My art week
This week we studied in our art class Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray and Lee Miller in our Tuesday class and French 18th Century art in our Thursday class.
I also watched on Monday Britain’s Lost Masterpieces on BBC4
Our art tutor praised Marcel Duchamp as the second most important artist of the twentieth century.
This may be a bit excessive but one superlative that is not is that he was undoubtedly the finest chess playing artist of all time.
Indeed he regarded art as mere retinal work and after 1923 devoted himself to chess playing in numerous international tournaments.
His great friend was Picabia, hugely rich, and the two introduced Dadaism to New York.
Duchamp was a natural Dadaist as he enjoyed playing games. Famously he presented his urinal on a plinth as art provoking a debate which still reigns today on “What is art?”
Duchamp was fascinated by movement and mechanical objects.
Our teacher who is no prude did not restrain herself with his sexual symbolism. His Coffee Grinder is symbolic of masturbation.
Etant Donne, which he worked on secretly after supposedly renouncing art (most of his output was between 1903-23), is of a splayed naked torso viewed from peeping holes in a fortress-like door.
Man Ray and Lee Miller were lovers and two of the best known photographers of the twentieth century.
Lee Miller is one of the most interesting figures of the century.
An American, raped by her uncle and photographed naked by her father, her beauty took her to the heights of modelling for Vogue.
She then went to the other side of the camera. She went to Paris, turned up at Man Ray’s studio and began a long relationship with him.
Man Ray too enjoyed chess.
Miller photographed Dachau and was pictured in Hitler’s bath in his Munich flat.
She married British artist Roland Penrose and they lived in Farley Farmhouse near Lewes.
Nancy (Bright-Thompson) and I were to visit this when the lockdown came.
French art in the 18th century is best summed up in one word “ Historical”.
The best known painter was Jacques Louis David who bent with the prevailing political wind.
He was in his time a court painter, Republican, signed the King’s death warrant, artist of and for Napoleon.
He is best known as a neo-classicist and for his magnum opus Oath of Horatii.
It’s a much debated picture not least for the grouping of the soldiers and the women to their right.
Frankly, it’s not my bag, even less Ingres, a pupil of David, who is too formal and stiff for my taste.
Finally, Britain’s Lost Masterpieces on BBC 4.
In The Godfather, Pete Clemenza is allowed to set up his own family.
So art historian Bendor Grosvenor contributed to Fake or Fortune and now has his own programme in which he researches into the provenance of art in stately homes and museums.
This week it was a Renaissance portrait in Tatton Hall, Cheshire, once owned by the Egerton family and now a National Trust property.
Bendor Grosvenor is amiable enough and erudite but co-presenter Emma Dabiyi grates on me with her simpering way.
It’s also very contrived.
The picture under review was first thought to be by Parmaganino then attributed to Florentine Francesco Salvato.
Ms Dabiyi tramped round Tatton Hall giving us the social history. You learn much about picture restoration and Renaissance art but you do not get the final “punchline’ of whether it is a fake or not.
