Think modern love is complicated? Wait until you see this exhibition. Here’s half a century’s worth of explosive couples, transgressive throuples, affairs, gaslighting fuckboys and, mercifully, some great art to contend with. ‘Modern Couples’ wants to show how intimate relationships between artists influenced their works, but it does something even better. By giving equal visibility to women artists who have previously been reduced to ‘muses’ or ‘dilettantes’ tied to more famous men, it subverts the image of the avant-garde artist as an untouchable male genius.
The usual star combos are here (Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, Dora Maar and Pablo Picasso, Lee Miller and Man Ray) along with less obvious names like Constructivists Aleksandr Rodchenko and Varvara Stepanova. They thrived in the creative bubble that existed post-Russian revolution, producing gender-flipping graphic art in the Vkhutemas (a state art school). Yet despite working as equals, art historians largely chose to erase Stepanova’s contribution.
Objectifying male obsession looms large in many of these unions. Take composer Alma Mahler, whose beautiful, haunting music was suppressed by husband Gustav when his ego wouldn’t allow room for her talent. She went on to have a relationship with painter Oskar Kokoschka, who took his fixation on Alma so far, he had a lifesize doll made in her image, asking that his ‘sense of touch be able to take pleasure in those parts where layers of fat and muscle suddenly give way to sinuous covering of the skin’. Yikes.
An antidote can be found in the loving, supportive world of writers Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West, and in the queering of the art scene on Paris Left Bank, where women created work on their own terms and laid the foundations of what it now means to be modern.
An exploration of the ‘Mad Love’ ethos of the Surrealist movement brings us into some stuffy, archive-style curation. The horny letters and paintings of Jacqueline Lamba and André Breton, Paul Nash and Eileen Agar, along with dozens more, are encased in a big glass box. It’s as though the quixotic desire of the Surrealists was so potent, the Barbican felt the need to seal it off from the public for safety.
It’s all a bit like speed dating in a Westfield – there are too many couples on display to make a meaningful connection. But this show, and the relationships it encapsulates tell us the same thing: that the best art can emerge from the most intoxicating, infuriating and complicated mess. It is so overstuffed with ideas that it will give you intellectual indigestion, but against your better judgement – you’ll go back for more.