Vienna 2: From Heldenplatz to Judenplatz

Anton Dominik Fernkorn, Archduke Charles, Duke of Teschen, 1860-65. Heldenplatz, Vienna

So, where was I? O yes, after exiting the Museum Quarter yesterday I went on a bit of a detour over Heldenplatz, through the Imperial residence and ended up in Judenplatz to see the Rachel Whiteread memorial- and ended up seeing a really gripping, unexpected exhibition into the bargain.

Heldenplatz was intended as the ceremonial parade ground of Austria-Hungary, but it was never finished. The big, open square is dominated by the Hofburg palace and two striking equestrian statues, featuring military heroes of the Imperial army. Above, standing in the middle of open ground, is a depiction of Archduke Charles, who defeated the armies of Napoleon Bonaparte in 1809, and was immediately elevated to the Habsburg pantheon as a result. Ultimately, though, Heldenplatz is remembered in Austria as the site where Adolf Hitler announced the Anschluss- the union of Germany and Austria- in March 1938. the status of Austria, as willing participants in Hitler's insanity for the following seven years, or as the first "innocent victim" of Nazi occupation, has produced claim and counter claim amongst historians ever since, and is still a rather uncomfortable issue for many citizens here.

Rachel Whiteread, Holocaust Memorial, 1995-2000, Judenplatz

A mere 5-10 minute walk away stands the memorial to the awful consequences of that period in history. 65 000 Austrian Jews lost their lives in the Holocaust, and Whiteread's site-specific sculpture is an uncomfortable break in the Habsburg ornamentation of the square. The sculpture features many casts of shelves of books, built up, at once referencing the Nazi cultural policy of destroying "un-German" books, and the Jewish scriptures and artefacts that were also destroyed, or stolen and sold abroad, in this period. The sculpture is intended to resemble a military fortification, and is a stark tribute to all that Vienna lost in those seven years; the far distant sites of loss, in Germany, Poland, and Belarus, are listed on the base around the main body of the sculpture. Some older residents have claimed that Vienna still echoes with the ghosts of its destroyed pre-war Jewish community, and hasn't really been the same city since. Although much smaller in scale, this memorial has a similar effect on the viewer as its counterpart in Berlin.

Painting by Alois Frankl, Art Forum, Judenplatz.

Quite by chance, I stumbled across a remarkable exhibition on the same square, entitled, Art Against Oblivion by an expressionist painter called Adolf Frankl. Frankl was a Slovakian Jew who was arrested by the Hlinka Guard and deported to Auschwitz in November 1944. Frankl survived several months there, finally being liberated by the Red Army in 1945, but this exhibition is his working through of the terrible sights, sounds and experiences he underwent in the camp. The work was all completed after his return to making art in the later 1940s, and marked a period of nearly fifteen years where he worked through his appalling, inescapable memories in a lividly coloured, Hieronymous Bosch-accented expressionism.

From the claustrophobic scene of his rounding up in Bratislava (above) through to some pictures of unimaginable torture and degradation of his fellow inmates, this is a very difficult exhibition to view- but compelling. Photographs of Frankl in the thirties, just after his marriage, show him as a handsome and debonair young man; an official portrait taken in the later forties shows him a little restored, but with sunken eyes, ringed by dark circles- a look that he apparently kept for the rest of his life. Images actually based on the death camps are, unsurprisingly, few in comparison with the written accounts of survivors, so this is an important show which deserves as wide an audience as possible.

Adolf Frankl, Faces that Still Haunt Me, c. 1960. Frankl is the face in the third row from the bottom, fourth from the left.

After all that it was more walking- I've got a reasonable handle on how central Vienna fits together now; the urge in an unfamiliar city is always to take the underground, but I've managed to resist that, more or less, and as a result have managed to see a bit more. Following the Frankl show I made my way, via Schottengasse (Scottish Way) up to Schwedenplatz- once the centre of Vienna club life, apparently, in the 1990s, but now a bit of a ghost town by comparison; and, took in the artificial beach by the Danube canal, where a number of bizarre Antigua-style open air pubs have sprung up; apparently this area comes to life late at night.

I also noticed that, in keeping with both Geneva and Zürich, Vienna is a city of small dogs. Every third person seems to come with an extra fabric limb, at the end of which is a quivering pom-pom of moist-eyed yap. I suspect most of the global population of Chihuahua, Pekinese, Pomeranians and Maltese terriers live in an arc between the Franco-Swiss border and here - the kinds of critters that just aren't taken seriously back home.

I'm footsore, having made it round both the Belvedere Palace and the Kunsthalle today. I'm not writing about it until tomorrow, though; I'm off to find some dinner, and a pint.

Vienna: Leopold Museum

Josef Maria Olbrich, Vienna Secession building, 1897

What a city Vienna is. Having spent two days tramping around taking photos of pretty much everything, and marinading in the atmosphere of this old imperial capital, I can safely say that it has far exceeded my expectations.

Vienna must be the best preserved memorial to a state that no longer exists. It's nearly 100 years since the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian empire, yet, wandering around the Heldenplatz and the old Imperial residence, its existence seems as recent as that of the Soviet Union, or Yugoslavia. There's a faint tang of horse piss around the city centre, much as there would have been a century ago; little Pinzgauer horses ferry cartloads of snapping tourists about the preserved relics, with the same look of pliant boredom on their faces as can be seen on a Blackpool donkey. Most postcard stands have postcards of the Emperor Franz Josef and his wife; maps of the old Imperial territories with their long-forgotten coats of arms; and, sepia photos of Alt Wien.

A guy dressed entirely as Mozart and painted gold for good measure, was whistling his way through the composer's entire oeuvre yesterday, earning a few Euros; he was chirruping his way through the Häffner as I passed him by. Another gold painted figure, this time some sort of late eighteenth century gentleman I think, was uttering bizarre deep bass noises, and generating widespread indifference, on the Kartner Platz. A lieder singer and opera tenor, Schubert versus Puccini, operated just out of one another's earshot on the same street (any closer, and Vienna's answer to 8 Mile would have been an absolute aural shuttlecrash).

Stephanskirche at dusk

The atmosphere here is very laid back. It's a cliche to say that nobody is in a hurry in Vienna, but the deep sense of history here, and the thorough immersion in European culture, doesn't seem to affect the locals one bit. There is no nostalgia for the past; just a sense of "well this all happened here once, I suppose you can't quite believe it, neither can we, but ...*shrug*". Vienna's easy charm matches Berlin in terms of ambience, without the arrogance / rudeness / stressed tail-chasing that normally characterises other capitals.

Yesterday, I spent nearly four hours in the Leopold Museum. Many of the Vienna museums are grouped together in the ambitious Museums Quarter, which is one of the largest cultural concentrations anywhere in the world. At least four major art museums, with further spaces for design, architecture and film, what looks to be one of the best art book shops I've come across anywhere, and a huge open air space dotted with brightly coloured furniture for some sunbathing (it was 27 degrees yesterday here), sprawl across 60,000 square meters in the city centre. I had initially gone yesterday expecting to do the Leopold and the Kunsthalle, but in the end the sheer depth and richness of the Leopold collection detained me much longer than anticipated.

Egon Schiele, Self-Portrait with Lowered Eyes, 1912. Leopold Museum, Vienna

First things first, the Leopold has the world's biggest collection of Egon Schiele paintings. Even with the ground floor under partial renovation, there were still two good-sized rooms filled with some remarkable examples of his work from all stages of his too-short career; the lowering, defiant stare in the self-portrait above, plus a landscape filled with ravens, stick in the mind. There were two further major exhibitions from the permanent collection upstairs; one floor, by far the busiest, told the familiar story of the Vienna Secession and the Wiener Werkstatte. It actually was wonderful to see many of these paintings with fresh eyes. I've seen Klimt's "The Kiss" and Schiele's female nudes on so many student poster sales, on so many stippled magnolia walls, manipulated towards advertising so many club nights/parties, that it became hard not to be cynical.

This, of course, all derived from an explosion in interest in the Vienna secession in the English speaking world from the late seventies onwards, stimulated in part by the writings of Carl E. Schorske and Peter Vergo, and, as the eighties developed, the spreading of interest in Jugendstil/Art Nouveau parallels elsewhere on the continent. Those who remember the inescapable ubiquity of Rennie Mackintosh style in late 1980s Glasgow will know what I mean.

However, being up close and being able to spend a long time in front of these images really breaks the old weary familiarity apart. Schiele's style veers erratically from sensuality and hedonism to flayed, raw, painful introspection. It seems very spare and pared down, compared to the decorative eroticism of Klimt. Upstairs, there is a rare sight; two lost Klimt canvases (the scandalous friezes for Vienna university that provoked a period of exile after 1903), at full dimensions, are displayed in black and white. Of course, the originals were amongst the last casualties of the Waffen-SS in May 1945, being burned at the Austrian castle where they had been held for safekeeping. The ghostly presence of the images, fully sized, is an unusual and poignant feature.

The Leopold is also key to answering the oft-asked question, "What happened to the Vienna art scene after 1918?" The death of four major figures- Klimt, Schiele, Moser and the architect Wagner in the same year would have been severe in a country at piece; couple that with the defeat of Austria-Hungary and its rapid dissolution, and you have an unprecedented cataclysm. This is dealt with in one large room on the top floor, bringing home the impact of these losses very effectively. Two large scale canvases, by Albin Egger-Lienz, hanging on adjacent walls- Danse Macabre and Finale underline his deep sense of futility and loss.

Albin Egger-Lienz, Danse Macabre, 1915

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Albin Egger-Lienz, Finale, 1918

After the war, Austrian artists experimented with various kinds of post-Cubism, abstraction, and a hone grown version of Neue Sachlichkeit. Unlike the politically charged grotesque of the German version, Austrian new objectivity veered towards an intensity of vision and an interest in what has become known as "magic realism". I had not come across many of the painters in this section of the show- names such as Greta Friest, Rudolf Wacker, Alfred Wickenburg, and the like. there was more than enough good painting here to dispel the myth in the Anglophone art world, that nothing much happened in Austrian art in between the deaths of Klimt and Schiele, and the Viennese Actionists in the 1960s.

Hanns (Jean) Kralik, Aus meinem Fester 1930

 I'll write more later, it's time for the Kunsthalle and I don't want this post to develop into one of thesis length.

Geneva & Zürich

MAMCO / Centre d'Art Contemporain, Geneva

So most of this week has been spent between Geneva and Zürich, in my first ever visit to Switzerland.

Geneva itself is a funny place. It's an international city, with more than half of the population being non-Swiss. Around the lake is beautiful, but the city itself is bitty, and seemingly in a state of permanent roadwork-induced chaos at present. The architecture, too, is all over the place, with elegant French style apartment blocks sitting cheek by jowl with mirror glass office towerblocks and East Germany-lite concrete housing estates. For all its international character, it seems like a pretty quiet and sleepy place, too.

However, there are some good art spaces here. The MAMCO centre, four floors of an old industrial building, has a very impressive permanent collection, continually rotated, and generous space for local and international artists to mount serious exhibitions. When I visited on Friday, the top floor was given over to the witty and humorous sculpture and mobiles of Markus Raetz; a real illusionist in three dimensions who delights in fitting two images into one form, through manipulation of the material and judicious use of mirror images and trompe l'oeil. If Raetz's ambitious retrospective was a delight, then Cosima von Bonin's hallucinogenic floor full of sewn bunnies, nod and a wink references to 90s rave culture, toy rockets and nonsense poems was far less so; very much an attempt to combine "witty" popular cultural knowledge, alongside a frenetic chase after the ambulance of controversy, with generally underwhelming results.

More interesting, on the ground floor, was the neon sculptures and installations of the young Swiss artist Mai-Thu Perret, a scattergun showing of lyrical abstractions. There was also a decent broad exhibition of European contemporary artists from the last forty or so years, featuring the likes of Gordon Matta-Clark and Julije Knifer . The second floor also featured a very wide ranging and well sourced show of Europunk, from c. 1976-80, very familiar to the British visitor but interesting in its display of European echos of the punk "revolution". MAMCO also seems to be a community run space with local artists featuring prominently in the development and display of the programmes, overall it;s a very well put together space well worth the visit.

Oscar Gauthier, Hommage a Laprade, 1962

At the Musée Rath, in the city centre, there was an excellent show of European post-war "lyrical abstraction" from c. 1946-62, mainly focusing on Paris' attempts to rebuild its cultural life and re-establish its credentials as the capital of world art in the years following the end of the traumatic Nazi occupation. This is a really solid narrative show, with all the expected names (Jorn, Appel, Soulages, Dubuffet, Hartung) featuring alongside some much less well-known painters. English language art history tends to focus on the COBRA group and Art Brut in this period, so decent painters such as Gérard Schneider, from Switzerland, and the Frenchmen Martin Barré and Oscar Gauthier have tended to slip through the cracks. A constructed Barré landscape dating from 1950 is amongst the best things here in a very strong and compelling show.

Gerard Schneider Opus 24.B

Three hours drive east, Zürich is a really beautiful city, extremely lively at night and stuffed full of art by day. Unfortunately, I've chosen the wrong time to come here for art as a) it's Sunday and b) everywhere seems to be closed for the holidays- from the well known Dada space Cabaret Voltaire to the Centre for Contemporary Art in the old Lowenbrau Brewery, which seems to be in the process of total re-construction. Nonetheless, it's been well worth visiting; sunny, gorgeous architecture, decent beer and very interesting to walk around on a lazy Sunday. Church bells are chiming sonorously next my hotel as I write this. I'll be back, when, er, everything is open, but not on this trip.

Tomorrow's an overnight stop in Salzburg, the prelude to six days in Vienna. The next update will be from the Austrian capital later this week.

Around the London Galleries

Michelangelo Pistoletto, The Mirror of Judgement, (detail), 1968-2011. Serpentine Gallery, London

So, a round up of all the shows I've managed to get through during my week in London. In the usual pointlessly convoluted manner, we start with the last first; Michelangelo Pistoletto's Mirror of Judgement exhibition at the Serpentine. Pistoletto, one of the founding creative personae behind the 1960s Arte Povera movement, has mined over forty years worth of imagery and experimentation to produce a labyrinthine installation.

Using sinuous sculptural arabesques of corrugated cardboard, Pistoletto transforms the space into a form of mini-pilgrimage for the visitor. The familiar spaces of the gallery are transformed into a claustrophobic walk-through, punctuated by the artists Trumpets of Judgement from the late 60s, an acknowledgement of the impace of the bombastic propaganda of Benito Mussolini and Fascism in his childhood. The focus here, however, is on world religions and the implicit inadequacy of each of the traditions of Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism and Islam. Each of the these traditions has a recognisable piece of religious furniture (prayer stool, statue of the Buddha, prayer mat) placed in front of a mirror; the constant process of confronting oneself whilst walking through the labyrinth becomes quite uncomfortable.

Pistoletto suggests that the limitations of organised religion be superseded by a new, idealistic fusion of human intelligence and the intelligence of the natural world - a utopian vision which may appear very much of the moment, but which he has been developing through his experimentation since the sixties. This is a compelling piece whose force is increased by the everyday nature of its materials.

The Contemporary Living Room, as it appeared in 1951. South Bank Centre, London

The re-working of old material of a very different kind is to be found in the Festival of Britain exhibition at the South Bank Centre. It is the sixtieth anniversary of the iconic 1951 Festival of Britain, itself held 100 years after the Great Exhibition of 1851 (coincidentally held on a site just next door to the contemporary Serpentine Gallery). This show, rather tucked away in the basement of the Royal Festival Hall (the only surviving structure from the original festival), is a real treat, not only in effectively re-constructing how the Festival site looked, but also the effect that it had on ordinary people, both at the main site in London and its peripheral satellites around the UK. In a cinema space, re-constructed with period seats, a British-Pathe news reader opines lazily on the habits of "the British" at their leisure and tries his best to conceal dubiety at some of the futuristic architecture, designs and products on display, a comedy highlight. 

Evidence of such "ingenious" design can be found in a display of the contemporary living room, a remarkable, geometric, spare amalgam of pink fabric, Bakelite and new domestic gadgets such as the television. This, of course, was the decade when the TV moved from being a luxury item attainable to only a very few, to being the central object of entertainment and discussion in households, changing our patterns of leisure and interaction for ever.

Due weight is also given to the graphic designer whose work is nothing like as well known as it should be- the Londoner Abram Games. Games provided the official logo and did much of what now would be called the Festival "branding", and his central figure of a modernist Britannia is re-worked. One of the more touching photographs on display is one of two of Games children, now middle aged, laughing in the presence of their father's best known design.

Whatever nostalgia there may be for a fast-disappearing past in the Festival of Britain show isn't to be found, as expected, at the BP Portrait Award 2011 at the National Portrait Gallery. The exhibition was absolutely packed when I visited (at two o'clock on a Monday afternoon) and, as always, was generating lively discussion about the choice of the judges versus each visitors own ideas of what should have won. I'm not going to get drawn into that, but instead focus on a portrait that really stood out for me.

Benjamin Sullivan Study 2010-11; copyright the artist. NPG, London.

The portrait is of Sullivan's girlfriend, and was completed whilst he was spending a good stretch of time away from her. The painting is attractive because of its distorted perspective; we look directly down into a cup of coffee, whilst seeing the seated figure in a more conventional manner; the Grimsby street scene outside again appears to be operating on an unusual plane. The device of the net curtain blurs the smokers conversation on the outside, and implicitly reduces their noise to a minimum. The narrow, wood floored interior throws the figure into sharp relief and invites the viewer to think about the introspection, loneliness and complete self absorption that study can bring- perhaps inviting a wider comment on the act of observing a painting. This is also an idealistic view, with the painter imagining what his partner will be doing in his absence and putting together that vision from a composite of past realities. This is a much more subtly complex piece than it first appears, and as such is emblematic of an ambitious, technically dextrous and wide ranging show- perhaps more so this year, than in recent times.

Thomas Struth, Semi-Submersible Rig, DSMES Shipyard, Geoje Island, South Korea, 2007. Whitechapel Art Gallery/The Artist

For one reason and another, it has been quite some time since I've managed to an exhibition at the Whitechapel- I think the last show I saw there was an Emil Nolde retrospective c. 1995-96. The main galleries are filled by an extremely arresting show by the German photographer Thomas Struth- one of the first truly "global" photographers, in terms of his range of subjects and his constant refining of his photographic methods. Struth is fascinated with man's constant desire to progress and to innovate, despite the mounting historical lessons of the folly of some of those innovations. The study of a new gigantic oil rig taking shape in a South Korean shipyard is perhaps the best example of this, although the ground floor of the show has many examples of humans interacting with gargantuan architectural and engineering spaces. Implicit in this is the emptiness and recurrent failure of utopian political and religious ideologies, and the persistence of the human spirit beyond those failures. 

Thomas Struth, Clinton Road, London, 1977

Struth was a student of Bernd and Hilla Becher in the 1970s, and some of his earlier portrayals of cities reveal their strong influence. A good example is the view of Clinton Road in Stratford, East London; the, seemingly, an empty space bounded by a railway line in the background, with only the parked cars giving any sign of human habitation in the Victorian terraced houses. Back then, East London was unimaginably different; the docks were in terminal decline, and would be cleared to make way for Canary Wharf and the new financial district, with this formerly mercantile hub of the British Empire/Commonwealth re-imagined as the finance and service sector"Docklands" by city planners. In a sense, then, this picture is a memento mori of an old working class community that was about to be swept aside by forces completely beyond its ken. More prosaically, although the photo is less than 35 years old, everything looks terribly shabby, and decayed; as remote as a photograph from the second world war.

Joan Miro, Vegetable Garden with Donkey, 1918. Moderna Museet, Stockholm

The other major retrospective I managed to see was the Joan Miro show at Tate Modern. It's worth the eye-watering £15 entrance fee even for those on a tight budget. The particular highlights for me were the opening room- where a series of pictures of Miro's parent's farm in Mont-roig, Catalonia. Much of the symbolism which underlay his later biomorphic and surrealist work dates from this period; particularly his view of the Cataln peasant as a kind of everyman figure, and his understanding of and sympathy with the natural world, dates from this period- a stage of his career which is crucial but often overlooked in favour of his more resolved style of the late twenties and thirties.

Miro's political radicalism as a driving motor behind his ideas and paintings are explained in compelling detail. The Constellations series, dating from 1940 to c. 1942, provides an anxious visual accompaniment to Miro's feelings of gloom at Franco's triumph in the Spanish civil war, the impending invasion of a defeatist France by Nazi Germany, and Miro's own return from France to Spain and "internal exile" with his wife's family. From then on, Miro maintained a low profile in Francoist times, whilst maintaining an international voice through regular exhibitions in Paris and New York. Throughout his long career, he continued to intervene on behalf of radical political causes, such as the triptych inspired by the imprisonment and ultimate garrotting of the Catalan anarchist, Salvador Puig Antich. 

This is a rich and provocative retrospective which will certainly alter any preconceptions the visitor has of Miro- it certainly did that for me.

Tomorrow, I set off from London for the Chunnel, and then an overnight stop in Reims, en route to Geneva and then Zurich for the weekend. My next entry will be from Switzerland, then.

The Vorticists at Tate Britain

This exhibition of Vorticist work at Tate Britain is the first major survey retrospective of this movement in thirty five years. As a student at St. Andrews, I became somewhat obsessed with them, their brief moment of art-political notoriety, and their subsequent sad dissolution in the trenches of the First World War. Vorticism, a sarcastic English cackle echoing in the uncertain hinterland between Cubism and Futurism, was the one truly radical homegrown contribution to European modernism before the Great War, which makes its subsequent neglect somewhat puzzling.

The first piece encountered by the visitor, in a dazzling opening to the show, is Jacob Epstein's re-constructed Rock Drill from 1913-15. Set against an appropriate backdrop of a livid pink-vermillion wall, this piece encapsulates many of Vorticism's more aggressive and discomfiting attributes; unashamed virility, chauvinism, the head-first enthusiasm for the machine aesthetic and, of course, sex.

Jacob Epstein, The Rock-Drill, 1913-15, reconstructed 1970s. Tate Britain

Epstein however was at one remove from the core of the Vorticist movement, shying away from being a signatory to the manifesto BLAST, although he did contribute a written piece. Having been badly stung by the constant fevered criticism of his work and its sexualised agenda by conservative British art critics, Epstein was developing a robust, independent position in aesthetic debate, one which viewed programmatic declarations of the type favoured by the Vorticists with suspicion.

This exhibition has three real strengths. Firstly, it shies away from focusing on the relationships between the core Vorticists- Percy Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska- relationships which have been the subject of much speculation in art history. Instead, it allows the visitor to re-construct the development of Vorticism for themselves, through re-building the exhibition timeline between 1913-17. For the first time, this allows some familiar works to be seen in their proper context- a strategy probably borrowed from Anna Greutzner Robbins' 1997 Barbican show, Modern Art in Britain 1910-14. The remarkable rare drawings by Lewis associated with Timon of Athens from 1912 (particularly a tiny ink sketch entitled Soldiers, as mesmerising as Gaudier's late Japanese Mask not shown here) are a good example of this, displaying a malevolent control of taut, whiplash line, that was still evident twenty years later in his Thirty Personalities and a Self-Portrait.

Secondly, the exhibition gives due weight to those adherents of Vorticism who have been largely forgotten since the end of the first world war, or who are remembered for work done later in their careers- not only the Edward Wadsworths and William Roberts, but also individuals such as Lawrence Atkinson. Atkinson, alone, persisted in pursuing an abstract style after the end of World War One and, in the changed cultural circumstances following the end of the conflict, it proved to be a lonely road to obscurity. A similar fate befell the women artists who enthusiastically followed the emerging movement- Helen Saunders, Jessica Dismorr, Kate Lechmere. All are sensitively re-incorporated into their proper place in the developing historical narrative.

Thirdly- and perhaps most importantly- the exhibition gives due weight to the written, without which an understanding of the movement would be likely to escape the visitor. For it was in the tumbling-over-itself bombast, penned by Lewis and Pound, in the first issue of BLAST that marks out their hardened, radical-right take on contemporary art. The writings also hold the key to understanding Lewis' challenging The Crowd of 1913, a modernist painting unique in that it does not celebrate the revolutionary potential of the urban crowd, but fears it, and seeks its control in a dense lattice of dun coloured lines and blocks.

Lewis' bizarre jackdaw's nest of phobia of the contemporary, narcissism, and general paranoia had, by the early 1920s, seen a failed attempt to re-start Vorticism (the Tyros and Other Portraits series) and a retreat into a series of satirical slashings of Bloomsbury, the Sitwells and the hegemonic Francophilia which governed the English "avant-garde" of the 1920s. Lewis' call for an unashambedly intellectual, hard edged, mechanised modernism had become a barely noticed casualty of the 1914-18 war.

Edward Wadsworth Mytholmroyd 1914. Private Collection

To be picky, perhaps the exhibition could have said more about the fate of all the Vorticists after the lingering dissolution of the movement during 1915-17. Gauder's death, sombrely announced in the second number of BLAST, and Pound's subsequent disillusioned flit to Paris, and advocacy of a new sculptural totem in Constantin Brancusi, would have been interesting to have seen a little more developed. But that is probably being overly-demanding. In the final room, the bizarre Vortographs of Alvin Langdon Coburn, and Edward Wadsworth's compelling wood and lino cuts of northern, industrial England, provides more than enough for the viewer to contend with.

This is an extremely well curated and thought through take on a complicated and challenging movement. Try and see it before it closes, because there won't be another show like this for at least the next thirty five years. This is so well done, there won't need to be.

The Trip

So, this is going to be my on-line journal for the next five months, as I slowly work my way around Central Europe and the Balkans. I have a research grant from the Royal Society of Edinburgh to look into art production and art history in the country that was Yugoslavia, until 1990-91. A publisher is interested in taking the project on in 2012-13, but I have to raise a lot of money towards the book actually happening around then.

I'm not going to be outlining a turgid manifesto of intent, or pious bullet-pointed research agenda, here. This blog is simply going to be about the experience of travelling in and thinking about this part of the world, which has fascinated me for a long time. As I am now a freelancer after ten years of taking the shilling of various academic institutions, I have a bit more time to develop this theme than might otherwise have been the case.

Here's the (intended) route, subject to change as things develop: London-Geneva (stopping off with a friend)-Zurich-Vienna-Brno-Ljubljana-Belgrade-Skopje-Bitola. I hope to be in Southern Macedonia for the end of August, and I will be working from that point on, until the second week in December, when I will re-set the co-ordinates for the UK and an uncertain but exciting 2012.