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‘A LASTING IMPRESSION’
METRO LIFE, 02 February 2007
by Wayne Burrows
True To Life celebrates the evolving tradition of figurative painting with past and contemporary classics.
During the20th century, art underwent more than one revolution. Most of the changes wrought by Picasso and Jackson Pollock, but fewer realise how the work of even the best figurative painters has been deeply shaped by
Modernism. Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach - members of a |
loose group collectively known as The School Of London - were decisively shaped by the artistic Currents of their times.
'You May have to consider the two world wars,' explains Nahem Shoa, one of the leading figures in a new
generation of British realist painters whose work is on show at The Herbert's True To Life: Freud, Auerbach And The New British Realists. 'Freud, Auerbach, David Bomberg and my own teacher, Robert Lenkiewicz, were all Jewish painters very powerfully affected by those events. It's no accident that their work came to emphasise the human figure and the spaces and absences in the landscape around them.
Shoa himself is best known for his monumental, thickly painted and emotionally charged canvases, showing faces, skulls and figures. His subjects are often fellow artists, such as Gbenga Ilumoka, Caroline Poole and
Desmond Haughton, all members of the seven-strong New British Realists group, which Shoa firmly believes
continues an important living tradition of art.
'You could trace the line back to Italian Renaissance painters, such as Mantegna and Bellini, just by looking
at a chain of teachers and students,' he says, touching on the larger theme of this show, curated by Karen Sykes.
"We're going put into a relatively small space with some of the greatest paintings of the past hundred years.
How many contemporary artists could hang their work in that context and not simply disappear into the walls? I
Believe our work can hold its own because it's about working from life, learning to see and bringing the struggle of
That process into the paint itself.'
Shoa also insists there were very good reasons why artists such as Cezanne abandoned rigid Victorian Styles and embraced modernism.
'To much emphasis on detail and illustration gets in the way of the materiality of the paint and kills the vitality of the image,' he says. 'Without that, you're left with nothing but bubblegum and wallpaper. I like chewing bubble gum sometimes, but I believe art has more to offer than that. When you look at a great Lucian Feud portrait it
could have been done yesterday or daubed on a cave wall 20,000 years age. That's the test of serious painting,
and that's what we want to measure ourselves against.'
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