For those of you who appreciate my writing, please consider five ways of indirectly assisting me.
Donate to me via www.ko-fi.com/alexanderadams Small donations add up and help to pay for articles I write, many of which are unpaid.
Subscribe to my Substack newsletter/blog here: www.alexanderadamsart.substack.com It contains material very similar to this WordPress site but also some extra content. If you become a paid subscriber ($5 per month, $50 per year) you gain access to exclusive content including articles, reviews, opinion piece, extracts of my books and offers.
Consider subscribing to the The Jackdaw (“independent views on the visual arts”, featuring journalism, news, artist profiles, exhibition and book reviews and contributor letters, six issues per year), subscribe here: The Jackdaw You will also be supporting independent journalism.
Consider purchasing my books. The Naked Spur (Exeter House, 2025) my autobiographical novel can be bought here. Culture War: Art, Identity Politics and Cultural Entryism (2019, Societas/Imprint Academic), Iconoclasm, Identity Politics and the Erasure of History (2020, Societas/Imprint Academic) and Artivism: The Battle for Museums in the Era of Postmodernism (2022, Societas/Imprint Academic) are available via the publisher’s website here. Women and Art: A Post-Feminist View (2022, Academica Press) is available via the publisher’s website here. Degas and Magritte (both 2022, Prestel) and all the other books mentioned are available via bookshops and book-selling websites. Other books by me include fiction, verse and art published by Aloes Books, Golconda, Bottle of Smoke Press and Pig Ear Press. These books can be bought here https://www.bournbrookmag.com/books/.
Sharing my online articles here and on Substack.
Rating my books on Amazon, Goodreads and other websites.
With pleasure and trepidation, I introduce you to my new book How to Start a Dissident Art Movement. As part of the re-thinking of the core principles I need to honour, I made a decisive break when I composed this book. I decided to move away from the disembodied advocacy of previous books and reviews, towards something that admitted I was in the art world about which I was writing. Having recently acknowledged that the neutrality of detached commentary was delusion and a means of concealing one’s group and self-interests, omitting the fact that art has an intrinsic partiality – utility as a means of advancing one’s values – it was not sustainable. A new book had to admit my discussions from quasi-neutral stance were not viable.
I have skin in the game and (if you care about Western culture) you do too. Let’s not pretend that this is not something on our minds and something that weighs on our hearts as we see another beloved institution erase part of its (and our) history, mock the masters and deplete its authority. It matters because if it did not, European high culture would have been so revered and carefully preserved and (consequently) so precisely targeted for subversion and usurpation by its opponents. I had treated opposing erosion of high culture as a matter of preference; now I was clear it was a matter civilisational survival. The stages were incalculably high.
In a new book I wanted to step over journalism and the sort of cultural analysis. I did not want to yet again complain about our social ailments and institutional decline. We have read so much commentary on that already that to put out another book (or article) decrying our situation would be an amplification of pessimism, amounting to assisting in a campaign of demoralisation. It is incumbent on anyone serious about the topic – after duly having established the nature of our crisis – to thereafter step over the culture wars and work towards presenting a counsel of hope not despair.
Why have so few of us historical centrists (holding views and values commonplace until a century ago) done so? Firstly, criticising is easy, especially as there is so much to justly criticise. The targets are unavoidably large and important; the causes of degradation are not difficult to identify. Secondly, offering a positive vision is often divisive. The historical centrists can easily unite against the sectarian interests of non-Europeans, the trojan horses of liberalism and the bio-Leninism of the progressivist managerial technocracy, yet when one says what one does want, their arguments start. Must the future of the arts be a form of traditionalism? If so, should it be traditionalism-in-spirit (perennial traditionalism) or a literal revival of the imagery and morality of chivalric medievalism (a sort of retvrn-to-tradition Arts & Crafts)? Suddenly, the solidarity that unites dissidents when they face the grotesque artivism and tokenism animating the corpse of state-funded fine arts evaporates as artists start promoting their preferred art style and aesthetic ethos.
Yet we have to have these conversations. I chose as a title How to Start a Dissident Art Movement because it was absurd and provocative but also aspirational and exhilarating. I wanted it to be a title that reflected accurately a book that supporters would be passionate about – the sort of book they’d thrust into the hands of artist-colleagues – and one that would also enrage sceptics, liberalists and traditionalists. The mere title alone should divide a room. I wanted sceptics to get the book in order to shred it with their own polemics only to find at least some parts of my arguments unassailable, gratingly obdurate, and to leave them thoughtfully unsettled. Whether the book does that, only you can judge.
In the book I debunk the idea that localism is any refuge, at least in the short term. I propose Modernism and vitalism as vigorous routes for future art. I look at the strengths and weaknesses of the British and American variants of National Futurism. Rather than a movement or school with a unified style or aesthetics, National Futurism looks to be shaping up as a platform. Alongside pieces you may have seen on my Substack (albeit expanded and lightly revised in the book), there are essays that are unpublished and designed to link with the previous topics. In “Twelve Rules for Artists” I give short pieces of advice that (if followed) help to make artists better, although they may not make the life of the artist easier. Too often, taking the easier route leads to compromise and failure, as I have found out to my cost. The rules are the sort of recommendations I wished I had had when I was a student. I may well have received some such advice from others when I was younger, only for me to forget it. Well, here is my reformulation.
At the end of the book, there are personal letters and postcards written by me on the subject of art and about being an artist. They show the origins of my ideas and how the approaches I have described in essays have played out in practice. In casual language I make points more forcefully or apply my ideas in encounters with exhibitions or artists. If art discussion is committed and subjective, then there is no reason not to engage in the sort of non-formal approach to art found in letters selected from the last 15 years. The selection also gives a glimpse of how artists talk to each other. It is the style of conversation I have overheard at opening nights and in the studio.
How to Start a Dissident Art Movement is a book that says goodbye to the last vestiges of liberalism in my public writing. No longer is there the hope (or desire) to return to the status quo of the 1990s; gone is the hope that restraint, reason or appeal to the aesthetic critical faculties will change the minds of those intent on undermining the achievements of the great figures of the past; banished is the dream of reconciliation – that form of grudging piecemeal surrender to the implacable opponent who gives nothing in return – and in its place arises a tough resolution. My intention is to move away from culture war discussion entirely; the essays in the book put a full-stop on topics I have previously covered (public statuary, iconoclasm, the failures of liberalism, tradition-as-form). They may act as decisive closures for me, allowing me to pursue new routes.
I wonder what readers will make of my most forthright and yet also most personal book. If it is treated with curiosity and generosity of spirit then I could not wish for anything better.
Alexander Adams, How to Start a Dissident Art Movement, Imperium Press, PB/HB/EB, xiii + 233pp, PB $19/£15, 9 Sept. 2025. How can buy the e-book and paperback through the publisher. NB The hardback will only be available through the publisher: https://www.imperiumpress.org/shop/how-to-start-a-dissident-art-movement/ . You can buy the e-book and paperback through all bookselling websites and shops.
Often, when we think of Romanticism, we think of a liberated imagination but a very constricted veristic technique. Even the mistiness of the mountains of Friedrich are precise in their softness and ambiguity – it is distilled and calculated. The arid plains of Dalí’s Ampurda and the gently graded skies above have the same exactitude. In the Nineteenth Century art we discern a broad consensus on technique, namely that clarity aids the imagination. Description of the unworldly demands the artist put in sufficient work and persuasive description to allow us to grasp the meaning of his unexpected proposition. In the minority are those Romantic artists who follow the loose technique of Turner, whose imagination is to do with space, light and colour rather than the precisely depicted phantasmagoric. One exception is Moreau, who moved between detailed description of the astonishing motif and a loosely implied setting of grandiose or exotic character.
Another exception is the writer-author Victor Hugo (1802-1885), whose drawings can be seen in Astonishing Things: The Drawings of Victor Hugo, Royal Academy, London 21 March-29 June 2025, a display now entering its closing week. Hugo was a gifted draughtsman – an architectural drawing made in Belgium shows Hugo had terrific powers of observation – but his vivid imagination was the type that can interpret natural forms in fantastical ways. The grain of wood is a flowing river, a stone is a skull, a cloud is a floating fortress. In this exhibition of his ink drawings, which involve daring technique that matches the vivid imagination, we find an artist of the highest level opening his imaginative faculties in a manner few others have ever harnessed to such effect.
Aside from the adolescent activity of caricature, Hugo’s initial impetus to draw seems to have been the desire to record and transmit to correspondents what he saw abroad. He also developed fantasies, such as invented buildings, to amuse himself and others. These thoughts were part of a retreat from modern life, as (on the whole) Hugo’s real and invented scenes omit signs of contemporary life. In that sense he has the temperament of a reactionary, although his politics were to become radically liberal and progressive.
Although we might consider Hugo an amateur artist – perhaps even an outsider artist – he was considerable artist. He was an draughtsman of distinction. He was not only technically able, he was inventive and imaginative. This allowed him to take advantage of the accident, harnessing it and allowing it to become a potent expression of his aesthetic vision, conjuring castles from his daydreams on to the page. However, it would be a stretch calling the artistically untrained Hugo an outsider, given his prominent social rank, fame, riches and public acceptance – albeit aligned to the liberals, a political minority during the reign of Napoleon III.
Hugo’s political commitment is explicit in Ecce lex (1854) was drawn to protest the execution of murderer John Tapner is the weakest piece on display. It is a generic scene of a hanged man – so generic in fact that it was reused with a new title John Brown, to campaign for the cause of the convicted abolitionist sentenced to death in the USA. Repeal of capital punishment was one of the liberal causes Hugo advocated in favour of. His attempts to save Tapner and Brown failed but eventually his liberal cause prevailed. This was also the case for Hugo’s support for the campaign to abolish slavery, which Hugo claimed was a justification for treason.
The exhibition has an unfinished drawing of a harbour (from a 1843 sketchbook), which includes pencil guidelines drawn in advance of the ink lines that were applied over them. Others reveal the same approach. With other drawings, something more spontaneous and less structured seems to have been the approach. Hugo flexibility is one of his best qualities as an artist. Hugo sometimes worked by wetting a sheet of paper then applying ink in washes that bloomed and rippled. He would also scrub ink with a rag, making marks that were organic, unpredictable and uncontrollable. They are often very sophisticated in terms of manipulating the chance effects of ink wash on paper and also making deliberate designs look organic. Bunched brush bristles create of wavy parallel lines of swelling sea and falling rain.
If one were to make the case for Hugo as a fantasy artist[ii], a choice example would be Les Orientales (c. 1855-6) which has an exotic castle in silhouette under a gloomy sky.[iii] The touches of intricate gemlike colour heighten the gothic atmosphere. It is just like a depiction of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast and would serve as a good cover illustration for that book, if Peake had not already got in ahead with his own drawings. Hugo’s inconsistent political outlook – more personal and emotional than ideological in basis – included an opposition to Haussmann’s programme of modernisation of Paris, which destroyed much of the remnants of the Medieval city. On this topic, Hugo’s aristocratic sentiment and Romantic taste overrode his populism.
While Hugo spent more time drawing than writing fiction in the late 1840s, so the materials he deployed became more diverse, coming to include not just ink but watercolour, charcoal, pencil, wax and lithographic crayon. He started to use stencils to mask areas and started to collaborate with printmakers who could reproduce his compositions. The late The Castle with the Cross (1875) is a great translation of Hugo wash technique as a large (75.9 x 132.2 cm) multi-plate etching.
The gallery has glass cases holding sketchbooks and letters, also pebbles Hugo retrieved during walks and upon which he inscribed dates and places of their finding. Photographs of his Guernsey home Hauteville show how thoughtfully the author-artist curated his living space, turning it into a Gesamtkunstwerk, made from his sensibilities in order to stimulate his creative work. Hauteville – a town house in St Peter Port – is preserved to this day as a house-museum. The richly patterned furnishings have a beguiling hypnotising effect. The glazed look-out allowed Hugo to gaze directly across the sea while writing and drawing in comfort. The sea was a constant subject during his time in exile at Hauteville on Guernsey (1855-70) as well as the preceding years on Jersey (1852-5). The watery effects of ink wash suggested waves in heavy weather, ships at sea, shipwrecks and sea creatures.
Victor Hugo, Octopus, 1866-9, Brown ink and wash and graphite on paper. 24 x 20.7 cm. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département des Manuscrits
Hugo did much of his drawing during a period of grief that lasted about a decade, following the death of his daughter in 1843, a period when he did not publish and wrote little. The drawings seem primarily for his own entertainment and edification. Of an estimated 4000 drawings made, 3000 survive, many in the archive collection Maisons de Victor Hugo, based in Paris and Guernsey. Although the drawings were not exhibited publicly, they were seen by associates of the artist. Colleagues saw and were appreciative of Hugo’s drawings, with Baudelaire and Delacroix speaking warmly of them.[iv] Hugo did drawing in copies of his books which he gave to friends. There is a really accomplished and beautiful drawing (1867) of a flying bird approaching its nest, painted on the flyleaf of Les Chansons (1866). A few pictures were made for newspaper publication. It seems Hugo toyed with the idea of including his drawings as illustrations in his books but that did not come to pass until late in his lifetime.
Hugo has received particular attention over the last 80 years because he is seen as a precursor of Surrealist autonomism and Abstract Expressionism. Not least, this is due to the expressed admiration of members of these movements. Breton and Picasso bought drawings by Hugo and Breton wrote, “Victor Hugo was a precursor of Surrealism in the matter of his technical experiments, which imply a controlled dialogue with chance in order to make evident certain forces which remain hidden from us.”[v] The ambiguous haunting Dead City of c. 1850 precedes Max Ernst’s petrified forests by 80 years but is hardly different in character and freedom.
The Abstract Expressionists adopted Hugo at a more superficial level – in a similar way to how they took up the unfinished watercolour sketches of Turner – finding in his tachisme a formal correlation to de Kooning and Kline’s rough brushwork.
Beyond the technical innovations of Hugo, it is worth weighing up his attachment to spiritualism. Hugo’s liberal rationalist side is in conflict with his intuition that the artist is one of the great men (as defined by Carlyle) and as visionary speaker for his people (as proposed by Nietzsche). Many of Hugo’s champions are progressives who have little feeling for Hugo’s grandiose sense of his spiritual mission for not as an advocate for the masses as an abstract, but as artist in contact with supernatural forces, guided by spirits. Hugo was not a conventional Christian but a latter-day pantheist. Contemporary materialists’ discomfort with both the great-man theory of history and spiritualism has meant Hugo’s political rather than spiritual drive has taken the fore in interpretation. As a recent authoritative compilation of verse puts it: “His conception of the poet’s role as intermediary and interpreter between man and God, man and Nature, man and History, can seem to us the outrageous pretentiousness of an overdeveloped ego.”[vi]
Victor Hugo’s writing desk, Hauteville, Guernsey
Considering the debate over the rejection of internationalist Post-Modernism and Conceptual art purposed to the globohomo and leftist agendas, Hugo’s art is worth consideration. If we do choose to pay more attention to the Romantic and accord it a place for serious endeavours in making new art and using it to revive national mythology, then for that Romantic art to be living, Hugo’s vigorous improvisatory style is an exciting path that can counter the somewhat leaden self-conscious productions of the Retvrn to Tradition camp. Hugo’s visions of castles, monsters and sea storms give us powerfully atmospheric and dramatic scenes that spark real feeling and demand attention. Their ambiguity requires active engagement from the audience in the form of identification, concentration and reflective consideration. Surely, if we want art to draw out of viewers deep feeling, such mental and imaginative engagement is not only appropriate but necessary. Nothing kills the primordial excitement quicker than picture-book naturalism. Consider Hugo’s risks and the high standards he sets for himself and you. This should be the gold standard of new fantasy and Romantic art.
Astonishing Things: The Drawings of Victor Hugo, Royal Academy, London 21 March-29 June 2025
[i] P. 13, Sarah Lea “Double Vision: Victor Hugo’s Mind’s Eye”
[ii] As is made in William Gaunt, Painters of Fantasy, Phaidon, London, 1974, which was where I first encountered Hugo’s drawings.
[iii] Hugo had published his poem of the same name in 1829.
[iv] Delacroix: “If Hugo had decided to become a painter instead of a writer, he would have outshone the artists of their century,”
[v] Quoted, Stefanie Heraeus, Surrealism and the Visual Arts, Cambridge University Press, 2002
[vi] P. 40, William Rees, The Penguin Book of French Poetry 1820-1850, Penguin, London, 1990
“It was mid-winter when I arrived in Berlin. I had a suitcase and an English-language teaching diploma. I found an unfurnished room in a top-floor flat in Kreuzberg near the Landwehrkanal. I had a mattress but no bed. I borrowed a desk and garden chair. I spent €20 on a portable Olympia typewriter and began writing.”
Read about the origins of “The Naked Spur” my first novel. Access this new article for free here: https://tinyurl.com/yunjsf6u
I am delighted to announce the publication of my debut novel. “The Naked Spur” (Exeter House, 2025, pb, £15.99) follows the life of a painter in London slipping into failure and anonymity. He rejects the art world and begins to paint humanity’s darkest corners, unwittingly revealing his own. He quits his job. He stakes everything on a reckless scheme, battling his own paralysis and the cold indifference of others. The Naked Spur is part satire, part raw confession, exposing a man in crisis. We witness a man coming apart as the truth dissolves his dreams and he realises the part he has played in his own downfall.
You may also be interested to attend the launch in London on 28 May, info in this link, when I shall be discussing the book and signing copies Alexander Adams: Leaving Las Vegas » Verdurin
You will (within a day or two) be able to order “The Naked Spur” via all bookshops and online booksellers. The Kindle version is published on 30 May.
On the evening of 28 May 2025 I shall be appearing in London to discuss my experience of leaving the London art scene in 2003 and my first novel “The Naked Spur”, written about that event. The novel will be published on 23 May. There will be copies of the novel for sale on the day and I shall be able to sign them. This venue has very limited space and tickets must be booked in advance. This will be my only London appearance to promote the novel. Tickets are £10.
A short explanation about the circumstances of writing the novel and my motivations for writing it will appear on this channel on 23 May.
[Francis Bacon, Man in a Cap (c. 1945), approx. 37 × 29 in. (94 × 73.5 cm) irregular, private collection. (c) 2025 The Estate of Francis Bacon]
In this new volume of Francis Bacon Studies series there is a collection of new material covering the artists life, including an introduction to a friend who became the subject of a 1969 painting and discussion of the nature of forgery (including a photograph of a fake Bacon produced in Italy in the early 1970s). The publication of an interior design drawing shows us a rare glimpse of Bacon’s first artistic career as a furniture designer. A study of Bacon’s treatment of animals in his art is framed by observation of his art, comments he made on literature and scrutinisation of his library. Bacon’s depictions of animals and animal-human-hybrids were informed by his understanding of evolutionary science, as well as his encounters with animals in life and in books and journals he is known to have perused. As author Amanda J Harrison notes, although Bacon’s fertile imagination allowed mental images to appear like a series of slides, his memory was well stocked with a reservoir of pictures of animals. The Erinyes and sphinxes were conjured from fragments of poetry, ancient statuary and classical art. As always in this series, the volume is generously illustrated with paintings and pages from Bacon’s personal copies of books on art and wildlife.
X-radiography analysis of Man in a Cap (c. 1945) indicates that it was painted over a bird-biomorph figure, reminiscent of those painted in the 1930s and later destroyed. It was painted on fibreboard due to the wartime shortage of canvas. The bird-biomorph found its ultimate manifestation in the 1944 triptych. Landscape with Colonnade (c. 1945) proved practically impervious to x-rays as it was multiple sheets of paper over two boards. The results show that during the early 1940s Bacon was being frugal by reusing supports and was developing his ideas in sequential fashion over failed experiments.
At the heart of the fifth volume of the Francis Bacon Studies series is group of extracts from Bacon’s interviews with David Sylvester. It has long been known that the interviews had been heavily edited for publication. Not only was the transcript tidied up to remove slips, repetitions and verbal tics, it was also cut. The reordering was masterful, making the interviews flow in a fluent manner, in what has been described as a classic piece of literature on art. As Martin Harrison notes, Bacon also intervened in the editing process. Having seen a draft of the interviews, the painter replaced passages with pithier comments or sometimes deleted them entirely. An instance of the latter when he deleted happy reminiscences of activities as a child, presumably because it conflicted with his portrayal of an anxious sickly child at odds with familial domesticity. Unfortunately, examination of transcripts could not determine whether Sylvester or Bacon was responsible for the deletion of passages included here.
In the presentation of these extracts, it was decided to retain more of Bacon’s verbal mannerisms and not to clean up the quotes. Hence we have some rather tangled sentences, redundant clauses and unfinished trains of thought. Nonetheless, it is possible to extract the kernel of the artist’s thoughts.
We have already had some formerly cut extracts published in Sylvester’s Looking Back at Francis Bacon (2000). This collection includes a couple of those but most of the material is new, amounting to around 15,000 words. What do we get that is new? We see changes of emphasis and an expansion of ideas. We get more on the familiar roster of heroes: Degas, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Velázquez. When Bacon talks about Picasso, he speaks with great admiration for his sculpture. He talks of Picasso as essentially a realist in extremis. “We’re talking the extreme points of realism. But in a way, it’s only the extreme points that are interesting. And so that is why perhaps we seem or I seem, very dumb in talking about it, because it’s something which can’t really be formed. It’s almost impossible to form into words.”[ii] We get some distaste for the excessive expressiveness of Soutine (Bacon speaks of Soutine at his most extreme as “brutalised El Greco”). On Manet, Bacon comments, “I think that a wonderful bowl of flowers, or the peaches, of the ham, or things that Manet did were really greater than Olympia.”[iii]
Handsome formulations arise but one can see why these comments were dropped in favour of very similar sentiments phrased a little differently. Such as, “Practically nobody feels anything about painting they only think about the stories in painting.”[iv] This relates to the problem of commenters having a fixation on the origins of art that obscures appreciation of finished works. “The trouble of telling people about sources of things is that they over-emphasise the sources, because for some reason they always find it difficult to write about my work, except disagreeably […] they over-emphasise things that I have told them.”[v]
Bacon sets out a non-egalitarian worldview. “I absolutely have no belief in equality. One just knows some people are born with more gifts than others.”[ix] Although he does go on to add that he believes people should be given equal opportunities despite the knowledge that most will not be able to advance themselves due to their inherent limitations.
Perhaps the most weighty comments by Bacon are on his own paintings.
“Half the time although I like very controlled, and the older I get the more I like it to be highly controlled, it comes about by chance and when I, although I have an idea of what I want to do I don’t know how I’m going to do it and that is where I’m hoping that chance will work in my favour and will bring up the way the image can be made. […] I’m really haunted by how appearance be remade, when I say remade how it can be made back onto what the appearance is but made in a totally non-illustrational way, or even the appearance can suddenly be coagulated by the way the paint just works for you, and it happens.”[x]
In the most poetic comment in the extracts, Bacon talks in 1971 about wanting to meld figure and shadow. “Well, one of the things is I’ve always hoped to make, and this is only perhaps a beginning statement, is to make a figure walking within its own shadow. So that the shadow and the image were identifiable not as two different things but as the, as it were, the shadow was part of the flesh that flowed out rather than being just a dark shadow against a lighter background. But I’ve always hoped one day to be able to incorporate the shadow and the image as one thing.”[xi]
The Sylvester-Bacon interviews have now been picked clean. However, as the series proves, there is a steady supply of interesting new material regarding Bacon and his art coming to light.
Martin Harrison (ed.), Francis Bacon Studies V: Francis Bacon Retrieved: Lost Words / New Writing, Estate of Francis Bacon, supported by Francis Bacon MB Art Foundation Monaco, distr. Thames & Hudson, 10 April 2025, paperback, 158 pages, col. illus., £28
To read more articles, access paywalled content and support by work, please visit and subscribe here: www.alexanderadamsart.substack.com
It is curious that perhaps the world’s leading Romantic artist is also the best living printmaker. Christiane Baumgartner (b. 1967) is a Leipzig-based printmaker who has been exploring the world through heavily processed imagery, both of urban environments and nature. Baumgartner’s current solo exhibition is Sunken Treasure (Cristea Roberts Gallery, London, 30 January-8 March 2025) presents new prints on the subject of reflection, glare and haze, set in forests or on the Baltic Sea coast.
The exhibited prints are woodcuts on a large scale; they have been created through filters that have reduced recognisable imagery to a basic minimum. The scenes in Sunken Treasure are in themselves not classically beautiful; they lack dramatic composition and incident; there is no staffage. They show moderate waves under cloudy skies and the haze of sunlight through mist within a wood. They are chosen to be striking through intense tonal contrast and the contre-jour effect, but they are not pretty or sublime, nor were they intended to be so. In large multi-colour prints Pearls and Diamonds, the imagery becomes so diffuse and hard to read it becomes abstract, although not arbitrary, led as it is by the source, however uninformative. Multi-sheet sets of transfer monotypes – made by placing a sheet on an inked plate and rubbed the back of the paper, which produces pastel-like clouds and bars of speckled colour; the process is repeated a number of times on the same paper but different colour inks – allow Baumgartner to present pure abstraction, untethered to source or concrete imagery.
Baumgartner’s art presents the seascape as a field of nature viewed and comprehended through digital technology, principally the grid of horizontal lines that one finds in screens, principally cathode-ray televisions. Not only are there horizontal strips of tone, there are lens flares – indisputable artefacts of photo-mechanical capture of image. While viewing the pictures, we are constantly reminded of the artificiality and optical difficulty of reading what is on the paper before us. We are never freed from ourselves by pure pleasure or complete immersion in a presented world; the mental ingenuity to turn serried rows of crude marks into intelligible views of deep space keep us from relaxing.
Artists working today who feel antipathy towards Post-Modernism and desire to engage with Nature (especially through the Romantic tradition) would do well to consider Baumgartner’s art. She has managed to approach the natural world in a non-ironic, serious way and kept in mind antecedents such as the German and Northern Romantic painters, while acknowledging she is of our age and can be none other than an artist of the early Twenty-First Century. Her art is of natural forms but it is filtered through technical devices that permeate our lives. She has extended the Romantic and Symbolist landscape but not resorted to anachronism or sentiment. She has resisted the temptation to quote (or even paraphrase) in order to make her art gain authenticity through lineage. Her art earns its place in that lineage through being true to its subject, true to itself and true to its age. Baumgartner’s prints are Techno-Romantic is character.
Techno-Romanticism is an approach to the wonders of nature that is indirect. It admits that today’s observer is a product of his time, that he has been conditioned by mediated experience, wherein Man encounters the object of his study through a photo-mechanical medium and this colours his response to Nature, even when he is in the direct presence of Nature. The viewing of a famous mountain is simply the latest iteration of the experience of a subject viewing this view; previous iterations have been in photographs, film, television or (recently) computer-generated imagery. When he sees the “original”, it is in the light of his experience with reproductions, mostly of a photo-mechanical character.
The Techno-Romantic is related to Walter Benjamin’s essay regarding the aura of a work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. However, it is a more diffuse matter. It is not simply a question of the authentic ur-image being disseminated and that this changes a person’s understanding and valuing of the original, then (consequently) how one approaches art and its role in an era of late capitalism. Techno-Romanticism is an attitude and worldview that comes about due to a subject becoming inured to the experience of distanced viewing and being unable to experience phenomena without a) engaging in recording, b) mentally comparing the viewing to recording, or c) feeling a pang of disappointment at the experience not being recorded or recordable. The aspect of technological processing and recording transforms the viewing experience because the brain is wired to received indirect processed material rather than the raw unprocessed object in itself.
In extremis, the Techno-Romantic man can only (like a Sadean voyeur) process the real through the lens of a telescope reversed, so that he views the object miniaturised and held within a glass, allowing him the experience of nature as contained, compressed and something he can hold within a hand. Like the eyepiece of a telescope, the laptop or mobile-telephone screen can confine nature, making it handheld, portable and (ultimately) controllable. The image can be manipulated, recorded, stored or erased.
It is this Techno-Romanticism that we see manifest when concert attendees watch live performances through their mobile-phone screens and when cultural tourists who jockey for position to photograph a famous work of art (with or without their spouse or themselves in the frame). Techno-Romanticism causes the subject to venerate the Romantic transcendental power of the authentic, but seeking to capture and experience it through technological means. There is a devotion to the beautiful sublime but an inability to absorb it directly, through pure sight and for that to be recorded in the unreliable data bank of the human memory. Techno-Romanticism is a state arrived at when Man seeks fusion with Machine, to commit his memories and sensations in an unalterable fixed state in a technological apparatus. It is a cry against the fallibility of memory; it is defiance of the truth of memento mori and – at heart – a rejection of a truth of human vulnerability, inconstancy and mortality. It says that if a man’s experiences can be preserved in digital form, his consciousness might outlast his frame; he might become as durable as stone; he might outlast a mountain. Yet, we know how foolish this conceit is; digital data rarely lasts intact for a decade, let alone a lifetime. Nevertheless, we dream such a thing might be possible – a modern professional of faith in non-spiritual immortality, as a ghost in the machine.
[Installation view of Christiane Baumgartner: Sunken Treasure at Cristea Roberts Gallery, London, 2025. Courtesy Cristea Roberts Gallery, London]
If that seems an exaggeration, consider the Romantic poets of the 1800s. For them, the experience of standing on a mountaintop in a storm made them feel that they were “completing Nature” by acting as a witness or a conduit for the power and drama. It raised the question of whether the beautiful or sublime could exist without a subject to experience and respond to either. For the deist, agnostic or atheist, the idea that Man was a component necessary for the beautiful or sublime to exist was only one step away from Man as beautiful and sublime, the cause of the wonders of Nature.
Baumgartner is a not only a skilled artist, she is an important figure because she is able to intelligently negotiate the technical imperative (that is to invent and excel, as every groundbreaking artist must do) while taking on the mantle of the Northern Romantic artist and not resorting to the tricks that might bolster that task. She does not adopt an old style or imitate the imagery of Romantic masters; she adopts an ancient medium (of woodcut) but incorporates elements that are new; she does not shy away from the fact that her working practice includes photo-mechanical image capture. Honesty is a prerequisite for an artistic greatness. It seems that Christiane Baumgartner and her prints have that quality (and many other qualities) which commend artist and art to us.
H.R. Giger, Woman and Child (1967), India ink on paper, 80 x 88 cm, (c) Estate of H.R. Giger, 2024
Studying the early period of an artist can be rewarding. It satisfies our desire to tie together strands and clues and discern how the artist’s originality manifested itself in preliminary concerns and exposure to identified influences. Two books attempt to explain who Swiss artist Hansruedi Giger (1940-2014) was before he made his iconic designs for the Ridley Scott-directed film Alien (1979). By the time Giger was invited to design for Alien, he was an established genre artist with a cult following. Giger is generally described as a science-fiction or fantasy artist or artist-cum-illustrator. This is a classification as genre art rather than fine art or plain art. Giger is a popular-culture figure, whose art is known primarily through movie-production designs, posters, book images and secondary-level materials, such as models, toys, computer games and fan art.
H.R. Giger: The Oeuvre Before Alien, 1961-1976 is a reprint of a catalogue published for the 2007 exhibition in Chur. This covers the period when Giger, in his own words, made “the best pictures with the greatest variety of subjects”.[i] Charly Bieler’s H.R. Giger: The Early Years, collects anecdotes from eyewitnesses to Giger’s early life and prints numerous photographs from the artist’s childhood and adolescence, his juvenile art is included and discussed.
In The Early Years there are many childhood photographs of Giger playing, skiing, posing for photographs. What do we get from such material? A view of a lively, inquisitive, active child and a close family; not much we can apply to an interpretation of the art. It has the weight of the illustrations in the early-life section of a biography. Photographs of Giger inventions – drawings, sculptures, installations, decorations – are more informative as we reach his teenage years, especially when we read the memories of the artist and his acquaintances in relation to this material.
Giger was something of a loner and daydreamer, described as introverted. His childhood was relatively normal. Giger grew up in a small farmhouse in the Swiss Alps, in Foppa close to the border with Italy. His father (Hans Richard Giger, a pharmacist) had chosen the location because he was worried that his hometown of Chur might be a target during the war. Although Switzerland was neutral, the possibility of invasion was a reasonable concern. The family lived near farm animals, which became part of their daily life. The two children of the family had a happy and active lifestyle. The photographs present a healthy child out in pastures, the sheer mountain sides rising over his wooden chalet house.
Giger remembered being greatly affected by the pictures he encountered at Catholic kindergarten. Images of the bloodied Christ made such a strong impression on him that blood flowing over the face became a motif in his later art. In 1967 he made sculpture assemblage of a head as part of an improvised water clock, with “blood” replacing water. The artist was not shy about revealing the origins of some of his imagery; he was thoroughly conversant with Surrealist practice, which encouraged artists to examine their subconscious drives and treat their art as a form of Freudian analysis.
Giger was an inattentive schoolboy but a keen draughtsman and much attracted to tinkering with toys, machines and in nature. His earliest art was of cowboys and Indians taken from Westerns and of Disney cartoon characters, which has been preserved in family archives. Later, he was a rebellious teenager, who adopted the stance of the counter-culture of the Beats, American jazz music and reading Satanic literature.
His attachment to the macabre becomes evident in his adolescence, as often is the case. He read horror stories and had a fascination with weapons and playing with explosives. He built a ghost train (chamber of horrors) in the basement of the family house at Storchengasse 17, Chur, making large paintings, constructing figures, arranging lighting and setting up an array of skulls. In became a den for him and his friends; they hung out in this private space sharing ideas, flirting with decadence and each other. It was the template for a fantasy artist or a serial killer. This became called the Black Room.
H.R. Giger, Mutants, State Two (1967/1975), India ink on transcop on wood, 105 x 127 cm, (c) the Estate of H.R. Giger, 2024
He worked as an architectural draughtsman. Interior design and industrial design were also part of his briefs, during the period that ran from 1959 to 1962. This allowed Giger to master the precision and technical skills that made his artistic visions so persuasive. Although it is claimed that Giger was largely self-taught, we should not discount three years study (1962-5) at Zurich School of Art and Design. With friends, he travelled to Vienna, Munich and Paris in the 1960s, seeing the sites, photographing and posing for photographs.
By the mid-1960s, Giger had achieved his signature style. The elongated, skeletal limbs, fusions of bone and reticulated metal and latex, skull-gasmask heads, flayed anatomy were his obsession. The attachment to mechanised weaponry is apparent is many images. The settings were purely fantastical: the flat floor as expansive as a desert, the stygian bunker, the elaborate mechanised chamber of horror-pleasure. Fusion of biological and mechanical, with sexual overtones, became a regular feature of Giger’s imagination. He worked almost entirely in black and white.
Less known than figural pictures are abstractions using ink mixed with glue, which has been vigorously manipulated with brushes and squeegee, to produce cosmic loops, vortices and spatters. These are in the style of the Tachiste painters working in central Europe at the time and demonstrate that Giger was keeping his finger on the pulse of contemporary art, even if he chose to keep a distance from it. He used the airbrush to draw freehand, which associated him more with commercial illustration and painting on vehicles. This technique allowed him to create uncanny effects of smoothness and depth in his paintings, usually made in ink and acrylic paint, almost all made on paper.
H.R. Giger: The Oeuvre Before Alien, 1961-1976 presents Giger’s art made between the ages of 21 36. Reproduced in it is fantastic art that prefigures (even if it did not directly influence) Giger’s visions. Piranesi’s Carceri series and Goya’s Caprichos are obvious and necessary, as are Kubin’s grotesque fantasies. Fellow Swiss Böcklin’s Isle of the Dead was a direct influence on Giger, who made a version of that composition in his own style. Klinger’s etchings dwell on the morbid and grotesque, also conveying a peculiar lucid distance through its meticulous technique. Klinger’s etchings have a dreamlike quality because of the care bestowed upon the backgrounds, surrounding and associated details, quite aside from the macabre motif or subject. This applies to Beksinski and Giger, who can quite often be spoken of together. It is disappointing that Bellmer’s art is not included, as Giger clearly looked at Bellmer at length and admired the German Surrealist. Giger was deeply impressed by Bacon’s caged and screaming figures in dark voids.
As the fine art world did not accept fantasy art as legitimate, Giger earned money by designing applied art and rock album covers, existing outside the high-art commercial gallery system. The success of Alien (1979) cemented his status as an outsider not a true fine artist, something Giger lamented. Yet, staying out of that system allowed Giger a degree of freedom to remain true to his vision. Yet, despite being classed an outsider, Giger is in many ways an artist actually highly attuned to concerns of his age. “His visions evolved very much in the atmosphere of fear that held the whole of the Western world in suspense in the Cold War era: the fear of the nuclear threat and of the global destruction of all life; the fear aroused by war in Vietnam and the Napalm carpet bombing; the fear engendered by rebellions, revolts, and street rioting; and last, but not least, the fear that machines and robots would make human labor superfluous, or indeed that human beings and machines might grow together like hybrids.”[iv]
Giger is as significant as any fine artist who emerged in the 1960s. His art exhibits originality, imagination, memorability and force; it addresses the deepest concerns of his era. He developed a signature style and became a consummate practitioner. His art exerts influence and continues to hold the attention of new generations, who crave what they can find in his art. Both books are recommended for those interested in the life and work of one our era’s most remarkable artists.
Charly Bieler, H.R. Giger: The Early Years, Schiedegger & Spiess, 2024, hardback, 192pp, fully illus., English/French/German text
Beat Stutzer (ed.), H.R. Giger: The Oeuvre Before Alien, 1961-1976, Schiedegger & Spiess, 2024, paperback, 167pp, fully illus.
[Francis Bacon, Study from the Human Body (Man Turning on Light) (1973), oil on canvas, first version left, final version right; (c) 2024 Estate of Francis Bacon]
I
Out of the approximately 5,000 books on fine art I have read over the last 35 years, Francis Bacon: Revisions has to be perhaps the most compelling and fascinating. It reproduces first states of paintings that were later revised, along with the final versions. The book thus constitutes what is effectively a whole unseen body of work by one the last century’s most important painters. Revisions is in the same format as the 2016 catalogue raisonné and treats its material as both a supplement and a subdivision of that existing published corpus.
We have long had photographs of unfinished paintings. Since the invention of photography we have had records of paintings in progress. There are sequential images of art by many artists, including Matisse, most notably La Grande Nue – Pink Nude (1925). Clouzot’s film The Mystery of Picasso (1956) showed Picasso at work on various drawings and paintings. We saw them develop, but in all sequences the art was never finished until the final state. The paintings in Revisions are ones that Bacon considered final and consigned to his dealer before changing his mind and recalling them. It is rare to see an artist’s work through his own eyes. We can view what Bacon considered definitive only see him change his mind and make alterations, revealing precisely what dissatisfied him about an image he had considered good enough to enter the public arena. To those of us who have followed Bacon’s (relatively limited and thoroughly published) oeuvre, this is fascinating insight. I cannot think of a comparative case.
From 1961 until his death, Bacon inhabited a small mews house in Kensington. The limited space meant that Bacon could not store many canvases (finished, unfinished or blank), so finished paintings were (even while wet) given directly to his dealer Marlborough Gallery. Art was photographed when it arrived at Marlborough’s London depot, hence there are high-quality contemporaneous colour images of the paintings. Compliments must be paid to the technicians who adjusted gravely faded colour photographs and managed to make them match the true colours, based on new highly accurate digital photographs of the paintings today.
The gallery knew that it was to their advantage to sell canvases before the artist changed his mind and destroyed them. It seems that as soon as Bacon joined Marlborough Gallery (in 1958) he was working in this manner, probably in an attempt to reduce his destruction rate due to his tendency to overwork pictures. “I sometimes let paintings out too soon because I find that if they are in the studio I go on fiddling with them.”[i] Considering how the paintings in their initial state were both acceptable, creditable and valuable, Bacon’s determination to get a picture right is a worthy and costly position for him to take. One can imagine his dealer’s exasperation at the painter’s fidelity to his standards.
Of the 584 surviving paintings, almost 100 are know to have been revised, through painting or cutting down or were moved into or out of a triptych or diptych. Sometimes panels were completely replaced. Revisions contains a few paintings that were reworked then later destroyed.
That Bacon changed his mind so often – and exactly how often – is interesting. Bacon always presented himself as unmoved by criticism. This was part of a show of being detached from the art world, movements and the desire to court approval (even that of the elite with educated refined sensibilities) but it was clearly not the whole picture. If one goes to his interviews, we find him speaking admiringly of the transcript of the edited drafts of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922). Bacon declared that he wished that he had a partnership where a fellow artist could critique his work in progress so that he might gain from another’s perspective, as Eliot had with Ezra Pound. It is on record that he did take notice of comments by artists Frank Auerbach and Lucian Freud, critic David Sylvester and gallery manager Valerie Beston.
[Francis Bacon, Study of Portrait of a Man (1969), oil on canvas, left first version, right final version. (c) Estate of Francis Bacon]
Beston’s work diary contains useful data about when paintings by Bacon were collected, returned, adjusted and destroyed. The pair discussed the pictures as they were finished and Bacon would sometimes voice doubts regarding pictures. Beston’s responses did influence his thinking, although their opinions differed. She was dismayed when handsome pictures were altered or destroyed. The diaries are quoted liberally and the dates form the basis for the deductions in Revisions.
Commercial imperatives affected the fate of pictures. Even in the later 1960s, when Bacon was established as a commercially viable artist, his large triptychs were difficult to place due to their size and price. More than once triptychs were reduced to diptychs or split into single paintings by the gallery, with Bacon’s approval, in order to sell them. Some of the paintings had public lives before the artist changed his mind. Triptych, May-June 1974 had a recumbent figure in the foreground of the centre panel. The set was exhibited three times and published before Bacon overpainted this presence in 1977.
The most absorbing change is the fate of the mafia triptych. Painted in 1979, this group was set in a white-walled interior, with two seated men on the left, one man on the right and an opened doorway in the centre without a figure. The men are dressed as mobsters, a common topic for news and popular culture at the time. Bacon was apparently irritated that the subject of the triptych was identified so quickly and universally as underworld crime bosses, perhaps as he thought it would date the piece or reveal him to be follower of popular culture. He split up the two wings and reworked the left panel in Triptych Inspired by the Oresteia of Aeschylus (1981). Its former emptiness – actually quite weak and wanting – was changed by the addition of a flying Erinye. The dangled spatter of gore – remarkably – actually predated this creature.
Although the general perception was that Bacon’s technique was irreversible, there were times when Bacon could make changes as delicately as a conservator expunging a distracting flaw. In a 1969 portrait the artist removed a cigarette in the subject’s mouth. In another portrait he removed a circular blot, having adjudged it unnecessary. Bacon clearly wanted to reduce distractions and par things back to an elegantly crisp concision. I have always felt that Bacon’s very last paintings (post-1985) are underappreciated, in part because this bloodless asperity.
Study from the Human Body (Man Turning on Light) (1973) (above) was made more complex by the addition of a green rhomboid carpet/staircase, which opened new spatial implications. Others featured a change of colour, most often of the background but sometimes of the figures. There are sections on instances of new separate versions of paintings and single canvases being expanded into triptychs. In one case, a late triptych was split up only to be reunited.
Alterations mostly resulted in clear improvements. An alarmingly deformed head that verged on the comical was replaced with a new head. However, there are occasions when Bacon’s improvements worsened a painting. Readers will play their own games of “better/worse”, dependent on their taste. Wherever one falls on questions of judgment, having such a comprehensive set of comparators in such detail for one of the great artists is a remarkable gift.
II
The Francis Bacon MB Art Foundation Monaco was established in the principality in 2014 to preserve art and artefacts relating to Francis Bacon and to advance understanding of the painter’s art and life, with a particular focus on his time in Monaco and France. From the 1940s onwards, Bacon spent a fair portion of most years there and rented a flat in Paris in the 1970s. The publication of Francis Bacon in a New Light marks the tenth anniversary of the foundation’s formation and summarises information about Bacon in relation to his French connections.
There is an interview Majid Boustany, director of the foundation. He explains the deep impact that Bacon’s painting had upon him and the mission of the foundation, which can be toured by appointment. “Through the crushing power of his vividly alive images, the painter made his life, but also mine, more intense. His paintings have such resonance in me that they give me, every time, an unparalleled emotional charge.”[ii] It is a curious experience to see gathered in one place so many significant objects related to an individual who was very protective of his privacy and public image. A can of dirty paintbrushes, a scattering personal correspondence, a plaster life mask and a slashed canvas – as well as a selection of paintings and furniture – add up to a poignant and partial portrait of the artist.
The new book contains (amply illustrated) essays on Bacon and France, Monaco, gambling, French art, Michel Leiris and portraiture. A section on the foundation’s substantial collection of art, documents, books, photographs and other material related to Bacon adds insight. A summary of the foundation’s activities as a sponsor demonstrates the philanthropy of the organisation and its commitment to primary research. All of this and more is documented in Francis Bacon in a New Light, a handsome, large and impeccably well designed book. One would expect nothing less from the foundation.
Paris in 1927 was where Bacon first encountered modern art and where he first became attached to the idea of making art. It was also where he became initially informed about interior design in the Art Deco before embarking on a brief career as a designer of furniture and rugs. The foundation owns two of the surviving ten rugs designed by Bacon; the remaining eleven documented rugs are known to be or presumed lost. Having seen these items in the beautifully appointed space at Villa Élise, Monaco, I can attest that the clarity and care shown by Bacon as a designer (and matched by the current setting at the foundation) were carried over into his fine art. The care to keep lines crisp and settings sparse is a trait that informs Bacon’s aesthetics for almost the entirety of his career as a designer and painter.
Director Boustany decided to collect copies of books found in the artist’s library posthumously, taking care to acquire the exact edition. This allows researchers to become familiar with the texts and sources that the artist had to hand during his life. Acquisition of vintage prints of photographs of Bacon – some formal portraits, some press shots, others snapshots – allow us to see Bacon’s life and his sartorial elegance. Bacon was always acutely conscious of how he appeared. Although he disliked his physiognomy, he made the most of his appearance through dressing well and distinctively. Some photographs were ones that the artist used in his self-portraits. Photographs of acquaintances map the artist’s social milieu, especially in Paris and Monte Carlo. The foundation particularly benefitted from the support of Eddy Batache and Reinhard Hassert, who sold the foundation unique material, including letters and studio artefacts, as well as supplying insights into Bacon’s life in Paris.
Any artist would be delighted to have his legacy in the hands of authors as careful as Martin Harrison and Sophie Pretorius and overseen by the Estate of Francis Bacon and the Francis Bacon MB Art Foundation Monaco.
Martin Harrison, Sophie Pretorius, Francis Bacon: Revisions, The Estate of Francis Bacon Publishing, supported by the Francis Bacon MB Art Foundation Monaco, in association with Thames & Hudson, UK: November 2024, US: July 2025, hardback, cloth, 168 pages, fully illus., £50.00, ISBN 978-0-500-96628-0
Majid Boustany, et al., Francis Bacon in a New Light, Francis Bacon MB Art Foundation Monaco, October 2024, hardback, 272pp, fully illus.
To get more exclusive original content visit www.alexanderadamsart.substack.com You can become a paid subscriber to support my writing. You can read some content for free without becoming a subscriber.
Since 1988, I have seen plenty of exhibitions of Surrealist art, perhaps more than the curators of “Imagine: 100 Years of Surrealism” (21 February-21 July 2024, Royal Museums of Fine Art, Brussels). Every time the subject comes up in an exhibition schedule, I experience weariness tempered by anticipation at the chance to see iconic works. Institutions must consider how to come up with an attractive display with suitable pieces that will appeal to visitors. Adding some scholarship helps, as does including rare works and unfamiliar names. Attaching the event to an anniversary implies some significance. The current exhibition in Brussels marks a century since the publication of André Breton’s first Surrealist manifesto and includes all these aspects. The result is a solid survey of the movement with plenty to distinguish it from previous thematic.
Brussels was one of the centres of Surrealism. French-speaking Belgians received Parisian publications as they appeared and quick trave between the capitals meant that as soon as Surrealism was defined, it was disseminated and adopted by a handful of Belgian poets and artists. There were two or three different Belgian groups active within a few years of the emergence of Surrealism in 1924. In addition to René Magritte (who would spend three years in Paris working with the core of the Paris Surrealists), there was collagist-poet ELT Mesens and writers Paul Nougé, Louis Scutenaire and Paul Colinet. Later, artists Paul Delvaux and Marcel Mariën joined the movement, although Delvaux was always more detached than the others.
The exhibition (organised in collaboration with the Centre Pompidou, Paris) draws on the collection of the collection of Belgian Symbolism held by the Musée Fin-de-Siècle. While the Surrealists were a little reticent about declaring their affiliation to such a recent movement (with some Symbolists still working as late as 1950), there are many parallels, as well as outright borrowings. All the talk of Freud, Marx and Trotsky made this group of self-declared revolutionaries self-conscious about acknowledging the fantasies of the dusty decadents they grown up imbibing. In fact, some of them were taught at art school by Symbolists.
Including the full Glove suite of etchings (1881) by Max Klinger is very welcome, reminding one of Klinger’s consummate technical brilliance and the inventiveness of the compositions. Jean Delville (1867-1953) has a distinctive dreaminess and a propensity towards Medieval imagery, much in the line of the Pre-Raphaelites. There is Fernand Khnopff’s Caress of the Sphinx (1896) – considered beguiling or risible by various observers – and number of other pictures from Musée Fin-de-Siècle. Léon Spilliaert is more of a stretch, stylistically speaking, but his nocturnes with an air of mystery align well with Magritte and Leonor Fini.
Max Ernst is shown extensively, with works of all periods and styles coming from multiple lenders (Brussels museums not having many Ernsts). He is considered the quintessential Surrealist due to his productivity, the range of his styles, his influence and his status as one of the founders and prime movers of the Paris group. The Birth of the Galaxy (1969) is an impressive late painting; its force comes about through its simplicity and the obviousness of its creation – spraying stencils that are constructed (lower) and trouvé (upper). It is part of Ernst’s cosmological preoccupations that coincided with the rise of abstraction as the dominant language of the avant-garde. It would be enlightening to show the late (post-war French) Ernsts alongside some abstract art by contemporaries (Gottlieb, Francis, Still, etc.). Arp, Bellmer, Masson, Brauner, Miró, Lam, Matta, Ray and other familiar Surrealists are shown, if not in depth then with characteristic pieces. Tanguy comes out well. In particular an early, rough canvas suggests that my coolness towards his earliest phase could well be misplaced. Tanguy, who never went to art school and had to teach himself painting, started his artistic career as a Surrealist and was exhibiting as he was learning his craft and repertoire. Tanguy became formidably consistent and skilful in a short time, which seems to have left his early work treated as juvenilia by most commentators.
Given current attitudes, it would be easy to look at large reproductions of pieces by Nusch Éluard, Jacqueline Breton is an feminist attempt to insert Surrealist wife-muses as overlooked artists. Actually, they were included in a set of postcards issued in 1937. However, women artists are more apparent here than in the earliest compendia of Surrealists. Tanning is well represented, as is Toyen.
Mercifully, British Surrealists are virtually omitted. Additions of new names are (on the whole) disappointing. Marion Adnams has a good Magrittean painting of stone-lamps, but the evidence of the examples included demonstrates exactly why you have never heard of Rita Kernn-Larsen (1904-1998), Jane Graverol (1905-1984), Valentine Dobrée (1894-1974) and Judit Reigl (1923-2020). (No Louise Bourgeois? No Leonora Carrington?) A strong painting (A Pair of Anthropomorphic Birds (1944)) by Belgian Suzanne van Damme (1901-1986) whets the appetite. Leonor Fini is good as an image maker, albeit not a subtle one; Dorothea Tanning has two substantial canvases from the 1940s and 1950s, which confirm her status as a major Surrealist painter. Dora Maar is included by Lee Miller omitted. Three unpersuasive paintings by Toyen do not live up to the crispness of her drawings. Toyen is no painter. The single painting by Kay Sage (1898-1963) is a rather lifeless affair, which suggests that her painting lacks the delicacy of Tanguy and energy of Tanning.
Did I say that I enjoyed the exhibition? Seeing good work and bad (alongside new work) gives the exhibition an enervating impact. Certainly, indifference would be the worst possible response to such provocative material.
Viewing paintings first hand allows one to spot details easily overlooked in reproduction. For example, in The Robing of the Bride (1940) by Ernst, the green imp who I assumed was crying is more likely to be picking his nose. The bride herself has a multiple head, with the bird head/mask facing us and a woman’s eye visible lower down, in a gap in the feathers. Likewise, Dalí’s Premonition of Civil War: Construction with Boiled Beans (1936) (which has travelled from Philadelphia) displays its astonishing qualities – combining magically smooth blending, persuasive modelling, microscopic detailing, a wide range of mark-making and intensity of colour (especially in the sky) – are not fully appreciable in reproduction. While it is not the last great painting Dalí made, it surely must be the apex of his achievements as a Surrealist.
Magritte’s Empire of Lights (1954) is a sublime expression of the liminal – the edges of day and night, nature and civilisation, comprehending and feeling – literally using its serrated foliage edge to hypnotise the eye. The great stillness – a profoundly meditative quality – infuses this haunting image. A masterpiece by Francis Picabia (1879-1953) is The Worship of the Golden Calf (1941-2), with a cow’s head on top of a cloaked torso, acclaimed by the upraised hands in the foreground. The colour and paint handling is wonderfully fresh and unlaboured. It does not matter that Picabia filched the motif from a published photograph; he made it his own and imbued it with ecstatic potency, giving the painting its ominous quality. Painted during the era of dictators, it seems a cutting critique of the adulation of the masses.
Delvaux has three classic paintings from the 1930s (including a loan from the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice), the most fascinating of which has to be the rarely seen Visitation (1939). Formerly in the Baron Urvater collection, it is now in a private collection, this painting is the most psychologically potent picture that Delvaux ever made. A voluptuous nude woman is seated on a stool; a nude boy enters the room, stepping in from a rural street. He gazes at her and she eyes his genitals while proffering her breasts. It is a profane annunciation loaded with nascent sexuality and forbidden carnal excitement.
It is exciting to see Pollock’s Moon-Woman cuts the Circle (1943), which is not all overworked. Suffused by a Matissean blue, its stenographic calligraphy is roughly filled, feeling airy rather than leaden. An early Barnett Newman shows the future gnomic elder of inscrutable abstraction wrestling with totemic vertical presences – somewhere between trees and personages – and a rough application of paint. Rothko might also have been included to good effect.
I unfortunately missed the recently closed exhibition “Histoire de ne pas rire: Le Surréalisme en Belgique” (BOZAR, 21 February-16 June 2024), although I have seen the catalogue (Xavier Cannone, Bozar Books/Fonds Mercator, €49, French or Dutch). That exhibition featured some of the same artists as “Imagine”, as well as others omitted. As any exhibition of Belgian Surrealism should, it includes art and manifestoes by proto-Surrealism of Magritte confreres Pierre-Louis Flouquet and Victor Servranckx. Collages by the Surrealist poets feature heavily. E.L.T. Mesens’s collages are bold and intense; those by Max Servais feature women cut from pornographic publications. Servais’s Equinoxe (1935) is disturbing scene of a beach intruded upon by écorchés, a female nude and a bloody corpse. The drawings of Armand Simon and photographs and collages of Marcel Lefranq (Leo Dohmen less so) make a creditable case for these artists and we may see them appear in future exhibitions (should there be space enough, given the glut of rediscovered female Surrealists).
Raoul Ubac’s photographs, which involve extensive studio work of solarisation and montage, are more complex than paintings by some of the more recognised Surrealists. Magritte’s work plays a dominant in this show, especially his Vache and Renoiresque periods, which are often excluded from group exhibitions as being discordant. In spirit, both periods are fully Surrealist in character, although the pictures painted in Renoir’s style are less effective than the regular and Vache works. This deep selection was made possible by borrowing from Musée Magritte (in Place Royale, literally 50m away from BOZAR) has the best collection of Magrittes in the world and has a particularly strong holding of pieces from these brief periods of aberration. The paintings did not sell, so Magritte gave the majority to Louis Scutenaire and Irene Hamoir, the latter of whom donated them to the Belgian state.
Evidence of paintings by Rachel Baes, Jane Gaverol and Roger Van de Wouwer are that they are low-talent followers of Magritte. The last named caused a minor scandal by depicting an ancient Greek statue wearing a soiled sanitary towel and who faced prosecution. Known most for his japes and fractious relationship with Magritte, Marcel Mariën looks better every time I see more of him – a serious and deep artist, when he overcomes a certain flippancy that can intrude.
The BOZAR exhibition included leaflets, periodicals and information related to Surrealism in Belgium, making the catalogue a very useful source for researchers. “Imagine” is a good overview of Surrealism of Paris, Brussels and Europe and an indication of what Surrealism would sow in New York.
Francisca Vandepitte, Didier Ottinger, Marie Sarré, Paolo Scopelliti, Imagine! 100 Years of Surrealism, 2024, Ludion, hardback, 240pp, fully illus., €35, versions in French, Dutch and English
Xavier Cannone, Histoire de ne pas rire: Le Surréalisme en Belgique, Bozar Books/Fonds Mercator, 2024, €49, French or Dutch versions
alexanderadamsart 