ANATOMIES Inside Pages.Indd

GLENN SUJO: ANATOMIES STUDIES FROM THE HUMAN SKELETON & OTHER WORKS ANATOMIES GLENN SUJO ANATOMIES Studies from the Human Skeleton & Other Works Eton College, Windsor Watts Gallery, Compton 27 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Foreword Watts Gallery, Compton Recalling the convention of the académies (fi nely rendered tonal studies of the lithe fi gure), the term anatomies alludes to those detailed studies of human physiology and anatomy rendered in section or The Drawing Schools, Eton College, Windsor elevation, presented in learned medical tomes with an instructional, diagnostic or often more conspicuous Welcome Collection, London purpose. A less familiar use of the term might suggest the variable components of a visual grammar laid Royal Collections, Windsor open to examination, as a corpus of drawings can do in an exemplary manner. The human skeleton presents the artist with a paradigmatic model, a tensile, see-through scaffold Perdita Hunt, Nicolas Tromans, Simon Cox and the staff of Watts Gallery, Compton; Anthony Little, Ian Burke, Serena of astonishing variety — from the vaulted dome of the skull and spinal column, to spanning arches and Hedley-Dent, Nicola Pickering and Liam Robinson, Eton College; Martin Clayton, Richard Williams, Rosie Razzall, buttresses of rib-cage and pelvis, to the fan vaulting of metatarsals and phalanges at the extremities — Royal Collection, Windsor; Ken Arnold and Rosalind Leake, Wellcome Collection London; Robin Tyler and Jon Bull, prompting Renaissance architectural theoreticians and Enlightenment thinkers to compare the human Selsey Press; Matthew Jones, Patrick Mifsud, John Jones, London; Jocelyn Cumming and Gillian Marcus, Department of Paper Conservation, Camberwell College of Art (UAL); the authors, Christopher Townsend and Monica Bohm- upright form to the apse, transept, nave and narthex of the great cathedrals, like them, an object of enduring Duchen; Carole Berman, Mark Bills, Matthew Booth, Michael Croker, Rosen Daskalov, Aviel Lewis and George wonder and captivating beauty. Rice-Smith. The medical anatomies collected in vast compendia aptly known as atlases and associated with names such as Vesalius, Albinus, Gautier-Dagoty and Gray, exert a similar fascination, promising to unlock the secrets of life and encoding a mute language of human suffering in a relentless mapping of the body and its ontologies. As efforts to decode the human genome spiral, so the gulf widens between those professional understandings and our everyday awareness of the body’s attendant functions, with its remarkable capacity This catalogue is published on the occasion of the exhibitions for renewal and healing, but also decline and demise. Refl ecting on one of the great mysteries of life, historian Philippe Ariès reminds us that we can never truly know nor be present at the moment of our birth Glenn Sujo: Anatomies, Studies of the Human Skeleton & Other Works or death. Perhaps then, the oversize colossi that today fi ll my studio like centaurs in some great army — The Drawing Schools, Eton College, Windsor Ezekiel’s Vision of the Dry Bones, or Bruegel’s Death Triumphant — serve also to interrogate the Cartesian separation of mind, spirit and body: for where does the spirit reside, if not in the body? Glenn Sujo: Animus and Shadow The Sculpture Gallery, Watts Gallery, Compton I fi rst came upon the work of George Frederick Watts shortly after my arrival in Britain at the artist’s retrospective held at the Whitechapel Art Gallery (in one of London’s most deprived neighbourhoods) in 1974. In such works as Found Drowned and Under a Dry Arch, I recognised at once the moral gravity Exhibition dates: 20 September – 2 November 2014 that struck me so forcefully as an impressionable seven year old child, in the tableaux-vivants and great machines of Venezuelan history painters (trained in the Beaux-Arts tradition) as in Arturo Michelena’s portrait of the libertarian thinker Francisco de Miranda, gazing despondently from his cell at La Carraca, Two workshops centred on the anatomical drawings of Leonardo da Vinci, or Cristobal Rojas’ The Sick Child, that fi lled me with a awe and dread. Their works hung in the otherwise the Windsor Leoni volume, will be held at The Royal Collection, bare, tall-ceilinged salones of the Museo de Bellas Artes (where once, I too learnt to hold a brush), while Windsor Castle on 7 & 14 October 2014. more recent creations by Alejandro Otero, Jesus Soto, Carlos Cruz-Diez and Gego fi lled the walls of our proudly secular, modern Jewish household in Caracas. Back in London, Watts taught me how at a fecund moment, British painting sustained a conversation with the cultures of Michelangelo and Titian — a fact I had ignored. What seemed an unbridgeable divide — between high-Modernism and Academicism — pointed a way: my generation faced up to the challenge of reconciling the iconoclasm of one with the grammatical construction of erudite subjects in the other. Not long after this encounter, I joined a group of fellow students from the Slade on a journey to rural Surrey and to the Watts Gallery where its idiosyncratic Keeper Wilfrid Blunt — formerly Drawing Master at Eton College — greeted us at the door. The Gallery’s pitched roof revealed chinks of light; rainwater poured into buckets strewn across the fl oor. The building has since undergone major restoration, its resplendent skin auguring a revival in the fortunes and reputations of George Frederick and of his wife, the potter Mary Cover: A Battle Of Skeletons, 1997-2014 Seaton Watts. I was fortunate to witness this transformation, and on one of these visits Perdita Hunt, the ‘They stood up on their feet—a vast army.’ Ezekiel (37:10) (cat. 21, illus. pp. 14-15) Gallery’s Director and former Curator Mark Bills (succeeded by Nicolas Tromas, Brice Curator) together 5 hatched a plan that allowed me to spend a year drawing at Compton as the G. F. Watts Associate Artist, awakening in me a renewed interest in Watts the man, his work and ideas. During the year, my aim was to revive the daily practice of drawing from the skeleton that once informed Watt’s work (Christopher Townsend gives a penetrating account of this corpus and its history in the following pages); to draw from the Antique casts that served Watts as models and aide-memoires in the sculpture studio; and to fi nd refreshment among the planted borders that surround the Gallery, at the end of a working day. The decorated interior of the Watts Memorial Chapel at Compton (now largely credited to Mary and an army of volunteers), with its cursive lettering and lace pattern of Islamic infl uence, the shrouded fi gure of The All Pervading hung above the small altar echoing the Hebrew Ein Sof (Without End) and consoling, wide-eyed cherubims looking down on us from its ceiling (in a reference perhaps to Raphael’s Sistine Madonna, Dresden) alludes to the three Abrahamic faiths in a tangible expression of the Watts’s spiritual eclecticism. This dimension of their lives sustained me through my year and prompted my return to the abandoned drawing Animus and Shadow, that takes up the subject of Jacob’s struggle with a divine emissary, a journey of becoming with parallels both in Watts’ Jacob and Esau and in Delacroix’s mural decorations for the Church of St. Sulpice, always high on my agenda during regular student visits to Paris. This and a second drawing, Large Wing will hang in the Sculpture Gallery alongside the écorché models and casts used by Watts and the full-size plaster casts for Physical Energy and Monument to Tennyson. Watts’ energy was undiminished in later years. His infl uence extended beyond Britain, as we learn from Joris-Karl Huysman’s novel À rebours, to France and Belgium, and the Symbolist and early modern movements. Watts’ experimental methods, apparent in the veiled layers of paint (Titian’s velatura) and extensive corrections that served to uncover the emergent subject spurred him on to his most abstract works, such as End of the Deluge, Endymion and The Sower of the Systems, that seem to presage the fi reworks of a František Kupka or a Wassily Kandinsky. Watts drew constantly. His prolifi c oeuvre includes the accomplished red chalk ‘presentation’ drawings, loose jottings on torn fragments of paper, sketchbooks, modelli and other process works. Watts was ahead of his time in employing a tripod camera to record the unfi nished states of his paintings, their tonal range and chromaticity subject to fi nal adjustment, thorough reworking, prompting variations on a theme. Watts’ improvisational drawing methods laid the ground for a personal iconology, as they would for other admired visionaries: William Blake before him, Edward Burra sometime after. Watts understood the capacity of the drawn image to transcend narrow temporal boundaries: his own drawings fl ourish at the intersection of Victorian and contemporary cultures and deserve to be seen in their variety and fullness. Glenn Sujo Compton, Spring 2014 50 7 Glenn Sujo’s Anatomies: Something more than backbone The human skeleton provides us with a language: one that allows us to see and to interpret ourselves, and which may articulate our most profound anxieties. Our understanding of syntax is now as a term referring solely to the ordering of words, yet in the early-modern period the word had a wider meaning that addressed the arrangement of elements in a system or structure, including the body. In Microcosmographia: A Description of the Body of Man, (1615), Helkiah Crooke wrote that: ‘the universal compage [framework] of coagmentation of the bones is called a Syntax, and the backe of the bones so fi tted together is called a Sceleton’. There is, for the Renaissance, in its novel awareness of the human body, a parallel between a corporeal grammar and the human capacity for self-expression.

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