Tag Archives: artistic style

Those Brushstrokes, Though: Francis Bacon and Vincent van Gogh

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Vincent van Gogh, House at Auvers, 1890. Oil on canvas, 19 1/8 x 24 3/4 in. The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC, Acquired 1952

Re-opening the original Phillips house galleries this June allowed the curatorial team to create new dialogues between artists. One of the more surprising, on the surface, is the side-by-side installation of Vincent van Gogh’s House at Auvers, 1890, and Francis Bacon’s Study of a Figure in a Landscape, 1952. Painted more than 60 years apart, these paintings would never be hung together in a traditional, chronological museum installation. Luckily for everyone, the Phillips was founded with the belief that works be hung in conversations with one another regardless of art movement, time period, etc.

Francis Bacon, Study of Figure in a Landscape, 1952. Oil on canvas, 78 x 54 in. The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC, Acquired 1955 © The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved. / DACS, London / ARS, NY 2015

Bacon and van Gogh shared similar mental struggles that manifested themselves in their work. Their respective feelings of anxiety and alienation find parallels not only in subject matter but style. In fact, Bacon admired van Gogh, and it’s safe to assume van Gogh’s brushwork influenced this work in particular.

The high horizon lines that draw your eye back into the pictures along with the staccato brushstrokes of the fields create an almost foreboding sense of dread. In van Gogh’s painting, it seems as though we will never reach the home across the turbulent field. The hope for safety (and, perhaps, sanity) lies in the walled-off home that is almost being pushed out of the painting’s frame, out of view.

In Bacon’s, however, we are being pushed to confrontation with a crouching figure who appears to have just materialized like a hallucination. The open brushwork and the exposed, unprimed canvas leave us nowhere to hide. We are face to face with an embodiment of the artist’s anxiety and psychosis. Is the subject a predator, or someone seeking solitude?

Both paintings seem to be paused in time, a snapshot of each artist’s travails, with no beginning and no end.

Poetry Challenge: Optical Order

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In addition to being an artist, Markus Lüpertz was a poet. Throughout the exhibition, share your Lüpertz-inspired poems with us to win prizes. Every other week, we’ll issue a new poetry challenge based on images or themes in the exhibition for fresh inspiration and chances to win.

Installation view of Markus Lüpertz at The Phillips Collection. Photo: Lee Stalsworth

THIS WEEK’S CHALLENGE:
Rather than chronologically, the Markus Lüpertz exhibition is organized in an optical order (more on this in a previous blog post). Write a short poem describing your response to the way Lüpertz’s works are displayed and arranged in this installation.

THIS WEEK’S PRIZE: An Individual membership to The Phillips Collection.

TO ENTER: Leave your poem in the comments here, or share on social media with #LupertzPoem. We’ll select winners on Friday, September 1.

**UPDATE: The winning poem was submitted by Rebecca B:

Walking into a room
A city
A town
A crowd
We do not simply
Walk
Into the present moment
With painted past
And indistinct future
We enter a space
Filled with
Light
Color
Voices
Feelings.
Because we enter
Through a doorway
Does not mean
We should expect
A way
We have already felt
We have already faced.

The Fashionable Markus Lüpertz

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Markus Lüpertz. Photo: Rhiannon Newman

We interviewed Phillips director and Markus Lüpertz exhibition curator Dorothy Kosinski about the exhibition and the artist:

In one small gallery of the Markus Lüpertz exhibition, you’ll find a kind of manifesto that Lüpertz offered once in a question and answer session with an author, which really reveals much more about his thinking. You’ll also find two photo blow-ups of Lüpertz, and you’ll see him in his (what I consider) regalia.

In the nineteenth century, Baudelaire would have called him the “artist dandy;” the Germans talked about some artist figures as the sort of “noble artist,” and he definitely, I think, adopts almost a performative presence in the world that’s part of his art. When I had the pleasure of spending two days with him here during the installation, he wore his fedora hat, and his beautiful cravat, and his spectator’s shoes, his beautiful cane, his elegant goatee, and it’s not an act of silliness. He also explained that he’s adopting the stance to protect himself, it’s like a buffer from the triviality, the white noise of the world. He’s an artist and he needs to hold onto that endangered platform in the contemporary world, that’s how I would explain it. But you’ll see two great pictures of him that gives sense of his dynamism and keen intelligence and forceful presence.

One essential reason that provoked me to embrace this project is a clear question: why is this very famous artist, known all across Europe with many exhibitions and publications, relatively unknown in the United States? Perhaps it goes back to the fact that he’s not easy to classify, he’s not about a recognizable style, that his paintings are challenging. There are probably also market forces that impact the evolution of an artist’s career. But we’re proud here at The Phillips Collection, in conjunction with our colleagues at the Hirshhorn Museum who are staging simultaneously a Lüpertz project with us, that we can offer an in-depth look at this important artist’s career.

Dorothy Kosinski, Phillips Director and curator of Markus Lüpertz