HENI Talks

Edwin Heathcote

Architecture Critic, The Financial Times 

Damien Hirst

Artist

Carol Jacobi

Curator, Tate

Brian Clarke

Oliver Garland and Lucy Miller

Articulation Alumni

Qabir Alli and Marianne Whiting

Cassius Ashcroft and Femi Themen

Michael Newman

Art Historian

Ben Street

Carine Harmand

Assistant Curator, Tate Modern

Hartwig Fischer

Director, British Museum

Architecture

Painting

Sculpture

Performance

Renaissance

Impressionism

Modernism

Contemporary

Postmodernism

Conceptual Art

Religious Art

Women

Abstraction

Landscape

Melancholy

Surrealism

Stained Glass

Is specialist knowledge needed to enjoy and understand art? 

Ben Street: How to Enjoy Art

We're in the National Gallery looking at paintings and thinking about the ways that we can engage with works of art as people without needing to know lots of extra historical information. This is something that anyone can do. You just need to be a person and you use the aspects of being a person to understand the art that you see.

Paintings speak in many ways. Paintings speak in scale, they speak in colour, they speak in technique, they speak in placement. I want to think, to begin with, of how paintings speak in scale so we immediately can engage with the work of art when we think about how big it is in relation to us.

I've chosen this painting because when you come into this room, it's one of the paintings that really stands out because of its scale. We don't always talk about scale when we talk about works of art, we tend to leap into what a work of art is about, who work of art is by, the period it was painted in. And what I'm saying really is that all of that information is useful, but it might take us away from the present tense experience of actually standing in front of the object that shares the space of us the viewer.

Now, given that this painting is much larger than me, it immediately tells me something about the tone of voice of the picture. Now that's a weird thing to say about a work of art in some ways, especially a work of art that literally doesn't make any noise. But every work of art has a tone of voice and establishing what that is, is a really helpful way of coming to engage with works of art you don't know.

If a work of art is quite big, it means that it's a bit like a speech. It can be understood by a large number of people at once. Now, because of that, the decisions that the artist makes within the picture are going to be about thinking about something that's got a sense of clarity about it. You can see who the characters are. You can tell what the story is. And one of the things the artist does is he uses, which is very traditional for when this painting was made, he used a lot of gold which is overwhelmingly beautiful and jewel-like. And that is part of the way it's speaking.

Now, many of the paintings in this museum were made long before museums existed. Sometimes we can fool ourselves into believing that museum is a natural home for an old work of art, just like we can fool ourselves into believing that a zoo is a good place to keep a polar bear. The thing is, is these paintings were made to be shown in a specific building, which was nothing like this building. How is it nothing like it? The lighting is completely different. The atmosphere of the place is completely different. What people do in this building is completely different.

So, when we think about works of art like this, it's really important to remember that all of them are fragments of a bigger creative idea. The big creative idea is about making a work of art for one part of one building forever, forever. So, when we take them out of context, we have to think about them in a different way.

What we have is a modern museum environment. And so, to engage with these works of art, rather than imagining that we're in a church and it's 500 years ago, we are allowed -- we have to, in fact -- bring our modern sensibility and our modern experiences into play. So, if I say in front of this painting, 'It's the size of a patio door,' -- that actually isn't a crazy thing to say, because I'm experiencing it in the present tense. And sometimes that might feel like a transgressive thing to do. If we look at a work of art like these famous paintings in the National Gallery, we can feel that's a bit wrong to compare them to commercial objects or to pop culture. But in fact, not only can we do that, we should do that because that's the way that these works stay alive. So, many people will come to this painting and they'll have no religious involvement with the Christian iconography of the picture, but the effects can still be there. They can still be wowed by the gold, by the scale and by the detail or by the grandeur of it. And that's not a misreading. That is the work of art staying alive.

What we often see in works of art is moments where the eyes of the character in the painting look out. Now, what that does is it builds a bridge between the world of the picture and your world. Somebody looks at you. It's a way of getting your attention, isn't it? A way of saying, 'Hey, hey, hey, look, look, look!'. You see things like little feet poking out, across the picture: that's another moment the painting knows it's made to be looked at. A work of art isn't finished until it gets looked at. If it's not being looked at, it's just a thing. So, when this room is closed overnight, when the lights are off and no one's here - there's still valuable pictures, but they don't come to life until they get looked at.

The experience of looking at a painting that's small is very different to the experience of a painting like the one we just saw by Carlo Crivelli, because a small painting immediately tells us how to physically engage with that. It tells us, quite simply, that we have to move closer. Before we even know anything about what the painting is of, the way we behave already sets the terms of our engagement. So, if I'm in front of a large painting and I'm stepping back to take it in, that's part of my interpretation of it. There are lots of aspects of the way we experience art that can't be written down: emotional experiences, spiritual experiences, physical experiences of space that there's no terminology for in art history. But those parts of the experience are really important. When we see a work of art in a book or on a screen, we see a photograph of it taken face on from a particular point of view. And we might assume that's what the painting is. But it isn't what the painting is. It's what the photograph of the painting is. The painting is something we experience as a physical object that we can move forward and back from. Sometimes that means that light shines on the surface, but that's good because it reminds us that painting is not an image, it's an object.

So, what can a small painting do that a large painting can't do? A small painting can take advantage of the fact that only one or two people can see it at once. So, its tone of voice is, it's the whispered, intimate voice of closeness. When we get close to it, what sometimes happens almost involuntarily is that we start speaking a bit more quietly.

What's in the painting is this quiet scene, a figure is in prayer. In other words, it's a picture of somebody in contemplation. It's a picture of quietness. So, that's immediately a point of communication between what we're doing and what the painting is doing. But there's more because when we get close, we notice the detail of the painting. We notice that the artist must have used a tiny, tiny brush, must have painted it flat on a tabletop. The way you would write a letter. And that also is interesting, isn't it? The way it's made is also quiet and slow. All of that is building up an idea of the tone of voice or the atmosphere of the painting.

There are three characters involved. There's you, there's the guy in the painting, and there's the artist. And everyone is doing something similar. Everyone is close, quiet, still and calm. So, that is a kind of beautiful moment of conversation between you, a real person, between him, a kind of fictional person, and between the artist: a real dead person from a long, long time ago.

When we walk around a museum, there are so many things to see that it can be completely overwhelming and an exhausting experience. One way of navigating the experience is to find the painting in the room that is the strangest object in the room. Now, I think the weirdest work of art in this room is the one that's behind me. It's unlike the other paintings in the room. But you can turn it to your advantage.

If there's something you are captivated by, but you don't know why, use another artwork to help understand it. So, this strange painting is surrounded by much smaller paintings, some of which seem to be in the way that they've been set up interacting with it. There is a wonderful painting of a waitress with pints of beer who seems to be looking over at this painting. It's all set up by the curators to create relationships between works of art. A really helpful thing to do is say, 'Well, look, it's a very strange painting, and everything else in the room seem to be roughly the same size, seem to be quite similar subject matter. So, this is an outlier painting in the room. But another thing that I think is so exciting about this particular painting is it reminds us that artworks are physical objects. When an artwork is damaged, as this one is -- this is in pieces and has been re-stuck onto another canvas -- it reminds us that every painting is like this. Every painting in this room is very delicate. This particular painting has a long story, about how it was cut up and how it was reassembled. And that's a really interesting thing to look into. But I want to focus on the present tense experience of it. What's it like to look at a picture which is in pieces?

The fact that it's in pieces seems somehow to rhyme with what it's of. There seems to somehow be a relationship between the size and the condition of the painting, and the subject matter. Well, what is the subject matter? We seem to be looking at a firing squad. Most of the surface of the picture we can see is people with their backs to us firing guns at someone we can't see. It's a scene of an execution on a very large scale. So, it's a very dark subject matter. Now, if you've ever done any theatre, you know that the one thing you don't do when you're on stage is turn your backs to the audience. If you turn you back to the audience they can't hear you, they can't engage with the story. What if you deliberately did that, though? All the things I've been talking about building a bridge. What if you break the bridge? The effect is disorientating. It's very strange to encounter a big group of people in a painting who are all totally anonymous. It creates a certain atmosphere.

It's an execution. It's about somebody being taken apart physically. The action of the guns in the painting makes it look like the guns are literally tearing the painting apart. Now you might say, 'Well, wait, hold on, hold on, that wasn't the artist's intention.' Well, look, the artist's intention is all well and good but the truth is the artworks live in time. They're not stuck in amber when the painting is made. We're interested in what the artist wanted to do, but we also have to deal with the fact that we're facing a painting in pieces. We have to deal with what we're given. We have to remember all the pictures we see are out of context, and that is useful because we can bring our own experience to enhance the encounter with the works of art.

We see a large painting; we might make an assumption that its size indicates the importance of what it's actually of. So, this is a large-scale painting of an execution. We can make certain assumptions that it's a historically important event. That's absolutely true. We also have to be a bit careful because there are certainly artists who know that, who know we come to the encounter like that and overturn the expectations we bring to it. We have to just be aware that we have those expectations. Then we have to weigh that against the strangeness of the painting. We have to weigh that against the fact we have these backs to us. If it's so important, why are we shut out from it? All those things just allow us to open up more questions, and the whole thing with an encounter with any work of art is you shouldn't leave it thinking you've solved it. It's not a crossword puzzle. You don't crack it. You leave a painting often thinking, 'I've got more questions now than I had when I started.' But that's good. It makes you want to go back and see it again.

The truth is you never exhaust a work of art. You keep going back to it and you keep seeing more and more things in it. Why is that? Not because the painting changes, but because you change. I became a parent. Consequently, I notice paintings with babies much more than I used to, and I feel differently about them. The way that we use our own experiences allows works of art to stay alive because our experiences change. But because it's your experience, it means that every painting has the potential to have a different meaning depending upon who's looking at it. And that is the joy of looking at art.

‘The drawings are traces of a life, creating territories in relation to limits and potentials. Communications transmitted to whoever will regard them.’ ⁠— Prof. Michael Newman

Gerhard Richter: Drawings

Drawing is an art of existence in and through time and space, and what exists of the living body. The drawings are traces of a life, creating territories in relation to limits and potentials. Communications transmitted to whoever will regard them.

Richter uses drawing in various different ways: as a way of preparing a painting, for example. You make a projection of a photographic image, and then perhaps draw it initially and then paint it, or maybe paint it right away, but sometimes drawing can be used in that sense. But over the last, I don't know, maybe twenty-five years, we see more and more autonomous drawings. And he's exploring drawing, I think, as a medium for its own sake. And he's doing it often in ways which are not typical of the tradition of drawing. He'd want to avoid them being seen as fine drawings. I think it's perhaps better to think of them as experiments, or as operations of drawing where different drawing techniques are brought together.

What the dating draws attention to is the relation of the drawing to time. The relation of the drawing to a moment, which obviously also relates it to perhaps a dimension of a diary, but not necessarily in a personal way, even if it takes and extended period. And maybe it can be made after the moment to which it refers. And I think that sense ofoperation and potentiality in relation to drawing, is tied with the experience also of time. And of being in the moment.

He uses various different kinds of mark making, almost a repertoire. In these drawings, we see a very good example of the use of frottage, of dragging the pigment across the surface of the paper, which has in turn being put on a surface so that a certain texture comes through. A texture which has a sense of being something almost like a geological stratum. So, relating to a different kind of temporality. In one of the series, he creates lines by erasure; the use of erasure or subtraction to produce a drawing. And those aspects of Richter's drawings, I think, relates very much to his extraordinary achievement in abstract painting, where he drags the paint using a squeegee across the surface. There's obviously a degree of control, he controls the pigments that he uses, he controls the pressure, he controls the speed at which he drags the squeegee across the surface, but the result is at the same time unpredictable --- even to him. It's not a simple result of his subjective intentionality. He creates the situation through his choice of materials and his actions. And then, the result that's produced I imagine would surprise him as much as it'd surprise anyone else. And then, of course, he can edit it. He can decide whether or not to keep it, he can decide whether to paint over it, which he often does until he achieves the result that he wants.

These drawings are from 2020. This one is from the 19^th^ of September, it's dated. It's a very good example of how Richter uses line in different ways. You can see a line that has created a kind of island, but you can't really identify what it is. You have a line which is more like a sort of squiggle there. You have a line that produces a contour, which is wandering here and geometrical there. Here you have parallel lines, almost creating something like a piece of paper from an exercise book. So, there you have a reflection within the drawing of the paper that the drawing is on. It creates, by means of the contour, a plane. The plane kind of parallels the plane of the paper. At the same time, you have this kind of turbulent hatching. And you have the hint there, just here, of the contour of a face. I think that's extremely interesting, and it occurs in a number of these drawings. You could easily miss it, but when you notice it, you can see more and more of these contours of faces. Why has Richter put contours of faces in these drawings? It may be some kind of joke, but it may also have something to do with this famous story in Pliny of the *Origin of Painting,* which could also be called the *Origin of Drawing*, where the daughter of a potter named Butades draws the outline of the projection of the shadow of her lover on the wall. The father then makes a cast from this projection which becomes a portrait. So, the story of the origin of drawing involves both presence and absence. This lover is going to go away, it's the outline not of him but of his shadow.

Let's find another face. Oh, yes, here look. This looks to me like a face. It's a silhouette. In the 18^th^ and 19^th^ century people made silhouettes instead of making photographs. So, the silhouette, the shadow, relates to the photograph. It also relates to the way in which Richter works in painting, by projecting photographs and then drawing the outline of those photographs, then painting the photograph over those outlines, which in a sense is the set of stages which we find in the story of the *Origin of Painting* in Pliny.

These are a group of drawings by Richter that use poured ink to create blots and puddles, which he manipulates in different ways and to which he adds drawing. I have the impression that the paper must have been laid flat and the ink poured onto the paper, so that's an operation. Pouring the ink onto the paper. And then I have a sense that the paper must have then been moved to create flows in a certain direction. So, that's another operation which controls the chance effect that is taking place. It's a kind of mixture of chance and control through the operation. Examine closely, one also sees lines drawn on some of these paintings and they're straight geometrical lines. So, there's an illusion to construction, and to rational construction, which seems to be contradicted by the way in which the blot occurs on the surface, which is less predictable and perhaps more opaque. And, you know, we might even be able to infer from that that the paintings are a sort of commentary on the relation of construction and chance, transparency and opacity. This idea of creating something from a blot or a stain goes back a long way. Leonardo refers in his notes to a technique of Botticelli, who threw an ink-soaked sponge at the wall in order to then get ideas for how he might create paintings and compositions. So, this kind of chance effect then contributes to the creativity of the artist. And in the 18^th^ century Alexander Cozens created blot paintings and wrote a kind of manual about how to do it. That you would start by making a blot on a piece of paper and that would give you an idea how to compose a landscape, so that the drawing came not from representing an existing landscape but imagining a landscape stimulated by the blot on the surface. In both of those cases, the blot is instrumentalised. It becomes a means to an end. That is not the case, I think, with Richter's drawings. In a way the blot, the stain, is an end in itself. It's a way of generating a drawing that says something about generativity itself, I would say.

Richter for a very long time has used photographs to make paintings and explored the relation of photography to painting. He's made paintings, he's photographed details of the painting, he's made further paintings from the photographs of the details of his paintings. So, there's really a very important and consistent relationship in his work between photography and painting. In the case of these drawings, he has painted over with a kind of grey-brown over, what I think are personal photographs of a forest or a wood. There seems to be something slightly ominous, I think about this covering over of the forest. The forest has a lot of implications, and meanings, and symbolism in the German context. I think the use of photographs in this case of a sort of in a way mundane wood is a way of simultaneously invoking and negating this German artistic and painterly relationship to the forest, a sort of place, if you like, of German nationhood. They make me think of that series of paintings that has been quite controversial that Richter made, a series called 'Birkenau'. The title refers in its meaning to a birch forest, but it of course also refers to Auschwitz Birkenau. The starting point for those paintings were photographs snatched by the Sonderkommando, the Jews who were forced to assist with the extermination. They managed to make very few, I think four, photographs of women going towards the gas chambers. Richter used these photographs as a starting point for the paintings. He projected the photographs, he actually drew the images, but then the painting activity completely covers the image. So, the question arises what is the relation between the painting that covers the image and the photographic image, highly charged evidence and trace of this terrible genocide. The painting is not a representation of the event, it's a response. So, this idea of covering over an image can be a very charged thing. It can involve concealment, but it can also involve response.

Catalogue raisonné work number 1 ⁠--- not the first work Richter made, because the catalogue raisonné is not everything, it's what Richter decides deserves to be included. And the first work ⁠--- obviously in a very significant position ⁠--- is a work called *Table*, from 1962. *Table* consists of a painting of a table, taken from a photograph in a magazine, and over that table he's made tachiste gestural marks. Those marks can be read as cancelling the representation. But they can also be understood as a form of generativity. Generating something in the making, generating a new form which indicates its own process, because the mark is a record of the brush being drawn over the image. And I use the word 'drawn' there. Drawing is there right at the beginning of Richter's oeuvre, and drawing signifies the exploration of generativity. How do you generate or create something that is not --- and this is important for Richter --- personal expression? He's not an expressionist artist but he's very interested in, as it were, the generativity of art. Generativity implies a future. That something will come from what you do, that people will look at it, appreciate it, wonder about it, think about it. It will have a life after you've produced it, and that is part of its potential.

Qabir Alli and Marianne Whiting — alumni of the Articulation Prize — discuss Barbara Hepworth’s ‘Family of Man’.

HENI Talks x Articulation: Barbara Hepworth, 'Family of Man'

**Qabir Alli (QA)**: The gardens are beautiful. You cannot help but be drawn in by every aspect of the surroundings. It is by no means like the gallery space, with a backdrop that is white and bland. And that is an important distinction for Barbara Hepworth's *Family of Man*. If you were to ask most people what they think when you say 'gallery', you'll find most answers will be along the lines of 'white walls' and 'bright lights'. This is the idea of an art display space being a 'white cube', a space where uniform colour reflects and grants the viewer a sole focus on the artwork. This sculpture is very different at Roche Court than in a gallery space. When you look through the organic negative space of the sculptures, you see very different things. Here you see the features and landscape beyond, seeing the garden and flowers in full bloom. This sculpture is clearly designed to interact with its environment, and here it is surely being utilised to the fullest.

**Marianne Whiting (MW)**: You're right, the metal feels both part of and separate from the landscape of Roche Court, for instance, as can be seen with the *Parent* statue. On the inside, you can see the bronze's blue patina. Although this detail was added deliberately by Hepworth rather than naturally occurring over time, it makes the sculptures feel as if they have aged and grown up with their environment.

Hepworth also guides us, as we walk through the sculptures to look through the negative spaces inside of them. Negative space was key. By piercing directly through the bronze forms, she emphasises a multifaceted way of seeing. For instance, take the *Child* statue. Looking through the headspace of the *Child*, we see the grass, we see the *Family*, and any visitors that happen to be passing by. With each new place the sculptures travel to, a new part of the story is added to *Family of Man.*

**QA**: As said, Hepworth considered strongly how viewers move through and around her sculptures. It is an interaction that focus' on the idea of family and relationship that she wished to portray in her sculptural work. The sculptures here at Roche Court represent are 3 individuals of the family of man collection. They represent the *Ancestor,* the *Parent*, and *Child*.  Family is incredibly important to Hepworth. In life she married twice, having triplets with her second husband. The raising of those children created the experience of a full house, so that by the time the collection was in creation in the late 60s, Hepworth's own experience of family was developed and at the forefront of her mind. The fact these three sculptures were selected together here is particularly poignant, in its representation of time, showing that as generations move on, there is a change. The very solid permanent feeling of these sculptures perhaps reflects the impermanence of individuals, but the everlasting nature of relationships.

**MW**: For all their grand size and dynamic detail, these sculptures are marked by how temporary they are. Yes, they have the blue patination, but they're also made in bronze. *Family of Man* is telling the story of living forever and decaying with time. This was one key reason for Hepworth's change in materials. By the late 1960s, she had all but abandoned sculpting with wood in favour of bronze, which held a malleability and a textural aspect that her smooth wooden sculptures. This can be seen looking at the *Ancestor.* The surface of the *Ancestor* is gashed with chisel marks which stands in sharp contrast with the smoothed metal of the *Child* sculpture. By convoluting her designs, Hepworth distinguishes the wise and worldly experience of the *Ancestor* with the untarnished and simple world of the *Child*. But this goes further. When you look closer, you can see that the bronze is uneven. It's puckered and scratched. This can be accounted for by Hepworth's process of casting in bronze, where the rough surface of the mould was transferred onto the bronze and was not polished down. From a distance, the sculptures may appear smooth but closer investigation shows Hepworth's hand is obvious. Spatial experience was important to Hepworth, but so was textural experience and this makes for a memorable installation.

**QA**:  The sculptures are memorable. From our initial impressions, to discovering the details of this timeless family's texture. It's that feeling of everlasting unity that gets us to think about Hepworth's intentions. She wants this piece to feel universal. When you look at the sculptures, it's instantly recognisable that they belong together. It's this sense of unity that makes this work particularly universal.

**MW**: These sculptures do feel universal. They have grown up together, even while their environment continues to age them. Even so, the hardy bronze means they will surely outlive me and Qabir. Hepworth's *Family of Man* tells the story of the eternal family, where past, present and future exist simultaneously. Hepworth binds those of us living today with our late relatives and relatives and those of us yet to exist. And, if only a fleeting moment, Hepworth makes all of our family histories exist together as one.

Articulation Alumni Lucy Miller and Oliver Garland reflect on 'Fructus' by Peter Randall-Page, exploring how the sculpture complements, juxtaposes and transforms the natural landscape in which it is placed.

HENI Talks x Articulation: Peter Randall-Page, 'Fructus'

Lucy Miller (LM): *Fructus industriales* --- crops produced by labour on the part of man.

From afar I see this, I see concrete, slate grey, a skyscraper among soft trees, I see coldness. An emblem of modernity among nature. But I also see a giant pinecone, fallen and burrowed into the ground, or the butt of an alien insect, suspended for a moment but filled with the potential to dig deeper into the ground. I feel unsettled.

Oliver Garland (OG): I see something with a vague sense of familiarity, but an apprehensiveness of the unknown. What is it that sits so imposingly before me, so large and so bold? I can't quite pinpoint its abstracted form; it's too abstract to say for certain what it is, but not abstract enough that one feels entirely disconnected or disinterested by it. I feel in some way restrained by this unknowingness.

LM: This unknowing becomes all the more unsettling for me when considering its place in a park, because for me parks are nostalgic. Family walks amongst green havens, picnics overlooking carefully crafted displays of floristry, a place of peace, rejuvenation and clarity. But *Fructus* changes this whole landscape for me. The coldness and the vague mimicry of nature, but not quite being nature itself. And the natural forms it does mimic feel unsettling to me. They make it feel like a tense and unwelcoming space because I see pustules, beehives, barnacles. This uncertain mimicry paired with the sculptures ginormous size of the sculpture as well as the juxtaposing colours, creates a distortion of place for me. I no longer feel the park holds a nostalgic sentimentality, it feels like a cold, tense space. The golden spell of the park being transformed makes me question what do I find intrinsically beautiful about nature? Is it the shapes and the forms themselves? Or is it all just a misguided sense of nostalgic sentimentality?

OG: The cool, resistant grey juxtaposing the soft greens and browns of its situation is so appealing to my senses. I know what it's like to touch. I know how it feels. Hard. Resistant. Cold. And yet I haven't touched it. I haven't been that close to it yet. Why is this, I ask? Why am I drawn so strongly to something that's form I don't fully recognise or understand yet?

LM: While foreign from afar, up close it is evident *Fructus* is not just a manmade imposition on the natural landscape: it is nature itself.

OG: It is almost ironic. The creation of this limestone was formed through natural processes over millions of years but was interrupted by man. By a sculptor. Its true form carved out and liberated at last. Yet it appears as though it could have been untouched. From close up we can see the rock in its raw beauty --- pure imperfections within the rock's surface are visible.

LM: Randall-Page, in carving through the layers of rock, has unlocked the life that resides within the stone. The natural patterns travel across the curves, in turn giving them energy and liberating the sense of life that brought them into being.

OG: Its natural forms --- the lobe and bulbous-like shapes --- are so distinctive and recognisable. These lobes appear taut, becoming increasingly pendulous and bodily closer to the ground. We only have to look around elsewhere in nature to suddenly see these shapes again and again.

LM: In considering it a natural form I can't help but think the park is the perfect place for *Fructus* to belong. There is something beautiful about the fact that while it appears so imposing and large in the space of the park, it is an intrinsically weak structure made from limestone, meaning it will weather. As such it is a never-ending process of sculpture. The elements will come down in the park and the sculpture will continue to change and be weathered down. And in this, it is beautiful, because it finally fits with the rest of the nature around it. With time it will decay.

OG: As is the consequence of time, this piece will continue to evolve, new forms divulging, but immortal, long will this sculpture outlast man, a testament of time and the wonders of the natural world. Perhaps we should consider again then the positioning of this piece. The shapes of it. The form of it. After revealing that it is rooted in the form of botanical study, on the fecundity and sensuality of ripened fruit, I feel liberated now knowing what this piece represents. No longer do we feel uneasy or unsure by it, but we experience it in a different light. For what it really is. Suddenly its context makes sense as if this is how a ripened piece of fruit has fallen from a tree. Right here. Completely naturally. And this is where it will continue to evolve and transform.

*Fructus naturales* -- crops produced without the substantial assistance of man.

Cassius Ashcroft and Femi Themen — alumni of the articulation Prize — explore Richard Long’s site-specific sculpture ‘Tame Buzzard Line’.

HENI Talks x Articulation: Richard Long, 'Tame Buzzard Line'

**Cassius Ashcroft (CA)**: So, this piece is *Tame Buzzard Line* by Richard Long, and it was commissioned for Roche Court. And the main idea of this piece was to mimic the transient journey of a buzzard flying from the old holm oak tree to the ash tree you see behind us.

**Femi Themen (FT)**: I think what is quite intriguing about the work when you're first introduced to it, is that you discover it from behind the green wall, and you just see this kind of theatrical, stark image of the sharp silhouette of the ash tree, and then the very strong, *initially strong*, sharp lines of the work itself. But then actually when you come and interrogate it, come up closer to it, you're playing and looking at the work, you see the much more natural formation, which I think is quite an interesting way of building a relationship with the viewer and then the artwork itself.

**CA**: Yes, and on that point, the idea of the environment and the transitory nature of it, is very important in this work. As we can see, there are weeds and there are plants growing throughout the cracks and the folds of the flint. And that's a very important point, because it demonstrates ephemerality in the piece. Although it does have a clear permanent quality to it, there is that ephemeral, transient nature that mimics the transient journey of the buzzard.

**FT**: I like that idea of the temporal nature of the work, I think the presence of it feels very important, especially that intimate relationship, where the distinction between the individual and the actual work itself kind of starts to be blurred, because you're looking, you're a part of the environment, and a part of the natural world itself -- which  is really beautiful, and really important, especially following lockdown and the limitation on interaction with nature, which I feel almost starved of. So to be able to actually be here, and looking at the work, and interacting with the work, feels really important, like a part of our development as human beings as well.

**CA**: Yes, definitely. Although, one of the first things I noticed about this piece is the way in which it contrasts with the landscape. So, we see that this flint stone, it contrasts very much with the smooth meadow. Although, when you look closely at it you realise that this is local flint. This is from the environment. So that forms a very interesting interplay between connection but also disconnection with the environment.

**FT**: Yeah. I think also talking about the flint, I think it's quite interesting seeing each form, they're very individual pieces, completely unique. So, it's that idea of rejecting the unity of more man-made structures, but also that individuality I guess, you can talk about how it mimics our individuality as human beings. It kind of replicates almost a stream of carcasses, a burial site. And I guess you could play with the idea of the buzzard being a bird of prey, and the predatory nature, the destructive nature of nature, as well as the kind of ephemeral beauty and gracefulness of the landscape itself.

**CA**: Yeah, and in terms of its aesthetic, I think you have to appreciate the value of the line, not necessarily just as a geometric form, or a start or end point, but also as an experience in itself. As we were walking around it, we took in this multisensory experience, we heard the rustling of the leaves, but we also heard the birds in the trees and we could feel the tactility, the rough angularity of the flint stones, and I think that really is important in embedding this idea of presence in this piece. So, Richard Long was a Zen Buddhist, and he was inspired by the idea of Satori, which is the here-ness and the now-ness of an experience. And this is fundamental in the appreciation of this piece.

**FT**: Yes, I think that's quite an interesting idea -- that presence, and the idea of 'nowness', because what he's doing is making permanent a very transitory and fleeting moment. So, that idea of flight being quite fast is not something that you necessarily would capture, but for him to solidify it so strongly I think it's quite an interesting relation to then how we as human beings feel the need to make our existence permanent as well. So, that idea of all the infrastructure that we're building, inscribing our names into history, graffiti tags, wall engravings, it's that idea of 'This is our existence, this is who we are now.' But as you were saying before, the sculpture being made of very natural materials gives still that sense of ephemerality. So, yes there is a sense of permanence in the work in the kind of rock formation, but actually with weathering, it will shift, and change, and grow, like our own state of nature as human beings. We will die, we will come back, depending on how you believe how life will regenerate, but there's the idea of our own ephemerality then looking at the work, and we're confronted with our lack of permanence and endurance within the world that we're living in now.

**CA**: Yes definitely, and the idea of the line is also important because you have to look alongside it. And there we see, at the end of the line, we see an ash tree, and ash trees often symbolise regeneration, because of the shedding of the leaves and the regrowing of the leaves. And then when you look towards this side of the line, we see an old holm oak tree, and they symbolise permanence and longevity because they have a life span of over four hundred years, a very, very long lifespan. And as we're walking down the line, we appreciate the present time and we realise that we're caught between three, triads of time, like a trinity of time almost. And that's very important because, like I said earlier, the Satori, the nature of that work, that enhances the experience and also what you take away from the sculpture, whether it be to be more respectful of the natural world, to be more transient with the natural world, or whether or not to just appreciate it more.

**FT**: Yes. And the idea of the triad of time is really interesting, because it's tying into the idea of the cycle of life. That we are part and parcel of nature, that everything is growing, and moving and evolving and developing and that nothing actually is permanent, maybe we are just completely in a transitory state for our entire eternity. I think that's quite a humbling experience, but also quite a beautiful notion.

**CA**: Something that I also find really interesting about this piece is the diversity of colours but also forms, so some of these rocks have holes in them, for example. Some are different in colours, we see ochres, we see greys we see blues almost. And I think that almost is symbolic of the diversity of the natural world.

**FT**: Yes, definitely. Yeah, the individualism in it, as well as the collective nature, which I guess you could talk about our own way of forming civilisation, we're individuals but also very much part of a community, whether that is in the UK, or the wider world collective. I think it's quite a nice connection to the human and the natural world. We are part and parcel of that we're not separate.

**CA**: And I think, to add on the idea of the line, something important about this work is that although it may seem like a perfect line, there are broken sections. We see some of the rocks falling out of the line. And I think that also suggests just maybe the lack of perfection in the natural world. Almost the lack of beauty in some sense. The idea that not everything is beautiful.

**FT**: Yeah, yeah. Richard Long definitely has a much more honest approach to the natural world, so like you were talking about before, there is a slight lack of beauty in this where the kind of like jagged carcass-like formations and the bird of prey, and that idea of destruction. Nature isn't a romanticised piece of literature, it's a very real, very organic, and very terrifying but also grounding environment to be a part of.

**CA**: And I think there is an argument to be made though, that the brokenness of the line could perhaps be human's fault. Because Long assembled each and every one of these flint stones himself. So perhaps it's not nature that is imperfect, perhaps is human endeavour that is imperfect.

**FT**: I like that idea, really interesting, and ties into that idea of environmentalism as well, and Long's philosophy and politics around our relationship with nature, and our destruction of nature. And that feels quite important now, with the idea of climate change and rising temperatures. It very much reminds you of our own impact on the world that we're living in.

Curator Carol Jacobi shines a light on the career of artist Isabel Rawsthorne (1912 – 1992), “a missing link of 20th century art”.

Isabel Rawsthorne Rediscovered: The Poetry in Things

Sparrowhawk was found on Isabel Rawsthorne's easel after she died, so we think maybe it's the last work that she ever worked on. She always used a language of animals, of living things, and the hawk for her was a bird associated with death from Egyptian times. She's clearly thinking about the end of her life. She's in her late 70s.

Next to the easel was found an actual sparrowhawk skeleton that she'd obviously been working from, and I think you can see that skeletal effect in the painting. And also the sort of sense of a sort of ephemeral, almost a ghostly effect. She was thinking, I think, about the hawk lying on the table, a dead thing, but at the same time she was thinking about what it was like if you were the prey of the hawk. Sparrowhawks appear above their prey very unexpectedly, and then it's too late. And so you get this sense of the animal arcing above you.

Isabel had a lifelong admiration of JMW Turner, and this painting was inspired by one of Turner's own paintings from the end of his life, 'The Angel Standing in the Sun'. You can see that the hawk's wings actually echo the rainbow of Turner's. Where Turner put figures representing the vicissitudes of love underneath the angel, Isabel has put the names of the people that represented the vicissitudes of love for her, the people who she loved and loved her. Underneath the wings of the sparrowhawk, she's written them, almost buried them, in the paint.

And the sketchbooks around this time are full of names, just lists and lists of names that we couldn't make any sense of until we connected them to this painting. So you can see names like Louis, which refers to the poet Louis MacNeice, I think you can see Alberto there, Alberto Giacometti, Tristan, that's Tristan Tzara, of many many people that she loved and who loved her. Isabel often included her own hand in her works of art, as though referring to her sort of actual making the work of art. And this is the most ephemeral of those hands, you can see it almost flutters over the painting on the left-hand side. It's almost like it's the last trace of her, in charcoal.

I do tend to call her Isabel because she had five surnames in her life, although now she is known as Isabel Rawsthorne, mainly because that's the name that Francis Bacon gave her in the many paintings he did of her, she exhibited as Isabel Lambert. So it's just easier to call her by the most consistent name she had through her life which is Isabel**.** Isabel was born in the East End of London in 1912 but she was brought up near Liverpool**.** She never liked going to school, she much preferred to go sketching, swimming in the sea, just running wild.

She was very much part of a period where a lot of people were trying to work out not just art but life from first principles. She always questioned everything; she was always a rebel. So, for example, even at 16 at Liverpool College of Art, she challenged the rule against women being able to draw from the undraped model by becoming part of a group of men and women who posed for each other at nighttime. I think this might be something to do with why she managed to get the life drawing scholarship to the Royal Academy.

Then she went to be the studio assistant of Jacob Epstein and a couple of years later she went to Paris. And she was at the centre of the Paris avant-garde for 12 years, apart from a gap during World War II when she worked for British Intelligence as part of the special operations executive, making black propaganda.

We think of Isabel as this, you know, incredibly glamorous figure, this is how other people saw her. She challenged that fundamental divide between the model and the artist. So, in a way when she was the subject of Giacometti, of Bacon, she was also an artist at the same time. She was kind of the model who looked back. She refused to play the roles that were expected of her. And I think she did this, partly, just to win the independence, the freedom to paint, which was always her priority. But, at the same time it was the vivacity, the sort of singularity of the persona she took on in order to do this, which so fascinated the people around her, and which led them to make images of her, fall in love with her.

It's very interesting to see how she saw herself. Artists from a poorer background, artists who are women, often used to draw and paint themselves, because they had less access to models. But if Isabel represented herself it tended to be her hands. And there are very very few images of her face. So in this room we actually have two. One that she made when she was just 24, she's wearing some kind of Japanese kimono, and it's just a quick sketch, possibly done in the studio of Alberto Giacometti. And another, which she made when she was 44, and exhibited, so it's clearly very important to her.

It's both brutal and very evasive. It's called 'Head with a Rose', and you can see her cow lick, and a mantel shelf with a white rose which, she would have understood, referred to ideas about love. But I think it's interesting to remember that, by this time, by the age of 44, she'd seen her face represented by so many leading artists of the age. Sir Jacob Epstein, André Derain, three portraits by Picasso, and dozens, if not hundreds, by Giacometti. And I think this portrait is very defiant. It's very much about her gestures, you can see that her face somehow comes into view through these movements and swipes of three-dimensional paint. It's a kind of 'now you see it, now you don't' effect. It's a quite embattled, stern, self-image.

Isabel was a lifelong natural historian. Her first drawings were done in Kew Gardens of the birds, or in London Zoo at the age of three. Her father was a merchant seaman. He used to bring home and trade animals to supply zoos. And she didn't really see any difference between human beings and animals. For her, she was always interested in the body, so she would either be drawing in the life class, or she would be drawing animals that she collected, or was studying in zoos.

An awful lot of Isabel's work from the early part of her life has not survived, partly because she had such an itinerant lifestyle. She didn't have a permanent studio, partly because things were lost or destroyed during the war. But we can see hints from publicity around her first exhibition, which was entirely animals, from her sketchbooks, and from a very rare work that she didn't destroy -- she was very terrible for destroying her work -- 'The Hare'. We can see the development of the way she was thinking about animals, and particular her interest in finding, collecting, not just looking at but touching animals. And the hare was actually given to her by the butcher, this rationing was still going on during this period, and you can see she's arranged it on this white cloth, in a position that, it haunts it really, with the way the hare would have been when it was living. Its eye somehow looks alive, and so you get this very poignant sense of the living presence of the hare in the dead hare that she's painting. This is of course, she would have known, a very old subject that goes back to Chardin and to 17^th^ century paintings, and this is her addressing that.

You can see in her animals how her style, her thinking, evolved through them. So, if we look at the baboons, for example, two paintings of a baboon and a child and another baboon. You can see that the animals are much more abridged. You need much less to see them, which is something she was really interested in, what was necessary to make a viewer see something. And you can also see that she's introduced texture, so you've got again, as in her self-portrait, these swipes and touches and gestures, her own gestures are in the painting.

Isabel was very interested in the language of gesture, the language of movement in humans and animals. She read a great deal about this. And I think one of the reasons she was pleased with the baboons was that the way the white baboon is sort of protective around the child, the way the strokes of paint all go into the body, so you get this sense of containment within that. And if you look at the brown baboon, again you can see the scratches going through the paint, it's almost as though he's withdrawing his elbows into himself. So you get this tremendous feeling of embattlement. And although it's clear that these animals probably are caged, you don't need to see the cage. You get a sense of their containment in the way they're painted, in their body language.

For me, the white baboon is particularly poignant because we know that Isabel had a child when she was just 22 but was not able to bring up that child. The child was brought up by its father, Jacob Epstein, and his wife Margaret Epstein. Isabel was always well-known for her verve, for her gaiety, that was her public persona. But she did have private sadnesses and these you tend to see in her art. Her art tends to be much more austere. She was very proud of its austerity. Have a sense of transience and sadness and the beauty of things that are transient. I think that when we look at the baboon and child, there is this layer to it as well.

One of the things that really interested Isabel was whether you could capture the movement of a living thing, in a static medium like painting. And Isabel took a very literal approach to this, she simply found a way of painting the life model moving. And the way she did was to go to the practice rooms at the Royal Ballet. What you have there is people doing the same movement over and over and over again, so she could sketch and sketch and sketch and she could get to understand how to find an equivalent on her page for those movements. So, quite often you have more than one movement signified in one figure and you can see this actually. Also, this translated to her baboons -- the male baboon appears to be sort of staring into the distance -- but when you look a bit more closely you can see he's actually turned his head and he's looking straight at you.

In 1968 Isabel moved to the Marlborough gallery and she had a large solo show of portraits and dancers. And you can see her exploration of movement in the portraits, just as much as the dancers. You get the sense of the head not just turning now, but animated by talk, by banter. She often painted her then husband, Alan Rawsthorne, and you get a sense of him smoking and his gestures. That's been obviously very important of her to capture, but also gives the figures an ephemeral quality, but also a kind of skull-like quality -- a sense of them as transient beings. I think what Isabel was doing in her work was, always her work was based on something real, but what she was finding was the poetry of things. So, for example, just a simple wine glass could have a poetry about it according to a few sprigs of flowers that might have a meaning, is the wine glass empty, is it full, is it convivial, is it sad, and in this portrait of Alan Rawsthorne, you can see that the wine glass is reflected and that the flower only exists in the reflection, not in the real glass.

Isabel's paintings are very hard to reproduce. They've got a kind of sculptural quality and in a photograph, you just see a scatter of shadows according to how the picture was lit for that photograph. But when you're standing in front of them, you sort of sense the three-dimensionality with your skin, as well as your eyes and that's when they really come alive.

Isabel never actually managed to get a permanent studio until she was in her 40s. Her work that we know -- the work that survived -- is from that last 40 years of her life. But, paradoxically, around that time, she fell out of sight. So that a lot of people didn't know she was working after her Marlborough show in 1968. It's also very typical of Isabel that she didn't tend to repeat a successful formula. If she felt she'd had a success, she would move onto something else. And what she moved on to in her last years was she went back to the animals. The animals she was finding in the fields around her cottage. And she made most startingly seven large paintings, which looked at these sort of themes of transience and life and death, but in an environmental context. This is where she started regularly introducing her own hand holding a swallow that she's just caught for a moment, quite often against the disk of the sun, which is a kind of, I think, a metaphor for inspiration.

Isabel was a very influential artist in the 40s and the 50s. When Tate acquired a portrait of her by Francis Bacon that he made in 1966, they described her as a well-known painter and designer. The reason that people are still actually surprised to find out she was an artist, which, considering she actually was an artist for 75 years and she made this really important body of work, I think it's to do with several things. I think it's partly to do with the prejudices of history, the expectations of artists who are women, which has hindered the appreciation, the survival of her art.  I think it's to do with her own reluctance to publicise her art. But I think it's also to do with the fact that she was part of a circle which included artists who were very successful, and they eclipsed her. And in particular in the 80s when their biographies were written, they describe the Isabel that we've known until recently, which is an Isabel who is a subject for their protagonists, rather than Isabel the artist.

Isabel was part of the major developments of the art of her time, an intrinsic part of them. And we can't really appreciate 20^th^ century art of her circle without putting her back into the picture. She's kind of like a missing link of 20^th^ century art. Through looking at the art of her contemporaries - such as Giacometti, Picasso, Bacon through her work, through her eyes, I understand so much more about them. I think she was also incredibly courageous in defying the expectations of her class, of her gender, insisting on working as an artist, identifying herself as an artist. Her passports always identify herself as an artist. Her whole life, against expectations.

British Museum Director Hartwig Fischer reflects on the story and inspiration behind Sir Richard Westmacott’s pediment sculptures.

Richard Westmacott’s Pediment Sculptures for the British Museum

The entrance of the whole façade of the British Museum is very imposing. It's one of the most important buildings of the Greek Revival, a style that came into being after the rediscovery of Greek architecture from the middle of the 18^th^ century. And Smirke's British Museum is one of the most important examples of that new rather severe and imposing style which was favoured for public buildings. And that set the example for museum buildings for a long time to come. So, when you approach the British Museum, you have this beautiful façade with the colonnade stretching across the front of the museum, and that is crowned by the pediment.

Originally, in the first plans which had been drawn up by Robert Smirke, no sculpture was to be found in the pediment. And it's only after Robert Smirke had retired and his younger brother, Sydney Smirke, had taken over, that you would find a new approach and suddenly there would be the direct commission to Richard Westmacott, the leading sculptor of his day, to execute these sculptures. And Westmacott had for decades been very close to the British Museum. He had worked with Smirke on questions of display, the distribution of works of sculptures in the galleries of the museum. And being an artist, he had a certain take on how the works should be displayed. And he was very directly involved in all the debates around these questions that in the end would set the course for the future development of the museum.

Richard Westmacott was born in 1775 and died in 1856. He studied with his father in London before going to Rome in 1793 to work under the classicist sculptor Antonio Canova. While in Italy, Westmacott devoted much of his time to the study of classical sculpture which would mark much of his subsequent work. On returning to England in 1797, he set up his own studio and soon counted among the most successful artists of Great Britain.

During his lifetime Westmacott executed a number of important monuments, among them the Achilles of the Duke of Wellington Monument in Hyde Park, the Duke of York on top of the Duke of York Column, George Canning in Parliament Square. Nearer to the British Museum are his statues of the agriculturalist and developer Francis Russell, 5th Duke of Bedford in Russell Square, and of James Charles Fox in Bloomsbury Square. The pediment sculptures for the British Museum were to be the last and crowning achievement of his career.

Westmacott was a very well organised artist. He had a great workshop, and he conceived the pediment sculptures in 1848 and they were installed in 1852. That is very fast. So, he had a team of sculptors working with him, for him, to execute these figures. They're made of Portland stone, the same stone that was used on the building. And they really caused quite a stir. People were intrigued, impressed by what he had achieved. He used a special concept developed by the architect and archaeologist Charles Cockerell a few decades earlier, suggesting that for pediment sculptures one should use one narrative that takes you from one side all the way across to the other side. So, not something which works from the centre, or that places personifications, allegories statically, one next to the other, but to develop a narrative. And that's what Westmacott did.

And there's a striking feature that perhaps we don't really understand nowadays. When he came up with this idea, he related back to the great Greek examples of not having sculpture carved in relief, but of having figures carved in the round, which would be placed in that quite challenging format of the pediment triangle. So, if you stand in front of the museum and you look up, you realise that these are figures in the round that have a great presence. Some arms, feet, even protrude beyond the frame of the pediment to make them even more present and more alive. And what is striking is the way he used the format of the pediment to give additional meaning and expression to what we observe.

Well, the drawing is highly interesting. It's a sculptor's drawing. A sculptor always looks at the distribution of masses, three dimensions, bodies, plasticity -- and that's what you find in this drawing, in this awkward format of a triangle which is always difficult to work in. And it's a pretty accurate depiction of what we see today realised in sculpture on the south facade of the British Museum. And Westmacott, wants to tell us about *The Progress of Civilisation*. For him that was obviously very important, to be able to show that humankind has gone through many iterations of development, leading up to where? Well, obviously leading up to his own time, European Western civilisation, which for him was the apogee of historical development. So, what we see on the façade is one take from the middle of the 19^th^ century, and one expression of that idea of the progress of humankind from ignorance to knowledge and understanding and being linked to the world.

On the left humankind is being lured out of forgetfulness, out of its primitive state, if you like, by the Angel of Faith. You almost have the impression that the triangle there, the angle pushes that figure out of the stone, out of the rocks. Then we see humankind evolving, growing into hunters, farmers, herders, tillers, working the fields, taking care of livestock. Still, they seem to feel the weight of their existence, and they have to bend slightly under the diagonal upper beam of the pediment. Whereas the first seated figures that follow, after the caesura of the Doric column, are much at ease. So, something happens there, and Westmacott uses the format to make you feel that suddenly you've reached a different state, and we move into personifications of the arts. There's Architecture, there is Sculpture, and there is Painting. And with that we arrive at the centre, where we have enough space for there to be a tall figure standing upright and she is Astronomy, representing knowledge and the understanding of the way the world is constructed.

So, it's a break, in a way, knowledge comes into play, Science, and next to her you have Mathematics. So, at the centre you have those two figures that show humankind in full possession of their faculties, and then in parallel, in symmetry to the three personifications on the left, on the right you find Drama, you find Poetry and Music. Most of these personifications are female and relate to the Muses. And finally, you have a man, sitting suave, relaxed in nature, surrounded by animals. And you may notice that all these creatures are non-European animals, making reference to the reach of Great Britain at that time, to empire. And they are like an echo to the first animals you see on the left, a crocodile, and a bear. And you can see how Westmacott tried to use that sharp angle at the edges of the pediment, to fill it with objects, animals, and even human beings, that obviously cannot stand upright, and he uses that, if you like, to give momentum to the story that he tells.

There are several fascinating features to be found in this drawing and of course in the sculptures. For instance, you see here the upper part of a column which is a direct quote from the Parthenon, an object you would find in the British Museum, as you would find the lamp the angel holds to lure humankind into existence, that lamp was also in the collection of the British Museum.

And some of the figures are obviously inspired by the Parthenon sculptures themselves. If you look at the group of these two, this is clearly inspired by a very famous group of two reclining women from the from the East pediment, which, when complete, told the story of the birth of Athena. Westmacott inversed the direction of the figures for his pediment. But it's very clear that through these sculptures he makes reference to what you would find inside the museum. He also makes reference to the purpose of the museum, which is to say, assemble objects to create knowledge. So, the sculptures together with the architecture give you a very strong message. This is a place that you enter in order to be enlightened. And that is what the Greek Revival architecture stands for too. This harks back to the most revered and most admired times in European history. So, you have, just standing in front of the museum, a very richly layered narrative.

Richard Westmacott's sculptures tell us about progress, learning, understanding, growing. His is a specific view of progress, but also of creation and civilisation, and of the relationship between the human and natural world. The challenge today is how do we read and interpret these images, rooted in one powerful and privileged European tradition, in a modern way that recognises global cultures and global humanity. Westmacott was no doubt proud of the achievements of his time, but like many contemporaries also had doubts. Perhaps today he would have worried about the effect of progress on the environment, or man's dominance over nature. Confronting old imagery like this is also an important part of how we confront our past more generally.

Westmacott's sculptures dedicate this place to civilisation, to culture. When you come into the museum, this is the experience you make. You engage with the cultures of the world, each in its own right. But you also look at how they interconnect, and how they have inspired each other. And you leave the museum enriched with a deeper knowledge and humbler in the face of the extraordinary achievements of human beings throughout history.

Why did Surrealism appeal to artists across the world?

Surrealism: Imagining A New World

What we're showing here is the ways in which Surrealism was actually an international network.

I think Surrealism is a movement in the true sense. A literary, artistic and philosophical movement that really wanted to explore the working of the mind, champion the irrational, champion the dream, the poetic, but also the revolutionary.

So, Surrealism really was a movement about the liberation of social conventions, of political oppression, but also of social norms. And that really spoke to artists all over the world.

And in Cairo, at the eve of the Second World War, a group of artists and writers came together in 1938 and wrote a manifesto called *Long Live Degenerate Art* and called their group Art and Liberty. And what they were promoting was an art that was liberated from state interference. It was an art that was as the Surrealists were exploring elsewhere in Europe, that was tapping into the unconscious, tapping into the dream, but also that was clearly against authoritarianism. That was clearly anti-fascist. And so this is how of Surrealism was taken up in Egypt. And you have works by really important artists like Ramses Younan, like Samir Rafi, but also maybe a bit less well-known female artists, but who were as important as the others, like Amy Nimr or Inji Efflatoun.

*Anatomical Corpse* by Amy Nimr is a gouache on paper, and is very soft in the way in which it looks on the surface. And what you have depicted is this very beautiful, abstracted figure in pink and fleshy tones, on a backdrop of blue. It's inspired by a poem by Georges Henein, who talks about a corpse decomposing at the bottom of the sea. So, there's something very beautiful about it, but also kind of macabre. And that's something a lot of the artists from the Art and Liberty group in Cairo were doing at the time. It was commenting on the difficulty, the social and political oppression that Egypt was in, in the 1940s, by using images of distorted bodies, of bodies in suffering, of phantasmagorical landscapes as well. And this is really what comes through in Amy Nimr's work here.

So, in Mexico, many artists converged in Mexico City in the forties, artists who were in general fleeing Europe because of the war. So, people like Leonora Carrington, Benjamin Peret, Remedios Varo, all gathered in Mexico City and then met other Mexican artists like Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, Maria Izquierdo. An International Surrealist exhibition was organised in Mexico in 1941, and all these artists came together and showed their work there. And we are here kind of focusing on a group of women artists who were all friends, and all interacted together. And some of them --- like Kati Horna, Remedios Varo --- were interested in the indigenous culture, and the indigenous past of Mexico, but also, they were interested in mysticism, in the occult, and they were putting all of this in their work.

A really important work made in Mexico that we're featuring in this exhibition is a triptych by Remedios Varo. She emigrated from Spain to Mexico during the Second World War. She was brought up in a very conventional, strict Catholic family. She went to a nun's school. And what she's depicting here in this triptych --- which she made actually at the end of her life in 1961 --- is a tale, an autobiographical tale, of a woman's emancipation. So, in the first painting of this triptych called *To the Tower*, we can see a group of students from apparently a nun school coming out of the tower, which was probably this Catholic school in which Remedios Varo was. Only one of the characters is looking towards us, and this character is probably Remedios Varo herself.  And in the next painting, what we can see is these students embroidering a world mantle. And the character that we saw before, so Remedios Varo herself, is again depicted here with a very cheeky look in her eye. And she has embroidered a small depiction of her kissing her lover, which we can see just there on the corner. So, we can see here this kind of willingness to escape and to kind of go against the the conventions. And the last part of the triptych is called *La Huída (The Flight),* fleeing with her lover. So, I think in a sense, it's also a triptych about emancipation through art. And this is probably what Remedios Varo found in Surrealism. It was a way out of that very kind of conventional and restrictive world in which she grew up.

Ted Jones for me is one of the fantastic surprises or discoveries working on this exhibition. He was an African American an artist. He was a visual artist, but also a poet, a musician, a performer. So, his work really takes a lot of different aspects. And for Ted Jones, Surrealism and Black Power or the Civil Rights movement were really linked together. He really kind of agreed and aligned with the idea of Surrealism as a political liberatory movement.

And a really amazing work that we're showing here is a very long, 10m long, paper work that looks like a very long accordion, that he made with more than 130 other artists traveling around the world over about 30 years. And this is a really very surrealist work. It's a collective work which the Surrealists called *Exquisite Corpse*, which consisted in bringing together drawings by different artists without them knowing what was made before. And so, it's really kind of exploring chance, and chance encounters in creativity, and coming together to make art.

I think the reason why Surrealism was taken on around the world, the reason why he was so relevant for so many different contexts, was because it was a movement about personal, social and political, liberation. And this is exactly why it is still so relevant today. So, so many of the causes these artists were talking about or creating about --- being against authoritarianism, working towards urgent causes and supporting urgent causes of the time ---which are still the same today, like anti-racism movement, like equality movements. And these are kind of the two tenets of Surrealism, I would say: revolutionary politics and the exploration of the unconscious, the exploration of the irrational.

An intimate 65-minute portrait of the artist Liz Finch by filmmaker Nichola Bruce.

The Romance of Bricks

A history and personal reflection of the stained glass Great East Window of York Minster.

The Great East Window: Brian Clarke

[00:06] Well I was born not very far from here, in Lancashire. [00:13] Every now and again from primary school we would have daytrips to local historical centres, and the most memorable occasion that sticks in my mind, indelibly, because it had such a profound impact on my young life was the daytrip we made to York, and in particular to York Minster.

[00:39] And to a child of that age, entering a Gothic edifice of this scale and this magnificence has a very considerable impact. It certainly had on me. [00:59] And as we made our way from the west end of the Minster, there was a tremendous conflation of experiences. [01:16] A choir were rehearsing, and the sound of polyphonic choral music in a Gothic building of this scale and this immensity is mystical and directs one back in what appears to be an absolutely unbroken linear connection to a glorious, complex and majestic past.

[01:48] And as we made our way up to the east end here, we were confronted with the Great East Window. [02:11] I recall a situation in which I ceased to be aware of my friends. I even ceased to be aware of location because something beyond location replaced it. And that was the feeling of being immersed entirely in art.

[02:37] On that extraordinary and unforgettable day in the 1960s, the combination of the music and the light that was transilluminated through the window and was dancing on the masonry, I felt an unmistakeable presence. [02:59] An overwhelming engagement occurred

to me. And I won’t call it anything other than an engagement because I felt connected to something much bigger than myself. And the overwhelming feeling of all these interacting artistic elements resulted in me fainting and passing out.

[03:29] And it felt to me like I’d touched on something that was potentially revealing to me of who I was. [03:43] I grew into having a very personal relationship not just with the Minster, which is my Luxury Item on Desert Island Disks, but in particular the Great East Window.

[04:03] In 1405, the Dean and Chapter of York commissioned an artist from Coventry by the name of John Thornton to design and provide this Great East Window. Clearly, Thornton was valued sufficiently well to bring him from his hometown in Coventry to work for a period of three years and produce one of the greatest commissions of art that existed in the world at that time. Now, he was expected in his duties to harness the services of a number of craftsmen who were capable of translating your ideas faithfully into what will work in the building. You are required to source and find the raw material that you’re going to make the window with, establish workshops within the city walls of York where it can be manufactured, to make templates of precise and accurate dimensions of the over 300 panels that exist in this immense cliff-face of stained glass, and to pull together all the entrepreneurial and creative and administrative skills required to make something like this happen in an extraordinarily short period of time, three years.

[05:26] There’s a great deal written about the Great East Window. A good deal of what’s written about it relates to the iconography, to the story it’s telling. And it’s a very common story. That acts as what was called the Biblia pauperum, the ‘Poor Man’s Bible’, that in the upper section you have the Creation of Man, the Creation of the World, and in the lower section the opposite end of the story with the Apocalypse. And sitting in majestic authority above all that, right at the top of that complex tracery, sits God overlooking the event and surrounded by the celestial host of golden-haired angels.

[06:13] However, you will have noticed yourself today that no matter how encyclopaedic your knowledge might be of scripture and particularly of the Old Testament, it is impossible to read from this distance what each of them is actually saying. So it’s one of the great myths of Medieval art history that windows of this sort acted as an illustrated guide to the scriptures for an illiterate public unless they were guided through it by a preacher. And even then they would say, “Oh yeah I can make that out and I can make that out”. With a little guidance they could make out that a story was being told.

[7:02] It's no use thinking about a window like this without putting yourself in some way into the time of the people who experienced it. Now, at the end of the 14th century and the beginning of the 15th century, this window was made between 1405 and 1408, a great deal of the population lived in mud huts, so detestably dirty and smelly. If you imagine a man, a woman, a child coming from the modest, humble, really hovels, never having themselves even seen a book. There were illuminated manuscripts in circulation and many of them were in churches so there’s a possibility that some of them might have actually seen one, but not handled one. These things were of immense value and letting somebody leaf his way through an illuminated manuscript would be rather letting an unknown neighbour drive your Lamborghini. It just wouldn’t have happened. So for a moment, if you can, just picture

yourself walking in to this cathedral, coming from a life who so rarely saw colour born of artifice, colour born of man’s invention. Only saw colour in nature, coming into this. There was no doubt in his mind not only that there was a God, but the Church were his official and legal representatives on Earth, and you didn’t mess with them.

[08:40] But what that man was really aware of, for he didn’t have jewels, he didn’t have TV, he was aware about the most splendid concentration of colour and the intensity of jewel-like, gem-intense hues that he had ever seen in his life. And those colours not born out of a natural cycle of events like the dawning and the setting of the sun, they were born out of man’s artifice. And the process was alchemical, because how could man turn the melted sand and a few minerals into rubies and sapphires and diamonds and glowing, refracting colours that when combined together could tell the story of the creation of the world.

[09:51] What you had here was a living, throbbing expression that there was a God, and that you were in the presence of that majesty in a building that was intended to be an analogue of Paradise.

[10:22] But how do you make a story so complex as the Creation and the Apocalypse not only coherent and legible in terms of narrative but how do you make that work in terms of it being architectonically appropriate to one of the greatest and most imposing Gothic buildings in Europe? How do you make it fit? How can you make it grow as if it’s a natural development out of the stonework into the building itself?

[11:00] You’ll notice in the design of the Great East Window, from the tracery down to the transom where the Creation moves into the Apocalypse, there are so many individual stories told. But looking at these windows, he only concession or gesture towards the structure of the stone work are the lines that follow each panel around. At the top line of light, you’ll see that the architectural canopies that you see all over the Minster protecting sculptural forms beneath them that frames each picture into an individual moment. Not unlike the Books of Hours or indeed the illuminated manuscripts of the day with which he must have been intimately acquainted. He achieved what I believe to be the closest experience that stained glass from the 12th century to the 16th century achieved in its relationship to contemporary cinematography. All you have to do is put the sprockets down the side and you’d be able to read it in that way.

[12:32] The people who come into this Minster every day and see this window, you can see reflected in their faces a sense of awe and humility that can only be occasioned by great art. It’s the artistic impact of the window and how that affected people then and people now. So the Cathedral, the window and certainly the art of John Thornton represent no only one of the most virtuoso compositions of the Medieval mind expressing Medieval fears and ecstatic ambitions, but it also represents the most extraordinary balance between building and art that has acted as a bridge for us to cross from mundanity into the sublime for 600 years plus. Not bad! [13:40]

Charles Jencks’ Cosmic House is the architectural historian’s “built manifesto of Postmodernism”.

Inside Cosmic House: A Postmodern Icon

Postmodernism created an explosion of intriguing, ironic, kitschy, occasionally terrible buildings. But it was a moment from which you might argue that architecture never really recovered. We’re still living in a Postmodern moment. 

Charles Jencks famously suggested that Modernism died on the 15th July at 3:32 p.m. with the dynamiting of the Pruitt-Igoe building in St. Louis, Missouri. It’s an image that’s become indelible in the mythology of the end of Modernism. 

Jencks was an architectural historian, a designer, a landscape artist and the author of a number of books, including The Language of Post-Modern Architecture in 1977. It was a book which defined a new moment and marked the end of Modernism. 

Jencks thought architecture had become denuded of any kind of symbolic programme, and that meant people couldn’t relate to it. They couldn’t find any meaning in it; they couldn’t find any pleasure in it. He believed that late Modernism, the architecture of the 1960s and ‘70s, had become monolithic, and a little bit dumb with a lack of message and meaning. 

Postmodernism is everything that happens after Modernism. Suddenly the whole of the past is opened up as a mine of references. It allowed a complete break from Modernism with its very minimal language, its stripped-down aesthetic. Suddenly architects and designers were able to create a kind of magpie culture, picking bits from what they liked in the past. And the freedom that it led to created an explosion of intriguing, ironic, kitschy, occasionally terrible buildings. 

The Cosmic House was Charles Jencks’ built manifesto of Postmodernism. He designed it with his wife, Maggie, in 1978. Maggie was a garden designer and historian and was very influential in the ideas and the execution of the house. It’s in this neighbourhood of 1840s 1850s villas in Holland Park, which is a kind of genteel, originally bohemian, now rather wealthy neighbourhood in West London. There are signs that this is not an everyday house. You can see its side extension with its wavy roof, which was designed originally to evoke a tent but also to avoid the boughs of a tree which was overhanging the house. And you can see the front door, which is a little curious with its proportions based on the human body. 

Jencks believed that the great architectures of the past a kind of coherent world view embodied in their fabric. For him at that time it was our relationship to the cosmos, something the ancients had indulged in, but had been lost in Modern architecture. So the Cosmic House is based around the solar system with the stairs at its heart. This represents the spiralling, orbiting sun, the moon and the Earth, a kind of dance between the planets. And on top of that, the architectures of the past. So there are echoes and shadows everywhere of fragments of architecture. 

Double-coding as an idea is absolutely central to how Charles Jencks saw Postmodernism. But what is double-coding? It’s a notion that architecture can operate on two levels. On one level it’s just about the way something looks. On another level it might be layers of irony, of kitsch, of references to historic projects and buildings, glimpses of things from the past. So, the way you see it here, the references to historic architecture all around me are flattened out and made cartoonish. But if you delve into the symbols, the meaning, the iconography, you can see it’s quite a serious exploration of the way the world works. The way architecture is developed, the structural system, and so on. But you can also enjoy it as a 2-D, cartoonish, surface. That’s the double-coding. 

In this room, Jencks introduces the idea that people’s houses reflect their lifestyles, the way they want to live. Here in the library, he traces the history of architecture through the books, and reflects that into the bookshelves. You have the architecture of late Modernism with grids all around, the New York skyscrapers with pointy spires and elaborate crowns. You could see it as an amphitheatre of books, and the books form an audience lining up to hear what we have to say. There’s a kind of irony in that. He said he was a critic who architects rather than an architect who critiques. Text is always at the heart of what he does. 

Jencks suggested that every architect should have their own motif. Every self-respecting designer should have a kind of aesthetic device which they could apply to their works. For him, it was the Jencksiana which was this particular window shape. It’s a sort of domed top with a squarer base. Sometimes it looks like a mushroom, sometimes like a face, sometimes its squished into a sort of parasol shape. But it’s always recognisably this sort of modular window form. It’s a little bit like the Palladian window which appears in a lot of English country houses, and Venetian villas from the 16th and 17th century which was a sort of arched window with two rectangular side lights. So in a way you might suggest it a reference to Classical architecture and history, and he used it everywhere in his furniture, in his doors, even in his landscapes. 

Charles Jencks was very keen to bring his friends in to help design aspects of the house. And those friends were architects and designers who were at the forefront of Postmodernism. So the fireplaces were designed by Michael Graves, an American architect and friend of theirs. The jacuzzi was designed by Piers Gough who was a young leading proponent of British Postmodernism. Eduardo Paolozzi, who was another close friend and designed the mosaic at the bottom of the staircase, and Paolozzi appears again in a bust downstairs sculpted by Celia Scott, who was another friend. So all these voices were brought into the house. It’s Charles’ vision, but it’s a vision based on a wider view of Postmodernism and it’s tolerant enough to be able to accommodate other voices and become richer because of that. 

And how did Postmodernism end? Well you might argue that Terry Farrell, who became one of the great proponents of British Postmodernism and designed the famous TV-am building in Camden with its eggcups on the parapets ended up designing a building for the intelligence services on the riverside at Vauxhall. It’s a building which was famously blown-up in the James Bond movies, and if you wanted an example of where Postmodernism lost its sense of irony, well there it is. 

The house was listed in 2018 at Grade I which is the highest possible level of protection. And it illustrates in a way how the house is the most complete example of Postmodernism arguably surviving in Britain. And that reflects a revival of interest in Postmodernism. Something that we’ve seen in architecture as well where younger architects have picked up on the possibilities of Postmodernism, the kind of freedom it offers to pick and choose from the past and to design with an intent of meaning.        


Damien Hirst’s ‘Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable’ reveals the fascinating story of the discovery and excavation of an ancient shipwreck.