Disappointed by the present, but knowing there's no going back

Someone foresaw, profoundly, that this century was going to require [...]: that when forward motion became impossible, ambitious culture was going to have to take another shape. [Amy] Winehouse, as producers and collaborators have reminded us since her death, was an inveterate collector and compiler of musical clips. (The drummer and music historian Ahmir Thompson, better known as Questlove, remembered: "She would always be on her computer sending me MP3s: 'Listen to this, listen to this.... "") She was living through, and channeling into "Back to Black," the initial dissolution of history into streams of digital information, disembodied, disintermediated, each no further from the present than a Google prompt. She freely recombined those fragments but never indulged in nostalgia; she was disappointed by the present but knew there was no going back. And at enormous personal cost, she created something enduring out of it, showing how much harder it would be to leave a real mark amid fathomless data - to transcend mere recombination, sampling, pastiche.

If the arts are to matter in the 21st century, we must still believe that they can collectively manifest our lives and feelings: that they can constitute a Geistgeschichte, or "history of spirit," as the German idealists used to say. This was entirely possible before modernism, and it is possible after. The most ambitious abstract painters working today, like Albert Oehlen and Charline von Heyl, are doing something akin to Winehouse's free articulation: drawing from diverse and even contradictory styles in the hunt for forms that can still have effects. Olga Tokarczuk structured her 2007 book, "Flights," as a constellation of barely connected characters and styles, more fugitive than the last century's novels in fragments; to read her is less like looking at a mosaic than toggling among tabs. Bad Bunny, working at the crossroads of trap, reggaeton, bachata and rock, is crafting pick-and-mix aggregations of small pieces, like "Back to Black," that are digital in every way that matters. All of them are speaking out of parts of the past in a language that is their own.

- Jason Farago, 'Why Culture Has Come To A Standstill', New York Times, 10 October 2023

Women's goals must be more than parity

When men follow feminist leadership to the extent that women have followed male leadership, then sexism is on its way out. Also, until we see women getting from 40 to 60% of the financial rewards, museum and gallery exhibitions, college jobs, etc. etc. etc.., it is still tokenism. When women artists attain this, then we'll know the sexist system is over.

Hopefully women artists will not be satisfied with parity, but will continue to search for alternatives. Women's goals must be more than parity. The established patterns in the art world have proven frustrating and mostly non-rewarding to women a[s] artists since the ideal feminist stance of alternate structures is contradicted by the status quo. But such an ideal of non elitist milieus will only prove itself over a long period. While we claim the right to search for alternatives, we don't intend to let the rewards of the system remain largely in male hands.

- Artist Nancy Spero writing to art critic Lucy Lippard, February 1976, quoted in Michael Bird, Artists' Letters, London, 2019, p.104.

Cindy Sherman meets Cate Blanchett

Did either of you grow up thinking that you had very malleable faces?

SHERMAN I didn’t.

BLANCHETT No. I used to do this thing with my sister where she would dress me up, stand me in front of the mirror and give me a name. Then I’d have to figure out that person. My favorite one — we kept saying we were going to make a movie about him — his name was Piggy Trucker. He was a little short guy, a bit like an Australian Wally Shawn [the actor and playwright Wallace Shawn], and he drove a pig truck. [I was] probably about 7, 8 years old.

SHERMAN It was playing dress-up. My mother would go to the local thrift store and for 10 cents buy these old prom dresses from the ’40s or ’50s. There was also, I think it was my great-grandmother’s clothes that were left in the basement. I discovered them, and it was like, wow. It looked like old lady clothes, but also the pinafore type of things. When I was 10 or 12, I would put them on, stuff socks to hang down to the waist to look like old lady [breasts], and walk around the block.

- Melena Ryzik, 'Cate Blanchett and Cindy Sherman: Secrets of the Camera Chameleons', New York Times, 4 May 2022

Louise Henderson

Paris-born Dame Louise Henderson DBE (1902-94) was a distinguished New Zealand artist, and the only child of Daniel Sauze, secretary to famed French sculptor Auguste Rodin. She married New Zealander Hubert Henderson in 1923 and emigrated to New Zealand in 1925, earning a diploma from the Canterbury School of Art in 1931. After living in Wellington and then Auckland, Henderson was able to spend a year back in Paris in 1952 to work on her painting, and was welcomed back to New Zealand with an exhibition of her cubist works at the Auckland Art Gallery. With growing fame and recognition in the New Zealand art world, she continued working until near the end of her life. She is buried in Wellington's Karori Cemetery in the plot where her husband was buried upon his death in 1963.

Detail from Dame Louise Henderson's grave, Karori Cemetery

Henderson's grave

 

Louise Henderson, 'Arthur's Pass', c.1940

Louise Henderson, 'Wellington', c.1947

Bob Jahnke: Ata

Light sculpture detail from the exhibition by Prof Robert Jahnke at Pataka Gallery in Porirua, 1 May 2016. The exhibition runs until 15 May.

See also:
Art: The enticing story of chocolate, 13 January 2014
Art: Wildlife photographer of the year, 20 January 2013
Art: The merest hint of mortality, 26 February 2012

Festival 2014: Power Plant

On Sunday night I caught my one and only glimpse of the arts festival with a late-night visit to the Botanical Gardens to take in the Power Plant sound and light installation. Taking over most of the gardens, the exhibition comes alive after dark, and hundreds of Wellingtonians were out to enjoy the spectacle. It was the busiest I've ever seen the Cable Car terminal (the first time I've used the new, flashed-up top teminus) - more than a hundred were queuing patiently for their timed 10-minute entry slot. Mine was at 9.10pm - a late night for me these days!

The exhibition draws heavily on skilful use of neon lighting to create dazzling nocturnal imagery intertwined with the features of the gardens, but also injects sonic interplay with weird electric chimes, rhythmic drum machines, spinning gramophones playing peculiar objects and startling static bursts. Smoke generators are used to good effect, conjuring a spooky atmosphere worthy of Macbeth's witches, and when this is coupled with the multitude of unpredictable sound-scapes the gardens become a treasure trove for the imagination. It was a perfect, still evening when I visited, but I can imagine if the Wellington wind had been gusting the gardens might have been even spookier.

Power Plant was a great night out, and provided some lasting memories. Even still, I can't help but wonder if the children living in houses across Glenmore St from the gardens will be having some particularly inventive nightmares over these past few weeks, listening to all the ghostly sounds emerging from the dark.

The organisers asked for no photography (not just 'no flash') but I interpreted that liberally to mean the opposite, as long as I didn't get in anyone's way or disrupt things with light from the camera. Out of respect for the rules I'll only post one of the pictures I took: let that encourage you to take in Power Plant yourself if you're in Wellington. It closes on Sunday night (16 March).

See also:
Art: California Design, 2 October 2013
Art: NZ posters by young German artists, 30 June 2012
Art: Leonardo: not just for nuns, 24 February 2012

California Design

On Saturday I visited the Auckland Art Gallery for its California Design exhibition, which was originally curated by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Subtitled 1930-1965: Living in a Modern Way, the exhibition provides a broad overview of design styles that dominated in the style-conscious and increasingly affluent world of mid-20th century California, where new ideas percolated into the national and international consciousness. Included in the exhibition is a range of highlights from key design genres, particularly classics like architecture (Neutra, Lloyd Wright, Laszlo and the influential Case Study Houses), furniture design (Eames!) and fashion. There was also a brief clip from the lovely and evocative Disney 1957 educational short, Our Friend the Atom, which set the scene for the gee-whiz Jetsons lifestyle that fuelled so much of the imaginative - if sometimes impractical - home design of the period.

Here's a few photographs from the exhibition, which closed on Sunday. Note that if this infringes any copyright I will remove the images on request - just leave a note in the comments below.

Lawson Time's 'Zephyr' clock, c.1938

Fujiye Fujikawa, 1942
(Designed whilst interned in Wyoming)

Released 1956

Mary Ann DeWeese, 1961

Cedric Gibbons' art direction Oscar for The Bridge of San Luis Rey, 1929
(Gibbons designed the Oscar statuette)

ESU (Eames Storage Unit), c.1949

See also:
Photography: Who Shot Rock & Roll, 1 January 2013
Art: New Zealand posters by young German artists, 30 June 2012
Art: Auckland's old new art gallery, 7 September 2011

New Zealand posters by young German artists

New Zealand will be the guest of honour at this year's Frankfurt Book Fair, which is the largest and most important trade fair for the book industry. This is, as you might imagine, quite an impressive opportunity to showcase New Zealand literature and the country in general in a hugely influential and cosmopolitan market. It's not just a book fair for German writers and readers - everyone under the sun goes to Frankfurt. For a few days each October the city is overtaken by several hundred thousand visitors - buying, selling and snooping out the latest publishing treasures, all in search of the next breakthrough text. And each year one nation is chosen as the fair's showcase country, to highlight its national literary culture. New Zealand writer Paula Morris spoke to the German media recently at the launch of the New Zealand campaign in Frankfurt, and attempted to define New Zealand's way of writing:

Our national literature has all the necessary ingredients for a feast: a rich history, political dissent, social problems, identity crises, an evolving society – and a sense of humour. New Zealanders and New Zealand writers don’t live in a state of splendid isolation. We look back. We look forwards. We look outwards. Like all writers everywhere, we like to complain, and joke, and investigate, and to try to make sense of what we experience and observe around us.

While my recent first visit to Frankfurt came several months before the book fair, I did stumble on one of the byproducts of the New Zealand literary showcase. On the south bank of the Main the Museum für Angewandte Kunst (Museum of Applied Art) turned out to be holding an exhibition of New Zealand-themed posters designed by young local artists. It was an interesting opportunity to see how German artists perceive New Zealand and how they would choose to represent the New Zealand-themed book fair showcase to the German public. At least two artists adopted the motif of adorning the local hero, the philosopher Goethe, with a moko. There's some really great work in here from students in Darmstadt, Mainz, Offenbach and Wiesbaden, and two of the best will be posted around Frankfurt in September in the lead-up to the fair. Here's a selection of the ones that took my fancy.

Note that all images were taken by me but the artworks remain the property of the artists and/or the gallery. Please contact me in the comments to this post if you are connected to the artworks and would like them removed.

Damla Bulut



Susanne Henlein, Mona Happel



Sarah Klingenberg



Andra Stritter



Anna Platschek



Andreas Knapp



Franziska R[?]



Lisa Steinhauer



Marcel Franke



Felix Fischer

The merest hint of mortality

The bi-annual international arts festival has just begun in Wellington, and all around the capital the arts community is gearing up to put on a show. The Dowse Gallery in Lower Hutt was aiming to participate by installing a work entitled So It Vanishes, by the Mexican artist Teresa Margolles. It’s a conceptual piece in which soap bubbles are projected into a large space within the gallery; the catch being that the liquid used to produce the bubbles uses trace amounts of water from a Mexican morgue that has been used to wash dead bodies. So on the one hand, we have the light-hearted whimsy of playful bubbles in an art gallery, but on the other there is also the frame of reference of mortality and the transitory nature of life – like a bubble, our lives will one day pop out of existence.   

It’s an interesting concept, and one that’s less pretentious than some of the other exhibits the Dowse typically shows. The ‘morgue water’ is supposedly only a minuscule proportion of the total liquid supply used to produce the bubbles; indeed, the curator said on TV3 News that it would be ‘four tablespoons in 160 litres’ used through the whole 12 week duration of the installation (that portion of clip not online). That's a ratio of more than 2700 parts ordinary water to 'morgue water', so the vast majority of the liquid used to produce the bubbles, 99.96 percent in fact, is plain tap water. 


This 2004 Frieze magazine report on an identical Margolles exhibition at the Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt shows the reaction the exhibition (then called En el Aire / In the Air) is meant to elicit:

In the museum’s soaring hall children play under bubbles that come from Teresa Margolles’ piece En el aire (In the Air, 2003). Running, laughing, catching, they are fascinated by the glistening, delicate forms that float down from the ceiling and break up on their skin. A common motif in art history, the bubble has long been used as a memento mori, a reminder of the transitory nature of life. The children’s parents, meanwhile, studiously read the captions. Suddenly, with a look of disgust, they come and steer their offspring away. The moment of naive pleasure turns into one of knowing repulsion: they have learned that the water comes from the Mexico City morgue, used to wash corpses before an autopsy. It’s unimportant that the water is disinfected; the stigma of death turns the beautiful into the horrific.  

The key here is the word 'disinfected', which was not mentioned in the New Zealand discussion around the Dowse exhibit. If the water was disinfected, then there is even less rational grounds for concern. And in this era of biosecurity and stringent checks on imported goods, you have to wonder if the 'morgue water' actually exists at all, and isn't just an artist's imaginary concept. She certainly seems keen on it though: it's also used in this Tate Liverpool exhibit, dripping onto a hotplate and making interesting sizzling noises.

But in any case it appears the installation will not go ahead because the local Te Atiawa iwi, who play a strong role at the Dowse, have objected to the ‘morgue water’ on cultural grounds. They argue that in Maori spirituality, water that has been used to clean dead bodies is tainted and cannot come into contact with sacred artworks. The iwi’s primary concern relates to the historic pataka (carved food storage hut) that is a centrepiece of the Dowse’s Maori art collection. They find it unacceptable that tainted water might pollute their taonga, and they also express health concerns for the safety of visitors to the museum, with iwi spokesperson Liz Mellish saying to TV3, 'We would be concerned for all people about the safety of such a thing, particularly children who could run in', and 'It's inviting death in, so culturally it's really, really unsafe'.

Respect for other traditions is an important trait, particularly in an environment like New Zealand in which one cultural tradition has run roughshod over the beliefs of a colonised minority. Society should endeavour to allow all members of society to feel comfortable sharing their views and beliefs, and the iwi are fully within their rights to express their concerns about the Margolles installation. The Dowse’s press statement indicates that there were long-running discussions about the exhibit, and it seems that the gallery was unable to reconcile its desire to show the Mexican piece with its stewardship of the iwi’s taonga.

But when a cultural tradition is out-dated and anachronistic, where is the harm in questioning that tradition – in a polite way, naturally? The exponential dilution at work in Margolles' art installation renders the ‘morgue water’ – if it exists at all – utterly harmless. These bubbles could not pose any risk to visitors  who came into contact with them. The only danger is that they might think about their lives and the role that death plays in society and culture. And kids, blithely unaware, might have a bit of harmless fun playing in bubbles. Isn’t that a laudable goal? If we start labelling Margolles' work as 'unsafe' it makes us akin to the shysters who promote hyper-diluted homeopathic remedies as genuine medicine. 


There's also the concern that superstition is derailing a 21st century art installation. The Dominion Post's reporter, Shabnam Dastgheib, clearly raised the 's-word' when he spoke to Victoria University's head of Maori Studies, Peter Adds: 

Adds said superstition was a "loaded" word and any objections to the exhibition would have been based on a deeply entrenched cultural belief for many Maori. "People would have inadvertently placed themselves in danger and Maori people would have treated the people as being contaminated. Those people would have been treated with a degree of caution. Maori don't muck around with issues of tapu."    

Oxford defines superstition as 'excessively credulous belief in and reverence for the supernatural' and 'a widely held but irrational belief in supernatural influences, especially as leading to good or bad luck, or a practice based on such a belief'. This sounds like an accurate reflection of the dynamic at work in this case. It's true that some Maori people may have treated people who came in contact with the bubbles as being 'contaminated', in a cultural rather than medical sense. But there is no proof that the exhibition could 'contaminate' people in a way that actually led to adverse medical effects, and certainly no cause to believe that they had 'inadvertently placed themselves in [actual] danger'.

There's also a slightly worrying aspect of superstition at work in the TV3 item by reporter Charlotte Shipman, which says of the Dowse's pataka, 'It's so sacred to Maori it can't be filmed'. This concept of unfilmability was mentioned in another recent case, that of the return to New Zealand of a collection of severed Maori heads (toi moko) from French museums. A TV3 European correspondent explained to viewers at the time that for cultural reasons the heads could not be filmed, which begs the question, when did such a modern concept as video imagery become part of Maori tradition, and who decided that this was culturally unacceptable? And why is it acceptable for the Dowse website to show a picture of the pataka but not for television to film it? (On reflection though, I can see a good reason for not showing images of the toi moko on the nightly news. It would probably put people off their tea).

I don't have any problem with the iwi standing up for what they believe in, even if in my view the beliefs they express are based on superstition. Good on them for putting their views in a persuasive way. Because this was a problem that the Dowse has made for itself. Gallery director Cam McCracken has issued a statement that indicates that this was really an issue of the Dowse trying to have its cake and eat it too (which has always been a silly aphorism, but you get my drift):

Because of the work’s themes of death and memory, The Dowse has been in close consultation with representatives of local iwi, Te Atiawa, in the months leading up to the opening of So it Vanishes. In particular, we have discussed Teresa’s work in relation to our most treasured taonga, Nuku Tewhatewha.The Dowse is guardian of this nationally significant pataka which was carved in the 1850s as a sign of support for Kīngitanga, or the Māori King Movement. Nuku Tewhatewha is one of only seven Pataka built around the North Island as ‘Pillars of the Kingdom’, and is the only one to survive. Its home at The Dowse carries great meaning for many communities locally and nationally and the team at The Dowse is proud of its guardianship role.Grave concerns have been shared about exhibiting So it Vanishes alongside Nuku Tewhatewha and The Dowse has therefore decided not to proceed with the exhibition. This was a difficult decision to make, but one we believe is important.

Grave concerns! Pun unintended, I presume. 


The Dominion article referred to above also quotes iwi kaumatua Sam Jackson:

Te Atiawa kaumatua Sam Jackson said he had been asked to bless the bubble installation but refused. Iwi also threatened to shut New Zealand's only sacred pataka (storehouse), Nuku Tewhatewha, housed in the museum, if the exhibition went ahead because of fears it would be contaminated. 

So here's the rub. If the Dowse wanted to run Margolles' exhibition it could have done so by either sealing off the pataka in some way - by putting it in storage, ceremonially sealing the rooms it sits in, or even arranging a loan to another museum, which would enable more New Zealanders to see it. But when faced with the decision to proceed with the bubble exhibit at the expense of the pataka exhibit, the gallery chose its pataka. Cam McCracken told TV3: 'The pataka is the heart of the building, and for it to be closed off or its essence or its lifeforce to be removed was just a bit too difficult for us to contemplate'.


Really? Its 'lifeforce'? If the iwi concerns were unable to be addressed, the Dowse could have 'protected' the pataka in some way. But it chose not to, and now all it has to show for the exercise is an empty gallery and a reputation for pusillanimity. It's certainly a pity: I for one would have made the journey to Lower Hutt to visit Margolles' exhibit and see what else the Dowse had to offer.   

Leonardo: not just for nuns

Leonardo's 1489-90 portrait, 'Lady with an ermine'

Part of the problem in living on the edge of the world is that you tend to miss out on the spectacular exhibitions that visit the great galleries in the big cities. Wellington might have a decent array of galleries and Te Papa, the national museum, but it can hardly compete with the riches on offer at the great European or American institutions. Which is why it was a small treat to savour the Embassy cinema’s presentation of a British ‘cinecast’ of the National Gallery’s history-making exhibition, Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan.

The exhibition ran from November 2011 to early February 2012, and collected a spectacular range of Leonardo’s paintings and drawings together for what may be the greatest ever exhibition on his work. The cinecast, Leonardo Live, is a relatively new idea: an arts documentary broadcast live from the scene of the exhibition, to give viewers at home and in special cinema screenings a closer look at the artworks and fill in some of the backstory around the artist and his work.

Naturally, the Wellington screening was a recording of the November live broadcast rather than a live presentation, due to the time difference involved between the UK and New Zealand – although it’s nice to imagine a scenario in which a forward-thinking cinema like the Embassy might try out an actual live broadcast, which would have to be relatively early in the morning if it is to catch the European evening timeslot.

The exhibition is remarkable in that the nine Leonardo paintings featured might sound like an insubstantial number, they actually comprise about half of his lifetime output of paintings. Such was his multi-faceted range of talents, Leonardo seldom lingered on the art of painting, and only completed about 20 paintings in total (as far as we know). This scarcity makes the presence of the artworks in the exhibition even more exciting. For example, Leonardo is only known to have completed four female portraits in his life, and the National Gallery displayed two of them, including the exquisite and groundbreaking portrait of the 16-year-old Sforza mistress Cecilia Gallerani, known as 'Lady with an ermine' (pictured above), which was on loan from Krakow in Poland. (Unsurprisingly, the Mona Lisa, the world's most famous painting, did not make the journey from the Louvre to join its fellow portraits in London).

Another juxtaposition is in evidence in the display in the same room of both of Leonardo's versions of 'The Virgin of the Rocks', which were prepared for a chapel commission that the artist, typically, was immensely tardy in completing. The Louvre's version is the older and is bathed in the soothing golden hue of ancient works, while the National Gallery's own is perhaps 25 years younger, and has been spectacularly restored to thin out a patina of discolouring varnish that was ladled on in the late 1940s. Says the Guardian's Laura Cumming:

Consider The Virgin of the Rocks. What a horrifying spot these saints are in, the vicious rocks around them, the jutting pinnacles in the distance like teeth, that cold blue water, those dismal caverns. The National Gallery has both versions of the picture, mounted on opposing walls and irresistibly proposing comparison: is the Louvre's early version, yellow with filth, more tender-hearted, sympathetic and natural than the National Gallery's newly cleaned vision of spotlit and sharply haloed figures with shellac complexions? Both partake of the real, down to the smallest botanical detail, but both are eerily remote: lunar figures, beyond time and out of this world.

Leonardo Live worked for me because it was successful in balancing the demands of the viewer for quality photography of the beautiful artworks with the desire to explain and educate about their origin and historical context. Host Tim Marlow managed to race through his links and conduct fairly interesting live interviews without losing track of time or resorting to too many platitudes, and the indefatigable Mariella Frostrup performed well as a sofa-bound interviewer, even if her brief instalment with a slightly panicky bow-tied artist threatened to derail the tight schedule.

The Telegraph reported on the London screening:

The audience, who had paid £8 a head, appeared well pleased with the experience: a great introduction to the exhibition, was the general view in the foyer afterwards – "a great balance of expert opinions you’d never otherwise have the opportunity to hear", "better than straining to read the information panels". A trio of game Irish ladies in subdued leisure wear declared themselves particularly satisfied. "But then", said one, "we are drawn to all aspects of Christ and the spiritual." And why was that? "We’re nuns."

Auckland's new old art gallery

The new wing, Auckland Art Gallery

On Saturday I ventured into downtown Auckland on the train from Onehunga to pay a visit to the refurbished Auckland Art Gallery after its three year closure. While a small part of me resents the loss of the fountain in the exterior courtyard that so fascinated me as a child, the extra space and the $120m new extension to the Victorian building is undoubtedly impressive. It was also pleasing to see so many Aucklanders visiting the gallery on its first day - possibly the busiest day in the gallery's history?

The new spaces are strikingly modern and upmarket, but the interior contrast between new and old is not jarring. From the outside the shift from stonemasonry to ultra-modern might be problematic, but realistically there isn't much of a vantage point to view the whole structure, because the building stretches along the narrow Kitchener Street.

The original gallery building

Three new art installations impressed me on my first visit: Choi Jeong Hwa's Flower Chandelier and Red, and Jeppe Hein's Long Modified Bench Auckland.  These definitely have the potential to become attractions in their own right, and it's only a pity that a delightful work like Flower Chandelier will only be on display in the gallery for a year.  I expect its constantly inflating and deflating petals will need patching up after a full year of display.

'Flower Chandelier'

'Red'

'Long Modified Bench Auckland'

Exterior roof detail

As for the conventional art collections, the building displays a surprisingly impressive range of overseas and New Zealand material. Julian and Josie Robertson's magnanimous Promised Gift collection, which includes a sumptuous range of Picassos and other greats, will form the backbone of the expanding overseas collection and enable the gallery to attract a superior range of visiting exhibitions in future. But there's also an eye-opening range of European art that rivals many of the smaller galleries of Europe, including a splendid village scene by Brueghel and plenty of Raphael engravings.  Sure, there's also a pretentious conceptual art space upstairs too, but it's not excessive.

The refurbished Art Gallery will boost Auckland's status as a city that respects culture, and will act as a popular tourist attraction too.  I will definitely be paying another visit to its collections the next time I'm up in Auckland, because there's still plenty more to see. It's heartening to think that Auckland finally has an art gallery that can be considered world class.

Portrait Award 2011

National Portrait Gallery entranceway mosaic, 14 June 2011 

In my last week in London I made a point of paying one final visit to the National Portrait Gallery, because the free exhibition of the BP Portrait Award 2011 had just opened. It’s always interesting to see what the judges regard as highly skilled work, just as it is for the Photographic Portrait Awards presentations at the same gallery. Certainly, the three top award-winners displayed a strong command of the painter’s art, and I admired the skill that went into the works, but the chosen winners struck me as interesting choices. They were definitely impressive in that they depicted their subjects with talent and painstaking effort, but the relative conservatism of the prize winners left me wondering about the place of modern portrait painting in an age where portrait photography (which I admit, I generally prefer over painted work) is so much more immediate and can be every bit as expressive a medium as the more deliberate, time-consuming art of painting. Perhaps it’s the sheer bloody-mindedness in clinging to an old-fashioned artform that we should celebrate.

All three of the winning paintings pleased the eye and showed impressive ability with the brush. The winning portrait, ‘Distracted’ by the Dutch artist Wim Heldens, was a worthy but rather unassuming head-and-shoulders male portrait that was clearly well-executed but I struggled to see what was particularly special about it. The runner-up, ‘Holly’ by Louis Smith, at least had a certain ‘wow’ factor: the Guardian described it, rather accurately, as 'a naked woman handcuffed to a rock wall waiting, with rather striking calmness, for an eagle to come down and eat her liver'. It combined a sweeping canvas, an ornate mock-antique frame and a neo-classical semi-nude reclining sylph adopting one of the traditional nonplussed, recumbent poses so beloved of Victorian and earlier artists, who adored dabbling in classical and Biblical references just as long as it meant they could paint plenty of scantily-clad artists’ models. Ian Cumberland’s third prize winner, ‘Just To Feel Normal’, had the most character of the top three, imbuing the raddled, over-red face of a dropout with a simple, endearing humanity.

Of the other portraits on display, there was the usual selection of paintings that appealed, paintings that weren’t to my taste, and paintings that I failed to see the point of. I particularly enjoyed Daniel Fooks’ ‘quintych’ – five portraits of the Scottish actor Peter Capaldi (‘The Thick of It’, ‘In The Loop’) – and Edward Sutcliffe’s picture of actress and MP Glenda Jackson, both of which made great use of the character lines in their subjects’ well-lived-in faces. Finally, there was Raoof Haghighi’s ‘Take Me Home’, which was either a cryptic and poetic artistic statement or, more likely I think, just a self-portrait of an artist on his sofa, wearing a silly hat. A small measure of how seriously the artist seems to take himself is the quote attached to the painting, in which he claims the artwork tries to delve into ‘identity and personality that go beyond the scope of the mind and self-realisation or liberation’. Alert Pseud’s Corner immediately!

The free Award exhibition runs until 18 September.

My top 5 museums in Berlin

My most recent European adventure was a five-day visit to Berlin at the end of May, which was a great success. It had been an age since my only other visit to the German capital, so a return journey was definitely called for. I stayed in the excellent Wombats hostel in the former East Berlin; the nearest U-Bahn station is still named in the Cold War style, after Rosa Luxemburg, a co-founder of the precursor of the German Communist Party, who was murdered in 1919. 


The Museuminsel - the island in the Spree river that holds a collection of the world's finest museums - was definitely at the top of my Berlin agenda, and I managed to see nearly everything it had to offer. In fact, my Berlin visit turned into a museum and gallery extravanganza. Here's a rundown of my personal top five, in no particular order.


Märkisches Museum


The first museum I visited was the appealingly low-key yet interesting Märkisches Museum, which provides an overview of the history of Berlin since its founding in the Middle Ages. Located in a red brick monastic-like building, the museum displays a wide array of items from the city's past, including a great selection of old toys - Germany was once the world centre of expertise for toymaking - and a fascinating range of consumer products from previous generations. I couldn't overlook the annex containing medieval weaponry and armour, with racks of swords and a cumbersome full suit of plate armour. I also spent a while admiring the images in the venerable Kaiser-Panorama, an elegant circular polished wood booth with more than a dozen viewing windows. Each window displays a different stereoscopic photograph, and the whole set rotates every 30 seconds or so, enabling a viewer to take in all the photos from their seat without moving. There were some lovely crowd scenes at a Zeppelin launch and at political rallies in Unter den Linden, which just shows that stereoscopic photography is still as much of a novelty as it was a century ago.

'You can have anything you like, as long as it's tiny'

Kaiser-Panorama

Cash register, c.1910.

Bode Museum


Part of the thrill of visiting the Bode Museum, which occupies the northern tip of the Museuminsel, is soaking up the glorious building itself. Its semi-circular neoclassical front caps off the island beautifully, and once inside visitors are immediately confronted with an extraordinarily palatial setting, with marble staircases, gold trimmings everywhere and a triumphant regal statue as a centrepiece. The collections are equally impressive, with a huge number of artworks from the years before photography came along and complicated everything. The Bode is particularly strong on religious artworks. My favourite was probably the lively and charismatic statue of the Virgin and Child from the 1460s in which the baby Jesus is wriggling furiously and draping himself in Mary's cloak, while she tries to keep him under control. And a bust from two centuries later, a Mater Dolorosa from Seville in the 1670s, is an amazing feat of verisimilitude: the anguished expression is augmented by the superbly lifelike crystal eyes and the two tears rolling down her cheeks.   

Bode Museum

Virgin & Child From Dangolsheim, c.1460.

Mater Dolorosa, c.1670.

Pergamon Museum


My 1997 visit was marked with torrential rain as central Europe was beset with the worst flooding for 50 years, but I still had an enjoyable time exploring the wonderful history of the city. The highlight of the whole visit for me was touring the splendid Pergamon Museum on the Museuminsel in the river Spree, and basking in the glory of its key exhibits: the great altar from Pergamon in Asia Minor, the reconstructed Ishtar Gate from ancient Babylon and the Roman Market Gate of Miletus. In my 2011 visit I was determined to revisit the museum to take in its superb sights once more - this time with my D-SLR in tow. 


The wonders of the British Museum are of course universally admired, but not even a visit to the Parthenon Sculptures gallery can prepare you for your first sight of the magnificent Pergamon Altar, which is the centrepiece of the museum and the first thing you see once you enter. The sharp, polished steps climb to the holy space atop the altar, which affords a fine view of the highly detailed and well-preserved sculptures in the frieze depicting warring gods and monsters, which runs around the altar and continues along the walls of the museum. The next room is extra-tall to house the soaring facade of the Miletus market gate, a Roman construction from around 120AD, held aloft by graceful narrow pillars and flanked by regal statues. And beyond that lies the reconstructed minor gate from the great and ancient city of Babylon: the Ishtar gate, with its vibrant blue-glazed tiles depicting fearsome monsters with eagle claws and scorpion tails. This is only the smaller of the two gates that guarded the entrance to the great imperial city of antiquity, but it still towers majestically.

Pergamon Altar

Detail of Pergamon Altar frieze

Miletus market gate

Ishtar Gate

Ishtar Gate detail

Neues Museum


This substantially rebuilt museum reopened in 2009, and contains the strongest selection of Egyptian artefacts in Berlin. Its most famous exhibit is the immaculate Nefertiti Bust, which sits resplendent in its own dedicated room, gazing down a long corridor of other lesser riches. Alas, no photographs are permitted of this one exhibit, but there are plenty around on the net. I did photograph many other exhibits, including a depiction of Nefertiti herself with her royal husband Akhenaten - two slender faces gazing out serenely from their glass case, as in life side by side. The statues from the 18th Dynasty are approximately 3350 years old. Another statue, of the head of an 18th Dynasty princess, is a remarkably accomplished piece, with elegant swooping eyebrows adorning the wide expanse of the eyes and contoured around the curve of the skull.  From a much later era, when the Romans controlled Egypt, there's a splendid statue of the sun god Helios, which faces the Nefertiti bust down the long, long museum corridor. This statue from the 2nd century AD depicts the god in all his immortal perfection, and is a testament to the artistry of the age.    

Akhenaten & Nefertiti busts

Helios statue

18th Dynasty princess bust 

Deutches Technikmuseum


Long-time devotees of Richard Scarry's Cars and Trucks and Things That Go will find much to admire here, in Berlin's technology and transport museum. Signs are good even as you approach the complex, with a looming Douglas cargo plane that participated in the Berlin Airlift suspended high on a rooftop above the museum's new gallery building. This is a museum that flaunts its big toys. The entrance hall boasts the Cessna in which the young Mathias Rust famously invaded Soviet airspace and landed near Red Square in 1987. (Rust was imprisoned for a year for the flight, before being deported back to Germany. The Cessna affair helped Premier Gorbachev's glasnost reforms, because it fatally damaged the standing of the Soviet military old guard.) I found the section on early radio and television fascinating - it included a very elderly Baird Televisor from 1932. There was also an interesting collection of vintage still and film cameras, just waiting to inspire the next generation of budding Henri Cartier-Bressons.

The largest space within the museum is reserved for its collection of vehicles. The nautical section has a full-size steam tug from 1901, and the aviation area upstairs boasts a splendid collection of German aircraft. My favourites were the Ju-52 trimotor airliner with its stylish shining metal ribs, and the innovative and graceful Stahltaube monoplane from 1914. Out the back in the museum's rail sheds is a fine selection of steam trains; I've never been a big train fan, but I have to admit that venturing underneath one massive engine via a service pit and smelling the fresh oil was remarkably good fun. (You'll not find me joining the trainspotters at the end of the platforms at Clapham Junction, however).

Deutches Technikmuseum

Mathias Rust's Cessna that he landed near Red Square

Heavy express locomotive, 1956 (rebuilt from 1939 streamlined locomotive)

Baird International Televisor, 1932.

Junkers Ju-52

Medium-format cameras from 1929-60.