Breathtaking exhibition captures the attention of OCA students
Turner, Monet, Twombly: Later Paintings, is currently being hosted at Tate Liverpool. OCA organised a study visit and a talk at the gallery last Saturday, which examines the work of three great artists, each born in a different country and in a different century. The exhibition concentrates on the artists’ later work in which they combine themes of mortality, nostalgia and loss. Cy Twombly, an American Abstract Expressionist who died last year, includes a quote from Dorian Gray in one of his paintings to refer to the ageing process. Turner commemorates the deaths of his fellow artists, David Wilkie and Robert Haydon, and Monet paints a funereal gondola in a work started shortly after his wife’s death.
The exhibition compares the artists’ use of classical myths, as in Turner and Twombly’s treatment of the Hero and Leander story. It examines their portrayal of the power of nature and of ‘awe-inspiring’ landscapes in the context of the aesthetic concept of ‘the sublime’.
The exhibition continues to the 28 October 2012. Hence it will still be on show at the time of the OCA’s visit to the Liverpool Biennial on Saturday September 29. Tickets cost £10 with concessions and free entry to Tate members.
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It is a breath taking exhibition. I suppose I knew many of the Monet and Turner paintings but Twombly was an eye-opener. And the whole experience led to the following poem:
Turner Monet Twombly: Tate Liverpool
Out of the underground railway at James Street
I’m startled by the new ship-white museum
jammed between the liver birds and the red
brick of the non-combustible warehouses.
August sun catches the shine wherever it can
until I dip into the gallery and am swept up
by the swirls of paint, knee-deep in sea, river,
feet tangled in water-lily, and the sun is paint.
Here I’m beside Petworth lake, early morning,
but it’s not just Turner: reflected in the painting
the barred window nets the bright Mersey,
the Wirral under a skyful of Constable cloud.
I try to edge out my own silhouette, backlit
by the gallery spotlight, green in the Turner sky.
I spin round to the Mersey, the three o’clock sun
a wayward child, spilling glitter over brown ripples,
and back again to Twombly’s summer, its yellow
and white emptiness suggesting something even hotter.
I wonder if when I get out of here, these paintings
will be able to shrug off my reflections.
I think I must have heard the comment a dozen times “We all know a bit about Turner and Monet but who’s this Twombly?”
Like Liz, I was mesmorised by some of Twombly’s work and the exhibition has given me inspiration for my future photography.
Thanks to David and Gerald for their great help as we walked around and for organising the excellent lecture which put the whole thing in context.
I like your poem Liz. It seems you got a lot out of the building as well as the paintings. Sometimes writing thoughts on an exhibition or your own work is better done as a poem. I was recently asked to write my thoughts on Memory for a touring group exhibition. Whatever i wrote just sounded pretentious, so i ended up writing a poem. I am not a poet, but found the experience thoroughly rewarding, so much so that I now regularly write poems about my paintings. I was wondering if you are on the creative writing degree or whether writing is an extra activity for you.
Hi Olivia, interesting that poems and paintings go together for you. Writing is my main activity and I’m a tutor for Creative Writing, but I am very involved with other arts as well. I’ve just done a book of poems with another OCA arts tutor, Pat Hodson, doing digital images and a sound artist doing a sound track. We did a month long residency in Iceland, and the book is a result of our collaboration.