Learning to see in Chichester and Venice
As art historians we know perfectly well that we have learnt how to see. Not only have we been trained by our discipline how to look critically at art as practitioners, but we also know that viewers in the past have looked and understood differently. We also engage increasingly critically with our own perspectives and unconscious biases, grounded in gender, race, sexuality, class and more.
It might seem odd, therefore, to say that two recent exhibition visits have brought into focus for me the contexts in which I learnt to see. In recent weeks I’ve been lucky to see the Ben Nicholson show From the Studio at Pallant House Gallery in Chichester and Migrating Objects: Arts of Africa, Oceania and the Americas in the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice.
The Pallant House show foregrounded looking at how Nicholson used objects from his studio throughout his career. It brought together his paintings, reliefs, prints and drawings with a beautiful range of little-seen objects from his personal collection that appear in his works. From a blue striped jug to a brown glass bottle or a royal commemorative teacup. The exhibition included shelves of objects displayed in simple formal relationship to each other, encouraging visitors to view them as artworks alongside the more obvious ‘modern art’.
A similar kind of relationship is set up between paintings and objects in the rooms of Jim Ede’s home at Kettle’s Yard. Spirals of spherical stones hold your attention as much as paintings by the modernist artists that Ede championed. I’ve known and loved Kettle’s Yard for many years, and it has always felt like home, but for some reason it took the Nicholson show to make me see that this is because I grew up in houses informed by the modernist ‘adoption’ of objects for their formal pleasure. With parents, grandparents and wider family who are artists, themselves trained in the core era of modernist art, I realise I’ve never quite understood why appreciating stones alongside artworks might be unusual or groundbreaking, because it was just what home was like.
Peggy Guggenheim’s home is similarly seminal in the history of modern art to Nicholson’s studio or Ede’s cottages. As a collector she championed artists like Jackson Pollock and Max Ernst, and her gallery Art of the Century helped to establish which were the artists to watch in the 1940s. I knew much of this before revisiting the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni last month, but I did not know that Guggenheim also collected ‘non-Western’ art. The Migrating Objects show trains a long-overdue lens on these artworks in her collection, breaking down but also giving proper attention to, the art/artefact Western/non-Western boundaries that have defined how we see them.
The show highlights how artists and collectors ‘discovered’ the arts of Africa, Oceania and the Americas in the early twentieth century, responding to the formal similarities that they saw with modern and surrealist art. While this brought such artworks to the attention of the Western artworld, it also assimilated them into Western modes of viewing, removing objects from their histories of production, meaning and relationships. It also ignored the colonial structures that led these artworks to emerge onto the artworld as ex-European colonies gained their independence.
Again, I knew this broad history, particularly through the fascination of collectors like Roland Penrose with oceanic arts, but it was only seeing this show after the Nicholson, that made me think about how some of these roots are knotted into my own history of thinking and seeing artworks. The modernist approach that appreciates an earthenware jug alongside a stone, alongside an African mask, alongside an abstract painting, might be visually appealing and seem to confer equality of status. Yet, it also erases cultural specificity and suborns everything to a Western way of looking.
Both timely and beautiful shows, the Nicholson and Guggenheim were also an important reminder to me that decolonial practice starts at home, and we need constantly to remember how we learnt to look and therefore what we may, or may not, be seeing.