Mad? Bad? Dadd

Richard Dadd spent most of his life in an asylum for murdering his father. But was he really a ‘lunatic’? Times have changed but his work survives.

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I can no longer laugh

Some years ago I was in Colombia, writing about the art scene, meetings artists and gallerists. The one artist they all referred to with respect and love was Beatriz Gonzalez. I was lucky enough to have the time to visit her great work Auras Anónimas in Bogota’s main cemetery. She lined the wall of a crumbling columbarium, where urns are placed in niches, with 8,956  silhouettes in silk-screen prints of the cargueros, the porters, who carried the dead to their rest. It was moving to see the people who had lost the ones they love visiting the cemetery.

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https://www.thenewworld.co.uk/richard-holledge-how-the-world-finally-caught-up-with-beatriz-gonzalez/

Foto finish

The new photo museum in Rotterdam is warehouse of visual treats. Just how do you pick the best images out of many millions?

Rage, rage at the telling of a bad joke

I met the late Barry Fantoni a few years ago. Splendidly his own man

Private Eye’s Barry Fantoni is in magnanimous mood. “Cartoonists in this country are very good,” he says. “They are as good as they get.”

But then, in a seamless volte face worthy of Eye heroine Glenda Slagg herself, he goes off: “Martin Rowson is rubbish; Peter Brookes? Rubbish; Nick Garland; he’s rubbish - the only joke he’s got is that ‘with apologies to....’ formula.”

So that’s the cartoonists for The Guardian, The Times and The Daily Telegraph dispensed with.

Donthca just love him. Fantoni joined Private Eye in 1963, almost at the birth of the magazine and the satire era. His cartoon the spiky Scenes You Seldom See still decorates the letters page and as EJ Thribb he pens Poetry Corner, the unpoetic tribute to the departed which starts ‘So. Farewell Then....’

“I don’t feel comfortable unless I am having a rage at something,” he says. “I still write letters to newspapers. I just can’t stop.”

Now he is putting himself up for scrutiny - maybe even a rubbishing - by holding a show of his cartoons as well as his landscapes and portraits.

“The show is a reaction to the fact that my mum died last year. She paid for me to go to Camberwell Art College when I was 14 so I thought I would put on an exhibition to celebrate what would have been her 100th birthday.”

Fantoni produced a pocket cartoon for The Times during the Eighties and another for the now-defunct The Listener for 21 years.

“It all started for me when I held an exhibition on New Year’s Eve, 1962,” says the 69-year-old. “The art critic of the Daily Express came for a drink and a story. He had seen in the catalogue a picture of the Duke of Edinburgh in his underwear surrounded by cut out outfits such as a boy scout’s uniform and a kilt.

“These days it wouldn’t raise an eyebrow but by lunch time it was on the front page of the Evening Standard. Shock! What have they done to the Duke of Edinburgh?

“Richard Ingrams, who was editor of Private Eye, saw it and asked me to work there and it’s been virtually the same four or five of us who were there at the start who do the pages of jokes in the middle.

“Private Eye seems to be at its strongest when it attacks the way the media reports stories rather than attacking the institutions themselves. What I find obscene is that the writing is so obviously bogus.

“Most papers are like a weather vane. They don’t have a view, just register where the wind is blowing. Columnists are like Glenda Slagg, incapable of understanding anything much more than PR handouts. They are being paid to write even though they have no opinions at all.”

Do any cartoonists make the grade?

“I think Vicky of The Mirror in the Fifties and Sixties got it right all the time and so did David Low of the Standard. They could draw properly.

“Look at the Osbert Lancaster’s cartoons - they are still relevant, they could have been drawn yesterday. Look at the work of Leslie Illingworth who was at his best in his Punch days. He produced full pages of political comment which, artistically, were as good as it gets. Beautiful.

“The two funniest cartoonists of my generation were Bill Tidy, who did The Cloggies and Larry, who  studied painting and drawing and knew you had to make people look funny in cartoons. I like John Husband’s work and I think Michael Heath is exceptionally good. He is observant, he is current and you know exactly who you are looking at when you look at one of his figures.”

But just in case it sounds as if he’s mellowing in his old age he even has a swipe at Private Eye itself.

“The cartoons are funny but I don’t think the drawings are very good. Some are just like hand writing aren’t they? I think you could draw better than that.”

Barry Fantoni: Public Eye, Private Eye Thomas Williams, Old Bond Street 22 April – 22 May 2009

Photos from the front line. They might surprise you

This is a piece I wrote for the New European. The work of these young Ukrainian photographers is mightily impressive.



There is little to lift Ukrainian photographer Rehina Bukvuch from her mood of bleak pessimism.

“We believe Russia is preparing for another offensive. There is no sense of a ceasefire, on the contrary Russia is bombing us more than ever. We are anxious about Trump and his policies but in reality we have no other choice.

“So for us, if the Russia comes all of this will end. We will either have to leave our country or be sent to a gulag - there will be no life for us. We know Russia’s policies and if they occupy us they will try to completely erase us so that Ukraine never resists again.”

The ‘all’ she refers to is, counter-intuitively, an art scene ‘thriving like never before’ with new galleries and exhibition openings as well as a growing focus on Ukrainian authors.

It is a scene she has contributed to as part of an imaginative scheme to inspire artists who have been compelled to swap camera or paintbrush for guns and drones by connecting them with artists who can work in safety far from the conflict.

The driving force behind the project, cultural activist Alona Karavai, says: “We wondered how we could help artists who were on the front. We thought, okay, we can help keep alive their sensibility by connecting them using emails, drawings, letters and photographs and encouraging them to work in tandem to create works, however small, however simple.

“The important thing is that the voice of the artists on the front line can still be heard.”

Rehina Bukvuch compiled a photo album for artist-turned-soldier Yevhen Korshunov, a friend from the youthful art scene they shared in Kyiv before the war

When he returns from the action, he will find the album - only three inches by 1.5 - filled with pictures of old friends and warm messages such as ‘Zhenya, warm hugs and a little kiss for you’ sealed with an extravagant smacker. He will be reminded of his peripatetic life on the front line where he is being moved from billet to shabby billet by quirky photographs which he took himself and sent to Bukvuch.

The album speaks of loneliness and dislocation, but it is a reminder of a time neither will forget and a small but eloquent gesture of defiance against the ever present threat of defeat and destruction.

The results of these ‘tandem’ works have been shown in an exhibition at an art centre, Asortymentna Kimnata in the small town of Ivano-Frankivsk, deep in the Carpathian mountains about 350 miles west of Kyiv. The place is also temporary home to 40 IDPs (Internally Displaced Persons) who have the opportunity to join other artists in a fever of creativity, including a display of deceptively colourful paintings by women, most of them amateurs. Deceptive because they are all grieving someone lost in the war.

The album is one of the more low key contributions to the show which is called Do Toads Sing in the Walls? after an artist wrote a song about toads which had settled in the buildings where his unit was stationed. Others are more disturbing.

While recovering from a wound in hospital, Klementyna Kvindt, a drone operator, poet, and ornithologist, complemented her recordings of birdsong with documents, photos, and poems which were collated in a book made of zinc by Olha Babak. Words set against stormy landscapes, or simply on the grey of the metal create a mood which is both eerie and forbidding.

The poems of Yulia Bondar are cries of anguish delivered in a monotone: I bury spring in the black soil / of my barren heart / How many springs lie buried / in this black land? and her words are matched  with animated drawings by Mashyka Vyshedska. Hands reach up to bring succour to a woman, only to fade away, flowers briefly bloom and die. A serpent curls around a female torso, leaving behind bloody scars.

The very fact that the works have overcome the constraints of geography and the challenges of communication is in itself a triumph, yet as Karavai, herself an IDP having been forced to flee Donetsk in 2014 when the Russians invaded, acknowledges this kind of grass roots activity will be targeted by the enemy.

“Putin wants to destroy our traditions, our free cultural expression,” she says, but insists that the venture is not merely about promoting national pride.

“It is not about nationalism,” she says. “But more about preserving a culture which is free and democratic. For me, art is a way of existence, of people being together, being fair to each other, and this for me, in a way, is the civilisation which Ukraine is fighting for against Russia. It's not about the Ukrainian nation against the Russian nation, but about one way of living, and art for me, is a part of this way of living. The civilisation we are protecting, is outside the notion of nation.”

That explains why the contributions are more reflective than the ugly images of death and destruction which are horribly routine in newspapers, social media and TV.

It’s a shift recognised by Kateryna Radchenko, curator of the Odesa Photo Days festival, who says: “On February 24, 2022 - literally overnight - every photographer, visual artist, and ordinary citizen with a camera became a documentarian of the war, often without training or proper gear.

“They became witnesses, transforming their cameras into tools to collect evidence of this unjust war, the destruction of cities, architectural heritage, and infrastructure; the bodies of killed civilians; torture and interrogation chambers. They took massive numbers of selfies, firstly to share with their families to show that they were alive and but also to prove to themselves that they were still alive. This focus is a kind of self protection.

“Now it has changed because we have had three years of adaptation, three years of living under the attacks, and artists stopped being afraid and hiding in shelters and started to think more and reflect more by using associations or symbols to describe their feelings and their thoughts rather than direct images.”

Testimony to that change can be seen with the results of a mentoring programme for young people she has helped establish.

“Thousands of kids suffered from the occupation in Mariupol, in Kherson and the attacks on Kharkiv,” she says. “We decided to help them use photography to work through this traumatic experience and also to provide them with the skills to earn money as photographers.”

One of those is Ivan Samoilov who has lived all his 20 years in Kharkiv. After the 2022 invasion he spent two months taking pictures of his hometown. ‘Only rescuers, old people, volunteers and homeless animals maintained some kind of life in the ruined city,’ he says.

His photographs include a lad flexing his muscles on a playground apparatus framed by the ruins of a block of flats behind him, in another, the eye is drawn to a bold flower bed of marigolds before taking in the devastated building behind. Two men on a pedestrian crossing a deserted street, the golden spires of a church catch the sun. As with all the images, the ruined buildings seem almost incidental. Life, after a fashion, goes on.

An essay on volunteers by Artem Baidala, 21, from Dnipro, shows a man concentrating fiercely as he crunches through the rubble carrying materials for construction work on homes hit by missiles, a dachshund trots along before him. Young men take a break with a game of football in a yard. It all looks so normal.

Odesa, with its beaches and noble architecture, has been ravaged by Russian missiles. Tim Melnikov, a 19-year-old student, chronicled the effects of the war on the city with its taped off beaches and piles of sandbags which is now ‘deserted and gloomy, but not broken.’

Radchenko has witnessed a growth in conceptual work, cleverly expressed by Olia Koval, 21, in Memory. A shabby room, sparely furnished with a table, a chair, pictures on the wall, clothes hanging from hooks is transformed in eight frames from rich dark shades to one in which the colour is almost entirely bleached out.

‘Time seems to have sped up after 24 February,’ she writes. ‘Large amounts of information carry you away from where you are. It’s hard to remember what exactly surrounded you.’

And few contributions are as conceptually dauntless as that of Sofia Konovalova, 19, from Kharkiv, who poses nude in a cupboard with a suitcase. In The Place where I Live she captures the oppression that has afflicted her since the invasion. Nevertheless in that claustrophobic confine, life goes on, cleaning teeth, brushing hair, reading a book perched on the suitcase which is packed and waiting to return home, just like her.

Whether it’s a workaday selfie or the ambitious dialogues between artists hundreds of miles apart, the creativity of Ukraine’s young artists is undiminished despite Radchenko’s belief that the world is ‘bored with Ukraine’ - a pessimism she has felt long before Trump and his cohorts abused the ‘dictator’ Zelensky in the White House.

To stir the world from that boredom she has organised a project with Magnum Photos, Beyond the Silence, presented the endeavours of an international array of talent in Lviv.

“The show will help to prove that we are still alive and that we are a different country with a different identity, with our own culture and our own voice, which we want to share, and to make it, like, really loud.”

Cash in on the bank that thinks it’s an art gallery. Two versions of the same story here. Money makes the (art) world go round

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https://www.theneweuropean.co.uk/richard-holledge-the-bank-that-thinks-its-a-gallery/


Good publicity and generous philanthropy. Huge profits. Nothing new about that as a business model for an ambitious bank.


The Medicis, the powerful Florentine banking dynasty of the 15th century, understood that all too well, spending some of their vast fortune endowing churches and cathedrals and sponsoring artists such as Donatello, Botticelli and Michelangelo to atone for their particular brand of usury and corruption.


It is a philosophy embraced by many contemporary banks, perhaps few more than another Italian

banking titan, Intesa Sanpaolo - not the usury and corruption, of course - which has won welcome publicity for its philanthropic role as lead sponsor of the ravishing Siena: The Rise of Painting now at London’s National Gallery.

The corporate world loves art. Banks buy paintings to adorn their boardrooms and impress their clients with a Picasso here, a Warhol there. No self respecting foyer is complete without a Tracey Emin to welcome a would-be investor.

How reassuring it must be for the shareholders to know UBS owns more than 40,000 art works or that Deutsche Bank’s London HQ is embellished with works by Damien Hurst and Anish Kapoor. Good to know Barclays Bank owns one of the most valuable collections of them all with their offices bedecked by David Hockney, Bridget Riley, Eduardo Paolozzi and many more.

These collections are crucial marketing tools when it comes to promoting an image of wealth and shrewd judgement. And, of course, they scream - in a subtle sort of way - money, money, money.

As JP Morgan Chase (35,000 acquisitions) explains on its private banking site: ‘Art transcends economic environments, providing cultural enrichment and a broadening of your asset classes.’

From Preach by Carrie-Anne Weems

Intesa Sanpaolo wouldn’t disagree with that but their business plan has at least one material difference; they are a bank which thinks it’s an art gallery - or rather four galleries. One of Italy’s biggest banks, it has cultural outposts in Milan, Naples, Vicenza and Turin and itself owns 35,000 artworks. Unlike its global rivals, where most of the works stay hidden from view, it owns permanent collections which are open to the public, schoolchildren are encouraged to come, look and learn, students enjoy free entry up to the age of 18 and courses are available for graduates to learn how to curate an exhibition or manage a gallery.

The other fundamental difference is that though there is a programme of contemporary work, the collections have been decades in the making and are inspired by the art and heritage of the region.They are not just a splashy gesture on an office wall.

Perhaps the one man most responsible for this was Milan banker Raffaele Mattioli who was managing director of Banca Commerciale Italiana between 1936 and 1972. Known as ‘the humanist banker’ he was driven as much by his commercial instincts as his passion for art which he displayed in the bank’s elegant offices on the Piazza della Scala.

He died long before his bank was subsumed in 1999 into Intesa Sanpaolo but, happily, the takeover has stayed true to his ethos by transforming the old bank from a building of business into a building of culture, the Gallerie d’Italia.

Its fascinating collection ranges from plaster works by Canova to paintings celebrating the Risorgimento, Italy’s long struggle for national unity, by way of genre representations of the working class and landscapes of Lombardy region. The artists lack the reputation, or the commercial dazzle of Hirst and Co, but the work has an authentic charm which speaks to the culture of the region and emphasises Milan’s significant role in Italian culture during the 1800s.

Canova in Milan

More recent art from the 50s and 60s is not neglected with a selection - again from the region - including Umberto Boccioni, Lucio Fontana and Alberto Burri and this June it hits the Sixties with Beatles in Milan, (June 25– September 7) displaying photographs of the lads posing in front of the Duomo and twisting and shouting on stage.

The photos are taken from seven million photographs from the 1930s to the 1990s which were acquired from an Italian photo agency and stored in the Turin gallery, a palazzo rebuilt after World War Two.

It’s a marvel of ingenuity using wood panelling, stucco work, gilt mirrors, furniture and tapestries, taken from nearby palaces which had been reduced to rubble but it’s fair to say the centre of attention is the new underground space which is given over to photography.

Next up is Italian Olivo Barbieri. Other Spaces (until September 7) with dramatic ‘helicopter’ shots of Chinese city life followed in April with a retrospective of Carrie Mae Weems. The Heart of Matter which includes Preach, a project exploring the role of religion and spirituality among Americans of African descent.

St Ursula

The gallery in Naples has permanent collection of 500 vases crafted between the 5th and 3rd centuries BC and an array of paintings from the 17th century to the early 20th. How surprised the experts were to discover after the local bank had been taken over by Intesa SanPaolo that a painting which had hung unremarked in the boardroom was none other than Caravaggio’s The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula which was shown at London’s National Gallery last year (2024).

By way of contrast, the current show stars Andy Warhol: Triple Elvis.(until May 4) with the silk screen paintings of Marilyn Monroe, Mao Tse-Tung, and the disquieting Electric Chair together with gun-toting Elvis Presley in silver and black based on a scene from the 1963 film Flaming Star.

Underpinning all these enterprises is the bank’s Progetto Cultura, a scheme to promote the bank’s commitment to the arts and to the philanthropic schemes which accompany it.

“Our history is the living part of our being, of our brand,” says Michele Coppola, Director of Art, Culture and Historical Heritage. “ Now we are contemporary philanthropists, supporting art and culture.”

As he intimated it would be naive to think this is not part of a brand building enterprise. After all, this is a bank. It’s aim is to make money. In December 2023 Intesa Saopaolo announced assets of €963,570 million (£802,305m) and in an unusual move put a price on its collection of €850 million (£707,822).

Nonetheless, there’s a real sense of genuine altruism about one scheme, La Restituzioni, which was launched in Vicenza in 1982 and has enabled the restoration of hundreds of paintings and sculptures which had lain discarded in churches, council chambers and cultural institutions. The results will be on show in Rome in the autumn.

Coppola says: “Restituzione is part of our roots, of our history, of our DNA. It shows how have a responsibility to our heritage and proves we are on the side of public culture by investing in the community we are a part of.




Apocalypse then... and now

We’re all doomed. Or are we? An intriguing exhibition in Reggio Emilia, Italy has the answers. Well, at least some dramatically visual suggestions.

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The Book of Genesis 7; 4. God’s message to Noah: ‘I will cause it to rain upon the earth forty days and forty nights; and every living substance that I have made will I destroy from off the face of the earth.’

It’s tempting to see world on the brink of divine destruction as the inspiration behind an exhibition at the Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia, Italy, (until Feb 16) not least because it is titled Through the Floods but also because the first image to greet the visitor is that of Noah’s ark.

But the show’s themes which are listed as ‘natural disasters; human abuse of animals and nature; man’s violence to man and the horrors of war; illness and death’ are not restricted to religious iconography, however potent.

The litany of catastrophe which has afflicted the world for centuries is reflected by the gallery’s choice of works which date from a second to third century stele of a woman’s head in the style of Ancient Egyptian funerary monuments, through melodramatic representations of violence and disaster from the 16th and 17th centuries and on to shifts of style and emphasis in the 21st century works, many taken from the last 10 years.

As curator Sara Piccinini explains: “There is something apocalyptic about the way we are immersed in a terrible flux, from floods and typhoons, to war and famine. There may be something Biblical about what is happening to the world but we are attempting to reflect the way the news is accelerating in intensity and for that we need to show contemporary work.”

That might explain why an early working titles for the exhibition was Apocalypse Wow! Conceived during the pandemic, planned during years of unprecedented global tragedies such as typhoons in Taiwan, floods in the Sahel Region of North Africa and the hurricanes which hit the USA, the show opened, with horrible irony, the week the first floods tore though Valencia killing hundreds.

While the show does open with After the Deluge (1864) by 19th century Italian painter Filippo Palizzisets, a traditional representation of the Noah story with the Ark atop Mount Ararat and the liberated animals happily gallivanting around, a salutary note is struck by a radical version of the legend in Spoiler Alert (Extreme Weather) (2018 - 2019) by American Andy Cross .

Inspired by Jacopo Bassano’s The Animals Entering Noah’s Ark painted in 1570, he shows how mankind has failed to deal with climate change and led by Noah, in this case a Rastafarian farmer, the animals are to be deported in a 21st century ark, a multi-mirrored space age dome, to a planet where the inhabitants have accepted their responsibility to protect the world.

Given the show’s title, inundations and ‘weather events’ are a recurring theme. A house, in a painting from 1837, is swept along like some domestic ark by Alpine torrents, sailors flee from a storm-torn ship only to drown in the turbulent waters. In the deceptively simple Irene 2011 by Monica Bonvicini, a wooden house, typical of the hundreds wrecked by that storm and many others such as Katrina and Helene, has been torn apart by the deluge. In stark black and white it is an understated image, but one which speaks of greater tragedies.

Back to the Bible: ‘God said unto Noah, The end of all flesh is come before me; for the earth is filled with violence through them... and, behold, I will destroy them with the earth.’


The gallery may well be reluctant to embrace such religiosity but certainly goes for Apocalypse Wow.


A graphic 19th print of The Plague in Florence, inspired by Boccaccio’s La Decameron, is a nightmare of prostrate bodies pleading for salvation from the Almighty. A scene of despair and death overseen by a priest before a banner decorated with a skull and cross bones. He is holding a flaming brand - in part to protect himself from the disease but also to keep the mob coming closer.


The fratricidal onslaught by the Cain on his brother Abel is brought to life in Domenico Piola’s 17th century Cain and Abel in a swirl of movement and colour. Cain, jealous that God had accepted Abel’s offering rather than his own, beats his brother to death with the jawbone of an ass. Looking on, a lamb, which signals the decline of human morality.


The inclusion of Fellice Boselli’s Macelleria (1720) seems an odd choice, after all it’s only a butcher’s and of no offence unless you are vegetarian. But the sheer bloodiness of it, the carcasses, the staring lifeless eyes of the dead beasts is so brutal, so ugly, that you can almost smell the dead meat. It wreaks of violence.


And then there’s the horror of war. In Metanarrativas No. 1 (2024) the Cuban Ariel Cabrera Montejo has a young soldier wearing virtual reality goggles to observe a military massacre in which bodies have been strewn across a battleground. The painting drew inspiration from the 1898 war between the United States and Spain that ended in an American victory and Cuban independence, but it could be today. It could be Gaza, Ukraine or Sudan.


Photojournalist Ivor Prickett kept his camera trained on a woman in Mosul Old City, Iraq, at the height of the conflict in 2014. She sits on a plastic chair, waiting and watching as an excavator digs through the ruins of her home, sending swirls of dust over her, dumping mounds of stone and wreckage beside her.


Underneath the rubble, the bodies of her sister and niece who were killed by an airstrike. She did not move until the bodies were eventually found.


“Her defiance was one of the most heart-breaking and inspiring things I have ever seen,” says Prickett. “It seemed to speak volumes about the futility of war but it was also a testament to the strength people have in this fractured region.”


If she was phlegmatic in the face of tragedy, Käthe Kollwitz’s etching from 1903, Mother with Dead Child, is a primal scream of loss. Kollwitz sketched herself naked in front of a mirror holding her seven-year-old son Peter who was to die in 1914. Her aim was to dramatise the high rate of child deaths in her home city of Berlin where many did not live beyond the age of five.


With such imagery this is an exhibition shrouded in pessimism despite the gallery’s insistence that there is some scope for optimism - or at least to take an equivocal view of the future.


This ambivalence is best expressed by Jules de Balincourt’s startling Blind Faith and Tunnel Vision (2005). Set in a darkened room to heighten the dramatic effect, it depicts a wrecked street; buildings lurch, telegraph poles teeter, the chaos of destruction is accentuated by scattered chairs, debris and shards of timber. Has the destruction been wrought by the irresistible force of a storm or by human violence, a bomb attack perhaps?To add to the ambiguity a rainbow of stripes, beautiful but threatening, soars away into space.



Does it portend the end of the world or a bright new future poised to emerge from the ruins?



Those who take the darker view will find little comfort In Joan Banach’s Deep Water (1998), a disturbing painting of a woman with just her head above swirling, yellow, waters. She is looking skywards but we do not know whether she is seeking help or is resigned to her fate. Is the water an allegory for her unconscious dragging her down, sweeping her away on a tide of despair?



Not waving, but drowning.