Masterpieces or Misspieces

I have left it til last minute and went to the Masterpieces exhibition at the Sainsbury Centre, UEA, today. In part this is a celebration of fifty years of the University of East Anglia, part celebration of East Anglia itself.
http://www.scva.ac.uk/masterpieces/
 
 I wasn't quite prepared for the scope of it, spanning the whole of history looking for the roles played in all walks of life by the area and people of East Anglia .  While I can imagine some visitors being disatisfied with the obvious thin spreading of such a wide remit, I enjoyed it perhaps because it was a reminder of many people I had already  heard of, a visual ticklist of all the talents of the region.

It was encouraging how many female artists were included, with one of Olive Edis's photos on the gallery guide. Olive served as a war artist in World War One, and was famous for portrait photography and autochrome photos. She took many photos of Norfolk fisherman, including the one on the guide and in the  exhibition.
But the first work you can't help but notice is the grand piece by Ana Maria Pacheco, an operatic arrangement of people on a boat, The Longest Journey (seen here in another space). I've already experienced a whole barn full of her work near to where I lived in Iken. Pacheco was Head of Fine Art at Norwich Art School for 1985 to 1989, and the boat she used for this piece was from Wroxham.Downstairs, in the first room and last room there are a couple of Marys!
Going back to the 17th Century, Mary Beale was a portraitist heavily influenced by Peter Lily. She was born in Barrow, Suffolk; her self-portrait is included in the exhibition.

Mary Newcombe's art was inspired by the small farms she lived on in the Waveney valley; she is seen as a visionary artist who first trained as a scientist and drew birds at Flatford Mill Field Studies Centre.A couple of her very fine detailed paintings featurehttp://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/yourpaintings/artists/mary-newcomb/paintings/slideshow#/5

I was already familiar with Elizabeth Frink's work, but according to the exhibition, her fascination for winged men, falling figures and birds originated from her childhood in Suffolk during the war years when she witnessed planes that had crashed there.



Another favourite of mine, Barbara Hepworth, was also featured: I have already seen an exhibition about the visits in the 1930s to Happisburgh in Norfolk by Hepworth, Ben Nicholson and Henry Moore, around the time of the beginning of Hepworth's relationship with Nicholson.
Another person connected with Nicholson and the St Ives group was Margaret Mellis, who from 1976 until her death in 2009  lived in Southwold, collecting driftwood from the beach there for her constructions, one of which is featured. I met her a couple of times while working in a gallery, and was very impressed with her enthusiam and joie de vivre, not realising who she was until I happened to see her on a tv programme.

In Kathleen Hale's Orlando books, the Iona a beached ship at Aldeburgh becomes the marmalade cat's holiday home; in the exhibition there is also a Lowry painting of the same wreck. In the exhibition it points out that Hale was Augustus John's secretary; she also became friends with Vanessa Bell (a painter and sister of Virginia Woolf).


The exhibition finishes tomorrow with a talk by Maggi Hambling, one of whose North Sea paintings is featured.Hambling is perhaps best known for her sculpture Scallop, a tribute to Benjamin Britten on Aldeburgh Beach

Gabriele Munter

I'm sure that I must have heard of Gabriele Munter before, but like most people have probably found her memory and work overshadowed by her male contemporaries, especially her lover Wassily Kandinsky So here's to redressing that imbalance.Gabriele Munter was born in 1887 to upper middle class parents, who unusually for the time encouraged her to become an artist; in her youth she was also a talented pianist. As a woman she wasn't allowed to enroll in the German Academy, but didn't feel challenged by the Woman's Artist School. By twenty-two both her parents had died, she and her sister were both left enough to live independently and  in 1898 decided to visit their extended family in America, which gave her social experience unusual for women in the early 1900s.
On returning to Germany she began taking classes at the Munich's progressive new Phalanx School, whose director was the Russian artist Kandinsky. Not only did he encourage her work, but they also had a relationship, until separated by the First World War in 1914 when he returned to Russia and she went to Switzerland.
She was dedicated to German Expressionism, a movement influenced by Nietzsche rebelling against the materialism of German imperialist and bourgeois society. In 1911 Kandinsky, Munter and Franz Marc formed Der Blaue Reiter (the Blue Rider)  movement, sharing a common desire to express spiritual truths through art, seeing  spiritual meanings in colour, and championing the connection between music and visual art. (Quite some time ago now, my son's dissertation for Music A level was on this connection and I joined him during this time in studying at length both Kandinsky and Klee)
Munter and Kandinsky travelled extensively around Europe and North Africa, meeting Rousseau and Matisse.   She was also influenced by  Fauvism, plus Van Gogh and Gauguin, and living in the small Bavarian market town of Murnau, a place untouched by industrialization and technology, when her landscapes became imaginative and rich in fantasy, with  blues, pinks and yellows. She was searching for a lost balance between humanity and nature. Munter used simplified forms, expressive lines and flat bold colours to communicate feelings; her paintings have their own identity and mood, a distinctive visual personality.

While male artists tend to use lovers and muses to paint, like many female artists Munter painted several self-portraits. What I love about Munter's face is that she reminds me of Emily Watson, one of my favourite actors, and like her she seems to have humanity and yet sadness in her expressions.