When Francis Bacon made furniture

Plus: Are commercial galleries tired of visitors?

Get more great writing every day – from just £1 a week

Digby Warde-Aldam on Francis Bacon's career as a furniture designer

If Francis Bacon's short-lived career as a designer in the early 1930s is not widely understood, it is because he devoted immense energy to pretending it never happened. The artist was by all accounts acutely embarrassed by his adventures in that world, possibly because (pace the recent biography by Annalyn Swan and Mark Stevens) 'there was a moment when his design work was not an unpleasant chore but a chosen career'. He preferred to let it be known that he spent his youth drifting 'from bar to bar', merely dabbling in creative pursuits. An exhibition currently at the Espace de l'Art Concret in Mouans-Sartoux, however, sets out to investigate the artist's work as a designer and trace his debt to contemporary trends in France.

Read the full article

Sophie Barling on the favourite fabric of the French elite

The small town of Jouy-en-Josas is a short train ride from Paris, four kilometres south-east of Versailles. Wandering through this sleepy sylvan suburb, the visitor is hard-pressed to find any trace of what was, at the turn of the 19th century, France's third-largest industry. For this was the site of the Oberkampf Manufactory, which from 1760 to 1843 delighted everyone from Marie-Antoinette and Josephine Bonaparte to papal and Persian ambassadors with its printed cloth of Arcadian scenes and delicate blooms – or, as it came to be known, toile de Jouy.What today serves as the town hall is one of the few buildings left from that period – one wing of the family home built in 1766 for the manufactory's German-born founder, Christophe-Philippe Oberkampf. A more eloquent relic of this hive of industry stands in the mairie's courtyard: the factory bell in its tall wooden frame, rung each morning to signal the opening of the gates to Oberkampf's 14-hectare production site. At its height, more than 1,300 employees, from illustrators and engravers to gamins épingleurs (kids who pegged out the fabric to bleach under the sun), worked in and around the manufactory's 36 buildings to make hundreds of kilometres of printed toiles each year.

Read the full article

Phin Jennings asks if commercial galleries really want visitors

A few weeks ago, White Cube in London sacked 38 of its invigilators and replaced them with security guards. The Art Newspaper reported that the restructuring, in the words of a White Cube spokesperson, 'follows a general trend across similar galleries that are moving away from visitor engagement to visitor management'. At the beginning of August, news broke that David Zwirner had fired about ten members of its digital team – staffers who were hired to boost the gallery's online presence. Such restructurings seem to suggest that major galleries are no longer convinced of the value of making their spaces, real or virtual, as inviting as possible. Which leads one to wonder: are commercial galleries turning away from the public?

Read the full article

Conrad Landin on the shape-shifting art of Adam Bruce Thomson

It's true that the City Art Centre's show of Thomson's works is at the more traditional end of the broad spectrum of exhibitions and events at the Edinburgh Art Festival, which this summer ranged from El Anatsui's bottle-top tapestries at Talbot Rice to Prem Sahib's re-working of a speech by Suella Braverman beneath Edinburgh Castle. Yet it would be hard to find an artist more relevant to living, working, gathering and resisting than Thomson, who was described as 'a leading exponent of the contemporary point of view' when he was, at long last, elected a member of the Royal Scottish Academy in 1946. 'The Quiet Path' (until 6 October) attempts to rescue him from relative obscurity, compared to contemporaries such as William Crozier and William Geissler. The show displays not only Thomson's accomplishment across printmaking, oils and watercolours, but also the impossibility of separating his shape-shifting career from the story of modern Scottish art.

Read the full article

Arjun Sajip on the tennis coach with an eye for abstract art

When he's not coaching Jack Draper, the current British #1 tennis player, James Trotman pursues a personal passion that is, to say the least, unusual in the world of competitive tennis: collecting abstract art. A former doubles champion who became a coach after a series of injuries drew an end to his promising career on the court, Trotman spends much of his downtime researching his favourite 'post-war mod Brit' painters, tracking down their work and assembling a collection that largely comprises work by women, though a few male artists – most notably Derek Jarman – feature prominently. While preparing for the US Open, which commenced in earnest yesterday, Trotman set aside some time to talk to Apollo about his long-standing love of modernist art, how he got to grips with the art world, and why art and tennis make for a good match.

Read the full article

In the current issue…

Kevin Dumouchelle of the Smithsonian explains what a fearsome 19th-century mask from Côte d'Ivoire meant to its makers

The mask has a very aggressive, startling, garish quality. It is meant to stop you in your tracks – to intimidate, frighten – giving a sense that the mask and the performer are representing an authority one should be fearful of and submissive towards. We believe that the masquerade served a variety of purposes, including leading soldiers into battle as an emblem of the might and power of the warriors behind it and to intimidate foes on the opposite side. Typically, these masks would have been accompanied by an elaborate ceremonial costume, made of cloth, raffia and plant materials. Feathers, hair and other important attachments were removed, owing to a limited European perspective that valued only the pure, sculptural form of the mask.

Read the full article

In the next issue…

More from Apollo

Current issue | Advertise | Podcasts

View this email in your browser

Follow us

Apollo Magazine, 22 Old Queen Street, London, SW1H 9HP.
All Articles and Content Copyright © 2024 by Apollo Magazine. All Rights Reserved.
If you no longer wish to receive these emails, you can unsubscribe at any time.
To ensure our emails are delivered to your inbox, please add Apollo to your email address book and safe-sender list.

ALL NEWS MAG

When Francis Bacon made furniture

Commentaires

Enregistrer un commentaire

Posts les plus consultés de ce blog

Kid draws a hilarious family portrait, featuring his mother on her period

Chris Froome sends out strong message to his rivals as he storms back to win Criterium du Dauphine for the second time

This Is What Fish Oil Supplements Actually Do