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- Art<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
2 October, 2018<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"\/standpoint\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/03\/files_u28_art_prodger_int_0.jpg\" "\\"Feature")
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Shared emotion: Dorothea Tanning and Max Ernst with his sculpture, \u201cCapricorn\u201d, in 1947 (\u00a9JOHN KATSNESIS)<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\u201cLet men busy themselves with all that has to do with great art,\u201d wrote L\u00e9on Legrange in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts <\/em>in 1860. \u201cLet women occupy themselves with those types of art which they have always preferred, such as pastels, portraits, and miniatures . . .\u201d Within a few years, however, and to Legrange\u2019s consternation, everything changed. In Britain the Slade School of Fine Art opened to both men and women in 1871 and the Royal Academy finally allowed women students into the life class in the 1890s; while across the continent art schools and academies relaxed their men-only grip so that by 1910 female art students were accepted on equal terms everywhere except for some provincial schools (although in several, male life models still had to wear some sort of covering around their loins).<\/p>\n
One of the results was that women took their place in the wider art world not just as muses, that tired old saw, or as models, but as a creative force in their own right. They met male artists at a younger age in the drawing class, formed alliances as peers, and as well as making their own work, shaped the attitudes of their male partners and entered collaborations with them. They helped turn art from an individual endeavour into a joint one.<\/p>\n
This cross-pollination is the theme of Modern Couples: Art, Intimacy and the Avant-garde<\/em> (October 10-January 27) at the Barbican, which looks at some 40 artist couples from the first half of the 20th century. Some of the pairings are familiar \u2014 Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth, Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo \u2014 while others are less so, such as Gustav Klimt and the fashion designer Emilie Fl\u00f6ge, Hans Arp and Sophie Taeuber-Arp. The pairings cross the disciplines from painters and sculptors to photographers and designers but seek to show that together the artists amounted to more than the sum of their parts.<\/p>\n
Some figures appear more than once: Ben Nicholson was married first to Winifred Nicholson, a painter of still lifes and landscapes, and later to the abstract sculptor Barbara Hepworth. It is perhaps no coincidence that Ben Nicholson\u2019s first abstract sculpture, White Relief<\/em>, was made in 1933, the year in which his marriage to Winifred ended and when he travelled to France with Hepworth to visit the studios of Arp, Picasso, and Br\u00e2ncu\u015fi. It was his new lover that drove him to a purer form of Modernism than he had previously essayed. Hepworth herself could have been a double entry in the exhibition, having previously been married to the sculptor John Skeaping.\u00a0 <\/p>\n
Another double entry is the composer and author Alma Mahler who was first married to Gustav Mahler and then to the architect and founder of the Bauhaus Walter Gropius. Immediately before the war she had an unusually intense affair with Oskar Kokoschka: the liaison inspired some of his best work but also his creepiest. Devastated by her desertion he commissioned a doll-maker to create a life-sized mannequin of her: \u201cPay special attention to the dimensions of the head and neck, to the ribcage, the rump and the limbs,\u201d he instructed. \u201cPlease permit my sense of touch to take pleasure in those places where layers of fat or muscle suddenly give way to a sinewy covering of skin. For the first layer (inside) please use fine, curly horsehair; you must buy an old sofa or something similar; have the horsehair disinfected. Then, over that, a layer of pouches stuffed with down, cottonwool for the seat and breasts. The point of all this for me is an experience which I must be able to embrace!\u201d Perhaps appalled, the doll-maker covered the fetish object with feathers, which was enough to cure Kokoschka of his obsession: \u201cI beheaded it out in the garden and broke a bottle of red wine over its head.\u201d<\/p>\n
Curiously, Kokoschka\u2019s Mahler figure had a passing resemblance to Bird Superior<\/em>, a strange 1939 portrait of her lover Max Ernst by Leonora Carrington. Ernst is dressed in a floor-length fur coat with a mermaid\u2019s tail and walks through a frozen landscape with an ice horse behind him. This quirky piece of Surrealism is ripe for interpretation \u2014 teasing everything from emotional chilliness and frozen desire to control. It makes a marked contrast with Rapture<\/em> (1944) by Ernst\u2019s fourth wife, Dorothea Tanning, showing a radiant sunflower floating unmoored above a rippling array of hills. Here is Carrington\u2019s emotional charge reversed. Ernst could have figured twice more: in the early 1920s he formed a m\u00e9nage \u00e0 trois with the Surrealist Paul Eluard and his wife Gala (who later married Salvador Dal\u00ed) and in 1942 he married the patron Peggy Guggenheim.<\/p>\n
What the exhibition shows most successfully is how creation was an indivisible part of these relationships. Orphism \u2014 abstract patchworks of colour evoking music \u2014 was developed and refined by Robert and Sonia Delaunay between 1905 and 1914 through a shared emotional interest rather than merely technical experimentation. The example of Camille Claudel, one of the most daring sculptors of the late 19th century, whom the influential critic Octave Mirabeau described as \u201ca revolt against nature: a woman genius\u201d, helped push Rodin\u2019s art towards greater daring and dynamism during her time as his student, helpmeet and lover. <\/p>\n
A similar interplay occurred between Alexander Rodchenko and his wife the designer Varvara Stepanova, and was an integral factor behind the founding of the applied arts Omega Workshops created by Roger Fry, Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant. These were not nine-to-five endeavours but the result of the artists taking their work home with them.<\/p>\n
A spin-off of the exhibition is the way it shows how the avant-garde was marked by innumerable shifting romantic and professional links and one degrees of separation. And in doing so it shows how small and tangled that avant-garde was. <\/p>\n
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