Social Realism and "Urbscapes", Prunella Clough and Carol Rhodes

Social Realism

Prunella Clough (1919 – 1999) Painter and printmaker

 Prunella Clough had an acute sense of place and time. In her book, Prunella Clough: Regions Unmapped (2012), Frances Spalding charts Clough’s career. During the 1950s Clough concentrated on men at work in manual roles, reflecting the post-war industrial recovery and has been associated with the movement known as “social realism”. She focussed on the industrial landscape, scrap and then the post-industrial decline. She liked to say small things “edgily”. Clough was not only a painter, but also a proficient print maker, and worked with collage and “found” objects, sometimes from memory. Her working methods have been preserved in the Tate archives.

Her subject matter was often things that otherwise would have been overlooked. She liked the dilapidated and the scruffy and called her views of industrial and barren land “urbscapes”.

 Some typical examples are illustrated below, which conjure up images of walks on grey days by derelict, abandoned industrial buildings and canals.

Her concept of approaching insignificant things as suitable subject matter relates to my topic. It is often such items which denote the character of a place and give it individuality and character.

 

Prunella Clough, Cooling Tower II, 1958, oil on canvas, Tate Collection

Prunella Clough, By the Canal, 1976, oil on canvas, with cellulose wadding, Tate Collection

Prunella Clough, Corrugated Fence, c. 1955, Intaglio print on paper, Hargeaves and Ball Trust

Modern “Urbscapes”

Carol Rhodes (1959 -2018)

A more recent, innovative approach, with similar themes to those of Clough, was taken up by Carol Rhodes. Rhodes spent much of her childhood in Bengal and was influenced by that experience and the dislocation she suffered when relocated to the UK. She painted on small, square, meticulously primed MDF panels, which allowed her to achieve fastidious brushwork, rather like Wyeth’s.

Her subject matter takes on an aerial viewpoint of unpopulated landscapes, quite often with no horizon line. She focussed on a very particular type of view involving industrial estates, commercial depots, airports, urban car parks, quarries, reservoirs, and airports.

“They are places where the man-made meets the untamed landscape. Her paintings speak of man’s desire to govern the land: to flatten it and regiment it, to take stuff from it, store stuff on it, and dump stuff in it. They are landscapes that are made by us, for us, and they are, in every sense, about us.

 

(Elliot, The Scotsman, 8 December, 2018)

These sentiments echo Sharma’s arguments about Man’s intrusion into the landscape. Carpark, Canal, 1994, below, is typical of her work, as stated by the National Galleries of Scotland website, Rhodes “has created a body of work unique in contemporary painting”. Her work is a good illustration of an inventive viewpoint, together with unusual and distinctive working methods.

Industrial Realism L.S Lowry

Laurence Stephen Lowry (1887-1976)

Lowry took a realistic, gritty approach to his environment. In Clark and Wagner’s book, Lowry and the Painting of Modern Life” (2013), (written to coincide with an exhibition I saw at Tate Britain), they make the point that,

“Lowry is a rarity in his century. In a sense he stands alone………He said it himself on several occasions, “My ambition was to put the industrial scene on the map because nobody had done it, nobody had done it seriously.”

(Quoted by Clark and Wagner at p. 37)

I have also watched two videos, the first a BBC Documentary from 1957 featuring Lowry himself, and the second, a Tateshot, 2013 (to go with the launch of the Tate exhibition).

In the 1957 film, Lowry was keen to point out that that he makes works from his imagination, based on direct observation over many years. He paints by “building up scenes from a blank canvas”, saying, that he depicts the Northern landscape “as I see it”.

This is an important point, because so many artists do not want to paint such scenes. They prefer, as Sharma says, to see only the picturesque.

Lowry’s paintings, below, show the doom and gloom he faced daily in his job as a rent collector. As T.G. Rosenthal points out, in his book, L.S. Lowry, The Art and the Artist (2010), Lowry is held in high regard for depicting the reality of his times and the cultural forces which existed in the northern industrial heartland. Most of the scenes feature landscape which is man-made, and the impact of it.

This aspect resonates with my images of the industry around us, and how it is often disregarded, despite being inextricably embedded in our modern environment.

L.S. Lowry, Street Hawker, 1929, oil on canvas, Private collection (Copyright, The Estate of L.S. Lowry)

L.S. Lowry, Industrial Landscape Wigan, 1925, oil on canvas, Private collection (Copyright, The Estate of L.S. Lowry)

 

 

"Magic" Realism and Andrew Wyeth

Building on my research into early forms of realism and the work of Gustave Courbet, I am now researching different approaches to landscape and how various artists have approached the topic. I am influenced by the writings of Simon Sharma, and wish to explore how I can best convey my thoughts on how human existence impacts onto the physical landscape. The American, Andrew Wyeth is a good example.

Realism: Magic Realism

Andrew Wyeth (1917-2009)

In the book, "Andrew Wyeth: Memory and Magic” (Knutson, 2006), Wyeth’s style, influences and methods are examined in a number of essays.

In 1943 there was a landmark exhibition “American Realists and Magic Realists”, devoted to artists who used,

“sharp focus and precise representation, whether the subject has been observed in the outer world -realism, or contrived by the imagination – magic realism.”

 (Quoted in Knutson, 2006 p.35).

“By concentrating on the outward appearance of a deliberately circumscribed environment, Wyeth construes a world that discharges its meaning through the most fleeting and elusive moments”.

(Knutson, 2006, p. 40)

In the examples below, I demonstrate how Wyeth captures the feeling of the coast or estuary in a very realistic way. Using smooth board, fine tempera paints and a muted palette, Wyeth achieves his detailed, evocative paintings. I have included Dryad as the look and feel of the aged wood replicates the character of the driftwood portrayed in some of my recent etchings.

Wyeth’s personal vision, choice of subject matter, and view of the world express his knowledge of, and passion for, Philadelphia and the coast of Maine.

 

Andrew Wyeth, Below Dover, 1950, tempera on panel, Private Collection.

Andrew Wyeth, Pentecost, 1989, tempera on panel, Private Collection

Andrew Wyeth, Dryad, 2007, tempera on panel, Private Collection

 

Simon Shama, Landscape and Memory

In his book, Landscape and Memory (1995) Simon Sharma argues that it is difficult to think of a natural landscape,

“that has not, for better or worse, been modified by human culture. Nor is this simply the work of the industrial centuries…….. it is this irreversible modified world, from the polar caps to the equatorial forests, that is the nature we have.”

 

(Sharma, 1995, pp. 6-7)

He captures the image of his argument with Magritte’s painting, La Condition humaine, below. What we see is a painting superimposed over the view it depicts, so that the two are indistinguishable.

 

René Magritte, La Condition humaine, 1933, oil on canvas, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Sharma expands on this perceived illusion,

“and it is culture, convention, and cognition that makes that design; that invests a retinal impression with the quality we experience as beauty.”

 

(Sharma, 1995, p. 12)

Sharma illustrates his argument with the Yosemite Valley, USA, a place of sacred significance for the USA, and the example of Albert Bierstadt’s painting, The Yosemite Valley, 1868 (below). The area had already been occupied and cleared by the expelled Ahwahneechee Indians and penetrated by mining companies before it was preserved as a park and “wilderness”.

 

Albert Bierstadt, the Yosemite Valley, 1868, oil on canvas, Oakland Museum of California

However, Sharma argues,

“There is nothing inherently shameful about that occupation. Even the landscapes that we suppose to be most free of our culture may turn out on closer inspection, to be its product.”

 

(Sharma, 1995, p. 9)

Sharma’s book explores not what we have lost, but what we may yet find. It is an alternative way of looking, an invitation for reflection and contribution to self-knowledge. My practice will be informed by these arguments, about how human activity affects the landscape, and how the ideas and work of the artists I have selected relate to my work.

Research - Realism: Gustave Courbet

Gustave Courbet (1819-77)

Courbet was the main exponent of Realism in 19th-century French painting. His work contrasts with the Classicism of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres and the Romanticism of Eugène Delacroix. He relied on the use of the palette knife to create heavily impastoed surfaces, as if to stress his disdain for the fine finish of academic practice. Courbet was born at Ornans in eastern France and received his early training in Besançon. In Paris from 1840, he studied especially the Dutch and Venetian paintings in the Louvre. He exhibited at the Salon in 1844, but public and official favour later deserted him. His mature works often treat genre subjects on the grand scale of history painting, as in his ambitious painting of his studio. After this was turned down by the Exposition Universelle in 1855, he held a one-man exhibition establishing his position as a Realist. (National Gallery Website)

Gustave Courbet, Burial at Ornans, 1851 Oil on canvas, 3.15 m x 6.6 m

Musée d’Orsay, Paris

 
Analysis of the painting

Content

A Burial at Ornans is a huge, frieze-like portrayal of sombre middle-class citizens at a graveside in Courbet's home town. It generated an explosive reaction among the painter's audience and critics. With few exceptions, viewers react to the work as an assault on the very idea of what a painting should be. With the recent worker uprisings of 1848 , Courbet's use of the “common” people as a grand subject was deemed a radical act -- "the engine of revolution," as one critic said.

Form and process

In his push towards a realistic style, Courbet has intentionally painted his black-clad folk in a manner that does not idealise their suffering. They are real people. The Salon audience is accustomed to paintings that uplift, and they read Courbet's grieving figures as vulgar and ugly. One critic writes, "He paints pictures as you black your boots."

Energy

Courbet wrote that his aims were to "translate the customs, the ideas, the appearance of my epoch according to my own appreciation; in a word, to create living art, that is my goal." Many art historians view Courbet's determination toward artistic freedom as an important rupture with the Salon-controlled painting of the past (grand historical mythological, religious paintings), and an inspiration to the next generation of innovators, the Impressionists. His work does not have the high finish of the usual type of salon paintings of the time, and reflects the subject matter of his genre scenes.

Culture

Courbet was a rebel and bohemian. He was the first painter to sponsor his own, self-financed exhibitions. His support for the poor and oppressed ran contrary to French politics. Near the end of his life, in the 1870s, he was jailed briefly for his association with the Paris Commune.

Relevance to my work.

Realism forms the basis for many movements and styles which are relevant to my approach. It is at the heart of Industrial and Social Realism, for instance, L.S.Lowry, whose work I shall be looking at in future research and posts.

 

Sense of Place - Research: Narrative and Memory

Anselm Kiefer (b. 1945): Narrative, History and Myth

I went to see Kiefer’s exhibition at the Royal Academy in 2014, and have recently re-read the book which accompanied the exhibition, “Anselm Kiefer” (Soriano et al., 2014).

Kiefer hones in on the impact of the aftermath of the war on German soil, interweaving mythology, ancient cultures, and cosmology. He meditates on beliefs and the complex relationship between art and spirituality. Kiefer’s work is extremely thought provoking and powerful.

Anselm Kiefer, Sulamith, 1983, oil, acrylic, emulsion and straw on canvas, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

 The painting was made in 1983. During this period Kiefer was exploring the impact and aftermath of the Second World War on German society. The painting works on a number of different levels. The image reflects a poem and the years his friend and poet, Paul Celan spent in a concentration camp. The building, modelled on Wilhelm Kreis’s Funeral Hall for the Great German Soldiers in Berlin, is transformed by Kiefer into a Holocaust memorial. Kiefer has used his imagination, and built on the story to make the connections between the poem and his image. Kiefer has deliberately provided us with a stark, dark, enclosed space to conjure up the oppressive feelings which must go with imprisonment.

Memory and time

Frank Auerbach (b. 1931)

In a rare interview with Smith on BBC Newsnight (2015) we get an insight into Auerbach’s background, motivation and personality which drive his work, having lost both parents in the Holocaust. Auerbach’s subject matter is confined to those subjects which he gets to know well over time. Over the years he has made hundreds of visits to the National Gallery where he will draw before the works of masters such as Rubens, Rembrandt and Constable. He would then take his drawing back to his studio where he would pin it up and work from it while it was still fresh in his mind, starting anew on each visit. They are not slavish copies, but lively original works.  Sometimes he will transfer compositional elements into another painting, such as his Park Village East, below, loosely based on Constable’s The Hay Wain,1821.

Frank Auerbach, Park Village East, 1997-98

His interest in landscape derives with his fascination of the area of London around Camden, where he has had his studio for over fifty years. He visited London as a child during the war and saw at first hand the bomb damage. When he was a student after the war and during the rebuilding of bombed sites, he would visit these areas on a daily basis and record the transformation. He became “fonder and fonder of it” (Auerbach, 2015). In this way, we can understand the influence time and memory plays on the way Auerbach sees and creates his paintings.

 

David Bomberg

David Bomberg (1890-1925)

Last year I went to see the David Bomberg Exhibition at the Laing Gallery, Newcastle. Bomberg was an innovator, seeking new ways of working and expression, right through from the early days of Cubism. He played with form, light and colour and produced inspiring works about “place” from a number of travels overseas, including Palestine and Spain. Since the exhibition, I have also read MacDougall and Dickson’s Bomberg (2017).

 An example of his good use of tone to capture form and mood is Mount Zion with the Church of the Dormition, 1923, below. The picture is strikingly simple and effective, and executed with energy using strong, fluid brushstrokes.

David Bomberg, Mount Zion with the Church of the Dormition, 1923, oil on canvas, Ben Uri Gallery

I have looked closely at the way Bomberg portrays colour and light. The light in his Palestinian and Spanish landscapes is totally different, but effective in each. For instance, take Bomberg’s ambitious painting, Jerusalem, City and Mount of Ascension, 1925 - the light bounces off the buildings and really gives off the feel of intense heat:

“Here colour itself has become an integral part of the painting’s structure and composition.” (MacDougall and Dickson, 2017 p. 111)

David Bomberg, Jerusalem, City and Mount of Ascension, 1925 oil on canvas, Ferens Art Gallery

In contrast, we see a more colourful, and vibrant depiction of the Spanish light in the painting, The Gorge, Ronda, Spain, 1935:

“Bomberg spins the canvas to capture a breath-taking vertical view, in which the drama of the setting is matched by the gorgeous extravagance of his palette.” (MacDougall and Dickson, 2017 p. 139)

David Bomberg, The Gorge, Ronda, Spain, 1935, Middlesborough Institute of Modern Art