‘A succession of bad paintings': Stanley Donwood and Radiohead's Thom Yorke
And now, in a homecoming of sorts for local hero Yorke, their artistic output is being celebrated at Oxford's Ashmolean Museum. There's no doubt that Donwood and Yorke, who met while studying at the University of Exeter, have created some of the most recognisable, ubiquitous and maybe even iconic album covers of their generation. But do they make sense in a huge, historic gallery such as the Ashmolean? Does any of it make for good art? Does it stand up to scrutiny when removed from the context of the records and merchandise it was designed for? It's a nice dream, but nope.
The exhibition starts with LPs, CDs, posters and T-shirts arranged as though you are in a very hip but dour record shop. The gasping, deathly resuscitation dummy of The Bends; the ghostly schematics and angry doodles of OK Computer; the weeping little fella of Amnesiac; the mountains of Kid A; the multicoloured poetry of Hail to the Thief; the woodcuts of Yorke's The Eraser. This is how the work was meant to be seen, this is the context it works best in: arranged as if in racks, as if you could pull a record off the wall and play it.
Donwood clearly has an issue with art galleries. 'They're just intimidating – it's not very democratic,' says a quote of his on the wall. 'Whereas you go into a record shop and it's full of all kinds of oiks.' I'm not sure I buy into this. Record shops can have exactly the same atmosphere of sneering exclusivity as galleries. There's a touchiness here that makes the show feel a little bitter. Guys, you're in the Ashmolean. You're not kicking against the establishment, you're in it.
The exhibition goes album by album, with sketchbooks and paintings displayed to lay bare their creative process. Everything is jointly attributed, positioning Yorke and Donwood as equals.
OK Computer sets an unfairly high bar early on in the show. The 1997 album captured the era's zeitgeist with its anxious teardown of corporate facelessness, technological paranoia and capitalist excess. It still resonates, as does its sense of isolation and loneliness in a world where you're constantly surrounded by people. The artwork looked like nothing else of its era: featuring a motorway overlayed with airplane safety manuals and the ghosts of people rushing by, the cover image looks how the music sounds – cold, frustrated, isolated, desperate. A brilliant meeting of music and album artwork.
But it works infinitely better as a CD insert. You gain almost nothing by seeing these digital images enlarged, framed and plonked on a gallery wall.
Radiohead would struggle to capture the moment again in quite the way they did with OK Computer. The same goes for the art. Donwood and Yorke made vast, bleak acrylic paintings for the covers of Kid A and Amnesiac. Eight canvases are displayed here and they are an unbelievable mess: badly composed, poorly executed, smudgy, splodgy, confused landscapes that even the RA Summer Exhibition would reject. The paintings of spiders and trees for 2011's King of Limbs are even worse; sub-A Level attempts at Max Ernst that almost make me embarrassed for them.
The woodcuts for Yorke's solo albums are less visually offensive, and the ultra-colourful paintings of rivers and forests for the most recent albums by his other band the Smile work better as artworks, but are still quite a distance from anything you'd call brilliant.
Plenty of the work here, especially from the 90s and early 2000s, has entered the wider public consciousness in a way that proves album artwork has cultural heft. It matters. It has an impact. But that doesn't mean any of it is especially good, or even interesting, as art.
If you're a Radiohead fan, there is tons of insight and detail here to keep you happy, but from an art perspective it is a succession of bad paintings. Donwood and Yorke probably shouldn't have put themselves in this position, but they did it to themselves, and that's what really hurts.
This Is What You Get: Stanley Donwood, Radiohead, Thom Yorke is at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, from 6 August to 11 January
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
BBC News
16 hours ago
- BBC News
Radiohead album cover image taken in hospital basement
Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke and artist Stanley Donwood have revealed the front cover of their album, The Bends, came about after the pair sneaked into a hospital and Donwood told the story in an interview ahead of a new exhibition of their work at Oxford's Ashmolean year marks 30 years since the release of The Bends, and Donwood said the cover was going to be based on the title of the album's lead single."It was a literal thing, because the song was called My Iron Lung, and I was like, 'Let's go and find an actual iron lung and film it'," he said. Their hunt led them to the basement of Oxford's John Radcliffe Hospital, where they found the dummy that appears on the cover. Speaking to the exhibition's curator, Lena Fritsch, Yorke said it was "probably" Donwood's fault it happened the way it said: "We managed to get into the basement of the John Radcliffe Hospital… we shouldn't have. "I don't know how we got in. We weren't supposed to be there."Donwood said they went into a "horrible storage area" which was like "something from a low-budget horror film". But, when they found the iron lung, they thought it was "very boring… just a metal box".But nearby they found a mannequin used to train people to perform CPR and use defibrillators."There were a few of them, actually. The resuscitation dummy was literally lying there," Yorke said. 'The record sold alright' Radiohead was formed in Abingdon, Oxfordshire in the mid-1980s - comprising of frontman Thom Yorke, brothers Jonny and Colin Greenwood, Ed O'Brien and Philip and Donwood became friends at Exeter University, where they were both studying English literature and fine first joined forces in 1994 to design the cover of Radiohead's single, My Iron Lung, and their second album, The whose real name is Dan Rickwood, has worked on most of Radiohead's cover art as well as for Yorke's other music projects. Donwood, describing their artistic process at the time of The Bends, said: "We had a video camera and went out filming material, all sorts of things, it didn't really matter what it was. We then played it back on Thom's TV and photographed the TV screen with a film camera."At the time, all of the TVs were analogue. So, when you got close to them, their display was really interesting, like a pre-pixel world."Yorke said: "Blowing it up would pixelate it. Then we stretched the image, distorted it a bit to exaggerate the expression.""Not very much, though, because I think we had a deadline the next day... from the record company," Donwood added. The pair admitted they had only just figured out how to use Photoshop and the colours on the image came out wrong."They all looked great on the screen, but when you print it onto actual records, then it was like, 'What's that muddy mauve colour?' 'That's your blue.' "So, good job there's not too much blue on the front cover," Donwood said."Good job the record sold alright. It looked like we meant it," Yorke exhibition This Is What You Get is on at Oxford's Ashmolean Museum from 6 August until 11 January. You can follow BBC Oxfordshire on Facebook, X (Twitter), or Instagram.
The Guardian
4 days ago
- The Guardian
‘A succession of bad paintings': Stanley Donwood and Radiohead's Thom Yorke
For decades, Radiohead's Thom Yorke and the artist Stanley Donwood have been locked in an intense creative partnership. They scribble over each other's drawings, scrawl in each other's notebooks, push each other, inspire each other. Their work has been on every Radiohead album cover since 1995's The Bends, every Yorke solo record, every poster and every T-shirt. Nothing is farmed out to designers or agencies – Radiohead's visual identity has been fully overseen by Donwood and Yorke. And now, in a homecoming of sorts for local hero Yorke, their artistic output is being celebrated at Oxford's Ashmolean Museum. There's no doubt that Donwood and Yorke, who met while studying at the University of Exeter, have created some of the most recognisable, ubiquitous and maybe even iconic album covers of their generation. But do they make sense in a huge, historic gallery such as the Ashmolean? Does any of it make for good art? Does it stand up to scrutiny when removed from the context of the records and merchandise it was designed for? It's a nice dream, but nope. The exhibition starts with LPs, CDs, posters and T-shirts arranged as though you are in a very hip but dour record shop. The gasping, deathly resuscitation dummy of The Bends; the ghostly schematics and angry doodles of OK Computer; the weeping little fella of Amnesiac; the mountains of Kid A; the multicoloured poetry of Hail to the Thief; the woodcuts of Yorke's The Eraser. This is how the work was meant to be seen, this is the context it works best in: arranged as if in racks, as if you could pull a record off the wall and play it. Donwood clearly has an issue with art galleries. 'They're just intimidating – it's not very democratic,' says a quote of his on the wall. 'Whereas you go into a record shop and it's full of all kinds of oiks.' I'm not sure I buy into this. Record shops can have exactly the same atmosphere of sneering exclusivity as galleries. There's a touchiness here that makes the show feel a little bitter. Guys, you're in the Ashmolean. You're not kicking against the establishment, you're in it. The exhibition goes album by album, with sketchbooks and paintings displayed to lay bare their creative process. Everything is jointly attributed, positioning Yorke and Donwood as equals. OK Computer sets an unfairly high bar early on in the show. The 1997 album captured the era's zeitgeist with its anxious teardown of corporate facelessness, technological paranoia and capitalist excess. It still resonates, as does its sense of isolation and loneliness in a world where you're constantly surrounded by people. The artwork looked like nothing else of its era: featuring a motorway overlayed with airplane safety manuals and the ghosts of people rushing by, the cover image looks how the music sounds – cold, frustrated, isolated, desperate. A brilliant meeting of music and album artwork. But it works infinitely better as a CD insert. You gain almost nothing by seeing these digital images enlarged, framed and plonked on a gallery wall. Radiohead would struggle to capture the moment again in quite the way they did with OK Computer. The same goes for the art. Donwood and Yorke made vast, bleak acrylic paintings for the covers of Kid A and Amnesiac. Eight canvases are displayed here and they are an unbelievable mess: badly composed, poorly executed, smudgy, splodgy, confused landscapes that even the RA Summer Exhibition would reject. The paintings of spiders and trees for 2011's King of Limbs are even worse; sub-A Level attempts at Max Ernst that almost make me embarrassed for them. The woodcuts for Yorke's solo albums are less visually offensive, and the ultra-colourful paintings of rivers and forests for the most recent albums by his other band the Smile work better as artworks, but are still quite a distance from anything you'd call brilliant. Plenty of the work here, especially from the 90s and early 2000s, has entered the wider public consciousness in a way that proves album artwork has cultural heft. It matters. It has an impact. But that doesn't mean any of it is especially good, or even interesting, as art. If you're a Radiohead fan, there is tons of insight and detail here to keep you happy, but from an art perspective it is a succession of bad paintings. Donwood and Yorke probably shouldn't have put themselves in this position, but they did it to themselves, and that's what really hurts. This Is What You Get: Stanley Donwood, Radiohead, Thom Yorke is at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, from 6 August to 11 January
Times
5 days ago
- Times
What Radiohead's artwork tells us about their music (and a new album)
In 2007, when Radiohead surprise-released the album In Rainbows, their legions of devoted fans were given a choice. Click here, we were told, and you can have the music for free. Or click here and you can pay £40 to have the music plus a load of artwork. Reader, I paid the £40 — and that record, with its gorgeous, trippy rainbow splurge of colour, is still on display in my living room. Hence This Is What You Get, an era-spanning hits, rarities and notebooks exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum in the band's home town of Oxford, and which is named for a lyric in their song Karma Police. Because nothing sums up Radiohead diehards better than spending hard-earned cash on some photocopied paintings instead of opting to own In Rainbows for zilch . Do the band have a sleeve as iconic as Sgt Pepper? Nevermind? Parklife? No. But nobody else gets close to the synergy between music and image that Radiohead's body of work boasts — a point This Is What You Get pushes over and over again as it traces the singer Thom Yorke's professional relationship with his artist friend Stanley Donwood through 180 exhibits. • The time Thom Yorke smiled — candid snaps by the Radiohead bassist They met at Exeter University in the late 1980s and started working together for the front cover of The Bends in 1995 — that image of a crash test dummy looking as if he is at the point of climax. The duo have put images to music for everything Yorke has written since. For fans, then, this exhibition will be essential, from the opening display of album and single covers they probably own, all the way to the gift shop, where a blue and white teacup and saucer will set you back £42. Yet fans are hardly the test here. Heck, we spent money on essentially free music and acolytes will lap up not so much the art on the wall as the personal items, mostly shown in display cabinets. There is a self-portrait by Yorke with spiders in his beard. One notebook shows an alternative track listing for the album Hail to the Thief (I tried it out; it's better). Another lists Yorke's fears from 2006, which include Iran, smoking ganja, getting fat, the suffering of millions as a consequence of global warming, and evangelists. Scribbled above some lyrics is a phone number for someone called Ellie. These lived-in pages in themselves prove to be a joy, probably as close to an autobiography as Yorke will get, showing us a mind that is always on, always jotting. The explanatory text for his solo album Tomorrow's Modern Boxes says it was made at 'a particularly bleak time for Yorke'. I am not sure we knew that. • Radiohead are playing together again Still, the focus here is not Yorke's words, nor his music, which plays very little role in the exhibition at his insistence that nothing would be played through speakers (there are a couple of points offering headphones for the uninitiated who have somehow found themselves in a Radiohead exhibition). Instead the point is is to let the visuals speak for themselves, to extricate Donwood and Yorke's artwork, which they mostly create at the same time as the music is being recorded, from the awards-laden band that made said art famous. 'It was years before I could go into a gallery,' an introductory text by Donwood reads. 'They're just intimidating, whereas a record shop is full of all kinds of oiks.' It says something about the confidence of the two men that we are clearly not in a record shop any more. So do the paintings, drawings and sketches, on canvases great and small, digital and analogue, stand alone? It is hard, as a fan, to divorce the art from the music — this is a nostalgia trip on which you recall where you were when you first heard each album in every room — but, largely, yes they do, albeit not at the start. The Bends, for instance, is limited here to a couple of posters, but its acclaimed follow-up, OK Computer, is gifted its own big room for artwork that was a parody of self-help and business speak — that lack of soul the album was railing against. It follows Yorke's lyrics and technological fears, thus making it less album art, more art for an album. Non-fans may wonder whether the room actually belongs in a gallery. Move on, though, and as Radiohead's music became more abstract, so did the images. The initially divisive, glitchy Kid A, we are told, was made when Yorke was struggling with the idea of following up OK Computer's success. 'Some anxiety could be exorcised by painting with brushes, knives, sticks, rags, anger, frustration and kicks,' the supporting text reads, and the nightmarish paint-splatter mountains and monsters perfectly evoke music that had left guitars behind and lyrics that no longer told stories but dealt with feelings. Which is pretty much what the past quarter of a century has been for Yorke, a man who, over time, became perhaps more interested in the visuals than he was in music. A real highlight is Yorke's debut solo album, The Eraser, for which Donwood created a London cityscape swept away in a flood. It is black-and-white, eerie and powerful in a way very little album art manages because most of it is not made in cahoots with the musician. At certain points the music supports the art, rather than the other way around: the monochrome sketches of endlessly chopped-down trees for Radiohead's single for war veterans, Harry Patch (In Memory Of), is far more memorable than the actual song. Now that I have seen that image, which I never had in full given I had only streamed the track on Spotify, the song packs a greater power. The exhibition ends with the Smile, Yorke's most recent band. This final room showcases how free-form his partnership with Donwood is. Made after lockdown, the bright, vivid paintings are full of life. It was a happy time and it shows. Many yellow suns are out and the trees are growing again. Donwood said he wanted to make 'less miserable pictures', something both Radiohead fans and haters will smile at. • How Radiohead reinvented rock (with help from a composer) But then the show ends — with a full stop rather than the comma fans would like. They would, after all, love another room, a hint at a new album by Radiohead, if one will ever exist. It is a question this exhibition does not even try to answer but it does at least point us towards what we already knew: that Yorke is an enigma who has put the art into art rock, someone who long ago left behind the idea that his music can be defined, let alone predicted. There is, after all, no mention whatsoever of the breakthrough hit Creep, made before Yorke really knew who he was — and before he started to work with Donwood, his most important creative Is What You Get is at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, Aug 6 to Jan 11,
