Latest news with #JohnSoane
Chicago Tribune
24-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Chicago Tribune
Review: ‘Materialities' at the Driehaus Museum puts new Chicago art in an old Chicago mansion
I really dig house museums. They're like historical fiction rendered as physical space, a portal into the lives of other eras, made newly accessible across barriers of time, race, class, gender and other limitations. Sir John Soane's Museum, a curiosities-stuffed townhouse in London, includes an Egyptian sarcophagus around which its owner used to throw parties. The Ulysses S. Grant Home in Galena has no electricity or indoor plumbing, and plenty of hand-cranked kitchen tools on view. I am very excited about the imminent opening, in early April, of the National Public Housing Museum in the last remaining building of the Jane Addams Homes in Chicago's Near West Side. I don't love the Driehaus Museum, a Gilded Age mansion at the corner of Wabash and Erie that was Chicago's most expensive and ostentatious private residence when it was finished in 1883. Built for the family of Samuel Nickerson, a banker, it was nicknamed the Marble Palace for the 17 types of marble it contained, and it was fireproof, a novelty prompted by the family's loss of their previous home to the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. After multiple residents and much deterioration, the home was meticulously restored in the aughts by the late philanthropist Richard H. Driehaus, who filled it with his sizable collection of historical decorative artworks — so many Tiffany lamps! — and opened it to the public in 2008. And there it sits, a monument to uberwealthy American extravagance. About once a year, though, the Driehaus does something brave and thrilling: it invites in contemporary artists. The series, called 'A Tale of Today,' was inspiringly inaugurated in 2019 with an exhibition by Yinka Shonibare, the British Nigerian artist whose remaking of Victorian fashions with African wax print fabric boldly raised questions about colonial trade, minority bodies and good taste in the Nickerson's grand rooms. Now we have 'Materialities.' Curated by Giovanni Aloi, it features the work of 14 artists and collaboratives, most of them based in Chicago, many of them having made new sculptures especially for the Driehaus. That matters because, as the title suggests, the show is premised on an engagement with the materials out of which the mansion was constructed and decorated. Amazingly, no one used marble, but then, good artists rarely do the obvious. Instead, there is blown glass, carved coal, old wood, wild animals, dead leaves, copper piping, Chicago River clay and even some glossy spandex. What's any of that got to do with this old mansion? Plenty. Let's start in the smoking room, where a Jewish woman such as myself would not have been welcome back in the day. Nor, presumably, would Jefferson Pinder, the African American artist whose 'Gust' fills the center of the den, jutting out of the fireplace as if blown in on a backdraft. The sculpture is a giant speaker cabinet emanating sounds of the past, an atmospheric mélange of whistly, rumbly, carnivalesque noises, plus the voice of George Washington Johnson, the first Black singer ever recorded. Paneled in pressed tin and patterned linoleum scraps salvaged from the working-class neighborhood of Bridgeport, home to successive waves of immigrants, 'Gust' neatly echoes the gorgeous pale blue dimensional tilework that lines the walls. I likely wouldn't have been invited into the front parlor either, and thank goodness, because I couldn't have handled its onslaught of fussy decor. Beth Lipman, whose glass tabletop sculpture stands in front of the fireplace, embraces that Victorian maximalism only to turn it on its head. Her 'Sphenophyllum and Chains' is a still-life gone mad, a jumble of vases and bowls overgrown with the creeping vines of a plant that went extinct 250 million years ago; strung with fetters, half of it hangs impossibly upside down from the underside of the table. Because the table is white and everything else is made of clear glass, the effect is ethereal to the point of disappearance. Sphenophyllum is one of the ancient plants that helped form coal deposits in Chicago and elsewhere, fueling the city's industrialization and urbanization, making the fortunes and fortresses of Gilded Age families such as the Nickersons possible. Naturally, it figures in 'Materialities,' as does coal itself, in the form of wee animal curios cast from coal dust and resin, arranged by Jonas N.T. Becker in the dining room's elaborate built-in oak cabinetry as if it were high-class decorative art. Also on display are large chunks of shiny coal and gnarled oak, plus slabs of timbered walnut, mossy and rough, laid out as a centerpiece on the enormous dining table. As raw materials, they possess an honest beauty. The return to nature continues in a room off the upstairs ballroom, where three artist books by Barbara Cooper seem to want to go back to being trees. The interiors of 'Unbound' are pages recycled from discarded drawings and notebooks; the exteriors are covers cased from veneer scraps. Dense and organic, their legibility is botanical rather than textual, like how one reads tree rings and whorls. In the quarters of the Nickerson's daughter-in-law, Laleh Motlagh has fashioned an imitation Persian rug by pressing dried leaves, collected from the Driehaus garden and her family home in Iran, into the hollowed-out spaces between two large sheets of acrylic. Semi-transparent and floating a few inches off the ground, 'Threaded Memories' is like the ghost of a carpet that once covered the floor at the foot of Adelaide Nickerson's bed. Such haunting happens throughout 'Materialities': Pinder's sounds are those of yesteryear, Lipman's glass-festooned table stands just where a table did in 1883, Becker's walnut slabs are what the dining table once was. Meanwhile, in the former hunting trophy room, Olivia Block has brought the wild animals back to life. 'Lowland' features solarized audio and video footage of moose, bison, deer and other creatures, projected onto the wallpaper as if they were clambering around, not only no longer dead, but also on land still wild enough to allow them free passage. Some of the artists in 'Materialities' fully embrace the mansion and its quirks. Edra Soto installs a trio of pillars as grand and ornamental as anything the Nickersons fancied, only her aesthetic runs modernist and tropical, featuring patterns based on those of her native Puerto Rico. Petra Bachmaier and Sean Gallero, who collaborate as Luftwerk, assembled a sort of upside-down chandelier, a minimalist version of the dozens that hang throughout the building. Theirs sits on the ground, just bare bulbs screwed into the ends of copper piping strung with wires, powering through a wondrous cycle of dimming and illumination, conjuring electricity's arrival to the Marble Palace long ago. Across the hall, a quartet of biomorphic sculptures by Bobbi Meier have settled into Mrs. Nickerson's jewel box of a sitting room. Fashioned from pantyhose and spandex stuffed to bursting, they are voluptuous and grotesque, swallowing up the side tables on which they perch, like ladies who lunch too much. It's tempting to wonder if the Nickersons would have liked 'Materialities.' They were voracious collectors of 19th century Western paintings, Japanese netsuke, Chinese jades and Indian jewelry, and donated more than 1,300 items to the Art Institute before leaving Chicago for the East Coast in 1900. To the great credit of Aloi and his chosen artists, I very much doubt it.
The Guardian
03-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Alison Watt: From Light review – hollow heads and spectral sheets loaded with meaning
Sir John Soane was a melancholy soul. Not content with a skull as a memento mori, he acquired the stone sarcophagus of pharaoh Seti I, which gapes like the mouth to the Underworld in the shadow-filled basement of his museum at Lincoln's Inn Fields. Two hundred years on, at his country house at Ealing, his fellow spirit, the painter Alison Watt, stares at the world with the kind of bleak thoughts he savoured. Watt's exhibition starts with a painting of a broken plaster cast of a classical child's head. Like all her still lifes, it is done with precision and craft. It is also totally eerie. The white plaster child's eyes are blank, devoid of pupils. There is a blue-shadowed hole, where the hollow head has been broken off from its body, opening a lane to the land of the dead. Uneasy? Good, then the ghost story can begin. Meticulous but unsettling paintings of folded white linen follow. Watt depicts their sharp creases, enigmatic dimples and empty overhangs with precise, patient attention. Yet her pristine sheets and tablecloths look unerringly spectral in Soane's spooky old place. She doesn't do anything flashy, just sticks to the facts, with one exception – you can't tell exactly what surfaces the linens rest on. They exist in a pale limbo yet still, disturbingly, cast shadows. Every manicured cloth made me think of my winding sheet. Wait, here are some nice pink flowers! The first of these four floral still lifes is perfect, with creamily exact pink petals casting cool shadows on a nondescript surface. But in the next painting they are yellowing, then in the next serious decay has taken over. In the final picture the flowers are just about surviving, like us all. Of course, it is not exactly original to put intimations of decay and entropy into a still life – 17th-century paintings do it religiously. But Watt does more than just emulate painters of the past. Watching a flower rot or staring at a sheet of linen until it seems alive was a more common pursuit for artists in a world without technological distraction. It means something different and positively strange to look this hard at things nowadays. And Watt really does look hard. A painting of a blue and white porcelain cup and saucer captures not just every detail of its antique pattern, but the sheen and depth of the glaze in a little wonder of observation. Has Watt never heard of a cameraphone? Doesn't she know you can have it 'see' something for you in an instant? Plainly she prefers to actually look. And look. This rigorously empirical method raises paradoxically metaphysical questions. A large depiction of a sheet pinned up to a wall sways in the light. It's just white cloth. Is that all there is? Or does something inhabit it? In fact this hanging cloth echoes a haunting, or haunted, masterpiece of religious art. In Francisco de Zurbarán's c1660 painting The Sudarium of St Veronica, a white sheet is similarly slung up and on it is the blood-brown, miraculously preserved imprint of Christ's face. No face appears on Watt's white cloth. Nothing. It is a religious painting without a God. She watches for so long, but nothing happens. Sign up to Art Weekly Your weekly art world round-up, sketching out all the biggest stories, scandals and exhibitions after newsletter promotion The show climaxes in a darkened space where three 'portraits' are brightly illuminated. These are not paintings from life but studies from death. Watt has done three still lifes, from different vantage points, of a death mask that survives in Soane's collection. He bought it, a wall text tells us, thinking it was the death mask of a naval mutineer called Richard Parker. We are not told why he wanted such a grisly memento of a sailor hanged from a ship's yardarm in 1797, or why the seller who conned him didn't just sell it for what it was. For what Soane bought was the death mask of someone far more famous, Oliver Cromwell. Watt ironically gives the dead lord protector the same triple portrait treatment that Anthony van Dyck lavished on Charles I, whose death warrant Cromwell procured and signed. Unearthly light falls on the dead face, deep shadows overhang its eyes. Is there a ghost here, she seems to ask as she paints the death mask from different angles. No. Not even that. Just a great nothingness. It might be too sad a thought even for Soane. Alison Watt: From Light is at Pitzhanger Manor and Gallery, London, 5 March to 15 June
The Guardian
28-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Cheeky monkeys, gored matadors and trompe l'oeil masks – the week in art
Alison Watt New paintings inspired by the sublime, poetic architecture of Georgian visionary Sir John Soane. Pitzhanger Manor, London, 5 March to 15 June William S Burroughs Artworks by the beat author whose best novel, Queer, was recently released as a film. October Gallery, London, 6 March to 5 April Ella KruglyanskayaSensual, haunting figurative paintings that pay homage to Manet's depiction of a dead matador. Thomas Dane Gallery, London, until 3 May Rhea StorrA film that documents Caribbean community groups in Wolverhampton and Sheffield. Site Gallery, Sheffield, until 25 May Tim StonerNew abstract paintings with verve, complexity and beauty. Pace gallery, London, 5 March to 12 April Forty-five years after it was bought for a then record price, doubt has been cast over the authenticity of this painting, Samson and Delilah by Peter Paul Rubens. In a new book, art historian Euphrosyne Doxiadis argues that 'the flowing, twisting brushstrokes that are so characteristic of Rubens are nowhere to be seen', and that what the National Gallery has on its wall is actually a 20th-century copy of a now lost painting by the 17th-century Flemish master. Read the full story Siena was a dazzling centre of the medieval art world Lubaina Himid will represent Britain at the 2026 Venice Biennale Leeds-based photographer Peter Mitchell had a correspondence with Nasa Crime-obsessed photographer Weegee still shocks today The arts sector may be breaking the law with its use of interns Leigh Bowery was the ultimate exhibitionist, and also Lucian Freud's muse Women are outperforming men in Africa's art market Photography is therapy for Martin Parr Still Life with Fruit and Vegetables with Two Monkeys by Jan Roos, circa 1620 Grapes glisten and apples shine in this depiction of a cornucopian mass of beautifully luscious fruit. It's a still life to make you slaver, yet the luxurious assembly of refreshing edibles is being stolen by two naughty monkeys who are portrayed with the same keen eye as the fruits. One is howling its excitement to the other as it holds delicious loot in each hand. Whichever human aristocrat or merchant was planning to gorge on these treats is due to be disappointed. It is an image of entropy undermining order; chaos coming for civilisation. Such intimations of decay and ultimately of mortality are common in 17th-century still life paintings, which sometimes swarm with insects or even reptiles, not to mention the odd human skull among the luxuries. But Roos takes a novel, comic line with his acute portrayal of mischievous monkeys. National Gallery, London If you don't already receive our regular roundup of art and design news via email, please sign up here. If you have any questions or comments about any of our newsletters please email newsletters@
The Guardian
16-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Soane and Modernism: Make it New review – red phone boxes, Sydney Opera House and a prophet of modern architecture
If John Soane had only created the combined house and museum that bears his name in Lincoln's Inn Fields, London – a domestic-scaled pharaoh's tomb with Alice in Wonderland tricks of scale and perception – his place in history would be assured. But he did far more. There, and in his building for Dulwich Picture Gallery, he helped to form the modern idea of a museum. His (mostly destroyed) headquarters for the Bank of England brought the serene grandeur and spatial complexity of imperial Roman baths to the workplace of financial civil servants. The son of a bricklayer who became one of Britain's most original architects, his restless imagination generated a trove of ideas that others still mine, two centuries after he lived and worked. After a period of relative neglect after his death in 1837 aged 83, his work began to be rediscovered in the 1920s. The best-known homage is the classic red telephone box, its shallow dome and reeded decoration frankly borrowed by its architect, Giles Gilbert Scott, from the tomb that Soane created for his wife and himself in Old St Pancras churchyard in London. Versions of the top-lit vaults he designed in Dulwich can be seen in art galleries all over the world. But most of all, according to a new exhibition at his house and museum, he was a prophet of the modernist architecture of the 20th century. 'People now,' says the show's curator, Erin McKellar, 'don't realise how new Soane was.' His life spanned a 'period of tremendous change', from the mid-18th century into the era when railways and photography were beginning to emerge. He both responded to circumstances and developed ideas that were ahead of his time. He pared back ornament, in at least some of his work, stripping it to essentials in ways you could call modern. The exhibition pairs drawings by Soane and his office, mostly from the museum's collections, with material by 20th-century giants – Frank Lloyd Wright, Ernö Goldfinger, Le Corbusier, the brutalist pioneers Alison and Peter Smithson. There's a drawing of the elegant Kingsgate Bridge in Durham by the engineer Ove Arup, and a beautiful wooden triptych by the architect of the Sydney Opera House, Jørn Utzon, in which the building's curving roofs emerge from the surfaces of a sphere. This object, an artwork as much as an architectural model, was made to demonstrate the geometric principles of this now famous building. The exhibits by 20th-century architects have been loaned by Drawing Matter, an astonishingly rich private collection of drawings and models. Here they are organised by McKellar into themes – light and space, engineering – that show the continuity of Soane's ideas into modernism. A two-storey conservatory he proposed for his country house, Pitzhanger Manor, in Ealing, gridded and glassy, it is matched with a similarly measured and transparent design by Goldfinger. The flint and brick gateway of the same house, whose effect comes from the contrasting textures of its raw and cooked materials more than from decoration, is linked to 'Eaglefeather' a dynamic stone-and-timber house cantilevered over a Malibu slope by Frank Lloyd Wright and his genius apprentice John Lautner. There's a drawing of Scott's phone box. The case for Soane's modernism is not in fact fully made, partly because space doesn't allow it, but more because he was too singular and multifarious to be put in any one category. He could equally be claimed as an ancestor for postmodernism, the movement that saw itself as the colourful antidote to the austerity of the likes of Goldfinger or the Smithsons, or for 20th-century versions of classical architecture, which was more Gilbert Scott's camp. One of the strongest exhibits is an 'urban scene' of 1978 by the Italian Aldo Rossi, a composition of triangles, cubes and cylinders based on his own projects, whose use of simple forms might be compared to Soane's. But it's a stretch to call Rossi, who sought to reinvent the monumental types of antiquity, a modernist. The truth is that Soane was an inventor and a creator, seeking incessantly and sometimes anxiously to innovate, with too many ideas in his head and in his drawing hand for any one style or movement. He had a magpie mind, and dreams of imperial scale. Architects of all kinds like him for the importance he gave to aspects you might call architectural – structure, materials, the use of light, the planning of spaces – over stylistic add-ons. What connects him most with the successors shown in the exhibition is a desire to explore and test the possibilities of their art with drawings and models. So the exhibition works partly as a series of intriguing suggestions as to what might link Soane and modernists. It works best as an occasion for celebrating the acts of architectural drawing, the magic by which pen strokes become masonry. This is evident in its second room, in which sheets of sketches by the contemporary British architect Tony Fretton and the Portuguese architect Álvaro Siza are juxtaposed with Soane's. These are examples of visible thinking, in which elements are worked over and over and one drawing is laid on top of another, with a coherent physical object slowly emerging from the mess. All of which, really, is architecture. Soane and Modernism: Make It New is at the Sir John Soane's Museum, London, until 18 May
