Ilka Gedo, Third Eye Centre, Glasgow; Willi Baumeister, Fruitmarket
Gallery, Edinburgh; Afghan Arts, Glasgow Art Gallery; The Man Who Shot
Garbo, Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh; New
Contemporaries, ICA, London.
THE Hungarian artist Ilka Gedo, lived and died in obscurity during the
tragic Iron Curtain years. She was also completely unknown in the West
until Glasgow's 1985 Hungarian arts season when her small exhibition at
the Compass Gallery received national acclaim. Now Third Eye director
Chris Carrell, who originally discovered Gedo in her tiny apartment
jammed floor to ceiling with drawings, sketch books, and paintings, has
organised a major retrospective 1932-85 which is at Third Eye Centre
before going on a world tour.
Gedo's artistic and emotional sensibility was exactly right to record
the grim isolation of the Budapest ghetto and stark post-war dreariness
of working life in Eastern Europe. Acutely intelligent, independent, and
fearlessly honest, both with herself and others, she quietly and
compassionately documented Hungary's throes of tumultuous change over 50
years.
The tensions that Gedo experienced throughout her life, despite a
devoted husband and two sons, are manifest in the densely-wrought
nervous surfaces of her numerous intense self-portraits, their wavering
lines reminiscent of Giacometti and sometimes Munch.
Her dilemma was a double insecurity, both physical and intellectual.
Having survived the war incarcerated in the hellish Jewish ghetto of
Budapest where she drew children and old people, their heads in their
hands as they huddled in dark, stuffy rooms, her marriage in 1946 to the
biochemist and literary translator Endre Biro introduced her to a circle
of intellectuals around the
philosopher Lajos Szabo.
Unfortunately this terminated Gedo's happy state of innocent,
intuitive creation for their aesthetic doctrines and theory maintained
that art was a religious issue and abstraction took precedence over
representation. In addition they questioned a woman's ability to be a
''real'' artist, following the age-old Jewish tradition that women be
excluded from religious and intellectual activity.
Unable to deal with this conflict and crushed by the Stalinist period,
after a time sketching at the Ganz machine factory Gedo stopped painting
for 15 long years. She destroyed much of her work in a fit of depression
and resorted to theoretical studies and art history, making endless
obsessive notes on Goethe's
theory of colour and Schopenhauer's Sights and Colours.
In 1964 she again started drawing but only in 1970 did she begin to
develop the many colour patterns of the 1950s into remarkable, delicate
semi-abstract flower gardens of enchanting magic and mystery. These
works have a sense of nostalgia which hark back to the countryside
sketches of her childhood when, as a precocious teenager she recorded
rural life in Szentendre; hens, goats, farmyards, carts, cottages.
I found this exhibition very moving. Gedo bares her soul to us, not in
a self-indulgent way but with searing courage. A truly honest artist is
rare indeed.
Willi Baumeister at Edinburgh's Fruitmarket, born in Germany 30-odd
years before Gedo, also suffered from Nazi rule. In 1933 he was
dismissed from his professorship at Frankfurt Art School and banned from
exhibiting. His work was shown in ''Degenerate Art'' 1937. His imagery
reflects this oppression. Myths and dreams peopled by demons which
inhabit the unconscious replaced the early constructivist geometrics of
his Wall Pictures and semi-figurative 1920s Sport Pictures where tennis,
hockey and football players are simplified into the dynamics of
movement.
Also intellectual in character, Baumeister then adopted a new,
inward-looking approach where large series of intensely-worked
low-relief monochromatic freizes recall prehistoric emblems and
Asiatic calligraphy, both with surrealist overtones.
Baumeister, a friend of Schlemmer, Lejer, and Ozenfant, painted
clandestinely until 1946 when he was reinstated at Stuttgart
Academy where he remained until his death in 1955. Edinburgh is the
only British venue for this comprehensive show which is organised by the
Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart, and tours to Berne.
The recent war in Afghanistan has introduced new imagery into a few
prayer rugs and textiles but on the whole Afghan Arts, a selling
exhibition at Kelvingrove of tribal kilims, donkey bags, hats, tent door
hangings, cushions, copperware and jewellery is traditional in every
aspect. It's an enlarged version of displays already seen in Edinburgh
and at the Gatehouse Gallery with the advantage of space to show a
splendid full-size Turkoman Yurt tent. Till January 14.
From the exotic to the sophisticated. The Man Who Shot Garbo at the
Scottish National Portrait Gallery is a breathtakingly glamorous
array of superb Hollywood studio portraits by Clarence Sinclair Bull,
head of MGM stills department 1924-61. The catalogue is excellent too;
full of famous film stars from
Elinor Glyn in 1920, via Fred Astaire, Clark Gable, Vivien Leigh to
Grace Kelly and Shirley MacLaine (1959). Of course the hypnotic Greta
Garbo outshines them all. The show ends on January 8. Miss it at your
peril.
For 40 years New Contemporaries provided a major platform for the
shape of things to come, discovering young talent such as Hockney,
Auerbach, Kitaj, Aitchison, Hoyland, Huxley, and Hodgkin. Things went
downhill in the 1980s and only now after a three year absence does the
show make a welcome return to London's ICA. Eighty works by 43 artists
chosen from 1500 entries nationwide include sculpture, painting,
photography, and video, mostly of a clean, cool, clinical minimalist
slant.
Inevitably, as with all
student works, influences are obvious: Tim Head, Donald Judd, Cindy
Sherman, lots of Lisson-type sculpture with Richard Deacon screws and
rivets. The overall impression is professional, even slick, but much is
arid and very 1970s deja vu.
Among the best, Mike Turner (Ruskin) concocts rise and fall poetry
from greaseproof paper and a vacuum cleaner; Brighid Lowe (Reading and
the Slade) makes her point with copper and steel; John Howard
(Birmingham) offers realist relief with splendid etchings of foundaries,
Nick Cass (Newcastle) and Darren Lajo (Chelsea) make interesting wall
sculpture, while Tom Benson (Royal College) sticks to subtle
sophisticated oil paint.
Julian Lee (also Royal College) exhibits an excellent series of black
and white photographs. Memorable are Maud Sulter's seductive
cibachromes. She has a long list of exhibitions to her name, and, news
to me until I looked up the index, trained at Glasgow on the MA
Photography course.
Will they make it into the real world? asked critics
Edward Lucie-Smith and William Packer at the preview. Sulter, Lowe,
and Howard may well. New Contemporaries tours to Manchester, Bracknell,
Halifax and Kendal. Hopefully next year someone will invite it to come
to Scotland.
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