very deep within me.’

Louise Bourgeois: Cell XXV (The View of the World of the Jealous Wife), 2001

In her eighties and living in New York (which had been her home since 1938), Bourgeois took her mother’s old clothes and some of her own, and redeployed them in her art. Delicate white camisoles, underwear and nightgowns; a pale pink blouse, a red apron and a little black dress were suspended from hangers, hooks and bones, in oppressive constructed rooms and cages, accompanied by two large white marble spheres, a small model of her childhood home and lurking spiders. 

‘You can retell your life and remember your life by the shape, weight, the color, the smell of the clothes in your closet.’

These are rather disturbing domestic pieces - claustrophobic, soaked in secrets and lies; memory and loss. Bourgeois was haunted by her childhood: by her father’s brazen infidelities with a string of women, including her governess; by her sick mother’s quiet acceptance; by her own sense of impotence and confinement.

‘Sewing implies repairing. There is a hole…you have to hide the damage…you have to hide the urge to do damage. There is a background of drama here… that something bad you must have done must be undone. I sew… I do what I can.’

Bourgeois repeatedly returned to the metaphor of fabric and weaving. Throughout her work she included scissors, bobbins, threads and needles; scraps of fading tapestry. Sewing implies mending. Seams are like scars. Clothes suggest second skins. Stuffed fabric prompts associations with soft flesh and fragile emotions. 

‘The needle is used to repair the damage. It’s a claim to forgiveness. It’s never aggressive, it’s not a pin.’

And though her spiders seem at first sinister and threatening, for Bourgeois they represented creation, restoration and motherhood.

'The spider is a repairer. If you bash the web of a spider, she doesn’t get mad. She weaves and repairs it.’

Bourgeois made stuffed heads covered in bright, colourful material: wincing, screaming, kissing; sometimes seeming masked and gagged. The pained head of her brother Pierre, who was institutionalized with mental illness, is loosely stitched - as if to suggest he is coming apart at the seams. 

‘I had a flashback of something that never existed.’

Louise Bourgeois: Pierre

There are twisted torsos hanging limp, copulating couples, body parts sagging with age. There are embroideries of flowers and clocks, collages of abstract patterns and spider’s webs. Bourgeois arranged cushion-like shapes in neat columns, perhaps trying to impose order on a chaotic world.

‘It is a world that is not going to disappoint me because I am building it myself. I am the author of my own world with its internal logic and with its value that no one can deny.’

What particularly struck me about the exhibition was that Bourgeois had been inspired to such variety of thought and depth of feeling by one broad theme. Weaving is a fertile metaphor. 

This may resonate with those of us working in the fields of commercial creativity. When we invent brand worlds and campaign ideas, we should fully explore the opportunity for texture and nuance. A well-chosen metaphor contains layers of meaning. It suggests a diversity of interpretations. It offers rich rewards.

Louise Bourgeois

‘My childhood has never lost its magic, it has never lost its mystery and it has never lost its drama. I refuse to let go of that period because, painful as it was, it was life itself.’

In the late 1930s Bourgeois ran her own gallery in Paris. In 1945 she had her first solo show. In the 1950s she exhibited with the Abstract Expressionists in New York. And yet she was marginalised by the art establishment. Only gradually through the 1970s did she receive recognition, and only in 1982 was she given her first retrospective - at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. 

'You learn for yourself, not for others, not to show off, not to put the other one down. Learning is your secret, it is all you have, it is the only thing you can call your own. Nobody can take it away.'

Bourgeois died in 2010, aged 98. She finished her last pieces the week before. Although her work had explored pain, anxiety and loss, she consistently returned to a message of repair and restoration. We all deserve a second chance.

‘The repair of a tapestry or a costume is precisely a plea in favor of a second chance, it is a plea in favor of x and against y.’

'Back through the years
I go wonderin' once again
Back to the seasons of my youth.
I recall a box of rags that someone gave us,
And how my momma put the rags to use.
There were rags of many colors,
Every piece was small.
And I didn't have a coat,
And it was way down in the fall.
Momma sewed the rags together,
Sewin' every piece with love.
She made my coat of many colors
That I was so proud of.’

Dolly Parton, ‘Coat of Many Colors'

No. 367