ART'S CONTENT - ELITISM - THE PUBLIC

Easel paintings by
DURAND
www.durand-gallery.com

Stanley Picker Gallery

Kingston University London 2000

Published by Charles Ryder, Curator, Stanley Picker Gallery 1999-2004 www.frari.co.uk

ART'S CONTENT - ELITISM - THE PUBLIC
Easel paintings by
DURAND
The Stanley Picker Gallery
MESSIAH 2000 in progress 20 July 2000
GIORDANO BRUNO BURNING
in progress, 11 August 2000
Stanley Picker Gallery 2000
www.durand-gallery.com
T his summer the Stanley Picker Gallery wel-
comes the renowned Canadian painter Andr
Durand who will use the gallery as an open
studio, completing several major works. The pic-
tures include DISSOLUTION, MESSIAH 2000, a vision
of Christ for the Millennium, GIORDANO BRUNO
BURNING a unique historical painting, and ET IN
ARCADIA EGO, Durands humorous, personal com-
ment on BritArt.
Visitors are welcome to come and see the works in
progress and to join in the informal discussions
which will take place. A lively series of seminars
and events is planned, and there will be surprises
in store. The work will be filmed for later publi-
cation on the internet via reciprocal links on the
Picker Gallery website, Durands site and others
including BBC news online and the National
Portrait Gallery.
Durand will invite his patrons and collectors as
well as friends and art critics for a subtle exchange
of ideas. He will be assisted at the Picker Gallery
by Armando Bayraktari, a painter and MA stu-
dent at Kingston University, with whom he will
receive journalists and other members of the
media to view the works in progress.
The rationale for this project derives from todays
recurring and salient questions about the role of
art and the artist in society. Is there such a thing
as progress in art? What constitutes the nature
of elitism? Does art develop when it is separated
from everyday life and becomes inaccessible to
ordinary people? Has the artists role in society
and his rapport with his surroundings and the
collective consciousness become non-existent in
the 20th Century?
Durand will seek to demonstrate that an appar-
ently elitist painter can communicate with the
public through the subject matter or content of his
pictures. The themes of Durands pictures are of
widespread debate and concern: death, regenera-
tion; Christ in 2000; the role of art in the healing
process and mans relationship with the animal
world - all subjects considered by everyone from
time to time. These subjects form the starting point
of an investigation which will examine British art
of the last three decades in the broader context of
western European art history.
 DISSOLUTION

T his is the first picture begun during Durands

residency at the Picker Gallery. The painting
has undergone shifts both subtle and profound:
what was once a verdant summer scene has
become a deep northern English winter, snow
clinging to the east window of Netley Abbey,
Hampshire, England. This important 13th century
Cistercian abbey also inspired John Constable
(below left).

DISSOLUTION
In progress July 2000

THE DISSOLUTION

Problem paintings, Victorians called them -

DISSOLUTION
September 2000
Netley Abbey ca. 1833
John Constable, 1776-1837
Collection of the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art
Cornell University, Ithaca, New York.
Stories mislaid in the snowdrifts of time.
Tales told in oil, each drawn from the past
Through a medium: a brush with subtext.
No one speaks. Framed, frozen in mime,
Colourful characters, these hunted figures,
With lost agendas, murky backgrounds.
Hatched, frilly formed, a mystery cast.
There are ambiguities. Hints. Triggers.
Clues. These people come with references.
A life foreshortened lies, unmarked, feet-first,
On a half-recollected slab. Grief surrounds.
His marbled body. Or guilty consciences?
Is the stone a relic to rival the Holy Grail,
Spotted with myrrh, chiseled, transplanted
To this abbey to slake the spiritual thirst
Of a copperheaded princess? Here, the trail
Dissolves. More Mary Magdalene than wife,
Her face is hidden. And the man who steps
Out of the ruins, never ageing, art-enchanted,
Reflects, perhaps, that he as simply a still life
In waiting - and that paint is mixed with a knife.
Elizabeth Kay 2000
after Durand's DISSOLUTION

Stanley Picker Gallery 2000

 GIORDANO BRUNO BURNING

G iordano Bruno, one of the most impor-

tant Copernican thinkers of the European
Renaissance, proposed the idea of a heroic phi-
losophy. He saw philosophy as an active and
passionate quest for truth. He left behind him a
number of esoteric and philosphical works includ-
ing The Ash Wednesday Supper.
The report from the Fraternity of St. John the
Beheaded is the only documentary account of
Brunos death to be considered authentic by the
Catholic church. It was published in 1889:
. . . But he insisted till the end always in his
damned refractoriness and twisted brain and
his mind with a thousand errors; yes, he didnt
give up his stubborness, not even when the
court ushers took him away to the Campo dei
Fiori. There his clothes were taken off, he was
bound to a stake and burned alive [e quivi
spogliato nudo e legato a un palo fu brusciato
vivo]. In all this time he was accompanied
by our fraternity, who sang constant litanies,
while the comforters tried till the last moment
to break his stubborn resistance, till he gave up
GIORDANO BRUNO BURNING a miserable and pitiable life.
Completed September 2000

This is Durand's only picture of an historical event.

Giordano Bruno's martyrdom in all its harrowing
detail is depicted in the Campo dei Fiori, Rome
of today. GIORDANO BRUNO BURNING demonstrates a
criterion of Neomodernism:
A Neomodernist treatment of political or histori-
cal subject matter is detached and philosophical,
never propaganda.
The Neomodernist Manifesto was launched by
Durand at the Stanley Picker Gallery on 27 January
2000.
Detail, GIORDANO BRUNO BURNING
With the head of St John the Baptist
and the 19th statue of Giordano Bruno in Campo dei Fiori, Rome

Stanley Picker Gallery 2000

ET IN ARCADIA EGO historical questions on their mind. This sup-
position is substantiated by another likeness.
T his group of Arcadian shepherds includes a
self-portrait and a portrait of the art histo-
rian Dr. Andrew Ciechanowiecki, as well as a
The eldest shepherd in the upper right-hand
of the composition is a portrait of Dr. Andrew
Ciechanowiecki, the Polish classical scholar
splendid nude based on the figure of Kephissos, and collector of Renaissance bronzes.
from the West Pediment of the Parthenon
We note that Hirsts icon, like all Post modern
(The British Museum, London). These figures
endeavours, mocks the autonomy of aesthetics
turn away from Damien Hirsts famous sheep
and form as well as painting generally. However,
in formaldehyde, Away from the Flock, which
the four generations of shepherds in Durands ET
Durand has placed like a tomb sculpture in an
IN ARCADIA EGO understand the truth in Hirsts
Arcadian setting.
flippant comment, If you can do the art world
Durands four Arcadian shepherds adopt a novel at 32, it means that there is something wrong
attitude to the presence of Hirsts Postmodern with the art world, not that you are a genius
sepulchre, an attitude unprecedented in any (The Big Issue). To be sure, there is something
of the other pictures Durand surely must have definitely wrong with the art world; and Hirst,
considered before he painted his own version most certainly, is not a genius.
of Et in Arcadia Ego. In every preceding pic-
Durand saw Away from the Flock once, in the
ture concerned with this subject, the shepherds
Serpentine Gallery the same day another visi-
are seen carefully examining the tomb that
tor poured ink into the formaldehyde. The
they have come upon. But in Durands ET IN
thought of a black sheep triggered his imagi-
ARCADIA EGO the shepherds refuse to scrutinize
nation - a blackened, dead, Post-modern lamb.
Hirsts lamb embalmed in formaldehyde. They
So often a victim in European art, the lamb
turn their backs to it. Had the artist not painted
suddenly became a symbol for art itself; the
himself as one of the shepherds, we might
aquarium a tomb. For Durand, Hirsts pickled
wonder what this Arcadian quartet could pos-
sheep swiftly emerged as an apt symbol of how
sibly be thinking about. With a self-portrait to
far art had gone astray.
remind us of Durands personal commitment
to the content of his picture, we can safely from A Dialectical Philosophy of Art
guess that these shepherds could have art Armando Bayraktari, Kingston University, 2000

Stanley Picker Gallery 2000

ART'S CONTENT - ELITISM - THE PUBLIC
Easel paintings by
DURAND www.durand-gallery.com

DEBATE
Discussion will focus on the issues raised by
the subject matter of Durands pictures, and on
the controversy that is currently taking place
in the British art establishment: figurative and
abstract art, modernism versus post-modern-
ism, art and society - as well as educational
issues, and the role of patrons, art institutions,
corporations and banks in todays interna-
tional art world. We will refer to the sources
of European art, starting in Ancient Greece ca.
450BC, proceeding through Medieval and Ren-
aissance art (Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael),
to Symbolism, Impressionism, 19th century art
and the present.
Opposing some post-modern thinkers and art-
ists are critics who maintain that art and cul-
ture in general has been dumbed down, particu-
larly in Britain.
George Walden, writing in the Evening
Standard (13 July 2000) identifies three points
in this debate:
. . . first, there is no conflict whatever between
popular art and more demanding culture, and
no need to choose. Second, that the major-
ity of popular culture is commercially produced
ephemera of mostly lamentable quality which
needs absolutely no help or encouragement from
government, still less nauseous ingratiation.
Third, that there is such a thing as high art,
and that some things will always remain for the
privileged few privileged not in the tired old
class-conscious meaning of the word, but in the
sense that by hard work and/or natural ability
they are able to appreciate highly refined musical
forms or classical literature that it is not given
to everyone to understand, even if we are given
every opportunity to do so.

DURAND
Photo: Miranda Twiss

STANLEY PICKER GALLERY, Kingston University, Knights Park

Kingston upon Thames KT1 2QJ Great Britain
ANDR DURAND will be painting in the Stanley Picker Gallery from July to September 2000.

Published by Charles Ryder, Curator, Stanley Picker Gallery 1999-2004 www.frari.co.uk