NOT TO BE CONTINUED

 

Bernat Klein was a Serbian textile designer and painter who lived and worked in Scotland from the early 1950s, where he established his own studio and a number of businesses that specialised in  weaving and knitting for carpets, tapestries and haute couture clothing, including for Dior, Chanel, Pierre Cardin - and Marks and Spencer.

Klein died in 2014 aged 91, and this photograph (by Gordon Burniston) shows his last, unfinished painting on the easel, forever a work in progress.

EXPECT THE UNEXPECTED

Edvard 'my whole life has been spent walking by the side of a bottomless chasm' Munch worked on this painting for three years (1932-1935) without ever finishing it. 

It's called Uninvited Guests and in it he makes a fairly unequivocal statement: alcohol has been consumed, the wallpaper is weird, and I have a firearm, so don't come around here ad hoc with your smiley balloon heads and expect your shrift to be anything but short.  

APE ART

Apes aren't natural artists, although they clearly have the thumbs for it, their hands being far more complex than ours - and they have twice as many. A chimp might trace its shadow on a wall with a finger, but that's generally as far as they go in terms of drawing and painting, unless they are presented with the right equipment and lots of encouragement. The pictures here are by Julia, Bozo, Jessica and Lady, respectively, all chimpanzees showing great promise. I love the great apes. That's where the future lays - not only in art, but of humanity.

HANG ON IN THERE

Caves. Motivational art created late at night.

HYBRID ART

Felix Labisse (1905-1982)

Bridging the gap between first wave surrealism and the sort of pictures people used to buy from Woolworths and put on the walls of their maisonettes in the 1970s.  

WOULD YOU ADAM AND EVE IT?

MAX BECKMANN: Adam and Eve (1917)

German painter Max Beckmann began his painting of Adam and Eve in 1913, only to have his work on it interrupted by World War One, where he served as a medical orderly, and saw more than his share of horrors. He completed it in 1917. There is an overwhelming seediness to the picture, and the mismatched couple seem more like a drunk and a whore rather than the Biblical first of the line - even the tree between them resembles a lamp post on the Reeperbahn. In a grey, wan light they stand, seemingly mid-transaction: him witless, awkward, gormless; her, looking older than him, proffering a breast, perhaps as an inducement to eat the apple the eared serpent lurking behind her has provocatively supplied. A daffodil provides the one bright spot in an otherwise pretty dismal Eden.

WOULD YOU ADAM AND EVE IT

HANS HOLBEIN THE YOUNGER: Adam and Eve (1517)

I was once stuck on a week-long training course during which I became so desperately bored in the evenings that started reading the Bible someone called Gideon had so thoughtfully left in my hotel room. I wasn’t converted, but I was intrigued by just how short the key passages were. The creation of the Earth, for instance, is done in about a page and a half. Adam and Eve (actually, man and woman – the names were added in later iterations) are around for no more than half a dozen paragraphs, even though their story is absolutely pivotal to Western belief systems. For centuries, artists have interpreted this story, not least because it gave them an opportunity to paint nearly naked anatomy, a chance too good to miss in less permissive times. 

Here’s Hans Holbein’s interpretation. Holbein famously painted the ‘too flattering’ portrait that Henry VIII married Anne of Cleves on the strength of. His picture of Adam and Eve, painted over twenty years earlier, pulls no such punches, representing the first man and woman as a somewhat disreputable pair: a swarthy, scruffy bloke with a perm, a stringy moustache and shifty eyes, and a slack jawed, pasty faced child, looking anaemic and inbred, as perhaps befits a person made out of bits of the only ever human being alive. Their collective IQ is probably just nudging triple figures, which probably explains why they have thrown away the chance of eternal life in paradise in exchange for a worm ridden apple. Their hapless expressions perhaps reflect that they are just beginning to realise how much shit they are in.

WHY ME?

Lucas Cranach The Elder: 'Christ's Head With Crown of Thorns' (c. 1520-1525)

I am not a religious person at all, but I am very interested in Jesus as a historical figure, as a man and, of course, as the inspiration for countless sublime works of art. Cranach's Jesus looks like what he is: a condemned man trying to come to terms with his imminent death. At this stage of his last agonising hours on this Earth, Jesus must have felt resurrection and eternal life a very long way off indeed.

RED HEADS, DEAD HEADS

Lucas Cranach The Elder was a German Renaissance painter who lived between 1472 and 1553. He specialised in portraits of members of the Weimar court, as well as of prominent protestants including Martin Luther and his family. 

Cranach also had an 'interest'* in the biblical story of Judith and Holofernes, in which the brutal Assyrian general Holofernes invades the town of Bethulia, only to be killed by the beautiful Jewish widow Judith, who seduces him and then, as he enjoys a drunken post coital nap, cuts his head off.

The subtle differences in these studies are fascinating, especially the various expressions that Judith wears, which vary from tired to triumphant, smug to sanguine, distracted to defiant. Holofernes' expression is fairly constant throughout: a dopey face on a dead head, a grisly reminder of the dangers of one night stands.  

* Many painters have depicted the subject, including Caravaggio and Gustav Klimt, but Cranach is clearly obsessed with it. 

THE SHAPE OF ABSTRACTION

Kenneth Noland (1924-2010)