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Al-Ahram Weekly 2 - 8 March 2000 Issue No. 471 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 2 - 8 March 2000 Issue No. 471
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Interview Features Focus Heritage Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters The crashing of waves
By Nigel Ryan
"The portraits included in the show tend towards the hard-edged... The light is positively fluorescent as it outlines the figures rather than softly diffusing itself through the translucent clouds."
The Sea, Hassan Soliman's latest exhibition, is -- superficially, at least -- a simple affair, yet another showing of serial paintings, this time seascapes.
Such big serial exhibitions appear to be Soliman's preferred format these days. Several years ago it was Girls on the Beach, a faintly salacious title for an exhibition that really was more swimsuit that surf. His most recent show, Still Lifes, which occupied the same space as the current exhibition, comprised 50 odd paintings of the same tabletop arrangement of pots and jugs. And now we have the sea -- an exhibition padded, a little inexplicably, with the addition of a number of portraits. Perhaps, though, that is the sea we glimpse, just visible through the window against which Soliman frames his sitters. For good measure, we have too, a couple of still lifes.
The problem, almost inevitably, given the subjects chosen, is that too many comparisons spring to mind. Still Lifes, if it recalled Morandi, as indeed it must, did so not entirely to Soliman's advantage. Given the restricted palette Soliman chose, other names too sprang to mind, and to even less advantage. The sea is yet a bigger subject. Storms, unfortunately, are seldom destined to remain in teacups.
Perhaps it is the prerogative of the older artist to enter into such dialogues with his predecessors. The young tend to be too absorbed in making their own splash, in carving out a name and a reputation for themselves to want to struggle away at 30 or 40 paintings of the same subject, conceived, one must assume, with an eventual exhibition in mind. And why should they? Why, indeed, should Soliman, who is certainly a name, and whose reputation often appears well-nigh unassailable, if it is not to invite the kind of comparisons that the paintings seem unashamedly to court?
The majority of these works, it must be said, tends to be stronger on atmosphere than topography, which is not, I would argue, a result of my own ignorance of the relevant bits of coastline. It is mood, after all, after which the painter is striving, not the making of maps. Rocks do occasionally make an appearance, over which waves crash, but they are there merely to create a bit of drama, and so one should not complain that they might as well be pieces of coal.
Water, and atmosphere: the comparisons are endless from Whistler and the Thames to Monet and his lily-pond to Turner and his whirling vortex of wind and rain. In individual paintings, Soliman appears to invite comparisons with all these, though the very mention of Whistler should sound a cautionary note in any critic's ear. In one of the most celebrated libel cases of the 19th century -- perhaps only Wilde's action against the Marquis of Queensberry had a greater impact on the eventual emergence of the modern sensibility -- Whistler was awarded a symbolic farthing in damages by a judge and jury who obviously believed John Ruskin's charge that he was flinging "a pot of paint in the face of the public". It was Ruskin, though, who came -- somewhat unfairly -- to be viewed as the aging Victorian reactionary while Whistler was eventually canonised as the ideal photo-modernist.
Over a century later, what are we to make of Hassan Soliman's own nocturnes, his moonlit seascapes, or the almost abstract compositions based on the surface of the water, all mauve and melting, honeyed light, like a very, very, late Monet? In truth, the answer seems to be that these are essentially decorative formulae -- any other impetus, beyond, perhaps, a display of dexterity, has been shipped away by the passage of time.
What we are left with are several unusually pretty paintings, others less pretty that play -- knowingly, it would seem -- with the work of other artists from Alfred Wallis's St Ives naïveté, to big Turneresque pantheism, to Ruskin's very own "pathetic fallacy".
The portraits included in the show tend towards the hard-edged, certainly compared to the seascapes. The light is positively fluorescent as it outlines the figures rather than softly diffusing itself through the translucent clouds. And the only comparison here that comes to mind is with Tanara de Lempicke. Less awesome than the others, perhaps, but a shift of temperament, and one who lent her name to at least some aspects of an age.
For details of the exhibition, see Listings.
