Images of Music Long Past

I suppose I’ll get the my moans about the National Gallery’s exhibition centred on the depiction of music in 17^th century Dutch art out of the way up front.  Although Vermeer’s name figures in the official title, there are only five actual Vermeers in the show; clearly his name and reputation are being used to pull the marginal punter through the doors.   The said punter might also feel a bit done down at paying almost full blockbuster price for an exhibition which (with the exception of a couple of the Vermeers) is drawn entirely from the Gallery’s own collections.  None of the paintings on display have come from outside the UK; the borrowings from further afield are limited to a number of musical instruments of the period.   Admittedly these are fascinating and sometimes beautiful in their own right -there is a particularly lovely English-made bass viol )a piece of functional wood sculpture whose sensuous lines help to make the viol’s status as a metaphor for femininity in Dutch art comprehensible) but they aren’t perhaps quite what the average gallery-goer would regard as star items in a show primarily about painting.   Even after scouring the Gallery reserves for every Dutch painting from the right period with a musical instrument in it, the curators clearly struggled to fill the exhibition space, padding things out with a section on Vermeer’s technique (he used an unusual amount of very expensive lapis lazuli in his colours, which helps to explain the richness of his blues…).

On the positive side (if you happen to be in the gallery at the right times) there are a series of short concerts given by an early music duet which highlight music from the same period as the paintings.  This is genuinely intriguing stuff as few 17^th century Dutch composers bar the keyboard specialist Sweelinck are at all well known even to early music enthusiasts like myself and it appears the folk doing the concerts have had to undertake quite a bit of archive research to assemble a repertoire for the event (sadly not included in the tie-in CD being marketed by the Gallery).

Moans apart, the exhibition picks up on an interesting theme.   Music was deeply embedded in 17^th century Dutch culture (as indeed it was in all West European cultures of that era) and paintings depicting the making of music clearly found a ready market amongst the picture-buying public.   There were even more direct linkages between the worlds of painting and music too; it was common practice for virginals and other keyboard instruments to be sold “plain”, with the purchaser commissioning an artist to decorate them-as with the instrument depicted by Vermeer at the top of this piece. Indeed Vermeer himself is thought to have done work in this field, though no instrument whose decoration can be securely attributed to his hand appears to survive Artists often owned musical instruments; it’s a source of some surprise that none appear in the inventory taken after Vermeer’s death.   On the other hand, the social profiles of the two arts varied a bit.  Musical participation was much more widespread- there would certainly have been vastly more people around who would have been capable of picking out a tune on a lute or a keyboard than could ever have hoped to draw or paint in a competent manner (in that respect not much changes- music in one form or another must surely still be the most common participant art form in the modern world).    Social elites who would never have dreamed of dabbling in the manual labour involved in painting were happy enough to perform music to (admittedly intimate and socially selective) audiences-though there was always a tension between music as the necessary accomplishment of an educated individual and music as a trade undertaken by low status professionals.    

Musical performance thrived further down the social scale too, in the Dutch equivalent of pubs and dance halls- not to mention brothels.  According to the catalogue for the exhibition there were drinking establishments which specialised in music to such an extent that they had musical instruments hung up on the walls for use by the clientele and even a fines policy under which any visitor who was capable of playing a musical instrument but refused to do so was expected to treat all those present to a drink (how did they check the musical abilities of people who weren’t regulars?...).   It is, incidentally, an interesting comment on the collecting priorities of an earlier generation of British enthusiasts for Dutch art that the exhibition contained hardly any paintings of music making at the more plebeian and raucous end of the spectrum- not a chaotic and ribald Jan Steen drinking den in sight, for instance.   While not all the music on display is necessary as decorous as it looks at first sight, one dimension of lived musical experience of the Dutch Golden Age is a bit marginalised.

This experience was a little bit different from that elsewhere in Europe.  The United Provinces of the Netherlands was a rather unusual polity in 17^th century terms.   A republic (or rather a federation of autonomous provinces each run on more or less republican lines), it possessed an on-and-off quasi-monarchy vested in the House of Orange.   Though the Orange family ran a permanent court at the Hague and retained princely status even in the periods when its head wasn’t also de facto head of state, it didn’t provide anything like the focus for music making that the French or British courts did- no Dutch court music tradition equivalent to Charles I’s court masques or Louis XIV’s ballets ever established itself.   Italian opera didn’t get into the Netherlands until well after the period covered by the exhibition.   The state church was Calvinist in theology, which limited liturgical music to congregational singing of psalms.  Dutch churches did however have organs (unusually for the Calvinist world- organs didn’t become mainstream in the Church of Scotland until well into the 19^th century and the more conservative splinter churches in the Highlands and Islands rely on precenting to this day).  These however played before and after service and were used for concerts (laid on in the probably vain hope that they’d draw the masses away from the pubs).

On the other hand there was a large, well-off mercantile elite- natural purchasers of musical instruments and tuition on how to use them (or how to sing along to them).  In addition to a lively world of home music making, they were also potential patrons of and participants in local and regional music societies.   This was a world open to both genders (it’s interesting that Vermeer’s “music” paintings invariably show women playing instruments, usually keyboards, though the lady below is being rather innovative and daring in trying out a guitar, a rarity in the Netherlands at that date).  

Judging by the paintings in the show, music also created an environment for legitimate interaction between young people of different genders, not to mention flirtation - a bit like tennis in the late 19^th century, perhaps- the Metsu example below is just one of many examples of that form of social interaction on display. 

Less well filled purses still had access to song books- a staple of certain Dutch printing houses- and you didn’t need to be able to read music in order to participate.   A lot of music was probably learned by ear and song books were frequently printed on a “words only” basis with an indication that they should be taken to a well-known tune of the day- the wonders of common metre…..

The sheer omnipresence of music in daily life meant that it could be taken as a metaphor for all manner of different, sometimes contradictory, things in painting.   It made a very obvious visual correlative for hearing in paintings which allegorised the five senses which are often set in musical dinners.  The ephemeral nature of all performances in a world before sound recording made a nod to music common in so-called “Vanitas” paintings which made a disabused commentary on the basic vanity of human ambition and worldly glory, all come to dust.   A musical instrument or a piece of sheet music joins swords and skulls and learned tomes and fading flowers to drive home the moral (one of the examples of this genre in the exhibition provides an interesting variant by including a Japanese samurai sword- a symbol of trading empire as much as military glory).

Perhaps the most obvious “meaning” of music was as a way of symbolising harmony at all levels in society.  This was a virtue which perhaps needed more stress in the Dutch Republic than elsewhere due to the enormously complex, multi-layered, federal structures which governed it.   This was a country run by committees and boards and chartered companies at every level, from parish poor relief to conquering and managing a substantial overseas empire.   Serious factional disputes could make the whole system seize up very quickly- and serious disputes were not in short supply in the 17^th century.   There were major divisions over the role of the House of Orange, pushed out of its dominant role and restored again twice in the course of the century.  There were divisions over the theology of the established church which led to schism and rioting in the streets.  Arguments between the provinces over the dominant role of Holland (just one out of seven) and, within Holland, the dominance of Amsterdam interests bubbled just below the surface.   Harmony was often in short supply- which was perhaps why it was so valued.  There aren’t many paintings in the show which overtly address harmony at the macro level, though one cheery domestic musical party is overlooked by a portrait of Prince Maurice of Nassau, military hero and sometime head of the House of Orange- which may suggest a political subtext, if itself arguably a partisan one.

It’s easier to see references to harmony at the micro, household, level in this art- full of references to what appears to be family music making as it is.  This of course could easily shade into the flirtations mentioned above- and in turn shade into a rather more equivocal view of music.   As I noted earlier, the most raucous and disruptive associations with plebeian misrule don’t get many outings in the exhibition.   Sexual innuendo of one kind or another is however very much on the agenda.  Take the music party painted by Jan Olis below.   The room is suspiciously bare and the rather louche looking collection of men relatively drably dressed (I wonder if they’re meant to be soldiers off duty).  By contrast the only female present is a blaze of brilliant colours as she saws away at the bass viol.  This would have been regarded as highly indecorous and unladylike- it was not an instrument which ladies generally played.  The obvious inference is that she’s no lady and this isn’t a cosy domestic dinner party…..

As also noted above the bass viol appears to have been viewed as a standing metaphor for femininity and, by extension, sexual innuendo, as was the lute (especially the large version, the archlute or theorbo.   Even when they’re not being played, bass viols pop up suggestively among the props in many of the paintings.   One of the Jan Steens which does make it in shows a young lady practicing on the clavichord under the watchful (lustful?) eye of a young man; in the background a servant approaches carrying a theorbo.   One can guess what’s going to follow, and it probably goes beyond getting the bass lines right for the next family concert.    I did sometimes suspect however that this sexualised reading was getting a bit overdone- surely there must be paintings in which a bass viol is just a bass viol….

The Vermeers in the show have their share of bass viols among the scenery but their tone is rather different.   Only one of them, the so-called “Music Lesson” below, contains more than one figure- it’s assumed that the young man is singing because he has his mouth open.   Young ladies practice their music in what are clearly the houses of wealthy members of the civic elites- even their instruments are top quality (the virginals look like top range Ruckers products, for instance).    Presumably they’re daughters of the house, well dressed and nice looking.  They’re probably primarily self-accompanied singers rather than keyboard (or guitar) virtuosi- the type of virginal in use is a “muselar”, a model purely produced in the Low Countries and used almost entirely to accompany singing (depending on who you read, it had a particularly mellow tone or sounded like the grunting of young pigs…).   As with so much of Vermeer’s mature art, we may be invited into their space but we’re also kept rather at a distance.   The guitar player seems more interested in someone out of shot to our left, the couple are more taken up with their own interactions than with anybody else; even the young ladies who appear to make eye contact with us are still busy with their practice and likely to turn away again any moment.   There’s a sense that the viewer is a distraction- who may or may not be a welcome one.   It’s a distinctly cooler and more reserved world than that portrayed by most of the other artists represented in the show.   I can’t imagine any of Vermeer’s subjects in a noisy Jan Steen tavern- or even having a riotous concert at home full of booze and flirtation.   I also have a faint sense that that might have been their loss……

Crisis of Brilliance- the Show of the Book

Dulwich Gallery is staging a rather intriguing exhibition at the moment.   Entitled “A Crisis of Brilliance”, it in effects sets out to provide a fuller visual accompaniment to the book of that title by David Boyd Haycock than he was able to do in the confines of a “normal”, non-coffee-table, book.    It this he set out to tell the entwined stories of six artists- Stanley Spencer, Paul Nash, Richard Nevinson, Dora Carrinbgton, Mark Gertler and David Bomberg- in the wider context of the London art world in the years before, during and immediately after the First World War.   All six attended the Slade School of Art for a greater or lesser period before the War; all were taught by the moving spirit behind that School in those years, Henry Tonks.   All were to a greater or lesser extent shaped by the time at the Slade and by the War.

It’s a really interesting and well written book about a more than averagely interesting (if not always likeable) group of people, with an intriguing supporting cast like John Currie, a highly talented contemporary and associate of the chosen six who shot his model/lover and then committed suicide just before the outbreak of the War, and Isaac Rosenberg, another Slade alumnus now better remembered as a poet killed in action in 1918 (and incidentally one of the very few War Poets who wasn’t of at least middle class origins and didn’t serve as an officer).   I’m not going to try to summarise its content; I’d advise anybody who takes an interest in the art of this period to read Haycock.   For the purposes of this blog I’m just going to focus on a few points which particularly struck or interested me.

The first of these was just how conservative the Slade actually was by about 1910.   It had a considerable reputation for being a progressive sort of place artistically and maybe by comparison with other art schools in London and beyond it was.   It had certainly been very much in the forefront of art education in the last decade or so of the nineteenth century.   The problem, I suppose, was that the same progressive young(ish) men who had been in charge back then were still dominant twenty odd years later and, like many old radicals, had become a new establishment almost without realising it themselves.  Tonks was a particularly egregious example here.   He was a huge champion of drawing skills, particularly of the ability to draw the human body in an anatomically correct fashion.   As a result he had no sympathy or understanding of students who weren’t so hot at drawing the human figure- his negative criticism of Nash, who was never at his best drawing people, virtually hounded the young man out of art altogether.  It was no thanks to the Slade (which he left after less than a year) that he discovered his true talent as a painter of landscapes.

Tonks was also violently hostile to just about every development in modern art in Continental Europe postdating Impressionism.   He was driven to fury by the two major shows of “Post Impressionist” art staged by Roger Fry in 1910 and 1912 and made it abundantly clear that he would have much preferred it had his students not visited them.   He can hardly have been happy that Spencer actually exhibited in the second one.   While there’s a case to be made that Fry was motivated as much by self- aggrandisement and the profit motive (a good going scandal was guaranteed to pull in the crowds) as a genuine desire to bring the wonders of modern art to the benighted heathen of London, it was a remarkably inward looking attitude. Obviously Tonks was a hardly alone in his views, which were shared by most- though not all- of the British media and art establishment of the day, but it left him aligned with the sort of people he wouldn’t normally have given the time of day to.

Of course the sextet in question all defined his wishes and in their different ways became deeply involved in the deeply fissiparous and quarrelsome little world of modernist art, London style.   The route to modernism wasn’t always linear.  It often took a dog-leg through early Renaissance Italy- an earlier Renaissance than that championed by Tonks, treating Piero della Francesco as an end rather than a start point.   In Spencer’s case that influence never entirely left him.  Others took modernism even further than Fry.  Nevinson, for instance, became England’s only fully paid up, card carrying, Futurist- literally banging the bass drum for that Italian import at the rowdy and chaotic Futurist “happenings” presided over by F T Marinetti.   Tonks must have had conniptions…..    Predictably Nevinson overplayed his hand by signing up a slew of his artistic friends to an English Futurist manifesto nominally co-authored with Marinetti without bothering to consult them. After much sound and fury (not just verbal- there was at least one outright punch-up at an exhibition…) Vorticism was dreamed up as a suitably English counter-movement to Futurism but itself proved a fractious and fissiparous affair.  Personal issues further complicated artistic alignments; Gertler and Nevinson had a major falling out because both seriously fancied Dora Carrington.    Gertler won that contest, at least in the short term.  

Looking at the art the chosen six produced in this period, however, it’s abundantly clear that much of the shouting and name calling was a case of the fetishism of microscopic differences.  Bomberg’s “The Hold” pictured at the top of this piece is about as Futurist a piece as one might hope to encounter (and a good deal closer in style and approach to the art of Severini or Boccioni than anything Nevinson was doing at the time).  It certainly reduced the “Jewish Chronicle” to baffled incomprehension- and given that both Bomberg and Gertler were only able to attend the Slade because they were beneficiaries of scholarships awarded to promising Jewish artists that paper’s views mattered.   Gertler’s relatively conservative portraits of family members and East End rabbis, though only partially representing his own preferences, were much more to the taste of the board which managed the bequest which paid his fees- and of Tonks.    The rather odd picture of apple harvesters below would just about have passed muster as well, with its clear echoes of classical and Renaissance art (though I have to admit I find it rather lumpish and slightly creepy).

One can only speculate how the artistic and personality issues would have played out had war not come in 1914.   It’s a pretty obvious truism that this deeply marked the lives of all six.   Intriguingly the only one to be part of the rush of volunteers to the colours in September 1914 was Bomberg, who was initially rejected by the army (evidently the recruiting officers didn’t quite know what to do with a rather hairy Jewish artist…).   Admittedly none of the men (apart perhaps from Nash, whose later health issues appear to have been at least in part a consequence of war injuries) were prime recruiting candidates.  Spencer only just scraped the minimum height requirements; Nevinson and Gertler both had serious health problems.    

Despite his health problems, Nevinson was the first to get to the Front.   He, more than most, ought to have had some idea what he was letting himself in for as his father was a notable newspaper war correspondent.   Nevertheless his Futurist principles meant that intellectually he approved of war as a form of social hygiene and felt he should live up to his principles by taking part.   Somewhat ironically he volunteered for service with the Friends’ Ambulance Service, established and largely staffed by Quaker pacifists who wished to do humanitarian work (mostly with the French forces, whose medical services were initially overwhelmed by the scale of casualties).   This evidently made for some lively discussions between Nevinson and his colleagues, though it’s fair to say that Nevinson’s own views shifted to and fro several times once he had been exposed to the realities of war.

Predictably his health broke down and he ended up back in London- with what was at that point a rather unique artistic insight into what was going on at the Front.   Being well connected and having a true Futurist instinct for self- publicty he was well able to take advantage of this situation.   He produced a series of much admired canvases including the one below showing the ghastly situation in an overcrowded and improvised French field hospital (contrary to what is sometimes claimed,  pictorial material which sought to show the full horrors of the war was never subject to state censorship in First World War Britain).  Even his modernist style found favour in unexpected quarters as in some way an appropriate response to a new, technological, style of warfare; senior generals went into print to praise his work.  For a brief moment Nevinson was arguably the most famous and most highly regarded contemporary artist in Britain. 

Inevitably the war impacted on all six artists.   The upper middle class Nash joined up as an infantry officer, the less socially prominent Bomberg and Spencer went into the Royal Engineers and the Royal Army Medical Corps respectively.   Nash’s front line service was brief; he was invalided out after falling into a shell hole and seriously damaging his ribs.  Bomberg self-wounded and was very lucky not to be detected- he could easily have faced a firing squad otherwise.  Spencer ended up in the mountains of the Macedonian Front (where my grandfather served- I wonder if they ever met).  Gertler became a Conscientious Objector (though he can’t have been as absolutist in his views as some, since he went through with the medical examination which accompanied the establishment of conscription in Britain in 1916, duly failed it, and never appears to have had to go before a tribunal to justify his position).   Unlike many young women, Carrington was just about well enough off not to have to go into war work to support herself, though the war hit her as hard as any through the loss of a brother to whom she had been very close.  There was enough of a well-heeled progressive anti-war counter-culture to provide a support network and commissions for Gertler; Carrington’s profound lack of artistic self confidence limited her output.  She also eventually dumped Gertler in favour of the writer Lytton Strachey- a somewhat improbable relationship given that he was notoriously gay, though Carrington was herself bisexual and as a relationship it clearly worked- at least on some levels.

Perhaps the most unexpected outcome of the war from a purely artistic point of view was the massive expansion of state patronage which it offered both during and in the immediate aftermath of hostilities.  One major aspect of this was the establishment of a formal “War Artist” scheme which recruited artists and paid them to produce war-related art.  Those who went to the Front were given commissioned officer status and a fairly free rein- though subjects were sometimes suggested.   Though the “top management” of the scheme were artists of an older and more conservative generation, there was absolutely no control over painting style and modernists were welcome to apply.  This proved a godsend for men like Nash and Nevinson whose health-based exemptions from further service were beginning to look tenuous as the pressure to find men for the Front mounted in 1917.  They could now serve under conditions of their own choosing.   This didn’t necessarily mean sitting in safe rear areas- Nash in particular used his skills as a landscape artist to depict the sheer devastation of the Ypres salient in a series of powerful works.  

It was however probably safer than being an infantry subaltern with a theoretical average life expectancy of six weeks.   Even Gertler found merit in the scheme on corporatist grounds (as favouring younger artists) and was initially prepared to participate, though he finally backed out because he found he couldn’t create something that satisfied him with the topic he had been pointed towards (people sheltering from air raids).  

Not everybody was included in the scheme straight away.  Spencer, far away in Macedonia, was initially overlooked and (having transferred to the infantry) faced combat in the final weeks of the war.   He was eventually included, though this did not speed up his demobilisation, which was only expedited when he went down with malaria.  Nevertheless his work was part of the immediate post-war exhibitions of art created under the scheme, most of which now reside in the Imperial War Museum (sadly Spencer’s wonderful painting of army mules watching as the wounded are treated in a field hospital in a strange inversion of a traditional Nativity scene wasn’t loaned to Dulwich).     

Other opportunities briefly opened up in the immediate post war period.   One doesn’t normally think of Lord Beaverbrook- newspaper tycoon and Conservative politician- as a patron of modernist art but in his role as head of Canada’s planned memorialisation of its role in the war he handed out commissions to Bomberg and other modernists.  Unfortunately for Bomberg, his first effort depicting Canadian sappers tunnelling under Hill 60 near St Eloi (see below) drew violent negative reactions from the committee managing the project.  He managed to rework the piece in a way which suited their susceptibilities but the incident left him scarred.   Muirhead Bone, who had been a senior figure in the War Artist scheme, then advised Bomberg that he would struggle to find sales for his works given the style in which he painted.  Bone was highly conservative in his own approach but he had a keen sense of the Zeitgeist.   Even in Paris, capital of the international avant garde, the talk was of “return to order” and neo-classicism- there were even rather bizarre attempts to argue that modernist styles were in some way “Teutonic” and therefore tainted.   Bone suggested that Bomberg might apply for a job as Official Artist to the nascent Zionist settler movement in Palestine.   As a result he disappeared from the mainstream of British and European art for a couple of decades; on his return he was more valued as a teacher than as an artist in his own right and his early works have only been fully rediscovered recently.

The other five enjoyed varied fates.  Gertler never quite found a solid footing in the post war art world and was doomed to be seen as someone who had not really fulfilled his early promise.  The works shown in Dulwich (which admittedly exclude some of his best paintings) suggest that even then he struggled to develop a truly consistent personal style.  Impoverished, marginalised and ailing, he committed suicide at the outbreak of the Second World War.   Carrington’s diffidence about her art became ever more overpowering, not helped by a complex private life spread between Strachey and a series of lovers of both sexes.   She more or less gave up art altogether and when Strachey died in 1931 she chose to take her own life.  

Nash’s war landscapes established him as a major figure in British art, a status which he enjoyed for the rest of his life.   Best remembered for his landscapes, he also dabbled in his own brand of Surrealism and lived to see service again as a war artist in the Second World War where he painted the vapour trails of aerial dogfights and downed German bombers being absorbed into the English countryside.   Nevinson, by contrast, never regained the status he briefly held during the war.  His post-war works were, to put it charitably, of variable quality- as in truth his war time works were also (there is, for instance, an unpleasant undercurrent of misogyny and possibly anti-Semitism in some of the pieces he produced away from the Front in this period).    He tried and failed to break into the American market and ended his days a half-forgotten figure.  It is an irony that a small number of his works from his fifteen minutes of fame have now acquired iconic status, visual clichés for the covers of books about the First World War.

Spencer had always been a sturdy individualist, deeply rooted in the Thames-side rural village of Cookham where he was born (it’s revealing that his nickname at the Slade was “Cookham”).   This was a more remote place in the 1900s than it looks on the map and Spencer’s upbringing in a highly religious family perhaps made it even more remote from the everyday world in mental terms.   Spencer retained a deep, mystical and rather unorthodox Christian faith throughout his life.  Like the fifteenth century Italians he admired, his art was always open to the possibility that the physical and spiritual worlds might intertwine in unexpected ways and that major events of biblical history could play out in the streets of Cookham.   In the picture below, Jesus carries his cross through the village, with the spectators looking out from upstairs windows doubling as the heavenly host and the pointed railings serving as an echo of the spears of the Roman legionaries doing crowd control duties on the way to Calvary.  The men carrying the ladders to assist in the Crucifixion look like a couple of local painters and decorators borrowed to take part in an event which transcends them.   Time and again throughout his career Spencer would project the great events of Christian history and anchor them in the village of his birth.   

Like Nash, Spencer lived to see artistic service in the Second World War.  His area of activity was far away from rural Cookham, in the Clydeside shipyards.  There he drew the workers toiling in the noise and ordered confusion of shipbuilding.   His work there was something of a throwback to the days of careful figure drawing at the Slade- Tonks would have thoroughly approved.