Picture of Marina Abramović and Jacob Rothschild in front a painting called "Satan summoning his Legions"
>The very honest and plain speaking Marina Abramović did the Rothchild Lecture at the RA ahead of her 50 year retrospective which will take over the place from Sept-Dec 2020. There’s still time to get in touch with her if you want to take part in a performance as some of the older pieces will be redone with new people. For me, the funniest part of the lecture was when she was asked about failure and she spoke about one performance years ago (of how they can’t be rehearsed like a theatre piece because the actual performance is the exploration of the concept) and just as she was starting the piece realised “Oh no, this is awful and bad’ then had to continue on with it for 8 hours as had been planned. Here she is pictured with Lord Rothchild with a backdrop of Thomas Lawrence’s ‘Satan summoning his Legions’. #marinaabramovic #contemporaryart #performance #performanceart
>Photo by Alastair Fyfe Photography on December 04, 2019. Image may contain: one or more people, people standing, suit and indoor
https://picbabun.com/alastairfyfe
https://picbabun.com/media/2191594602188178148_312760230
https://www.instagram.com/p/B5qG63bFwLk/
>Thomas Lawrence’s grandest history painting attracted strong reactions. It is dominated by a muscular male figure, naked apart from his sword, helmet and some carefully placed drapery. He is Satan, the rebel angel, who has been sent to Hell. Standing by a lake of fire, he summons his followers. The subject is Milton's ‘Paradise Lost’, Book I, line 330, 'Awake, arise, or be for ever fallen'.
>Lawrence made a bold decision to paint this imposing painting for the 1797 Royal Academy Annual Exhibition, where it was titled ‘Satan calling his Legions. First Book of Milton’. It attracted attention and criticism at the exhibition and even before it was finished, when people saw it in Lawrence’s studio. The painter Richard Westall RA was sceptical about it, stating he ‘did not think Lawrence qualified to paint Historical subjects. He has little of the creative power.’ (Joseph Farington’s Diary 12 April 1797) During the installation of the exhibition John Hoppner RA said he ‘wd. Give £100 to have Lawrences Satan out of room, as it takes effect from his pictures.’ (Joseph Farington’s Diary 25 April 1797) In 1830 the painting was exhibited at the British Institution with the line from Milton as its title, 'Satan! - Awake, arise, or be for ever fallen!'
>David Bindman does not discuss Lawrence’s picture specifically, but suggests that for English artists in the 1790s, Satan’s ‘heroic defiance of the Almighty could be taken as a model of resistance to a distant and arbitrary power… The French Revolution, especially as it passed beyond the stage when English radicals could regard it as a new dawn for humanity, began to appear even more Miltonic, as destruction, chaos and envy seemed to attend it, as they did Satan on his travels across the universe. Milton could be seen, depending on one’s degree of revolutionary commitment, as a prophet of Revolution, who had foreseen its inevitable collapse into tyranny, or alternatively had witnessed its hard and painful progress before it could achieve its aims.’ (David Bindman, The Shadow of the Guillotine, Britain and the French Revolution, exh cat, British Museum Publications, 1989, p166)
>Michael Levey instead prefers a contextualisation based on Lawrence’s childhood interest in Paradise Lost ‘which can be said from childhood to have haunted Lawrence’. Levey saw the painting before it was conserved, ‘No amount of darkened varnish and discoloured paint can conceal the imperious pose of Satan’s naked, muscular figure, with arms upraised and eyes glaring out from a helmeted head. The rest of the composition must always have been shadowy, intentionally subordinated to that single form.’ (Levey 2005, p129)
https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/art-artists/work-of-art/satan-summoning-his-legions
Q you haven't discussed this.