Picasso – Page 7 – { feuilleton }

Sex at the Barbican

Still from Blowjob by Andy Warhol (1963).

Seduced: Art and Sex from Antiquity to Now opens today at the Barbican Art Gallery, London, and runs until 27 January 2008.

Seduced explores the representation of sex in art through the ages. Featuring over 300 works spanning 2000 years, it brings together Roman sculptures, Indian manuscripts, Japanese prints, Chinese watercolours, Renaissance and Baroque paintings and 19th century photography with modern and contemporary art.

Seduced presents the work of around 70 artists including Nobuyoshi Araki, Francis Bacon, Jeff Koons, Robert Mapplethorpe, Pablo Picasso, Rembrandt van Rijn and Andy Warhol among others. Stimulating the mind and the senses, provocative and compelling, Seduced provides the historical and cultural framework to explore the boundaries of acceptability in art. Seduced is curated by Marina Wallace, Martin Kemp and Joanne Bernstein.

• Barbican gallery selection
• Guardian gallery selection

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Male Gaze

Penguin Labyrinths and the Thief’s Journal

Detail from La Havane by René Portocarrero; photo by C. Marker.

This week’s book finds are a pair of titles I hadn’t come across before in these particular editions, another haul from the vast continent that is the Penguin Books back catalogue. Labyrinths I’ve had for years in a later edition (see below) but the cover of this one seems more suited to Borges (as much as he can be illustrated) than the somewhat bland Surrealism of illustrator Peter Goodfellow. René Portocarrero (1912–1985) was a Cuban painter with a post-Picasso style who specialised in hallucinogenic profiles like the one here. And it’s a guess but I’d bet the “C. Marker” who photographed the painting is French filmmaker Chris Marker (who I compared to Borges last year), director of La Jetée and Sans Soleil. Marker worked as a photo-journalist for many years and made a documentary entitled ¡Cuba Sí! in 1961.

Continue reading “Penguin Labyrinths and the Thief’s Journal”

Finnegan begin again

I posted an old James Joyce portrait sketch for Bloomsday a couple of days ago and today decided to rework it as a vector graphic. This is the result. I was producing a lot of sketches like this while working on Reverbstorm a decade ago, most of them post-Picasso/Bauhaus/De Stijl variations. Joyce is particularly easy to render in a semi-abstract form on account of his distinctive features and apparel: hat, glasses, nose, moustache and bow tie. The Reverbstorm series is still in the process of being reworked as a single volume so this will probably find a home there.

My pastiches

Lord Horror: Reverbstorm #3 (1992).

Following from the post about an art forgery exhibition (and Eddie Campbell discussing his American Gothic cover for Bacchus), I thought I’d post some of my own forgeries, or pastiches as we call them when no deception is intended.

Reverbstorm was the Lord Horror comic series I was creating with David Britton for Savoy in the 1990s. The Modernist techniques of collage (as in the work of Picasso and others) and quotation (as in TS Eliot’s The Waste Land) became themes in themselves as the series developed, so it seemed natural to imitate the styles of various artists as we went along. Pastiche is also a chance to flagrantly show off, of course, and I can’t deny that this was also one of my impulses here.

Issue #3 of Reverbstorm had marauding apes as its theme, from the Rue Morgue to Tarzan and King Kong, so I had the idea of doing an ape cover in the style of the celebrated paintings by Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1527–1593) which make human heads out of fruit, flowers or animals. Easy enough to have the idea but making it work took a lot of effort and required careful sketching beforehand, something I rarely do. The painting was gouache on board, a medium I’d been using for years and this was about the last gouache work I did before switching to acrylics.

Continue reading “My pastiches”

The Art of Deception

Harlequin Disturbs Sleeping Fish by John Myatt
in the style of Joan Miró (no date).

Fakes and Forgeries: The Art of Deception is an exhibition at the Bruce Museum, Connecticut, running from May 12th–September 9th 2007.

For its major spring/summer exhibition, the Bruce Museum explores a subject that is exceptionally topical in today’s art world. Fakes and Forgeries: The Art of Deception presents 60 examples of Western paintings, works on paper, sculpture and decorative arts that have been recognized as imposters, including examples of the rarest and most famous deceptive works.

Fakes and Forgeries: The Art of Deception reveals the strategies and techniques of the world’s most successful forgers and exposes the extraordinary lengths to which they went to produce authentic-looking artworks. It also addresses techniques used to expose these deceptions, including X-ray fluorescence, pigment analysis, spectrography, dendrochronology, and carbon dating.

The exhibition presents Western painting and sculpture that has been faked from all periods of art, starting with fakes from antiquity and moving chronologically through the Middle Ages, Renaissance and Baroque eras, exposing forgeries ranging from medieval sculpture and quattrocento gold backs to the rare art of Vermeer.

Christ and His Disciples at Emmaus by Han van Meegeren
in the style of Jan Vermeer (1937).

What exactly is a fake or a forgery? Perhaps the biggest problem in this field is the complexity of determining what constitutes an authentic work versus a vast array of faked, forged, copied, attributed, misattributed and replicated work. A fake is a work that replicates an existing work of art; it may be a deliberate deception or simply not the real thing. A forgery is a work that mimics the style of an artist or replicates his signature in a deliberate attempt to deceive.

Paintings in this exhibition that have fake signatures include forgeries of Edouard Manet, Juan Gris, and Giorgio de Chiricio; the etching Le Bain purportedly by Picasso also bears a forged signature. One of the show’s highlights is Han van Meegeren’s legendary forgery, Christ and His Disciples at Emmaus, in the style of Johannes Vermeer, which is arguably the most famous forgery in the world.

Bruce Museum
One Museum Drive
Greenwich
CT 06830
USA