In Homage, Skarstedt

The latest Skarstedt Gallery (London) Exhibition, In Homage, reveals the old master influences among Modern giants such as Francis Bacon and Andy Warhol 

An ongoing fallacy about Modern art – and modernism in general – is that it enacted a revolutionary schism with the past, and tore up the history books in its quest for avant-garde novelty. In actuality, just as the Renaissance took the Classical world as a departure point, so have many great modern and contemporary artists taken influence from the deep history of art and the ‘Old Masters’.

The exhibtion

At Skarstedt London – one of a crop of New York galleries that have taken root in Mayfair in recent years – you’ll see In Homage: a group of artworks by artists both modern and contemporary including Francis Bacon, George Condo, Martin Kippenberger, Sigmar Polke, Richard Prince and Andy Warhol. The idea is that their exhibited works overtly show their historical sources. 

The artworks

So Francis Bacon’s Study for a Pope III (1961) channels Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X of 1650: as Bacon himself said of the Spanish masterpiece: “I became obsessed with it”. Indeed, Bacon often used historically religious formats for his paintings, making almost 30 pictures based on the form of the triptych. Then there is In Disquieting Muses (After de Chirico) of 1982 by that other modern master Andy Warhol, who took as his muse the great Italian artist Giorgio de Chirico’s Disquieting Muses; one of the most famous and unsettling pieces by the early 20th century Italian genius of the ‘metaphysical school’. This shows that Warhol wasn’t solely moved by the ambient advertising imagery that informed Pop Art.

       Moving from the 'modern' to the 'contemporary' George Condo’s Portrait of a Woman (2002) is influenced by Picasso’s drawings from the 1920s, while Richard Prince’s Untitled (de Kooning) of 2008 presents a montage of fragmented body parts pulled directly from catalogues and books on the great Willem de Kooning.

 These works are powerful examples of the exhbition's theme. It has to be said that sometimes harking back to the art historical canon can be seen as a ploy to gain quick credence or to make a quick visual gag, but In Homage cannot be accused of that.