French Kissing At Tate Britain: Degas/Lautrec Lick Sickert

[molly bloom]

Tate Britain has a new exhibition about the cross fertilization between the French and British art scenes in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries.

There were many similarities- explosive urban growth, new techniques and adjuncts to painting (photography), new forms of mass entertainment (the early cinema) and a crossover between high and low art, with painters such as Sickert and Toulouse Lautrec being attracted by the atmosphere of the music hall and cheap cafes.

Degas painted women not as archetypes or stereotypes, but as real people, performing real tasks in real settings- his women sweat, and get dirty, and frequently are captured in natural, clumsy poses, looking awkward and ungainly in situations ranging from ballet warm-ups to brushing out their hair or ironing.

All three artists also looked with an unsparing eye at the seamy, bohemian world, the 'demi monde', and Lautrec and Degas also used unsettling compositions- with parts of bodies outside the pictorial frame, or by adopting framing devices from Japanese art.

http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/exhibitions/degas/

L'absinthe makes the heart grow fonder:

[SpencerH]

You lucky lucky bastard.

[molly bloom]

Thanks, SpencerH.

The good thing about the exhibition is that it widens the net beyond just the three big names, to include painters that might be otherwise overlooked.

So along with Sickert you also find other members of the Camden Town Group, and Scottish artists and members of the art world who frequented high and low society- like Singer Sargent.

High-Steppers
1938

‘High-Steppers’ is probably Sickert's last painting to show a theatre scene, one of his favourite subjects. It is his third painting of the Plaza Tiller Girls, a dance troupe who performed at the Plaza cinema in Piccadilly, entertaining the audience before the start of the film. Although Sickert was a frequent visitor to the theatre, he never made any drawings or paintings there; instead, he preferred to work from press photographs. All three paintings of the Plaza Tiller Girls were based on a photograph which appeared in The Evening News in 1927.

Accession no.GMA 2099
Medium Oil on canvas
Size132.00 x 122.50 cm
Subjects Performing arts
Credit Purchased 1979

http://www.nationalgalleries.org/collections/artist_search.php?objectId=860

Bring on the dancing girls!