100 Years: Translation as Invention: In Collaboration with Fairhead Fine Arts: Francis Bacon, David Hockney, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso presented alongside new paintings by Ann Dowker, Andrew Graves, Humphrey Ocean, Sara Lee Roberts
-
WorksNo images available.
-
Overview
Vivienne Roberts, in collaboration with Niall Fairhead (specialist in works on paper by Modern Masters), presents 100 Years: Translation as Invention
100 Years: Translation as Invention
It is often hard to tell when a work of modern or contemporary art was made. A lithograph by Picasso can appear as immediate as a painting completed this year; a recent work can seem to answer one made decades earlier. Once the artist's name is removed, chronology becomes less certain than the language of the work itself.
The twentieth century was a period of extraordinary experimentation, as artists challenged established ideas about what art could be. New movements such as Cubism, Der Blaue Reiter and Surrealism opened up new possibilities, but these movements were less destinations than points of departure. Their lasting achievement was to encourage artists to discover their own visual languages, shaped not simply by convention, but by imagination, intuition and inner necessity.
The work of Paul Klee exemplifies this freedom. Rooted in a deeply personal and spiritual vision, his paintings seem to arise from an inner necessity rather than the demands of a particular style or period. We recognise them immediately as Klee's, not because they belong to a movement, but because they reveal a singular way of seeing the world. Although Klee is not represented in this exhibition, his example remains central to its ethos: the conviction that an artist's task is not to follow a prescribed language, but to discover a visual language of their own.
The history of art is, of course, also a history of looking. Artists have always looked at what came before them, whether consciously or otherwise, and transformed it through the act of making. What passes from one generation to another is not necessarily style, but ways of seeing, constructing and thinking through an image.
Picasso's so-called 'stealing' of compositions resulted in wholly original works. What he took from earlier masters was not style, but the underlying structures through which an image could be constructed: compositional logic, spatial tension and pictorial organisation. By transforming these structures through his own visual language, he extended a practice that has existed throughout art history, in which established images are reworked into new forms of meaning.
Matisse offers another form of translation. His encounters with Morocco, its carpets, ceramics, textiles and spatial arrangements, entered his work not through literal transcription but through transformation. What he encountered became the means by which he developed a new visual language based on flatness, pattern and colour. Later, in his gouache cut-outs, Matisse reinvented his own practice once again, translating painting into cut paper and allowing colour to become both form and space. The cut-outs were not a retreat from painting but a radical rethinking of what painting could be.
If Picasso transformed existing compositions into new pictorial structures, Matisse translated visual languages encountered outside Western painting into his own system of colour, pattern and space, while also repeatedly reinventing his own means of expression. In both cases, what emerges is not imitation but invention: something new created from what already exists.
David Hockney's engagement with art history belongs to this same process of rethinking rather than repeating. His fascination with Piero della Francesca, for example, is not a matter of visual imitation, but a way of thinking through questions of space, clarity and order. The work of earlier artists becomes a means of testing the possibilities of painting in the present.
Francis Bacon's relationship with art history is similarly transformative. He repeatedly returned to historical images, portraits and compositions, but stripped them of their original contexts and reworked them into something that operates through sensation rather than narrative. Gilles Deleuze's reading of Bacon in The Logic of Sensation is significant in this respect. Bacon is understood not primarily as a painter of stories or subjects, but as an artist working directly on sensation, structure and pictorial force. The focus is not on influence or quotation, but on what happens when an existing image is taken apart and made to function differently.
Across the twentieth century and into the present, artists have therefore continued to draw upon existing images, structures and ways of seeing, not through imitation but by translating them into new pictorial realities. Whether working from observation, memory, art history or abstraction, the act of painting becomes a process of construction and transformation. The source may be another painting, a landscape, a remembered place, a human figure or the experience of light itself. What matters is what happens in the process of making.
The contemporary artists in this exhibition extend these questions in distinct ways.
Ann Dowker's work moves gradually towards abstraction, distilling landscape and the human figure into essential forms. Her relationship with art history is grounded in an exhaustive process of looking. Over many years, she has travelled to museums around the world to study and sketch the work of the Old Masters, absorbing their approaches to structure, space, light and composition through close observation. This engagement is not an exercise in imitation, but part of the process through which she has developed her own visual language. In her paintings, elements of the observed world become both realistic and abstract, functioning as markers and structures that regulate the picture surface. The growth of fields and gardens is condensed into shorthand forms, while the human figure is simplified into symbolic shapes. The visible world remains present, but it is increasingly transformed into a language of structure, rhythm and pictorial space.
Sara Lee Roberts works within the field of pictorial transformation. Her paintings often reinterpret the Old Masters, engaging closely with the processes through which images are constructed and reconfigured. Making becomes a way of testing, adjusting and reorganising visual relationships rather than simply recording appearances. In her paintings, explicit narrative and descriptive elements are removed, allowing the paint itself to reveal the abstract musicality of interacting form and colour. The real subject is light.
Andrew Graves extends the enquiry into abstraction itself. His paintings suggest places, moments and structures through colour and surface, yet they are not descriptions of the world. Instead, they construct pictorial situations in which perception is reorganised through colour and form. Graves has a particular sensibility towards the expressive possibilities of colour, in which colour itself becomes a generative force within the painting. His engagement with the work of Paul Klee is part of this enquiry. Klee's experience in Tunisia, where his encounter with the intense light and colour of North Africa profoundly altered his understanding of painting, offers a compelling example of how an encounter with the world can transform an artist's visual language. For Graves, as for Klee, colour is not simply descriptive but an active force in the construction of the image. Abstraction departs from reality only to reconstruct a reality of its own, governed by the internal logic of the picture.
Alongside these more overt dialogues with art history, another form of attention emerges in the work of Humphrey Ocean, often described as a 'painter of contemporary life'. Ocean does not speak in terms of influence or artistic inheritance. His practice is grounded in attention: what is seen, encountered and experienced directly. Yet his work belongs to the same wider field of pictorial questions explored throughout the exhibition: how an image is constructed, how a moment is held, and how perception is translated into form.
Speaking of Ocean's painting, Antony Gormley captures something of its essence in describing its capacity to make us 're-inhabit our time' and 're-inhabit our space', with a freedom, generosity and clarity that is extraordinary. In Ocean's work, the familiar is made newly visible. The act of looking becomes a form of translation in itself.
Seen together, these works propose not a history of styles or influences, but a continuous process in which images are repeatedly constructed, translated and transformed. Across one hundred years, painting does not advance in linear succession. It returns, reworks and reimagines itself, each time producing new forms of reality through pictorial means.
100 Years: Translation as Invention invites us to look beyond chronology and recognise an ongoing conversation across time, in which painting remains a living language, continually renewing itself through the freedom to look again.
-
Exhibited Artists
-
Henri Matisse
1869 - 1954The remarkable career of Henri Matisse, one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century, whose stylistic innovations (along with those of Pablo Picasso) fundamentally altered the course of modern art and affected the art of several generations of younger painters, spanned almost six and a half decades. His vast oeuvre encompassed painting, drawing, sculpture, graphic arts (as diverse as etchings, linocuts, lithographs, and aquatints), paper cutouts, and book illustration. His varied subjects comprised landscape, still life, portraiture, domestic and studio interiors, and particularly focused on the female figure.
Initially trained as a lawyer, Matisse developed an interest in art only at age twenty-one. In 1891, he moved to Paris to study art and followed the traditional nineteenth-century academic path, first at the Académie Julian (winter 1891–92, under the conservative William-Adolphe Bouguereau), and then at the École des Beaux-Arts (1892, under the Symbolist painter Gustave Moreau). Matisse’s early work, which he began exhibiting in 1895, was informed by the dry academic manner, particularly evident in his drawing. Discovering manifold artistic movements that coexisted or succeeded one another on the dynamic Parisian artistic scene, such as Neoclassicism, Realism, Impressionism, and Neo-Impressionism, he began to experiment with a diversity of styles, employing new kinds of brushwork, light, and composition to create his own pictorial language.
In its palette and technique, Matisse’s early work showed the influence of an older generation of his compatriots: Édouard Manet (1832–1883) and Paul Cézanne (1839–1906). In the summer of 1904, while visiting his artist friend Paul Signac at Saint-Tropez, a small fishing village in Provence, Matisse discovered the bright light of southern France, which contributed to a change to a much brighter palette. He also was exposed, through Signac and Henri-Edmond Cross, living in nearby Lavandou, to a pointillist technique of small color dots (points) in complementary colors, perfected in the 1880s by Georges Seurat (1859–1891). As a result, Matisse produced his Neo-Impressionist masterpiece Luxe, calme et volupté (1904; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris), so titled after a poem by Charles Baudelaire, and exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants in Paris (spring 1905) to great acclaim. The next summer, in Collioure, a seaport also on the Mediterranean coast, where he vacationed in the company of André Derain (1880–1954), Matisse created brilliantly colored canvases structured by color applied in a variety of brushwork, ranging from thick impasto to flat areas of pure pigment, sometimes accompanied by a sinuous, arabesque-like line. Paintings such as Woman with a Hat (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art), when exhibited at the 1905 Salon d’Automne in Paris, gave rise to the the first of the avant-garde movements (fall 1905–7), named "Fauvism" (from the French word fauve or “wild beast”) by a contemporary art critic, referring to its use of arbitrary combinations of bright colors and energetic brushwork to structure the composition. During his brief Fauvist period, Matisse produced a significant number of remarkable canvases, such as the portrait of Madame Matisse, called The Green Line (1905; Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen); Bonheur de vivre (1905–6; Barnes Collection, Merion, Pa.); Marguerite Reading (ca. 1906; Museum of Modern Art, New York); two versions of the Young Sailor (1906), the second of which is in the Metropolitan Museum (1999.363.41) ; Blue Nude: Memory of Biskra (1907; Baltimore Museum of Art); and two versions of Le Luxe (1907), among others.
Subsequently, Matisse’s career can be divided into several periods that changed stylistically, but his underlying aim always remained the same: to discover the “essential character of things” and to produce an art of “balance, purity, and serenity,” as he himself put it in his “Notes of a Painter” in 1908. The years 1908–13 were focused on art and decoration, producing several large canvases such as Reclining Odalisque (1908; (1999.363.44); two important mural-size commissions, Dance and Music (1909–10), for the Moscow house of his Russian patron Sergei I. Shchukin; a trio of large studio interiors, exemplified by The Red Studio (1911; MoMA, New York); and a group of spectacularly colored Moroccan pictures. These were followed by four years (1913–17) of experimentation and discourse with the Cubism of Pablo Picasso and Juan Gris. The resulting compositions were much more austere, almost geometrically structured and at times close to abstraction, as shown in the View of Notre-Dame (1914; MoMA, New York), The Yellow Curtain (1915; private collection), The Piano Lesson (1916; MoMA, New York), Bathers by a River (1916; Art Institute, Chicago), and a group of portraits in which a seated figure or the sitter’s head is positioned against a thinly brushed, neutral background. Yet he also created meticulously drawn portraits such as the famous Plumed Hat (1919; MoMA, New York).
In the autumn of 1917, Matisse traveled to Nice in the south of France, and eventually settled there for the rest of his life. The years 1917–30 are known as his early Nice period, when his principal subject remained the female figure or an odalisque dressed in oriental costume or in various stages of undress, depicted as standing, seated, or reclining in a luxurious, exotic interior of Matisse’s own creation. These paintings are suffused with southern light, bright colors, and a profusion of decorative patterns. They emanate a hothouse atmosphere suggestive of a harem.
In 1929, Matisse temporarily stopped painting easel pictures. He then traveled to America to sit on the jury of the 29th Carnegie International and, in 1930, spent some time in Tahiti and New York as well as Baltimore, Maryland and Merion, Pennsylvania. Dr. Albert Barnes, an important collector of modern art and owner of the largest Matisse holdings in America, commissioned the artist to paint a large mural for the two-story picture gallery of his mansion in Merion. Matisse chose the subject of the dance, a theme that had preoccupied him since his early Fauve masterpiece Bonheur de vivre. The mural (in two versions due to an error in dimensions) was installed in May 1933, and remains in place at the Barnes Foundation (Merion, Pa.). The composition highlighted the simplicity of female figures in exuberant motion against an abstract, almost geometric background. In preparation for the mural, Matisse began using a new technique—that of building up the composition from cutout shapes of previously colored paper. From 1940 onward, the paper cutouts became Matisse’s favored exploratory medium and, until the end of his life, the dominant medium of expression.
Another medium that Matisse explored and experimented with throughout his lifetime was drawing. As the most direct expression of the artist’s thoughts, drawing often helped Matisse to work out compositional and stylistic problems or new ideas. During the mid-1930s, he created distinctive series of pen-and-ink drawings on the subject of the artist and his model, while in the early 1940s he conceived his famous sequences of Thèmes et Variations, sensitively drawn spare works in elegant, unshaded line, describing simplified forms of female figures or still lifes. In the late 1940s and early ’50s, his drawings become bolder, the contour line thicker, the forms even more simplified and devoid of detail. The latest large drawings of acrobats (1951–52), executed with a thick brush placed at the end of a long stick, are made up of contour only. They are contemporaneous with a cutout series of Blue Nudes (2002.456.58), and the two mediums seem to represent two different approaches to form and space. The relationship between figure-ground becomes ambiguous and space complements the intended form. The form appears almost sculptural.
Sculpture was another medium pursued by Matisse since his early years, and although independent in expression, it was frequently used to find a solution to pictorial problems or became an inspiration to painting. More than half of Matisse’s sculptures were completed between 1900 and 1910; he also frequently worked in series, manipulating the form and simplifying it over the years. Among his best-known works belong the series of four Back reliefs (1903–31), the series of five Jeannette heads (1910–16), and the Large Seated Nude (1925–29).
Matisse’s creativity extended into the area of graphic arts and book illustration, the latter begun when he was already in his sixties, with the illustrations to Stéphane Mallarmé’s Poésies (1932), and culminated with the cutout compositions (1943–44) for his book Jazz (published in 1947). But the crowning achievement of Matisse’s career was the commission for the Chapel of the Rosary in Vence (1948–51), for which he created all the wall decorations, Stations of the Cross, furniture, stained-glass windows, even the vestments and altarcloths. The beauty and simplicity of this project constituted Matisse’s spiritual Gesamtkunstwerk and attested to his creative genius.
Contributors
Magdalena Dabrowski
Department of Modern and Contemporary Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art -
Francis Bacon
1909 - 1992WHO IS FRANCIS BACON?
By Mike Pinnington
(Quoted from Tate website)
WHO IS HE?
Francis Bacon (1909–92) was a maverick who rejected the preferred artistic style of abstraction of the era, in favour of a distinctive and disturbing realism. Growing up, Bacon had a difficult and ambivalent relationship with his parents – especially his father, who struggled with his son’s emerging homosexuality.
This contributed to a troubled childhood; he ran away from school, and subsequently drifted through the late 1920s and early 30s in London, Berlin and Paris, living off his allowance and occasional jobs, and dodging the rent. When in London, he lived in the epicentre of the bohemian scene; a regular in Soho, he led a hedonistic life.
From the mid-1940s his work met with critical success, establishing his reputation. Today, he is recognised as one of the most important painters of the twentieth century.
HOW DID BACON BECOME AN ARTIST?
Bacon did not become an artist through any traditional route: he didn’t attend art school, for example, or serve a conventional apprenticeship. In early professional life, he worked in interior design, but decided to abandon this and take up painting after seeing an exhibition of Picasso’s at Paul Rosenberg’s Paris gallery in the late 20s. Picasso’s representations of the body as bone-like, biomorphic structures revealed to Bacon the ‘possibilities of painting’. He later acknowledged Picasso as a key influence and reference point.
I’ve had a desire to do forms, as when I originally did three forms at the base of the crucifixion. They were influenced by the Picasso things which were done at the end of the ‘twenties. And I think there’s a whole area there suggested by Picasso, which in a way has been unexplored, of organic form that relates to the human image but is a complete distortion of it.
WHAT ARE HIS KEY WORKS?
When the triptych, Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion 1944, was first exhibited at the end of the war in 1945, it secured Bacon’s reputation. Chris Stephens, Head of Displays and Lead Curator, Modern British Art at Tate Britain called the work ‘a turning point in the history of British art. It’s one of the masterpieces in the Tate’s collection… It’s a work that was seen immediately as a brutally frank and horrifically pessimistic response to the Second World War. It was first exhibited in April 1945, and though the two were not directly related, the fact that this painting was unveiled the month that the concentration camps were revealed to the world, inevitably led to the way it has been understood as a statement of human brutality and suffering.’
Bacon suggested he had intended to paint a larger crucifixion beneath which these would appear. Speaking about this work in an interview in 1955, the artist said: ‘I have no religious feelings but at the same time I was [going to] do a crucifixion and put these figures around the base of it. And the only reason I ever used the crucifixion [was] because it was an armature on which I could hang certain sensations.’
Study for a Portrait 1952 dates from a crucial point in Bacon’s engagement with portraiture; Bacon painted his first head in isolation in 1948, and his contemporary Lucian Freud, a close friend, sat for Bacon’s first identifiable portrait of an individual in 1951. As is the case with other examples of the artist’s work in which he has employed a cubic, architectural framing device, or space-frame, implicit in this painting is a sense that the central figure has been trapped by the transparent cage that surrounds him. Asked by the critic and curator David Sylvester about the persistence of this technique, Bacon explained that the device was used simply to ‘concentrate the image down’.
For Bacon, the format of Triptych 1967 was a tactic, in some ways akin to the cubic cages, to isolate images from each other in order to ‘avoid story-telling’. References to poetry and drama became a central element in Bacon’s work in this period. Formerly titled Triptych Inspired by TS Eliot’s ‘Sweeney Agonistes’, rather than illustrating the verse drama (first published in 1926), this work can be understood as evoking the experience of reading the themes of violence and life’s futility in Eliot’s poetry.
-
