WORK OF THE WEEK: Alice Neel, Self Portrait,1980

‘LIFE BEGINS AT SEVENTY!’(Alice Neel)

Alice Neel, Self Portrait,1980,Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery,Washington D.C.

The American artist Alice Neel (1900-1984) was 80 when she finished her first painted self-portrait-one of only two she made. Neel stuck to portraiture at a time when Abstract Expressionism was all the rage, often depicting marginalized figures, the poor, her black neighbours in Harlem,New York, or political activists;  not the traditional subjects of mid-20th century America. One critic observed that in making portraits, Neel ‘hurls shafts that hit the mark but do not sting’. Her portrayals are psychological, penetrating and compassionate. They can make you smile and bring tears to your eyes in equal measure. This work took five years to finish -her cheeks are flushed because she said ‘it was so damn hard!’ With characteristic honesty and empathy, she chose to depict herself unapologetically naked, perching  on her striped  chair, with definite echoes of Matisse and Picasso. She depicts herself  as artist AND sitter-pretty radical for a woman in her 80s…ferociously biting  the historical hand of the idealized female nude. Neel presents us with her aging body in all its glory! She stares defiantly at both herself (behind the easel) and at us-one eyebrow raised in a mischievous challenge to us for looking. It is a celebration of her courage for telling it as it is.

WORK OF THE WEEK: VERONICA RYAN WINNER OF TURNER PRIZE 2022

Finally! After several years of banal, pretentious, over explained offerings, we have a Turner Prize winner who really deserves our celebration. Hooray! for Veronica Ryan, with her beautiful, soft, squidgy meditative and truly poetic sculptures- soft and stretchy, plumped up like pillows, arranged like shells or pebbles on a shelf, or hanging in net bags that stretch and bulge, like fresh produce from the veg market. They evoke found things, bits and pieces washed up on a beach or thrown away in a skip – but are artfully cast. Many of her sculptures are based on the flora of Montserrat, the Caribbean island where she was born in 1956: soursop skins and cocoa pods, glazed with the island’s volcanic ash. These vegetable forms suggest history, culture, life, AND place; from the fruit itself- unpeeling to reveal both cherished and painful memories. Her winning works included the giant Caribbean fruit sculptures that were unveiled in Hackney, in east London in October 2021 in tribute to the Windrush generation who moved from the Caribbean to the UK after 1948. It was the first permanent public artwork to commemorate the Windrush story.

Fruits, seeds, plants and vegetables are recurring motifs in Ryan’s sculpture – they function metaphorically for the artist’s own sense of dislocation and in a wider context, they refer to a history of trading across the globe amd the legacy of empire and exploitation.

Born in 1956 in Montserrat, she moved to the UK when she was a small child. Her interest in art developed during her school years. In particular, she remembers making a Christmas tree in infant school and being inspired by the creative use of materials in a minimalistic way. She also cites her mother's patchwork as an inspiration for her art.

Ryan was keen to break out of the mould of male-centric British modernism as it was taught in the seventies and eighties by drawing on a wider range of female sculptors and artists of colour. Among her earliest influences was the German-born American sculptor Eva Hesse, whose work she saw first-hand in 1979, at an exhibition at London’s Whitechapel Gallery. Around the same time, Ryan discovered the work of Louise Bourgeois. Another formative influence was British sculptor Barbara Hepworth.

Ryan completed her arts studies, which included Slade and School of Oriental and African Studies , at the beginning of the 1980s, a time marked by the rise of the British Black Art Movement. She took part in the ICA’s seminal exhibition The Thin Black Line (London, 1985) and From Two Worlds ( London and Edinburgh, 1986) and this connected her with a broader anti-racist movement although later she felt the need to stress that her work should not be pinned exclusively to race: ‘All along I have had various people be very critical of me because I did not fit into their politicized agenda,’ she said.

At 66 she is the oldest winner in the Turner prize's 38-year history. When her name was announced she shouted out ‘POWER! VISIBILITY!" You bet! For more than twenty years she has been in the shadows- ‘no one was paying attention to my work’ she said. Not a chance of that now. Many congratulations to Veronica Ryan!

Veronica Ryan, picture courtesy of Hackney Council, 2021

Veronica Ryan, Along a Spectrum, 2021, Spike Island Gallery Bristol, photograph by Max McClure






Hell is Other People?- The Future of the City

Here are a few images from one of my lectures ‘Picturing the City’. An opportunity to reflect as we slowly re-emerge after collective lockdowns…

Gustave Caillebotte, The Bridge of Europe, 1876, Musée du Petit Palais, Paris

Gustave Caillebotte, The Bridge of Europe, 1876, Musée du Petit Palais, Paris

What’s going to happen to our city centres? In the age of pandemic, shops, offices, and restaurants have been firmly off limits-city centres reduced to quiet retreats. Since 2007 more than half the world’s population now officially live in cities but it is tempting to wonder how this will change in a world which has become so traumatised by the effects of pandemic. Hell has certainly been other people, to take the French philosopher Jean Paul Sartre’s phrase. So will we now shun the crowds of the city in favour of seemingly safer rural life?

Artists have long been fascinated by the city and city life-certainly since the 19th century the city has been used as a trope to represent modernity. Gustave Caillebotte’s The Bridge of Europe from 1876-a classic example of a modern life Parisian street scene.

Camille Pissarro, The Boulevard Montmartre at Night, 1897, National Gallery, London

Camille Pissarro, The Boulevard Montmartre at Night, 1897, National Gallery, London

The electrification of cities was a popular aesthetic for Impressionists like Camille Pissarro. Paris, like London, began to be electrified at the beginning of the 1880s creating a very different sort of urban experience from the more vaporous, hazy gaslights at the beginning of the century. This painting is alive with light: the repeated patters of flickering carriage lights, the street lamps, the shop windows. Streets which might have been dark and dangerous were now enticing and energetic.

John Atkinson Grimshaw, Liverpool Quay by Moonlight, 1887,Tate

John Atkinson Grimshaw, Liverpool Quay by Moonlight, 1887,Tate

John Atkinson Grimshaw was famous for his night scenes of urban landscapes-in particular these views of docks in northern cities such as Liverpool and Hull. The golden glow cast from the shops through the fog and drizzle reflected on the wet cobble stones created a new type of urban aesthetic. The divisions between inside and outside spaces-shop and street- were loosened through the mesmerising effects of electrical lighting.

Hatekeyama Naoya, display at Tate Modern, Night-time Tokyo

Hatekeyama Naoya, display at Tate Modern, Night-time Tokyo

Night time images of Tokyo from the 1990s

Pierre Auguste Renoir, Dance at le Moulin de la Galette, 1876, Musée d’Orsay

Pierre Auguste Renoir, Dance at le Moulin de la Galette, 1876, Musée d’Orsay

Nicole Eisenman, Brooklyn Biergarten II,2008

Nicole Eisenman, Brooklyn Biergarten II,2008

Will the crowds return to our cities?

Giorgio de Chirico, The Enigma of the Day, 1914, MOMA

Giorgio de Chirico, The Enigma of the Day, 1914, MOMA

The empty streets of the Italian artist Giorgio de Chirico, painted in 1914 as Europe braced for what was to be a truly cataclysmic war-and one which was followed by the last world pandemic-the Spanish flu of 1918-1922.

Hey Ho! We can always rely on art to cheer us up!

Picturing the City-How Artists Depicted the City is available as a longer lecture. Please contact me for further details



A Breath of Fresh Paint: A Revival of Figurative Art and the Changing Face of Portraiture


#mydressmychoice” (2015) by Michael Armitage (© Michael Armitage, photo © White Cube/George Darrell)

#mydressmychoice” (2015) by Michael Armitage (© Michael Armitage, photo © White Cube/George Darrell)

Who says painting is dead? The curators of a new show at London’s Whitechapel Gallery would have us believe that painting had its last hurrah in the 1980s. The stock market boom, powered by the wolves of Wall Street and Square Mile wide- boys, was bankrolling the neo-expressionist swagger of artists like Julian Schnabel, Georg Baselitz and Philip Guston. That “hurrah” was best exemplified by the seminal show at the Royal Academy in 1981, A New Spirit of Painting, which featured 38 artists—all, incidentally, white men—who broke free from the chains of minimalism and abstraction to champion figurative art.

Since then, according to the Whitechapel curators, representational painting has lost its appeal, is past its sell-by date, and has been largely overtaken by photography and video produced by ambitious young artists. In a century dominated by digital photography (a jaw-dropping 1.8 billion images are uploaded every day) how can painting ever compete?

For your answer, walk around Radical Figures: Painting in the New Millennium. Instagram selfies are so last year: this is a show articulating topical social issues with new energy, showing how the paintbrush is so much more powerful than the camera in its capacity to portray an inner psychological world, of the self, the body, race and gender. Reports of the death of figurative painting have been greatly exaggerated. Chris Ofili, Peter Doig, or Luc Tuymans, to name but a few established figurative painters, are not exactly languishing in obscurity, despite the ubiquitousness of the photography or conceptual art installations that continue to bemuse most gallery visitors.

Curatorial headline-grabbing aside, Radical Figures deserves attention. The Whitechapel’s director, Iwona Blazwick, says it highlights 10 of the “most exciting artists working in figurative painting today”. In stark contrast with the 1981 Royal Academy show, seven of the painters are women and four are artists of colour. The choice is inevitably subjective: who is to say there would not be 10 completely different “exciting” artists chosen at another venue? Well, the more the merrier. This is a truly enthralling vibrant display of young talent.

“Tarifa” (2001) by Daniel Richter (courtesy of Galerie Thaddeus Ropac, London)

“Tarifa” (2001) by Daniel Richter (courtesy of Galerie Thaddeus Ropac, London)

The dialogue with art history is genuine. Tarifa (2001), by the German Daniel Richter, evokes the notion of the sublime and the terror of dramas at sea, referencing Theodore Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa and Turner’s The Shipwreck. Painted at the time when night vision technology started to be used by the military and the police, it is a harrowing and alarmingly prescient image showing a small inflatable raft tossed in a dark sea, overloaded with refugees huddling in fear.

Nicole Eisenman’s Brooklyn Biergarten II (2008)

Nicole Eisenman’s Brooklyn Biergarten II (2008)

Nicole Eisenman’s Brooklyn Biergarten II (2008), painted at the height of the 2008 crash, shows artists, hipsters and businessmen drowning their sorrows, echoing Édouard Manet’s masterpiece of Parisian bourgeois entertainment, Music in the Tuileries (1862); her Progress, Real and Imagined (2006), below, meanwhile, has clear references to Pieter Bruegel and Hieronymus Bosch.

But painters have always engaged in visual conversations with their predecessors. Turner was, after all, known as the “British Claude”.

Right panel of “Progress, Real and Imagined” (2006) by Nicole Eisenman (courtesy of Ringier AG/Sammlung Ringier, Switzerland)

Right panel of “Progress, Real and Imagined” (2006) by Nicole Eisenman (courtesy of Ringier AG/Sammlung Ringier, Switzerland)

Kenyan-born Michael Armitage uses social media videos as a source for his subjects. #mydressmychoice (2015) - see above-is taken from an incident in 2014 in which a woman was assaulted and stripped by a group of men while waiting for a bus in Nairobi. The attackers accused the victim, who wore a miniskirt, of “tempting” them with “indecent” clothing. The attack was captured on a video that was posted on YouTube and went viral. Thousands took to the streets in uproar, under the hashtag #MyDressMyChoice.

In this work, the pose of the woman is a direct reference to Diego Velàzquez’s Rokeby Venus, the mirror replaced by the “male gaze” of the attackers’ shoes. Armitage tells me that the fascination lies in the conflation of beauty with something truly horrible and violent. “Painting is still and silent, so it gives us more time to reflect on the full horrors of what this scene depicts”. Precisely because it consists of recognisable images articulated through paint, figurative work, Armitage claims, unlike abstraction or conceptual art, is a far more powerful way of engaging and reflecting life.

This reinvigoration of figurative painting has been especially championed among black artists, such as the British artist Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s enigmatic portraits of imagined black subjects (a retrospective of her work was scheduled to be at Tate Britain from May 20 to August 31; the Tate galleries are now closed until at least June 1), and the Chicago-based Kerry James Marshall. In both cases it is figurative painting that lends greater potency to the representation of issues of identity and racial stereotyping.

Kehinde Wiley is a young African-American painter who is quite literally changing the faces of portraiture with his pulsating and political depictions of black men and women, ranging from young people he meets on the street (a process he calls “streetcasting”) to rap artists, and even Barack Obama, whose 2018 portrait now hangs in the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington DC. Wiley has made his name with hyper-realistic, brightly coloured portraits, often with dramatic botanical backdrops. He challenges viewers’ preconceptions of people of colour and brings them into museums and galleries where they have, up to now, been largely excluded. His works are represented in every major museum in the United States.

His portraits give power to those without it, turning the privileged and elitist identity of traditional portraiture— the “field of power”—on its head.

Installation view of “Portrait of Melissa Thompson” by Kehinde Wiley. (© Kehinde Wiley, 2020. Courtesy Stephen Friedman Gallery, London. Photography by Nicola Tree)

Installation view of “Portrait of Melissa Thompson” by Kehinde Wiley. (© Kehinde Wiley, 2020. Courtesy Stephen Friedman Gallery, London. Photography by Nicola Tree)

Wiley’s latest venture is a collaboration with the William Morris Gallery in Walthamstow in London. Long inspired by the floral motifs of William Morris, he first came to know the designs while helping his mother sell bric-à-brac in South Central Los Angeles in the 1980s. In what must surely be a coup for the gallery, this is his first solo exhibition at a public institution in the UK. It is also the first time he features portraits exclusively of women, all of whom he met last summer in Dalston. Kehinde Wiley: The Yellow Wallpaper takes its name from the 1892 text “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The short story, much loved by literary theorists, is a semi-autobiographical and proto-feminist tale of a new mother confined to her bedroom after being diagnosed with “hysteria”. The room’s yellow wallpaper design takes on a monstrous life of its own, contributing to her paranoia. It is a consuming, psychological parable of the dangers of denying women their independence. In deliberate contrast, Wiley’s Dalston women break out of their yellow wallpaper like powerful warriors; they are palpably not objects of consumption for the male gaze or control.

Wiley’s work is right at home in a museum dedicated to Morris, the great socialist maverick who passionately believed that art and design could change people’s lives. These monumental East End women are immortalised in a Grand Manner style in an artform previously reserved for royalty, aristocratic landowners or simply the very rich and famous. Museums can no longer afford to ignore or exclude culturally the people who live their lives outside their doors. Wiley’s portraits address centuries of inequality and lack of representation with scintillating and empowering images that turn the genre on its head.

Installation view of “Portrait of Dorinda Essah” by Kehinde Wiley. (© Kehinde Wiley, 2020. Courtesy Stephen Friedman Gallery, London. Photography by Nicola Tree)

Installation view of “Portrait of Dorinda Essah” by Kehinde Wiley. (© Kehinde Wiley, 2020. Courtesy Stephen Friedman Gallery, London. Photography by Nicola Tree)

Radical Figures: Painting in the New Millennium” is at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, and will run until August 30th. Kehinde Wiley: The Yellow Wallpaper” was at the William Morris Gallery. The gallery is still shut due to Covid; please check website for reopening news

This article appeared in the March 2020 edition of Standpoint Magazine