Artist list:
Bacon, Francis
Dalí, Salvador
Hirst, Damien
Hopper, Edward
Johns, Jasper
Kandinsky, Wassily
Klee, Paul
Léger, Fernand
Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni
Picasso, Pablo
Pollock, Jackson
Rauschenberg, Robert
Scully, Sean
van Rijn, Rembrandt
Francis Bacon was one of the most individual, powerful and disturbing artists of the post World War II period. He took the human figure as his subject at a time when art was dominated by abstract styles, and he was also one of the first to depict overtly homosexual themes. Largely self-taught, he was widely read and of great independence of mind and remains a towering example to those dedicated to the depiction of the human figure.
The Ten Storey Love Song video is based on a selection of Francis Bacon's works.
John Squire's See You On The Other Side is based on the Buñuel / Dalí film Un Chien Andalou.
Damien Hirst is the leading artist of the group that has been dubbed 'Young British Artists' (or YBAs). He was a dominant figure of the art scene in Britain during the 1990s. Death is a central theme in his work. He is best known for his Natural History series, in which dead animals (such as a shark, a sheep or a cow) are preserved, sometimes cut-up, in formaldehyde. His iconic work is 'The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind Of Someone Living', an 18ft tiger shark in formaldehyde in a vitrine. Its sale in 2004 made him the second most expensive living artist (after Jasper Johns). Hirst's name is emblazoned on this artwork by Squire entitled 'Strange Feeling':
The influence of such Hirst works as 'The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living' (1991), 'Away from the Flock' (1994) and 'Mother and Child Divided' on Squire's artwork is strongly evident:
John Squire's second solo album, Marshall's House (and one b-side, Nighthawks) are based on the works of Edward Hopper, an artist best known for his works from the Depression-era America. Gas (1940) and Nighthawks (1942) stand as exemplary glimpses into the starkness and loneliness of America as she strove towards modernisation.
With Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns was one of the leading figures in the American Pop Art movement, and he became particularly well known for his use of the imagery of targets, flags, maps and other instantly recognizable subjects.
John Squire is using a combination of a Jackson Pollock technique and a Jasper Johns concept on the Waterfall artwork. In a Q issue ('The 100 Best Covers Of All Time', in which the Roses' debut features) from 2001, Squire says of the Waterfall artwork: "It is a little bit Jasper Johns...I was aware of that. I liked him as well." The Waterfall artwork shows the American flag encroaching upon the Union Jack, symbolic, according to Squire, of the dominating influence that the U.S. has over British culture. The Johns painting 'Three Flags' (1958) shows one American flag overshadowed by the next:
The Spike Island artwork, I propose, borrows heavily from Johns in the style of lettering. See, for example, the following two paintings, entitled 'Numbers' and 'Zero To Nine' (1958):
The Second Coming artwork contains a 'target' (above-right of the '3'), a feature of several Jasper Johns' works. For example 'Target' (1974):
The introduction of a Melody Maker June 1990 feature cites Jackson Pollock and Wassily Kandinsky as John Squire's two significant artistic influences at school:
Paul Klee is regarded as a major theoretician among modern artists. In much of his work, he aspired to achieve a naive and untutored quality, but his art is also among the most cerebral of any of the 20th century. Klee’s wide-ranging intellectual curiosity is evident in an art profoundly informed by structures and themes drawn from music, nature and poetry.
In 1995, John Squire was asked to create artworks for the Warchild 'Help' LP and EP respectively (The Stone Roses contributed a live-in-the-studio version of Love Spreads to the LP). The 'Help' LP artwork is similar to Klee's 'Farbtafel':
Fernand Léger was a French painter, sculptor, and filmmaker. As one of the first painters to take as his idiom the imagery of the machine age, and to make the objects of consumer society the subjects of his paintings, Léger has been called a progenitor of Pop Art.
John Squire's 'Léger City Butterfly' (2001) is an homage to the abstract expressionist work of Léger.
An Italian sculptor, painter, draughtsman and architect, Michelangelo is a central figure in the history of art. One of the chief creators of the Roman High Renaissance, the elaborate exequies held in Florence after Michelangelo’s death celebrated him as the greatest practitioner of the three visual arts of sculpture, painting and architecture and as a respected poet. As a poet and a student of anatomy, he is often cited as an example of the 'universal genius' supposedly typical of the period. His professional career lasted over 70 years, during which he participated in, and often stimulated, great stylistic changes.
Michelangelo's David, a masterpiece of Renaissance sculpture, is on the front cover of The Stone Roses' Ten Storey Love Song single. The sculpture has become regarded as a symbol both of strength and youthful human beauty. The 5.17 metres high (17 ft) marble statue portrays the Biblical King David at the moment that he decides to do battle with Goliath and came to symbolise the Florentine Republic, an independent city state threatened on all sides by more powerful rival states. This interpretation was also encouraged by the original setting of the sculpture outside the Palazzo della Signoria, the seat of civic government in Florence.
David, 1501 - 1504 (Carrara Marble, height 517 cm, Galleria dell'Accademia)
Picasso dominated 20th-century European art and was central in the development of the image of the modern artist. Episodes of his life were recounted in intimate detail, his comments on art were published and his working methods recorded on film. Painting was his principal medium, but his sculptures, prints, theatre designs and ceramics all had an impact on their respective disciplines.
The Stone Roses song Guernica is named after Picasso's 1937 mural, which is among Squire's favourite ever artworks (see the quote under the Jackson Pollock entry above).
Guernica, 1937 (oil on canvas, 349 x 776 cm, Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid)
A John Squire artwork from 2005, 'Man With a Bloody Nose', has strong traces of Picasso's style.
Jackson Pollock was the youngest of five sons and in his first 16 years moved 9 times with his family between California and Arizona. In 1928 he settled in Los Angeles, where he studied at the Manual Arts High School under the painter and illustrator Frederick John de St Vrain Schwankowsky. He learnt the rudiments of art and learnt about European and Mexican modernism. His teacher introduced him to the doctrines of Theosophy and of its former messiah, Jiddu Krishnamurti, which prepared Pollock, who had been brought up as an agnostic, to be open to contemporary spiritual concepts: the unconscious, Carl Gustav Jung’s analytical psychology and Surrealist automatism. As the artists of postwar New York grappled with existential ideas, a new style of painting began to evolve which expressed these preoccupations. Characterized by abstract imagery, loose brushwork, and large, dramatic "gestures", the new style was thought to represent some crucial psychic drama depicting subjective emotions rather than objective reality. The new style soon became known by several different names, including Painterly Abstraction and Action Painting, but today it is best known as Abstract Expressionism, sometimes shortened to AbEx. John Squire is notorious for his pastiche of Jackson Pollock's action painting style, not only on artwork covers, but also most famously on the front cover of the NME in December 1989:
Jackson Pollock's 'Number 5' is directly referenced on Going Down.
Number 5, 1951 ("Elegant Lady", 58 x 55 1/2", 147.3 x 140.9 cm)
Number 1A, 1948 (oil and enamel on canvas, 172.7 x 264.2 cm, The Museum of Modern Art, New York).
The artwork for Second Coming is very much in the style of Robert Rauschenberg, an artist considered, along with Jasper Johns, to be a pivotal figure between Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art. In 1952 Rauschenberg began his series of 'Black Paintings' and 'Red Paintings', in which large, expressionistically brushed areas of color were combined with collage and found objects attached to the canvas. These so-called 'Combine Paintings' ultimately came to include such theretofore un-painterly objects as a stuffed goat and the artist's own bedquilt, breaking down traditional boundaries between painting and sculpture.
Below are the back-cover artwork and accompanying print for the One Love release:
The 'One Love' painting (1990, cellulose and paper, sand and oil on calico, 18" x 18") was used for 'The Complete Stone Roses' (1995) album artwork and the Silvertone/Weinerworld video compilation of the same name, also from 1995:
Compare that to these Sean Scully paintings:
The front cover of the One Love artwork uses Cubist techniques:
The colours for the Love Spreads artwork may have been influenced by this Scully work:
This is an excerpt of Scully in conversation with Eric Davis:
Scully: "I think it is very difficult to decide, to quantify what goes into it. There was a period where people thought a certain shape in relation to the "S" made beauty. The serpentine river in London is based on that principle and you would find this shape occurring in paintings, or people talking about paintings and looking for this shape. I don't believe you can do it like that. I am not sure I believe in "schools" either. I am really an individualist. The question for me is whether or not something moves me and engages me. If I am moved and engaged by something, I find it beautiful. For me the term beautiful is not pejorative, it is always affirmative. If I say I find it very convincing, even though it is ugly, the fact it is done with such authenticity and conviction and it is finally persuasive, it becomes beautiful. In other words, I don't think beauty is simply a question of appearances. It can come out left field and redefine itself. It can be something you've never seen before, or it can be something you think you have seen before, like my work, that presents itself with another life."
Squire interestingly allocating four 'squares' on the front cover of the Second Coming artwork to an 'S' beside the title 'Second Coming'.
Self-Portrait, 1659 (oil on canvas, 84.5 x 66 cm, Andrew W. Mellon Collection)
Rembrandt's name symbolizes a whole period of art history rightfully known as the 'Dutch Golden Age', in which Dutch world power, political influence, science, commerce, and culture — particularly painting — reached their pinnacle. Rembrandt was not only a gifted painter but also an inspired graphic artist: he has probably never been surpassed as an etcher, and he often seems inimitable as a draughtsman. His subjects reflect his manifold talent and interests. He painted, drew and etched portraits, landscapes, figures and animals, but, above all, scenes of biblical and secular history and mythology.
Bibliography:
Berger, John. Ways of seeing (London: Penguin books, 1972).
http://elsap1.unicaen.fr/~manguin/peinture/scully_eng.html
http://www.brown.edu/Administration/News_Bureau/2001-02/01-012.html
http://www.germanexpressionism.com/printgallery/klee/
http://www.jca-online.com/scully.html
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Paul McAuley
http://www.thisisthedaybreak.co.uk
Email: Paul@thisisthedaybreak.co.uk
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