8 THE BEATEN PATH
9 THE BEATEN PATH
Dylan’s contributions to worldwide culture have been recognised and honoured with many awards. He received an honorary doctorate of music from Princeton University, New Jersey, in 1970 and another from the University of St Andrew’s, Scotland, in 2004. President Clinton presented him with a Kennedy Center Honor at the White House in 1997, recognising the excellence of his contribution to American culture. President Obama subsequently granted him America’s 2009 National Medal of Arts and, in 2012, the highest civilian honour in the United States, the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 2013, he received France’s prestigious appointment of Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur. Dylan’s song ‘Things Have Changed’ from the film Wonder Boys (2000) garnered a 2001 Academy Award. In 2007 he received Spain’s Prince of Asturias Award for the Arts and in 2008 a Special Citation Pulitzer Prize ‘for his profound impact on popular music and American culture, marked by lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power’. In addition to winning 11 Grammy Awards, Dylan has achieved six entries in the Grammy Hall of Fame, which honours recordings of ‘qualitative or historical significance’ at least 25 years old. His 37th studio album, Fallen Angels , was released to critical acclaim in May 2016, entering the charts in the top 10 in 12 countries. Dylan dates the origins of his work as a visual artist to the early 1960s. In his 2004 memoir, Chronicles , he writes: ‘What would I draw? Well, I guess I would start with whatever was at hand. I sat at the table, took out a pencil and paper and drew the typewriter, a crucifix, a rose, pencils, knives and pins, empty cigarette boxes. I'd lose track of time completely.... Not that I thought I was any great drawer, but I did feel like I was putting an orderliness to the chaos around.’ A few drawings reached the public’s gaze through various means, including the cover of The Band’s 1968 debut album, Music from Big Pink . A book of 92 drawings titled Drawn Blank followed in 1994, and exhibitions of reworked versions of these images were mounted at the Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz in Germany in 2007 and the following year at Halcyon Gallery in London. The original Drawn Blank sketches date from 1989 to 1992. Dylan explains that he drew them as a way of relaxing and refocusing his mind while touring America, Europe and Asia. When approached by the Kunstsammlungen wanting to exhibit them, he returned to the images and reworked them. A single picture would emerge as a set, coloured sometimes delicately, sometimes brilliantly, with different elements emphasised. ‘He riffs with color across the same simple black-and-white sketches the way he plays songs in concert, sometimes making subtle changes, other times brutally overhauling them’, commented Marisha Pessl in The New York Times [‘When I Paint My Masterpiece’, 1 June 2008]. ‘His brushstrokes are like his voice: straightforward, rough, occasionally fragile, but always intent on illustrating the treads of human experience.’ Two important exhibitions of The Drawn Blank Series took place in 2010 at the Accademia Albertina delle Belle Arti in Turin, Italy, and at the Asahi Exhibition Centre in Roppongi, Tokyo. At Halcyon Gallery, the
works were exhibited both as limited edition graphics and, in Bob Dylan on Canvas , as the artist’s first-ever paintings in acrylics. As this fresh medium opened up to Dylan during an intensive burst of artistic activity, he completed a significant new group of some 50 paintings, The Brazil Series . In the subsequent exhibition at Copenhagen’s Statens Museum for Kunst from September 2010 to April 2011, visitors saw how Dylan had developed preliminary studies into richly coloured depictions of countryside, cityscape and, above all, characters such as musicians, card players and troublemakers. A further artistic landmark was Dylan’s first New York show in autumn 2011 at the Gagosian Gallery, where The Asia Series was exhibited. These 18 works reflect on his time spent in China, Japan, Vietnam and Korea but also quote from art history, including works by Édouard Manet, Paul Gauguin and Henri Cartier- Bresson. In November 2012, the artist’s controversial Revisionist Art Series opened in New York with large silkscreen works that satirised lofty public figures and celebrities within the format of famous magazine covers, re-contextualizing the familiar graphics and iconography with vivacity and a maverick sense of the absurd. In February 2013 the Palazzo Reale in Milan exhibited Dylan’s New Orleans Series, a group of 23 oil on canvas works paying homage to the birthplace of blues and jazz in atmospheric 1940s scenes and portrayals of decadent, virtually monochrome nudes. ‘Night can swallow you up, yet none of it touches you’, says Dylan in Chronicles . ‘There’s something obscenely joyful behind every door, either that or somebody crying with their head in their hands.… The city is one very long poem.’ Dylan's first museum show in London, Face Value , opened at the National Portrait Gallery in August 2013. An exhibition of 12 pastel portraits depicting enigmatic characters conflated from memory, imagination and real life, with such names as Nina Felix and Red Flanagan, it represented a break in tradition for this august institution, which generally admits only portraiture of well-known figures in British public life. Three months later, Dylan’s fascination with metalwork came into the public arena at Halcyon Gallery’s exhibition Mood Swings , presenting his first collection of iron sculptures. Works of threshold and transition, they bar the path but simultaneously allow people to see through to the scenery beyond. During 2014, Dylan exhibited again with Halcyon Gallery, showing Revisionist Art and Side Tracks , a running series of over 300 prints, each uniquely hand-embellished by the artist, revisiting the evocative Train Tracks image from The Drawn Blank Series . The Face Value exhibition toured, first to Copenhagen’s Museum of National History in 2014, then to the Butler Museum in Youngstown, Ohio, in 2015, followed by Kent State University Museum, Ohio, and Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz in 2016. The New Orleans Series travelled to the city that originally inspired this suite of paintings for a two-part show.
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