Went to a fantastic exhibition of Keith Haring’s work on Sunday which is currently on at Tate Liverpool. Haring is known for his iconic Aztec-tribal-age meets electric-age style art which he often drew spontaneously, famously on the advertising blackboards of the New York subways in the early 80s. He tragically died of Aids very young at just 31, but accomplished much in that short time. He collaborated with many of the icons of the 80s including Andy Warhol, Jean Michel Basquiat and William Burroughs. Below are a few of the works displayed at the show (nb. almost all of the works are untitled so I haven’t given them names or dates but they can be found elsewhere).
“When it is working, you completely go into another place, you’re tapping into things that are totally universal, completely beyond your ego and your own self. That’s what it’s all about” – Keith Haring
Bosch-Cronenberg vibes
… very different to Haring’s usual style of drawing
favourite piece at the exhibit – you could spend an hour just looking at the scenes all the way down the wall which is like reading an interconnected story almost
Haring comic art
this was another of my favourite things at the show – an ad for a charity art exhibit which is hand designed by an all-star cast. My eye was drawn first to the little scraps of paper and I immediately recognised the handwriting of Jean-Micel Basquiat. The umbrellas are by Warhol, the striped sky is Lichtenstein, the mini-men Haring, and the little footsteps are Yoko Ono. What an amazing piece of history in one small poster!
harriet in front of ‘3 people attempt to stop the assassination of John Lennon’A piece by haring on the hood of a New York taxithis one reminds me of the calligraphy works by Brion Gysin who Haring said was an influenceafter the exhibit we went to the Cavern Club
“If a man would be alone, let him look to the stars. The rays that come from those heavenly worlds, will separate between him and what he touches. One might think the atmosphere was made transparent with this design, to give man, in the heavenly bodies, the perpetual presence of the sublime. Seen in the streets of cities, how great they are! If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature
“There is a moment, in the history of every nation, when, proceeding out of this brute youth, the perceptive powers reach their ripeness, and have not yet become microscopic: so that man, at that instant, extends across the entire scale; and, with his feet still planted on the immense forces of night, converses, by his eyes and brain, with solar and stellar creation.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson, Plato or, The Philosopher
** featured image is Lieve Verschuier’s ‘the great comet of 1680 over Rotterdam’ (1680)**
This weekend I was lucky enough to go and see one of my favourite Salvador Dali paintings up close at the Freud museum in London. ‘The Metamorphosis of Narcissus’ (1937) is a painting I’ve written about many times, but it is only when you really see it up close, that you begin to take in the true depth and intricacy of the work. It is much smaller than I had imagined, as I had always thought it would be a few meters tall and wide, for only that could capture the scale of the myth and the events of the painting. But much like ‘The persistence of memory’, which is the size of a postcard, it is relatively small (perhaps a3 sized – see image below). Yet the depth and intricacy of such a small painting, the detail on each and every one of the figures – all fully formed and realized – is staggering. But there is also a dimension – and I’d never really considered this in the images I’d seen printed in books – through the way the paint spatters and oozes and circulates, perambulates in currents of colour making it even more dream-like and psychedelic in reality. With the epigraphs on the walls of the gallery wherein Dali speaks of inhabiting madness whilst painting, I was reminded of Kay Jamison’s book Touched With Fire, in which she writes about the circumambulatory consistencies in works by the great so-called ‘mad’ or manic-minded painters like Van Gogh and Edvard Munch. It seems as if Dali is somehow tapping into these mentalities here.. The significance of the painting to The Freud museum also bears mentioning, for Dali, like most all the surrealists, worked at the aestheticisation of Freudian psychoanalysis, and so Freud was a hugely significant figure for his ideas. Dali had met Freud at his London house (the house where this very exhibition was held) on July 19th 1938, and Dali had brought this painting along with him. So this was a kind of symbolic return for the painting. Dali took artistic inspiration from their meeting, drawing many pictures of Freud, and even likening Freud’s cranium to the spiralling shell of a snail, using it thenceforth as a symbol for Freud in many subsequent works. Freud himself was taken aback by Dali, and later called him a ‘mad Spaniard’ (surely this brought major boasting rights to Dali considering the stature of some of Freud’s best known patients), but he too was nevertheless deeply impacted by their meeting. Freud later said: “I was inclined to look upon the surrealists, who have apparently chosen me as their patron saint, as absolute cranks. The young Spaniard, however, with his candid fanatical eyes and his undeniable technical mastery, has made me reconsider my opinion”. Not a bad legacy hey? To convince the very founder of psychoanalysis that just maybe there’s something to surrealism after all? Breton famously kicked Dali out of the movement, and yet it was Dali, not Breton, who convinced Freud of their significance. So anyway, to finish the weekend off, on the Saturday I presented a conference paper at Birkbeck university on Salvador Dali and the symbolism of death and decay within his work.
me gazing on the Metamorphosis, beside which are the echoing, joyous words of Dali – “the only difference between myself and a madman, is that I am not mad!”
“In classic paintings, I look for the unconscious – in a surrealist painting, for the conscious” –Â SIGMUND FREUDFreud’s spiralling, conical craniuma poem written by Dali to complement the paintingFreud’s infamous couch and the office where many of the legendary unconscious plunders were undertaken…
Freud’s totem collection. It is said he often held many of these figures as he spoke to patients, as if trying to draw some ancient, mythic significance from them… the ancient myths and the unconscious mind are seen as somehow deeply intertwined
