Tag: Tate Modern

Tate Modern: Georgia O’Keeffe Exhibition

TUESDAY, OCT. 4

Six years ago I first visited Tate Modern. I was wowed by its ingenuity, a derelict power plant on the south bank of the River Thames converted into a modern art gallery. I didn’t hesitate to revisit this time around.

The Tate Modern was designed by the Swedish architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, the 2001 winner of the Pritzker Prize, the ‘Nobel Prize’ of architecture.  Their concept of maintaining the industrial motif and juxtaposing it with the artistic is a marvellous idea.  Furthermore, they have turned the massive, hollow industrial space in the centre into a welcoming people space, the Turbine Hall. When I got there on an overcast Tuesday morning, I saw people, many are families with children and babies, lay on the massive floor space, yes, actually lying down, to view the mobile, mixed media installation from the ground.

How much more ‘grassroot’ can you get? The symbolism is ingenious as the people space breaks down the barrier of ‘high art’ and ‘public art’. In another area, several large helium-filled fish ‘balloons’ floating in mid-air, kids and adults playing with them. Interactive art, like an invisible sign saying, ‘Please do touch the art objects.’

While most of the collections were free and photography was allowed, I was excited to learn their current event was a Georgia O’Keeffe exhibition, paid admission and no photography. Interesting to note that there’s no O’Keeffe works in UK public collections, thus making this exhibition all the more rare and valuable.

Before I entered the exhibition room, I only had one image in my mind: flowers. Georgia O’Keeffe was a painter of flowers, wasn’t she? And with 100 pieces of O’Keeffe’s works on exhibit, lots of flowers. How wrong I was.

Certainly, the cover of this beautifully designed accordion pamphlet uses the iconic O’Keeffe subject of flowers, but I soon found that she was a highly versatile artist, and cerebral in style and subject matter. No photos were allowed in there so I had to take a picture of the pamphlet for you to visualize. For the rest of the post, I’m afraid I’ll have to make do with my clumsy written words to describe my experience with the magnificent visuals.

 

georgia-okeeffe-exhibition

Here’s a synopsis of the exhibition in a sequence of rooms following the life of O’Keeffe as an artist. And thanks to this compact, informative pamphlet, I’m still learning even after I’ve come home.

1. The Early Years – abstractions in charcoal, made while she was an art teacher in Virginia and Texas. There are colourful watercolours and vivid oil paintings inspired by the landscapes of both States. My fave has to be the Red and Orange Streak, 1919. So here I see Georgia O’Keeffe, the emerging abstract painter.

2. Moved to New York in 1918 and produced more abstraction while exploring other artistic possibilities such as chromesthesia, where musical tones elicit particular colours, “the idea that music can be translated into something for the eye”. This is also the period when she painted more sensory content, and for some, eroticism is evoked. I like this quote: “When people read erotic symbols into my paintings, they’re really talking about their own affairs.”

3. O’Keeffe, Stieglitz and their Circle. As muse, collaborator, and finally spouse of photographer Alfred Stieglitz, O’Keeffe is presented in photography in this section. I find O’Keeffe’s personal portraits particularly revealing; Stieglitz’s portraits of her all exude a special boldness and independence. Here we see her beginning fondness of clouds, depicted in A Celebration 1924, the year they married. Clouds evolving into petals later?

4. O’Keeffe the New Yorker. I never knew. Here I see her stylistic depiction of the urban cityscape of NYC. O’Keeffe and Stieglitz lived on the 30th floor of a skyscraper, a convenient vantage point to paint tall buildings. “… I think that’s just what the artist of today needs for stimulus.” After the 1929 Wall Street crash, however, she moved out of NYC. The vision of the urban promise dismantled with the market crash.

5. Upstate, New York, Maine, and Canada. Lake George, trees, clouds, apples and leaves. For a change, from metropolitan New York to Nature.

6. Finally, we begin to see her flower paintings. They are huge. The photo of the pamphlet cover above, Jimson Weed/ White Flower 1, 1932, is 48″ x 40″. BTW, I just checked online, that painting is the world’s most expensive painting by a woman. Walmart heiress Alice B. Walton bought it for $44.4 million in 2014. I should have looked at it a while longer. But from the short stop when I stood in front of it, I could see the gradual change of light and shadow on the petals, meticulously painted. Most impressive was the sheer size of it.

Why paint a tiny flower this big? Here’s O’Keeffe’s answer:

“Nobody sees a flower, it’s so small… I’ll paint it big and they will be surprised into taking time to look at it… I will make even busy New Yorkers take time to see what I see of flowers…”

7. New Mexico: Taos and Alcalde. Paintings of the vast, horizontal expanse of the land in contrast to the vertical, tall skyscrapers of NYC, earth-built dwellings, crosses, Native American and Spanish colonial features. In Taos O’Keeffe met Ansel Adams and other artists.

8. O’Keeffe found the white bones and animal skulls left on the barren Southwestern desert a worthy subject for her paintings. A sharp, harsh contrast with the soft petals of flowers, but the light and shadow gradients convey the same fondness from the artist’s eyes.

9. Red earth, pink cliff of the landscape in the Southwestern expanse. O’Keeffe discovered Ghost Ranch, a tourist attraction and later bought her first home there. During the 1930’s to the 40’s, she delved into the area with immense passion, especially the flat-top mountains or mesa.

10. White Place and Black Place, two locales she continued to stylize in her painting. From the realism of the earthy desert expanse shifted to more stylized contrast of white and black.

11. The artist continued her focus on bones, in particular, the holes in them; when she lifted them up towards the sky, the blue piercing out from these holes. The bones too are symbols of death and destruction, a parallel of WWII and the death of Stieglitz in 1946.

12. The Southwest and Native American influences on her subjects while living in New Mexico during the 1930’s and 40’s.

13. Lastly, from landscapes to skyscapes. I was confronted with another huge painting, inspired from her airplane travels during the 50’s and 60’s: Sky Above the Clouds III, 1963. Since I couldn’t take any pictures at the exhibition, I just have to do this. Here, take a look at this photo of the pamphlet, section 13 on the right. The painting is on there. Clouds like ice floes against a distant, pinkish sky.

sky-above-the-clouds

 

Definitely more than just flowers.

 

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Related Posts on Ripple Effects:

 Tate Modern and Billy Elliot

Alex Colville and the Movies 

Art Gallery of Ontario

Beauty and Terror

 

Tate Modern and Billy Elliot

Solution to Arti’s Cryptic Challenge #1:  London… don’t mind the gap.

When time is short, you must select and forego.  The Tate Modern has long been on my ‘must-see’ list yet unfulfilled.  So for the short stay I had in London, I chose this one above all else.  Five years ago, my then 15 year-0ld son went to visit and wrote in his email back to me: ‘Tate Modern is brilliant.’  This time I got to see it first hand.

If a museum of modern art can wow a teenager, there must be something in there that links the gap.  And was I disappointed?  Yes and no.  No because it was brilliant indeed, both the conceptual design, architecture and the exhibits.  And yes, because I was so preoccupied with the directions getting there from our hotel that I forgot my camera.  No excuse for that, I know.  And what makes it worse, the museum allows photography even of its exhibits.  In my utter disappointment, my now 20 year-old said to me calmly, ‘you just have to make do.’  That I did with my iPhone.

The Tate Modern was converted into a modern art museum from an obsolete power plant on the south bank of the River Thames.  The idea itself is brilliant. What better use of a derelict power station along the beautiful Thames?  Used to be a gloomy stretch of land by the river bank, now the whole area, the Southbank, is revitalized and is home to many London attractions, including the Shakespeare Globe Theatre, the Millennium Bridge, The London Eye, theatres and green, open space.

And thanks to Wikipedia Commons, I found the following photos.  The Tate Modern viewed from the Millennium Bridge.

The Tate Modern was designed by the Swedish architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, the 2001 winner of the Pritzker Prize, the ‘Nobel Prize’ of architecture.  Their concept of maintaining the industrial motif and juxtaposing it with the artistic is ingenious.  Furthermore, they have turned the massive industrial space into a people space.  The main entryway is named The Turbine Hall, allowing people to fill the massive vacuum that was once associated with a power plant. The huge area also makes display of larger pieces of exhibits possible.  Now they are doing it again, yet another redesigning, an even more amazing remodelling and addition, all for the 2012 Olympics Summer Games in London.

Two streams of thoughts constantly ran through my mind during this trip.  One was the dichotomy of ‘High Art’ and ‘Public Art’, ‘high culture’ and ‘popular culture’.  Does such a rift still exist?  All the galleries and museums I visited were all flooded with people.  It was hard to take a picture without any heads caught in the frame.  So every photo I took was immediate.  I had to wait for people to move away and snap the moment quickly.  In the Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern, I saw families with young children, many pushing baby carriages, kids doing cartwheels on the huge floor space.

Is it still ‘high art’ if the exhibits are free to the public, a destination for family outing?  As a rock concert ticket can cost hundreds of dollars… now does that re-define the ‘high’ in culture?  Is it still ‘high art’ if people can get in free, as with the Tate Modern collection, enjoy what they see, gasp at the possibilities, or be bewildered by a notion conveyed through an artwork?  Do we need to ‘understand’ art in order to enjoy it?  Maybe we should just allow the object of art to speak for itself, and thereby, linking the gaps between us.

Here are a few exhibits I took with my iPhone.  Please do click on the link of each piece to see the good photos at the Tate Modern website and an explanation.  I was gratified to see works from some of my favourite artists in their original.

Metamorphosis of Narcissus by Salvadore Dali, the work that changed Freud’s original negative view of Surrealist art.  In the painting, you’re supposed to see Narcissus on a pedestal in the background, then kneeling by the fatal pond, and lastly transformed into a flower… and what a self-absorbed egghead he was:

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Man with a Newspaper (1928) by René Magritte (1898-1967), under the section ‘Poetry and Dream’.  These are supposedly four different perspectives … mmm … , but hey, this is Magritte speaking.  His dead pan surrealist style is regarded as a subtle form of social critique.

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And here are a few other interesting works. Polish artist Magdalena Abakanowicz’s ‘Anti-form’ sculpture which she created during the 1960’s Soviet-occupation of Warsaw, another example of the freeing effect of art and the social statement they subtly convey:



Untitled sculpture with wood and wool by Jannis Kounellis, homage to Jackson Pollock’s drip painting:

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I like this work of open books, but don’t remember the artist or the name of it.  With the fast emergence of eBooks, this work could soon become an antique artifact:

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The second event I chose was to see ‘Billy Elliot The Musical’.  I liked the movie a lot, appreciating the depth of conflicts which touch on the same dichotomy: ‘High Culture’ and ‘Mass Culture’, and the seeming incompatibility of art and life.  A miner’s son in a blue collar neighbourhood is attracted to the beauty of the ballet, and the freeing energy of dance.

The conflict persists starkly as the political backdrop of the miners’ strike turns ugly in the 1984-85 years. While their livelihood is at stake, and as the miners determine to pose the fiercest strike action against the Thatcher government, where does ballet come in?  It sounds trivial and even surreal to think of ballet compared to the major battles raging in the country. But this is also a conflict between the individual and the masses, the individual and, yes, even the family.

Billy’s new-found love and immense talent ultimately melt the heart of his macho father and older brother, and soon those in the mining community.  He is given the chance to audition for the National Ballet School, with the local miners raising funds to support his cause.


The movie allows more in-depth exploration of internal conflicts while as a musical, the focus has shifted to the dance performance, the music, and for crowd appeal, some Monty Python style romp com, mellow-dramatic scenes, and many exaggerated, stereotypical expressions and language choices. I’m afraid it looks like a contrived way to bring the ‘high’ down to the ‘common’ level.  Elton John’s music while lively, seems lacking in variety and depth compared to his other works and those in the Andrew Lloyld Webber tradition.

Performed on the London stage since 2005 and still going strong, ‘Billy Elliot the Musical’ is directed by Stephen Daldry, lyrics and book by Lee Hall.  It has won both the Lawrence Olivier Awards in England and the Tony Awards in the US.  It went on Broadway in 2008, and on the main stages in several other countries.  The night I went the role Billy Elliot was performed by 12 year-0ld Rhys Yeomans, and he was marvellous, both as actor and dancer.  He practically carried the whole show on his young shoulders, singing, acting, and dancing in superb style, energy, and versatility.  The role of Michael, Billy’s friend, was done animatedly by another 12-year-old, Reece Barrett. The boys’ performance were the main attractions for me.

In the middle of the show however, the performance was interrupted by a technical difficulty.  It was no minor glitch.  We had to wait in our seat for around 15 minutes before performance resumed.  Now that had discounted some of my enjoyment.  And when the show started again, a scene was skipped.  But overall, it was quite an experience at the Victoria Theatre in London.  A good choice I still think considering the limited time I had in London.