- Venue
- New Art Gallery Walsall
- Location
- West Midlands
Jacob Epstein’s sculpture of his 15 year old daughter Esther is at once beguiling and unsettling. In traditional style, it ends at the upper arms, skating across the top of Esther’s breasts. But in her case it gives the effect of a girl trapped in quicksand, arms pinned to her side, her gaze impassive as she awaits her fate. From the distance of the future it is difficult not to think of her death just 10 years later at her own hands. She is inscrutable, caught, we imagine, in that place of adolescent turmoil that lets no adult in, and god forbid, a parent. It seems that we are not, contrary to the common claim made for great artists, able to see through his eyes into her soul. Instead she allows us only a shuttered glimpse of her inner life.
First Portrait of Esther (with Long Hair), 1944 is the starting point for an exhibition of art that spans more than a hundred years and includes major works from seminal women artists of the late 20th and early 21st century. The title of the exhibition -The Life of the Mind – refers to the Cohen Brothers’ film Barton Fink in which a writer strives to show the interior worlds of ‘the people’ and yet is blind to the real characters that come into his life. Jacob Epstein fails to penetrate Esther’s gaze and yet it is a testament to his skill as a sculptor that he does none the less capture this very essence of her personality – this refusal to be pinned down and analysed.
The subtitle of the exhibition is Love, Sorrow and Obsession and all of the artists featured in some sense communicate what Barton Fink was striving to grasp; the interior life – the emotions that make us human. Beginning with their own inner experiences, each expresses something about the human condition that we could recognise as universal. The pieces range from large-scale sculpture – Louise Bourgeois’ cage-like structure of marble and steel, Cell (Eyes and Mirrors), 1989-93, which alludes to imprisonment but also to a safe space of one’s own – to the ambiguous fragility of Lucia Nogueira’s One and Three, 1994, delicate glass earrings containing a potentially explosive pairing of mercury and phosphorus. Embracing film, video, photography, painting and audio, a gossamer thread of meaning runs around the space, drawing connections. So Yayoi Kusama’s obsessively drawn Infinity Dots, painted in between stays in a mental institution are echoed in the abstract shapes which collide across Jeff Keen’s film, Flik Flak, 2003, in the sparkling circles dancing within Liz Arnold’s paintings of ‘little worlds’ and the painstaking repetitive patterns of Chris Ofili’s mappings interpreting his Visits. Tracey Emin’s self-portrait The Last thing I Said to You Was Don’t Leave Me Here II, 2000 sees her crouching naked, back to the camera, knees grasped protectively, in a reflection of Van Gogh’s Sorrow, 1882 a sketch of his prostitute girlfriend taken from the gallery’s Garman Ryan collection. Sarah Lucas’s Suffolk Bunny, 1997-2004, a prostrate figure made from kapok stuffed tan tights, blue stockings and clamped to a chair nods to Annette Messager’s unsettling Colonne ‘Tete Violette” (Column ‘Violet Head”) 2000 of homely fabrics topped by a glassy eyed stuffed animal and both point to Helen Chadwick’s Meat Abstracts, 1989 and Piss Flowers, 1991-2 where the unpalatable fact of the fleshy corporeal nature of humanity is laid bare.
There is playfulness and darkness here often intertwined as in Emma Talbot’s powerful non-linear comic-strip narrative Time Passes, 2010 which captures fragments of everyday life as the individual remembers it including in this case the death of her husband. We are invited to make connections, to come to our own psychological versions of the truth.
The exhibition has been brought together by Bob and Roberta Smith as part of the New Ways of Curating programme which seeks to illuminate historical artefacts by juxtaposition with the contemporary. An 18 month exploration of the Epstein archive working alongside Archive Curator Neil Lebeter, uncovered a tragic family story amongst the newspaper cuttings, letters, photographs and diaries left by Kathleen Garman, Epstein’s lover (and later his wife) and mother of his three illegitimate children Esther, Theodore and Kitty. Although he was part of their life, Epstein did not acknowledge the young children as his. A magazine clipping showing Epstein at the opening of his painter son’s show refers to him only as his ‘brilliant young protégé Theodore Garman’. Theo’s long struggle with mental illness ended in his death during an attempt to remove him to an institution and less than a year later, his sister Esther gassed herself. The most affecting of the archive material is something that could so easily have been missed. Lying in one of Catherine Garman’s handbags were two crumpled pieces of paper, pages torn from a calendar of 1954. The dates, only 10 months apart are the dates of her children’s deaths.
Bob and Roberta Smith hangs the exhibition together with his trademark hand painted sign-writing that makes up the interpretive labels for each piece of art and culminates in large scale pieces of work relating to Epstein and his children. Eppy Daddy Battle Bot references Epstein as the inventor of the robot, the melding of machine and human in Rock Drill, but is clothed in statements which point up the anti-semitism that Epstein faced from some of the British art establishment. In Esther’s Law, Bob and Roberta calls for a ruling that ensures ‘the same proportion of gender diversity and disability in society is reflected in parliament’. While the robot works as a sharp reflection on the role of the artist within his or her society, Esther’s Law sits uneasily amongst the more complex messages of some of the other artists.
Bob and Roberta Smith’s largest piece of interpretation made for the gallery is a plea that should be heeded and reads Come and see Esther Walsall’s Mona Lisa. The richness of the gallery’s permanent Garman Ryan collection from which this piece and others in the exhibition are drawn (most notably Theodore Garman’s thickly daubed dark and brooding paintings, shown here for the first time) invites further exploration. For me though the atmosphere of the visit is encapsulated in Lucy Nogueira’s film Smoke in which residents of an old people’s home in Berwick fly black kites on a windswept beach in joyful concentration – an uneasy symbol of hope in the face of an uncertain future. Love, sorrow and obsession distilled.
