What follows is not a review, as I have not been able to visit this exhibition, currently in Geneva. However, I have been sent the link to the exhibition catalogue, which I will share at the end of this brief introduction to an important, striking and moving series of works on the increasingly relevant theme of Statelessness. Minority artists, who have all had personal experience of Statelessness, either currently or previously, were asked to submit five works relating to themes relating to Statelessness. There were thirty nine submissions from twenty three different countries and the judges decided on three winners and four honourable mentions and the work of all seven artists can be seen in the online catalogue.
Multiple variants of discrimination against minorities ,such as on ethnic, religious, nationality, linguistic grounds can lead to the denial of citizenship. There are now 4.2 million stateless people worldwide. This exhibition marks the 30th anniversary of the UN Declaration of Minority Rights and is a timely visual reminder of the fraught and fragmentary existence of those unfortunate enough to find themselves in the situation of Statelessness across the globe. I will give a brief overview of each of the winners and include a visual for each artist.
The first winner , as mentioned in the catalogue, is Abdullah, who experienced Statelessness in Myanmar, as a member of the Rohingya minority community , and is currently in a refugee camp, Cox’s Bazar , in Bangladesh. He is a photographer and videographer and poignantly records, in documentary detail , the daily lives of people in the camp. He does this with great sensitivity, dealing with his subjects with empathy and portraying them with considerable dignity. His work is extremely moving.
The next artist , Jean Philippe Moiseau, initially from Haiti and now living in the Dominican Republic, is very different . He is an artist and sculptor, frequently using ‘found’ and recycled items in his work . The judges found his use of traditional materials and techniques to convey a radical political message compelling . I have chosen his visual critique of the 2013 ruling of Constitutional Court of the Dominican Republic revoking the Dominican Republic nationality for many Haitians.
The final winner, Zehra Hassan Marian is an artist , working in watercolours and ink, and author ,who was born in Kuwait, a member of the Ayam minority. She now lives in the USA , where she has gained citizenship. Her work, as catalogued here , comprises a children’s book, ‘ Where Butterflies Fill the Sky: A story of immigration, family and finding home’ . It is a distinctive contribution as it offers a hopeful message directed towards immigrant children.
I cannot do justice here to the range of artists and media used in this exhibition in the elucidation of the theme of Statelessness, the title has a link to the competition and this is the link to the online catalogue for further information on this crucial topic.
On a quick visit to France and this hotel in Tours inspired the Gallery Tart to pick up her pen!
We were just on an overnight stop and our fellow traveller had nosed out this little boutique hotel as a characterful place to stay. We weren’t disappointed, situated in a lovely old house, it was just off the main drag of bars and restaurants that fill Rue Colbert.
It has a lovely welcoming feel, we walked into the tiny reception and were met by a warm smile by one of the owners. There is admittedly no lift and the room was up two flights of the beautiful spiral staircase but our cases were brought up and we were too busy looking at the decor and marvelling at the ironwork on the staircase to notice too much. The rooms were comfortably furnished and had a lovely balcony onto the street below.
But what makes this hotel is the decor. It’s gorgeous, you’re in that eye of the artist that I love. It’s not wildly polished, but that’s the point, it’s real, it’s tactile. The foyer and reception are a delight, an antique gramophone in the corner, gorgeous vintage chandeliers and a use of colour that creates a sense intimacy with echoes of fabulous, naughty pasts.
I loved the bamboo mirrors in the reception which propelled you to to a sense of wider shores. In the dining room at breakfast the style continued. the tables were beautifully set with old crockery and the buffet had old teapots to use. All of which comes together with good quality ingredients for a filling breakfast to set off your day on.
A lovely little nook of a place to rest your weary bones and a hop, skip and a jump away from the delights of Tours!
Following a very successful series of films relating usually to specific art exhibitions, thirty-one to date, the latest offering, on the American Modernist artist, Edward Hopper (1882- 1967), takes a rather different approach. It has the format of a biopic and it examines, in particular, the under appreciated importance of Hopper’s wife and fellow artist, Josephine Nivison. She promoted his career, offered artistic help and critical support, as well as generally acting as his manager and muse. She was the more established artist of the two when they met; Hopper having spent ten years prior to meeting her unable to promote his work and gain recognition. In many ways it is a familiar story. There are other more well-known examples in art history of female artists sublimating their own undoubted talents and ambitions in the promotion of their spouse. One such example is the relationship between Jackson Pollock and his wife Lee Krasner and her work has been recently celebrated. This film feeds into the current debate about why there are fewer female artists celebrated throughout the history of art, including in recent times.
Morning Sun 1942
Like other films of this series, it relies on expert opinion from the art world, as well as the use of essays, diaries, archival footage and in this case, statements from the artist himself. The film is unhurried and this gentle pace allows reflection and detailed appraisal of a wide range of paintings and close ups. The film includes less known more surprising works, as well as the usual favourites, such as ‘Night Hawks’ and ‘Office at Night’. Work ranging over his entire career is covered and there is an interesting section on his formative years in Paris and the influence of French artists, especially Manet, on his choice of modern life, everyday subjects and his treatment of them. Other than this brief interlude in Paris, his career was totally based in the States and he favoured a reclusive life, almost exclusively relying on his wife to be his model. The film makes the point that this frustrated his wife both artistically and personally and caused considerable tension and resentment in their marriage.
Hopper, at that point in American Modernism, presents as a singular artist in pursuit of a new realism and not dabbling in any of the modern trends leading away from figurative art to greater abstraction. His particular appeal to a modern audience is usually attributed to the sense of alienation, anomie and isolation that is frequently observed in his work. Hopper, in an interview, distances himself from these interpretations, saying, for example, of a solitary woman impassively gazing out of a window, that he is merely depicting a woman looking out of window. He also attempts to defy any attempt to place his work in a genre category, for example portraiture or landscape. For many, and I include myself, Hopper’s particular appeal lies in an ambiguity in his paintings that lend themselves to a plurality of narratives. Some of the experts in the film gave interpretations and I found myself disagreeing with them.
Cape Cod Morning 1950
I was eager to find out more about the work of Josephine Nivison and the film does show some of her early work and juxtaposes it with her husband’s work completed after meeting her and the influence is clear. She introduces him to watercolour techniques. The couple even sat side by side, painting the same subjects and when the completed works are juxtaposed on the screen give an intriguing insight into their differing techniques and approaches. Throughout his career she helps also suggesting sites and subjects for his paintings. I became very curious to learn more about the story of this clearly remarkable artist and woman and so was delighted that she put in a surprise and sparky appearance towards the end of the film and towards the end of their lives. Perhaps there will be a reassessment of her work?
I enjoyed this film and felt I gained a new perspective on Hopper’s work. The case was strongly made that Hopper’s wife had a crucial role in his artistic development and wider recognition as an important twentieth century artist. Although the film does not directly relate to an exhibition, it does coincide with an exhibition of Hopper’s work at the Whitney Gallery in New York and it makes me feel I would love to make the trip to see it. I wish…There are more films forthcoming, which do relate directly to current exhibitions, for example the recently opened Cezanne exhibition at the Tate Modern in London. I would highly recommend this series of Exhibitions on Screen to those who have yet to see them.
I was eagerly anticipating my visit to MKG to see the latest show, a retrospective of Vivian Maier’s photographic oeuvre, only discovered in 2007. Her story is a dramatic one. She was a nanny in New York and Chicago, who led a dual life as an obsessive photographer. The archive of her prolific work was auctioned off, having been stored in a Chicago storage locker, when she was no longer able to afford the payments. This exciting discovery was made just two years before Maier’s death in 2009, she was born in 1926.
Having previously watched the documentary, Finding Vivian Maier, I had formed some ideas about the life and work of this extraordinary, hugely talented and largely self-taught photographer. I wanted to find out more and was confident, having seen the two previous excellent exhibitions at MKG, celebrating the work of two other under celebrated female 20th century artists, Laura Knight and Ingrid Pollard, that this show would be interesting and thought provoking. I was not disappointed.
The selection of images, black and white and colour and also some film and audio recordings cannot have been an easy task as the archive comprised around 150,000 items, spanning 45 years of work. The curator, Anne Morin, has judiciously selected 146 images, mainly street scene vignettes and portraits shot in both New York and Chicago from the 1950’s to 1970’s and predominantly black and white images.
I was surprised to learn about Maier’s early life, usefully chronicled in the exhibition, as I had made certain assumptions about her as a quintessentially American photographer and a reclusive person. In fact, although she was born in New York, her parents were European immigrants, her mother French and her father Austrian and she spent her early childhood in France, eventually returning to France to sell a property she had inherited. She also spent a period travelling extensively around Europe, as well as America and Canada.
These biographical details interested me and informed my view of her as a flaneuse, seemingly unobtrusively capturing and chronicling eclectic aspects of urban American life. The persona of a family nanny, accompanied on many of her photographic expeditions by her charges, enabled her to traverse New York and Chicago and engage with whoever caught her eye, rich and poor, particularly the latter as her work reveals a profound empathy with the marginalised and dispossessed.
Certainly, there are photographs that show an eye for architectural detail; they are technically highly accomplished and beautifully composed but, for me, these are not her most striking works. I find her particular skill is shown in the photos depicting people, often children, in these urban settings and offering images that are characterised by subtle detail and mystery. There are stories that the viewer can infer from these enigmatic, poignant and sometimes confrontational images. She interrogates the psycho-geography of the cities that provide her subject matter.
Although Maier is undoubtedly an enigma, she does reveal much about herself in her choice and treatment of the subjects that she selects for forensic, but also sympathetic, scrutiny. I find it ironic that a nanny in charge of children from wealthy families should majorly focus on children from clearly impoverished backgrounds, whom she depicts with such compassion and empathy. For example, a photo of a young, scruffy, rather grubby girl juxtaposes the frontal close up image of the girl with the background of an up-market haberdashery shop displaying gloves. The little girl’s face is streaked with dirt and on closer inspection we can see tears and yet she stands, arms crossed, in a confrontational pose. It is a poignant, touching, unsentimental image. Another image I found arresting and affecting is of two small “tear away” boys who look both tough and vulnerable and must have been worlds away from the milieu in which Maier operated as a nanny. She obviously somehow gained the trust of these children to allow her to take these telling photographs.
There are other images in the exhibition where it is not so clear that she sought or gained permission to take the photographs. For example, there is a desperately sad, poignant image of a homeless man, not facing the camera, but bent over in a foetal position. In another image her focus is on the legs and feet of a woman, elegantly shod, and next to her a small child wearing slightly scuffed boots and wrinkled leggings and, in a typically Maier detail, the child is shown clinging on to the mother’s skirt.
Maier can find expression and poetry in even the smallest of details and she would seem to have a fascination with legs. In one of her colour photographs, she depicts a park bench, painted bright red and yellow and we see a woman lying on the bench. We do not see her face nor upper body but the little detail of her scuffed shoes lends itself to imagined possible narratives. She wears a bright blue skirt; we see a few inches of this above her knees. It is a quirky, almost playful image, provoking first a smile but then a deeper reflection about the woman. The green of the park background makes the image a pleasing one, both in terms of the colour contrasts and the composition. Maier’s images always repay a close and considered examination.
In yet another image, the issue of the consent of the subject is particularly called into question as it shows the female subject in both an unflattering and intimate light. It depicts a middle-aged woman in a changing room and the picture is taken from behind the woman and shows her exposed and vulnerable in her underwear, her flesh bulging and escaping the confines of the garment. The viewer certainly feels like a voyeur looking at images like these. In Maier’s defence, it should be stressed that she had kept her work largely private, as far as we know, and indeed did not even have the money nor facilities to print out most of her work. Many of her images were therefore unseen by her. In her summation of the exhibition and her evaluation of Maier’s legacy and place in the canon of twentieth century photography, the curator draws attention to these ethical considerations that are exposed when we examine Maier’s work. It would be a huge loss, however, if the public did not get to see this unique photographic talent.
Grey Area?
On one level I have the impression of Maier as a rather private, shy individual and so I was fascinated by a relatively large number of her self – portraits, displayed throughout the exhibition. Many of these are highly stylised, using images within images, deploying frames, mirrors, window panes, metallic surfaces, a still life arrangement of her clothing and conjuring up mystery and ambiguity through the use of reflections and shadows. These comprise some of her most experimental and innovative works. The impulse behind this relentless self-scrutiny is perhaps puzzling as she appeared to be without any personal vanity, not at all self-promotional and indeed indifferent to recognition. She did not take these photographs for public consumption.
I particularly liked the image of her clearly defined by her craft which opens the exhibition. There is technical experimentation but the lasting impression of her is of a youthful professional, focused intently on her obsession of photography. Of the other images that I have selected two experiment with shadows; the first one uses reflective ‘gazing balls’, where her reflection seems to float in the middle of her shadow; the second uses colour and projects her shadowy image on to a buttercup meadow. These shadowy presences suggest that effectively her craft was seminal to her identity and they signify more about her in terms of self-portraiture than a more straightforward attempt of formal, posed likeness. The coloured image is a charming, quirky and surprising image. The final self-portrait in the show is a striking, ambiguous still life of just her dark unfussy, utilitarian coat with her distinctive red hat. It is an image of absences, poignant and very typically reflective of Maier’s lack of ego and vanity. It felt fitting to display this image in the final room as it suggests a summation of her art in terms of the notion of the unobtrusive flaneuse, who is defined by her work in observing life around her and herself in relation to it.
This arresting and thought-provoking exhibition runs at the MKG until the end of September 2022 and I would urge anyone with an interest in 20th century photography and/or a very particular visual perspective on the streets and people of urban New York and Chicago between the 1950’s and 1970’s to visit at least once. There is much to see and every image has a worthy place in this exhibition; I was struck by the consistently high standard of her work. The documentation of time and place, with the wealth of detail, is striking, but so too is the humanity evident in her treatment of the individuals she captures on film. It has a special beauty and style that impresses and the images stay in the imagination even after leaving the exhibition. It has left me wanting to see more of her work and learn more about her and that is certainly the marker of a successful exhibition.
Gallery Tart Reviews 