20 paintings, 120 years: ‘Portraits of an Era’ brings history of Western art to Korea

Twenty paintings may not seem like enough to tell 120 years of art history, but “Portraits of an Era” at the Global Sae-a Art Space in Gangnam District, southern Seoul, would disagree. The exhibition, starting from Surrealism through abstraction to the figurative painting of the present, attempts to do so by way of Paul Delvaux, Marc Chagall, Willem de Kooning, Yayoi Kusama, David Hockney and nine others.

“Works I and other curators had only ever seen in books, I came here and saw in person, and my heart was racing,” said independent curator Park Mi-wha, who organized the show. “There are only 20 works, but every one of them has real impact.”

“Studying these artists, what I felt was that every one of them was shaped by the environment they grew up in,” said Park, who previously worked at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA). “When a work is comfortable and beautiful, it is because the artist’s upbringing was like that too. Someone who grew up rough — it shows in the painting.”

The art history lesson begins with photography, which freed 19th-century painting from the job of describing the world.

“What remained were two problems: What will we look at, and how will we paint it? Those became the biggest homework of modern art,” Park said.

She referenced Gustave Courbet’s “A Burial at Ornans” (1849-50), a monumental work regarded widely as a turning point for 19th-century art and now housed at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris.

“Why does that Courbet work matter? Because he painted the funeral of ordinary people. He was condemned and criticized for it, and what was won through that criticism was creative freedom,” Park said. “Creative freedom, and the autonomy of art — the 20th century keeps circling back to those two.”

The “Portraits of an Era” show follows that circle in three sections, each titled “A Walk Through Dreams,” “Enigmatic Abstraction” and “Return of the Figure.”

The dreams section begins with Paul Delvaux, the Belgian Surrealist raised by a strict mother and a lawyer father who opposed his painting; the nudes that fill his canvases appeared only after his mother died. Three of his paintings are shown at the Global Sae-a show, among them “The Sleeping Town” (1938) and “Christmas Night” (1956).

“We know René Magritte well in Korea, but we don’t really know Delvaux, even though he is a very important artist,” Park said. “And this isn’t some side work of his. These are A-plus works. Even in Korean art, paintings from the 1930s are rare and expensive, so to get to see foreign works from the 1930s here in Seoul genuinely astonished me.”

Chagall, the eldest of nine children raised in poverty in Vitebsk, is represented by “Around Vence” (1955-57), with its blue heaven hovering over a table of fruit and bread.

“Why do his figures float so freely, flying through the sky? The answer is his religion,” Park said. “Hasidism is a mystical strand of Judaism whose believers hold that by living joyfully, singing and dancing, you can meet God. So Chagall’s life was always joyful, and that runs through every one of his works.”

De Kooning has a background of a rough upbringing. He stowed away to the United States in 1926, lived undocumented until 1962 and made his living as a house painter, which is where he first learned to handle a wide brush. “Untitled XIX” (1984) was painted as his memory failed; he was diagnosed with Alzheimer's in 1989.

“Even as de Kooning’s cognition declined and he could no longer recognize people, when he stood in front of the canvas, he painted,” Park said. “Some complained that he had help from those around him, but it was recognized that these were painted by the artist’s own hand. I was proud, honestly, that you can see a work like this in Korea.”

Kusama, who died this year, appears in two sections, with “Infinity-Dots (AB)” (2003) and a pair of pumpkin paintings. The pumpkins go back to childhood.

“When her mother hit her, the place she hid was a storehouse full of pumpkins,” Park said. “She looked at the pumpkins and took great comfort in them.”

Bradford, where Hockney grew up, was a gray mill town thick with coal smoke, and he never lost his longing for clean, open country. “More Woldgate Timber, October 13th 2009” comes from the decade Hockney, who also died this year, spent painting the lanes of East Yorkshire, Britain. A felled log sits in the foreground and the road drops away sharply, but the hard clash of red against green holds everything flat to the surface.

The lineup at the “Portraits of an Era” exhibition is entirely Western, and that was very deliberate.

“I did that on purpose,” Park said; the Korean side of modern art was covered in the space’s previous show, “Modernism and Challenge,” which Park also organized. “Look at the course of modern art since the 19th century in three stages, and always in relation to the artist’s background — that’s the message of this exhibition.”

“Portraits of an Era” runs through Jan. 9 next year. Admission is 5,000 won ($3.70).

BY LIM JEONG-WON [[email protected]]