Going for gold

For this month’s column, Suffolk-based Artist, Educator and Presenter Grace Adam, appreciates the colour gold in art across the centuries

If speaking is silver, then listening is gold – Turkish proverb

It is luminous, expensive, sacred and treasured. Gold has been traded, stolen and sculpted for centuries all over the world. It’s fair to say that gold is a bit of a human obsession. In the Bank of England’s vaults sit around 400,000 bars of gold, worth over £200 billion. The Bible describes gold being given to Jesus as a symbol of kingship on earth. The Inca believed gold was the sweat or tears of the sun. Gold is associated with numerous belief systems, often protecting the living and travelling with the dead to the afterlife. Not so in Greek myth; greedy King Midas’s touch turned everything into gold, including the crops in the fields and even his daughter. In China though, its Jade that holds pole position.

In 13th and 14th century Italy, gold was ostentatiously applied to religious art. Shimmering gold leaf imbued stars and saints, halos and mosaics, even ceilings with spirituality. Of course, there was the added bonus of a wealthy patron – sometimes private, but usually the Church looking good. Florence was the epicentre of production, with scores of artisans beating out gold ducts, (coins) to create wafer-thin gold leaf squares to be sold to patrons and painters.

Duccio’s altarpiece was commissioned for Sienna Cathedral in 1308, and the artist took 3 years to deliver his unique double-sided painting. Imagine entering the cathedral and seeing this huge visual story, with its gold panels glistening in the candlelight. Not only would you have been wowed by its richness, but you would also have noticed slightly more human-looking people in it; people more like you. The Renaissance, with its focus on naturalism, was around the corner. Duccio was ahead of the curve.

Skip forward 6 centuries to 1959 and French conceptual artist Yves Klein explored ritual, value and owning art, with gold. Klein sold empty space – a Zone of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility to collectors in exchange for gold. They got a receipt. For non-transferable ownership of this bit of empty space, an elaborate ritual was performed with Klein burning the receipt and throwing half the gold into the Seine. Alternatively, the collectors could elect not to complete the ritual and just hang on to the receipt.

One receipt recently sold for $1m. A very profitable early NFT (Non-Fungible Token), Klein kept the other half of the gold and incorporated it into a series of pieces called Monogolds. He was fascinated by the human love affair with gold, and the millennia-long attempt to turn base metals into gold: Alchemy.

Turner depicts the sun sinking below a watery horizon, with barely visible white mountains on the right. He pushed loose buttery paint around his canvases to create magic. Found in his studio after his death, it’s probably not finished, and wasn’t formally unveiled for almost 100 years. You can see why fans include Monet, Rothko and Tracey Emin.

A precocious Turner got off to a flying (more conventional) start in his career. When late paintings like this started to emerge from his studio, some critics pedalled the narrative that the painter was now senile. How could he be anything other than ‘mad’ to produce these weird ill-defined pictures? These brilliant, almost abstract paintings were the result of rigour, commitment and energy. Getting golden light out of oil paint is alchemy.

Visit Grace Adam Artist and The Art Channel.

Featured image of Grace Adam – supplied