Art and Intimacy: How the Arts Began (McLellan Book)

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Robles TF, Slatcher RB, Trombello JM, McGinn MM. Marital quality and health: a meta-analytic review. Psychol Bull. 2014;140(1):140-187. doi:10.1037/a0031859

GAZIRA BABELI, CLARA BOJ, MARTIN JOHN CALLANAN, GRÉGORY CHATONSKY, DIEGO DÍAZ, RAFAEL LOZANO-HEMMER, LAURENT MIGNONNEAU, PAUL SERMON, CHRISTA SOMMERER, CARLO ZANNI. It’s this sensuality and embodiment that Long is eager to explore in Trust Me. “I think it’s no surprise that we’re craving intimacy after being separated from each other for so long,” she said. “There seems to be a particular urgency – maybe it’s curatorial urgency, or audience-driven urgency, as much as it is urgency that the artist themselves are expressing. It’s what we’ve all just lived through and are continuing to live through, finding each other and making meaning in this confusing world we’re inhabiting. It’s a different world, and I think people are entering museums in a slightly different way and looking for something slightly different.” The first exhibition to fully survey the work of Winifred Nicholson was staged by the Tate Gallery in 1987. Maybe, then, it was a sort of preparation, for a greater kind of happiness. And in that happiness, a greater heartache. I didn’t know then how it could feel – how it would feel when I met you.”

Embedded in Pham’s chronicle is a wider narrative of what it is to see and be seen, to build an identity while rejecting the ones endlessly imposed from the outside, including dealing as an Asian American woman with acquiring the status of fetish object in the minds of many of the men she meets, something invisible in much of the white, feminist theory she reads in college. And from this mesh of memories, visual associations and events another thread emerges, an account of an all-consuming, failed relationship and all the revelations and confusions that came with it. I found Pham’s book’s thoughtful, sometimes intense, often unflinching, on rare occasions perhaps a little predictably precious. But I really liked her voice, how she structured her material, and, although I preferred the more concrete aspects of her discussion - the section spinning off from Nan Goldin was particularly powerful - there was so much that resonated here that I was completely absorbed throughout. According to Long, the choice to make the show entirely of photographs added dimensions of her exploration of trust and intimacy. “There’s something very immediate about photography. Offers something very particular when thinking through intimacy. We all have a relationship with photography. There’s something very familiar and very easy about engaging with images of this kind, even when the content of these images may not be easy at all.”

Broude, Norma, and Mary D. Garrard, eds., Feminism and Art History: Questioning the Litany, (New York: Harper & Row, 1982)Likewise, Winifred and Ben Nicholson’s painterly experiments with flatness and the depiction of family life bleed into Ben Nicholson’s departure for a relationship with Barbara Hepworth, here emphasising the shifts in style and formthat their coming together precipitated for both parties. This merges into the section on Jean Arp and Sophie Taeuber-Arp, friends of Nicholson and Hepworth who shared their experimental approach to abstraction – a coupling of couples shown visually in a white relief by Nicholson, Hepworth’s sculpture Tides 1 (1946) and Jean Arp’s painting Dancer (1923). But the traffic has not been entirely one way. In the 1960s, artists Zahoor ul Akhlaq and Gulam Mohammed Sheikh studied at the Royal College of Art in London and, independently, found themselves walking through the miniatures collection of the V&A on their way to classes. “Of course, they were already familiar with miniature paintings,” says Nasar, “but the intensity of these everyday encounters, and the opportunity to engage with scholars, saw them look anew at the work and expand their visions. They returned home to arguably the most important art schools in Pakistan and India respectively, and their influence over artists and institutions is still being felt today.” Waller, Susan, Women Artists in the Modern Era: A Documentary History (London & Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 2002) Clarke, Meaghan and Francesco Ventrella, ‘Women’s Expertise and the Culture of Connoisseurship’, Visual Resources, 33:1-2, 1-10. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01973762.2017.1308623 [accessed 23/09/22] The Kiss shows a loving couple mid-embrace. As they kneel in an otherworldly garden, the man leans in to kiss his partner, delicately cradling her face and running his hand through her flower-embellished hair. With her eyes peacefully closed, the woman wraps her arms around him, accepting and anticipating her lover's kiss.

I find sex to be pretty absurd, and I wanted to show that,” Krantz told Short of the Week, which premiered “Squeegee” in late May. “I’ve also been in relationships with people where we both know there is no practical way to really be together. But when you’re having one of these ‘flings,’ I have found that it can actually be easier to express how wild you are about a person… because you both know that you can never end up together. So that’s the glass between these two characters.” “Ambrosia” Like a song that feels written just for you, Larissa Pham's debut work of nonfiction captures the imagination and refuses to let go. Salomon, Nanette, ‘The Art Historical Canon: Sins of Omission’, in (En) Gendering Knowledge: Feminists in Academe, ed. by Joan Hartman and Ellen Messer-Davidow (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991), 222–36

Toulouse-Lautrec also explored brothel life in his Elles portfolio, a collection of lithographs. Though celebrated today, these pieces were not well-received during the artist's lifetime, as the public was not interested in “mundane intimacy.” The Museum of Modern Art explains: “ Elles proved to be a commercial failure for its publisher—Gustave Pellet, who specialized in erotica—because it delivered not an exotic fantasy, but rather an intimate portrayal of women Lautrec knew firsthand and the milieu in which they lived and worked.” Lakoff, Robin Tolmach, Language and Woman’s Place: Text and Commentaries, Mary Bucholtz ed., (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004)