Ismeal Smith – The Beauty and The Monsters

The Beauty and The Monsters – Ismeal Smith (1886 – 1972) Exhibition at MNAC, National Museum of Catalan Art, Barcelona.

A portrait of the artist, through allegory of the Duck Headed Man.

‘Cabeza de Pato’ 1917

I came away from this exhibition with the feeling that Ismael Smith is an artist who never found his style. Some artists are bound to spend a lifetime looking. Or perhaps he did find it, early on in his successful, satirical illustrations, but couldn’t convert it into the the grandiose mediums of the time, painting or sculpture, that were accepted as ‘fine art’. He tried his hand at everything from illustration to grand-scale painting, from architectural monuments to furniture design, from jewellery and classical sculptures to the highly unusual, brightly painted busts of Don Quixote that almost recall carnival masks. The best of those works retain a sense of his early caricatures, even as they lean, or strain, towards realism.

Outside His Time

He was definitely an inspired man, of fluid capabilities, with a fire in his belly and an eye for the ambiguous and the androgynous, but these were not in line with contemporary tastes. Or perhaps it is more true to say that the grotesque, the dark and the exposure of society’s, or humanity’s, absurdities was accepted in satire… but not in seriousness, not as earnest, psychologically challenging artworks, as being far too unsavoury and disturbing. Some of his works were reportedly collected by the precursor to MNAC and destroyed whilst he was away in America.

figures-ismael-smith-i-mari-1909-fundacio-palau

Over Abundance

In the displayed notebooks you can see his lovely, neat handwriting covering every inch of the page, squeezing right up to the edges and margins, like words being poured into an already exhausted breath. He was not a man short of ideas. But as for many artists this abundance of ideas and of directions may have hindered more than helped him in developing his style and finding success.

The Duck Headed Man

I fell in love with this illustration of the duck headed man. (‘Cabeza de Pato’ 1917) I feel it’s almost a self portrait. Not only does the face somewhat resemble Smith’s own under the duck features, but he too is a dandy, the detail embroidered on his clothes, his boot-strings prettily bowed, the heavily lashed eyes look out at the viewer, both coy and gentle as in the various portraits and self portraits of the artist himself in the exhibition. I have scoured the internet and cannot find the story of the ‘Cabeza de Pato’, originally a french tale. But from the illustrations the duck faced man also appears to be an outcast for his difference, and comes to a sorry end, like Smith himself.

Rejected by the establishment Smith retreated from the art-world into other obsessions and in 1962 he was committed to a mental asylum outside New York where he lived, due to complaints of his nudist tendencies. He spent the last years of his life there continuing his passions teaching art therapy workshops. Like the duck faced man, he is cast out for being different, for disturbing the norms, for being himself. It seems he was a man the world neither accepted in his craft, or let alone in his retreat. He wouldn’t have known his own story when he drew the illustration, but I feel there’s a sympathy to the character, an identification with the gentle, coy and curious duck headed man.

The exhibition is well curated, and well worth seeing. The space feels a little cavernous for the majority of his works which are small, rapid sketches, but it is a wide-ranging retrospective and his story is sensitively told. The narrative highlights his unique qualities, and his place within, and outside, the art movements of the time without hailing him or his works as having universal virtue, a trap that I think many curators fall into in order to justify showing an artist’s work. For myself, I am often as fascinated by the artist as by the art, and by the mark and measure of their supposed failures, as of their successes, so I appreciate this balanced view and recommend the exhibition which is on until 17th of September 2017.

Other projects, artwork & texts:

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Etchings

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Etchings of musicians and other strange familiars.

Hockney: Ode to Invisible Blue

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After a long while of looking I felt very attached to this painting, not it’s miniature reproduction on screen, but the vibrating body of the canvas itself.

Interview The LondonY

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Interview about my art and music with the lovely Nastasia at the LondonY

Ismeal Smith – The Beauty and The Monsters

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A portrait of the artist, through allegory of the Duck Headed Man.

Two floors of enormous canvases, head after head emerging from disrupted space or poised, static and clean, cut from a violence of abstracted shapes. It is wonderful to see such a great expanse of uncomfortable artwork.