Brazen Images

The latest Royal Academy show goes by the very simple name of “Bronze”.   A pedant might argue that this slightly infringes the Trades Descriptions Act as careful examination of the catalogue shows that some of the items in the exhibition are, in fact, brass or some other copper alloy rather than bronze in the proper metallurgical sense of the term.    I suppose a more accurate name might be “150-odd beautiful objects that happen to be made of bronze and other copper alloys”, but that would hardly have pulled in the crowds.

As the above suggests, this is very much a high level survey based on the artistic use of a specific material- bronze and related copper alloys- across cultures and covering some four thousand years.   Apparently it had to be put together in a hurry when a planned show majoring on the role of Syria as an artistic and cultural crossroads was pulled as the first shots of that country’s descent into chaos were heard.   This rather fraught genesis isn’t obvious; the exhibition has managed to gather top quality material from museums and galleries from all round the world (Italian collections have been particularly generous in this regard, as has the National Gallery in Lagos).   

The show is laid out by theme rather than, say, chronologically or by region.  The themes, however, are very broad and clearly overlap (in the sense that quite a few items could easily figure in more than one gallery)- “Animals”, “Figures”, “Objects”, “Gods” and so on.   This creates some nice juxtapositions across the centuries and cultures, particularly in the animal section, with slightly dopey looking lions (or are they leopards?) from Benin looking hungrily across the gallery at Giambologna’s strutting turkey while Louise Bourgeois’ giant spider crawls malevolently up the wall.   A strange attenuated figure from an Etruscan tomb stands alongside a similarly elongated Giacometti created some 2500 years later.   The wonderfully expressive portrait of King Seuthes III of Thrace dating from around 300BC (see above) looks slightly wistfully at Georg Petel’s impossibly pompous and triumphalist depiction of Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden- in turn flanked by a much smaller bust of Charles I, looking edgy and harassed.

This approach could also be seen as a clever way of making artistic bronze work look a little more universal in human cultural expression than it actually is.   Obviously the early Americas and Oceania are out of the frame as neither region went in for bronze casting.   All the items from Sub-Saharan Africa come from a limited range of West African cultures in the Niger Delta.  A strong focus on figurative works (for which bronze is indeed a wonderful medium) leads to the Islamic world being somewhat under-represented.    Areas not blessed with the right mix of mineral deposits or isolated from trade routes which would have enabled them to overcome this problem are obviously also excluded.    One can play endless “spot the gaps” games even within regions which are represented.  Coverage of China is oddly patchy (some items from the very earliest semi-mythical Shang dynasty back around 1500 BC, a few very Indian-inflected Buddhist items linked to Tantric Tibetan cults in vogue under the Ming dynasty around 1500 CE and not much from the intervening three thousand years).   The Egypt of the Pharaohs comes down to one cat.    In the end however one has to take the selection at face value; this isn’t really an encyclopaedic view of every way bronze has ever been used for artistic purposes anywhere on Earth but rather a very general overview of certain artistic uses of the material.

Indeed I wonder if the show might have held together even better if it had explicitly focused on figural depictions; the “Objects” section is the most random element in what could be seen as a pretty random show.   Its primary focus (particularly for pre-modern cultures) seems to be mostly on items which had some kind of ritual significance- for instance the famous Battersea shield fished out of the Thames in 19^th century is now assumed to be a ritual deposit as there is no evidence it ever saw combat.  On that basis I’d have liked to see a few classic European Bronze Age socket axe heads to play off the ancient Chinese axes included in the show- the argument now seems to be that many of the ones which have been found in archaeological contexts may have been as much ritual items used to display power as practical tools for cutting down trees or weapons for use in combat.  

To its credit the exhibition devotes one gallery to illustrating the techniques of bronze making and bronze casting.  This brings home just what a mysterious and even magical process this can be even in contemporary environments; no wonder many cultures regarded metal workers as special people with closer links to the gods than the average mortal.  No doubt metal workers were not backward in cultivating this aura by ensuring that their trade secrets were well kept- and no doubt they prayed especially hard to their gods when doing something complex in case it went horribly wrong and damaged their reputation.   The show also encourages a degree of engagement with the tactile aspects of bronze by providing replicas of some of the smaller items on display for the visitor to handle.  Sadly one isn’t encouraged to take this approach with the main exhibits even though it’s clear that some of them must be used to this treatment- the wonderful 17^th century “Piglet” (in fact a massive boar) from Florence shows clear signs of regular stroking of his snout (as well as other parts of his anatomy….).   Bronze is such a wonderfully tactile material that this is a real loss.

It’s almost impossible to produce a very structured review of this kind of show.  I’m going to post a number of favourite pieces on my Flickr site (which is probably how most readers get to this blob anyway) so I’ll simply pursue one aspect which struck me when looking at the show.

Bronze is both very durable and terribly vulnerable as a material.   The durability is self-evident when in the presence of items four thousand years old looking almost as they must have done when they first emerged from the caster’s mould.  The vulnerability is more complex and, in a slightly metaphysical sense, relates to all the items which could have been in the show if they hadn’t been lost in the intervening years.  Bronze is a valuable material, not least because, while copper is reasonably common, tin deposits are much rarer and more scattered across the earth’s crust (indeed it’s always intrigued me to speculate on just how the whole concept of making bronze ever got going, especially in places where the tin had to come from far away lands like Cornwall or Central Asia).  The most convenient source of bronze in any culture which has become accustomed to its use is going to be existing bronze objects- which means that items may be melted down and reused several times over. 

It’s clear that bronze as a material has traditionally had a particularly close association with power and authority (secular and spiritual), no doubt because of its relative rarity as a material and the artist’s need for a certain amount of infrastructure to undertake work on any scale in the medium.  This close association with power and authority can have ambiguous consequences here- the great and powerful may be able to demand that they are memorialised in bronze but their statues are vulnerable to regime change and bronze can be a great deal easier to break up and dispose of than, say, marble (Eisenstein played up that image when mythologizing the 1917 Revolution on film, echoed, perhaps unconsciously, by the Hungarians in 1956 when they made short work of the massive bronze statue of Stalin in Budapest).   From the 15^th to the early 19^th century bronze objects were especially vulnerable because bronze guns were for many years the best artillery pieces available and statues or church bells might be melted down for conversion into armaments in times of crisis.    Other factors could place bronze monuments in danger.  The exhibition includes a number of exquisite mourning figures (“pleurants” in the jargon) from the tomb of Isabella of Bourbon, second wife of Charles the Bold, the last Valois Duke of Burgundy.  These originally decorated her tomb in Antwerp Cathedral but were looted when the tomb was smashed up by Protestant Iconoclasts in a surge of image breaking in 1566.   They (or at least some of them) appear to have survived, perhaps because they weren’t explicitly devotional images, but were stolen and re-emerged many years later in the modern Netherlands.   It’s not clear, however, just how many items may have vanished into the furnaces of gun founders or other utilitarian users of bronze in that crisis- itself just one of many across the bronze-using world which might see yesterday’s cherished item lined up for conversion into something else

Losses to the furnace can however be compensated elsewhere, as the (admittedly fragmentary) statue which opens the exhibition shows (see below).  It’s a dancing maenad (a follower of Dionysus, god of wine).   This is Greek in origin and dates from perhaps some time in the 4^th century BC and was found by Sicilian fishermen under the sea as recently as 1989.   It was salvaged, subjected to conservation measures and now lives in a museum in a small Sicilian town.   Evidently the surviving piece was just part of a much bigger ensemble (which must have been quite something).   When it went into the sea and under what circumstances are unclear.  It might have been on a ship which went down off the Sicilian coast- or it may have been thrown overboard in a storm to lighten ship in a storm.   It may have gone into the sea not long after it was cast or it may have been just one part of the insatiable Roman appetite for Greek art which saw massive displacements and relocations of pieces in the years after 150 BC.    It is just part of an ongoing situation in which advances in marine archaeology are allowing the recovery of lots of items lost in transit between the Greek speaking world of the Eastern Mediterranean, with a corresponding rewriting of our knowledge of classical Greek art.

There is much more that could be said- every item has a fascinating story of its own.    I won't even draw too much attention to the presence of one of the iconic artefacts of Italain Futurism in the show.... Perhaps the best thing any readers can do if they’re anywhere near London is try to see this exhibition before it closes in early December.

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Useless Machines, Milk Dresses and Selective Memories

As foreshadowed at the Italian Abstraction show, the latest Estorick special exhibition focuses on Bruno Munari- or rather the early years of a long and productive artistic career which saw him end up as something of a Grand Old Man of Italian art.   These early years, however, are ones which he appears to have been rather uncomfortable with; asked about his artistic origins, he would admit to having had a Futurist past and change the subject.   The present show probes that past, presenting some of the reasons why he might have been evasive about it but without drawing the threads entirely together.

Munari was the kind of artist who dabbled in just about every medium imaginable- painting, sculpture, photography, graphic design all feature in the show. Looking at his career as a whole, he’s probably now best remembered for experimental work in “alternative” media- light sculptures using slide projectors, video art and so on.   For obvious technological reasons he was only just beginning to go down this road during the period covered by the Estorick show, which stops around 1950, though some early versions of his experimentation are on show.   The most “alternative” items on show there are a number of his “Useless Machines”.  These take a variety of shapes and forms and not all of them are advertised as being entirely useless- though their suggested uses are whimsical, to say the least (there’s a design for a machine to wag the tail of a lazy dog….).   Some of them look vaguely as if they ought to have a use if one could work out what it might be- they include bits and pieces taken from “real” machines put together in rather complex random ways, for instance.   Some, like the one at the top of the post, are simply pure shapes assembled from bits and pieces of wood, scrap aluminium and other waste material like pumpkin rinds.  Others again hang from the ceiling and throw shifting shadows as they twist round; indeed the show gives his most sophisticated creation in that mode, made of metal lattice work and called “Concave Convex” a gallery to itself to allow full appreciation of the complex light and shadow effects it creates (though for the record this isn’t the original piece, which came back from a show in Paris in 1946 in pieces having been disassembled by the gallery staff, who had no understanding of what they were dealing with).   This aspect of his artistic production obviously that being undertaken in the US by Calder- indeed Munari created his first “mobile” a few years before Calder’s better known “invention” of the form.  

How does this fit with Futurism?   Munari could hardly deny his links to that movement, at least in its Second Wave.  He’d left his home in the Po delta just south of Venice in the late 1920’s (when he was still under twenty years old) to go to  Milan, the capital of Futurism (though Soffici might have argued that Florence was co-capital….).  He rapidly gained access to Futurist circles and most of his exhibiting career in the 1930’s was undertaken in that ambit.   F T Marinetti picked up on his promise and clearly regarded him as one of the most talented figures amongst the Second Wave; they collaborated on a variety of projects, one of which I’ll talk about later.  Whether Munari found it altogether easy to sustain the obligatory attitude of unconditional loyalty to the Great Man is left unclear…..

It’s certainly possible to read Munari’s work from this period as constituting a very subtle critique of Futurism.   His paintings suggest that he found pure abstraction more appealing than Futurism’s sometimes slightly frantic attempts to render rapid movement in an inherently static medium like paint (I’m afraid my blind spot with regard to pure abstraction makes it rather hard for me to say much about this aspect of his work).  Some of his works look like slightly satirical appropriations of earlier Futurism themes.  The “Useless machines” can easily be interpreted as a critique of Futurism’s obsessive enthusiasm for the machinery-dominated modern age- Munari justified their existence as affording a moment of relaxation from daily engagement with useful ones.   On the other hand, if (heretically) you take a slightly wider view of Futurism than that defined by Marinetti’s own thunderings, one finds a manifesto for Futurist sculpture produced by Balla and Depero which called, amongst other things, for an art based on assembling the detritus of the modern age in unexpected ways.   Futurism was always in practice a rather broader church than Marinetti’s ex cathedra pronouncements might imply and one could find legitimisation in its canonical literature for a rather wider range of approaches to a given problem or art form than is sometimes allowed.

In other areas Munari was very much in tune with the obsessions of Second Wave Futurism.  Aircraft swoop and roar through his art.   He fantasised about human/machine combinations in sometimes disturbing forms- woman blends into aircraft, a misunderstood poet appears to be about to get a brain transplant with an aero engine.   It would be hard to say that he had really turned his back on Futurism.

The sometimes violent imagery in these works gives a clue as to why Munari might not have been so comfortable with his Futurist past.   This is reinforced by a look at the content of some of his graphic design work.  Obviously a lot of this work was more or less commercial in focus.   Like other Futurist artists, Munari produced advertising material for a range of companies- Campari appears to have commissioned a lot of advertising in overtly “modernist” styles in the 1920’s and 30’s, for instance.   In the Italy of the 1930’s, however, advertising work pretty rapidly also led to commissions from state and para-state enterprises.    

In this context Munari appears to have done quite a bit of work for SNIA Viscosa, the state artificial textile company.   The company had come into existence as part of the Fascist regime’s obsession with “autarchy”- trying to minimise the Italian economy’s reliance on imported products and raw materials as far as possible.  This push was strengthened by the League of Nations sanctions imposed on Italy after the invasion of Ethiopia; widely derided at the time and subsequently as ineffective (not least because the Soviet Union continued to sell oil to Italy, something rarely mentioned in the history books), they nevertheless imposed enough pain on the regime to prompt frantic efforts to cut back on cotton and wool imports.  One approach was to look to “non-traditional” animals and organic fibres (rabbit wool had a brief moment of glory; as did forms of hemp and even raffia).   A more high-tech response lay in developing artificial fibres. One of the most important of these was “Lanital”, which was derived from cow’s milk.   Not everybody was impressed with the product; garments made from it didn’t suffer from moths but it was almost impossible to iron without the fibre disintegrating (like ironing mozzarella cheese, according to those who tried to do it).   Clearly it was going to be a hard sell to a fashion-conscious nation.  Marinetti and Munari therefore were paid to collaborate on a rather strange project- a piece of Marinetti parole in liberta poetry called “The story of the milk dress” produced in a presentation booklet designed and illustrated by Munari.   The poetry is typical Marinetti, full of invented compound words and onomatopoeia, tracing the path from milk pail to loom and generally glorifying the new high technology world in which a cow’s udders give out cloth which enables Italy to resist a hostile world.   Munari’s illustrations and presentation are equally modernist and inventive, using photo montage, cellophane pages and other modern techniques to underline the message that Lanital was seriously modern and cutting edge.   Whether any of this persuaded the target market (Italian women of the urban upper and middle classes) to pop out and buy a Lanital frock is less clear.

This could be seen as pretty harmless propaganda work, as could Munari’s advertisement design for a guide book which included the then-Italian colony of Libya along with Southern Italy, Sicily and Sardinia.   Other pieces must have looked a good deal more uncomfortable after 1945; montaged aero engines labelled as “The Power of the Empire”, material published in the aviation propaganda magazine “Ala d’Italia” (“Wings of Italy”) and above all a fantasy depiction of New York being bombed which dated from 1942.  Even granted that the aircraft depicted performing this attack are massively in advance of anything on the roster of the Luftwaffe, let alone the Regia Aeronautica, there’s hint of relish in the depiction which leaves the viewer asking a lot of questions about Munari’s politics.  These questions become more insistent with a careful reading of the chronology of his career supplied with the show, which makes reference to work exhibited in Milan in 1944.   At this date Milan was nominally under the control of the “Italian Social Republic” (RSI), the regime run by Fascist hard liners set up after the Germans sprang Mussolini from prison.   Its main function was to put an Italian face on an increasingly brutal German occupation- and assist in the violent suppression of resistance, which its militias did with considerable zeal.   Taking part in a show which could only have been staged within the context of the corporatist structures imposed on artistic creation by the RSI could easily be read as implying at least some degree of identification with the regime.   This would not be something to boast about after 1945.

The exhibition simply slides round these issues.  They appear a bit more clearly in the catalogue, though the slightly frenetic denial by one of the contributors of the very possibility that Munari could ever have been a Fascist sets the alarm bells ringing.  The show’s curator, Miroslava Hajek (a long-time collaborator with Munari in his later years and clearly a personal friend), takes a subtly different tack.  She argues that the links between Second Wave Futurism and Fascism have been exaggerated (not least because of the residual anti-German tone of a movement which had propagandised long and loud for Italian participation in the First World War against Germany) and that Marinetti himself was at one remove from the regime by the 1930’s.   There’s some reality to this view.  By the time Munari joined up with Futurism it was increasingly clear that it was never going to be allowed the dominant role in Italian artistic life which it once aspired to and was rather less in favour than it had been in the days when Margherita Sarfatti used her position as Mussolini’s mistress to promote her friends.  On the other hand it was hardly a dissident coterie, as the SNIA Viscosa commission suggests.  

As far as the movement’s figurehead was concerned, Marinetti was far too much of an egotist ever to fit comfortably into the role of an obedient follower of anybody.  He had himself briefly entertained political ambitions, trying to turn Futurism into a political movement in the immediate post-First World war period; when this flopped he’d folded the Futurist Party into the very earliest version of the Fascists when they still looked like a movement of the dissident left.  Marinetti appears to have had a complex relationship with Mussolini and regretted the compromises with traditional power elites which the Duce had been obliged to make on the way to power.    No doubt he mumbled faintly disrespectful comments from time to time.  Again, though, none of this made him any sort of dissident.  He could be relied upon to write and speak in favour of regime policies (albeit putting a Futurist spin on them).  He was even trotted out to harangue soldiers setting off for Ethiopia on the high mission they were going to fulfil (Heaven knows what peasant conscripts from the deep south or the Po valley made of him…..) and went in the train of the Italian army which fought in Russia alongside the Germans in 1941.   The RSI gave him a state funeral when he died in 1944.  Awkwardly for Munari, perhaps, Marinetti was probably more in tune with the rhetoric of that regime (which cast itself as the reincarnation of the original, republican, anti-clerical, anti-capitalist, socially radical movement of the very early 1920’s) than he had ever been with that of Fascism in its 1930’s Imperial pomp.  Trying to make Marinetti into some kind of anti-Fascist dissident has been a minor academic cottage industry for some time; I simply don’t think it works.

Hayek’s really revealing comment is that she felt Munari related well to her because they had both grown up under dictatorships (she was born in then-Communist Czechoslovakia).   I take that to mean that he felt she would understand the complexities of life,  the insecurity and lack of trust, the grey zones between total commitment and outright dissent and the messy inglorious compromises involved in staying alive and artistically productive- and would perhaps be less judgmental in consequence.  My guess is that Munari, who seems to have been a man of great charm and gentleness, was not particularly interested in politics as such but was willing to go with the flow, whatever that flow might be, as long as it enabled him to create the art he wanted to create (he was perhaps lucky that the dictatorship he grew up with wasn’t interested in promoting an obligatory style of art…).   He was born a bit early to be caught up in the Party’s youth movements and I doubt if he was ever a true believer in the Burri mould but (like an awful lot of Italians?) he probably retained a degree of loyalty to the regime quite a bit longer than it became comfortable to admit after 1945.  Later he preferred to forget or minimise the more awkward bits of his past- like his association with Marinetti.   It’s all very human and I’m not overly inclined to sit in judgment on the man.

Legacy transferred

In the end I decided to shift it all manually- tedious, but probably at least as easy as using the on-line file transfer system, at least for an IT ignoramus like me.  I don't know if the pictures will survive in the long term but that's secondary as I imagine most visitors are likely to come in via my Flickr account anyway.

Legacy 23-Julietta

Accordion Dreams

Oct 11, '12 6:20 AM for everyone

There can’t be all that many opera productions in which a giant accordion is a major part of the scenery; even in an age of self-consciously strange and “clever” staging it suggests that there’s something a bit odd about the piece.   The ENO’s recent production of Bohuslav Martinu’s “Julietta” makes considerable use of the oversized instrument and it is indeed a distinctly strange opera.

It’s based on a play “Julietta ou le Clef des Songes” (“Julietta or the Key of Dreams”) written by the French Surrealist Georges Neveux in the late 1920’s and first stages in 1930..  The process by which Martinu came to create the opera has its own surreal side.  Neveux had offered the option of adapting the play for the musical stage to none other than Kurt Weill during the latter’s Paris period.   Martinu then write to Neveux along the lines of “I know you’ve offered the rights elsewhere but I just happen to have done an arrangement of the first act myself- please come to my place and hear it”.  Neveux went to Martinu’s apartment in the south of Paris near Parc Montsouris (territory I used to know very well myself back in the distant days when I lived in Paris) ready to give him the brush off but was so taken by what he heard that he asked his lawyers to get him out of the Weill contract.  Or so, at least, Neveux subsequently claimed; I wonder if he was being a bit disingenuous to cover up some rather unethical behaviour on his part (especially as it appears that another musical adaptation of the play had been made by the time Martinu picked up on it) .   One also wonders what Weill would have made of the play- admittedly by this time he was a bit past the jazz band and agitprop world of his collaborations with Brecht and heading towards his Hollywood period but his sound world is rather different from that of Martinu.   Martinu did his own adaptation of the play to translate it into his native Czech for a 1938 premiere in Prague; as I’ve never seen the original play I’m not sure how far he may have tinkered with the storyline for dramatic effect.   Since Neveux allowed Martinu to adapt one of his later plays for the operatic stage, however, he can’t have been that unhappy.

The plot of the opera isn’t that easy to summarise.   Michel, a slightly weedy bookseller from Paris, turns up in an unnamed seaside town.  Three years previously, on an earlier visit, he had heard the voice of a girl singing through an open window and become so obsessed with the memory that he had come back to find her.   The problem is that all the inhabitants of the town are amnesiacs, unable to hold memories for more than a few minutes.  Playing an accordion brings memories back for some, but in fragmentary form.   Michel is briefly made mayor because he can recall his earliest childhood memory.   The postman delivers three year old letters; a few minutes before he was a police detective.  Fortune tellers predict the past.   Michel encounters his love object Julietta and they agree to meet in the woods- rather surprisingly she actually turns up.   When she does, she acts as if they’ve been a couple for years.   A memory salesman tries to sell them the holiday snaps and souvenirs of a past holiday in Spain- Michel rejects them in favour of his “true” memories, only to find that Julietta has a very different “memory” of their first encounter and one which shows him in a less than favourable light.  He loses his temper and shoots her- or does he, because there’s no body to be found?   He finally boards a ship leaving the town.   The final act in the Central Office of Dreams, where it emerges that the first two acts were all a dream which Michel doesn’t want to abandon even though it becomes increasingly clear from the dreams being issued to other clients that Julietta is the common dream woman for them all.   He wants to go back into his dream to find her; the bureaucrats want him off the premises by closing time.   Eventually he is hustled out- but he still hears her voice and the opera ends more or less where it began, with Michel arriving in the town again and looking for a hotel which no longer exists, if it ever did.

Being a Surrealist obviously means you don’t have to worry too much about logical consistency.   The precise contours of the mass amnesia in the town seem to shift around from character to character and episode to episode- Julietta seems to have two parallel memory tracks running at once when she meets Michel, for instance, with the unfavourable one activated when he doesn’t collude in the memories she wants to have.   The Central Office of Dreams doesn’t seem to cater for female customers (at least none turn up to request a dream during the scene) and surely the Office can never close as people sleeping in non-European time zones have as much right to a dream as the French.   The precise mechanics of the ending are a bit odd- Michel is bundled out of the Office on the argument that if he stays there after closing time he’ll never get out of the world of dreams but he somehow ends up there anyway.

I suppose as I get older I find myself thinking more about memory than I used to do- there’s a lot more of my life covered by it than there used to be.  I’ve always had a reasonably good memory but I know I find it hard sometimes to place things that happened to me in quite the right order or relate them reliably to what else might have been happening in my life at the time.  As it happens, I do a daily diary entry so in principle, if it really matters, I can always try to look things up- assuming I can get somewhere near the right year to start with!  But suppose the external back up is itself highly unreliable?    What happens if someone turns up with photographic evidence that you were on holiday with them when you clearly recall that you weren’t- particularly if the person making the claim is someone you’d very much have liked to be on holiday with (there’s a kind of premonition of Susan Sonntag’s view of photography in the way Neveux constructs the role of the memory seller)?   How far do memories depend on external confirmation by third parties- at one point an elderly couple are greeted by a café owner as old acquaintances even though he is simply making this up to keep them happy?

Given that it is set in “the present”, it’s intriguing and revealing that one topic nobody appears to have any memories of, even in the most fragmentary form, is the First World War, which must have dominated the memories of so many in 1930’s France (and indeed Czechoslovakia).   In retrospect Martinu noted that the opera’s first night more or less coincided with the Anschluss and the slide towards war but doesn’t hint that he saw any direct linkages between the aspect of repression of unbearable memories which may play into the opera and the political context of its creation.

The one place which appears to contain distorted echoes of contemporary events is the Office of Dreams.    This is very much a rule bound bureaucracy –though with a welfare aspect (the indigent are allowed a quota of one dream a week, on Fridays).   There’s a whiff of Kafka about it- appropriately enough for a Czech opera.   There is surely also a reference to the growing importance of state structures in economic and social management, even in countries like France and Czechoslovakia which had not yet succumbed to totalitarian rule.   “Julietta” was written at the point where the theories of Freud and Jung had begun to filter into the consciousness of the artistic and cultural world, blending and overlaying older traditions relating to dream states which attached fixed, often prophetic, meanings to dream events.   These stretched back into classical antiquity and were articulated in books of dream interpretation- one of the most popular of which was known as “The Key of Dreams”.    Neveux’s dream bureaucrats seem to work with aspects of both ancient and modern understandings of dreams- an intriguing approach though one which makes it harder to decide what Neveux’s “message” is, if indeed he has one.

There is a slightly unexpected element of gender bending in the opera too.  Three enigmatic “gentlemen” slip round the edges of the action; in the ENO production they’re dressed to be alter egos of Michel but they’re all sung by women.   Martinu justified this as a way of dealing with a shortage of female roles in the original play but they add to the unreal atmosphere.   More intriguingly, the sailor whom Michel enlists to look for Julietta’s body is first seem in dialogue with one of his crew mates asking for the loan of a dress which the latter possesses; his search fails to find a body but does turn up the shawl which the memory seller had included as part of the Spanish holiday package.  The sailor begs Michel to be allowed to keep it as his colleagues all have lots of stuff and he doesn’t.    On wonders what goes on aboard ship- and whose dream world we are looking into here.

Martinu’s music has a suitably shimmery and dream like tone for much of the time, not undercut by deliberate irony- musically the romantic high point almost exactly in the middle of the opera when Michel and Julietta meet is done absolutely “straight”, without a hint that her response is based on false memory, let alone that she probably doesn’t exits outside Michel’s imagination.   Unsurprisingly the sound world is very similar to late Janacek, with echoes of Ravel and Debussy and D’Indy in the mix.  The ENO production was vocally fine; Peter Hoare manages to combine a distinctly nerdish look with romantic longing and Julia Sporsen is a gorgeous flame haired Julietta whom one can well imagine seducing a passer by with her voice.  The rest of the cast has to double and treble up and does so effectively.   It’s a rather odd opera but this is probably as good a rendition as it’s going to get.

Legacy 22- Lorraine

Quiche, Crosses, Prefabs and a failed King of Poland

Oct 3, '12 6:01 AM for everyone

The sadly customary apology for silence- though if you get here via my Flickr  account you’ll know I’ve been on the road lately.   I won’t write any more about my work-related visit to Cyprus, which I covered over there.   Since then I’ve also had a week’s break in France- in Nancy, historic capital of Lorraine, to be precise.

I suspect the automatic association which the word “Lorraine” evokes for most readers will be “quiche”.   I certainly tucked into my share of that pleasant comestible (properly made with no cheese, I discovered), as well as a wide range of excellent fruit tarts (mirabelle plums are a big local delicacy) but there’s more to the region than food, however excellent.  

Perhaps the next word association might be “Cross of”, which gets one closer to the unusually complex history of this bit of France.    Strictly speaking, the two barred cross ought to be known as the Cross of Anjou as its original heraldic association was with the House of Anjou, a junior line of the medieval French royal family who became titular Kings of Jerusalem years after that title had ceased to mean very much.   Members of the family did however at different times in the 14^th and 15^th centuries actually rule over the south of Italy, Sicily, Hungary (the Angevin cross can still be seen on the flag of Slovakia and in the heraldic arms of the modern Hungarian state as a result), Provence- and Lorraine, where the dynasty managed to retain its autonomy well after the King of France had gobbled up Anjou and Provence.   Its 20^th century association with de Gaulle and the Free French was apparently a pure accident- a Gaullist admiral with Lorraine origins (for somewhere a long way from the sea, Lorraine produced a lot of sailors…) hit upon it as a relatively simple addition to the regular French tricolour flag to differentiate Free French ships from those loyal to the Vichy regime.   De Gaulle (who had no particular Lorraine connections)  and his intellectual supporters latched on to it and played up aspects of the Lorraine past which I’ll say a bit more about later to give it a kind of transcendent French identity (which must puzzle passing Slovaks).

This is more than a little ironic given that Lorraine only became part of France in the late 1760’s, and was a very reluctant addition to the kingdom.   If history’s cards had fallen differently, Lorraine might well have become a rather larger cousin to Luxembourg as an independent duchy perched between France and Germany.  Legally it was part of the Holy Roman Empire- indeed one could almost argue that the Holy Roman Empire was part of Lorraine, as the region’s very name ultimately derives from Lothar, Charlemagne’s grandson and Emperor.   Its problem was that it lay a bit too conveniently at the crossroads of western Europe.  In the 15^th century the Dukes had to fend off attempts by their cousins the Dukes of Burgundy to take over their duchy and link up the northern and southern chunks of their territory- the last Valois Duke of Burgundy was killed in January 1477 while besieging Nancy and the troubled years leading up to the battle help to explain why Nancy is a medieval city with no surviving buildings predating the late 1480’s.   In the next three hundred years the threat came from the west as successive kings of France sought to grab the duchy as part of a drive east towards the Rhine.   The sieges and sacks and years of French occupation in the 17^th century saw off a good deal of the city’s architecture- it is cruelly symbolic that Lorraine’s greatest artist of that era, Jacques Callot, is best known for his horrific depictions of the sheer brutality of war.   The duchy was erased from the map of Europe- and then reinstated thanks to the stubborn determination of its exiled dukes and their role as commanders in the service of the Hapsburg Emperor in Vienna (a Lorraine Duke captured Buda from the Turks in 1686).  

In this context the enemy was clearly French.   There appears to have been a distinct Lorraine patriotism- Callot, though prepared to take commissions from the French king, refused point blank to engrave a picture celebrating the French capture of Nancy in the 1630’s- which even today finds echoes on the captioning and interpretative material in the Lorraine Museum.   The problem for the restored duchy in the early 18^th century wasn’t that the dynasty had lost support among the local elites- it was a matter of political geography.   Lorraine was to all intents and purposes impossible to defend on its west side, which runs pretty well seamlessly into the bare rolling east French plains which stretch to Paris (even today this is an incredibly empty featureless landscape, whose most striking features are massive grain silos which look from a distance like Greek temples on steroids).   To make matters worse, in a pattern familiar in the Holy Roman Empire, the duchy’s political map was a Swiss cheese riddled with enclaves where the duke’s writ didn’t run.  Crucially, three of these (the bishopric lands of Metz, Toul and Verdun) were under French control.  

The long term solution to this issue involved a diplomatic manoeuvre which looks quite bizarre to modern eyes, at least in those parts of the world where there’s a sense that people might actually like a bit of a say in who rules them and where a degree of personal autonomy over marriage is favoured.    In 1723 France faced something of a crisis.   The king, Louis XV was only 13 years old and looked in shaky health (nobody could have foreseen he would live another fifty years).  Every responsible figure in the Versailles court must have shuddered every time he coughed.  He’d come to the throne in 1715 on the death of his great grandfather Louis XIV after a run of deaths which had left him the only heir in the direct line.   If he died without an heir the result was likely to be chaos.  His uncle Philip had had to renounce his rights to the French succession to take over as King of Spain in the final settlement of the War of the Spanish Succession but had never in his heart accepted his exclusion- France and Spain had even fought a slightly farcical war in the late 1710’s when Philip sought to press his claims to act as Regent.   The man who actually ended up as Regent, the Duke of Orleans, was detested by much of the political elite but his family could also advance plausible claims on the throne if Louis died.   The War of the Spanish Succession had devastated Europe for the first decade and a half of the century; a War of the French Succession didn’t bear thinking about.   Louis needed to be married in order to father an heir as soon as possible. 

In essence French diplomats were left placing a rather odd “Situation Vacant” advertisement along the lines of  “Wanted, Princess to become Queen of France.   Must be of royal status and a Roman Catholic.   Candidates must be of child bearing age.  Looks and financial status irrelevant- this is unlikely to be a monogamous relationship but the life style on offer is unparalleled”.  

But for the immediate crisis I don’t suppose Maria Leszczyska, the plain, pious daughter of an impoverished exiled King of Poland would ever have ended up Queen of France.   Her father, Stanislas Leszczynski, came as part of the flitting.   Polish kingship was decidedly odd by normal 18^th century standards.   Kings were elected rather than succeeding on a hereditary basis.  The precise membership of the electorate, however, was vague and electoral Diets were dominated by masses of dirt-poor minor nobles little better off than peasants, full of their status and wide open to bribery and influence from foreign powers.  Inevitably disputed elections were commonplace.   Stanislas had gained the throne as the candidate of Charles XII of Sweden and lost it when his backer was defeated by the Russians in 1709.   He’d scraped by in penurious exile until fortune came knocking on his door.   He moved to France and settled down in a disused royal palace.   Then in 1733 Polish politics took another turn, the throne became vacant and Stanislas had another go at taking over, backed by his son-in-law.   He didn’t do much better second time round.  Though it’s clear he had genuine support in parts of the country, he was bundled off the throne again by the Russians in the War of the Polish Succession.   This time, though, his French links meant that he had to be given a better consolation prize than a German micro-duchy- Louis XV’s honour required it.   Conveniently, the last Medici Grand Duke of Tuscany was clearly not long for this world and had no heirs.   Even more conveniently the ruling Duke of Lorraine had a tenuous hereditary claim to Tuscany.  So a swop was arranged.   Francis of Lorraine went off to take over in Florence (quite a nice trade, some might feel) and Stanislas was appointed Duke of Lorraine on the clear understanding that the duchy would become French when he died.  This was not expected to be a lengthy arrangement; Stanislas was pushing sixty, very overweight and didn’t look in prime health.

He was to rule Lorraine for nearly thirty years.   “Rule” is perhaps a misnomer; the arrangement was that he cast the refulgence of his royal dignity (he was still allowed to call himself King) while the serious work was done by a team of officials loyal to Louis.   In a way this worked really well for Stanislas.  He saw himself as a model Enlightened prince, a patron of arts and sciences and a benefactor to the wider public.   The Lorraine public were inclined to see the nice bits of his rule- the free medical consultations for the poor, the improved education system, the major building programmes with the employment they brought- as personal gifts from him while blaming the nastier bits- the taxes which paid for it all- on his government.  After a shaky start, the local population came to like their rather improbable ruler.  Perhaps it helped that he wasn’t French.

Stanislas certainly made his mark on Nancy.   He rebuilt much of the city centre, creating one of the most magnificent 18^th century squares in Europe, where his statue (erected many years later) now stands.   The buildings have recently been burnished and polished until it glows in the sun, the ornamental ironwork restored and re-gilded to great effect.  It isn’t a bad memorial to a man who failed at his day job.

So why did a region which in the 1770’s was a pretty reluctant part of France come to be seen as a hotbed of French patriotism a hundred years later?    “Seen as” may be the operative term here.  It’s perfectly possible that a lot of this was projection by a limited number of elite Lorrainers- writers like Maurice Barres and Paul Deroulede, artists like Majorelle and Galle involved in the Ecole de Nancy- of their own feelings on a wider population.  Nevertheless the image did matter.   The developing 19^th century patriotic cult of Joan of Arc, a local girl, presumably played a part.  So no doubt did those great mechanisms for turning peasants into Frenchmen- military conscription, compulsory education conducted in “standard” French with a hefty patriotic content, the role of state employment, railway links- though these are usually seen as being at their strongest in the last quarter of the 19^th century.  

The key issue, however, was undoubtedly the partition of Lorraine after France’s crushing defeat in the Franco-Prussian War on 1870-1 which left Nancy as a heavily militarised frontier town waiting for the next war.   The partition was almost an accident, in the sense that it wouldn’t have happened if the French Provisional Government had made peace after the overthrow of Napoleon III.   The new-minted republic, however, was run by men convinced that the very fact of being republican would enable them to repeat the epic victories of the Year 2 of the First Republic.   It wasn’t, and Bismarck was annoyed enough by the additional cost in lives and money imposed by their efforts that he imposed the annexation of the northern part of the region round Metz.   One can still see the effects in the look of the two cities.  Metz has an enormous railway station which looks as if it’s escaped from the “Niebelungenlied” and a late 19^th century “Imperial Quarter” (as it’s now labelled) full of buildings constructed in a historicising Teutonic style inflected at the edges by a whiff of “Jungstil”.   Nancy, its population boosted by wealthy business families who left German annexed Lorraine, has 19^th century suburbs full of villas built and decorated in the Art Nouveau style known as the “Nancy School”- all sinuous lines and forms drawn from the natural environment.  You’ve got to look quite hard at the detail of decoration to spot the nationalistic edge, but it’s there. 

I could go on at length about Art Nouveau in its Nancy version but I have to draw things to a close somewhere.   I suppose a good place is the series of linked shows across the Nancy museum system focused on the work of Jean Prouve.   Prouve is fascinating transitional figure.   His father, Victor, was a leading light in the Ecole de Nancy (as well as in local politics), noted mainly as a graphic designer.   Jean, born just too young to see active service in the First World War, started out as a metalworker in the strongly craft-related traditions of that school and ended up deeply involved in the more machine-based end of modernist architecture designing and supervising the manufacture of prefabricated elements for buildings like the terminal at Orly airport.  He also got into lecturing on design- he was perhaps happier in that mode as he seems to have had a lot of problems in the collaborations he undertook in the 1950’s and 60’s, even losing the right to sign his own designs for a bit.   It could be seen as a symbolic trajectory- especially as his son Claude himself became and architect specialising in steel framed buildings.  

Perhaps the most interesting of the sub-exhibitions was one which looked at the activities of Prouve and his company in the years from the late 1930’s to the early 1950’s- obviously including the period of the Germany Occupation of 1940-4.   This reinstated the pre-1914 frontier (so Metz was annexed directly to the Reich) and put Nancy into a region under even closer German control than, say, Paris- a zone probably being lined up for long term annexation post war.  French sovereignty was very much at a discount though (for instance) a Prefect appointed by the Vichy regime still sat in the office on Place Stanislas.   Raw materials were in desperately short supply as the occupiers snaffled most industrial production.  Prouve’s firm survived by designing and building very basic, wood-based, furniture (particularly for use in schools) and other consumer necessities- his design for a bicycle frame which used as little metal as possible looked remarkably modern.   Presumably his company only stayed in business by participating fully in the various quasi-state bodies set up to manage the penury and taking contracts from the collaborationist state.   I suspect they must have taken at least some from the Germans too, otherwise Prouve wouldn’t have been able to protect his work force from forced labour demands.     He played the paternalistic boss card in ways which chimed nicely with the Vichy regime’s sporadic corporatist tendencies and would have got good marks from the ex-trade unionist collaborationist left (there was one) while also cultivating contacts with a non-Communist resistance grouping.  Indeed he was in good enough odour with the Resistance to be appointed mayor of Nancy briefly in the period immediately after liberation; a nice example of the murky complexities of life during the Occupation.

After the war his company was very much involved in the creation of masses of prefabricated cottages to accommodate populations left homeless by the fighting.   This built on work designing lightweight temporary buildings before the war (the intended target then being the holiday colony market created by the establishment of paid holidays for the workers by the Popular Front government in 1936) but still had to work within an economy of shortages- the example on display in the museum looked pretty wooden, basic and crude by comparison with the prefabs which sprouted on the edge of many British towns and cities at the same time and offered such unexampled luxuries as fridges.   The Prouve cottages do seem to have served their purpose and, as is the way of these things, survived well beyond their intended lifespan.    The experience also made Prouve a “go to” designer when the French state was looking to run large programmes of temporary housing, whether in the Saarland (given specially favourable treatment within the generally very harsh French occupation regime in Germany because the French authorities hoped to build sentiment favourable to long term annexation to France) or in the French colonies.   Few of those schemes got past the prototype stage, even if design elements were to be taken up by later projects for temporary accommodation in refugee and disaster relief contexts.   It was all a long way, conceptually and in terms of materials, from the luxury iron work of the Ecole de Nancy- though still with a footing in the projection of French power and influence.

Legacy 21- Clark Collection French Art

Impressionism from Paris to Massachusetts

Aug 23, '12 5:10 AM for everyone

I believe it’s a rule of thumb for all art galleries that putting “Impressionist” in the title of an exhibition is a good way of boosting the numbers coming through the doors.   While it would be unfair to accuse the Royal Academy of doing this in a fraudulent way in its current hosting of a show of 19^th century French art from the Clark collection now housed in Williamstown Massachusetts- a lot of the art is indeed Impressionist- the lure of the name seemed to be working when I went to have a look at it, with the Sackler galleries a good deal busier than usual.

The exhibition is about half way through a world tour which takes in places like Milan, Montreal, Tokyo and Shanghai as its home base undergoes renovation and upgrade- no doubt the publicity and income will be welcome too.   The works on display don’t represent the totality of the Clark collection, which includes a good deal of art from other periods, but form an important sub-section of it.   This (one or two pieces acquired later from endowment income apart) is very much the product of the enthusiasms, taste (not to mention money) of one individual, Robert Sterling Clark, aided and abetted by his wife Francine.  

Clark was a rich American in Paris.  It’s tempting to see him as a kind of Henry James or Edith Wharton character come to life, though in fact his back story is a bit more complex than the average fictional American of pre-1914 literature.   Obviously he had enough money not to have to worry about vulgar things like work (the family money came from a business connection with the Singer sewing machine company).   By the time he hit Paris, however, he was a man in his thirties and had seen a good deal of the world as a soldier and military engineer- he saw service in China during the Boxer Rebellion and undertook major mapping projects there in the early years of the 20^th century.  He was no wide eyed innocent American naïve abroad.   Nor was he on the make seeking family advantage in Europe- relations with his family were at best tense (they broke down completely in the 1920’s) and he seems to have come to Europe to put an ocean between them and him.   Once settled in Paris he rapidly acquired a French partner- Francine, an actress of part Polish origins, who already had a child by an earlier relationship.  He also began dabbling in the art market, initially because it was the done thing and because he needed to cover the walls of his accommodation rather than from any profound enthusiasm.   Like most neophytes unsure of their taste, he started with Old Masters.  After being burned a couple of times through over-optimistic attributions and over-restored paintings (an experience which left him with an abiding distrust of art historians and other experts- ironic given that the college where his collection now lives specialises in educating such people!) he switched his main focus to contemporary or near-contemporary French art.   He also had a clear sense that Old Masters were becoming poor value for money- he may have been very rich by most normal calculations but he was a millionaire rather than a billionaire and always very careful to balance cost against quality.   How far Francine played a role is unclear, though she was clearly an active partner in collecting (she could even persuade him to pay more for a piece than he originally intended).   Impressionism, and other recent French art, was still relatively cheap in the 1910s even for a purchaser who worked entirely through art dealers- Clark, unlike some slightly earlier American collectors, never appears to have cultivated personal relationships with the artists whose works he collected.

Clark remained in Paris during the First World War, rejoining the US Army when his native land entered the conflict.   He finally got round to marrying Francine in 1919- an action which triggered a final breach with his family, who probably didn’t approve of her and weren’t prepared to make provision for her and her daughter when carving up the family assets.   The couple (who had no children of their own) remained largely Paris based for much of the inter-war period though Clark was careful to ensure that they had a base on the far side of the Atlantic in case of a future European war.   The Great Depression actually worked to his advantage- his inheritance doesn’t appear to have been badly affected and he was able to buy up works from financially embarrassed collectors on both sides of the Atlantic.   With war looming (the couple were in France when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939) they shut up their Paris home and shipped their art off to sit in a Montreal vault for some time, until they acquired a New York home with enough wall space to show it off (a flat with some two hundred paintings can’t have been much fun for the cleaning staff….).   They were still collecting in the early 1950’s, pretty well up to Sterling’s death.  

The Clarks seem to have been a very close and on some levels intensely private couple.   They very rarely lent items from their collection (which, in addition to the paintings, included antique silverware and Old Master drawings) to public exhibitions in their lifetimes.  They weren’t even particularly noted as collectors; Sterling Clark was far better known to contemporaries as a breeder and owner of racehorses (one of which won the Epsom Derby in 1954) than as an art connoisseur.  Nevertheless from the 1930’s onwards he  was actively looking for somewhere to put his art collection on display- ideally a locating in which it would be the star attraction, not overshadowed by other works.   A variety of schemes came and went before the Williamstown option was finally adopted in the early 1950’s.   The now-elderly couple apparently took up more or less permanent residence on site as the gallery was constructed; it was completed just in time for Sterling to be present at the opening.  Francine lived a few years longer, bossing the museum trustees round over her interpretation of his wishes until she too died in 1960.

Part of the fascination of this sort of exhibition is the way in which it reflects the idiosyncratic tastes and preferences of one collector (the Clarks seem to have been such a close couple that they count as one).   What is striking is how stable their collecting patterns were after the 1910’s.  Right up to the 1950’s they were still buying art created (mostly) in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.   To the extent that buying Impressionist art was still radical and cutting edge when they started out, it was distinctly conservative by the 1950’s.   This was obviously a very conscious choice.   Sterling Clark had little time for the art which was being produced in Paris in the inter-war years, which he thought was artistically inferior and ludicrously over-priced - indeed one of the conditions imposed on the trustees of the collection limited their ability to buy art to the work of painters who had been dead more than twenty five years.   It’s therefore not surprising that there aren’t any Picassos, Braques or Vuillards in the show .   What is a little more unexpected is that many of the later generation of Impressionists get comprehensively cold shouldered- no Van Goghs and no Cezannes.  Indeed the exhibition as displayed if anything underplays their conservatism since it includes an early Bonnard and one rather strange Gauguin (see below) which were both acquired by the collection trustees after the Clarks' deaths; neither artist was represented at all in their own purchases.  

 By contrast, the pre-Impressionisms of the Barbizon school, Millet and Corot are well represented as are the works of Academic opponents of Impressionism like Gerome or Bouguereau.  The image of French art presented by the show is therefore a somewhat peculiar and truncated one which favours certain linkages and influences while ignoring others.

Even among the artists who are represented in the collection there are certain biases in what the Clarks collected.  Both Renoir and Monet made the cut- but only in respect of their earlier works.   The publicity for the show makes a lot of the fact that the Clark collection contains over thirty Renoirs and Sterling Clark went into print raving over Renoir’s gifts.  Despite that, there’s no suggestion in the catalogue that he ever met the artist, let along bought art directly from him even though Clark’s residence in Paris overlapped with the last decade or so of Renoir’s life.  The works in the collection are almost all from the 1880’s or earlier.  I can’t say I’m sorry about this from a personal point of view.   I’m not a great Renoir fan and I find his late works- all chocolate box colours, blurry lines and women with the same vacuous blank expression on their faces- well nigh impossible to look at.   While the earlier works often show all too clearly the signs of what was to follow- especially when painting young women- there are some unusual and idiosyncratic works which appeal to me (like the still life at the top of the page or a couple of Italian cityscapes).   To a less pronounced extent the same applies to Monet, represented by paintings like the one below depicting the famous sea arch near Etretat on the Norman coast rather than his massive late water lily paintings.

Obviously as collectors who bought their art through dealers rather than cultivating relationships with living artists the Clarks were to a considerable extent dependent on the vagaries of the art market, especially as time passed, the Impressionists became increasingly part of the established mainstream artistic canon, prices increased and works which might once have come on the open market began being acquired for or willed to public collections.   Issues of availability may have skewed their acquisitions (at least to the extent that Sterling Clark was not prepared to pay what he regarded as excessive prices for works) and pushed them towards early or thematically unusual pieces but I doubt if that was a really major inhibition.   What we have, then, is an intriguingly conservative view of what was in its origins a thoroughly revolutionary artistic movement- though one which I suspect fits quite well with contemporary expectations of what an Impressionist show ought to look like.

The show is divided up by genre rather than taking a chronological view (I think I’d have arranged it by date of acquisition……).   Naturally all the standard genres are there- portraits, landscapes, genre scenes and so on.   There are few obvious surprises here.   Paintings in urban Parisian settings are thinner on the ground than they would be in a statistically representative survey of Impressionist art, though there is a very nice late Pissaro depicting the busy industrial port of Rouen (again a post-Clark acquisition by the trustees).   Given Sterling Clark’s own passion for horse racing I might have expected more than one example of Degas at the races (see below). 

  On the other hand there is quite a lot of naked female flesh- several of the Renoirs, for instance, are nudes or semi-nudes.  The fondness of Academic painters for “Oriental” themes is well represented in the show-  indeed the majority of the paintings in the “Orientalism” section have a female nude or two to arouse male interest and some of the paintings housed in other sections also have distinct erotic undertones.   One wonders how far Francine got a say in those acquisitions…….