Latest news with #ColonyRoom
The Guardian
01-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘You can see affection, love, respect, rivalry': what happens when artists paint each other?
As with all genres of art, portraiture has its own set of subgenres. Aside from the standard configuration of artist and model, there is the double portrait, the group portrait, the self-portrait and so on. But one other strand habitually draws freely on all the others to create its own unique sub-subgenre: when artists are the subject of another artist's work. Artists painting other artists has a long and distinguished tradition: see Raphael including Leonardo and Michelangelo – and a self-portrait – in his Renaissance crowd scene masterpiece The School of Athens. This unique dynamic has remained a source of fascination for both artists and viewers ever since. 'All portraits can say something about personality and the way people represent themselves, the way they are represented and even something wider about the human condition,' says Melanie Vandenbrouck, chief curator of the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester. 'But what is particularly intriguing about portraits of artists by other artists is that you have two peers looking at each other with affection, love, respect, rivalry and so much more that is not usually present in a standard commission relationship. It inevitably also adds to a heightened sense of collaboration.' Vandenbrouck has curated Seeing Each Other: Portraits of Artists, which features more than 150 works by more than 80 artists to tell a story of how artists working in Britain have portrayed each other from 1900 to the present day. The attractions for one artist to depict another are hugely varied, but at the outset of a career it is often proximity and cost that play their part. Your friends or fellow art students are not only close at hand – they also charge less than a model. This sense of intimacy and kinship continues whether it is an artist depicting spouses, lovers or members of the same groups. As well as the art-school networks, the exhibition runs from Walter Sickert's pre-first world war Fitzroy Street group through the Bloomsburys, the Newlyn School in Cornwall, the School of London, the 1980s BLK Art Group of young Black artists to the YBAs and beyond. These works rarely emerge from commission and so reveal a lot about the artists: who their friends are, and maybe their foes; how they position themselves within the art scene. They can be seen as much as self-portraiture as portraiture. They also reflect the wider histories of the times, great global upheavals of world wars and economic booms and busts, but also profound societal change at the personal level. 'Roger Fry's 1917 portrait of his then lover Nina Hamnett might look fairly conventional today,' says Vandenbrouck. 'But her loose clothes – no corsets – her relaxed pose, and the interior around her all placed her as a quintessential female bohemian artist flouting conventions. Michael Andrews's 1962 study of the Colony Room features distinct and identifiable figures – Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, photographer John Deakin and more – but we see them in terms of wider relationships within a particular milieu.' Seeing Each Other features photography, sculpture and installations – Lubaina Himid's lifesize wooden cutouts – as well as painting. There is also newly commissioned work by Chantal Joffe and Ishbel Myerscough, who met at Glasgow School of Art in 1987 and have been painting one another ever since. 'As well as portraying each other and their families, they have a strong friendship, live near each other [and] shared life milestones such as having children around the same time. All that comes across in their work,' says Vandenbrouck. 'Something really remarkable happens when artists cast their gaze at each other.' Michael Andrews's Colony Room, 1962 (main image)Andrews's depiction of the Soho drinking club with its starry bohemian clientele shows how a space can encapsulate a sense of effervescence conjured by smoke, alcohol and the conversation between creative peers. Ishbel Myerscough's Two Painters, 2025; Chantal Joffe's Studio, 2025 (main image)These two works are the latest iterations of Joffe and Myerscough's decades-long study of each other. Whether through Myerscough's meticulous attention to detail or Joffe's broad gestures, they both produce remarkably candid and affecting studies of a friendship in which they can truly be themselves. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion Lubaina Himid's Bridget Riley, Untitled 1982, from Vernet's Studio, 1994Himid's Bridget Riley was one of 26 lifesize painted wooden cutouts that conjured artists such as Frida Kahlo, Barbara Kruger, Faith Ringgold, Claudette Johnson and others to expose the marginalisation of Black and female creativity. Himid invited viewers to see how many artists they could name, exposing their comparative invisibility. Roger Fry, Portrait of Nina Hamnett, 1917 Fry's portrait not only situates Hamnett as a modern woman and central figure in London and Paris avant garde circles, but also as a respected artist herself. Her work was admired by Walter Sickert and around the time of this portrait, Hamnett and Fry drew reciprocal nudes of each other. Seeing Each Other: Portraits of Artists is at Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, 17 May to 2 November.
The Guardian
26-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘Champagne for my real friends!' Francis Bacon masterpiece escapes to the artist's old drinking den
When a work of art fails to excite, interest or move me, the word that comes to mind is 'dead'. Bad art is lifeless, good art is alive and great art is supervital. And it's a supervital masterpiece I am looking at right now. Face as sharply hewn as a Congolese mask, with a flesh-coloured pullover melting into the shadows of his loins, Peter Lacy dominates the room, captured in a gold-framed portrait by his lover Francis Bacon. That room is the Colony Room Green in London, not the original Colony Room but a bar nearby that lovingly recreates, with the precision of an art installation or stage set, the bohemian drinking den run by Muriel Belcher where Bacon would order drinks all round with his famous toast: 'Champagne for my real friends and real pain for my sham friends!' Its green walls are covered with art and memorabilia, including a wanted poster made by artist Lucian Freud to recover his own lost portrait of Bacon. So how has Peter Lacy, who seems an immense, baroque phenomenon propped up in the middle of these cosy confines, made his way home ? He is on 'day release', explains Jago Cooper, director of the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts at the University of East Anglia – as in a day out from prison. The Sainsbury Centre has declared that all the artworks it owns are alive: 'Art is alive and animate, waiting to be communicated with by anyone with a soul.' So, Cooper wondered, where would a living work of art want to go if it had a brief escape from the jail of the museum? It's a pretty good guess that a Bacon painting would choose to return to its creator's old haunt, or at least this replica. The burningly intense painting holds court at the centre of the room. You half-expect it to start dropping acid one-liners to the cackling delight of drunken ghosts – all the Soho monsters and reprobates hovering in the afternoon shadows, drinks in their skeletal hands. It's a lovely bar, but if you do visit the new Colony Room, you won't, sadly, find Bacon's painting. This really is just a day release, although it is all being recorded for a film to be shown from April at the Sainsbury Centre, with actors playing gay men from Bacon's generation and from today, comparing experiences. Sign up to Art Weekly Your weekly art world round-up, sketching out all the biggest stories, scandals and exhibitions after newsletter promotion So what is this about? A lightning visit by a masterpiece to a drinking den where the public can't see it except on film? Let's not use the dread words 'publicity stunt'. Instead, let's wonder whether it really is meaningful to claim that a work of art is a living thing, with a mind of its own and opinions about where it would like to go. Anyone who has ever loved a work of art knows this to be true. It is fundamental to art's power and magic. The Bacon in the bar is electrifying proof. Every smoky brushstroke, every matted smear of black or pink, simmers with life. Lacy is a sentient being, and behind him, you feel the vital presence of the artist himself, the warm blood coursing through his painting hand. Five centuries ago, the Renaissance writer Giorgio Vasari praised the Mona Lisa thus: 'In the pit of the throat, if one gazed upon it intently, could be seen the beating of the pulse.' In fact, art has been experienced by most people in the majority of places throughout human history as animate: that is, as sacred objects in which a divine or magical force is infused. In southern Italy, you can still see statues weep, come to life, process at festivals. In this pleasantly claustrophobic little bar, I am getting that same uncanny feeling about Peter Lacy. Is he about to reach out of the painting and hit me, as he was wont to hit Bacon? It's a reverence that was replaced in most parts of Europe by the 18th century with a more secular, rational spirit of aesthetic admiration. Works of art – or objects designated as such – were torn from religious or ritual settings and placed in museums. Or imprisoned, to continue the 'day release' image. There we sometimes struggle to feel their magic power, their life. The Sainsbury Centre is trying to reclaim that intoxicating belief in art, not just through its day-release programme but in its displays, which urge you to encounter artworks as living beings, from carved masks of the Pacific Northwest to Picasso drawings. Its app tells you not the 'history' of an artwork, but its 'life story'; not when it was made, but when it was 'born'. Gimmicky? Not to me. Either you believe art is alive, or it means nothing to you. Do yourself a favour. Believe. The Living Art collection displays can be experienced at Sainsbury Centre, University of East Anglia, Norwich.
