ANTONY DONALDSON
AT THE ORIGIN OF THE ENGLISH POP
Antony Donaldson is one of the mythical artists of English Pop. His original and schematic analysis of the forms and colors proposed by the urban environment, combines efficiency and strangeness, figuration and geometry with an iconography marked by the stroboscopic repetition of pin-up girls, racing cars, cinema facades, tributes to the history of art... His painting Take Five kept at the Tate Modern in London is the first Pop painting entered the Tate Gallery in 1963!
Historical flashback :
One of the characteristics of Pop Art in Great Britain is its close link with the cultural revolution that the Beatles and the Rolling Stones personified with their music, Mary Quant and her sublimated fashion of the mini skirt, Twiggy and her extravagant haircut, Michelangelo Antonioni with Blow-Up and all the film directors of the New Wave The famous verses of Philip Larkin in Annus Mirabilisdate precisely this arrival of a new era by proclaiming ironically: "The sexual relations began/In one thousand nine hundred and sixty-three/Between the end of the censorship of Lady Chatterley/And the first 33 rpm of the Beatles!"
At the time of Swinging London, after the precursors of the Independent Group Richard Hamilton, Edouardo Paolozzi, those of the Royal College of Art Peter Blake, Richard Smith ... it is in February 1961, during the exhibition The Young Contemporaries at the Royal Society of British Artists (RBA Gallery) that Pop Art explodes in Great Britain and really takes the form of a coherent movement. A new guard of artists composed of Antony Donaldson, Collin Self, Jann Haworth, David Hockney, Derek Boshier, Patrick Caulfield, Peter Phillips, Allen Jones, Pauline Boty, Ron Kitaj and of course Gerald Laing, embodied it brilliantly. In 1961, the president of the exhibition of The Young Contemporaries was Peter Phillips and the following year it was Antony Donaldson's turn. From these two first editions, the aesthetics of Pop Art spread in continental Europe and throughout the world.
Pin-up girls, cinema and Turkish bath:
The Laurent Strouk gallery for this exceptional Antony Donaldson exhibition offers rare series of works devoted to pin-up girls from the 1960s, historical paintings from the 1970s that present the Art Deco facades of Los Angeles movie theaters and a more recent series of paintings that immerse us in a polychrome rereading of Jean Dominique Ingres' Turkish Bath.
The 1960s works show highly rhythmic juxtapositions of pin-ups in underwear, compositions made up of sequential montages. With the handling of images of striptease Antony Donaldson expresses openly what hides advertising, desire and eroticism. His formal audacity does not exclude lyricism or romanticism and far from sinking into formalist vacuity, it allows him to paint with a superior realism, in phase with the sixties, radiographing the mutation of morals. In front of his portraits of women, we discover the painter's interest in the famous Women of Willem de Kooning. Following in his footsteps, he operates a body to body with the canvas, a true fusion with the subject. But in the face of De Kooning's terrifying Women, with their voracious and carnivorous mouths, ravaged bodies and aggressive sexual attributes, Antony Donaldson opposes a certain balance in the composition and a greater tenderness in the poses that face each other and respond to each other, even if he also has the same desire to freeze an image in motion. The elimination of the eyes, the mouth in a face, the concentration on the essential of the form, all these simplifications, allow to avoid the banality of too much expressiveness. Antony Donaldson has also worked a lot on variations and on the almost frenetic repetition of the same image by playing with asymmetry and the play of mirrors, and color is also one of his main subjects.
In Antony Donaldson's work, symmetry, repetition, reflection, doubling, all these duplicative representations exacerbated by retinal permanence, are there to translate and/or question symbolic, social or aesthetic structures. By looking at an identical image in a mirror, in a diptych, in a single canvas, similar, but not unique, everyone can question themselves. The repetition becomes as much imagination as an empty and pure form of time. As with Arman in his accumulations of everyday objects, Andy Warhol and his repetition of photo booth photographs or Hervé Télémaque and his serial use of the Banania logo, it seems that repetition allows above all a distancing of things. Moreover Antony Donaldson specifies: "I like to create a tension in the painting by repetition and especially by using symmetry placed in asymmetrical places."
In 1966, Antony Donaldson was awarded a Harkness Fellowship to travel across the Atlantic. After a two-month road trip across the North American continent in a large Chevrolet, he landed in Los Angeles, California. He knew two artist friends there: Joe Goode and Edward Ruscha. He then met Bob Graham and John McCracken. What changed in his creation in L.A. was two things: a large studio and a compressor with an airbrush and paint guns. Driving through the City of Angels, Donaldson discovered incredible old movie theaters rising like cathedrals from the ground in the middle of rows of bungalows. He then took pictures of all these Art Deco theaters that will give birth to an important series of paintings marked by the play of lines and a certain geometric abstraction. In Fly the Frendly Sky, the first painting he made in California, presented in the exhibition alongside the monumental Alex Brand Avenue, Antony Donaldson uses large spindles in isometric perspective on each side of the painting: the projections propagate like triangular beams of light, starting from the bottom and revealing the curved bodies of two women at the top. His historical paintings, related to the aesthetic concerns of his friend Edward Ruscha, propose a fusion between body and architecture, dream and reality, desire and its fulfillment.
The exhibition at the Galerie Laurent Strouk also highlights the recent interpretation of the Turkish Bath where the artist returns to the fundamental precepts of Pop Art made of detour, pastiches, parodies, disguises, demystifications, iconoclastic gestures in order to assert a desire for renewal of artistic forms. He seizes the spirit of the work he copies and inscribes himself in a continuity while freeing himself from the model by adding his personal, modern and humorous touch. This malice is readable when he replaces the beautiful woman who is having her hair done in the center of the painting by a pretty, luscious blonde with thick, musty hair! By repeatedly immersing himself in the steam room of the Turkish Bath, he lets his painter's eye wander, either to isolate the woman with the turban playing the viola, or to concentrate on the figures in the background. Antony Donaldson's recent rereading of Jean Dominique Ingres' Turkish Bath proposes a total fiction, where today's odalisques are in stilettos and bikinis. When he cites this particular source, this last masterpiece of Ingres where he takes up figures already represented in his previous paintings as La Baigneuse Valpinçon, Antony Donaldson proposes an account of all his own production. One thinks, of course, of his various approaches to the female body, from his memorable pin-up girls of the 1960s, his cut-outs of fiberglass figures, his lacquered canvases depicting Lido dancers, and his bronze sculptures whose reduced size evokes the equivocal world of dolls. This exceptional exhibition presents historical works linked as much to the eroticism of 1960s Pop Art as to a more minimal approach to painting.