2024 promises to be a truly remarkable year. Whatever happens in the horrific wars in the Middle East and the Ukraine, or in the forthcoming critical national elections all over the world: in the UK, the United States, India, Pakistan, Africa, Mexico, Indonesia, we can turn to art to find our footing. Artists will be watching and creating their responses to the turbulent climate that affects us all.
Henceforth, whether we want to be or not, we may be more tuned-in to the world beyond our shores than at any time since the Second World War. Against the backdrop of alarming challenges to world order, this year the Western art world will outdo itself with a cornucopia of exhibitions intended to correct the errors of past attitudes, and ameliorate the present. The artistic output of more than half the world’s population is no longer banished to the margins. Now included in mainstream exhibitions are not only Female artists who have been swept away by the white male art-historical hegemony, but Black creatives who were also denied the education and training and acceptance they sought. Those who have been rejected because of their gender or skin colour are valued and represented more widely than ever before in this coming year. These individuals have asserted all along that they should not be pigeon-holed as Black artists or Female artists, but simply as artists in their own right.
In addition, spotlights have been turned on certain male artists like Blake, Friedrich, Munch, Kandinsky, Malevich and Rothko. These artists were often viewed as aberrant in their replacement of themes of the Christian paradigm with alternative views of divinity.
Those are a few of the themes of the exhibitions planned all over the western world in 2024: from Basel to Paris, St Louis to New York to Washington DC, Hamburg to Dresden, Oslo to Essen, and, of course, London.
We gather the amazing plethora of exhibitions under two cohesive themes, which follow one another: “Ye Gods” from February to March, and “Now You See Us” from March to April. Perhaps you will be able to travel to see these exhibitions, perhaps not. But whichever you do, our course enables a comfortable series of ‘armchair exhibitions’. As we did for our recent ‘Fourth Plinth’ course, we will allow more time for discussion: in response to each exhibition, there will be much to talk about! After all, turning to art, we assert, submerging oneself in art, is the only sane response to a mad mad mad mad world!
Voltaire was a deist, but hugely controversial in his anti-clerical views, Ours is assuredly the most ridiculous, the most absurd and the most bloody religion which has ever infected this world. His disciple, Diderot, developed his thinking towards atheism and natural selection. But they had much in common, notably their libertarianism. They were concerned simultaneously with doing away with unnecessary hierarchies, and with the spread of knowledge to all. The ideas of both these great philosophers were expanded directly into politics by Tom Paine, whose writings influenced both the French and American Revolutions. By the end of the 18c, William Blake too was inspired by all three thinkers to debate within himself the nature of the God that had shaped artistic work for centuries, and to ask what the two great 18c Revolutions had revealed about the relationship between God and man, and between man and freedom.
For Caspar David Friedrich, whose 250th anniversary we celebrate in 2024, the answer to these challenging questions lay in the divinity of nature. A woman, arms outstretched, acclaims the sun; a couple gaze at the moon by an uprooted tree; three figures on a rock gaze at the setting moon; a lone monk stares at the darkening sea. Friedrich’s work echoes, in powerfully emotional paintings, considerations pursued in the contemporary poetry of Wordsworth, Coleridge and Shelley.
By the end of the 19c, the ideas of Voltaire and Diderot, followed by the 1859 publication of Darwin’s ‘On the Origin of Species’, had for most thinkers overturned many of the preconceptions, as well as much of the power, of the Church. Nietzsche provided a new philosophy of the Self “… at hearing the news that ‘the old god is dead’, we philosophers and ‘free spirits’ feel illuminated by a new dawn.” Yet his disciple Edvard Munch remained initially unconvinced, and his paintings explore the darkness and loneliness of the human soul before bursting into colour, perhaps in discovery of Nietzsche’s dawn.
Blending the later brilliant palette of Munch and the Post-Impressionists before him with legends from Russian and German folklore, German Expressionists of the ‘Blue Rider’ group established a new mythology based on colour and relation to animals. Painters like Franz Marc and Auguste Macke reimagined the world as seen through the animal eye, and in so doing affirmed that we humans are simply animals, after all.
During the horrors of the past two years’ war in Ukraine, many of us have asked ourselves questions about the rich history of Ukrainian culture, wondering what Ukrainian artists may have contributed to the story of Western art. Part of the answer lies in this forthcoming exhibition at the Royal Academy, from which we will learn that the great constructivists Kasimir Malevich and Alexander Archipenko, as well as the pioneering women artists Marie Bashkirtseff and Sonia Delaunay-Terk, were Ukrainian. Ukraine was in the eye of the storm of the Russian Revolution in their time a century and more ago, just as it is now. Art provided Ukrainians with another experience of revolution, this one a revolution delivering their message through shape and strong colour.
Colour alone ultimately became fundamental to Mark Rothko’s life after he experienced a godless world in the aftermath of the genocide of his people in the Holocaust. The current exhibition on Rothko at the new Frank Gehry-designed Louis Vuitton gallery in the Bois de Boulogne in Paris explores Rothko’s development from early gritty urban realist paintings through his struggles to find in Surrealism a style appropriate for the times, through to the magnificent later soft-edged rectangles of layered colour, like veils of the temple, simultaneously hiding and revealing the divine.
The emergence of the movements of Black Lives Matter and Me Too, catalysed by the horrific death of George Floyd and the trial of Harvey Weinstein, both in 2020, have meant that curators across the western world have been forced into new inclusiveness in their exhibitions. Alongside the overthrow of old white male hegemonies and hierarchies, new worlds have opened up to the eyes and the mind by the discovery of the work of artists who have simply been forgotten in the sweep of traditional art. The latter part of this course on current and forthcoming exhibitions celebrates some of the more remarkable, and sometimes challenging, of these discoveries.
Opening imminently in March will be a brave show at Kensington Palace acknowledging the role of royal servants in making possible the daily lives of the monarchy. We use the exhibition as a springboard for an exploration of the little-investigated subject of otherwise unsung servants in portraiture, from the Renaissance through to the Victorian period.
We have taken the title of our course from the Tate Britain show ‘Now You See Us: Women Artists in Britain’ in which the perceptiveness of work by such artists as Dorothy Johnstone, presents images of women unaffected by the male gaze, thus refreshing the eye and the mind, and restoring dignity to the female life experience.
Major omissions from conventional histories of art have been the works of Black artists. Two exhibitions, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and at the Kunstmuseum Basel, go some way to remedying the omission. The first addresses the marvellous phenomenon of the Harlem Renaissance, that mighty conjunction of artists and writers and jazz musicians in Harlem New York in the 1920s and 30s led by Langston Hughes and Jacob Lawrence, Duke Ellington and Ma Rainey. The second, at the KunstMuseum Basel, essentially picks up where the Harlem Renaissance left off: a blockbuster show of Black figurative art of the past 100 years including work by Danielle Mckinney and Lynette Yiadom – Boakye. We shall truly be able to see how Black figurative art has simply been invisible to white art historians, and how it can offer completely new ways of thinking about the nature of painting and its subject matter.
The show at the St Louis Museum on the Federal Art Project, Roosevelt’s 1930s scheme to employ artists in the Great Depression, will introduce us to many artists. Painters of hugely skilled and interesting, often political, murals- Lucien Labaudt, August Henkel, Mabel Wellington Jack, Lucienne Bloch and Mildred Waltrip- are represented in this exhibition by their other equally powerful work on canvas.
Finally we address, not just unrecognised artists, but an almost unrecognised art form: textiles, inspired by the exhibitions at the ‘Woven Histories’ exhibition at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, and ‘Unravel: the Power of Textiles in Art’ at the Barbican. It seems at last textiles are getting their due, after centuries when paint ON textile (canvas) was celebrated far over and above art which IS textile, with all its complexities of weave and texture, colour and material.
Booking Information:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
This online course via Zoom has been developed by Louise Friend and Nicholas Friend. It will be presented by Nicholas Friend, Co-Founder of Inscape. It is held on Tuesdays in two parts Part I begins on Tuesday 6 February 2024 at 5 pm and ends on Tuesday 12 March 2024 at 5 pm. Part II begins on Tuesday 19 March 2024 at 5 pm and ends on Tuesday 23 April 2024 at 5pm. Please note the time of 5 pm: Nicholas will be lecturing from California (at 9 am his time) for the duration of this course.
You may choose to attend individual sessions or all eleven. If you book for the course but cannot manage a particular date, then be assured we will be sending recordings of sessions to all participants. Each session meets from 15 minutes before the advertised time of the lecture, and each lasts roughly one hour with 15 minutes discussion.
Cost: £495 members or £605 non-members for the course of 11 sessions or £45 members or £55 non-members per individual session. All sessions are limited to 21 participants to permit an after-lecture discussion session.
Due to the coronavirus cheques are not a viable option at this time. Instead, please make your payment to Friend&Friend Ltd by bank transfer to our account with Metrobank, bank sort code 23-05-80, account number 13291721 or via PayPal to nicholas@inscapetours.co.uk, or credit/debit card by phone to Henrietta on 07940 719397. She is available Tuesdays 10-12 and 2-5 pm or Thursdays 10-12 and 2-5 pm. Do get in touch if you would like extra support learning how to use Zoom.
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