| Orcadian Memories and Roman Portraits | for everyone |
First of all I was on my annual break in Orkney and since I got back I’ve been busy at work, with a trip to Brussels ( a really nice one-thanks for a truly special evening, Pauline).
My holiday in Orkney was lovely, helped by the fact that I had the best weather I've experienced there for a couple of years while just about everywhere else seemed to be suffering from heavy Bank Holiday rains ( I do sometimes wonder if I'd have responded quite as strongly to the islands if my first visit had been marked by non stop rain!). Watching the sun set into the North Atlantic while singing at the seals in Birsay Bay
Of course seals don't exactly "sing"- though the thought of them doing four part harmonies on the rocks is an appealing one. The sound they make is more like a high pitched repeated yelping, with modulations which sounds somewhat unearthly when you first encounter it. The intriguing thing is that, at least under certain circumstances, if you make vaguely similar noises back at them they will respond. I don't know why they do this- perhaps they think you're another seal from a different group with a funny accent- and it doesn't always happen but when it does it's rather special. The long sunny evenings made it possible to sit by some of the rock stacks watching sea birds; it was amazing to see one pair of male kittiwakes chasing and duelling with each other over nest sites for over an hour. Unfortunately there didn't seem to be many puffins about; they seem to be having a bad year all down the coast and the only one I saw was at a time of day when it shouldn't have been there (mid-morning, when it should have been out at sea hunting hours before- I did wonder if this one was on a retainer from the Orkney Tourist people....). I did see lots of them a couple of years ago and they're as amusing and appealing in the flesh as they look in photos; they're remarkably unperturbed by a human presence close at hand and just look quizzically at people on the cliffs above their burrows. Watching them landing is a permanent source of amusement as they are not by any means graceful fliers and always seem to land with their eyes closed, braking frantically as they descend before rather thudding into the ground.
I was staying in the north west
I haven’t entirely given up on art exhibitions, though I’m afraid I’ve also been distracted by the European Football Championships. I managed to catch the Pompeo Batoni exhibition at the National Gallery just before it closed. It was an interesting show, though sadly it appeared to be very poorly attended. I suppose it’s a case of “who was he?”. Even though Batoni was probably one of the best known artists in 18th century Britain Rome ; the reason he was so well known in Britain was that he made a lot of his living painting portraits of members of the British elites passing through Rome
Batoni didn’t just do portraits- indeed in his own mind the portrait side of his business had a relatively low status.. One of the interesting parts of the exhibition in fact was that it put the full range of his work on display; he did devotional works for religious institutions in Rome (a side of his output hardly ever seen in Britain as it’s far too Counter-Reformation Catholic in spirit ever to have appealed to Protestant tastes), scenes from classical mythology and general purpose allegories (which did sometimes find their way northwards- classical antiquity was acceptable where a Virgin and Child would not have been). These are interesting but just a shade conventional and saccharine in feel- lots of fluttering putti and elegantly drooping young women impersonating virtues.
The portraits are what makes the exhibition interesting. Batoni was an astute businessman- he needed to be as he had twelve children from his two marriages. He dabbled in art dealing and ran cultural evenings in his studio for potential sitters- his second wife was a noted singer and saw to that side of things. He also drove a hard bargain with his clients, insisting on 40% of his fee up front. This gave him a certain reputation for greed, compounded by the fact that he wasn’t always quite as deferential to his clients as they would have liked, calling them back to his studio at times which suited him rather than them to make late alterations to paintings. It was also probably the case that he took on rather more work than he could really handle, especially as (unlike so many of those working in the portrait business in that era) he does not appear to have farmed out most of the work to studio staff and consequently maintained a consistently high quality of output.
Obviously, as a portrait paint of the great and noble he wasn’t in the business of “warts and all” reproductions. Part of his skill lay in making clients look just a little bit better than they did in the flesh. He also had a pretty clear brief most of the time to indicate, whether by placing his subjects in identifiably Roman settings or by juxtaposing them with such items as classical sculpture, that the person in the painting was a cultivated sort of fellow who had been to Rome and absorbed the influences of classical antiquity which were supposed to be found there. Occasionally, when the disparity between the sitter and this brief were too wide to bridge credibly he would take a different tack (the Duke of Gordon, who notoriously found the whole ruins and statues side of Rome a massive bore, was painted returning from the hunt in the countryside round the city). More subtly, however, one senses that at times Batoni might have been sending up his sitters by taking them absolutely at their own estimation of themselves. Colonel Gordon (a relative of the Duke, visiting Rome Rome on the way to Turkey
I hope I won’t quite be as lazy and slow about keeping up to date again….. I’ll try to put a few Batonis on my Flickr site soon.
 | Nudes and Reformers | for everyone |
I still managed to visit the “other” Royal Academy London
As far as the exhibition itself is concerned one has a sense of a quart being squeezed into a pint pot. Cranach was incredibly productive and lived to a ripe old age (indeed his sheer productivity led to him being for many years somewhat under-valued by comparison with contemporaries like Durer or Holbein). He painted in a wide variety of genres. This superabundant production is somewhat squeezed into the RA’s “secondary” exhibition space. Evidently it’s the sequel to an exhibition in Frankfurt which, judging from the catalogue, was substantially larger and it feels cramped in its current home.
Leaving aside the nudes (and the modern annexation of his painting of Adam and Eve to provide the opening sequence for “Desperate Housewives”) Cranach is probably primarily thought of as the “painter of the Reformation”. He knew Martin Luther personally and painted him several times (the most famous Luther portrait, a double one with his wife Katherina von Brora, isn’t in the show but a couple of lesser know ones are, including a somewhat strange image of a bearded Luther dating from the period when he was supposedly living in hiding under the alias “Junker Georg”). He was court painter to John Frederick of Saxony, Luther’s earliest and strongest supporter amongst the ruling houses of Germany
While this aspect isn’t exactly ignored in the exhibition, it is somewhat de-emphasised (his engraved work, for instance, gets very little coverage in the show). The argument advanced is that Cranach (not his original name; he was, appropriately enough, originally called “Maler”- “Painter”- and adopted the name of his place of birth) was basically a professional artist who would do a job for anybody. Clearly there is some truth in that view. Cranach was a well established artist well before Luther got into the business of nailing theological position papers to church doors. He had created plenty of thoroughly Catholic images in his own version of the rather expressionistic South German style of the 1500’s. These included rather theatrical saintly martyrdoms set in spiky “Gothic” landscapes and a depiction of the thoroughly unscriptural Holy Kindred (which also featured members of the Saxon dynasty as husbands of the Virgin Mary’s half sisters with the Emperor Maximilian inserted as one of St Anne’s three husbands- allegiance to the Habsburg ruler was important to the Saxons at the time it was painted). Even once the upheavals of the Reformation were in train, he was quite willing to take portrait or other commissions from both sides of the incipient confessional divide. After all, he had a big workshop to keep employed- he was one of the largest single employers in Wittenburg by the time of his death and all these apprentices and journeymen had to be kept active, not to mention the models (the same women reappear in several paintings, often wearing what was clearly the Cranach workshop’s property high fashion frock). It probably helped that confessional boundaries remained fuzzy for many years, which helped to sustain the market for images of saints and the Virgin Mary as even Lutheran parishes took years to work out whether they were allowed to have paintings of saints or not.. Even if the religious markets became increasingly segmented and parish committees or priests in strongly Catholic regions became less and less inclined to put business the way of heretics, there was always the “secular” market for nudes and paintings referring to classical mythology (often the same thing) which transcended the confessional divide.
I’m not sure however that it’s entirely correct to dismiss Cranach’s Lutheranism quite so easily, even if turning him into a kind of proto-ecumenical figure (albeit driven as much by the profit motive as theological conviction) may make him more sympathetic to modern eyes. Certainly his alignment with the Saxon ruling house was very strong- he went into exile with his employer John Frederick when the latter was deposed for a few years after the Lutheran Princes were defeated by the Emperor Charles and the circumstances of the exile suggest a degree of personal commitment to both the man and his religious cause. There appears to have been a rather touching relationship between the ruler, whom Cranach first painted as a rather worried looking six year old, and his much older court artist.
Cranach was a brilliant portrait painter- to my eye his portraits are his finest works and I wish there were rather more in the exhibition. He had an ability to convey a sense of a real person behind the mask of power- and, unlike so many early modern portraitists, he could paint children as children, not as little adults, even if these children are already having to play an adult rule. The Electors and Dukes and Counts of his paintings may have a disconcerting amount of facial hair and dress in an impossibly elaborate style but they are still individuals. One focuses all the more on them because they’re almost always painted against an entirely neutral background without any external props to underline their status (one of the few exceptions, intriguingly, is the arch anti-Lutheran Cardinal Albrecht of Brandenburg
I’ll try to post material from the exhibition on Flickr in the coming week.
| From Russia with some Ambivalence | for everyone |
Back after another break….. I’m afraid I just haven’t felt very inspired to write in the past month or so- I go through these phases from time to time, usually associated with just how much time I’m spending hunched over a keyboard at work.
I’ve finally been shaken out of my winter torpor by the latest Royal Academy Russia UK and Putin’s Russia Russia
There are direct descendants of the original owners out there who are still trying to get some compensation for their ancestors’ losses, so the possibility of legal action in the UK courts was not a complete fantasy, though clearly the whole affair was something of a try-on by the Russian authorities, who sought (and obtained) a formal UK Government guarantee that nobody would be able to make claims in the British courts concerning the art in the show. I’ve got mixed feelings about this. Part of me says that there isn’t a major art or museum collection in the world which doesn’t contain items whose provenance and legal ownership wouldn’t stand up to too much close scrutiny and that the culture of litigation over allegedly confiscated art which has developed in the past twenty years or so has increasingly become a form of legal extortion driven by lawyers rather than genuine claimants. The other part of me simply imagines the massive outcry there would have been had a similar blanket guarantee been granted in respect of, say, a show involving German and Austrian galleries lending early 20th century art and can’t shake loose from the thought that there are double standards at work here even though there have been some low key criticisms of the UK Government’s decision in the broadsheet press.
The controversy certainly hasn’t done attendance numbers any harm- the galleries were packed when I went to the show and I’m going to have to go back (possibly more than once) to get a real sense of what’s there. The core of the exhibition is formed by works collected or commissioned by the aforementioned small number of enthusiasts for modern art in pre-Revolutionary Russia, in particular Ivan Morozov and Sergei Shchukin. These were interesting figures; both very rich (obviously) but merchants (traders in things like textiles and sugar) rather than traditional aristocrats. In other words, they were outsiders- something reinforced by their religious background (both came from Old Believer families). The very fact that such people existed and could have such a visible social role- Shchukin even opened his house to the public as an art gallery- is an interesting indication of just how the rigidities of Russian society were beginning to break up in the years before 1917.
While Shchukin and Morozov were buying up Cezannes and early Picassos and commissioning massive canvasses from Matisse (the painting at the top of this blog was created by Matisse for Shchukin’s house as part of a matched pair symbolising music and dance), they were not the only people creating links between the artistic avant garde in Paris and its Russian counterpart. At a slightly earlier period, Russian art had been influenced by Impressionism and the so-called Wanderers group broke away from the St Petersburg Academy Russia
The most important intermediary figure between Russia Paris Russia Russia
The final section of the exhibition is devoted to the Russian avant garde. I blogged about the linkages between Italian Futurism and its Russian counterpart some time ago; this exhibition brings the Franco-Russian linkages into closer focus. Evidently the received term for the art produced in Russia under these Franco-Italian influences is Cubo-Futurism (I don’t think that’s a contemporary term- Russian artists claimed to be Constructivists or Suprematists or Rayonists- but it’s not a bad one for the style). The relationship between French and Russian art could be ambivalent at times (some of the Russian art on show clearly responds to French influences by sending them up rather than adopting them wholesale). As I noted before, there are in any event striking differences between the Russian approach and those of western artists despite shared interests in decomposing objects to give a sense of looking at them from different angles or viewing them in movement. Russian artists were far more interested in drawing on traditional folk arts and even on traditions of church icon painting than their western counterparts- some even undertook commissions for religious institutions at a time when very few western avant garde artists would have been seen dead in a church). In some cases the folk art is a bit of a fraud- modern artists began looking there for inspiration just when the masses were dumping it for modern forms of entertainment and not many of the artists had genuine roots in the peasant villages where folk art was still a living tradition. Nevertheless there is a definite nationalist tonality underlying much of this art- perhaps underscored by a range of paintings which subtly favours the Russian side of the show (some of the most famous French items from the Morozov and Shchukin collections haven’t been lent, with lesser works coming in their place)
There are some lovely things here, though, from Larionov’s and Goncharova’s pseudo-primitive portraits though Chagall’s surreal fantasies from Jewish life to Naum Altman’s gorgeous portrait of the poet Anna Akhmatova. The show does however slightly fizzle out. It contains Malevich’s famous Black Square, which could be seen as a statement of the final death of figurative art (though when this was first displayed it was hung in a context which echoed where the family icons would have been hung in a Russian home- again the subtle reference to an Eternal Russia of folk/religious art) and finishes with a model of Tatlin’s proposed headquarters building for the Third International (a kind of deconstructed Eiffel Tower on steroids which would have dominated the Moscow or St Petersburg skyline has it even been built- the fact that there was no consensus on where it would go shows how much of a pipedream it was).
The political link is of course appropriate- the artistic culture which this exhibition documents was ultimately destroyed by politics. The great collectors saw their collections expropriated. Some of the artists headed westwards, to very varied fates (Kandinsky and Chagall ultimately did pretty well, Goncharova ended up distinctly marginalised). Those who remained in the Soviet Union were ultimately dependent on state favour and patronage to work, and that dried up as Stalin tightened his grip on power. Many came to untimely ends in the Gulag, which has posthumously cast them in the role of noble victims of a philistine state. Whether that is entirely justified is another issue; I don’t think any of the avant garde who remained in Russia
It’s a fascinating show but it’s hard to avoid a degree of ambivalence when visiting it, as well as a sense of regret for a moment when the future for Russia
I’ll be putting some of my favourites on Flickr in the next day or two
| Siena- Art for a City | for everyone |
Hope you all had a lovely Christmas and a great start to the year. I found the former hard work- family duties in Scotland
I even managed to get some culture in for the season by going to the National Gallery’s current exhibition “Siena Siena
The agenda, articulated by its chief curator Luke Symons, is on one level simple- Siena Siena Sienese Republic Italy- Venice , however, was the publishing capital of Italy in the 1550’s and well placed to look after its interests- Siena
There are plausible reasons why Sienese art might have gone up a cul-de-sac. The city was very hard hit by the Black Death in 1348- its cityscape is still marked by the massive cathedral whose construction had to be abandoned after the plague, leaving huge walls leading nowhere. Several of the great artists of the 14th century- most notably the Lorenzetti brothers and Simone Martini- appear to have died then, disrupting workshop traditions. Economically and politically it was badly affected by the downturn which followed, with a series of increasingly fragile regimes presiding over a republic ravaged by raiding mercenary companies and under growing pressure from its neighbours. For all practical purposes Siena
Even though it regained independence a few years later, it remained an edgy, fragile place, a small player in an Italy Siena
The exhibition makes the best case possible for Sienese art in this difficult era. The admitted conservatism of most public commissions is viewed not as decadence but a conscious affirmation of civic identity in hard times, bolstered by the positive value attached to certain iconic pieces or art by such venerated figures at St Bernardino of Siena, the hugely admired Franciscan preacher of the 1430’s and 40’s. In any case, the conservative tradition (which, interestingly, is taken as looking back to the Lorenzettis and Martini rather than the more recent figure of Sassetta, who still remains curiously undervalued in this account), was not monolithic and was open to adaptation in response to stimuli like the short residence of the great Florentine sculptor Donatello in the city. And things did change; artistic innovation was more acceptable if filtered via the papal court in Rome
It’s a valiant efforts but it doesn’t quite convince. What Symons has come up with, it seems to me, is a more socially and politically sophisticated version of a familiar tale. Even his account admits that painters in the Sienese tradition like Sano di Pietro went on too long and were responsible for workshop production of gilded Madonnas on an almost industrial scale, most of which lacked any real artistic merit. Some artists like Matteo di Giovanni were able to produce works which looked both backwards and forwards like the massive Asciano altarpiece illustrated above, complete with the heavenly orchestra in full cry. It’s hard to avoid the feeling, though, that the tradition was getting very played out and the modest impact of Donatello (who never completed the work for the cathedral which he had been imported by a somewhat less anti-Florentine regime than usual to undertake) was pretty marginal. Although Sienese artists did get commissions outside their city, they seem to have been less mobile than masters elsewhere, protected by even more stringent guild regulations blocking foreigners from work in the city than were usual elsewhere in Italy
It’s also revealing that a lot of the most interesting work on show was nevertheless produced by those “foreigners” who managed to slip though the loopholes in the guild ordinances, for instance by being employed by those “inside outsiders” like the Piccolomini and their Spanocchi associates. The most intriguing of these painters is simply known as the Griselda Master (from his depiction of the Story of Griselda on a series of panels, possibly part of the case in which a bride transported her trousseau- though the rather ghastly story of Griselda seems an uncomfortable image for both parties to a wedding even in a society which regarded the duty of wifely obedience as absolute). His name is unknown and it’s not certain where he came from- possibly from further south in Italy
Others came in when the whole system of 15th century Siena Siena
The final room makes a big pitch on behalf of Beccafumi (ironically the one Sienese artist of the era valued by Vasari and a political weathercock who painted for the Petrucci regime and then for the revived Republic which followed its overthrow). I’m afraid it just doesn’t work for me; his hazy proto-mannerism leaves me cold. I’d rather have a gilded Madonna.
I’ll be putting some of the art from the show on my Flickr site in the next day or so- even a couple of Beccafumis to show I’m not biased.
| Historic drag | for everyone |
Its sometimes amazing what you find in very academic journals.... I came across this following up on a reference to an article written about Prisoner of War camp theatre in Russia during the First World War published in last year's American Historical Review. Officer prisoners (German, Austro-Hungarian- the vast majority- and Turkish) had a pretty good time of it, at least until the Revolution; they couldn't be obliged to work and were even paid a decent salary by their captors. In fact conditions of life were so comfortable that the German military censorship got quite concerned about prisoners writing home about how well fed they were when Germany was starving.
There there was the issue of female roles. Obviously these had to be found from amongst the ranks of the prisoners as well- sometimes with spectacular results, as the photo of Emmerich Laschwitz up top shows. Ms Laschwitz was evidently the reigning superstar diva of the Siberian camp circuit and I think one can see why- even ninety years on she's quite a turn-on. Staging productions was sometimes complicated by prima donna egos amongst the actresses (no doubt those directors who had worked in the peacetime theatre would have found it all very familiar). Laschwitz apparently regarded the time in Siberia as the happiest in his life- perhaps one can guess why. I haven't been able to find anything on what happened to this gorgeous lady after the war but I suspect it was all a terrible anti-climax.
| IT and Antiquaries | for everyone |
I don’t know if I mentioned that I was on the move again at work, this time within the same building. We moved down a couple of floors and are now established in a space which feels a bit like an airport departure lounge without the retail options- total open plan, minimal storage space, hardly any private meeting rooms, and a much greater density of bodies. Bizarrely we’re not allowed waste paper bins- they make the place look untidy…..
And we’re supposed to be getting new IT in the shape of postage stamp sized lap top computers. Handover was supposed to be this week. I turned up yesterday afternoon for the training session at which I was supposed to receive the machine and was told “sorry, there’s a problem with yours”. Each machine is being individually constructed and something had gone wrong downloading the software on to mine so I missed my slot. I suppose I’ll get it next week. By then the kit might even be working- a lot of my colleagues who’ve come back with machines have found they don’t work when they try to log on. In any event, the desks haven’t yet been modified to install the docking stations required for the lap tops to work. Oh, and the lap tops don’t seem to operate outside the building. It’s a bit depressing when things turn out exactly as you’d expected. I suppose by the standards of the UK tax administration managing to send all the family and bank details of every household in the country claiming child benefit (in all some 25 million people) on unencrypted disks through the regular internal post and managing to lose them in the process the shambles of re-equipping DIUS is pretty small beer but it gets rather frustrating when one has to deal with the consequences.
I escaped from the lunacies to see the Royal Academy ’s exhibition “Making History- Antiquaries in Britain
The show is in truth a bit of a rag bag. It’s curated by David Starkey, a well known “media don”- he’s a history professor at one of the London University Colleges who’s for ever presenting history programmes for the BBC. He’s also notoriously opinionated, a thundering snob and a screaming queen (he was known in London University
In the end the exhibition is a bit of all the above. It starts at a slightly arbitrary point around 1450 with a wonderful pedigree which sought to trace the descent of Henry VI back to Adam and Eve- done on a massive roll several metres long in a rather modern looking timeline form with lots of little illustrations of the key points on the way, including such episodes as the Great Flood. It then reviews the work of the first generation of antiquaries in the Tudor age, goes on to the establishment of the RSA and looks at the activities of its founding generation, examines various projects sponsored by the RSA in the 19th century and comes down to the present day. In truth, though, the show rather fizzles after 1900, when archaeology in its modern form had become established as a professional academic discipline (and archaeologists spent a good deal of time pouring scorn on their antiquarian predecessors in order to demonstrate their superior intellectual qualifications). The core of the exhibition lies in the period 1660-1880.
One thing which emerges from the exhibition is that the bits of 18th and 19th century antiquarianism which had the greatest artistic impact were the bits which centred on the recording of medieval and Tudor art. There is a section on the appropriation of a thoroughly idealised English Middle Ages first by the Gothic Revivalists (the work on rebuilding the Houses of Parliament after the 1834 fire was very important as a place of cross-fertilisation between artists and antiquarians) and then by the Arts and Crafts Movement. The visions of William Morris and Burne-Jones were heavily influenced by published reproductions of medieval paintings undertaken under RSA auspices- and in turn antiquarian publications were inclined to adopt a rather Pre-Raphaelite approach to visual presentation of the past.
The more complex issues of what one might call the invention of pre-history don’t lend themselves quite so well to visual presentation but were as important. Antiquaries working in the 17th and 18th centuries had the major problem of trying to fit everything they found into a very compressed time scale. Even if Bishop Ussher’s notorious calculation that the world had been created in 4004 BC was not universally accepted, it was generally agreed that the Creation had taken place not so many thousand years in the past. This meant that, for instance, remains of mammoths were accounted for as elephants imported by the Romans for gladiatorial contests. It took many years for the thought that there might be an awful lot more time to fill than had hitherto been recognised to take shape- ironically in the writings of men many of whom were ordained clergy of the Church of England.
Complicating matters further in England was the very long shadow cast by that great storyteller Geoffrey of Monmouth whose “History of the Kings of Britain” (written in the mid 12th century) attributed the foundation of Britain to Trojan exiles led by one Brutus. Even though his fantasies about such figures as Lear and King Arthur are supposed to have been debunked in the early Tudor period, they remained potent. The glories of Arthur were useful to underpin a strengthened English Protestant nationalism and to assert vague territorial claims in the Atlantic (“British” elided into “English” with remarkable ease- in that sense the exhibition’s title did have some validity). King Lucius’ alleged conversion to Christianity years before Constantine gave the Church of England an ancient lineage, arguably superior to that of the Pope in Rome
Even when Arthur faded reluctantly into the shadows, Geoffrey’s invented past remained useful as a stepping stone to other interpretations. Geoffrey suggested that Merlin had caused Stonehenge to be built by magically shipping it over from Ireland Stonehenge as a Druid temple- and of the Druids as the heirs to the Old Testament priesthood. The picture above shows a Grand Conventional Ceremony of the Britons, drawn in 1815 but in line with Stukely’s imaginings with the Ark of the Covenant putting in an appearance.
The exhibition has a section devoted to Stonehenge as an iconic site of antiquarian imagination. This admirably resists the temptation to mock Stukely and his ilk. As it shows, although we now know a lot more about the dating and construction of Stonehenge , it’s still not really clear exactly why it was built. Stukely’s imaginings may turn out to be no more unreasonable than some of the equally grandiose intellectual edifices constructed in recent years about Neolithic observatories and his desire to confer some form of superior religious status on our remote ancestors looks curiously like the New Agey flirtations of certain elements in the modern archaeological establishment.
I’ve put some more pictures of items in the exhibition on my Flickr site.
| Lust by the Roman Seaside | for everyone |
The storyline is another riff on classical Roman history. The Emperor Nero wants to dump his wife Octavia to marry the beautiful Poppea. She’s all for the idea, dumping her existing lover Otho to do so. The Emperor’s tutor Seneca isn’t at all happy but is pressurised into killing himself. Octavia decides to have Poppea murdered and recruits Otho to do the job, though he’s not very keen on the idea. His new girlfriend, Drusilla, is however very happy when he tells her he needs her help to do this and she helps him by disguising him in her clothes. The murder fails thanks to direct intervention by the Goddess of Love. Nero sends Otho and Drusilla into exile, followed by Octavia, and then marries Poppea. Cue flourishes of trumpets and happy ending.
Of course it’s all rubbish in historical terms. The real Otho was actually married to Poppea and forced into a divorce to let her marry Nero. Seneca did indeed kill himself, but three years after Nero married Poppea. The key figure opposing the marriage was Nero’s mother Agrippina (until he murdered her). She doesn’t even appear in the opera- presumably even a thoroughly amoral telling of the story might have balked at taking a favourable view of matricide. And of course there wasn’t really a happy ending- Nero eventually murdered Poppea too, allegedly by kicking her so hard that she miscarried their child.
As I pointed out when writing about Handel’s “Agrippina”, the intriguing thing about all this messing around with history was that the highly sophisticated Venetian audiences both operas were created for would have been very well aware of the incongruities and inconsistencies- classical Roman history was a central part of elite education in that society, at least for males. Indeed the librettist made the point quite explicit in the published version of the text- the preface in effect says “You all know the story as presented by the Roman historian Tacitus but we’re telling it differently”. No doubt part of this was the natural propensity to tidy up storylines which every Hollywood scriptwriter would understand. It does however also serve to question the “historical” version in subtle ways. In this, Octavia comes over as a noble but largely passive victim. In the opera she’s a ruthless schemer whose schemes go wrong. But was the “real” Octavia quite as passive as she’s made out to be? She’d sat in silence when Nero poisoned her brother. Had she been complicit in that murder out of personal ambition? Seneca, a prolific writer and inveterate self publicist, presented himself as the man who’d kept Nero on the rails- a view posterity tended to go along with. He also appears to have been a man up to his elbows in dubious financial dealings and peddling influence (it was claimed that his financial speculations in tax farming led directly to the rebellion of Boudica in Britain
There are of course some additional twists which add to the enjoyment. The opera is full of gender bending. Some of this of course comes from the Italian baroque taste for casting castrati in key male roles- in this case Nero. This has interesting consequences. The old Leppard adaptation transposed the part down for a tenor. Modern authentic performances are more or less obliged to cast a female singer in the role- with the result that the final love duet of the opera comes out as perhaps the most beautiful and sexiest piece of lesbian music in the classical repertoire. There is also the part of Arnalta, Poppea’s elderly, lecherous, social climbing nurse/servant. In the present production this is played as a drag role. A lot of the reviewers didn’t like this approach but it’s one of the few bits of the production I actually agreed with- and not just for the obvious reasons. I’ve seen as many productions of “Poppea” where this approach was adopted as ones were a woman sang the role and I actually think it works better as a drag role. There is a little rather tenuous evidence that it was sung that way originally and Arnalta certainly appears to have been the prototype for what became a stock character who was to be found in later 17th century Italian operas. These parts do seem to have been sung by men, which suggests that Arnalta was- the vocal line is comfortably in the counter tenor range. There’s also a spot of dragging up on stage. As observant readers will have noticed, Otho dresses up as Drusilla to murder Poppea. Naturally I take a keen interest in how this bit of business is done. Traditional stagings are apt to wimp out by having Otho borrow Drusilla’s cloak. The last ENO production, however, saw Otho make a very creditable effort indeed to mimic Drusilla, hairdo and all (I thought he looked a good deal sexier than she did but that’s just me). The present production was an irritating mess; Otho was bearded but still slipped on Drusilla’s frock, a blonde wig she just happened to have conveniently in her bag- but ducked out of the six inch heels she was wearing in favour of a more sensible set of what looked like kitten heels (it’s not easy to run away from the scene of the crime in stilettos).
This brings me to the staging. It was awful. ENO had imported a Chinese director who seemed to have no idea what he was about. One is inured to modern dress productions but this was just bizarre. The scene seemed to be set somewhere by the seaside (at one point possibly under the sea…..). Seneca was in a business suit, supplemented later on by green wellies as he set about mowing his lawn (which I found genuinely amusing). Poppea got a couple of nice frocks, though she was saddled with a frightful concoction for her wedding/coronation and Kate Royal as Poppea simply towered over Anne Gravelius as Nero. Everybody else was dressed either like a beach bum or a refugee from a PVC fetishists ball- even the Olympian divinities who pop in and out of the action. Six inch heels appeared to be mandatory for the female roles. I suppose I could just about have swallowed the costuming had there appeared to be a reason for it all but there wasn’t. The action was supplemented by a (very good) dance company from Java who looked completely lost in their surroundings. A radio controlled giant conch shell buzzed round the stage at one point for no very obvious reason. At times the staging actually worked against both the singing and the sense of the story. Kate Royal was expected to sing an aria perched on a swing some half dozen metres above the stage and Otho was supposed to try to stab her to death from ground level as she sat in the air above him- even without divine intervention it was shard to see how he was going to do the job. The worst sufferer was Octavia, who spent the whole opera reclining in a purple shift and bondage boots on a giant translucent white sea-shell (at least I think that’s what it was supposed to be). This must have been a most awkward position to sing from- and the giant shell had acoustic effects, causing slight but discernable distortions to the sound of her voice at certain ranges. The staging was so bad that it began to actively detract from my appreciation of the opera, which takes a bit of doing.
If ENO want to be that off the wall, what about an all-male “Poppea”? You might have to use some of the Leppard transpositions but I think it could be made to work musically (even Poppea’s part lies fairly low in the soprano scale). After all, Nero’s chosen successor to Poppea was a pretty young man called Sporus who looked just like her. “The Coronation of Sporus”, anyone?
| Pictures | for everyone |
I think I've finally managed to get the pictures to stay put.....
| Update | for everyone |
Well, I've transferred all the blogs I really want to transfer now...... Don't say I'm not good to you!
| Growl.... | for everyone |
I've fixed the garbles on the blogs I've imported but (a) it looks as if the pictures embedded in some of the entries have now disappeared (they were there when I first imported them.....) and (b) about half the entries have got lost in transmission. I'm afraid that folk who really want read the whole story will still have to go to my 360 site
| Blogs from 360 | for everyone |
I've managed to import most of my blogs form my 360 site (thanks Vickie for the tip that it was possible to do so) Unfortunately the transfer has garbled some of the punctuation. I've fixed the older entries; I'll try to do the rest eventually
| Spritual Futurists | for everyone |
I'm afraid my cultural activities have also suffered a bit because of the rugby World Cup- which I won't bore you with as other people's sports are apt to be as tedious as other people's politics. I did however get to the Estorick Gallery for the latest exhibition there. This addresses the topic of spirituality in Italian Futurist art.
At first sight this seems an odd subject. The common stereotype of Futurism is that it didn't do the spiritual- or did it in very odd ways. F T Marinetti invited Futurists to worship speed and high technology and suggested that the railway tracks on which high speed trains ran were a suitable site for religious veneration. In other contexts Futurism treated the Italian nation as a suitable object for veneration. The Futurist movement tended to be venomously anti-clerical on nationalist grounds due to the hostility of successive Popes to Italian unification and the Italian monarchy's seizure of the Papal States in the 1860s and 70's. While Marinetti occasionally played the "If Jesus was alive today he'd be a Futurist" gambit, his more normal default position in the early years of Futurism was a quasi-Nietschean distaste for Christianity as too pacificist and meek to be a proper religion for a modern, warlike, imperial Italy.
It therefore comes as bit of a surprise to find Marinetti signing a Manifesto of Futurist Religious Art in 1931. In his own inimitable style, he claims that Futurism is in fact the only style of painting properly suited to depict spiritual impulses in the modern age both on technical grounds (its approach to issues like the depiction of speed and simultaneity makes it uniquely capable of giving visual expression to key Catholic dogmas like the Incarnation) and more generally because it is in harmony with profound spiritual impulses. The Manifesto represented more than just Marinetti indulging his taste for provocation; there was a body of Futurist religious art being created at the time it was published and representatives of this art make up the core of the Estorick exhibition.
What was going on? Intriguingly the curators of the exhibition themselves don't entirely agree. The two Italian ones take the Manifesto broadly at face value and go truffle hunting for earlier Futurist explorations of the spiritual. They come up with some interesting material, though not all of it seems entirely relevant (musings on the inter-relationship between man and machine by people like Prampolini are intriguing but some way from the apparent point). The British curator takes a much more sceptical line, suggesting that this was little more than a piece of opportunistic bandwagon-jumping by Marinetti in the aftermath of Mussolini's own hugely opportunistic Concordat with the Vatican- and hints that quite a lot of the art in question wasn't up to much. Again, I'm not sure this can be the whole explanation. If the Manifesto was an attempt to steer church patronage towards deserving Futurist artists it was a resounding failure. The Vatican, perhaps understandably suspicious of Futurist motives and unenthusiastic about modernist art at the best of times, was negative about Futurist religious art and precious few commissions materialised (the only one actually noted in the exhibition was in Switzerland). My own feeling is that Marinetti was probably sincere in his own rather erratic way- he was after all the sort of person who was inclined to regard an excessive concern for consistency as a weakness of small minds. There is evidence from his own writings that he was inclined to think more about spiritual matters as he grew older. His wife Benedetta was one of the artists who engaged in Futurist religious art and she appears to have had rather more influence over him than the distinctly testosterone-drenched mythology of Futurism would like to admit. I'm sure the Concordat played a part too, though in a less purely cynical way than has been suggested. Futurism as a movement liked to claim its relevance to every aspect of human existence (there was even a Futurist cuisine); with church/state relations apparently stabilised the time probably seemed ripe for Futurism to set forth its manifesto for matters spiritual without appearing to betray its principles.
It's interesting to note that that very few of the first generation Futurists actually engaged in religious art and Marinetti had to struggle a bit to make up the numbers when he came to listing Futurist artists who were active in the field. He cited Severini, who had undoubtedly undergone a religious conversion in the 1930's but hadn't been a Futurist in any meaningful sense for years. Other important names however were conspicuous by their absence- no Carra, no Balla (the two Ballas in the Estorick exhibition come from the 1920's and don't really fit in with the show- though his faintly Warholian "Nuns in a Landscape" is great fun), no Sironi (even though he had increasingly turned to traditional media like mosaic and fresco in this period). Most of the names cited by Marinetti were second generation Futurists, born around 1900 and active in the Aeropittura movement of the 1930's- and many were fairly minor figures.
What of the art? It's a mixed bag, to be honest. The most important figures represented are Fillia (pen name of Luigi Colombo), who was the other key signatory of the Manifesto and Gerardo Dottori (who rather surprisingly didn't sign it even though he would clearly have approved of its sentiments). Fillia may be important but I'm afraid he does nothing for me; his work seems to recycle the same abstract doodlings over and over again. Dottori was a first generation Futurist and a key figure in the Aeropittura movement, which sought to capture the visual effects of flight. He was also a man whose interest in religious art pre-dated the 1931 manifesto and was known for his mystical tastes. I find his work enjoyable if a bit kitschy at times. The thoroughly stagey Crucifixion shown above is in some ways a good example of his work, though rather more static than usual. His fondness for strange perspectives, sweeping lines which convey movement through the air and rather un-natural colours prompt the slightly irreverent thought that he would have been a brilliant cartoon animator had he ever tried his hand at that trade. The other artists are mostly lesser known figures. My personal preference tends to go with those who sought to re-interpret fairly traditional religious imagery from medieval or Renaissance art in modernist guises (the Resurrection depicted like a rocket blasting off or the Annunciation depicted from a point above and behind the Archangel Gabriel's wings), but that's probably just my medievalism coming out. It's an intriguing show, even if one senses that Futurism and religious art were not an entirely well matched couple.
| Holidays, feudal dreams and a bearded lady | for everyone |
Back from a lovely holiday to chaos. To take the chaos first- as a result of the government reshuffle I talked about on an earlier blog which pitchforked me into a newly invented Government department we're having to move offices (so that everybody in the new Department can be in the same building- it's supposed to make sure we all know and love each other). I'd assumed this would take some time but I got back on Monday after two weeks away to find that we were moving at the end of the week- hence a week of frantic activity packing and trying to organise for the new home while still keeping the day job going. The crazy thing is that we move now and than are scheduled to move again within the new building at the end of November. It doesn't help that the place we're going is a notorious slum of an office- I used to work there years ago and it hasn't improved any. It freezes in winter, bakes in summer and the lease is up in about five years so there's no incentive to spend much on getting it right. It also looks as if we'll be moving to some new untested IT system at the time of the second move; this is based on lap top machines which have to be put in a central store every night. A very special friend of mine has just been forced into home working using a lap top and she's having a hellish time with the IT- her inability to get anything to work is literally reducing her to tears every time I talk to her, and she's an electronic engineer by training. I suppose we'll have some sort of back up in the office but I can all too easily foresee productivity plummeting for months on end.
This rather takes the shine off a fun holiday in Italy. Half of this was in territory I'd been before- Verona and its surroundings-, the other half in new areas to me- up the Adige valley into the mountains, staying in Trento and exploring from there. I could go on endlessly about places of interest, art works and building seen and so on- there are lots of things to talk about.
How Mantua seems to have decided that it wants rid of tourists by arranging access to its most important single piece of art (the Mantegna frescoes in what's known as the "Camera degli Sposi") in a way which obliges visitors to take in a modern art exhibition but excludes the rest of the palace complex (suited me fine- I'm interested in modern art, got a long session in the Camera and was on my own for most of it- but I wonder a bit about the long term economics).
How Verona seems to be in the middle of a massive cleaning and restoration operation which means that the things one wants to see either look great or are under scaffolding- one benefit was that one could look Mastino II della Scala, Lord of Verona in the mid 14th century, in the eye as the wonderful equestrian statue from his tomb was down in the art gallery, but to balance that his father Cangrande was under wraps there and his successor Cansignore had his tomb under wraps too (and, yes, the della Scala family really did call themselves "Big Dog" and "Mastiff" and "Lord Dog"- "Top Dog", perhaps?- I've no idea where the silly names came from but they became a family tradition).
How it struck me for the first time just how many frescoes in Verona churches depict men in full armour in the traditional donor position (kneeling before their favourite saint)- donor portraits are familiar enough in medieval art but it's not so common in Italy to see armoured knights in that role and it perhaps suggests that Verona was a more overtly militarised sort of place than the average Italian city.
How I said hello to Oetzi the Iceman in Bolzano, where his naturally mummified body lies in a specially constructed chamber in the local museum while his clothes and all the paraphernalia he was carrying when he met his violent death in the high mountains five thousand years ago are on display around him and how, for all the fascination of the display and of what the finding of his body in a glacier in the early 1990's has told modern researchers about the world he lived in, I had a sense of discomfort at seeing him left stripped of his belongings as a pure museum exhibit- it's a funny sort of immortality of the flesh and, while I wouldn't suggest reburying him in the mountains, I do feel he could at least have been laid to rest in the museum in a way which more closely mirrored how he was found.
How I went to a couple of major collections of the kind of 20th century Italian art which really interests me- Trento and it's smaller neighbour Rovereto share a gallery complex called MART which specialises in the period.
How going up and down the Adige valley gives a real sense of the complexities of 20th century European history- to simplify things, Trento feels like an Italian town with Germanic accents while Bolzano/Bosen feels like a south German town with Italian accents (and a full blown Fascist era triumphal arch). Both started the century as parts of the Habsburg Empire, both ended it in the Italian Republic. In between came one World War in which there was a subsidiary front just south of Trento, in which the Italian Nationalist member of the Austrian parliament for the region opted to fight in the Italian army, was captured and hanged as a traitor by the Habsburg authorities, in which thousands of Italian speakers served in the ranks of the Habsburg armed forces and fought the Russians and in which the Austrian authorities made a big pitch for the loyalties of the rural folk who spoke neither Italian nor German but Ladin, a Romance language (or more accurately series of dialects) with heavy Germanic influences- a population which did indeed have a very thin time after the region became part of Italy after 1918 and found themselves under pressure to "be Italian" even before Mussolini came along but are still there and actively demanding their rights. After that war, the region passed to Italy and was subject to massive Italianisation in the 1920's and 30's, planned ethnic cleansing in the early 1940's (there was a serious Nazi plan to shift the German speaking population en masse to conquered lands in Poland or Ukraine in order to remove an irritant to relations with their Italian allies- plans which went into violent reverse after Italy changed sides in 1943 and the region was annexed to the Reich for a couple of years), a vicious partisan war in the mountains and competitive bombing campaigns by right wing extremists from both language groups in the 1950's and 60's. Things seem to have settled down now, though it's clear that the countryside north of Trento is becoming ever more homogenously German speaking while Bolzano itself is slowly shifting in that direction as the children and grandchildren of the Italians who were moved in by the state during the Fascist era tend to drift away.
One of the real highlights, though, was in Trento. The town was a prince-bishopric on the Germanic model until the 1790's and the Prince Bishops governed from the Castello del Buonconsiglio (though the name was perhaps a shade optimistic- the quality of council and governance dispensed from it was very variable), a splendid if rather rambling affair which pulls together towers and halls and courtyards from the 13th to the 17th century. Buried away in one of the towers is the Cycle of the Months. This is an almost complete fresco cycle of the passing year (March is missing, lost in structural alterations). It's a fascinating and beautiful work and nothing like as well known as it ought to be- it's only just begin to find its way into coffee table books as a source of illustrations of medieval life alongside the far better known illuminations of the Tres Riches Heures of the Duc de Berry which also depict the changing seasons and the activities associated with them. In many ways the Trento frescoes are even more impressive as a record of medieval life since they give more space to everyday work- haymakers raking hay with implements of a type still in use at the beginning of last century in the region, the wine harvest in full swing (the region produces some very fine wines), pigs being slaughtered for the winter, ploughing and harrowing and bird scaring. Nature gets a look-in too- the bears awaken in the mountains for spring and -less happily-are hunted in the autumn. The houses of the lower classes are depicted in detail. The aristocracy engage in a noisy jousting tournament, go hunting, dance and sing in the summer sunshine or throw snowballs at each other in December.
And that is where it starts getting interesting. The frescoes could be seen as the depiction of an ideal late medieval society with everyone in their place- a kind of late Gothic paradise for the elites. They are however the product of one of the major fiascos in the history of the Prince-Bishops of Trento. They date from the disastrous reign of Georg von Liechtenstein. He was a member of the family which still rules the little principality of that name wedged between Switzerland and Austria but the bulk of his lands and revenues came from the present day Czech Republic and many of his immediate followers seem to have come from there (indeed the artist who was responsible for the frescoes may well have been a certain Master Wenceslaus(/Wenzel/Vaclav) who is recorded as a member of his household). After his appointment in the 1390's he managed to fall out with everybody who mattered- the city council in Trento and its population as a whole, the local aristocracy, the peasantry, even the local clergy under his control. In 1407 he was forcibly deposed by the lord of the neighbouring Tyrol to the loud cheers of everybody who had to deal with him and, though he remained nominally bishop until the 1420's, he never set foot in Trento again.
Obviously the temptation is to see the cycle as a cross between a manifesto and an escape from the messy realties of the real world into a dream paradise, and clearly there's a lot to commend that interpretation. For all his faults, Bishop Georg was a genuinely enthusiastic patron of the arts and it's easy to see how he could have chosen to present his view of the world through art- a thoroughly un-religious vision, it has to be said. Looking more closely however, one does wonder if even his own chosen artist wasn't trying to subvert the message. The workers in the fields without exception look miserable and fed up. The wine harvest is supervised by a man in a red hat who is probably the bishop's tax collector. The institutional church is almost invisible apart from one village priest preaching a sermon and firmly banished to the "peasant" register. There are little hints that things aren't quite as idyllic as they might seem. This was an era of peasant revolt- England (which had surprisingly close links with the Czech lands in the 1370s-90s because of Richard II's marriage to a Bohemian princess) had seen one in 1381, the Czech lands would see massive social and religious turmoil in the early 15th century culminating in the Hussite uprisings of the 1420's. It would certainly be possible to read the frescoes as a kind of meditation on the famous tag of the day "When Adam delved and Eve span/Who was then the gentlemen?" There's always a danger of over-interpretation and of reading too much into works of art (especially of reading subtly subversive messages which were so subtle that they passed unnoticed at the time) but I wonder of Master Wenceslas might just have been playing little games with his patron. After all, he may have come to hate him as much as everybody else who knew him seems to have done .
In this context I wonder about the painting at the top. Naturally it shows the aristocrats enjoying themselves, dancing in the fields to the strains of a group of minstrels in June while the lower orders get on with the business of making cheese. Look closely at the central couple, the ones in dark brown and pink- especially the lady in the height of fashion in the splendid pink frock. She has a beard...... The story is that her partner has the face of a later Prince Bishop (there were problems with the paintings which needed repeated maintenance over the years and it's known that Bishop Kless had work done on the frescoes during his reign) and that the artist got worried about the implied immorality if the bishop was depicted dancing with a pretty young lady so he altered her face as well. I'm not sure I buy that- the message sent by the painting as it stands now could be seen as even more questionable in terms of conventional views of correct episcopal behaviour. It's all rather odd and leads me to wonder whether Master Wenceslaus was playing games again.....
| Dutch Worthies and Holidays | for everyone |
Something odd happened last weekend- we had a Bank Holiday weekend in which the weather was mostly good. Normally a British Bank Holiday weekend in guaranteed to pour with rain. Since this has been the wettest summer since 1912 it ought to have been a good bet that the heavens would open for all three days but in fact the sun shone.
I still disappeared into an exhibition for one of the days. The National Gallery is doing a show on Dutch Portraits in the age of Rembrandt and Hals (which will transfer to The Hague shortly- and pick up a few more paintings there, the catalogue suggests). It's a very fine show with some surprises in that (for instance) I'm amazed the Mauritshuis in The Hague was prepared to allow one of Rembrandt's most famous works which depicts the anatomist Dr Tulp doing a public dissection out of its sight- it may be a bit gruesome but it was a major work both in establishing the artist's contemporary reputation and in establishing the position of Dr Tulp, who was a major figure in Dutch medical circles for years afterwards.
The sheer number of portraits produced in the Netherlands in the Seventeenth Century was probably unprecedented for its day, at least in terms of the type of people commissioning them. There were of course good social reasons why things developed in the way they did. The Dutch Republic was a Protestant state- nominally at least a Calvinist one. This almost eliminated the role of painting in religious contexts and left a lot of painters looking for alternative forms of artistic expression. It also left a lot of potential patrons who would once have used the sponsorship of religious art as a way of displaying their power and importance. They were now able to junk the religious pretext and step forward to be depicted in their full glory rather than having to gatecrash, say, a Nativity scene in the lower register as donors.
There was also a lot of money around, at least in the major cities of the provinces of Holland and Zealand- long range trade to the East and West Indies gets the headlines but a lot of the riches of the Republic came from the humble herring and the not-so-humble Dutch herring fisheries which dominated the fish trade of Europe (no Dutch merchant ever refused to sell fish to Papists who needed endless amounts of salt herring and cod for Friday dinner) and a lot more from a carrying trade which stretched from the Baltic to the Mediterranean. There was a certain amount of more or less overt piracy as well, usually aimed at the Spanish (the Republic had fought its way to independence in the 1570's and 80's against Spain and went into a second war against the Habsburgs in the 1620's, at the period when many of the paintings in the exhibition were created).
And there was a lot of self assertion to go with the money too. The Dutch Republic was a very odd polity indeed in Seventeenth Century terms. There weren't many republics around in those days- Venice, Genoa, Lucca and the Swiss Confederation were about the only others I can think of, plus a dwindling number of Imperial Free Cities in the Holy Roman Empire. Even as a republic it was a rather odd affair. It's more properly referred to as the United Provinces of the Netherlands since it was a very loose confederation of seven Protestant provinces which had rebelled against Spain. Each of the Provinces was highly autonomous and very different in size, wealth and social structure. In turn the individual provinces could themselves look like loose federations of city states. In practice the wealthier trade-oriented provinces like Holland and Zealand tended to set the pace- and they in turn were more or less run by the biggest and richest cities like Amesterdam or Haarlem. It could be an amazingly ramshackle affair- for instance, despite the importance of naval power to the Dutch, the United Provinces as such did not have a navy. There were five separate Admiralties based in six ports, each of which ran its own fleet. Into the mix would also go the ships of the East and West India companies, vessels which might be the property of individual cities or provinces and ships owned by individuals. All successful Dutch admirals had to be diplomats and politicians even to get the vessels they commanded into line of battle. It should have been a recipe for chaos (and sometimes it was) but things somehow worked most of the time. At times I suspect that trying to agree any policy on a United Provinces basis must have felt a bit like negotiating legislation in the modern EU.
It was also an odd republic in that it had a royal court. Venice and Genoa may have had Doges, but these were elected figureheads with little or no real power and subject to constitutions which consciously sought to ensure that they couldn't have anything like a court round them. The United Provinces had the stadhouder. In theory it had seven stadhouders, one for each province- the title literally means "steward" (I think- no doubt my beautiful Dutch friend Angela from Flickr will tell me off if I've got this wrong) and originally the stadhouder was the local representative of the ultimate ruler of the province (the Duke of Burgundy, then the Holy Roman Emperor and finally the King of Spain). After the rebellion against Spain led by Prince William of Orange the title remained and (to simplify a bit) became hereditary to his family, the dynasty of Nassau/Orange, in all (bar, I think ,one) of the provinces. Who exactly these "stewards" represented by, say, 1600 was rather unclear given that they were in open rebellion against their overlord (there's a faint air of Tolkien and Gondor about the situation, though the Orangists would have been even less happy than Denethor if someone had turned up claiming to be the true king with a title which trumped the Habsburgs). How they fitted into the complex political structures was also uncertain. A competent adult male member of the house of Orange could exercise enormous power and influence as stadhouder and be little short of a de facto monarch (and was regarded as such by other royal and princely houses) though he might well also face strong "republican" opposition. When no such figure was available the stadhouder almost vanished from the scene. Dutch history in the 17th century was marked by sometimes violent power struggles round the role of the House of Orange and the stadhouder's office. The society which paid for the portraits in the exhibition was a deeply divided one both politically and in religious terms, especially after the Calvinist state church split in the 1620's over theological issues which rapidly came to take on a political colouring.
You wouldn't guess that from the art, though- at least not directly and not from this genre (there was a great deal of ephemeral printed material, pamphlets, songs etc which mirrored the politics of the day). There's a huge amount of individual self-assertion going on , of course. The people who could afford to pay for portraits by the top artists of the day were shelling out to show how important they were. As Protestant citizens of a republic and members of an urban rather than landed elite the approach to ostentatious display is perhaps rather different from what it would have been elsewhere. The predominant colours for clothing are black and white or rather muted golds and silvers. This isn't a matter of modesty though- the fabrics shimmer with quality and keeping a lace ruff dazzlingly white must have cost a fortune. Nor is it a blindness to the latest trend- the colours may be muted but the styles of dress reflect the height of contemporary courtly fashion. These people may not be titled nobles but they can do swagger as well as any lord and have adopted the life styles and fashions and interests (intellectual and other) of the nobility (Willem Coymans above is a good example). There's a kind of "warts and all" element to the portraits- these folk are secure enough not to need excessive idealisation, so an Amsterdam notable is quite happy to be depicted with his deformed left arm and others are willing to show their rather paunchy figures. There's no great sense of how these people came by their money (give or take an occasional stylised ship tucked away in the background) but they're clearly enjoying it. Quite a few of the portraits are husband and wife affairs, either as a matched pair of portraits or, rather more unusually for the date, in paintings which figure both husband and wife together. The appearance of domestic bliss mattered- even if the servants would have had to do the work.
There were a few group portraits in the exhibition- I wish there had been more because they form a fascinating genre. These were generally corporate commissions paid for by the organisation in question; the sponsors ranged from trade and merchant guilds through the managing committees of urban charitable bodies to the local militia companies. The Dutch Republic was a republic of committees and boards, often operating on a very local basis but somehow all holding the structures of society together. Sometimes the committees are just shown sitting down to a meeting- with the spectator left in the position of the applicant for poor relief or the stallholder who's been cited for selling short measure. I remember a late Hals work from an exhibition of his work in London years ago (not, sadly, in this show) which portrayed the female regents of the Haarlem poor house- and a more ferocious group of old biddies would be hard to imagine; one pitied any unmarried mother who found herself facing them. The medical profession were keen to be seen discussing their trade- hence Dr Tulp's dissection. The militia companies look as if they're more interested in having a good time (but before one jokes too much about them, it's worth remembering that their fathers or grandfathers would in many cases have had to stand to and defend their cities from the Spanish in the War of Independence and they were still in line for call up in the 1620's and 30's). Interestingly, in some cases it's known that the members of these committees had strongly opposed political and religious views but the paintings never hint that they're anything other than a totally united group. That, no doubt, is the point- the elite putting on a show of unity to the outside world and displaying a corporate identity which outweighed their private differences. It may have been a fraud but it's quite an impressive one and perhaps gives some indication of why such an apparently dysfunctional state as the United Provinces of the Netherlands survived and indeed prospered mightily in the 17th Century.
I'll be off on holiday to Italy next weekend- up north to Trento and then down to Verona. I'm looking forward to it.
| More rain and Islamic art | for everyone |
My latest bit of exhibition going took me somewhere I'd never been before even though it's just across the road from the Victoria and Albert Museum in South Kensington- the Ismaili Centre. As the name suggests, this is the London base of the Ismailis, a sub- group within the Shia tradition in Islam whose spiritual leader is the Aga Khan. They're an intriguing group who split off from the Shia mainstream as represented in Iran at a very early stage in a dispute over who to recognise as the Imam- the Ismailis backed one brother while the others supported his younger sibling. This dispute came before the Twelfth Imam of the mainstream Shias went into the occlusion where he lurks until his return brings on the Shia version of the Millennium. In Ismaili theology the charisma of the Imamate descends in direct hereditary line. This has some slightly mind-blowing consequences- when the current Aga Khan refers to "my Fatimid ancestors" (the rulers of Egypt and North Africa a thousand years or so ago and the only really significant Ismaili dynasty in terms of secular power) he's not talking figuratively. He's understandably a bit less keen to underline the most important Ismaili contribution to the English language- the word "assassin", which derives from an Ismaili sub-group based at Alamut in northern Iran who sought to bring about the installation of an Ismaili caliphate by the targeted murder of key figures in the Islamic world during the 12th and 13th centuries. Their fame went beyond the Islamic world- they were blamed for several high profile unsolved killings of leading figures in the contemporary Crusading states as well, though it has to be said that there was a great deal of legend making about the Assassins and their leader the Old Man of the Mountains in both Christian and Moslem lands and it's now very hard to disentangle truth from legend. These days, however, the Ismailis are a thoroughly peaceable group, mostly to be found in India while the Aga Khan divides his time between the world of horse racing and funding extensive cultural and charitable activities.
The exhibition at the Ismaili centre in London falls into the cultural activities category. It puts on display elements of the Aga Khan's personal collection of Islamic art and this particular show is touring the world before taking up residence in its new permanent home in Toronto in 2010 (this is a bit of a sore point because the original intention as to put the permanent gallery here in London but attempts to acquire suitably central sites were rebuffed where Toronto was welcoming). When the exhibition was shown in Italy earlier this year its title referred to court art; interestingly the London show is called "Spirit and Life", implying that Londoners are more likely to appreciate the religious aspects of the exhibition than Italians would be.
The Italian labelling isn't entirely misleading. The "life" in question is very much the life of the courtly elites of the Islamic world and in truth even the bulk of the items with obvious religious significance would have been created in courtly contexts- a proper show of piety and the patronage of the arts was part of the approved behaviour for a ruler in the Islamic world every bit as much as for his Christian contemporaries. Indeed it's clear that other skills and behaviours and pastimes valued in elite culture were also very similar- a good seat on a horse, the pursuit of hunting and of warfare, appreciation of music, playing chess, the pomp and circumstance of formal occasions and so on. Admittedly not many European monarchs before 1800 would have gone tiger hunting on elephant back or played polo but I suspect they'd have got the taste quite rapidly if the occasion had offered. Islamic rulers ought to have been more abstemious in their feasting than their Christian counterparts but this didn't always happen- the Ottoman Sultan Selim II was not known as "The Sot" for nothing and is even depicted drinking what looks suspiciously like a cup of wine. Islamic rulers gave patronage to sufi holy men and dervish orders whose religious orthodoxy might be very shaky. The Qajar shahs of Iran who ruled from the late 18th to the early 20th centuries even sought to look back to pre-Islamic Persia for some of the style of their courts and cultivated improbably luxuriant beards to this end. The secular elite focus of the exhibition (and indeed its Shia origins) may, however, import subtle distortions to the picture of Islamic art which it presents (I'm sure there ought to be more Korans about and does the delightful depiction of a family of elephants from 16th century India really have a religious dimension, as implied by its situation in the "spirit" bit of the exhibition?).
It's hard to give an overall view of an exhibition which covers something like a thousand years of art gathered from places as far apart as Morocco and South China though some 150 items. It can't hope to give an overview of Islamic art as whole and the items on display tend to come from what are to a western eye the more accessible parts of that tradition- there are a lot of Indian and Iranian manuscript illuminations and miniature paintings which shatter any Koranic prohibition of the depiction of the human body. There are some beautiful ceramics and pieces of metalwork. There are some outstanding specimens of artistic calligraphy though perhaps rather fewer than a genuinely representative account of Islamic art would have contained.
I'm glad I went to see the exhibition and I'm annoyed that we in London won't have the opportunity to get to know this material a lot better in future years. I still ended up with the faint feeling of irritation which comes when I realise I know just enough about what I'm seeing to appreciate how much more I need to know to understand what's going on. The catalogue, beautiful as it is, isn't very helpful in answering the sorts of question which spring to mind about (for instance) how items might have been used or whether different calligraphic scripts used for presentation Korans might have conveyed meanings beyond simply showing where a book came from. It took me back to a wet afternoon in Reading many years ago listening to the late great Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan performing at WOMAD to an audience overwhelmingly composed of white middle class world music fans who insisted on treating his songs as music to dance to. Khan was (I think) an Ismaili (he was certainly Shia) and his songs were entirely devotional in content, full of the mourning and martyrdom and mysticism of that brand of Islam. Everybody seemed to enjoy themselves and the performer himself didn't seem to mind but there was a kind of well meaning incomprehension going on which in other circumstances could have been rather ominous.
| Rain and French art by the seaside | for everyone |
I'm looking out at grey clouds again. At least there isn't a monsoon falling outside like there was on Friday, though there's drizzle about. In other words it's another typical day of this wet and miserable English summer. At least I'm not flooded out of my home- living on the top of a hill has some benefits and if flood waters got anywhere near me I'd expect to have two of every beast in the world forming an orderly queue at my front door. The irony is that, if it wasn't quite as excessively wet, this would look like a normal British summer- on the cool and damp side, and distinctly more congenial to me than sweltering in the rather humid heat which we've had in the past few years.
I'm not sure this was the ideal sort of weather to be going to the "Impressionists by the Sea" exhibition at the Royal Academy- though intriguingly one possible conclusion to be drawn from the art on display was that the weather on the French Channel coast in the second half of the 19th Century was pretty variable when it came to taking a seaside holiday. No doubt this had a lot to do with a natural artistic interest in depicting interesting sky and sea conditions- stormy seas were just much more fun to paint than flat calms and even sunny days on the beach seem to have been accompanied by almost gale force winds- but the result was a view of the coast which was at some remove from that which those charged with promoting local tourism would probably have liked.
The title of the exhibition is a bit misleading and the cynic in me suspects that "Impressionists" was included for commercial reasons. Much of the art isn't really Impressionist at all but comes from painters like Corot or Boudin who were up to a generation older than the core members of that movement even if they too favoured open air sketching and could legitimately be seen as precursors of full blown Impressionism. In fact the only big name Impressionist who seems to have had a sustained interest in painting by the seaside was Monet, who is responsible for a good percentage of the works on display.
There's an additional limitation to the coverage. The seaside in question is exclusively that along the Channel coast and overwhelmingly confined to a fairly limited area in Normandy which saw the first fully developed French seaside resorts on the British model- the Mediterranean coast doesn't figure at all despite its popularity with a slightly later generation of artists. This coverage certainly raises some interesting issues of the inter-relationship between art and society which are well discussed in the catalogue. The Normandy coast developed in the way it did because it was increasingly accessible from Paris by train. Seaside resorts provided artists with aesthetically appealing places to stay which were both relatively cheap and well linked to the art market. And artists (though a rather earlier generation than the ones covered in the exhibition) worked hand in glove with writers to create the image of the Normandy coast as a desirable place for the urban upper and middle classes to come and get away from it all (indeed one- sadly not represented in the exhibition- even went into property development using his paintings to promote a location where he had acquired building rights). The earlier artists worked within in a tradition which saw the seaside either as a place where dramatic things happened or (influenced by Dutch 17th century art) where one could encounter picturesquely primitive fisher folk. Their proto-Impressionist and Impressionist heirs had slightly different agendas. The storms are still there, of course, and the picturesque fishing types can still be seen but increasingly they have to share their beaches with tourists- and no doubt profit from them too. In the 1860's there's quite a focus on the tourists on the beach and the new and very grand hotels which had been constructed to accommodate them. This all seems to fit quite well with the image of the Impressionists as painters of the new modern world, even if the beach is a tamer place in consequence (a reminiscence of Stanley Holloway's famous monologue about a working class English family on holiday in Blackpool in the 1920's sprang into mind looking at some of the paintings- "They didn't think much to the seaside/The waves they was spindly and small/No shipwrecks and nobody drownded/In fact, nothing to laugh at all").
Then in 1870's Monet and Boudin (and most other artists) almost completely stop recording the tourist activity along the coastline even though it was still booming. They prefer to turn their eyes out to sea and record the play of light on the water, the spectacle of the skies or spectacular bits of coastal scenery in varying weather conditions. Any human presence is dwarfed by the setting. The drama is back, but in a rather more impersonal way. When Monet does cover human activities, he focuses quite narrowly on traditional fishing boats rather than the tourists who were no doubt watching them too (fishing boats were never driven out by tourism- the tourists offered a reliable local market for the catch and in any event fishing boats were part of the experience that tourist expected, to such an extent that they probably served to perpetuate increasingly old fashioned work patterns for at least a generation beyond what would otherwise have happened). Some of the empty beachscapes involve sites which would in all probability have been full of visitors.
Quite why this happened is a bit unclear. It's not totally uniform- there were always some artists who would depict the coastline as it now was, dotted with villas and expanded villages- and a slightly later generation of artists like Renoir would revert to depicting tourists on the beach, though in a rather different way which focused on the seaside as a generic place for fun without much in the way of geographical specificity. It may have been a withdrawal from resorts which had become too commercialised (and indeed possibly too expensive for a long term stay) coupled with a search for the "unspoiled". The drivers may equally have been purely technical and aesthetic- a shift of interest to pure landscape (or seascape) art as providing a greater challenge. There may have been market factors as well. My guess is that it was a bit of all the above- and that Impressionists weren't quite as dedicated chroniclers of their own age as they're sometimes thought to be. Personally I find the empty coastlines perhaps more beautiful but rather less interesting than the bustling canvasses of an earlier age, like Boudin's depiction of the Empress Eugenie visiting Trouville (see above).
The exhibition is coming to Washington and Hartford after it's finished in London.
| ork changes and abstraction | for everyone |
I've been reshuffled. As my friends will no doubt be aware, we've just acquired a new Prime Minister here in the UK by a rather curious process- a cross between a dynastic succession and a walk-over on the racetrack. As usually happens when we have this sort of change at the top, there's been a major reorganisation of government and I am now in a brand new Government department called the Department of Innovation, Universities and Skills (no science in the title- the Prime Minister didn't want it). This bolts together the Office of Science and Innovation where I currently work and the people who run university and further education policy in what used to be the Education department. I suppose it's a logical enough fit and it's close to how a lot of European countries organise these issues (though it makes a bit of a mockery of the justifications formerly given for having OSI in the trade and industry ministry which related to bringing science and research to bear on the UK's productivity by improving the links between research and industry). At least DIUS works as an acronym and doesn't throw up anything absurd or obscene when you put it in a spell checker (unlike a previous attempt to rename DTI which was pulled when it was pointed out that the new acronym came out as "dopey" in the Department's own spell check software)- apparently Dius was a Latin god of oaths and good faith, an avatar of Jupiter (at least that's what a quick Google threw up).
It feels a little odd, though. I'm still in the same office environment but the IT support at the moment comes via the successor department to the old DTI and doesn't even mention DIUS. There is a name board in reception which mentions the two departments now in the building, which went up in record time yesterday. There isn't anything else to show that we exist and I fear we'll be in for six months of chaos as that situation is rectified, the IT systems disentangled, new accommodation sought (not least for the ministers, who aren't going to want to live as squatters in two separate buildings), new staff grading and reporting arrangements created, a new logo and website created (the former being probably the most important issue of all for some of our senior management) and all the other things that any self respecting Government department has to have acquired or created. And we'll still have our day jobs to do as well- and go through with a move from one end of the building to another in three weeks time which seems thoroughly pointless in the new set up but which is programmed and will therefore happen.
I was at the latest gallery opening party at the Estorick on Tuesday evening. The latest show is of the works of Lucio Fontana, the founder of Spatialism. It's fair to say that this was one exhibition I don't suppose I'd have gone to if I wasn't a Friend of the gallery and got an invitation to the opening party- pure abstraction isn't a style of art that I really relate to and I'm afraid the show didn't really change my mind. I can see that Fontana was important. I can appreciate that in many ways he represented a kind of third or fourth wave of Futurism, responding to the new high technology of the 1950's in the same sort of way as Marinetti and his cohorts did to early 20th century high technology back in the years before the First World War. His career is intriguing since his life overlapped with original Futurism to a much greater extent than one might have expected- he was born in Argentina in 1899 and was old enough to have seen service in the Italian army in the First World War, made the acquaintance of the first Futurist generation in that period and was apparently exhibiting abstract paintings in Italy in the 1930's. Curiously he doesn't seem to have found his own style until the 1950's- though this may be an unfair judgement based on the fact that the works on show at the Estorick all dated from the 1950's and 60's, the period when he launched Spatialism.
And what of the art? Well, I'm sorry if any of my friends are real enthusiasts for pure abstraction but I'm afraid it didn't do much for me. His trademark was painting a monochrome field of colour and then slashing the canvas as a way of suggesting space and infinity beyond the frame. It's a clever enough idea and quite effective, but he did rather overuse it (I hope he- or more likely his estate- got his residuals when the advertisers of Silk Cut cigarettes picked up on the idea for their purposes). Other canvases were marked with patterns of holes, sometime sin the canvas, sometimes simply impressed into paint which had been spread very thickly. It's hard to avoid the feeling that he was at heart a sculptor who was trying to apply sculptural techniques to other forms of art. Possibly if the show had included some of his sculptures involving neon tubes it might have been more interesting. It did include a dress with his trademark slashes- I'm not sure if it was ever supposed to be worn or was simply a kind of artistic statement and it was bit on the drab and dowdy side. Several of the works on canvas and paper were described as fashion studies so perhaps he did create a few frocks.
So for once I was at a show which didn't really inspire me much. I suppose it's good for me to be exposed to things which don't immediately appeal to me but I must admit I spend more time upstairs in the gallery with my favourite paintings, sculptures and engravings from the permanent collection.
| Northern Travels | for everyone |
As some of my friends will know, I've been in the north- on the Orkney Islands, to be precise. For those not too sure where to find them, look at a map of Scotland and they're the islands just off the top end (unless they've been pushed into a little box somewhere out in the middle of the North Sea- though that's more commonly the fate of their more northerly cousins the Shetlands). I first went to Orkney (the preferred designation for the whole archipelago) back in 2000 for what was supposed to be a one-off visit and have kept going back every year since then. It's rather had to explain why in entirely objective terms. It's not for the weather, though the islands are stunningly beautiful when the sun does shine and the light dances on the waves and the deep blues of the sea meet with the golds and greens and ochres of the land and the skies are huge. This year, though, was dominated by low cloud and the strange Orcadian form of fog in which you can be standing in bright sunlight but visibility is no more than fifty metres in any direction. The very long summer days help, of course, even in the worst weather (though they can make getting to sleep tricky if you're staying somewhere which hasn't invested in black out curtains).
Part of the attraction is that it's a wonderfully relaxing place to go, especially if one spends some time on the outer islands (the total population of the archipelago is about 20,000, of whom 14,000 or so live in Kirkwall, the main town- at the other extreme the most northerly island, North Ronaldsay, has a population of less than 60). It's one of the very few places where I actually find travel an interesting experience (my normal attitude to travel is that, much as I like being in interesting and far away places I don't much like the process of getting to them) since sailing out among the islands is scenic and gives at least a faint sense of how earlier inhabitants would have experienced the place in times when the sea linked rather than divided places. It's also wonderful to be out walking in a world where there are no man-made noises at all- just the birdsong and, just occasionally if you're very lucky, the seals singing.
Partly also it's that there are things which I go to enjoy- most notably the Orkney Folk Festival in Stromness (the second largest town). This is always excellent and on a human scale- and pulls in performers one wouldn't normally encounter in the south of England (this year there were a group of artists from Cape Breton Island in Canada and a trio from Sweden).
Mostly though it's a kind of intangible attraction. This is not at all usual for me- I don't generally react to places in a strong emotional way (perhaps the only other place which has the same kind of pull is Siena in Italy). Perhaps in an earlier existence I was a Neolithic farmer of Orkney......
Orkney is different. In many ways it's a part of Scandinavia which became part of Scotland by accident. It was the core of the Viking Earldom of Orkney which dominated the lands and sea routes from Shetland to the Isle of Man in the early Middle Ages. The King of Denmark handed over Orkney and Shetland in the 1460's when he couldn't raise the cash to meet his dowry obligations when his daughter married James III and the debt was never repaid (though people in Norway from time to time wonder what the going rate would be to buy the islands back since they were historically part of the Kingdom of Norway and arguably a Danish ruler who also happened to have inherited the Norwegian crown shouldn't have been giving Norwegian lands away). All the islands' place names are Norse derived. Links to Norway remain strong and if anything are getting more visible- there's been a celebration of Norwegian independence day in Kirkwall for the past twenty years and more at which Norwegian royalty have been known to turn up (there is a distinct sense that this is done to remind the folk in Edinburgh that Orkney has different roots from the rest of Scotland and might just choose to go its own way if Scotland ever broke away from the UK). The islands had their own Scandinavian influenced language until the late 17th century and the local accent still sounds more Scandinavian than Scottish (people who should know better often wonder where the Gaelic speakers are- Gaelic was never spoken in Orkney). Kirkwall is still dominated by its red sandstone cathedral dedicated to St Magnus- a rather dubious Nordic-style saint who had been the loser in one of the endless factional struggles over the Earldom and was murdered by the winner in the 1110's. After his death he began to work miracles and was promoted as saint (this was before the Vatican got control of saint making) by one of his descendants Rognvald Kolsson when he grabbed power some thirty years later. The cathedral is a small scale version of Durham in England- Rognvald recruited teams of stonemasons from the building works there and shipped them north to erect a wonderful piece of Romanesque architecture.
The region I really respond to, though, is in the west of the main island (unimaginatively known as Mainland). There, between the two large lochs of Stenness and Harray, is the Neolithic heart of the islands (oddly enough I don't react as strongly to the famous Neolithic village of Skara Brae on the coast to the north west of the lochs, impressive though it is). I find it a magical place with water lapping and curlews singing and wonderful views where land and water meet and intertwine. I'm generally a little sceptical about ancient "sacred places"- archaeologists have a great tendency to account for anything or any site whose function isn't immediately obvious by saying "ritual object/place"- but this region feels like a place for ritual. There are two stone circles which survive at least in part (there are traces of others, now lost) - the more recent Ring of Brodgar, which had 60 stones to start with, all spaced at 6 degrees from each other and the older Stones of Stenness, only four of which still stand (there appear to have been twelve originally- and it's not certain that the present alignment is quite right since at least one stone was re-erected in the 19th century) and all of which have a 60 degree slope at the top. And oldest of all (some five thousand years old, in fact) is Maes Howe. This looks like a grassy dumpling in the landscape but the mound contains a massive chamber tomb. The entry shaft is aligned so that the sunlight on the midwinter solstice hits the back wall of the central chamber and lights up one of the three side chambers which are usually taken as being burial places. It's a wonderful place to visit; the stones out of which it is built are massive (some as heavy as 30 tones) and it's estimated that it may have taken over a hundred years to build. It's also quite enigmatic- it's not even absolutely certain that it was used as a tomb and there's no way of reconstructing just what may have happened in the chambers when it was in use.
The Vikings got in, though. In the 1140's a group of them broke in looking for treasure. They didn't find any, though they and their successors left their mark on the place in the shape of one of the biggest collections of runic writing outside Scandinavia. Not much of this elevated in tone- there are boasts about the writer's skill in rune carving and lustful comments about a "fair widow", and even hints that the chamber may have become a kind of hang out for unruly Viking adolescents. I suppose this is vandalism but it's old enough to be historic in its own right. And who can be too censorious about those who carved the dragon depicted above? He's a splendid creature who's become something of an Orcadian symbol, much reproduced in jewellery and decorative works. In his own way he's a great symbol of the changes and the continuities of inhabitation which help to make his home such a wonderful place.
If anyone's interested in finding out more about Orkney history and monuments, the link below will take you to a thoroughly informative site.
http://www.orkneyjar.com/index.html
| Travels and a Lost World Illustrated | for everyone |
Another irregular contribution..... I've been on work related travels, this time to Stuttgart in Germany. This didn't work quite as I might have liked- if I'd realised the travel constraints I'd be operating under I'd have tried to get to Stuttgart on Saturday night and have a whole day to explore on the Sunday rather than staying in a hotel beside Heathrow airport on the Saturday evening. I didn't have time to do much more than have a short stroll round the centre of the city and look at the outside of some of the more notable buildings- very pleasant and interesting but hardly the way to get a proper sense of the place. I suppose it will just have to join the ever- lengthening list of places that I really ought to get back to and look at properly.
My latest cultural event was visiting the British Museum's exhibition of the paintings of John White, who went with one or more of Raleigh's expeditions to North America in the 1580's- to what the Elizabethans called "Virginia" though in modern day terms it was North Carolina. White is an intriguing if shadowy figure who gets a footnote in history if only as the appointed head of the Roanoke colony whose members disappeared (he was back in England at the time) and the grandfather of Virginia Dare, the first English child born in North America. It's a pity he had such a common name; there are several John Whites about in Elizabethan England who might have been the same person. He appears to have been a gentleman rather than a guild-trained artist (the fact that he worked in water colours also points in that direction). He may possibly have worked in the Court Revels department responsible for producing the costumes and stage sets for the masques and tournaments and other entertainments which were central to every royal court in the 16th century (a view I favour given some of his non-American artistic production). Somewhere along the line he picked up skills in surveying and mapping and became part of the Raleigh connection (he turns up on Raleigh's Irish estates in the 1590's). He may have sailed with Martin Frobisher on his Arctic expeditions- he certainly depicted the Inuit whom Frobisher kidnapped and brought to England and also painted episodes on the Frobisher voyages, though he might have been going on descriptions by others. He appears to have developed an interest in trans-Atlantic voyaging and copied now-lost paintings of the natives of Florida and parts of Brazil produced in the context of abortive French Huguenot attempts to establish settlements in those parts and/or make use of alliances with the local populations to advance their war against the King of Spain.
White appears to have been taken along on the voyages as a map maker but also for his artistic skills. These were to be deployed in detailed depictions of animals and birds and fish and plants encountered on the way (always depicted with a certain eye to whether they were any good to eat or might in other ways be economically valuable, though this does not detract from the minute detail of his paintings). Once the English had pitched up in Chesapeake Bay and begun to make contact with the Algonquian peoples who lived there, he began to illustrate the people he encountered and their environment.
These paintings are also done in minute detail and one has at least the illusion that the people he depicts were identifiable individuals. The general impression conveyed by the pictures is of an orderly, settled agrarian society whose members live in tidy villages not so very unlike those in England. It's a society with social hierarchies- chiefs and aristocrats- and organised religion- “idolatrous" admittedly and with some rather odd practices like mummification when it came to dealing with the dead but still recognisably a religion. Indeed on some European conventions it could even be seen as a type of Earthly Paradise- the limited amount of clothing worn by the natives could be seen as a sign of their proximity to Adam and the apparent social harmony suggests that the Golden Age hasn't quite faded away in these parts. The English are almost completely invisible apart from a doll carried by a little girl which had obviously been given to her as a gift by one of the settlers. There's no sign of warfare, either setting native groups against each other or pitting them against the English (unlike the Frobisher voyages where White depicted armed clashes with the Inuit). Fish and fowl are plentiful, the fields look fertile.
This looks a little too good to be entirely true, though it's possible that White simply wasn't around when things began to get nasty and initially friendly relations began to break down. He probably wasn't aware that the English had turned up in the middle of a period of abnormally dry weather which meant that the corn harvest had failed several years in a row and that the apparent fertility of the land was a bit misleading. When read in conjunction with the written accounts which in a sense go with his paintings, however, it's clear that there was indeed an agenda. This was very much colonisation on the cheap. A lot of the potential backers for Raleigh had lost a packet on Frobisher's voyages to the Arctic which had failed to locate the North West Passage and had led to the diversion of massive resources by the standards of the age when an incompetent assayer detected gold in some rocks he brought back. Tons and tons of rock were shipped back to England only to end up being built into the walls of Dartford in Kent when it transpired there was no gold there. Raleigh and his associates were operating on a shoe string. They had every incentive to stress the fertile nature of Virginia and the pleasant disposition of its inhabitants- it was far easier to raise money that way
It's also the case that we shouldn't assume that 16th century Englishmen would have looked at Algonquians in quite the way that their descendants would have done when they encountered other native groups in the Americas. There's no particular reason to think a man like White would have regarded his native sitters as being in any way racially inferior or much more alien than, say, a Turk or even a Catholic European. He almost certainly saw them in a considerably more favourable light than he viewed the Gaelic Irish. This isn't Rousseau-ite noble savagery either- though the images of harmony contributed to the development of that particular view. The general sense is that these people are different but not so different that, with a bit of hard work learning languages and so on, we English can't come to terms with them and live amongst them in amity. The thought that these folk might be totally displaced and their land grabbed wholesale was not on anybody's agenda in England- not at that stage, anyway. If you wanted to do that sort of thing you went to Ireland.
Of course it didn't work like that. Things were going wrong even by the time White left the Roanoke settlers for a trip home that stretched out far longer than he'd ever planned thanks to the Spanish Armada. There had been armed clashes, not helped by the growing shortages of food amongst the local population. More subtly, the diseases that the English carried with them were beginning to wreak havoc amongst populations with no natural immunity to them. There is some evidence that the Algonquian peoples put two and two together and associated the increased mortality with the arrival of the strangers even if they couldn't quite work out what exactly was causing the sicknesses (the English had no real appreciation of the situation- after all, they'd no sense of what "normal" patterns of health and sickness amongst the locals were) and became less welcoming. In the end the colony failed.
White's paintings were however to have a long after life. They were picked up by an emigre Flemish publisher called Theodore de Bry who issued a monumental series of volumes on the New World in the 1590's and illustrated the bits relating to English explorations with engravings which took over White's figures and scenes, mixed and matched them into largely artificial landscapes and created a part- real, part-imaginary Virginia which was in turn recycled through subsequent publications for the best part of a hundred years to come. In particular, the illustrations which went with accounts of the Jamestown colony were in fact White's paintings reworked to a new environment- there was no artist on the roster at Jamestown and enterprising or unscrupulous figures like John Smith fell back on White's images when they wanted to illustrate their accounts. Ironically White's originals largely disappeared from view in the 17th century. Some were lost, others damaged in a fire. They only broke surface again about a hundred years ago, memorials to a long-lost world.
I'll be away again for the next couple of weeks- off in the far away Orkney Islands for a serious chill-out.
| Family issues and Russian Futurism | for everyone |
Sorry for the long break since the last blog. I was back in Scotland over Easter for a bit doing family duties. This wasn't much fun; my aunt went into residential care last September because her mental health has begun to deteriorate. Clearly it's the only possible solution but it's not the easiest thing to work through and the process of sorting out her affairs, selling her house and generally managing the process has taken months. Most of the work has had to be done by my mother, who's an old lady herself and in some ways is in less good physical health than her sister, but it works its way back to me as well. At last all that has been done and she's as settled in the home as she's going to be. We took her out a couple of times while I was visiting but it was all very depressing; her short term memory has completely gone and it's very hard work relating to her. At least she still knows who I am; I've a terrible feeling that by the time I next see her that will have gone too.
As a result of being away I've been pretty swamped at work and elsewhere since I got back and am only now beginning to get back on an even keel. At the weekend I was gallery visiting again. The Estorick was for once looking beyond its Italian focus and holding an exhibition of Russian Futurist art. It's a reasonable enough extension to make. Russia was with Italy the home of Futurism as an artistic movement and there were obvious connections between the two artistic groupings. These were not always entirely amicable. F T Marinetti, the inventor of Italian Futurism, had a very clear view of how Futurism was meant to work- in essence as a world movement offering undivided allegiance to the opinions of F T Marinetti- which the Russians didn't share and Marinetti's visit to Russia in 1914 at times took on a faintly farcical air (there was a whiff of the intellectual property lawyer about Marinetti, who was for ever rushing off to remote parts of the globe when he got word that people who called themselves Futurists were operating in order to ensure that they weren't interpreting the brand name in ways he disapproved of......¦).
Seeing Russian Futurist art alongside its Italian counterpart brought out interesting parallels and divergences between the movements. Both noisily rejected the "high art" traditions of their societies and the constraints of "bourgeois" society (interestingly both in societies which were politically and culturally a great deal less "bourgeois" dominated than much of Europe). Both worshipped speed and modern technology (aircraft figure in their art time and again as a metaphor for a new world). In artistic terms, both were much concerned with the issues of how one might depict moving three dimensional objects in a static two dimensional medium like a painting on canvas. Both leaned towards irrationalism and dreamed of casting off the bounds of logic and even of language itself. They shared some of their more uncomfortable aspects as well- a tendency towards elitism and exclusivism, a fascination with violence (if anything the Russians were even more given to using physical violence against those whom they saw as their opponents than the Italians- not for nothing was the key Russian Futurist manifesto entitled "A Slap in the Face"), enthusiasm for war as a process of national regeneration and (I would argue anyway) a tendency towards aggressive nationalism.
It is in fact the nationalism (always very visible in Italian Futurism, frequently overlooked in its Russian counterpart) which points up the areas in which the two movements diverged. Italian Futurism was thoroughly urban in its focus. Russian Futurism was much more inclined to draw on nature for its subjects. Italian Futurism, at least in its original form, was at best indifferent and at worst positively hostile to the Italian past and to the living traditions of folk art and crafts which still had a strong existence in Italian life. Russian Futurism was very different. Artists like Goncharova and Larionov were profoundly influenced by Russian popular art forms ranging from the wood block prints called lubki to icon painting. There was a certain irony here- the representatives of the artistic avant garde were appropriating elements of Russian folk art just at the point when these were dropping out of favour with the wider populace, at least in urban settings (and given the number of Russian industrial workers who moved between village and city and back on a seasonal basis the effect of urban fashions went further into the Russian countryside than might at first sight be expected). The results of this cross-fertilisation of sensibilities could be fascinating. The picture at the top of this entry is part of a Goncharova cycle produced at the start of the First World War called "Mystical Images of War" which combines the traditions of icon painting and references to Russian heroes like Alexander Nevsky (a saint of the Orthodox church) with Futurist tropes like aircraft. There was a relatively brief but nevertheless intense patriotic engagement in opening months of the war which saw artists like Malevich produce anti-German and anti-Austrian patriotic lubki, full of heroic Cossack cavalrymen and swooping aircraft (the artists probably fielded more machines than the Imperial Russian Air Service could muster) in a style which hovered between the highly traditional and the almost abstract. Much as Marinetti loved aircraft and warfare it's very hard to imagine him ever producing a work of art which looked backwards to Italian tradition while incorporating Futurist motifs.
This rather raises the issue of the political alignment of Futurism. Italian Futurism is traditionally seen as being ultimately aligned with Fascism (something of an over-simplification but with some validity) and has suffered in consequence. Russian Futurism, by contrast, is deemed to be "left wing" with the added attraction of being a left suppressed by Stalin. I'm not sure it's quite that simple. The Russian Futurists on the whole supported the Revolution (though Goncharova and Larionov left Russia before the Bolsheviks took over and worked in the West thereafter, doing theatre and costume design for Diaghalev's "Ballets Russes"- some of the gorgeous costumes they created were in the show). They were certainly quite willing to work for the regime- the exhibition included a Mayakovsky poster designed to underpin compulsory vaccination programmes run by the new regime and one of the (thoroughly impractical) designs for propaganda kiosks as well as a model of the very innovative Soviet Pavilion at the 1925 Paris World Fair. How far this implied genuine political alignment is another matter. My sense is that artistic policy in both the NEP-era Soviet Union and Mussolini's Italy (at least until the late 1930's) was actually quite similar- provided an artist was willing to serve the regime and didn't openly challenge it, there was relatively little pressure to paint or design buildings according to a style laid down from above. If you had good personal relations with the people who were running the regime's cultural policy then so much the better. Active political commitment was admirable but not essential.
Obviously this changed in the Soviet Union in the 1930's. Stalin was not all that bothered about visual art policy- unlike literature or music, subjects on which he had very strong views and a quite genuine personal interest which made his interventions in policy erratic and frighteningly unpredictable. "Socialist realism" as a policy for the visual arts was made by the arts bureaucracy by extension from his views on the other arts, not dreamed up by the Vozhd himself. Nevertheless the Futurists had a pretty thin time- if only because Stalin was unlikely ever to intervene on behalf on an artist in the way he might do for a writer or poet who had fallen into NKVD hands. Some tried to conform but they rarely succeeded- and several ended their days in the Gulag in consequence. Their Italian brethren were on the whole more fortunate. Although Mussolini's art policy became more rigid and conservative as the 1930's wore on (admittedly mirroring the evolution of some of the artists in question- a former Futurist like Sironi had by then rediscovered the beauties of mosaics and medievalising fresco techniques) and the secret police became more obtrusive in their surveillance nobody actually ended up in prison for painting in the wrong style.
I'll try to post a few of the pictures from the show on my Flickr site in the next few days.
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