Women's Views on News |
- Exhibition: major first for Winifred Knights
- Witness: nuclear bomb on Hiroshima
- Mali: music versus violence
| Exhibition: major first for Winifred Knights Posted: 24 May 2016 02:49 PM PDT
Dulwich Picture Gallery is to present the first major retrospective of work by Winifred Knights, 1899-1947, an award-winning Slade School artist and the first British woman to win the Prix de Rome. The exhibition, which runs from 8 June-18 September, will establish Knights as one of the most original women artists of the first half of the 20th century. It brings together her most ambitious works and preparatory studies for the first time since they were created, including the apocalyptic The Deluge, 1920, which attracted critical acclaim as 'the work of a genius'. Knights' admiration for the Italian Quattrocento was the inspiration for a highly distinctive and painstakingly executed body of work. The smooth surface, contemplative mood and harmoniously restricted palette of her paintings consciously recall early Renaissance frescoes, adapted to everyday subjects from her own time. And Knights' works are deeply autobiographical: presenting herself as the central protagonist and selecting models from her inner circle, she consistently re-wrote and re-interpreted female figures of fairy-tale and legend, Biblical narrative and Pagan mythology to create documents of her own lived experience. Arranged chronologically, the Winifred Knights exhibition will highlight the key periods in the artist's career, beginning with the work she produced at the Slade School before charting her stylistic developments at the British School at Rome. The exhibition will also explore significant themes that run throughout Knights' oeuvre including women's independence, modernity and her experiences of wartime England. Knights attended London’s Slade School of Fine Art from 1915-16 and 1918-20. Under the rigorous tuition of Henry Tonks and Philip Wilson Steer, she learnt the importance of meticulous compositional discipline which included the use of scale drawings, full-size sketches and life studies, a large selection of which will be exhibited to highlight her early development as an artist and offer a fascinating account of art education at the Slade during this time. Early works reflect Knights' growing awareness of women's rights, due in part to her close relationship with her aunt Millicent Murby who is sensitively portrayed in the pencil drawing Portrait of Millicent Murby, 1917. A prominent campaigner for women's emancipation and the right for married women to work, Murby's writings had a profound influence on Knights' early compositional work. Knights' seminal work, The Potato Harvest, 1918, is the first of her compositions to portray the harmonious interaction of male and female workers. Leaving the Munitions Works, 1919, records female munitions workers where, albeit momentarily, progress in the economic emancipation of women was evident. A Scene in a Village Street, with Mill-hands Conversing, 1919, shows a female trade unionist arguing for better conditions for women's labour at Roydon Mill, Essex. In 1920 Knights became the first woman to win the Prix de Rome scholarship in Decorative Painting awarded by the British School at Rome with one of the most enduring images in the history of the competition, The Deluge, 1920. Chosen on the insistence of John Singer Sargent, Knights' painting was seen to possess 'a rare command of technique in hue, figure and composition, and a meticulous care in detail'. This epic work will be displayed alongside the numerous studies Knights made in preparation including Compositional Study for the Deluge, 1920, which shows the initial ideas for the painting. The final composition brings together 21 figures who clamber towards and up a mountain, soon to be submerged by the flood. While Knights avoided making any overt reference to the war, this painting is imbued with its presence. The disposition of the fleeing figures is likely to have drawn upon her first-hand experience of the zeppelin raids over Streatham and the sense of panic in the painting may have reflected this traumatic experience. The picture shows the influence of the war paintings of a previous generation of Slade students including Paul Nash, Stanley Spencer and C. R. W. Nevinson. The impact of the five years Knights spent in Italy was the strongest unifying force in her work, fuelling her imagination in works such as Italian Landscape, 1921 and View to the East from the British School at Rome, 1921. She saw Italy as a living landscape that revitalised her creative spirit and as a result she produced some of the most evocative pictures to come out of the British School at Rome: The Marriage at Cana, 1923, Edge of Abruzzi; boat with three people on a lake, 1924-30, and The Santissima Trinita, 1924-30, all of which bridged Renaissance techniques with modernism to create the highly individual language that was her own. In The Marriage at Cana, Knights appears several times as one of the wedding guests, as does her future husband, Thomas Monnington. Although she had previously outshone her male contemporaries at the Slade and the British School at Rome, when Knights returned to England in 1926 she struggled with the conventional chauvinism that then dominated the art world. In 1928 she was awarded a prestigious commission to design an altarpiece for the St. Martin's chapel in Canterbury Cathedral, on which she worked for five years. The finished piece, Scenes from the Life of Saint Martin of Tours, 1928-33, is profoundly autobiographical, expressing Knights’ anguish upon giving birth to a stillborn son in January 1928. Among the onlookers are Knights' mother Mabel and Knights, with Monnington standing alongside. The fixed and melancholic gaze of the three figures records their shared sense of loss. When World War II broke out, Knights became distraught and her only concern was for the safety of her son. This brought her already intermittent work to a standstill. She only began working again in 1946, a few months before she died of a brain tumour at the age of 48. Sacha Llewellyn, curator of the Dulwich Picture Gallery’s exhibition, said: "Although never part of the modernist avant-garde, Knights engaged with modern-life subjects, breathing new life into figurative and narrative painting to produce an art that was inventive and technically outstanding. "She explored form and colour to create a mood of calmness and reflection that impacts directly on our senses. "Like so many women artists, heralded and appreciated in their own day, she has disappeared into near oblivion. "This exhibition, in bringing together a lifetime of work, will create an irrefutable visual argument that she was one of the most talented and striking artists of her generation."  |
| Witness: nuclear bomb on Hiroshima Posted: 24 May 2016 02:27 PM PDT
We were honoured to receive a visit in Parliament recently from a survivor of one of the most horrific events of the 20th century, the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima. Setsuko Thurlow, aged 84, generously gave us her time, to recount the events of that fateful day on the 6th of August, 1945. Hers is a truly harrowing story. Setsuko was thirteen when the US dropped a nuclear bomb on Hiroshima in Japan. On that day, she had been told to report to the local defence offices with her classmates where they would be taught how to decode military messages. She arrived early. Her immediate impression after the bomb dropped was of confusion. All of a sudden the building collapsed around her and the world was twilight where previously it had been light. Someone shouted to her to get out but she could not stand up. Setsuko crawled outside the building and could not believe what she saw. Where previously there had been well-known landmarks and a large city, there was simply nothing. The building behind her burst into flames and she carried on crawling away from it. There were thousands of dead bodies, blackened and burnt, and a sea of people desperate for water. There were no utensils for her to gather water for assistance and Setsuko told of how she tore her shirt to wet it and press to their mouths as often this was their dying wish. She saw one man literally burst open from the stomach with his intestines pouring out, others had eyeballs hanging out of their sockets and many were literally holding their own bodies together. She was told to make her way to higher ground where survivors were gathering and there, she spent the rest of the day administering to the dying. She noted how, in the event of an attack such as this, there can be no organised response from the various services as they too are hit. She had been fortunate that the defence offices were on the outskirts – the city centre, where she lived, had been completely destroyed. Remarkably, Setsuko's parents had survived. Her father had taken the day off work to go fishing and saw the mushroom cloud rising from the city. Her sister also initially survived, but, as with thousands of others, both she and her child succumbed to radiation sickness in the weeks that followed. They soon learned to identify the tell-tale signs of a purple spot as an indication of impending death on those who otherwise looked relatively healthy. Setsuko remains very angry about what she views as the systematic and orchestrated removal of the horror of Hiroshima and the attempts to sanitise what really happened. She believes this has opened the door to the nuclear industry we have today. She spoke of the people who were maimed by burning and how they were shunned by society, something which further increased their mental anguish and pain. She saw many babies born with deformities and they too were often shunned. Her passion and life’s work became clear when she said, with force, “I have a moral duty to relay to the world what I saw.” All of us felt humbled to be in the presence of someone who was prepared to relive the loss of their world and everything in it over and over again to tell her story and convey her message. I was honoured to chair this meeting when Caroline Lucas was unable to attend as she was speaking in the chamber. I gave the vote of thanks, although it was difficult to keep my emotions in check. As I looked around the room during the event, I could see that Setsuko's story had had a profound effect on everyone in attendance. I chatted with Setsuko at the end to explain how strongly Scotland feels about the renewal of Trident. It’s fair to say this experience was one of the most moving I have had since becoming elected. How Setsuko has overcome such adversity and shown such bravery is truly humbling and the experience of listening to her story is one that will stay with me for a very long time. You can hear more from Setsuko by following this link.  |
| Posted: 09 May 2016 11:13 AM PDT
No radio, no gigs, no music at weddings, no ringtones, no internet – nothing. Music is the beating heart of Malian culture – and when you hear the music of Mali you understand why it is renowned as the birthplace of the blues. The musical world owes much to Mali. But when Islamic extremists took control of northern Mali in 2012, they enforced one of the harshest interpretations of sharia law in history and, crucially for Mali, they banned all forms of music. Radio stations were destroyed, instruments burned and Mali's musicians faced torture, even death, and so overnight, Mali's revered musicians were forced into hiding or exile – where most remain even now. But rather than lay down their instruments, the musicians are fighting back, standing up for their cultural heritage and identity. And they have used music as their weapon against the ongoing violence that has left Mali ravaged. Fadimata "Disco" Walet Oumar is a renowned singer, a UN-recognised humanitarian and an outspoken activist. She organises gigs from her refugee camp base in Burkina Faso, and is a constant support for musicians in exile, who look to her to eventually lead them home. Kharia Arby is known as the "Nightingale of the North" and speaks all seven languages of the country. Her home was raided by jihadists and her materials, records and instruments destroyed, yet she has remained firm in her criticism of their actions despite threats to her life and she campaigns tirelessly for elections. And she was determined to organise the first public concert in Timbuktu since the conflict – to prove that musicians will not be silenced. But the rise of ISIS gave Mali's extremists new life, and realising Khaira's dream was risky for everyone. 'They Will Have To Kill Us First' – a feature-length documentary about Mali and how its musicians struggle to keep their culture alive – is American-born, UK-based filmmaker Johanna Schwartz's first feature-length film as a director. It begins with musicians on the run, reveals rare footage of the jihadists, captures life at refugee camps, follows perilous journeys home to battle scarred cities, and witnesses the two female characters perform at the first public concert in Timbuktu since the music ban. They Will Have To Kill Us First draws audiences into the human side of Mali's conflict, watches events as they unfold and witnesses the impact on Mali's musical community. The situation in Mali forms part of an alarming trend: across the globe, extremists are attacking culture, art and freedom with increasing frequency and violence, using religion to justify rampant destruction and murder. Many of the songs featured in the film were specially commissioned by Johanna Schwartz from some of Mali's most renowned artists as well as exciting newcomers, and the lyrics of the songs act as a kind of 'narration', adding layers of understanding for audiences – both factual and emotional. Johanna Schwartz is an award-winning filmmaker known for creating thought-provoking documentaries and who has a highly praised natural filming style. She has produced and directed films for the BBC, Channel 4, Channel 5, Discovery, National Geographic, The History Channel, PBS, CNBC, CNN and MTV, and films she has worked on have won awards including TV Story of the Year at the Foreign Press Association Media Awards and a Prix Italia nomination. As a director she has won Gold at the New York Film and Television Festival as well as receiving over 100 "picks of the day" in the British press. To read an interview with Joanna Schwartz, click here. “They Will Have to Kill Us First: Malian Music in Exile” had its UK premiere at the 2015 BFI London Film Festival. To find when and where it will be showing near you, click here.  |
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