6/10/2023 0 Comments Surrealism art view fro heaven![]() ![]() And speaking of close-ups, Google’s Art Project has the three paintings above in their Tate collection click the pictures for links.īelshazzar’s Feast (1820) by John Martin. Visitors to the new exhibition will be able to judge for themselves in close-up. I once read that if the insanely huge banqueting hall in that picture had been a real construction it would have extended for at least a mile. Of note for Martin enthusiasts will be the emergence from a private collection of the vast and lurid Belshazzar’s Feast, the painting which inspired some of the set designs in DW Griffith’s Intolerance. The show will run there until June then travel to Sheffield (where I may pay it a visit) and Tate Britain. Well things change, not least critical opinion, and with the emergence in recent years of (for want of a better term) Pop Surrealism, and also the current vogue for crappy disaster movies and apocalyptic chatter, Martin’s paintings have been deemed interesting enough to warrant an exhibition at the Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle, which has been the permanent home of other Martin works for many years. The Plains of Heaven (1851) by John Martin. What I saw was an astonishing audacity-this artist had dared to paint the end of the world!-and three deeply strange paintings, two of which feature deliberately confused perspectives which are almost Surrealist in their effect and quite unlike any other work produced in the 19th century. But there’s more to art than the surface. If you only look at painting as being about the surface of the canvas then Martin is inferior to Turner whose nebulous works contain the seeds of Impressionism and much 20th century art. ![]() Yet for a long time these works were never seen in art histories, being dismissed as a kind of religious kitsch, interesting perhaps for their Romantic connections (he also depicted scenes from Milton and Byron) but with Martin regarded as deeply inferior compared to his contemporary JMW Turner. Some of these paintings have become more visible over the years, especially Martin’s startling chef-d’oeuvre, The Great Day of His Wrath, which has found a new lease of life decorating various music releases. The Last Judgement (1853) by John Martin. Those works were present, of course, and it was a thrill to discover artists I hadn’t heard of such as Brâncusi and Moholy-Nagy, but the greatest shock came in the room reserved for the enormous canvases filled with apocalyptic scenes by Francis Danby and John Martin. I wanted to see Modern Art (capital M and capital A), and especially my favourite Surrealist and Pop artists. At the time of writing, there were no fewer than 33 exhibitions devoted to Surrealism and its key artists in major museums and galleries around the world, including London’s Tate Modern, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, the National. My first visit to the Tate Gallery (now Tate Britain) when I was 13 was of my own volition during one of our annual school visits to London. W e live in surreal times, and consciously or not the art world appears to be tapping into the underbelly of this troubled moment in history. I’ve written on a couple of occasions about having been a precocious youth when it came to art appreciation. ![]() The Great Day of His Wrath (1851) by John Martin. ![]()
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