‘RADICAL HARMONY: HELENE KROLLER-MULLER’S NEO-IMPRESSIONISTS’

National Gallery, London

Don’t Diss The Dots!

1886 proved something of a pivotal year for Modernism, witnessing the final Impressionist exhibition and the first showing of the Neo-Impressionists. Who brought in a whole new look, thanks to their originator Georges Seurat.

Impressionism had taken up the then-novel practice of mixing paint ‘wet’ on canvas, giving it an immediate and ‘unfinished’ look. While Seurat precisely painted adjacent dots of contrary colours, which would mix together in the eye, creating a shimmering effect. You can see shows enlargements which demonstrate the workings here. This came to be called Pointilism by critics, though he used Divisionism. (He also suggested Chromoluminarism. For some reason that didn’t catch on.) See for example his ’Port-En-Bessin, a Sunday’ (1888, below.)

And Divisionism proved divisive, in more than name. If it was pilloried by contemporary critics, those were much the some fools who’d done the same to Impressionism. Perhaps more significantly Monet and Renoir refused to exhibit with Seurat. (Though Pissarro not only took up the new look, he helped organise that 1886 show.)

And modern critics, who of course now fawn over Impressionism, seem similarly keen to diss the dots. They slagged the show, criticising not just the participants but the style itself. Perhaps best summed up by the Telegraph headline ’The National Gallery Succumbs to the Plague of Pointilism’. 

With crowds un-following in their wake, attendance was significantly under either the Impressionist shows held here or the National’s recent Van Gogh blockbuster, apparently their most successful show ever. Despite both being part of the same continuum.

Let’s take each group in turn.

Contemporary critics called it “the death of painting”. And, in fairness, you can see what they’re saying. The effect is entirely different to Impressionism. Compositions are not casual-seeming but harmonious, forms not impressionistic but clear-cut, bold in outline even as they flicker in-between those lines. Impressionism made everything seem in constant motion. Here, even things which are in motion no longer look it. Go back to the fluttering flags above. They’re not caught in flight but frozen in place, like a sculpture of a flag. Seurat’s even added a painted frame around the edge of the work, doubling down on the formalism.

Further, some see the artist’s touch as the basis of art, studying his line the way a graphologist would handwriting. Against which Divisionism can seem a near-mechanical process. The works look clean, smoothed over and ‘posterised’. (It’s also hard for us not to think of dot-matrix printing, though that came decades later.) And on the back of this ‘artist’s hand’ fixation comes the snobbery about poster design and reproductive art.

It should be said that Seurat is not represented here by any of his major works. (’Bathers at Asieres’ is in the permanent collection, but wasn’t moved for this show.) His ’Le Chahut’ (1889/90, above) is clearly intended as a centrepiece, given a room almost to itself. And this was part-inspired by concert posters.

Here the integrity of pictorial space is already starting to break down, everything becoming design elements rather than objects in themselves, to a degree that’s almost collage-like. The dancers are reduced to a mechanical line, echoed by the stem of the double bass. Things are compressed together, if this was actual pictorial space those dancers would be kicking the orchestra half the time. The audience seem to be seated behind everyone, but then who’s that leering hatted figure bottom right? Are those flower motifs attached to a wall, or floating in the air? These are all things you’d barely stop to question in a poster image.

We are of course going to ask what’s wrong with that. Colour litho posters were at this point a relatively recent phenomenon, so must have seemed fresh and exciting. Seurat’s contemporary Toulouse-Lautrec regularly moved between paintings and posters. But we should add that to ‘go poster’ to this degree is unusual for Seurat. In fact its quite possibly the only work in the whole show to do this.

Modern critics, shrewdly noticing this did not in fact turn out to be the end of painting, took another tack. Some separated Seurat from his followers, as if it was a one-man movement plus some also-rans. The main selling point for this is his early death, in 1891, at just 31. Modernism borrowed from Romanticism the lustre of the genius-artist who died young. Though if you’re thinking of taking that seriously, know its chief proponent was Jonathan Jones.

But more commonly Divisionism was portrayed as but a waystation in art history, these dot painting actually just a dash, a line linking art’s great nodes of Impressionism and Fauvism. Seen this way, its stillness is an uncanny valley which had to be descended into, in order to climb back out of and reach the next peak.

Vincent Van Gogh might seem to epitomise this. He briefly followed Divisionism, but by the time of ’The Sower’ (1886, above), those sharp dots have grown, become visible, extended into dashes and swirls. Which leads to pretty much the opposite effect. Rather than evoke stillness the work seems to deny it’s existence, pulsing throughout with life.

Monet’s guru, as much as he had one, was Eugène Boudin, who introduced him to painting en plein air. While Seurat read the scientific writings of Michel Eugene Chevreul. Monet painted quickly, trying to capture changing light conditions. Seurat made over a hundred preparatory drawings for the famous ’La Grande Jette’ (also not in show). Notably, the first thing we’re shown here is not a painting but a colour wheel. (The Wikipedia article linked to above contains a simplified version of it.) Divisionism was based not on observation of life but a theory of colour, one not especially found in the wild.

So if Monet was (in the well-known quote) “just an eye”, was Seurat just a brain?

Nobert Lynton said of him: “every aspect of his paintings was severely controlled, proclaiming their basis in thought and knowledge.” He said of himself: “Some say they see Poetry in my paintings; I see only science.” So was the whole thing dry and cerebral, a technical exercise? The Modernist movement which lived up to its formalist stereotype?

Helene Kroller-Muller, wondering where she comes into this? She had enough taste to be the only art collector to buy a Van Gogh during his life. But from there she went on to collect not Fauvism but Neo-Impressionism. And she countered that Seurat "sees the view of the harbour with its boats as the emotion of a religious-poetic disposition.”

And, kids, maybe you’re both right! A poetic disposition is not incompatible with science. In fact Impressionism had its own associations with science, including new investigations into the workings of sight, if not to the same degree.

Impressionism was a brilliant, often literally brilliant, way of doing something necessary. It had begun art again at a time someone needed to, and had done it by going back to the most basic questions - what do we actually see?, how can that be captured on a canvas? Yet imitation of life, it was a good starting-point but too slender a place to settle. Neo-Impressionism needed to move past those questions.

And everything about Impressionism as an art style stemmed from that central purpose - it evoked verisimilitude, immediacy. We should ask a similar question about Neo-Impressionism, not why wasn’t it Impressionism but what was it? Or more accurately, what was it for? Even if it wasn’t made with a purpose in mind it has to find one, or be just a style, a suit of clothes with no wearer.

The show suggests three answers to this. Let’s take each in turn.

How Radical Met Harmony

After a first room in which human figures are either absent or ancillary to the landscapes, suddenly they’re everywhere. And that’s a clue to what’s coming - in fact a pretty hefty one.

Because the show’s first answer might not have been on your Bingo card - its Anarchist Communism. Particularly bamboozling if your default notion of politically charged art is Dadaism.

We’re told “their style went hand-in-hand with radical political ideas… depicting the struggles faced by the working class, in reaction against the industrial age.” Paul Signac is quoted: “justice in society, harmony in art: same thing.” They effectively titled the show in its honour, and it dominated much of the discussion.

Georges Lemmen’s ’Factories On the Thames’ (c. 1892, above) isn’t of beaches or haystacks but… well, the title gives it away. And the change of subject matter includes a change in style. Unlike the precision of Seurat, the smoke leads the eye but also the buildings fade from view in the haze. It looks, in mood if not style, more Whistler. And this mood undermines the argument being made for it. This etherial, it may well be of factories but they’re seen as shining spires, a dreamscape not a workplace.

Jan Toorop’s ’After the Strike’ (c.1888/90, above) is more clearly political. But while Lemmen looks across to Whistler, this looks back to the Realism of Jean-Francois Millet. (The subject of a small show elsewhere in the National, which overlapped with this one.) And truth to tell those heavy-load-bearing bodies vie with the lightness of Divisionism, it would have worked better in Millet’s style.

So we have a work that’s good but not at all political, followed by one that was political but not terribly good. More happily, Maximilian Luce’s ’The Iron Foundry’ (1899, above) manages both. But again it looks elsewhere, only this time forwards - the muscularised, heroic workmen of Socialist Realism. The light of the foundry back-lights them into semi-silhouettes, foregrounded but de-individualised. Significantly, this isn’t still but dramatic The workers form shapes which frame and harness the explosive burst of the foundry, creating diagonals to left and right before central pillars. It’s a strong, affecting work. But to make its point its composition must overrule its style, its Divisionist in a formal sense only.

The show also concedes not everyone signed up for the radicalism. Luce was even arrested in 1894, in a round-up after the French President was assassinated. Toorop and Signac were definite card-carriers, but Anna Boch not. (It doesn’t mention Lemmen.) While Seurat, the great founder, had Socialist sympathies but there’s no reason to think him an Anarchist Communist. We’re told Van Rysselberghe was a key figure in spreading the new art to the Netherlands. But the show makes no mention of him having any particular political convictions, not could I find any on-line. Making the Anarchist Communism seem a little optional.

So why the stress on it? Curators always pounce on connections between art and radical politics, not because it seems so relevant but precisely because it doesn’t. With no modern mass Anarchist Communist movement to contend with, it seems equally enticing and quaint. But here, it may also be in order to counter those notions about this art being dry, clinical and soul-less. Actually, they respond, it was a call to arms!

These times certainly were politically tumultuous. For example, May Day was founded in 1890, commemorating Chicago workers murdered by the State in ’86. In France, 1892 to ’94 was known as The Era Of Attacks. 

Naturally enough, people thought that the radical new art and radical new politics must go together. In fact, they didn’t. Even if some tried to straddle the two. Despite what Signac says, radical and harmony didn’t go together like a horse and carriage. The times pressed them up against one another, a shotgun marriage. Divisionism’s true calling lay elsewhere.

Painting The Spaces Between

In something of a dimensional leap, we jump from factory floors to interiors of bourgeois life. Figures which are, in the show’s words, “presented as isolated, occupying a world in which geometry and lines of force govern their movements.” Signac’s ’The Dining Room’ (1886/7, above) not only creates an impasse-like space between the two main figures, but adds a servant as a barrier between them.

While their poses might be stiff, this effect comes mostly from the style. They’re as fixed as the furnishings, in a world that looks lifeless. Not conveyed in this thumbnail, but the effect’s compounded by the size of the work, a much greater scale than would normally be granted for such an intimate subject. There’s enough space to get lost in. It’s like the old joke that money gives you misery in comfort.

Van Rysselberghe’s ’In July, before Noon’ (1890, above) conversely is an outdoor scene under dappled sunlight. Monet painted many such scenes. Yet here there’s an unease to it. All faces are turned away, both from us and from each other, despite there being five figures. A device we’ve seen used by Walter Sickert, slightly later. There’s a large area of empty space just beyond them, framed in such a way the eye is pulled towards it.

All this may be making a virtue out of a necessity - if you painted in this way nothing could be made to move, so you evoked the stillness like you’d meant to. But two things - first, Signac’s work was painted only two years after he had embraced the new style. If it was a fix he arrived at it remarkably quickly. Besides, a virtue is a virtue.

More pertinently, this was art going with a social trend, only this time one the art was well-suited to convey. This was the Fin de Siele era, and as Wikipedia puts it “cultural hallmarks that were recognized as prominent in the 1880s and 1890s includ[ed] ennui, cynicism, pessimism, and a widespread belief that civilization leads to decadence.”

As we’ve seen, this was a time of anarchists battling authoritarians, with the body count to show it. But it was simultaneously an era of disturbed spirits, of psychic unease, of people no longer knowing each other or even themselves. Eras do not have just one nature, any more than people do.

All Went White

Neo-Impressionism, as we’ve seen, was moving beyond the task of capturing external reality. Emile Verhaeren shrewdly said Seurat’s work was composed of “tones and lines for which reality serves only as a pretext.” And this led to works where, again using the show’s words, the “world of appearances” is only a means to access the ineffable, to convey “absence within an image”. Those dots become like ellipses, what they lead to is space. There’s a kind of serene sublime.

For example Van Rysselberghe’s ’Coastal Scene’ (c.1892) is a way of framing that central area of white. The vertical sticks in the water are something of a compositional master-stroke, offsetting the whiteness without over-balancing it. We know that if we went towards it, it would retreat. It’s insubstantial, ungraspable. And this sense, of it being beyond physical space, is the point.

Johan Thorn Prikker’s ’Basse Hermale, Sun at Noon’ (1904) is not a painting but composed of undulating strokes of chalk. It’s not just minimal, there’s denser marks behind the haystacks than used for them. As with Van Rysselberge, the central area is of space.

And this is where Dualism inherently led. By minimising fidelity to the real world it banished its clutter, its messiness, its jagged corners - to create something harmonious.

It’s bizarre to think that those Van Rysselberge’s were painted two years apart. This seascape serenity is something else entirely to all that to bourgeois ennui. One sees space positively, a clearing-out which rids us of quotidian baggage, the other negatively, as separation, the gulf that widens between us.

But what lends itself to serenity as easily offers melancholy. Henry Van de Velde’s ’Twilight’ (1889, above) has a “profound melancholy”. You feel this liminal space cannot be dawn but must be dusk. Those three thick bands of colour, running the width of the painting, suggest a barrier more than an invitation. The thin trees play the same offsetting role as Van Rysselberghe’s sticks.

And melancholy may not be so far from serenity. In both, the self is being left behind. And Seurat’s ‘Suburb’ (1882/3, not in show) could be read either way up, depending on the viewer’s disposition. Dualism proved dualistic, go figure!

But What Comes After New?

Signac, there’s no doubt, strongly influence Matisse and Derain’s Fauvism, even if they ditched his dots. But the show looks further, claiming by “untethering the picture form its dependence on subject matter” it paved the way for Abstraction. Signac gave his pictures Opus numbers, suggesting an equivalence to musical composition, a practice which was later taken up by Kandinsky. This was especially true of the seascapes, of which there’s no shortage. Toorop’s are particularly semi-abstract, a series of horizontal bands of colour, such as ’Shell Gatherers On the Beach’ (1891, below).

We could, if we wished, see abstraction as the sea, a field of formless colour. We’ve got close to it here, but are still stuck on the shore, looking out. We just need to make that final leap.

But here the show’s essentially repeating a version of its own critics argument, making Neo-Impressionism into a way-station. Yeah, it was fresh for a while, then this other thing showed up which was fresher. If you reduce Modernism to an evolution line, the significant thing about each ism becomes that it led neatly to the next, like a product upgrade. And the whole system becomes hermetic, talking only to itself.

We should ask instead - what was significant about the movement in and of itself? What does a painting of the 1890s tell us about the 1890s? And how do we relate it it from here?

Which, we might hope, we’ve begun to…

Kroller-Muller’s collection is based in a museum which can be seen on-line here.

(NB This is unlikely to mean a return to regular blogging.)

‘LEONORA CARRINGTON: AVATARS + ALLIANCES’

Firstsite, Colchester

“The Surrealists explored liminal spaces between consciousness and dreaming, including mental illness. In contrast, Leonora experienced these first hand.” 

Leonora Carrington’s life was, in one sense, a succession of escapes. She escaped two prestigious English schools by getting herself expelled. Then in ’37 she escaped a privileged yet confining life among the moneyed English by taking up with Surrealist enfant terrible Max Ernst and relocating to France. Nazi occupation and Ernst’s arrest necessitated another escape, this time to Spain. Then in ’42, she escaped a combination of sexual assault, mental illness and institutionalisation by moving to Mexico.

Yet, and despite so many of the works here being from so late in her life, it was those early English years which tended to dominate her imagery. And small wonder. “Do you think anyone escapes their childhood?” she once asked. “I don’t think we do. That kind of feeling you have in childhood of being very mysterious.” (Quoted in the recent ’British Surrealism’ show.) And of course we don’t. Childhood is when the basement of our brains are built, everything after just added on.

Her life story is something like a character from an Angela Carter novel. While her father wanted her married off to high society, her mother, nanny and grandmother read her Celtic folk tales from a young age. And, however taken she was when she discovered continental Surrealism, they remained her primary influence.

Take for example ’Green Tea’ (1942, up top.) The figure on the left is generally agreed to be Carrington herself, swaddled in some kind of strait-jacket. She’s paired with the two tethered animals, the cow hide on her swaddling echoing their animal state. While she also seems paired with the larva-like creature in the underworld beneath her feet. Beyond one tethered dog, the only points the stillness in that picture is broken is in that underworld.

Yet the focus isn’t on the swaddled figure but on the landscape. A cloistered garden of a landscape, with each tree depicted individually in an iconic fashion. Perhaps, confined long enough, she’ll turn into another tree. But the landscape still dominates. And it’s imbued with its own kind of charm. This isn’t a protest work, a rejection of green-lawned England, its a portrait of that England more than of herself. This is where she was grown.

Carrington first met Leonor Fini in ‘37. The two soon became fast friends, often painting one another. And a key feature of both their work is the delicate style, made up of small deft strokes. It’s not as bold and in-your-face as is standard for Surrealism, more diffuse, more similar to illustration. There’s definitely a feedback loop here where this led to their art being sidelined - this women’s art looks just like illustrative art and vice versa, not really proper painting you know.

One thing the show does well is to meet this square-on, displaying illustrations (including from children’s fairy books) which influenced her. (Less happily, it doesn’t always credit the artists.)

An artist it does name is Dore. Which is to the good, but it then disregards the way in which her art differs. His engravings are classical in style, foregrounding knowledge of proportion and anatomy in a bid to make the strange sights look credible. It’s like the tag line to the original ’Superman’ film - “You’ll believe a man can fly.” Whereas Carrington deadpans, more in the way of fables and folk tales. Characters within her work rarely react to the strangeness, they stay stoic, often calmly meeting our gaze. Her approach is “man flies”.

The show goes on to say “subversion and transformation were key approaches… [they] channel her rejection of the attempt at being categorised, where hybrids of animals and humans inhabit a mix of imagined, real and ritualistic worlds.” Again this channels childhood, where we don’t feel the same sense of separation from animals, can even feel like we are between the human and animal worlds.

See for example the etching ’Badger Causing Table To Fly As Medium Falls In Trance’ (1987, above). The badger and medium are not only placed the same side of the table, her ankle-length dress and its fur are made up of the same two blocks of shading - downward strokes and cross-hatching. The badger is the medium’s familiar, joined to her if not part of her self. Other works look very much like the Surrealist ‘exquisite corpse’ game of chimera creatures, one (undated) is appealingly titled ’Alien Whale Sphinx Goose’.

But the show misses one element of this. Yes, in her work the distinction between human, animal and spirit forms are slippery. But check out her lithograph ’Stag At Mourn’ (1974, above). No less than four of these figures are passing between physical form and symbols. Which surely reflects her interest in magic and alchemy. Those symbols may have meant something specific to her, or just found their way onto the plate. We’re never likely to know which, and it doesn’t matter much because the point is a broader one. Magic is the manipulation of symbols, with the intent to alter the physical world. It’s been said well enough before now how that links it to art, that the two may have at one time been interchangeable.

And her art often functions like symbols, an arrangement of elements where their combination is the thing to look out for. They’re usually discrete from one another but placed within the same pictorial space, prompting you to take them together. Take ’Night of the Eighth’ (1987, above). A highly symmetrical work, this immediately draws our attention to the place where that symmetry is broken. The silver-and-grey figure has an opposite number in purple, but that second figure has been shifted up in the composition. Its place is taken by another symbol, a loop. Or it may be the figure and symbol together make up the eight of the title. It ‘flies’ with birds, but they’re so stub-winged and chubby they could never soar like that. Suggesting that we’re seeing is some spirit form of flight.

Silver-and-grey holds its hand out in a shaping motion, and the outlined creature next to them looks the most morphing. You could say this figure represents the artist, just as you could for the medium earlier. But it’s more than that really. Reality isn’t depicted as something normally static, which a select band of magicians know the secrets to make it shift. Reality is in a continual state of flux, and we can learn how to ride the waves. As David Gascoyne, a fellow British Surrealist, put it: “the marvellous is within everyone’s reach.”

Overall this show does well on the indicia front, contextualising Carrington’s work. (See up top for an example.) Alas it does less well actually showing her work, which is sparse, not always well selected and padded out- at times with little more than ephemera. ’Green Tea’ is rather ridiculously represented by a print. (Disclaimer: it was free to get in.) Perhaps I’ll get to see a fuller show some day, maybe pairing her art with Fini’s. The title is right there, curators - ’Leonor and Leonora’!

In my more indulgent moments I like to think I’ve managed to give space to Surrealism’s more unorthodox currents, including Edward Burra, Paul Nash, Dorothea Tanning, Dora Maar, Wifredo Lam, Joseph Cornell, women and Surrealism, British Surrealism and Surrealism goes global. (Only in Surrealism would us Brits be the underdogs!) Though you can be sure there’s more out there to discover. It’s Surrealism, the only limit is your imagination.

'PHILP GUSTON’

Tate Modern, London

“Probably the only thing one can really learn is the capacity to be able to change.” 
-Philip Guston

A World To Win With Murals

Everyone knows the Guston story. It’s the one about the dissident American Abstract Expressionist, the one who went back to painting… gasp… things, to great controversy. In a style bordering on cartoony, which some also found controversial. Which included depictions of the Ku Klux Klan. Which also proved controversial.

But as the opening rooms of this show demonstrate, his origin story was almost bog-standard. He was even a teenage friend of the most Ab of all Exers, Jackson Pollock. He followed the familiar recipe, which as we’ve seen before, was a mixture of Surrealist practices and the scale of New Deal muralism.

We start off with some fairly standard Surrealist works, clearly indebted to de Chirico but with the silkily synthetic painting surface of post-Dali. There’s nothing wrong with them, but nothing particularly right about them either. They’re regular, when Surrealism needs to be estranged from us.

The murals are a different story, however. He’d soon joined the Block of Painters, a group of political muralists in Los Angeles. As these are somewhat challenging to transport, they often get left out of this story. But the Tate goes to efforts, including projecting roving sections of ’The Struggle Against Terrorism’ (1934) on a wall. But let’s focus on a drawing, specifically ’Drawing For Conspirators’ (c. 1930, below.)

Its as politically committed a work as any Berlin Dadaist ever spewed. Had it been given a thumbs-up by the critics and no more, it would have failed in its intent. It exists to make a point. Yet however politically charged it might be, its not a reportage image. In fact its as much a tableau as any Victorian ever painted.

You don’t question this, the crucified Jesus and the black lynching victim being placed next to one another, because there’s no attempt to convey any actual pictorial space. The setting’s a stage, not a place, the figures theatrical. And the creation of works from big, broad symbols… this segues quite neatly into Abstract Expressionism. The symbols just become more general, more universal, that all.

But also… yes, the Klan show up this early. And why wouldn’t they? This period, the inter-war years was their strongpoint. And while this work displays their notorious anti-black racism, they were as much anti-semitic and anti-immigrant. With Guston (birth name Goldstein) a Jewish child of immigrants. In 1932, another mural of his was defaced by the LA Police (then closely linked to the Klan) when they raided the centre which held it. Yet at the same time the era contained a sense of hope, the feeling that old certainties had eroded, that what gave danger also raised possibility. “There was a sense of being part of a change, or possible change” he commented afterwards.

Guston’s personal image bank was filled up then, and he continued drawing on it throughout his life. In his later return to the representational pretty much all that’s new in terms of imagery is the backdrops. (Which are of his adopted New York rather than his original Los Angeles.)

And why shouldn’t this be? After all, when we’re young aren’t we soft clay, impressionable and absorbing? We then progressively harden as we go through life, until our attitudes become impervious.

’Bombardment’ (1937, above) is Guston’s ’Guernica’. Literally so, like the more famous Picasso work it was painted in immediate response to the fascist bombing of that town. The unusual roundel design is used to create a vertiginous effect, explosion placed dead centre, figures flung out at you from it. War’s presented as a kind of ‘big bang’ event, gestating the world we live in.

’Gladiators’ (1940, above) is similarly war-based, only this time it’s not happening to but embodied by the figures, who look inseparable from their masks. The composition’s a swirl of ceaseless combat, your eye never coming to a focus point but forever rolling round. Particularly with the blue angle, the frame seems to be moving down on them. The violence feels menacingly real, but at the same time the weapons are toys, a dustbin shield, a wooden sword. And it's another tableau. The upper left figure outsizes the others, but in so symbolic a work it takes you a while to notice.

’Martial Memory’ (1941, above) is in many ways a successor work, incorporating many of the same elements. (“Guston and the dustbin lid motif, in this talk I will…”) But its a more static composition, working out from the central triangle of the main figure. It’s thing isn’t motion but density. It features, as the indicia puts it, “forms overlapping one another in a very dense manner”. The result is that it neither resolves to either a literal or allegorical reading, inhabiting a kind of ‘between’ space similar to Paula Rego.

In this work the figures have become children, who frequently appear in this period. It’s reminiscent of the way children will repeat back to you what’s on your mind. Inevitably, their response to a world of war is street games of battle. Which easily tip over into true fights of their own.

’The Porch' (1947, above) seems a transitional work into his later abstraction. There’s still some suggestion of pictorial space, but with a cruciform shape imposed upon it. And the figures are stretched, the way a scream is an elongated note.

And 'The Tormentors’ (1947/8) seems almost the next step along in a timeline, the foreground figures fading into inscribed lines, the red-and-black background darkening to dominate the composition. Yet those shapes look not just like they might oncer have been things, they retain some sense of anthropomorphism. (The title suggests we should look for pre-Klan figures.) Perhaps because there’s something primal about the work, as if made from some pre-verbal urge.

All would seem to bode well for Guston’s future abstraction…

”The Process of Creation”

…alas not.

Guston's reasons for turning to abstraction are textbook and exemplary, both the right ones and the best expressed. Briefly, it allowed him to just paint. He made a point of never stepping back from his canvases never pausing work to check on the overall composition, lest that interrupt the flow of paint. “I am not concerned with making pictures,” he commented, “but only the process of creation.” The action of painting the painting is the painting.

But the results don’t particularly honour that noble intent. ’Beggars Joys’ (1954/5, above, is quite typical, with the de-centred cluster of brighter strokes against a paler background. In fact its one of the better works, with its shimmering quality. But this is art for aesthetes.

At the time, with Ab Ex ascendent, these cemented his reputation. He represented America at the Venice Biennale in 1960, aged 47 (a neophyte in painting circles), followed by a Guggenheim retrospective two years later. But the truth is, in the New York School he was but one enrolment among many. There’s no suggestion he broke away for this reason, but the fact remains - if he was going to be Head Boy, he needed to found his own establishment.

The impression’s often given that his return to imagery was some sort of Damascene convention. Like he sat up in bed one morning and went, “hey, everybody - things!” This show demonstrates how slow and tortuous it really was.

In the early-to-mid Sixties black heads started appearing in his work, floating Zardoz-like over clouds of brushy grey. ’Painter III’ (1963, above) is one of the more developed examples, with a brush-sporting arm appended, even reflected in the title. It’s scarcely a great work, and in a room of essentially similar efforts it becomes both repetitive and unfinished. But its significance is in his timeline.

Did those heads just keep arising, unbidden, in his work? And did he break off when he saw what he’d done, alarmed at the forbidden imagery, only to do the same again? It seems a bit too romanticised. Plus these works were apparently shown at the time, not hidden away. Nevertheless, surely something of this sort happened.

From 1966 he then took an eighteen-month break from painting. (“You have to die for a rebirth”, he commented later.) And when he started again, it was with lines. Just lines. Over time these became simple doodles. Blown up to the size of small paintings, but still simple doodles of single objects. As basic as basic can be. But, like the heads, their significance is as steps on his timeline.

The phrase often used for Guston is ‘return to figuration’. Yet he started off painting things, and that’s significant. The first object we see here is a book. And, from an artist’s perspective, what does a book ‘mean’? It’s a repository of words, the alternative to images. If an artist paints a head, he must find a specific head. Even if he doesn’t model the work on a real head, if one comes from his imagination, it becomes a specific head once its painted. While in four letters the word ‘head’ can stand for all heads.

And the stripped-down, iconic way they’re painted is surely to circumvent this problem. A chair or a shoe is designed to represent chairs and shoes as directly as the word would. Significantly, he called these works a ‘visual alphabet’. And a great many items from this alphabet then reappear in his paintings. At the same time there’s something cartoony about them, which makes them least a little anthropomorphised.

Amid Idiot Evil

By 1970, he had fully worked up paintings which were shown at New York’s Marlborough gallery. And this is where the legend starts. Critics raged, former Ab Ex soulmates never spoke to him again, leading to him feeling like he’d been excommunicated. No less than John Cage was dismissive, only de Kooning positive. From that point on, and significantly, his main associates became not artists but writers and poets.

Okay, about time we looked at some…

’Open Window’ (1969, above) recursively hangs some of those 'visual alphabet’ pictures inside a larger work, works-within-a-work. But the window of the title makes them fairly accurate descriptions of a stripped-back urban environment. (And this the New York that classic Modernists were so rhapsodic about!) Downward strokes predominate, suggesting dumbed-down art as a response to a dumbed-down world. It’s reminiscent of the Matisse quote, that the build environment does to our eyes what prejudice does to our intelligence. And we’ll see that stripped-back colour scheme recur again and again, off-whites, chewing-gum-pinks, muddy reds and deep greens, lurid and cheap.

In a similar vein ’City’ (also 1969) reworks city buildings as Klan hoods, narrow windows doubling as eyeslits. As if the city itself was a product of, or perhaps producing, Klan ideology. And speaking of which…

The first room contained a 1924 photo of Klansmen in a car, publicising a white power lecture. An image which reappears in ’City Limits' (1969, above). Guston may not have ever seen it but he must have seen similar things, perhaps in person.

But what’s significant is that they are not depicted in the same way as the Klan of old, as in ’Drawing For Conspirators'. Their appearance, with those sinister costumes, had been designed to strike dread into their victims. But their role as racism boogeymen had waned over time. Racism clearly remained, but it was less embodied in the Klan. And so those pointy hoods started to look a little absurd.

If his personal image bank was filled up in those inter-war years, as he started to draw from it he knew he was spending old money to a changed world. So he paints not malevolent fascist entities but knuckleheads, goons, bozos, neighbourhood bullies. In fact they become a more generalised symbol for knuckleheads, goons and bozos. Their car has gargantuan wheels, yet three figures are crammed into a tiny bubble cab, complete with fag smoke. (You could read that giant car as their externalised self-image, and the diminutive figures as their actuality. If you wanted.)

Adrian Searle describes them as exuding “idiot evil”, and indeed they seem like henchmen without a criminal mastermind, wandering this way and that, often pointing forwards like they wouldn’t know which way to go otherwise. Their nearest comparison in contemporary art would be Crumb’s White Man, with his mantra “I must maintain this rigid position or all is lost.”

Ands the style they’re painted in is as different. Guston had once painted children reflecting adult concerns. Now he’s effectively doing the reverse, depictions of adults in a childlike manner which makes them essentially children. With those huge hoods, the Klan’s heads vanish into their toros, the way child art won’t differentiate head from body. They’re often depicted oversize, both from the child’s habit of ascribing size to significance and as a way of portraying their grasping nature. The banality of evil via the cartoonification of evil.

As is well known, this retrospective was originally planned a few years ago. Then, after the murder of George Floyd and the rise of Black Lives Matter, Washington DC’s National Gallery of Art in suddenly got cold feet over these images. Whereas of course when they’re relevant is precisely the time to show them! How could anyone get something so spectacularly wrong?

The answer is that the privileged forever mistake their status for smarts, when in fact it’s the reverse. Cushioned from the world’s sharp edges, they cannot see what we see. So they assume that they, the enlightened few, might be able to perceive these were anti-racist images, but what about us, the bewildered herd? As if someone could confuse Guston with DW Griffiths!

The only time either artists or black advocacy groups seem to have been involved in this is to complain it was un-necessary. Plus, all the furore when these works were first shown seems to have been over their representational form and their deliberately crude style. No-one then thought they were Klan-sympathetic. They were wrong - very wrong - about Guston’s art, but that didn’t make them cretins.

Further, the fact that galleries would worry then but go ahead now proves it wasn’t even the images being misinterpreted that worried them but the direction of social media trends. Potential flack coming down upon their own heads was a bigger deal to them than the knee on Floyd’s neck. Now black lives mattering is no longer this year’s thing, it’s safe to go ahead.

(Disclaimer: The Tate seem to have been more caught up in this delay than willing accomplices. And even then co-curator Mark Godfrey resigned from them in disappointment.)

And there another, equally important, dimension to this…

Klan Am I 

The Royal Academy show included a 1971 caricature of Nixon, skipped over here. Which may well be wise, as it can be played on too hard. Guston wasn't a 'political cartoonist'. More significant is all the self-portraits…

…such as 'The Studio’  (1969, above). It’s a painting of a Klansman painting a Klansman, brushes pushed to the foreground to emphasise this is a kind of self-portrait. Because as soon as Klansmen step from the sinister shadows and become regular bozos, we need to accept we are all part-Klansman. They’re our enemy, but not necessarily our external enemy. Guston said “it could be all of us. We’re all heels.” Or at another point, “I am the subject”. He’s shown smoking as he works in the accompanying filmshow, and I’d soon decided that any smoking Klansman was tagged as a self-portrait. (Which means that was also Guston in ’City Limits’.) 

By being a painting of someone painting, this foregrounds the graphic style, Guston painting himself as a Klansman in the way he depicts Klansmen. Klan men in a klan world in a klan style. And as Adrian Searle said, they “look exactly like they were painted by the kind of people they depict… some heavy, slow, intractable goon.”

Further, its significant the way the image is stacked - paint brushes before raised fingers before drawing hand before canvas. It’s not as dense as 'Martial Memory’, but it it feels crammed, claustrophobic, as if depicting an inescapable situation.

And this is enhanced further in ’Painting, Smoking, Eating’ (1973, above), by which point Guston was habitually painting himself as a one-eyed testicle. The horizontal figure actually only has a plate of food on him, the accumulation of objects is behind. But it's painted as if they weigh on him, accentuated by the flatness of the figure under the bedclothes. Guston called this stuff crapola, the detritus of life. And while critics’ claims to find Holocaust references in his work normally feels fanciful, the mass of discarded shoes here may well echo those photos of abandoned belongings in piles.

’Monument’ (1976, above) is like the antonym of those studio paintings, what Guston scuttled past on his forays out to buy more fags and tubs of off-pink. We grant a common identity to the crowd, simply by thinking of it as “the crowd”, while knowing at the same time it has none, its just an agglomeration of individuals. And so we get an apparition such as this, an assemblage of stamping feet without guiding heads, its bestial nature accentuated by the comparison of shoes to horse’s hooves.

There’s a famous quote from Guston: “what was happening in America, the brutality of the world. What kind of man am I, sitting at home, reading magazines, going into a frustrated fury about everything - and then going to my studio to adjust a red to a blue?” It’s blown up on the gallery wall, it takes up a page in the booklet. But it’s widely misinterpreted.

Guston was not such a fool as to imagine adjusting a red to an off-pink was a different matter. He wasn’t trying to recapture his politically committed youth, as if you could just transpose from one era to another, and from public walls to a gallery setting. He was using his work to ask himself just that question - what kind of man am I? If you didn’t care about the brutality, you weren’t a human being. On the other hand, if you didn’t care about your art, you weren’t an artist. So the artist cannot help but respond to world events, but at the same time cannot help but feel isolated from them. This art grapples with that conundrum.

Further, its now generally agreed that the New York School retained their leftist beliefs (apart from the occasions where they retained their anarchist beliefs), even when it wasn’t evident in their art. They would have all been aghast at what was happening in America. Which suggests Guston’s motivations were a combination of inner and outer, political outrage and a dissatisfaction with Ab Ex methods. And in saying this we don’t need to place one above the other.

Where did this new style come from? Robert Crumb, mentioned earlier, was soon complaining it had all been stolen from him. Yet he never really missed a chance to be vexatious. Both are really borrowing from the same source, the old American newspaper strips. It’s like arguing my band sounded like the Stones before yours did.

The show refers to this but, as is standard, insists that means George Herriman. Yet Herriman’s fluid, sketchy line could not be further from the blocky things stuck to these walls. Guston is borrowing from lesser-known but more regular newspaper artists, such as Bud Fisher. And he’s not even taking directly from Fisher or from any one of them. He’s taking from them on aggregate, the general way they depicted things, picking up on the common slang. Rather than trying to raise the comics style, Guston lowers himself to its base level. He’s more interested in their crudity, their scuzzy printing, their reduction of objects down to signs. And that’s why his pictures work.

Life After Klan

Though Guston is now defined by the crapola paintings, the style lasted less than a decade and the Klan had disappeared from them well before that. Laster works are more metaphysical, larger in scale and more spacious in content. They’re less fraught and frenzied, more contemplative. Expansive and calm oceans appear, as in ’The Ladder’ (1971, below.)

They’re perhaps best summed up by his comment “there’s nothing to do now but paint my life.” Guston said at the time that while he’s painting something he has no idea what it will be, and he didn’t see why that process should stop just because he’d stopped painting it. He quoted approvingly from Paul Valery, “a bad poem is one that vanishes into meaning.” He wanted back some of the inscrutability abstraction had afforded him.

Still later works swap off-white for much darker and more sombre hues, often full black. The motive for these is mortality, as both himself and his wife dealt with illness. ’Web’ (1975, above) is a particularly nightmarish image, the spiders dominating the horizon, their distance only emphasising how trapped the figure is. Whether his death is near or not, it remains inescapable. The reflections of two of his key colours, muddy red and green, might suggest it’s his art he’s trapped in.

Should we see this as a good exhibition? As you may have guessed from above, it presents a compelling timeline of Guston’s career. But that may be a better thing to write about than walk round, as it gives greater weight to lesser works when we could have had more Klan paintings. (Not something to quote out of context!) The Royal Academy show of 2004 effectively did the opposite, sweeping through his early years, encouraging us only to look for emergent symbols, in order to bring on the crapola. Neither porridge is quite right. And Guston would surely have exulted in remaining hard to pin down.

‘SOULS GROWN DEEP LIKE THE RIVERS’

Royal Academy, London

“My art is evidence of my freedom”
- Thornton Dial

Birds Unflown

This show is subheaded ’Black Artists From The American South’, raising something interesting right at the start. The Great Migration, a pivotal event in Black American history, saw unprecedented numbers escape Southern segregation for newly opened-up jobs in the Northern cities. As this led to developments such as the electrification of Blues, we tend to think that when they left they took culture with them. We even came to use ‘urban’ as a polite euphemism when we didn’t want to say ‘black’.

The Civil Rights movement, starting in the mid-Fifties, may have been based in the South. But as that turned into Black Liberation, both broader in scope and more radical in expression, it expanded North and West, and took up more of a cultural form. The Tate’s recent show ‘Soul of A Nation (Art In The Age of Black Power)’ largely focused on this.So those who got left behind in that migration, surely they just got left behind. There were, in words from a work here, ’The Birds That Didn’t Learn How To Fly’.

Like all such assumptions, as soon as you say it out loud you see the absurdity of it. The majority stayed in the South, after all. So this show arrives as a welcome correction.

Both title and exhibits come from the Souls Grown Deep Foundation and Community Partnership of Atlanta, “dedicated to promoting the work of Black artists from the American South and supporting their communities by fostering economic empowerment, racial and social justice, and educational advancement”. And the title comes via a poem by Langston Hughes.

Most of this art was created not just outside of the art market but without access to art materials, and so was made with whatever the artist managed to forage. Take for example Lonnie Holley’s ’Copying The Rock’ (1995), below.

Holley himself has given us a choice of two explanations. The guidebook quotes him: “We can’t just copy the past. We got to deal with the new. Sometimes it’s like living in hell.” While Laura Porter writes of attending a talk where he said it was about the unreproducible quality of nature, where a photocopy of a rock is at best a poor approximation of its source. Which makes it sound almost like Magritte – “Ceci n’est pas un rocher”.

And who would be vain and rash enough to disagree with an artist about his own work? You’re looking at him. For more, I would say is afoot. Neither accounts for the seismic violence in it, as if the copier had been destroyed in the attempt of copying. Then there’s that savage statement scrawled on the lid - “it’s like I’m living in Hell”. (Alluded to only in the first explanation.)

It suggests to me the black American experience is a kind of unparseable truth, an oppression so extreme and so ingrained it can’t be communicated - any attempt will just wreck the recording device. I doubt you’re supposed to think of it, but it brought to my mind the famous Malcolm X quip - “we didn’t land on Plymouth Rock, Plymouth Rock landed on us.”

Art is so often views, windows onto other places. Which we then rate according to how realised those other places are. Whereas Ronald Lockett’s ’Oklahoma’ (1995, above) is precisely the reverse, a frame without a picture, a kind of anti-window, the grille added almost as a taunt. It’s not a portal but a blocking device. And a most beleaguered one at that, various strips of sheet metal stuck together as if repeatedly patched up against the pitiless elements. The accumulation of sedimentary layers comes to be a common motif here.

Why’s it called ’Oklahoma’? Especially when the artist was from Alabama. That 1995 date is a clue. It commemorates the Oklahoma City bombing, where white nationalist terrorists killed 168 people.

And this sets the tone. References to oppression as a physical force run through the show, but the expression is normally oblique. There’s some drawings by Thornton Dial, with titles like ’Katrina’ (2005) and ’Slavery’ (2009), but the images aren’t the direct expressions they would suggest. Their dominant theme is discombobulation. ’Slavery’ may well be set in a plantation field, but it's a whirl of body parts as if they’re being washed down some giant plughole.

While his ’Blue Skies: The Birds That Didn’t Learn How To Fly’ (2008, above) hangs rags weatherbeaten from a line. They’re hung so low the image is dominated by that sky, which is actually gun-metal grey. It looks more like another oppressive weight than an escape route. And dour, acerbic titles such as that recur. Joe Minster titled a sculpture ’And He Hung His Head And Died’ (1999, while Richard Dial (Thornton’s son) called a 1988 piece ’Which Prayer Ended Slavery’.

Art As Alchemy

But everything above, while true, makes it too easy to overlook an equally vital fact - this art is not just creative and inventive, it’s actively playful. It’s like the famous story of the young Miles Davis being told by a college lecturer that Blues was the raw, inarticulate cry of the suffering black man, and him shouting back “you’re a goddamn liar!” The Thornton Dial quote up top… it’s up top because, if there was one takeaway you should take from this show, it would be that.

And this sense can’t be separated from the use of found materials. Ralph Griffin’s ’Midnight’ (1978, above) is really not much more than a bit of old wood. We effectively accept that art can find nascent identity in organic things. Sculptors commonly say they already see the shape inherently in the block of material, which their work only realises. So it’s only a small step to noting that you position a piece of wood in a certain way and it already resembles something. But just as significant is what he adds, the tin legs, the red plastic for eyes. To find life in nature, even dead nature, is one thing. To do it for tin and plastic is another. In a splendid detail, the nails that hammer in those bits of plastic become the pupils for the eyes.

Hawkin’s Bolden’s ’Untitled’ (1989, above) is more an assemblage than Griffin. The source of his materials, an old pot, a section of drainpipe, a baking tray, could scarcely be more obvious. So obvious there’s something comical to it. But there’s something charged about it too. It’s simultaneously a bunch of stuff stuck together and an entity.

Thornton Dial’s ’Tree Of Life (In the Image of Old Things’) (1994, above) decorates a wood assemblage with paint and decorative objects, including a crown. The concept of a single tree as the wellspring of all life is well known across cultures. Here Dial applies it to dead wood. Creativity can bring fruit even to barren trees.

…while his ’Stars Of Everything’ (2004, above) turns tin cans into brightly coloured stars. This is another show where thumbnail images get across little, in particular not conveying the 3D quality of this work, they way it seems to both recede and come out at you. As the stars are physically attached to the canvas we see them fade in size and colour, like looking at a full night sky.

The bird figure, in monochrome green, doesn’t seem an obvious addition. It cannot be resolved into a scene, it isn’t standing before a star field, its stepping out of the work and its dead eyes meet our gaze. (The guide suggests he’s an alter ego for the artists, like Ernst’s Loplop.)

What kind of mind looks at an old tin can and thinks of stars? My brain boggles at even the prospect of it! Dial described art as “a bright star up ahead in the darkness of the world.” And the quote which came unprompted to my mind this time was Wilde’s, “we’re all of us in the gutter, some of us looking at the stars.”

The show says “theirs is a story of transcendence, of the recuperative power of recycled - and reimagined - material.” And there is something alchemically transformative in turning detritus into stars. The origins of materials are normally hidden in art, mere props for the artist to exert their will upon them, their previous state pushed into the background. Think for example what a statement it is for a painter to leave even a small area of bare canvas on a work. While these materials are taken up less with a sense of “I will defy these constaints by finding a way to work with what you have reduced me to.” And more “hey, more cool stuff in this other dumpster over here!”

These old bits of driftwood or junk are transformed but also somewhere between elevated and realised, as if they had buried qualities only now brought to light. Some of the artists have commented that they themselves felt written off, allowing them to identify with the discarded. “I had been thrown away as a child, and here I was building something out of unwanted things,” said Lonnie Holley. Perhaps we should see the materials more as collaborators.

But while found materials might work for sculptors and assemblage-creators, it’ll be different for painters, right? Wrong. Mary T Smith’s ’Untitled’ (1984, above) doesn’t just use distressed piece of old corrugated tin for a canvas. It utilises those corrugations to capture the coloured stripes in the design. It’s not like she needed something to work on and in desperation resorted to this, it’s like the material inspired the composition.

While Sam Doyle takes another old tin panel in ’LeBe’ (late 70s, above), and turns it into a romantic image. The figures are built around that central depression in the panel, until they become mirror images of one another, sheet-metal crossed lovers. Their arms don’t cross or go under one another, just un-naturalistically reflect. While the point where their mouths meet has a pair of lips painted flat on. You could see those lips and eyes as forming a single face. The artist’s initials split across the two sides perhaps suggest different parts of his personality coming together.

Jimmy Lee Sidduth painted on board rather than canvas. For which there is a tradition. (Well, more of one than there is tin.) But he painted with with grass stains, berry juice or - in ’Atlanta’ (1988, above) - mud. The restricted palette and painted borders are primitive. But the road leading up to the cityscape, with its ever-escalating towers, soaring till they touch the upper border? That isn’t so different to the way Nevinson depicted New York. Part of the appeal is the dynamic fusion of ‘folk’ forms with ‘modern’ content, a folk-art city.

While Purvis Young’s ’Carrying the Angel to the People’ (1994, above), is a kind of synthesis of stained glass windows and cave art. Particularly conveying the latter is the use of red ochre, a commonly available ‘paint’ even in stone age days, and the dominance of that giraffe-like animal. (Young apparently calls it a ‘freedom horse’.) While the sense of several scenes inside an overall design is more stained-glass window. We may note that, however varying those forms are in our common response to them, both are forms of religious art, and Young often gives his work religious themes, his figures sporting halos.

Not All Art is Protest

But we should also look at the exceptions here. Not all art is protest, not even by the extended definition we’ve come to here. And we should protest the notion it should be. Nor are black artists obliged to make ‘black art’. Charlie Lucas’ scrapyard assemblage ’Three-Way Bicycle’ (c. 1985) is Dada, resembling a functional object less and less the more you look at it. While the figure looks less riding the bicycle than part of it.

While Eldren M. Bailey’s plaster sculpture ’Dancers’ (1960s, above) captures the sweeping contours of those figures, even to the point of bending anatomy, in a way similar to Matisse. Their hair could be said to be in black style, but the theme of the work is simple love of the dance.

Primitive Modernists

So, does all this mean we’re looking an an exhibition of outsider art? Formally speaking, these folk operated outside the art market, or at least for much of their careers. And if this was all that was meant by that term, it would be fine to use. But the point is… it’s not, is it? And in fact its nebulousness is a large part of the problem.

We often like to romantically imagine pure outsider artists, possessing what we lack, uncontaminated by the art world the way noble savages are by civilisation. But while this art may have been made by marginalised Americans, they were still Americans, not some lost tribe in pure isolation. There’s every indication they were aware of developments in art. Dial’s ’Blue Skies’ looks like someone who has seen Abstract Expressionism, for example.

Nor was the influence just one-way. It’s impossible to see this show and not think of Rauschenberg. But it seems that, Texas-born, it was Rauschenberg who saw and became influenced by this art rather than the other way around. He was of course a great artist. But it’s another case of white folk gaining recognition for picking up on what black creators were doing. It’s like being told by everyone Captain Beefheart was a true original, then discovering Howlin’ Wolf.

A more interesting question might be, how aware were they of primitive art? Joe Minter devoted a whole area in Alabama to his works, which he called ’African Village In America’. And he’s quoted as saying “I’m listening to the ancestors coming through me to you”. Yet there’s no particular reason for a Black American to find their identity in that, any more than I look on the Sutton Hoo hoard and see myself. It’s the black American experience we see expressed here.

But at the same time… even if you’ve no greater empathy with primitive art, with its totemic functions, you’re less primed to treat it reverentially. You have more a sense of “this is mine to play with”, it becomes more malleable in your hands. What Minter thought wasn’t true. But believing it was empowering nonetheless.

And this cannot help but lead onto another question…

Unsurprisingly, artists without access to art materials didn’t tend to have much access to art galleries either. So came the yard show. One Americanism we Brits have had to grapple with is the yard sale. To sell off our tat, we need to lug it to a flea market. While they just turn their front yard into a shop. Now it seems we need to add to this the “distinctly Southern phenomenon” of the yard show, art taking the place of tat.

It’s not specified, but despite the common name it doesn’t look like this was a way to sell work. (And your neighbours were unlikely to be any better off than you.) It seems more about having a space to build up your works, until they combine into a kind of installation piece. The guidebook has a photo of Good Bread Alley in Miami which Purvis Young has pretty much entirely covered in paintings, even at the price of them overlapping one another (below).

And this takes us to yet another question - how was all this viewed by their neighbours? Was it seen as creating an indigenous black culture, or articulating popular concerns? Did artists become local celebrities, perhaps not always understood but still championed for brightening up their neighbourhoods? Were they tolerated as eccentrics, like Alfred Wallis in St. Ives? Or dismissed as weirdos? The show doesn’t consider this at all, alas.

Which leads to the most common criticism of this show, that it treats the work too reverentially. If its habitat is the accumulated yard sale, this art exhibition looks more like an art exhibition. (See for example the Time Out review.) I’m semi-sympathetic to this, but wonder if the yard show works best for individual artists or self-defined groups, so it doesn’t really matter if everything sloshes together into one mega-work. While round robin shows such as this may require some separation between the pieces. (There should be more photos and videos of the yard shows, that much is true.)

The works here date from the Sixties up to today. (The most recent being from last year.) Which means it starts at pretty much the point Modernism expired. Visit most contemporary exhibitions and they just look moribund, a corpse stuffed with some po-mo buzzwords. And you come away sadly concluding that ours is just not the era for visual art. Except here the art is not dry and sterile at all, but bold and alive. It virtually crackles with creativity! It’s like the primal purpose of art has not been forgotten after all. And yet we only hear of it now?

The question is of course its own answer. Ultimately, it’s not our times that screw up visual art, so much as the dead hand of the art market. Like the tourist industry does to places, it seizes excitedly on anything outside itself but only to subsume it. Outside that ever-grasping shadow, artists can still create.

Which raises the question, is there an way we can discover art like this, without it falling under the Art establishment’s sway? In short, there isn’t. There’s no showing this stuff in a secret hush-hush gallery, and not telling Jonathan Jones. Further, it’s true to say that all the disadvantages these artists faced became their advantages. But it’s also easy to say, for us at least. Subsisting is not always the easiest way to live, and finding a market to sell your wares had obvious advantages. The art market is a form of the labour market, something we may not like but can’t simply ignore. While we continue to live under the system we live under, there’ll be no right answer to this. But this show’s a testament to the credo that creativity will always find a way.