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Spectator
02-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Spectator
The greatest decade for British painting since Turner and Constable? The 1970s
Slowly the canvas was unfurled across the concrete floor of a warehouse on an industrial estate in Suffolk. On and on it went, a flurry of paint marks and brush strokes, yellow, green and occasionally blue, like a cornfield at harvest time. By the time we got to the end some seven metres of it lay stretched out at our feet. It was the first time anyone had seen this unknown magnum opus by Gillian Ayres since it was rolled up in 1974 – and it looked sensational. Recently I've been reflecting on the 1970s for a couple of reasons. One is that I'm working on a book about art in London at that time, the other is that I've been helping to organise an exhibition of Ayres's work from that era at the Heong Gallery, Downing College, Cambridge. Of course, as L.P. Hartley noted, the day before the day before yesterday is alien territory – and the maps we have of it may not be reliable. It strikes me as a period from which much art and many artists are waiting to be resurrected and re-examined. Artistically the early 1970s was a period in which painting was out. Everybody knew that at the time, including the painters. But that does not mean that good pictures were not being created, on the contrary. Simply by a count of masterpieces, it ranks as one of richest since Turner and Constable were exhibiting side by side at the Royal Academy. Francis Bacon was still working at full power. David Hockney produced such marvellous works as the two canvases, 'My Parents' and 'Looking at Pictures on a Screen', both 1977, which last year in the National Gallery hung on either side of Piero della Francesca's 'Baptism', withstanding that exalted comparison with aplomb. Meanwhile Lucian Freud was just entering his late phase, rich in magnificent portraits, with and without clothes, and also painting a group of London landscapes, among the bleakest and most evocative of all images of that city. Among numerous other fine figurative painters, Frank Auerbach, Euan Uglow, Leon Kossoff and Michael Andrews were all working at full power. Then there was a vigorous, and varied community of abstractionists, including not only Ayres, but Bridget Riley, Frank Bowling and Sean Scully. Nonetheless, the general view was that painting was if not dead, certainly moribund (or smelt bad, as John Lennon is supposed to have put it). At St Martins School of Art, where Ayres taught until 1978, other members of staff used to warn the students: 'Don't listen to her, she'll make you want to paint'. In some cases, she did. Personally, Ayres reacted against this tide of fashion by luxuriating in her medium. Her environment and – quite frequently – the artist herself were covered in the stuff. The painter Mali Morris recalled attending a party during the 1970s at Ayres's house on Beverley Road, Barnes. The door was opened not by the artist herself, but by her then dealer Kasmin. He was dressed in an outfit startling even for a social gathering in that unconventional decade: 'one of those paper boiler suits that forensic teams wear to the scene of the crime'. This precaution was 'very necessary', Kasmin explained, since he always got covered in paint whenever he visited this dwelling. He was right. When she got home she discovered her party dress was smeared with Prussian blue, probably the result of sitting on a kitchen chair that doubled as a palette. Later in the decade Ayres changed from paintings of remarkable length to ones with extreme thickness of impasto. 'Handfuls of paint' as she put it – which she did not mean metaphorically. She worked, as her friend the critic Tim Hilton noted, 'in some intimacy with her picture, with fingers, rag and torn-off scraps of cardboard'. The results were paintings with a texture like some sumptuous textile. Ayres remembered how, 'when people came to the house they used to say, what are those? Are those carpets pinned up all over the walls?' At a distance of four decades they look magnificent. In the early 1970s Ayres's whole house was turned into an extended studio. Her son Sam Mundy remembers how he and his brother Jim sometimes had to crawl under a canvas to get into the sitting-room to watch television. Other works were pinned up in the loft space and, in summer, stretched down the garden. Not every artist worked at home. This was an era in which artists were searching for larger places to work – partly because art itself, especially painting, was tending to get bigger. Empty space was a commodity which in the depopulated and rundown city of the 1970s was plentiful – and cheap. Peter Sedgley, an op and kinetic artist, briefly considered taking over the decayed remains of the Marshalsea prison, familiar from Dickens's Little Dorrit. When these premises proved impractical he and his then-partner Bridget Riley transformed part of the disused St Katharine Docks into a warren of communal studios. The square footage was enormous but heating was nugatory. Michael Craig-Martin had a studio there, warmed by a portable gas fire. He remembers, 'standing so close to it that my legs were almost bursting into flames and the rest of me was absolutely frozen'. For much of the 1970s Antony Gormley worked in a squatted ex-factory on King's Cross Road shared with numerous other indigent artists (this was the golden age of squatting). 'None of us,' he told me, 'were making any money.' Detail of 'Achnabreck', 1978, by Gillian Ayres. JO UNDERHILL London in the 1970s was a city crowded with artists of every kind, but largely lacking in anyone willing to buy their work. This unbalanced state of affairs had developed after the second world war. Previously in Britain, professional artists had been a vanishingly tiny group. Lucian Freud remembered that when he told people at parties what he did they'd reply: 'I wasn't asking about your hobbies.' But that changed in the 1940s and 1950s. In the autumn of 1945 so many would-be artists flocked to the Camberwell School of Art that extra buses had to be put on from Camberwell Green. The number of people making art and who wanted to see it both greatly increased, but the tally of collectors did not keep pace. By the 1970s, especially after the oil shock, it was worse. Kasmin, who also represented Hockney and the sculptor Anthony Caro, recalled that at that date, he had to travel to sell. 'I sold pictures in Belgium, a little bit in Germany and a great deal in America.' Art had become a curiously self-supporting activity. With the exception of a tiny handful of stars – such as Henry Moore and Francis Bacon – most artists supported themselves wholly or partly by teaching. Once they'd graduated the best of their students went on to do the same. The result was a period of remarkable creativity and limitless innovation. Art schools such as St Martins and Goldsmiths fizzed with ideas, all the more so since sales were an improbable outcome whatever kind of art you produced. Highly uncommercial idioms proliferated: land art, performance art, conceptual art. Gilbert & George, star students from St Martins, pioneered the notion of living sculpture. Even painting, though a more traditional medium, was frequently approached in a highly uncommercial manner. Certainly it was by Ayres. Naturally abstractions like the one we unrolled in Suffolk – along which it was necessary to walk to get the full experience – remained unsold and largely unseen. Few private houses contain a suitable spot for such a work, and not all public galleries either. Many canvases of similar length, perhaps up to 30, remain rolled up in Ayres's old studio. They constitute a reminder that the era of Edward Heath, the Thorpe trial and the three-day week is also an art-historical time capsule full of artists and art awaiting rediscovery.
Telegraph
14-06-2025
- General
- Telegraph
Sacred Mysteries: The Holy Trinity –three persons in one God
We are surrounded by references to the Trinity. There's a Trinity College in Oxford, Dublin, even Cambridge, which also has a Trinity Hall for good measure. Trinity House is in charge of lighthouses. A triplet of Trinity hospitals founded by Henry Howard, the good Earl of Northampton, four centuries ago, thrive as almshouses at Clun, Castle Rising and Greenwich. And tomorrow is Trinity Sunday. If you're unlucky a clergyman will say in his sermon that the doctrine of the Trinity is too hard to understand and so he'll talk about something else. I suppose that is better than saying things about the Trinity that are untrue. Yet Christianity regards the Trinity as the very making of Christians – at Baptism, when water is poured over them with the words: 'I baptise you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.' There are big differences between Catholics and Orthodox and Anglicans and Lutherans, but they agree about Baptism, and no one who moves from one communion to another has to be baptised anew. Yet the words are important. There was an incident resolved in 2008 in which people – babies mostly, in Australia – had been baptised 'in the name of the Creator, and of the Liberator, and of the Sustainer'. When asked, the Vatican ruled that the baptisms were invalid and would jolly well have to be done from scratch. There is a grammatical point about the formula that is meant to throw light on the doctrine of the Trinity. It is the fact that the words say 'in the name' and not 'in the names'. The name is held to refer to the essence of God, not to the three personal names of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The same invocation, 'in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit' accompanies the Sign of the Cross, at the start of a prayer, at grace before meals, on entering a church or when taking a penalty kick. I don't think people imagine that God the Father is connected to the forehead, which is touched when his name is spoken, or that the Son is connected to the heart or the Holy Spirit to the shoulders. The form of the devotion marks out the shape of a cross. It feels different making it by touching the right shoulder before the left, as Eastern rite churches do, but one soon gets the hang of it, so often is the gesture used in their worship. Even without the Sign of the Cross, the Holy Trinity is often invoked in liturgy by the doxology: 'Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.' Some people apparently got confused by the phrase 'world without end' when we all know that the world will have an end (and pretty soon, the way things are going). It is surprising the confusion wasn't untangled when they were little children, for 'world' here refers to the world of eternity, translating the Latin saecula saeculorum, which itself follows the pattern of Hebrew superlatives such as holy of holies, Song of Songs. Anyway, some English forms of prayer have changed the end of the doxology to 'is now, and will be forever. Amen'. The change must have seemed a good idea at the time. I'm not suggesting these habitual prayers contain the whole doctrine of the Trinity (any more than does its adumbration in the Sanctus prayer, 'Holy, holy, holy'), but if worshippers follow the way these are employed in the liturgy, they should gain some intuition of God the Holy Trinity.
Yahoo
14-06-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Sacred Mysteries: The Holy Trinity –three persons in one God
We are surrounded by references to the Trinity. There's a Trinity College in Oxford, Dublin, even Cambridge, which also has a Trinity Hall for good measure. Trinity House is in charge of lighthouses. A triplet of Trinity hospitals founded by Henry Howard, the good Earl of Northampton, four centuries ago, thrive as almshouses at Clun, Castle Rising and Greenwich. And tomorrow is Trinity Sunday. If you're unlucky a clergyman will say in his sermon that the doctrine of the Trinity is too hard to understand and so he'll talk about something else. I suppose that is better than saying things about the Trinity that are untrue. Yet Christianity regards the Trinity as the very making of Christians – at Baptism, when water is poured over them with the words: 'I baptise you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.' There are big differences between Catholics and Orthodox and Anglicans and Lutherans, but they agree about Baptism, and no one who moves from one communion to another has to be baptised anew. Yet the words are important. There was an incident resolved in 2008 in which people – babies mostly, in Australia – had been baptised 'in the name of the Creator, and of the Liberator, and of the Sustainer'. When asked, the Vatican ruled that the baptisms were invalid and would jolly well have to be done from scratch. There is a grammatical point about the formula that is meant to throw light on the doctrine of the Trinity. It is the fact that the words say 'in the name' and not 'in the names'. The name is held to refer to the essence of God, not to the three personal names of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The same invocation, 'in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit' accompanies the Sign of the Cross, at the start of a prayer, at grace before meals, on entering a church or when taking a penalty kick. I don't think people imagine that God the Father is connected to the forehead, which is touched when his name is spoken, or that the Son is connected to the heart or the Holy Spirit to the shoulders. The form of the devotion marks out the shape of a cross. It feels different making it by touching the right shoulder before the left, as Eastern rite churches do, but one soon gets the hang of it, so often is the gesture used in their worship. Even without the Sign of the Cross, the Holy Trinity is often invoked in liturgy by the doxology: 'Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.' Some people apparently got confused by the phrase 'world without end' when we all know that the world will have an end (and pretty soon, the way things are going). It is surprising the confusion wasn't untangled when they were little children, for 'world' here refers to the world of eternity, translating the Latin saecula saeculorum, which itself follows the pattern of Hebrew superlatives such as holy of holies, Song of Songs. Anyway, some English forms of prayer have changed the end of the doxology to 'is now, and will be forever. Amen'. The change must have seemed a good idea at the time.I'm not suggesting these habitual prayers contain the whole doctrine of the Trinity (any more than does its adumbration in the Sanctus prayer, 'Holy, holy, holy'), but if worshippers follow the way these are employed in the liturgy, they should gain some intuition of God the Holy Trinity. Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
Yahoo
12-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Key Latin America Animation Titles to Come Under the Spotlight at Annecy-MIFA's La Liga Focus
'Baptism,' directed by Oscar-nominated Hugo Covarrubias, 'Carmín,' from Mexican mural and animation artists Los Calladitos and Brazil's 'Pipa and Snail,' an ode to imagination will all be highlighted at this year's La Liga Focus, Annecy-MIFA's popular Latin American many of the most exciting and highest-quality titles from Latin America, the Focus will underscore the breadth and vibrancy of the region's animation output, plus current artistic and market trends. Unspooling Thursday at the Imperial Palace, home to Annecy's MIFA market, La Liga yokes the energies of MIFA, Ventana Sur's Animation!, May's Quirino Awards in Canary Island Tenerife and September's Pixelatl, Mexico's major animation fest. More from Variety 'Edmond and Lucy' Returns With Season 2 From MIAM! Animation: Feature Adaptation in Development Netflix Shares 'Stranger Things: Tales From '85,' 'In Your Dreams' First Looks in Annecy Annecy Has It Bad For 'The Bad Guys 2' as DreamWorks Animation Previews Footage for the Very First Time: 'Bigger, Better and Badder' 'Baptism' marks the feature film debut of Chile's Covarrubias whose scored an Academy Award-nomination for best animated short in 2022 for 'Beast,' winning a Quirino Award as well. The stop-motion feature explores the same sense of disavowed disconnect between daily life under Augusto Pinochet and the ghastly deeds carried out by his regime. A short film sourced from Pixelatl's Shortway strand, 'Carmín' marks the latest from Los Calladitos, who have painted another mural in Annecy, a 15 meter x 15 meter work in a prime festival location, on the façade of Annecy's central Pathé Cinema. This is the first mural in a series of murals that they plan to create in the future, notes Silvina Cornillón, director of the Ibero-American Quirino Awards who had coordinated Annecy's La Liga Focus. From Brazil's Mesinha Amarela, ('PiOinc'), 'Pipa and Snail' proved one of the standouts at last December's Animation! in Uruguay, with three other titles – 'Superchance,' 'Baptism,' 'Hua Awakes' – also winning MIFA Annecy Awards to take part in La Liga La Liga Focus title, 'Where There's a Will, There's a Way' is tapped from the 2025 Animation! Mentoring Program for Female Creators. 'La Liga Focus showcases the extraordinary talent and creativity of Latin American animation, combining universal themes with our region's unique history and culture – from Chile's dictatorship memories in stop-motion to Colombian feminist stories in mixed media to Peruvian-Chinese identity in CGI – all with diverse visual styles and strong creative identity,' said Cornillón. Here's a closer look at this year's lineup:'Baptism,' ('Bautizo') (Hugo Covarrubias, Chile)After losing a VHS tape of his baptism, Héctor attempts to fill in the gaps of his memories from his childhood, which ran parallel to Augusto Pinochet's military dictatorship. Produced by Lucas Engel at Chile's Pista B and France's Vivement Lundi!, written by Covarrubias and Alejandra Moffat and targeting 14+ spectators, the project 'questions the subjectivity of memory, whether the truths we cling to are shields fabricated to guard us from trauma,' Covarrubias told Variety. 'Carmín,' (Ariadna Galaz, Mexico)A 2D short film prized at Pixelatl, directed by Ariadna Galaz – one half with Jorge Peralta of producers Los Calladitos – 'Carmín' explores characters based on legends, myths or real characters representing communities. Here, Carmín, a half-human, half-coyote girl, lives alone on an island of giant cactus, encounters a giant coyota, wounded and forgotten by its pack. The title mixes adventure, coming of age, migration and fantasy, La Liga notes. 'Hua Awakens,' ('El despertar de Hua,') ( Daniel R. Chang Acat, Peru)Peruvian-born Chinese teen Cheng struggles with his dual identity. After arguing with his father, he's transported to an ancient Chinese village where he battles a dark spirit to reconcile with his roots. The CGI title 'brings the rarely depicted experience of the Chinese-Latin American diaspora to life, highlighting the Asian minority experience in Latin America,' producer Saul Anampa explains. 'Pipa and Snail,' ('Pipa e Caracol,' Alex Ribondi & Ricardo Makoto, Brazil)A 2D cutout animation series from Brazil's award-winning Mesinha Amarela follows twins Pipa and Snail as they embark on adventures in a magical forest where a flying whale marks the passage of time, stones have feelings and stars appear as butterflies. Ribondi comments: 'It's a series where fun and philosophy go side by side.' Presented at Rio2C, Animacoaching, SAPI and Brasilia Film Fest in 2018. 'Superchance,' (Juan Gallo, Uruguay)Produced by Cine HHH, a reality show in which contestants repress their desires are expelled. What they don't know is that by losing they find the freedom to live true to their desires. A multi-prize winner at December's Animation! billed as a dark comedy made with 2D, 3D and grease pencil techniques, the series producers are Micaela Tcherkassky & Itatí Romero who are looking to structure the title as an international co-production. 'Where There's a Will, There's a Way,'('El Que Quiere Besar Busca la Boca,' Sandra Obando Morales/Tatiana Pinzon Salavarrieta Colombia)Yolanda is born with wings, which are clipped by her family. She spends her life trapped in a house that literally feeds on female sacrifice. Luckily, her daughters come back for her, and after a lifetime of servitude, Yolanda finally gets to fly—no metaphor this time. Gender dynamics depicted through the prism of allegory and magic realism. A black comedy step-up for Colombia's Malpraxis Studio, using 2D, 3D and stop-motion. Best of Variety New Movies Out Now in Theaters: What to See This Week 'Harry Potter' TV Show Cast Guide: Who's Who in Hogwarts? 25 Hollywood Legends Who Deserve an Honorary Oscar
Wall Street Journal
28-04-2025
- Politics
- Wall Street Journal
Trump, Zelensky and a Prayer for an Honorable Peace in Ukraine
The Catholic in me wants to believe that something supernatural was at work in the Vatican on Saturday. The image of Presidents Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky, hunched in intense conversation just inside the doors of St. Peter's Basilica, a mosaic of the Baptism of Christ as their backdrop, was a transcendent moment of hope in a dispiriting time. That it took the funeral Mass for a pope to bring together two fractious and unequal temporal leaders—one with more war power than anyone in history, the other heading a country ravaged by conflict—in the eternal city, under the gaze of the Prince of Peace, heightened the sense that the Holy Spirit might achieve what secular efforts have so far failed to deliver.
