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Creative relationships

Modern Couples at the Barbican: anthology exhibition packs emotional punch 
Miles Rowland
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Modern Couples is a labyrinthine monster of an exhibition, the scale of which has rarely been seen at the Barbican.

It covers over 80 artists, spanning many mediums, and its reach may exceed its grasp.

Its mission statement is to examine how ‘relationships can become a playground for creativity’, but in equating long-term marriages, love affairs and countercultural movements, it suffers from a lack of cohesion; it's also difficult to take it all in over a single viewing.

However, despite all of this, it’s a must-see show.

By the time you enter the first room and are greeted with Rodin's tribute to Camille Claudel, Je Suis Belle – a piece which seems to defy gravity in its outrageous depiction of desire – two things start to become clear.

First, the quality of the art is often remarkable.

Second, there is a move to give women parity with their sometimes better-known male lovers – Claudel’s sculpture of Rodin’s face is shown to be just as proficient as his own of her.

In the same room and completing a peculiar dichotomy of French modern art, Marcel Duchamp’s salacious moulded keepsakes of Maria Martins’ body stand alongside her jagged sculpture of the couple as a pair of winged monsters, perhaps showing how forbidden love can manifest itself in peculiar ways.

After this intoxicating opening salvo, Modern Couples continues into a maze of rooms – with highpoints in unexpected places.

Among them is surrealist couple Max Ernst and Leonora Carrington’s collaborative work La Rencontre. This is a strange chimeric vision of their first meeting, painted during what Carrington called their ‘era of paradise’. Viewing the painting with its desolate backdrop of stone and volcanic ash is particularly affecting in the knowledge that shortly after its creation in 1939, Ernst would be interned by Germany as an enemy alien, leading to the end of their relationship and Carrington’s mental health crisis.
Dorothea Tanning and Max Ernst with his sculpture Capricorn, 1947 © John Kasnetsis
There is also a room centred around the ambiguous friendship of Salvador Dalí and Federico Garcia Lorca. Dalí subsequently denied that they were sexually involved, but the words on display exchanged in letters between them are among the most passionate of the exhibition. There is also a convincing parallel drawn between the young playwright’s surrealist line drawings and a later painting by Dalí.



Federico Garcia Lorca and Salvador Dali in Cadaques

Some of the stories that unfold are fascinating. A peculiar segment serves as a shrine to the influence of Alma Mahler, a talented composer whose streak was stifled by her first husband, Gustav Mahler, for most of their marriage.

The space flits from a recording of his disquieted 10th Symphony, influenced by the revelation that his wife was having an affair with Bauhaus architect Walter Gropius, to erotic paintings of her by Oskar Kokoschka, to a creepy photograph of a stuffed Alma doll that Kokoschka commissioned after the affair ended. This episode, like several others where the exhibition is at its best, plays out like a thrilling, if necessarily thinly exposed, soap opera.

In a few cases, however, big name artists feel like they have been cynically tacked onto the bill. Kahlo and Rivera could command an entire exhibition on their own but are scantily represented here.

Less impressive still is Picasso’s section. This summer’s 1932 retrospective at Tate Modern showed how he could churn out a string of epoch-making art inspired by women in a single year. A single painting of lover Dora Maar, and her grainy polaroids of him at the beach, do neither artist justice.

If you can hold your concentration until the latter stages of the exhibition, some of the best rooms can be found upstairs in the Barbican’s atmospheric and dimly lit ‘landing’.

There is huge range here, starting with the emotional sucker punch of Virginia and Leonard Woolf: a cabinet of their collective works is displayed next to a panel with her suicide note, which ends: “I can't go on spoiling your life any longer. I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been.”

At the other end of the scale, optimism is to be found in the understated genius of Alvar and Elissa Aalto, the Finnish couple who revolutionised modern design – it’s hard to believe that some of the sleek furniture on display in this room was created some 90 years ago. Moving, too, is the exploration of the 60-year creative and emotional bond of Russian avant-gardists Natalia Goncharov and Mikhail Larionov, which shines through in their dazzling abstract paintings.

Those who have been to the exhibition will pick out entirely different highlights to these. What Modern Couples may lack in overarching narrative, it makes up for it in its ability to connect with its audience on an emotional level. It’s one of the few examples where the phrase ‘something for everyone’ is not a complete platitude.

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