Bold or boring? Bob Dylan's new exhibition
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Famous for his ground-breaking music over the past half-century, America-born Bob Dylan is on show again, this time with his latest exhibition of paintings here. But critics say his reputation masks his limited skill as a painter.
"The Brazil Series," as the collection is known, consists of 40 acrylic paintings and eight pencil drawings, and opened last weekend at the National Gallery of Denmark.
The paintings, with such titles as "The Incident," "Favela Villa Candido," and "Barber Shop," display Dylan's fascination with Brazil's cultural diversity.
They picture crowded slums, spaghetti-eaters in a cafe and workers in a vineyard. Dylan also captures sombre snapshots of courtrooms, street shootings, cabaret dancers, even a solitary boxer practising in a gym. The series was painted between 2009 and March 2010.
"Dylan is a story teller," says Torben Weirup, art critic for Berlingske Tidende, a conservative Danish broadsheet. "A wonderful storyteller in his songs, he is also a storyteller in his paintings."
But Dylan does not tell the story of Brazil's multiple roles as an emerging economy and industrial powerhouse, nor of its reputation as a football giant and samba sensation.
Dylan often made rough sketches in Brazil, and recreated the scenes in his studio. The canvases, vibrant with color and drawn with short brushstrokes, evoke German expressionism, the American Ashcan School and traces of Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse.
"As in his music, Bob Dylan bluntly borrows elements," explains Kasper Monrad, the National Gallery's Chief Curator, "and he does it with admiration and no shame at all."
"Bahia," for instance, depicts an inky-blue night sky and dimly lit and teetering houses. The eyes are led up a narrow street to an imposing, softly lit church sitting on the horizon.
Balancing it are three small figures standing in the foreground: an old man leaning on a stick, a street sweeper, and a curvaceous prostitute. She seems to be soliciting a client who has just driven up in an expensive car. The men look bored.
Critics of Dylan's paintings also seem a little bored.
"Bob's Brazil does not interest me," wrote art critic Torben Sangild, in the left-leaning Politiken newspaper. "He has only momentarily aroused my curiosity during this otherwise well-curated exhibition."
He believes the style is "traditional" and "mediocre," drawing on techniques invented nearly a century ago.
Weirup is more generous, saying "(Dylan) clearly has studied the great masters. And learned from them." Yet, he feels "Bob Dylan is a genius as a poet and musician. Not as a painter. And the only reason to exhibit him in a museum is that he is Bob Dylan."
Impressed by Dylan's first exhibition of watercolor paintings in Germany in 2007, Denmark's National Gallery invited Dylan to exhibit in Copenhagen.
Karsten Ohrt, the gallery's director, says the exhibition is "adding to the fact that we're getting a very well known poet and musician to the museum, but also a very remarkable visual artist."
However, he admits: "I think the fact that this is Bob Dylan will lead to more visitors. Not the fact that it is Brazilian motifs."
Dylan himself writes in the exhibition catalogue that it was "more than a little surprising when I was asked to create works specifically for this museum," but "it was an honor and a thrilling challenge."
Born in 1941 in Minnesota, the United States, Dylan cut his first album in 1961, and has had more than 40 official record releases since. His music has tackled social, religious and moral themes, while hits such as "Blowin' in the Wind," "Tambourine Man" and "Like a Rolling Stone" have influenced the musical taste of generations.
But Dylan fans hoping to find parallels between the songs and the paintings are likely to be disappointed.
"I've tried hard to find songs that match his pictures," Monrad reveals, "but I haven't succeeded."
That is not surprising. While working on this series, Dylan told the gallery, "If I could have expressed the same in a song, I would have written a song instead."
After this exhibition, the public might agree with that, too.
Bob Dylan's "The Brazil Series" is "on the run" from Sept. 4, 2010 to to Feb. 20, 2011 at the National Gallery of Denmark here.
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