Your Guide to Tate Liverpool's Spring Programme
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
COMPASS: YOUR GUIDE £1 TO TATE LIVERPOOL’S SPRING PROGRAMME 1950. Photograph 1950. by Hans Namuth. Courtesy Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona. Hans Namuth © 1991 Estate. Jackson Pollock SUMMER 2015: ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM / AMERICA / THE ARTIST’S STUDIO / COLLISIONS / CONSTELLATIONS / ENCOUNTERS WELCOME MAP / CONTENTS This summer at Tate Liverpool we have three be an extraordinary way to show a viewer how remarkable artists who, each in their own way those encounters and clashes fuel the creative capture and reveal the concerns and contexts in process.’ which they are working, acting as seismographers of different eras. Overcoming her initial marginalisation in the 1940s (when the communist party introduced Jackson Pollock: Blind Spots / ‘Is he the greatest living painter in the United rules to exclude students whose family owned Glenn Ligon: Encounters and Collisions States?’ That question, posed by Life magazine property), Romanian artist Geta Brătescu’s works 30 June – 18 October 2015 of Jackson Pollock in 1949, helped to cement include print, performance, installation and film. Adult £10 / Concession £7.50 his status; however, the artist spent much of the With a particular emphasis, exploration of, and rest of his career seeking to justify it. He would commitment to the drawn line (‘for me, the line Assistant Curator Stephanie Straine and artist also feel it necessary to look beyond the abstract is the essence’), Brătescu’s often monochrome Glenn Ligon discuss our top floor exhibitions expressionism he had pioneered. Jackson Pollock: practice engages with themes – both formal and Blind Spots explores these developments, tracing conceptual – found in Jackson Pollock’s oeuvre. Living Room / DLA Piper Series: Constellations his evolution from the famed multi-coloured drip But her experience outside a pervasive cultural Until 5 July / Ongoing from 3 August technique to what came to be known as black hegemony means she also shares certain, perhaps Admission free pourings. Figurative, near calligraphic works more personal correspondences with Glenn Ligon. rendered almost exclusively in black, art historian You can catch the Living Room display until 5 July. Michael Fried believed them to be of ‘virtually If you have any questions about the exhibitions From 3 August the floor will be home to a new limitless potential’. Complementing this story, for please do ask a member of staff. galaxy of constellations the first time utilising the expertise of our Visitor Assistants, we have produced an in-house audio We hope you enjoy your visit. DLA Piper Series: Constellations guide. With a script written by Lee Kendall, voiced Ongoing by Ann Bibby and John Hughes, the guide brings Francesco Manacorda Admission free you closer still to the incredible narrative Artistic Director at play in Pollock’s career. Content Editor Mike Pinnington discusses the thinking behind DLA Piper Series: Constellations If Pollock is a colossus of post-war American culture, then Glenn Ligon might be the echo, G Geta Brătescu reflection and even conscience of that period’s 30 June – 18 October 2015 legacy. Believing that ‘an artist uses history … as Admission free the raw material for one’s practice,’ in Encounters and Collisions Ligon brings together artworks Assistant Curator Lauren Barnes explores the with which he shares affinities. Punctuating and importance of the studio space for Geta Brătescu reframing the post-war American canon, works by artists such as Bruce Nauman, Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat – as well as key examples Toilets of abstract expressionism, such as Willem de Cloakroom Kooning’s Black Untitled 1948 – sit alongside those of his own. The artist has said: ‘I realized that juxtaposing my own work with that of others could JACKSON POLLOCK: BLIND SPOTS FLOOR 4 POLLOCK IN TRANSITION The big thing right now is Jack’s show. Alma 1950 can in retrospect be understood as the year works, Pollock’s personal demons were perhaps and I were there and it was bigger than ever in which the artist attained total mastery of his triggered by the raw exposure of performing this year and many important people in the revolutionary all-over drip technique, in which on film, and shortly after, his painting practice art world present. Lee seemed very happy he laid canvas directly on the floor of his studio abruptly changed course. and greeted every one with a big smile, Jack and painted not by touching its surface, but by appeared at home with himself and filled dripping and flinging paint from above, gravity Hans Namuth, looking back on this time in 1979, the part of a famous artist. Must be great a partner in his actions. He often used industrial wrote: ‘I have asked myself why Jackson chose to be talked about in the newspapers and enamel paints thinned with turpentine for greater this point in his life to resume drinking. In part, magazines and recognized by them as one fluidity. Pollock, speaking in a radio interview with of course, it was the result of the circumstances of the leaders in the non-objective art field William Wright (recorded that year), modestly gave of that last day of filming. There was a heavy air some insight into his approach: ‘Well, method is, of crisis hanging about. […] One can, of course, Recounting the opening of Jackson Pollock’s it seems to me, a natural growth out of a need, speculate on the deeper reasons. I wasn’t aware Jackson Pollock Number 7 1952 © The Pollock-Krasner Foundation ARS, solo exhibition at the Betty Parsons Gallery, and from a need the modern artist has found new of it at the time, but in retrospect I think he NY and DACS, London 2015 New York at the very end of 1950, Marvin Jay ways of expressing the world about him. I happen had reached a transition point in his work […].’ Pollock’s letter of 3 December describes a man to find ways that are different from the usual Namuth’s images engage with and encourage the that blurs the lines between conscious and finally at home with his success. In this exhibition techniques of painting, which seem a little strange enduring myths and aura of the artist’s studio; unconscious motivations. Pollock would pose for Pollock presented his most mature works to date, at the moment, but I don’t think there’s anything but more than that, they actually succeeded in Namuth once again in the summer of 1951, with including such latterly iconic paintings as Autumn very different about it. I paint on the floor and this transforming public understanding of the artist these black poured paintings still in his studio, but Rhythm (Number 30) 1950 and Number 1, 1950 isn’t unusual – the Orientals did that.’ through their pervasive media presence. Namuth’s never again would he allow the camera to capture (Lavender Mist) 1950: vast, wall-spanning canvases documentary, reportage style lends above all else him in the act of painting. which represented the very summit of abstract In the last months of 1950 Pollock, following two a ‘truth’ to these images of Pollock performing his art’s achievements, and the culmination of his years of sobriety, abruptly returned to drinking painting for the camera, however slippery that Stephanie Straine Assistant Curator signature drip technique. – an event, it seems, that was precipitated by truth may be. the conclusion of his second filming session with Jackson Pollock: Blind Spots has been developed in collaboration with The Pollock-Krasner Foundation and organised in partnership Perhaps somewhat shielded by fraternal pride, the photographer Hans Namuth in November. We can never really know if it was Namuth’s with the Dallas Museum of Art Marvin Jay’s letter does not, however, tell the Namuth’s friendship with Pollock and his wife Lee intrusion into his previously private painting whole story of this pivotal moment in his brother Krasner had begun only a few months earlier, sanctuary that prompted the turning point in Supported by Jackson’s career. Despite the clear step forward when he approached the couple with a request Pollock’s practice, away from the all-over dripped that these paintings signified, the truth of their to take some still photographs of the artist abstractions and towards the darkly menacing immediate critical reception is that many art working in his studio-barn. These black and white figurative imagery that appears in the poured journalists once again disparaged the works in images were later to define public opinion of black enamel paintings he began in 1951, but this era-defining exhibition, with the New Yorker Jackson Pollock, but it was to be a short, sharp certainly, after this encounter Pollock’s art – and The Pollock-Krasner Foundation critic dismissing the majestic floor-to-ceiling and explosive working relationship. After Namuth life – fundamentally changed. The exhibition Tate Liverpool Members paintings as ‘meaningless embellishment’. Even wrapped the experimental film of Pollock painting Jackson Pollock: Blind Spots examines this return to Pollock’s most fully realised body of work took on glass (which became the work Number 29, representation within these relatively neglected some time to be recognised for what it was: a 1950 1950 now in the National Gallery of Canada, works of 1951 to 1953 (such as Number 7 1952, Media partner complete redefinition of modernist painting. Ottawa), the artist started drinking again that very pictured). Pollock’s refined pouring technique day. In the aftermath of completing what would creates an almost calligraphic style, producing a come to be seen as some of his most successful tense balance between abstraction and figuration GLENN LIGON: FLOOR 4 ENCOUNTERS AND COLLISIONS In her 1987 autobiography People Who Led to The emerging exhibition consists of works of art My Plays author Adrienne Kennedy details the and other cultural material that have different people, places and things that influenced her degrees of proximity to my own practice.