Lydia Corbett, Picasso's 'Sylvette' at Penwith gallery, St Ives March 8 to April 6 , 2024

 Lydia Corbett, Picasso’s Sylvette, Penwith Gallery St Ives, March 8 to 6 April 2024


You can view this exhibition through extensive photographs online but far better to go there and enjoy the show in the large gallery where the displays of painted pots and the paintings and drawings which make a dynamic impact from a distance are displayed so beautifully and you can examine Lucien Berman’s book on Lydia Corbett’s ceramic objects, He was there when I visited and explained how despite failing sight Lydia can respond to the curved forms made for her and draw her designs of faces that enliven these pots, recalling how Picasso worked in Vallauris at the time when aged 19 she was drawn by him repeatedly.

 

 

Her paintings are very Picasso-esque with also influences from Chagall and I thought Bernard Buffet, who was promoted by her father. Her drawing style reminded me also of the illustrator Charles Keeping who drew for Rosemary Sutcliff’s historical children’s novels.

Lydia Corbett, now 90 years old, was present and I was so pleased to meet her. She has a gentle manner and French accent and a very positive inspirational attitude to life and the need to express love.

Her daughter Isabel Coulton was there and I congratulated her on the excellent book she wrote with her mother, ‘I was Sylvette’ which I re-read recently. It is a really captivating vivid account of Lydia’s life from being a child in occupied France through to school at Summerhill, and later living at Dartington  School of Art. It is illustrated well with many family photographs that give a sense of her complicated history and her family connections. She only took up painting at 45 after her children were independant.

Naturally her relationship with Picasso is fascinating and she insists in the book that he treated her with respect - he was in his seventies - and was a fatherly figure with no sexual predation involved. She modelled for him clothed, with her blonde ponytail which she said was seen and copied by Brigitte Bardot.

The show is a room full of exuberant energy which whilst so reminiscent of Picasso reveals Lydia’s enjoyment of making her own use of his language.

Incidentally we have a great Picasso in Tate St Ives, a very sensitive expressive face, just round a corner in the main galleries and my favourite work in there.

Rambert 'Death Trap' at Ha;; for Cornwall March 2nd 2024

 Rambert ‘Death Trap’ Hall for Cornwall , March 2024

Years ago I did a painting, ‘an afternoon at the ballet Rambert’ - seen here - but recently I spent an evening at what is now it seems all too correctly named just ‘Rambert’ in which Ben Duke presents ‘Death Trap’, a performance of spoken theatre with songs and an occasional few minutes of dance.

At the end the usual enthusiastic whoopers were vocal and many stood to show their approval but in the queue to pay in the car park some usual suspects who have seen Rambert dance over many years were in agreed disappointment with this development away from dance.

I found the evening a muddle of many ideas thrown together. Presumably it was considered creative to do this and to mix moments of satire about news media with myth, ritual, live musical theatre and some short pieces of dance.

Notices warned of nudity, bad language and strobe lighting but none of these were in evidence.

Lack of any information sheet meant I was puzzled how the two parts connected, only to find later from previous reviews that they are separate pieces.

It was puzzling that the man sacrificed wearing a  goat’s head who danced himself to death was then soon afterwards revived to dance acrobatically and inventively with his lover.
At one point I hoped a woman was going to intervene to stop the weird sacrifice but it had gone ahead, with many current good causes for protest called out during a group circle dance.

The singer was excellent even managing to bring some serious emotion to the well worn cliche of ‘feelings’- was this a deliberately set almost impossible challenge?
The signer was very expressive and occasionally amusing.
The musicians were fine.
The best humour was in the opening remarks about stopping the performance to accommodate any necessary phone calls in the audience.
The dancers were so good but only given a few minutes to use this medium.

Next year I will read the reviews before I book and hope Rambert return to giving us the treat of an evening of dance.

Watching Dr Zhivago again.

When did I first see this film?  1965
I was so young, so much yet to do - I knew very little of revolution, ….

Now - do I prefer Strelnikov to the Dr, with his infidelity and charm?
Julie Christie like a cover of Vogue.
I had a lacy scarf like hers which I knitted.

My mother and I used to play and sing Lara’s song.
For years I always played it whenever I visited.
At 97 my sweet mother made me cry.
She said, ‘ I didn’t know you played the piano dear’.
She had taught me to play from the age of five.

Its so calm and slow, widescreen.

How beautiful Russia is in the snow, how lovely when I visited in the 80’s, the anniversary of Yury Gagarin’s  flight in space - me wanting a baby, looking at the soldiers in Gorky Park, before, before I met Kevin to love me, before he died, murdered by two strangers for no reason,  before the others, before, before, until Pedyr loved me, but died of cancer, before my new life alone….

Luxury and vice - and why did my mother never point out the immorality - nor in Gigi- just loving  the music and the clothes, the beauty - leaving the meaning for me to sort out alone.

Ignoring anything unpleasant until some later time - later when it has to be seen.

Ignoring what’s under your nose, and secrets, disgusting family secrets, maybe I have never heard them all.

Only the romance and imagination encouraged.

And is this the essence of Dr Zhivago?

Now I see the disgusting rape where Komarovsky says Lara is a slut, where the writer makes her give in to it - and break Pasha’s heart - shoots the rapist but miss killing him and he lets her go.

Well it’s all believable. And as we know the plot so ironic when Komarovsky says he gives Lara to the Dr as a wedding present.

‘Happy men don’t volunteer’. So the narrator assumes Pasha was not happy with Lara and their baby.

Do all revolutions fail?
The stupid First World War.
Chance meetings leading to love.
As they can.

‘I wish they’d decide which gang of hooligans constitutes the government of this country.’ Says the Uncle.
How apt for us today.

Unconsummated love as the strongest? Longing and a song - oh yes, always the way…..

But we are a mixture of romance and reality and the story gets this across so well.
Half way through I cry, when Tanya has not told her husband she has no fuel and she weeps.

Balalaika ……

The scene I best remember is Strelnikov  on his train - but I remember it more dramatically like Turner’s ‘Rain steam and speed’.

Then I remember when Yury walks down a path and is captured - I have always - before that. —  been afraid my father would get lost for ever when he would get off a train before our stop - and stroll on the platform despite my mother’s pleadings - it’s later than this first time that Yury gets forced to serve the Reds as a doctor.

Fancy having a country retreat with Russian domes like this wealthy family, with  a nearby cottage to live in.

Now I can’t remember how it ends.

The Tsar and his family is shot.

Yury gets used to his double life with two women, but guilt makes him give up Lara.
Oh - he gets captured on the way home - so I got that mixed up with the train.

The Cruelty of war.
We see it come into Yury’s  mind to run away, he thinks he sees his wife.
Gets back to Lara- his wife has gone away back to Moscow.

Is this why men want two women - to save them should there be a crisis?
Lara met Tanya
Tanya being deported. She left the balalaika.

Oh now I remember the odious Komarovsky will help - he is a survivor. He has some feeling that he must help Lara.They refuse the help and go to Varykinow.
Hardy would let them die -  what does Solzhenitsyn do?


  ‘The private life is dead’ - it makes the revolution seem bad - and it’s proved to be of course untrue.

If they had met before.

Victor comes still to save them. Says Strelnikov is dead and was a murderer, had been captured and killed himself.

‘Is your delicacy so exorbitant that you would sacrifice a woman and a child to it?’ Victor - so Yury saves her and loses her. Tanya is pregnant with Yury’s child.
He remains in Moscow - suitably with a heart problem, sees Lara one day,  runs to her and dies before he reaches her. His poetry lives on. Lara meets his brother at the funeral , she lost the child years before - picture of Stalin, her child is found later by the brother- Komarovsky let go of her hand.

She plays the balalaika!

I’m watching it on a small tv but with the memory of sitting in the shared darkness of a cinema with the wide expanses of Russia before me and the unknown expanse of what my life might be and the power of love and death as they have bowled me over since.








 

Outi Pieski -a Sami Woman Artist at Tate St.Ives

              

                                            Flag of the Sami

Outi Pieski   Tate St Ives. February 9th  - May 6th 2024

Outi Pieski is a Sami artist from Finland.

The preview was buzzing with interested people delighted to see something new.
There are large hanging brightly coloured chevrons of long tassels which refer to the traditional clothing of the Sami, whose culture and language was suppressed for many years by Christian colonisers who regarded it as pagan and evil. The Sami are the only designated indigenous people in Europe.
More recently the Sami have revived their community and are engaged in struggles with the Scandinavian governments because their reindeer herding and salmon fishing is threatened by wind farms, hydro electric power and graphite mining - all part of green power developments.

Outi Pieski also presents her paintings, which are textured expanses decorated with textile, some with small ornamental figures added in front, some with tassels or ribbon or bejewelled with crystal gems.
These paintings are unlike anything we are used to and combine folk elements with abstract paint marks that evoke strange landscapes.

Then there is one area with grids of photographs of traditional women’s hats, red with other bright ornamental trims and a curved shape rising above the head. These are being found and ‘rematriated’ from distant museums. Outi Pieski has been involved in community workshops to revive the making of them.

The artist was present, wearing colourful traditional dress and the next day gave some talks with an interpreter and signer. Unfortunately the difficult acoustics that Tate has failed to overcome rendered the one I attended virtually inaudible but I heard the  unfamiliar Sami language and sensed a serious  artist very involved with especially the Sami women.

The lengthy labels and statements on the walls refer to many political issues and also to an implied belief in evil spirits. As often happens I felt these issues were not expressed in the art- which concentrated on being romantically evocative and attractively decorative. Some labels refer to a belief that women are the guardians of the earth, which I find a divisive view.

However I felt moved to spend a couple of hours reading online about the Sami so the fact of the exhibition had caused me to find out a lot about Sami history and current problems.
There are some parallels with the suppression of Cornish language and culture and our efforts to keep it alive, so often expressed through particular festivals that require dressing in particular ways.
I would have liked to see and hear some Sami music and events.

Sami culture has been very connected with eating reindeer meat and salmon, making it at odds with current trends towards not killing animals.
Someone at the event who had visited the northern areas where the Sami live mentioned to me that their communities suffer from alcohol and drug problems, as all communities do, but maybe parallel with the similar pre Christian culture of Native Americans, similarly seen as once very much at one with the environment, respecting its life with an animist spiritual consciousness, which has conflicted with our modern world.
I found online accounts of how reindeer eat fly agaric mushrooms and the Sami via drinking reindeer urine were able to experience hallucinogenic visions more safely than by eating the fungi directly. There are ancient connections with the Father Christmas story.

So, a new show to surprise visitors and engage them with distant lands - thankfully not another artist parachuted in to swiftly pick up a few cliches about Cornwall, but an artist working in her own homeland and bringing us the results.

The mystery of how these visiting artists from foreign lands are chosen persists. Do any Cornish artists take our current preoccupations to Finland?

 

Looking at Picasso Pepe Karmel, 2023

Looking at Picasso. Pepe Karmel. 2023 This new book is well designed with many good quality illustrations on substantial matte paper and each chapter defined by double page differently coloured paper so that it’s a pleasure to navigate it. 

 Karmel begins with an account of Picasso’s life, mentioning his dealers and his relationships with women and pointing out that he was famous by 1918, when he was 37. That he visited his lover Eva Gouel daily as she died of cancer in 1915 was new to me. 

 Under ‘symbolism’ Karmel deals mostly with ‘Les Demoiselles d’Avignon’, giving the views of different critics who see in it virility, domination of women, savagery, anti-colonialism, and sexuality, Surprisingly he ignores the story of Picasso’s friend Casaquemas who killed himself because of an unhappy love affair, which I thought was relevant. I can see the picture as depicting that women in a brothel are made into monsters by their exploitation and I think the point here is that symbols have many possible interpretations.

 In ‘Cubism’’ Karmel explains carefully the workings of this new phenomenon with its inventiveness, paralleled in the writings of Joyce and Woolf. This encourages the reader to re examine the compositions. 

 Under ‘Surrealism’ he gives his personal interpretations of particular paintings in some detail such as seeing a key in a Dinard Beach picture as ‘a symbol for the artist’s hidden self, waiting to be unlocked by a woman bearing the right key.’ He tends to find obscenity and brutality where I could describe a playful freedom. I hadn’t previously been aware of depiction of oral sex performed on a woman by a man in some Picassos.

 Chapter five is about Picasso’s varied use of classicism and again a parallel use of Greek myth in a modern setting in Joyce’s writing. Lastly Karmel attends to politics, telling us that before 1936 Picasso was not involved and also that Guernica was not at first admired although Herbert Read called it ‘a modern Calvary.’ He refers also to Orwell’s use of animal allegory. 

 The book then ends abruptly, saying that the late works need future evaluation but calling them pornographic and deliberately crude, whilst I might have spoken of wry humour and self satire.

 I found this book interesting, getting me to take a new look at familiar images, and to notice my reactions where they differed from the author’s. It was not a revelatory clearly unified analysis nor was it

 unmasking Picasso as a misogynist. 

I liked the contextual comparisons to contemporary writing which counteract the usual story of an isolated genius. 

 Picasso remains in his complexity which in its various forms reflects whatever one brings to it. 

However, Pepe Karmel provides a well researched and thoughtful commentary.

`Penlee Gallery, Penzance The Branfield collection

Penlee House in Penzance have an exhibition of works from the private collection of Pep and John Branfield Open now and until January 13th 2024. The art is to be sold at auction in February so this is a good opportunity to see it together. The first room has the oldest paintings. There is a Stanhope Forbes horse which I thought might be done using a photograph from the way it is framed - something rarely mentioned in discussing Newlyn painters. There is what looks like an abstract composition by Thomas Cooper Gotch but is a study for his ‘Lantern Parade’ Further on in the back gallery there is a small David Haughton, ‘Carn Bosavern’ of which he said the drawing of St Just was the hardest to do drawing of any for him. Was this because it’s hard to keep track of a row of houses observed with their great similarities but interesting differences? I liked very much the elegant pots by Peter Swanson. There is a Bryan Pearce of men bowling that does not employ his all round perspective. I wondered if the collector got his explanation of strange symbolism in a Patrick Hayman directly from the painter? Not all the pictures strike me as the artists’ finest work but perhaps the collectors tried to find affordable examples to make a comprehensive collection. The last pictures are by the living Kurt Jackson and there is a stunning large brown one of a vast scene, ‘Carnsew’. My favourite was Willy Barns-Graham’s ‘Gurnard’s Head’ with its wintry look and lively tree amongst buildings but I gathered the attendant would also make a bid for it.

Women in Revolt-catalogue of Tate Britain show.

Women in Revolt is a new show at Tate Britain, Nov 8 2023 to April 7 2024, then at National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh 25 May 2024 to 26 Jan 2025 and at The Whitworth in Manchester 7 March to 24 August 2025 Subtitled’Art and Activism 1970-1990’ The catalogue has a brown cover - unimpressively discreet I thought - conveying a quiet unimpressive revolution. Linsey Young, the curator, introduces the show with personal details about her mother’s feminism, dedicating the show to her memory, reminding those of us who were artists then of the difficulties and energetic efforts of the women who formed organisations and made personal political works and the part played by black women. She claims that there are contemporary women artists carrying on the feminist fight - but I find it hard to think of any. Amy Tobin writes about the groups formed and collective ways of working, mentioning Brixton Women’s Work to which I contributed in 3 shows. It’s a thrill for me to read of artists I met then like the inspiring Kate Walker and calm tower of strength Rita Keegan who worked with the black women artists but I am disappointed that the illustrations are mostly of posters and photos of women in groups not showing the actual content of the shows. Three of the ten chapters are about black and Asian artists and one about transexuality. There are quite a lot of illustrations of women’s work but the notes about them are in very small grey print grey making them tedious to read. An example is the two pages on Bobby Baker.There is room on the second page about her to print the words twice as big rather than stylishly cramping them up at one edge to leave a blank area larger than the text. Thus the design of the catalogue replicates the lack of space given to the women’s movement in the art world. Many of the artists named are still alive and said to be working which points out how little we hear of them now and this show fails to give much reference to their current projects. There are new names and organisations to me even though I was an active feminist artist in this era in London. I have met only a few of these artists and several more whose names and art is sadly not included. The text is the tip of an iceberg that has largely melted away but has been important in art history nevertheless. It’s a worthwhile thing to have made the show and hopefully the images in Tate Britain will make more impact than they can in this catalogue, which will remain to mark the history or as we used to say ‘herstory.