Latest news with #TheSchoolofAthens
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
23-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Raphael's School of Athens review – rewarding study of Renaissance fresco
Here is the latest in the series of high-minded, low-tech studies of Renaissance art history from Howard Burton, a theoretical physicist turned art historian, who has launched a series of films called, with admirable Ronseal-ness, Renaissance Masterpieces. Having already looked over Botticelli's Primavera, Burton now turns to Raphael's wall fresco in the Vatican palace, arguably the high point of the artist's prodigious output and a work to rival Michelangelo's Sistine chapel decorations. Burton has already tackled The School of Athens as part of his mammoth survey of Raphael's entire oeuvre, Raphael: A Portrait, but here he gets to drill down in considerable detail for the film's 81-minute running time. Admittedly, the visuals are as rudimentary as Burton's previous offerings – it looks like a glorified PowerPoint, with Burton's sonorous commentary overlaid in unpunctuated voiceover – but as before, the tone works: Burton is scholarly without being dull, and clear without being obvious. It's also unusual, to say the least, to hear about some of the names Burton pulls into his disquisition – Neoplatonist thinkers such as Gemistos Plethon, Nicholas of Cusa and Marsilio Ficino – as Burton ruminates on the symbolism of the painting's imagery, from the postures of the figures involved, to their much-discussed (but surprisingly mostly uncertain) identity, to the meaning behind the spectacular masonry backdrop. Burton is also very good on the mechanics of the fresco's creation, and how the details of the architecture of the former papal apartments play into its meaning, in concert with the complementary works on the ceiling, floor, and adjacent walls. He even takes a 15-minute mea culpa for having not paid much attention to Renaissance chronicler Giorgio Vasari's religion-based interpretation of the painting, suggesting that Vasari might have been right to identify the foreground figures (one of whom is supposedly inspired by Michelangelo himself) as the four evangelists, rather than the classical philosophers that they are routinely ascribed to be. Not light viewing, for sure, but rewarding all the same. Raphael's School of Athens is on Prime Video from 24 April.
The Guardian
09-04-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Academic freedom in the US is under threat – universities of the world, unite!
In western academia, everything began with philosophy. Ever since, especially since the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution of the 17th century, there has been a long, centrifugal process, with discipline after discipline making its distinctive contribution and marking out its methods and its domain of inquiry. Raphael's painting The School of Athens displays this perfectly, with the two great philosophers Plato and Aristotle in the centre. Yet even here, Raphael points at the specialisation of knowledge that is about to explode. Plato points upwards, symbolising his interest in the timelessness of metaphysics. Aristotle gestures downwards, emphasising his interest in the empirical. Today, at university, students and researchers focus on a single sub-branch of, say, modal logic, labour economics or organic chemistry. Knowledge has accumulated and fragmented. Renaissance men (or women) are almost nonexistent. Hand in hand with this, especially in the last century, we have seen ever more rigorous academic standards and an ever sharper emphasis on evidence and logic, and the importance of separating these from opinions. As a senior member of Oxford University put it to me recently, from the start he was taught to distinguish the positive from the normative, and that, in the words of his tutor, 'we only do the positive'. This is correct 99% of the time, and the new chancellor of Oxford was fully on target when he said a university did not need a foreign policy. However, the central question about universities – all universities – is whether they can be and should be neutral with respect to everything. Should we avoid the normative all the time? Absolutely not. Return to the Raphael painting. Aristotle and Plato have different approaches, but they are entirely agreed about one thing: the subject of their inquiry is the cosmos. Or, as Ludwig Wittgenstein put it, 'The world is all that is the case'. We in universities, in every discipline, have an interest in investigating the universe as it is. This can and should include writings about human imagination or our dreams or fantasies. But our investigations cannot take seriously claims about the world that we know not to be the case. Evolution and creationism are not to be compared, one with the other, any more than we should take someone seriously who believes the Earth is flat. In universities, beliefs are to be examined, not taken as God given. None of this means that there is anything as simple as the truth. The truth is almost always partial, debatable and context dependent. Yet, as Bernard Williams argued so convincingly in Truth and Truthfulness, academics must be truth-tellers. We cannot be neutral with respect to fake news, misinformation or outright lies. No matter where these come from, they must be called out. If a university does not believe this and does not act accordingly, it does not deserve to be a university. With Columbia having capitulated, and with Harvard and Princeton under pressure to follow suit, every university, not just across the US, but around the globe, must unite in standing up for truth-telling. Andrew Graham is a political economist, former master of Balliol College, Oxford and former director of the Scott Trust
