Evanescing Skull
Maker
Glenn Sujo
Title
Evanescing Skull
Date of Production
1991
Medium
Graphite, blue pencil and watercolour on paper
Dimensions
Height: 41 cm
Accession Number
D.2023.XX.7
Credit
The Courtauld, London (Samuel Courtauld Trust)
Copyright
© Glenn Sujo
Location
Not currently on display
Label Text
Glenn Sujo is a visual artist, educator, author and curator. He completed formal studies in fine art and the history of art at the Slade School of Art (Dip FA), University College London (BA) and Courtauld Institute of Art (MA, PhD supervised by Dr Shulamith Behr). An inspirational teacher and course leader for forty years, he has lectured extensively in colleges and universities in Britain, the USA and Israel. In 2010, he was appointed Wingate post-doctoral research fellow at the Courtauld Institute of Art, and in 2013-14 he was elected G. F. Watts Associate Artist at Watts Gallery, Compton. Since studying at The Courtauld, Glenn has cultivated and fostered strong ties to the institution.
Glenn has written two essays on art education, one focussing on the life and work of Slade Professor Sir William Coldstream and the other, on the life-time achievements of the artist and art historian John Golding CBE (2021). He has led numerous workshops at the British Museum, the Royal Collections Trust, the University of Surrey, the Department of Life Sciences at the Hebrew University, the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Jerusalem, and the Department of Fine Arts at the University of Haifa, among others. He has contributed to exhibition catalogues and publications: Legacies of Silence: The Visual Arts and Holocaust Memory at the Imperial War Museum, London (2001), among others.
This graphite, blue pencil and watercolour study of the human skull awash with light was made by the artist during a visit to the Levant as a visiting lecturer in the Department of Art at the University of Haifa’s Erasmus programme in summer 1991, shortly after the First Gulf War. Perched on the Carmel Hills overlooking the Mediterranean and flanked by large conifers, the campus was the ideal setting for a series of memorable encounters and outdoor workshops with aspiring artists from Europe and the Middle East. The drawing was made in a single sitting, working alongside his pupils, under a glaring midday sun, conditions that contributed to the drawing’s unintended message of evanescence and vanitas.
About this work the artist has written:
“The human skull and full-length assembled skeleton have been abiding concerns in my work since autumn 1980, when the artist Leonard McComb RA (1930 - 2018) invited me to join an evening class at the Sir John Cass School of Art. This was my first experience of drawing the skeleton from observation. A fully assembled skeleton of Asian origin, has become a studio companion since. I acquired this specimen at Magasin Auzoux (after the French naturalist and anatomist Prof. L. T. Jérôme Auzoux) in Paris. The subject had been one of great cultural and iconographical interest for me, representing an agent of revolutionary change, social and moral critique, in the work of Mexican graphic artist José Guadalupe Posada (1852-1913) and the Ars Moriendi tradition, exemplified by Wilhelm Pleydenwurff’s dancing skeletons, Hans Baldung Grien’s Death and the Maiden, and Hans Holbein the Younger’s Danse Macabre.
Death as an animate skeleton surfaced in my work in a group of studies and finished drawings after Matthew Brady’s photographs of the 16th American President, Abraham Lincoln, taken shortly before his assassination in April 1865. Bearing the title, Brady’s Dream with Torment (1979/80), suggesting that the image had come back to
torment Brady after Lincoln’s murder, this was shown as part of Glenn Sujo: Histories at the Institute of Contemporary Art London and tour in 1982. The daily practice of drawing the skeleton culminated for me, thirty years later, with the exhibition Anatomies: Studies of the Human Skeleton, at the Eton Drawing Schools (in association with Royal Collections Windsor) as the locus of various workshops and study sessions. The exhibition also included several larger-than-life studies of the assembled skeleton — such as Large Skeleton I, 1999-2005 (Wellcome Collection, London) and a later reworking of Brady’s Dream entitled Lincoln, Oh Father! (1982-2014) a homage to the architect of the Emancipation movement in the United States that declared slaves free in the Confederacy.”
Glenn has written two essays on art education, one focussing on the life and work of Slade Professor Sir William Coldstream and the other, on the life-time achievements of the artist and art historian John Golding CBE (2021). He has led numerous workshops at the British Museum, the Royal Collections Trust, the University of Surrey, the Department of Life Sciences at the Hebrew University, the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Jerusalem, and the Department of Fine Arts at the University of Haifa, among others. He has contributed to exhibition catalogues and publications: Legacies of Silence: The Visual Arts and Holocaust Memory at the Imperial War Museum, London (2001), among others.
This graphite, blue pencil and watercolour study of the human skull awash with light was made by the artist during a visit to the Levant as a visiting lecturer in the Department of Art at the University of Haifa’s Erasmus programme in summer 1991, shortly after the First Gulf War. Perched on the Carmel Hills overlooking the Mediterranean and flanked by large conifers, the campus was the ideal setting for a series of memorable encounters and outdoor workshops with aspiring artists from Europe and the Middle East. The drawing was made in a single sitting, working alongside his pupils, under a glaring midday sun, conditions that contributed to the drawing’s unintended message of evanescence and vanitas.
About this work the artist has written:
“The human skull and full-length assembled skeleton have been abiding concerns in my work since autumn 1980, when the artist Leonard McComb RA (1930 - 2018) invited me to join an evening class at the Sir John Cass School of Art. This was my first experience of drawing the skeleton from observation. A fully assembled skeleton of Asian origin, has become a studio companion since. I acquired this specimen at Magasin Auzoux (after the French naturalist and anatomist Prof. L. T. Jérôme Auzoux) in Paris. The subject had been one of great cultural and iconographical interest for me, representing an agent of revolutionary change, social and moral critique, in the work of Mexican graphic artist José Guadalupe Posada (1852-1913) and the Ars Moriendi tradition, exemplified by Wilhelm Pleydenwurff’s dancing skeletons, Hans Baldung Grien’s Death and the Maiden, and Hans Holbein the Younger’s Danse Macabre.
Death as an animate skeleton surfaced in my work in a group of studies and finished drawings after Matthew Brady’s photographs of the 16th American President, Abraham Lincoln, taken shortly before his assassination in April 1865. Bearing the title, Brady’s Dream with Torment (1979/80), suggesting that the image had come back to
torment Brady after Lincoln’s murder, this was shown as part of Glenn Sujo: Histories at the Institute of Contemporary Art London and tour in 1982. The daily practice of drawing the skeleton culminated for me, thirty years later, with the exhibition Anatomies: Studies of the Human Skeleton, at the Eton Drawing Schools (in association with Royal Collections Windsor) as the locus of various workshops and study sessions. The exhibition also included several larger-than-life studies of the assembled skeleton — such as Large Skeleton I, 1999-2005 (Wellcome Collection, London) and a later reworking of Brady’s Dream entitled Lincoln, Oh Father! (1982-2014) a homage to the architect of the Emancipation movement in the United States that declared slaves free in the Confederacy.”
Notes
From Glenn Sujo: "Naturally, I will be happy to assist with a recording of the genesis of the work (audio or in writing), against the immediate backdrop of the First Gulf War and my first visit to Israel at Prof. Avram Kampf’s invitation on the occasion of the Barbican Gallery’s ‘Jewish Experience in 20C Art: from Chagall to Kitaj’; pupils from the Erasmus programme at Haifa University; the outdoor setting on Mount Carmel and blinding lights; together a life transforming experience."
in his catalogue he writes: graphite, blue pencil, watercolour on Barcham Green RWS
Provenance
Glenn Sujo; gifted by the aritist to The Courtauld in November 2023
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