by John Gorman

Artwork Description

Bathers

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Bathers, graphite, oil pastels on paper, 30x30cm The title of the work refers us, of course, to Paul Cézanne’s Les Baigneuses, and, thanks to clues gathered from the author, especially to his three Grandes Baigneuses (respectively kept at the Barnes Foundation, the National Gallery, and the Phildelphia Museum of Art, and painted between 1894 and 1906). It is therefore interesting to note the similarities and differences between the works of the pre-Cubist master of Aix and the post-Cubist John Gorman. First of all, while Cézanne’s figures remain, although greatly simplified, quite legible, and flourish in front of a post-naturalist background, those of John Gorman, on the contrary, offer to the eye cut, chopped, collided forms, bodies made of ovals, circles, lozenges, limbs detached from their trunks, and only the silhouette on the right, seated, arms dangling, is easily discernible. In addition, the background is vaguely indicated by a few blue-green streaks. If we look at the faces, those in Cézanne’s three works are often masked but because the figures turn their backs on the viewer, or oversimplified, while those of John Gorman are all hidden under a thick layer of pigment, which is characteristic of the artist’s style. In terms of tonality and luminosity, his work is closer to that of the Barnes Foundation, begun earliest in Cézanne’s life, and differs most sharply from those of the Museum of Art in Phildadelphia, so brightly lit. The National Gallery’s Grandes Baigneuses, which are very abstract and lackluster, are also closer to the artist’s drawing of the twenty-first century, in intention and meaning if not in the choice of colours, which are different in the two works. In fact, although the reference to these last works of the master of Aix is tacitly expressed, John Gorman’s drawing lifts the veil on the avant-gardist movements to which they gave rise, particularly Cubism, therefore, but also on his own work, which is not currently comparable to that of any artist in activity. These very compact compositions, in which the figures press against each other, in a fusion that leads to a kind of sharing of the same bodies and limbs, this crowd that seems innumerable by a trickery effect, when in fact only a handful of models are present, refers once again, and beyond the centuries, more to the works of Michelangelo and his few brilliant successors, of Caravaggio, but also to the medieval bas-reliefs with their religious iconography, or to the Ghiberti or Donatello of the abundant works, then to the marbles of ancient Greece. Thanks to his astonishing mastery, John Gorman multiplies the lines, playing with their different thicknesses and intensities, just as he does with oil pastel, applied in a smooth touch partially on the bodies, or with graphite, determining the striations and hatchings and lines, or dark flat tints as on the heads of the figures. Only the choice of an ochre hue refers to the shades of the Philadelphia Big Bathers. But it is as if John Gorman’s work is still bathed in the faint carver’s glow of northern winters and takes us back to prehistoric times. The overwhelming chain of references and memories that leads us there, at this point in our contemporary history, is both terrifying by the majesty with which the artist of the 21st century plays with our own ‘’homelands”, real or imaginary, our perception, our memories, all singular, and bearer of immense hope for the future of art. Delphine Costedoat

Artwork Details

Medium: Drawing Other

Genre: Figurative