THIS GREAT STAGE OF FOOLSBARTHOLOMEW BEAL

Bartholomew BealThis Great Stage of Fools18 January - 5 February 2016

The Fine Art Society148 New Bond Street • London W1S 2JT • +44 (0)20 7318 1895 For sales enquiries please contact Sara Terzi • st@faslondon.com

It is with great pleasure that The Fine Art Society presents the second solo exhibition at the gallery by artist Bartholomew Beal. Following the brilliant Heap of Broken Images based on T.S. Eliot’s Wasteland in 2014, this new body of works comes as an undoubted confirmation of his talent.

I have personally known the artist for some years now and it has been a thrill to see his work develop and to observe how his distinctive style characterised by lonely and sometimes ghostly figures has taken a step forward in this show with an increasing evolution of his composition skills.

With This Great Stage of Fool, Beal takes inspiration from another work of literature – Shakespeare’s King Lear – to draw images that instantly evoke in the viewer an impression of visual poetry that lingers past the first glance.

The paintings never fail to be immediate, powerful and evoc-ative; they carry the conviction of presence, value and author-ity. You know this instinctively, even if you don’t know the specifics of its meaning – all of which can be discovered.And like all works of art which have been created by brilliant imagination, Beal’s are a point of real contact and are mo-ments of intimacy that will captivate you.

ForewordSara Terzi

Bartholomew Beal has chosen to base the images for his new exhibition on one of Shakespeare’s greatest plays – King Lear, first known to have been performed on St Stephen’s Day (26 December) 1606, at Whitehall, before King James I and his court. It was also first published in that year, with two oth-er, somewhat different versions to follow: a Second Quarto in 1619, and an appearance in the First Folio, published in 1623. For much of its early life in the theatre it was not seen in the version or versions based on the original text or texts, but in a much altered version by Nahum Tate, which was provided with a happy ending.

In the years of George III’s madness, from 1811 to 1820, it was not performed at all, as the subject matter was consid-ered to be too controversial. The only two major professional theatres then active in London both presented productions in 1820, within three months of the king’s death. The great tra-gedian Edmund Kean played King Lear, using the original text, in 1823, but this failed, and after only three performances Kean reverted to Tate’s softened version. The original did not full re-establish itself until another great tragedian, William Macready, presented it at Covent Garden in 1838. Since then the play has been regularly performed, always according to the theatrical conventions of the time.

Even with the tragic ending restored, the great actor-manag-ers of the 19th century continued to show comparatively little respect for the playwright’s intentions. They invariably cut the text heavily. In 1892, Henry Irving’s version, with the strong

emphasis on pictorial spectacle common in the theatre at that time, before filmmakers showed that they could always out-do live theatre in this respect, cut 46% of the text. There was still, too, a certain squeamishness about the more brutal aspects of the play. Irving, for example, cut the scene with the blinding of Gloucester.

The rise of ‘literary’ painting, from the mid-18th century onwards, and the already existing emphasis on narrative in European art, meant that artists, already attracted to myth-ological and Biblical scenes, and accustomed to depicting them, began to turn to Shakespeare for subject-matter. This was particularly true, inevitably, of artists who had English as their first language. Two major figures in the early Sturm und Drang period of the Romantic Movement, Benjamin West (1738-1820) and James Barry, (1741-1806) both painted ambitious compositions based on the play. In both cases the emphasis was on Lear’s relationship with his youngest daugh-ter Cordelia.

This emphasis continued throughout the 19th century. A number of members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood made paintings illustrating scenes from King Lear. Among them were Ford Madox Brown and John Everett Millais. Ford Madox Brown’s painting Cordelia’s Portion had a strong influ-ence on the designs made for Irving’s 1892 production.

Throughout this period of King Lear’s popularity as subject matter for artists, the focus was always on Lear’s relationship

Drawing on King LearEdward Lucie-Smith

with his daughter Cordelia. Very few artists ventured else-where, though there is a striking painting of King Lear and the Fool in the Storm by William Dyce (1806-1864), who came from a generation slightly earlier than that of the Pre-Raphaelites. This, however, is something of an exception to the rule.

It is possible to see this focus on Cordelia as being part of the Victorians slightly creepy fascination with virginal young women, especially when seen in relationships with much older men.

The atmosphere of Bartholomew Beal’s suite of paintings in-spired by one of Shakespeare’s greatest plays is very different from that evoked by the much more literal 18th and 19th cen-tury images that I have just cited. The constantly recurring images are, yes, that of Lear himself, but also that of Lear’s Fool, who is presented as being in some way Lear’s alter ego.

To complicate matters further, he is also, it seems, the alter ego of the absent Cordelia. This is in line with a modern theory that Cordelia (played by a boy according to the conventions of Jacobean theatre) and the Fool were both played by a single young actor, who doubled the two roles. The figure in the little head-and-shoulders painting entitled Much pined away is clearly androgynous, though the quotation applies only to the Fool, pining because, at this point in the play, Cordelia is absent.

A much older version of the Fool appears in a larger painting called Little world of man, where he and his royal master seem like twins of the two tramps, Vladimir and Estragon - pro-tagonists in a much later drama, Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. In this it is Estragon who suggests ‘Let’s hang ourselves immediately,’ and Vladimir who replies, a moment or two lat-er, ‘You’re my only hope.’ Then, quite soon after, there comes a further exchange:

ESTRAGON We don’t manage too badly, eh Didi, between the two of us? VLADIMIR Yes yes. Come on, we’ll try the left first. ESTRAGON We always find something, eh Didi, to give us the impression we exist?

VLADIMIR (impatiently) Yes yes, we’re magicians. The dialogue makes one think of an even crisper exchange, not between Lear and his Fool, but between two concerned spectators observing their interaction:

KENT But who is with him?GENTLEMAN None but the fool; who labours to out-jestHis heart-struck injuries.

The fact is that Beal’s paintings based on King Lear are not nar-rative in the sense that either Victorian theatregoers, or Victo-rian enthusiasts for Pre-Raphaelite art, would have understood that term. They are the visual equivalent of an echo-chamber – they represent the way in which the experience of studying Shakespeare’s text has created a series of echoes and re-ech-oes in the artist’s head. In this sense they are closely related to Bartholomew Beal’s series loosely based onT.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, previously exhibited in this gallery.

From this, they mark a step forward, since they are consist-ently more ambitious and more complex, in keeping with the grandeur of the play. They do nonetheless have several things strikingly in common. One is a set of purely technical char-acteristics: for example, they often leave certain things to be filled in by the spectator. The paintings are in a state of move-ment as one looks at them – they seem to be evolving in front of one’s eyes. Look. Turn away. Look again, At this second glance, the image is somehow different.

The other is the pervasive sense of irony, always present in The Waste Land, but perhaps more deeply buried in King Lear (where the Victorians pretty certainly failed to find it). It is not for nothing that the exhibition is entitled This Great Stage of Fools. That is a comment that applies not so much to the world that Shakespeare has imagined, but more directly to our own day.

One particularly significant painting seems, at first sight, to have little or nothing to do with what one finds in the play.

Sweeten my imagination, 2015Oil on canvas105 x 85 cm

This feather stirs, 2015Oil on canvas25 x 35 cm

The title is This feather stirs, and it comes from a late moment in the play. Cordelia is dead, but Lear, holding her in his arms, refuses to believe it:

This feather stirs; she lives! If it be so,It is a chance which does redeem all sorrowsThat ever I have felt.

What the painting offers is simply a pair of hands, each hold-ing a string, each string cut off at the lower margin. This is the puppet-master at work, controlling the destinies of men – who remain unaware of their inability to do or say anything than other than what the master commands.

There are in fact two dominant sets of imagery in this series of paintings. One is to do with the idea of the Fool as the true hero of the play, rather than the King. Yet there is a consola-tory element as well – the presence of nature, the background against which the tragedy of the clown is played out. Sweeten my imagination shows Lear, flowers and leaves in his hair, con-versing with a wren perched on his hand. Yet the text of the play once again contradicts what is shown in the painting:

There’s hell, there’s darkness, there’s thesulphurous pit,Burning, scalding, stench, consumption; fie,fie, fie! pah, pah! Give me an ounce of civet,good apothecary, to sweeten my imagination:there’s money for thee.

It is the oscillation of moods and images that gives these paint-ings their fascination and their strength. They make one look, and once one has looked, they have a tenacious hold on one’s imagination.

Lear’s final enigmatic words in the play are, fittingly for an exhibition, ‘Look there, look there’. What does he see?

The King’s Marotte, 2015Oil on canvas45 x 35 cm

Lear: When we are born, we cry that we are come To this great stage of fools.

My paintings tend to explore solitary or contemplative figures, which is often remarked as a contrast with my more cheer-ful disposition. I use the painted settings within which I place the individuals to develop the nature of their predicaments or their mood.

Literature has consistently been a key source of inspiration. My 2013 show Biscuit, I Gave You Half was partly a response to Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, where he poetically and wittily scrutinises dysfunctional characters. By contrast, during my year long residency in Derby, I immersed myself in local his-tory and folklore. In my first solo show Saint Mondays - and Thereby Hangs a Tale I tried to capture the spirit of the place by depicting some of the larger than life characters and stories which have been immortalised in folk songs and myths.

When preparing A Heap of broken Images (2014) I was draw-ing upon T.S.Eliot’s work, particularly The Waste Land, writ-ten partly as a response to the First World War. Eliot’s richly allusive poem includes borrowings from other writers to ex-press the lack of cohesion and sense of loss. I found bearded figures, like The Drowned Sailor and the blind seer Tiresias, haunting my work. I suddenly realised that the tragi-comic quality of some of my subjects was informed by my familiarity with Shakespeare’s King Lear. I decided to dive into the play in the hope of producing a set of theatrical paintings. This proved to be an experience as daunting as it was exciting. I

did not want my paintings to be mere illustrations of the text but to use some of its powerful iconography as a starting point from which to examine ideas of human blindness, folly and disorientation.

From that point forward these paintings started gaining some exciting momentum. King Lear, the Fool, Gloucester and Edgar are the focus of many of them, as their journey as homeless outcasts was what fascinated me most. The play is particularly poignant in 2016 when we have been daily con-fronted by media images of ‘unaccommodated’ men, women and children, their terrible suffering and yet their dignity and humanity.

The story of King Lear is based on a series of relationships and this provoked me to start placing more than one figure in my larger paintings. When I am painting these larger canvases it begins to feel like the work of a stage director, pushing many different characters around the space to try to find that dy-namic correlation between different shapes and colours, in-stead of relying upon my bearded lead in the centre of the stage

My use of saturated colour, composition and definition in each work swings between blurred abstract shapes and tight, figurative painting, There is an element of the undecided in each piece, leaving ideas open for the painting to be complet-ed by the imagination of each viewer. The archetype in the middle of each painting leaves much to be concluded and the surroundings provide hints and suggestions, but nothing final.

This Great Stage of FoolsBartholomew Beal

This is the second exhibition of Bartholomew Beal’s paintings at The Fine Art Society, in collaboration with I.P. Arts. In the first, he became the youngest artist ever to have a one-man show at London’s oldest commercial gallery, demonstrating its continuing commitment to contemporary art.

That exhibition had followed five other successful solo and duo shows throughout London in 2013-2014, also organised by I.P. Arts, subsequent to Barley’s graduation from Wimble-don Arts College with a Fine Arts BA with 1st Class Honours and commendations. Whilst still at art college, Barley received the prestigious Jonathan Vickers Fine Art Award which fund-ed a year-long residency in Derby, culminating in a his first large-scale solo exhibition at Derby Museum and Art Gallery which took place in 2013, a year after his graduation.

Our collaboration with The Fine Art Society greatly enhances our international reach, for collectors of Barley’s paintings are already located in a wide array of countries including China, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Australia, Saudi Arabia, UK, Austria, Greece, Russia, France, Germany, Spain, USA, Mexico, and Brazil.

To date, Barley’s preferred studio practice is painting a large body of works simultaneously, stimulated by literature, par-ticularly plays and poems, which have had a formative influ-ence upon him. He enjoys working towards exhibitions but has also undertaken client commissions for I.P. Arts, with a waitlist of over 50 strong.

This new body of 25 works takes its title “This Great Stage of Fools”, from Barley’s favourite Shakespearean text King Lear which could be said to be in his DNA. This is not, perhaps, surprising as both Barley’s parents are teachers of English Lit-erature and his father, in fact, taught him and his classmates King Lear as one of their A level texts.

The canvases in this exhibition range in size from 25 x 35 cm to 225 x 180 cm. The paintings cover many different moods from the play and Barley’s thinking around it.

As highlighted by Edward Lucie-Smith in this catalogue’s es-say each of these works evinces links to words and lines in the Shakespeare’s great tragedy. Through these relationships, the viewer experiences something of the very real excitement of watching performances of King Lear as it moves from profound tragic intensity to candid comedy.

While Barley draws upon lines and themes of King Lear in this series of works it is important to highlight the significance the artist places on Act III where Lear and his followers are cast out into the storm. Here they are removed from all the trap-pings of court and power and have to confront painful, and sometime redemptive, truths about themselves.

Barley has loved theatre since childhood and finds one of the privileges of studying, and now living, in London is the op-portunity it affords for theatre-going. Although he has been steeped in Shakespeare from having grown up in easy reach

This Great Stage of FoolsJason Colchin-Carter

of Stratford-upon-Avon, Barley is equally fascinated by twen-tieth century and contemporary drama. Indeed, one of his previous exhibitions explored elements of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame. Recent spectacular London productions such as Ivo van Hove’s interpretation of Miller’s A View from the Bridge at The Young Vic and Ian Kelly’s Mr. Foote’s Other Leg directed by Richard Eyre at The Haymarket have encouraged Barley’s reflections on the theatrical nature of human existence.

I.P. Arts and Bartholomew Beal express their gratitude to The Fine Art Society and are both keen to extend the collabora-tion with them. I.P. Arts and Jason Colchin-Carter also ex-tend their gratitude to Edward Lucie-Smith whose essay so successfully encapsulates Bartholomew’s work and puts it in a historical context.

www.isisphoenixarts.com43 Berkley Square, London W1J 5FJ

I see it feelingly, 2015Oil on canvas45 x 35 cm

Every inch a king, 2015Oil on canvas35 x 25 cm

Horns without a case, 2015Oil on canvas30 x 30 cm

My master calls me, 2015Oil on canvas

65 x 50 cm

The Fool’s Marotte, 2015Oil on canvas45 x 25 cm

Fool (study), 2015Oil on canvas35 x 25 cm

Little world of man, 2015Oil on canvas

75 x 115 cm

I want no eyes, 2015Oil on canvas225 x 180 cm

The standing pool, 2015Oil on canvas180 x 125 cm

Idle weeds, 2015Oil on canvas65 x 50 cm

Much pined away, 2015Oil and acrylic on board 35 x 30 cm

Sunshine and rain at once, 2015Oil on canvas

77 x 61 cm

The eldest have born most, 2015Oil on canvas225 x 180 cm

Elf all my hair in knots, 2015Oil on canvas45 x 35 cm

The way to Dover, 2015Oil on canvas65 x 50 cm

The Eldest, 2015Oil on canvas35 x 25 cm

Turlygod, 2015Oil on canvas mounted on board50 x 30 cm

Yet have I ventured?, 2015Oil on canvas65 x 50 cm

I stumbled when I saw, 2015Oil on canvas105 x 85 cm

EDUCATION

2009 - 12 / BA Fine Art Painting, WimbledonCollege of Art2007 - 08 / Foundation in Art and Design, University of Gloucestershire

SOLO EXHIBITIONS

2015 / Bartholomew Beal – Temple, I.P. Arts, London2014 / A Heap of Broken Images, The Fine Art Society, London 2013 / Saint Monday and Thereby Hangs a Tale, I.P. Arts in col-laboration with the Derby Museum and Art Gallery, DerbyBiscuit. I’ve kept you half, I.P. Arts, Mall Gallery, London (with Eleanor Watson)

GROUP EXHIBITIONS

2015 / Art Miami 2015, I.P. Arts with Cynthia Corbett Gallery, MiamiFarfetch, I.P. Arts, LondonYoung Master Dialogues, I.P. Arts with Cynthia Corbett Gallery, London and New YorkYoung Masters Prize, I.P. Arts with Cynthia Corbett Gallery, LondonRoyal Arts & Fashion, I.P. Arts, Middle Temple Hall, LondonSummer Exhibition, I.P. Arts with Cynthia Corbett Gallery, Lon-don

Art15, The Fine Art Society, LondonScope Art Fair 2015, I.P. Arts with OS Gallery, New YorkSignature Art Prize Finalists exhibition, London2014 / What Marcel Duchamp Taught Me, The Fine Art Society, LondonArt14, The Fine Art Society, London2013 / Memory and Desire Part 1, Theobald Jennings Gallery, London2012 / FLOCK 2012, GX Gallery, LondonWimbledon College of Art Degree Show, LondonRedEarth Spring Exhibition, Bickleigh, Devon100outof10, Vyner Street Gallery, LondonThe Perfect Nude, Wimbledon Space | Exeter Phoenix | Charlie Smith Gallery, LondonHans Brinker Prize Exhibition, AmsterdamAffordable Art Fair, London2011 / Drawing Projects: an exploration into the language of drawing, LondonLast Orders, Redgate Gallery, LondonSeven Acres, Brick Lane Gallery, LondonBaker’s Dozen, Acquire, London

RESIDENCIES AND AWARDS

2012 / Jonathan Vickers Residency, DerwentValley MIlls World Heritage Site (Oct 2012 - Jul 2013)Landmark Plc Fine Art Award2011 / Finalist of the Hans Brinker StudentPainting Prize, Amsterdam

Bartholomew Beal

Published in an edition of 1000 copies for the exhibition This Great Stage of Fools18 January - 5 February 2016

Catalogue © The Fine Art SocietyDesign by Sara TerziText © the authorsImages © Bartholomew Beal, courtesy of I.P. ArtsPrinted in the UK by ArtQuarters Press

Front cover: I stumbled when I saw, 2015

ISBN 978-1-907052-62-0

With thanks to Jason Colchin-Carter and I.P. Arts

The Fine Art Society148 New Bond Street • London W1S 2JT • +44 (0)20 7318 1895 contemporary@faslondon.com • www.faslondon.com

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