Creative Design Concepts

By KAREN WILKIN

London

Art, even the most original, tends to be about other art—except for the work of “outsider” artists, although some of them turn out to be less innocent than presumed. It’s hardly news that adventurous early 20th-century innovators looked to Pablo Picasso for direction and confirmation. (Picasso, of course, looked to Paul Cézanne.) American museum-goers are well aware of the importance of the Spanish master to artists on this side of the Atlantic, thanks to shows such as the Whitney’s 2006-07 “Picasso and American Art,” which traced his impact on modernists from Max Weber and Stuart Davis to Jackson Pollock and Jasper Johns. More recently, surveys of David Smith and Arshile Gorky have revealed how firmly their distinctive, individual languages were rooted in Picasso’s example. And more.

But if Picasso’s significance to American modernism is well documented, his influence on English-speaking painters and sculptors elsewhere has been a less familiar story—that is, until “Picasso & Modern British Art,” at Tate Britain. Surprisingly, the exhibition, which, the wall texts announce, was designed to examine “Picasso’s evolving critical reputation” in the U.K., as well as “British artists’ responses to his work,” is the first to explore “Pablo Picasso’s lifelong connections with Britain.” (“Britain’s connections with Picasso” might be more accurate, since, despite his well-known friendships with British critics such as Douglas Cooper and John Richardson, the artist was in London only in 1919, designing sets and costumes for Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes.)

The installation, arranged chronologically, presents works by Picasso that were exhibited, collected or reproduced in Britain (or were seen abroad by British artists), alternating with works by seven of those artists, chosen as exemplars of response over seven decades: Duncan Grant, Wyndham Lewis, Ben Nicholson, Henry Moore, Francis Bacon, Graham Sutherland and David Hockney. Some Picassos on view were those actually exhibited in influential shows or seen in collections; others represent types of works. Some connections are conjectural, based on purely visual evidence. Moore almost certainly never saw the Neo-Classical goddess by Picasso that is paired with one of the British sculptor’s abstracted reclining figures, yet there are startling similarities between them, suggesting awareness even without a direct encounter. Other relationships are fully documented. Grant knew Picasso and, introduced by Gertrude Stein, even saw “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” in the artist’s studio. Nicholson described the impact of the green planes in a Picasso seen in Paris.

Cumulatively, the exhibition offers a capsule history of the British taste for modernism—or, at least, for a particular aspect of modernism—beginning with the controversial exhibitions organized by the critic Roger Fry in 1910 and 1912, for the Grafton Galleries, London, which introduced Picasso and other radical modern painters to a resistant British public. Picasso’s 1912 show of Rose and Blue period drawings—his first solo in London—is evoked, as is his commercially disastrous 1921 survey at Leicester Galleries, which included Blue and Rose period works, Cubist paintings, and Neo-Classical images, some borrowed from early British supporters, such as Fry and the painter and theorist Clive Bell, a fellow member of the progressive Bloomsbury set. The 1921 exhibition was so poorly received that a full decade passed before another gallery—not a museum—presented “Thirty Years of Pablo Picasso,” a gathering of important canvases accompanied by a catalog with an essay by Maud Dale, the critic wife of the American collector and later benefactor of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, Chester Dale.

Tate/Succession Picasso/DACS 2011

‘The Three Dancers’ (1925), by Pablo Picasso.

In the 1930s, only a handful of daring British collectors paid attention to Picasso. Their importance to British modernism is emphasized by a gallery devoted to some of these bold patrons’ most significant acquisitions, such as the stellar works once owned by Roland Penrose, a painter, poet and writer about art. Penrose’s selections include a well-known collaged “Head” (1913), a triangle brought to life by a curved line and some pasted diagonals, and the celebrated sculpture “Still Life” (1914)—the shelf with the projecting wooden knife, fictive bread and sausage, and real ball fringe. A brave few acquired Cubist works; others chose large, seductive paintings of the pneumatic Marie-Thérèse Walter. (Generally, American Picasso collectors, such as the Steins, bought earlier and more adventurously, perhaps because, as citizens of a much younger country, they felt less constrained by tradition.)

Watching British artists try to come to terms with the irrepressible, protean Picasso is fascinating. While the show includes some impressive works—and some terrifying ones, such as Lewis’s grim, red-faced figures, charitably interpreted as a deliberate challenge to Picasso’s Neo-Classicism—British painters can seem polite in comparison to the brash Spaniard. Hung near a bright, aggressively patterned 1924 Picasso still life with a guitar, Nicholson’s elegant explorations of similar motifs read as subdued and tasteful.

In the 1940s and ’50s, British artists struggling with painful memories of World War II and the deprivations of the postwar years found clues to an expressive formal language in Picasso’s “Guernica,” his weeping women, and his bony, Surrealist-inflected bathers—all exhibited in Britain. Witness Sutherland’s and Bacon’s gnarled, ambiguous figures, with their wormy appendages or threatening spikes. A more playful response, from a member of the Swinging London generation, is signaled by Hockney’s tongue-in-cheek “homage” paintings and drawings, allusive stage designs, and “Cubist” photo collages.

The exhibition ends with Picasso’s “The Three Dancers” (1925), which Penrose helped the Tate to buy from the artist in 1965. Picasso, we are told, thought the work one of his best. Allowing it to go to London was “emblematic of the artist’s affection for Britain.” Alas, we are not shown evidence of the effect of this daring, ambiguous trio of prancing figures on postwar painters in the U.K. Can we hope for a second installment of “Picasso & Modern British Art”?

Ms. Wilkin writes about art for the Journal.

A version of this article appeared April 18, 2012, on page D5 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: The English Channel Picasso.

By WILL FRIEDWALD

In April 2010, a cloud of black volcanic ash gathered over Europe, blocking all air travel between the U.S. and Britain. One prisoner of the atmosphere was Paul McCartney, who was forced to spend several extra nights in Manhattan. The ex-Beatle was staying at the Carlyle Hotel and, having unanticipated time on his hands, found himself in Bemelmans Bar, the Carlyle’s jazz lounge. There he came across the Thailand-born pianist-singer Loston Harris and his trio, with guitarist Ron Affif and bassist Chris Berger. According to Mr. Affif, Mr. McCartney not only spent several nights enjoying the trio’s music, but sat in with the group on “The Very Thought of You.” Upon hearing himself singing this classic (and, coincidentally, British) song, he became determined to go ahead with an idea that had been on his mind for some years: to do a whole album of the Great American Songbook.

Now, almost two years later, Mr. McCartney has released his newest studio album, “Kisses on the Bottom”—his first to consist almost entirely of interpretations of existing songs. The ironies of Mr. McCartney recording an album of traditional, prerock numbers are numerous: If there was any one band that put the older generation of songwriters out of business, it was the Beatles. It was their unprecedented success as both performers and composers that made it a given for pop stars to write their own material. From the mid-1960s on, old-school singers who didn’t write and full-time composers who didn’t perform were forced, in the words of singer-songwriter Jimmy Webb, “to go kicking and screaming into that good night.”

Mr. McCartney has said that what held him back from doing a standards project up to now was that so many rock stars (most successfully, Rod Stewart) have done such albums in recent years. Even Bob Dylan, the last person in the world you’d think would travel that road, did an album of traditional pop Christmas songs in 2009. What distinguishes Mr. McCartney’s effort from those of his fellow ’60s and ’70s rockers is that most of the others seem to have started with Frank Sinatra as a point of departure. Mr. McCartney, conversely, has placed his effort solidly in the pantheon of great singing musicians, starting with Fats Waller (one of his signature songs, “I’m Gonna Sit Right Down and Right Myself a Letter,” yielded the album’s title, “Kisses on the Bottom”) and Charles Brown (whose early R&B crooning style Mr. McCartney honors on “Get Yourself Another Fool”).

But by far the overwhelming influence on “Kisses” is Nat King Cole. Mr. McCartney taped the album at Capitol Studios in Los Angeles, and has said repeatedly that he felt intimidated at the idea of working where Cole once played and sang. There are more songs from the Cole songbook than any other (and none associated with Sinatra), and all the principal players on the album, including pianist-arranger Diana Krall and guitar soloist John Pizzarelli (as well as Mr. Harris) are overt Cole disciples. The album divides into three general formats: The King Cole Trio (on “It’s Only a Paper Moon,” violinist Andy Stein pays tribute to Stuff Smith’s contribution on Cole’s classic “After Midnight” album); Nat King Cole with strings (Johnny Mandel and Alan Broadbent, who wrote the sumptuously beautiful large-format orchestrations, have both worked with Natalie Cole on her tributes to her father); and a hybrid of the two, where you feel the jazzy presence of piano (Ms. Krall) and guitar (Mr. Pizzarelli) on top of a string backdrop, which is also a format that Cole used extensively in the middle of his short career.

Mr. McCartney has also said that on most of the sessions he felt like he was “on holiday,” in that singing the old standards is not what he does for a living. The idea of being on vacation, as we Yanks would say, seems to have liberated him from having to take anything too seriously, which for an album evoking Waller and Cole (especially in the latter’s earlier years) is a very good thing. Mr. McCartney sings many of the faster numbers, like the Waller classic “My Very Good Friend the Milkman,” in an entirely different voice, presumably evoking African-American jazz singers of the ’40s. It’s a voice that I would have never recognized as Mr. McCartney’s; you could say that this is his “Holiday” voice, as in Billie Holiday.

What’s especially telling is that his two new songs, “My Valentine” and “Only Our Hearts,” are among his finest. Although the latter has an old-fashioned verse that references the standard “Body and Soul,” on the whole they don’t (unlike “When I’m 64″ and “Honey Pie”) specifically evoke the world of prerock standards. He doesn’t use the Holiday voice here, sounding instead like Paul McCartney of Beatles and Wings fame. These two originals boast stunning string charts by Messrs. Broadbent and Mandel and some of the composer’s most impassioned singing.

From bottom to top, “Kisses on the Bottom” is a much more classy and heartfelt effort than all the other rockers-go-standards projects (a genre partially launched, coincidentally, by fellow Beatle Ringo Starr’s 1970 “Sentimental Journey”); it will probably be the only one that, in future years, I’ll listen to anywhere near as often as the classic recordings of Nat King Cole, Tony Bennett or Frank Sinatra.

Mr. Friedwald writes about jazz for the Journal.

A version of this article appeared February 15, 2012, on page D5 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: McCartney’s ‘Holiday’ Voice.

By JIM FUSILLI

Across the 15 tracks of her latest album, “Soul Is Heavy” (Decon), Nneka Egbuna demonstrates she’s at ease with reggae, rock, soul and pop in almost equal measure. Her reedy voice is by turns sweet, vulnerable, brazen and triumphant, and her conviction palpable. She’s showcasing her music during a brief U.S. tour this month.

Here’s hoping this visit goes better than her 2010 trip for the annual South by Southwest Festival in Austin, Texas. Back then she was bitten by a mosquito just before departing her home in Lagos, Nigeria; by the time she landed, an infection had set in. Following minor surgery at a Texas hospital, she performed several shows, limping and grimacing in anguish; after one performance, she was seen sprawled on the floor backstage. Despite the obstacles, she impressed with her stage presence as she and her band unfurled songs from her album “Concrete Jungle,” her first to be marketed in the U.S. After recovering, she joined the Lilith Fair tour later that year.

Born in Warri in the oil-rich Niger Delta to a Nigerian father and German mother, as a teen Ms. Egbuna, who performs as Nneka, relocated to study anthropology at the University of Hamburg.

“I didn’t have an opportunity to listen to popular music as a child,” the 31 year old said by phone from Ghana, where she was performing. “I didn’t have a Walkman or CDs. There was no money for that.” Later, she joined a church choir and also found the music of fellow Nigerians King Sunny Adé and Fela Kuti, as well as Western pop and R&B—”a mix of everything coming from the outside,” she said, adding, “The emotion is the link between every type of music. That was my inspiration.”

As her musical skills developed in Germany, she began to perform with DJ Farhot, an Afghanistan-born producer-composer who recorded Ms. Egbuna’s first album in his basement. She also held several jobs—a janitor at a movie house and secretary at a driving school among them. “That was how I financed my studies.” After performing for more than 2,000 people, she would bike home, sleep for a couple of hours and go off to work. “Nobody knew the girl on the stage was the same one who was cleaning toilets at the cinema.

“But, you see, this is what I tell people who are passionate about music: Look, this is life. You should work because that is the right thing. You should contribute to society and not remove yourself.”

“Soul Is Heavy” was culled from some 50 songs Ms. Egbuna and her collaborators wrote since “Concrete Jungle.” Once again she works with DJ Farhot, who contributed to eight compositions, including the opener “Lucifer (No Doubt)” in which she speaks from the point of view of one who believes more in the power of money than the power of the soul. “Oh no doubt, I am loving you more than I love myself,” she sings over percolating reggae rhythms.

Love songs abound: “Shining Star” is pure soul-pop, while “V.I.P.,” which in her lexicon stands for “Vagabond in Power,” springs from a flamenco rumba guitar. “Valley” is a lovely soul ballad that leaps to a reggae lilt. But the politically minded “God Knows Why”—written with Black Thought, the singer from the Roots—uses a sample from, all of things, the 1969 film “Paint Your Wagon” as a springboard to a harsh yet swinging slice of hip-hop.

She infuses several other songs with her political perspectives. In the title track, Ms. Egbuna invokes the memory of Nigerian activists Isaac Boro and Ken Saro-Wiwa, as well as Jubo Jubogha—who founded Opobo, now a state in southern Nigeria—to address her homeland’s social and economic woes. Using a colloquialism for Nigeria, she sings, “Naija, for too long we have surrendered to the ignorance of our self defense / In you we have failed / America, how far must we walk in calamity, in suppression / How long will it take for you to love Naija.”

Hardly the stuff of mainstream pop. Thus, though she’s been compared to Erykah Badu and Lauryn Hill, right now the political specificity of Ms. Egbuna’s lyrical themes, as much as the variety of her music, is an obstacle to reaching mass audiences in the U.S.

But she’s unlikely to tailor her organic approach. Provocation isn’t just a gimmick to position herself and her music in the West. “Every track begins with my life,” she said. “My personal life, my surroundings, they trigger me to write. That comes kind of naturally.”

Mr. Fusilli is the Journal’s rock and pop music critic. Email him at jfusilli@wsj.com or follow him on Twitter: @wsjrock.

A version of this article appeared March 7, 2012, on page D7 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Nigerian Provocateur.

By PETER PLAGENS

New York

Artists can be classic or romantic, fussbudgets or spewers, cultural radicals or cultural conservatives, and so on. One division that’s always struck me is the one between those for whom art is a disciplining force (say, the photographer Cindy Sherman, or the conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth), and those such as the sculptor John Chamberlain (1927-2011), whose art seems to flow naturally from their hands. They make art the way a hawk flies.

In the summer of 1958, Chamberlain rented the painter Larry Rivers’s house in Southampton, on Long Island. He discovered a 1929 Ford delivery van sitting in the back yard, and yanked the fenders from it. Then Chamberlain drove over them with his car. He didn’t do it to be radical, to shock anybody, to be clever, or to indulge in that old modernist trope, expanding the boundaries of art. Chamberlain did it to get the shapes he wanted, which he then welded together to create the industrially jazzy sculpture “Shortstop” (1958). It’s but one of nearly 100 works—mostly Chamberlain’s exhilarating sculpture, but also some adroitly energetic works on paper—in “John Chamberlain: Choices,” an exemplary retrospective exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum.

Chamberlain, the son of an Indiana tavern owner, dropped out of high school and undertook—in the middle of World War II’s gas rationing—a road trip, with the idea of getting some sort of career in Hollywood. (Until he started selling enough art to support himself, he would earn a living as a hairdresser.) Busted in Blythe, Calif., for neglecting to pay a restaurant tab, Chamberlain enlisted—though underage—in the Navy, and served for a couple of years, in the Pacific, on the aircraft carrier USS Tulagi. In the mid-1950s, he made his way to that touchstone for so many of the best American modern artists, Black Mountain College in North Carolina. There, he met and was profoundly influenced by Robert Creeley and Charles Olson, the poets who helped run the place. The rest, as one might say, is sculptural history. A half-century on, Chamberlain’s early 1960s sculpture looks as fresh—if not fresher—than anything that opened in a Manhattan gallery last Thursday night.

At first—with such works as “Essex” (1960), a 9-foot-wide wall piece in which Chamberlain uses his almost-trademark found color of crumpled auto-body parts—he was suspected of operating within the boundaries of Pop Art, of having more in common with Andy Warhol’s silk-screened car crashes than with Willem de Kooning’s Abstract Expressionist paintings. Not true. Chamberlain is practically sui generis—though the idea of his best work (where steel is as malleable as paint) being AbEx in 3-D is a little closer to the truth. While “Three-Cornered Desire” (1979) obeys a couple of art-world maxims—make it big, and make it red—Chamberlain gives you more variety in his found rouges than most painters could stir up in a week of trying. Wonderfully contrapuntal bits of green and aqua punctuate the back side. The guy really knew his color. He also knew scale—his miniatures seem monumental—and could be really funny in where and how he placed hood louvers among his steely folds. Chamberlain’s work is genuine American rock ‘n’ roll sculpture; it looks the way a good garage band sounds.

John Chamberlain / ARS/David Heald/Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation

His works look the way a good garage band sounds.

Only certain full and robust artists can make some mediocre work and still be great. Chamberlain produced his share of middling art—which, on anybody else’s aesthetic scale, is still pretty good. After his breakthrough car-metal pieces and ultranonchalant works in cinched foam rubber, Chamberlain switched in the later 1960s to plain galvanized steel, leaving you (or at least me) with a feeling that something vital had been taken away. The exhibition contains a couple of 1970 works in clear polyester resin that are exotic in a not-good way, and the crinkled, shiny-silver aluminum finale in the rotunda, “SPHINXGRIN TWO” (1986/2010), might be a giant extraterrestrial Gumby.

In “Gondola Charles Olson” (1982), Chamberlain regains his automotive mojo, and right into our current century his oeuvre comprises a plethora of treasures in salvage-yard Baroque, including the atypically small “LEXICONOFFURN” (2006) and “Dictator Taxidermist” (2006), as well as the reassuringly big—about 10 feet tall—”Women’s Voices” (2005). The last three of these by the way, are white and chrome, a combination only Chamberlain could handle without getting precious about it.

“It’s all in the fit,” was Chamberlain’s motto. He was a master at plucking the right part from the scrap heap, and a genius at making it fit—that is, in making it contribute almost effortlessly to the slash and flow of the piece as a whole. It’s been said of Picasso that he was a great painter who basically painted pictures of the sculptures that his paintings could have been. Chamberlain is thought by some to have done the reverse—made sculptures of the paintings that they could have been. But Chamberlain’s forms and volumes and hollows and edges are so good that we joyously realize that they simply constitute some of the best sculpture of the past 100 years.

Mr. Plagens is a New York-based painter and writer. He writes the bi-weekly gallery-review column for the Journal.

A version of this article appeared April 11, 2012, on page D7 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Looks Like Rock ‘n’ Roll.