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

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Marter, Joan M., ed., Women of Abstract Expressionism (Denver, New Haven and London: Denver Art Museum and Yale University Press, 2016)

Broude, Norma and Mary D. Garrard, eds., Reclaiming Female Agency: Feminist Art History after Postmodernism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005) Broude, Norma and Mary D. Garrard, eds., The Power of Feminist Art: The American Movement of the 1970s, History and Impact (New York: H.N. Abrams, 1994)

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Yoo H, Bartle-Haring S, Day RD, Gangamma R. Couple communication, emotional and sexual intimacy, and relationship satisfaction. J Sex Marital Ther. 2014;40(4):275-293. doi:10.1080/0092623X.2012.751072 Gillis, Stacy, and Joanne Hollows, eds., Feminism, Domesticity and Popular Culture (London: Routledge, 2011) Alison, Jane, and Coralie Malissard, eds., Modern Couples: Art, Intimacy and the Avant-Garde (Munich, London, New York: Barbican ; Prestel Publishing Ltd, 2018) For decades, art history taught us that Kandinsky was the greatest pioneer of abstract art, the artist who removed the subject matter from painting. The great ideological debate between abstraction and figuration has given way to a more considered view of the dialogue between the two, yet many misguided views and myths remain.

There is much to learn in these artworks. They can be educational in the stories they tell about sexuality. They can be inspirational in depicting the body as desirable outside of the white gaze. They can be empowering by showing the multitude of ways we can love. Amedeo Modigliani's (1884-1920) premature death at the age of 35, as a consequence of bohemian excess, overshadowed a proper analysis of his work for many years. Rudd, Natalie, ed., Breaking the Mould: Sculpture by Women since 1945 (London: Hayward Gallery Publishing, 2020) Clarke, Meaghan, Critical Voices: Women and Art Criticism in Britain, 1880-1905 (Aldershot, England & Burlington: Ashgate, 2005)Pop Song is a high 3 stars or a low 4 from me. I went for the lower rating because the first chapter (about running) bored me rigid and if I hadn't already bought the book I might not have carried on.

The exhibition, however, is overstuffed: 40 couples or groups are explored across 23 rooms (plus the stairwell and two corridors), with each wall text giving a lightning-speed history of how they met, the nature of their relationship, their shared ideas and artistic activities, any extra social, political and geographical details, as well as quotations and a display of artworks, letters, gifts and photographs (many with their own discursive captions). The research is expansive and the insights given are fascinating, but it feels as if these fresh perspectives have been pared down substantially simply to fit everything in. Doing justice to each couple would mean spending a good chunk of time in each room; doing justice to the show’s argument would therefore mean spending the whole day there. The Barbican has rather naively plumped for both quantity and quality, with the curator passing on the physical and intellectual burden to the unsuspecting viewer. To refute reductive and limiting representations of their bodies, sexualities and lives, a number of artists have dismantled and disputed the commonality of such images by portraying nudity and sexuality through their own eyes. These artists, often from marginalised communities, present their renderings of the human form in a way that reclaims the historic narratives held over their bodies. Over the years, Indiana'ssculptures have taken on a lovey-dovey life of their own. While the late artist had a love-hate relationship with the wildly popular series (he famously said, “It was a marvelous idea, but it was also a terrible mistake”), they will undoubtedly continue to inspire romantics for years to come. Bownes, David, and Oliver Green, eds., Poster Girls: A Century of Art and Design (London: London Transport Museum, 2017) 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.Pop Song is also a book about distances, near and far. As she travels from Taos, New Mexico, to Shanghai, China and beyond, Pham meditates on the miles we are willing to cover to get away from ourselves, or those who hurt us, and the impossible gaps that can exist between two people sharing a bed. Art has always been a way for me to witness and recognise modes of relation and intimacy, to remotely feel, to love something even when they don’t reveal themselves entirely to you, to be moved by a gesture, line, the fraying of an object - the kind of close looking that art invites is also a kind of witnessing. Reading Pop Song makes me reflect on the ways that people holds us and art holds us too and sometimes when art holds us, it’s also us holding ourselves. Halfway through reading it, an image of my reading experience of Pop Song started surfacing in my mind - I was imagining a kind of small fire, think of a fireplace in the cold room and the comfort of the warmth, being held and seen in that light. Greenan, Althea, ‘Feminist Net-work: Digitization and Performances of the Women’s Art Library Slide Collection’ (unpublished PhD Thesis, The University of Brighton, 2017)