| Citizens and Kings and Image Making | for everyone |
Back after another excessively long break- blame too much sport. I'm not going to bore my friends with a detailed dissection of the 2007 version of the Six Nations rugby tournament nor start on the increasingly murky business of the cricket World Cup, overshadowed as it has been by the murder of the Pakistan coach in his hotel room the night after his team went down to one of the biggest upset results in the history of the competition and the growing concern that matches are being fixed wholesale.
I finally got round to doing something a bit more cultural- going to the Royal Academy's latest blockbuster exhibition entitled "Citizens and Kings". This deals with portraiture in the years between 1770 and 1830 and implies that there were major artistic upheavals in parallel to the political revolutions of the era and in some ways mirroring them.
I'm not sure I find the argument entirely convincing, at least in its strongest form. Clearly there were some changes in conventions. Sentimentality was very much in fashion- at times to an almost absurd extent (there's an incredibly stagey and over the top portrait of a minor Irish nobleman mourning his dead wife in such an exaggerated way that a modern viewer suspects his sincerity- itself an interesting comment on how attitudes to these matters can shift). It was fashionable to show the depth of one's soul and feelings in ways which hadn't been seen before- though again the results can be faintly absurd at times (Wright of Derby's portrait of Sir Brooke Booth, a slightly pudgy figure dressed in the height of fashion who has apparently chosen to lie down at full length in the middle of a wood and looks soulfully out at the viewer rather than getting on with reading the books he has brought with him- presumably he's just discovered the light is too poor, though his servants aren't going to be very happy at the mess he's making of his fine new suit, which will not be easy to clean.......). Children bulk much larger in family group portraits and are depicted rather less as young adults- often to charming effect. Even the great are depicted in a somewhat more relaxed and informal way- though one senses that the "informality" is a thoroughly posed affair and that what we're seeing is merely another form of image management by the elites. It's worth noting, though, that most of these changes occur independently of the political upheavals of the age and in many cases precede them.
Other things however change a good deal less. It was hardly a late 18th century novelty for the great and good to want to appear in classical guise, despite suggestions to the contrary. Nor was it a novelty for artists of all kinds to seek to show themselves as uniquely inspired and admirably cultured members of the elite (however tenuous their claims to gentility might actually have been). Members of the social elites continued to display themselves as successful warriors or cultivated gentlemen- and if they were lucky enough to be friendly with a genius like Goya might also come out looking rather dashing and even sexy (if they weren't then Goya would send them up while appearing to work within the conventions of the genre; there are specimens of both approaches in the exhibition).
In particular, the conventions of how one displayed the holders of serious power proved rather more flexible and therefore durable than the exhibition appeared to suggest. One is clearly supposed to do a compare and contrast exercise between, say, the portrait of Louis XVI in full ceremonial robes and that of George Washington, all in black and looking stern and businesslike beside a table covered in governmental papers. This is a bit of a fiddle, which brings out one of the issues with the choice of exhibits. The material of display is overwhelmingly centred on the English speaking world and France, with a certain Spanish presence thanks to the Goyas. While Europe east of the Rhine and south of the Alps is not entirely ignored, it is seriously under-represented. This matters when it comes to the depiction of monarchs and the real power elites. The image of the sovereign as, in effect, the top ranking servant of the state, depicted in uniform (military or civilian- civil servants being expected to wear uniforms in many 18th century states) and visibly engaged in the hard work of ruling, was very well established in German speaking Europe and points east and south by the last quarter of the 18th century- most notably in the shape of Frederick the Great of Prussia and the Habsburg Emperors like Joseph II but including lesser rulers and more remote ones like the Czars of all the Russias or even the Bourbon Kings of Naples. Their "routine" state portraits would have looked a good deal more like the Washington model than the Louis XVI one- as indeed would ones of George III which were not chosen for the exhibition. There is a strong argument that the French monarchy badly fumbled its self-presentation in the late 18th century and was rather more out on a limb in these areas than the exhibition suggested.
That said, the "new" power holders could be even more over the top than any monarch by divine right. Napoleon obsessed about his public image and regulated the creation and distribution of his portrait in a very modern way. He could and did play the "first servant of the state" role but his approach to princely magnificence reached heights of self-adulation which no "genuine" monarch would have risked- the Ingres portrait at the top of the entry borrows both from descriptions of the statue of Zeus at Olympia (one of the Seven Wonders of the World) and from depictions of Christ in 15th century Flemish art. The divinisation of the political leader probably was a novelty in the period and one with ominous overtones for the future- David's propagandist depiction of the assassinated Marat with its deliberate echoes of Christ taken from the cross would have numerous progeny in the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century. David himself, who served successive revolutionary regimes to end up as court artist for Napoleon (and ultimately to die in exile after the Restoration in 1815) is a very modern figure, the artist as both activist and propagandist.
The focus on power and intellectual elites means that women are seriously under-represented as subjects. There are some nice female portraits in the show- notably by the much under-rated Elizabeth Vigee-Lebrun who was painter to Marie Antoinette and clearly had a real fondness for her sitters, both male and female- but not all that many and some of the female images which do make it are ambiguous ones. The delightful Reynolds painting of the Duchess of Devonshire playing with her daughter takes on a different meaning when one discovers that Reynolds painted it precisely to stress Duchess Georgiana's domestic role as mother in a period when she was subject to increasingly negative comments because of her open participation in the world of politics as a supporter of the Whig leader Charles James Fox. This sort of female activity would have been largely uncontroversial a couple of generations earlier.
Across the Channel those who argued for the Rights of Woman in Revolutionary France were liable to end up facing the guillotine or banished to lunatic asylums- no flattering David portraits for them. Doors were closing as well as opening.
 | Sex, drugs and Roman conspiracies | for everyone |
I hope everybody had a lovely Valentine's Day with lots of love and good times- I certainly did.
I've been having a slightly thin time on the cultural side recently, partly because the Six Nations Rugby has started and I've been stuck in front of the telly watching the matches for the past two weekends. There was a convenient gap in the programme this weekend, though, so I went to the opera- Handel's "Agrippina".
This is an early work, created for Venice in 1710 during Handel's time in Italy before he finally settled in London. I won't begin to summarise the story line; like most baroque operas it's ridiculously complex, full of scheming and betrayal and improbable emotional turn rounds all done to wonderful music, with Handel even at this early stage in his career able to come up with interesting tweaks to what is always in danger of being a rather monotonous formula of show-off solo arias constructed on a standard "a-b-a" format. To summarise very simply, the scheming Roman Empress Agrippina sets out to ensure that her husband Claudius names her son Nero as his heir and, after many twists and turns, succeeds. Those old enough to remember the classic BBC adaptation of "I Claudius" will get the drift.
The libretto however takes even more liberties with historical reality than a Hollywood screenwriter of the Golden Age would have done The action is pushed back to the time of the Roman invasion of Britain- at which point the historical Claudius had not even married Agrippina. Other characters who bulk large in Roman history at a later date- Poppea(who was to become Nero's second wife and had already had her own moment of Venetian operatic glory in Monteverdi's "Incoronazione di Poppea" back in the 1640's), Otho (Poppea's first husband and later, very briefly, Emperor himself), even the ex-slave bureaucrats Pallas and Narcissus- bulk large in the action despite the fact that they would all have been far too young to play any sort of role in politics at the supposed date. Even Nero would have been a six year old boy rather than the teenager of the opera. One wonders what an elite Venetian audience of the 1700's (all of whose male and many of whose female members would have been steeped in the classics from childhood) made of it all since they would have been well aware of the distortions and manipulations (the thought that Poppea might have had simultaneous affairs with Otho, Nero and Claudius is intriguing but bizarre given that she'd have been an infant at the supposed time).
I'm sure some of the game playing with the historical record was deliberate and intended to inspire a frisson from a sophisticated audience who would have known that all the principal characters without exception were going to come to a sticky end- Claudius murdered by Agrippina, Agrippina and Poppea both murdered by Nero, Nero and Otho both failed emperors dead under murky circumstances, Pallas and Narcissus disposed of by the Neronian regime. It casts a rather interesting light on the final chorus which stresses harmony and reconciliation. No doubt an audience of Venetian patricians, well used to intrigue and backstabbing and political manipulation would have nodded sagely. The equivocal ending is, I think, very Venetian- I doubt if a conspicuously amoral ending to a thoroughly amoral story in which nobody bar perhaps Otho could be said to be acting with pure motives would have got past the censors elsewhere in Italy or would have been socially acceptable for, say, a London audience even when set in pagan Rome. The Venetian audience might even have been able to come up with a credible explanation for the gaping hole in the middle of the storyline- it is never stated just why Otho couldn't have been appointed as heir to the throne by Claudius and still marry Poppea. The assumption that the two are totally mutually incompatible is a major driver of the plot but it's never stated why this should be. The librettist is thought to have been a Venetian aristocrat himself and a Venetian audience might perhaps have made assumptions about Poppea's social status based on their own society which didn't need to be explained in the text.
The performance on Saturday evening began with an announcement to the effect that Sarah Connolly, who was singing Agrippina and is one of the great Handel interpreters, would be singing through a nasty throat infection. This sort of announcement always gives the subsequent performance a slight air of a high wire act with some of the fascination being whether the performer will get through the evening or have to be substituted in mid show. Connolly came through in the end and as far as I could tell was only marginally pulling her high notes to preserve her voice. Christine Rice was splendid as Nero (a role written for a castrato), suitably loutish and surly and with an alarming facial resemblance to Kim Jong Il minus the spectacles. The show was stolen however by Lucy Crowe as Poppea, who sang brilliantly, handled the comedy with flair and produced a wonderful depiction of an apparently air headed blonde bimbo who when push came to shove could scheme with the best of them.
She also gets some of the best frocks. This is (inevitably, it seems these days with ENO) a modern dress production (though not as modern as all that- the style sense and hemlines are rather 1970's Hollywood). Agrippina spends quite a bit of the opera wafting round in very sexy black lingerie; Poppea gets a couple of rather nice evening gowns. Most girls I know would kill for some of the outfits on display. I didn't find the modern dress quite as offputting as I sometimes do- after all, this isn't really ancient Rome at all but some kind of baroque opera never-never land. Nor was I too bothered by the way the production played for laughs- I'm pretty sure the original performances were supposed to raise a smile (if this had been a proper operatic tragedy the stage would have been covered with bodies by the end but all the murder plots end up miscarrying and it's clear that, for instance, the scene in which Poppea has her three suitors all hiding from each other in different cupboards was always meant to be funny).
I was however a little puzzled by one aspect. This was a very "sexy" staging. Agrippina is played as a boozed up nymphomaniac with hints of incest and lesbianism to boot (to be fair, the hints of incest go right the way back to the classical historians), Poppea spends the whole opera pulling men in order to manipulate them (though never actually going to bed with any of them), Nero snorts cocaine, picks his nose and chases anything in a skirt- and drops a few four letter words into his recitatives. The production has nevertheless been given unanimously rave reviews. This is fair enough, not least because of its musical qualities- but a little odd as well. A few years back Callisto Beixo's modern dress productions of Mozart's "Don Giovanni" and Verdi's "Un Ballo in Maschera" caused a huge row precisely because of their overt use of what one might call sex, drugs and rock and roll imagery on stage. This, I might add, included one of the leads in "Ballo" dragging up for one act (he looked pretty good too....). The fuss helped to reinforce a sense of crisis about the company, even though this had arisen for other reasons. The fall out of the crisis did long term damage which has still not been completely repaired. Why the difference in reaction- when Nero produced cocaine in qualities which would have got a herd of elephants high and began to snort it wholesale the audience reaction was laughter while drug taking in "Ballo" was greeted in stony disapproving silence and was actually booed in the "Don"? I don't think opera going audiences in the UK are any more tolerant of drugs than they were a few years back. Maybe Verdi and Mozart draw a different, more socially conservative, audience from Handel (which would be slightly counter-intuitive but might have some validity). Maybe Beixo's reputation for controversial stagings went before him and influenced how his productions were viewed and reported. Maybe there's an edge of good old fashioned British xenophobia at work- Beixo is Catalan while David McVicar, who's a regular with the ENO, comes from Glasgow. To be fair, the sex in Beixo's productions was much more blatant and much nastier than anything on offer in "Agrippina" (homosexual rape and necrophilia figured on the menu) and, at least in "Ballo" was distinctly gratuitous and in direct contradiction to the basic plot assumption that King Gustavus is fundamentally a decent sort who is agonised at the fact that he has fallen in love with his best friend's wife. On the other hand, Don Giovanni is supposed to be every bit as amoral and dubious a character as Nero, so the (fundamentally very traditional) argument that this is pagan Rome and of course they behave badly there doesn't quite work. It's an intriguing sidelight on what was a thoroughly enjoyable evening.
I've been having a slightly thin time on the cultural side recently, partly because the Six Nations Rugby has started and I've been stuck in front of the telly watching the matches for the past two weekends. There was a convenient gap in the programme this weekend, though, so I went to the opera- Handel's "Agrippina".
This is an early work, created for Venice in 1710 during Handel's time in Italy before he finally settled in London. I won't begin to summarise the story line; like most baroque operas it's ridiculously complex, full of scheming and betrayal and improbable emotional turn rounds all done to wonderful music, with Handel even at this early stage in his career able to come up with interesting tweaks to what is always in danger of being a rather monotonous formula of show-off solo arias constructed on a standard "a-b-a" format. To summarise very simply, the scheming Roman Empress Agrippina sets out to ensure that her husband Claudius names her son Nero as his heir and, after many twists and turns, succeeds. Those old enough to remember the classic BBC adaptation of "I Claudius" will get the drift.
The libretto however takes even more liberties with historical reality than a Hollywood screenwriter of the Golden Age would have done The action is pushed back to the time of the Roman invasion of Britain- at which point the historical Claudius had not even married Agrippina. Other characters who bulk large in Roman history at a later date- Poppea(who was to become Nero's second wife and had already had her own moment of Venetian operatic glory in Monteverdi's "Incoronazione di Poppea" back in the 1640's), Otho (Poppea's first husband and later, very briefly, Emperor himself), even the ex-slave bureaucrats Pallas and Narcissus- bulk large in the action despite the fact that they would all have been far too young to play any sort of role in politics at the supposed date. Even Nero would have been a six year old boy rather than the teenager of the opera. One wonders what an elite Venetian audience of the 1700's (all of whose male and many of whose female members would have been steeped in the classics from childhood) made of it all since they would have been well aware of the distortions and manipulations (the thought that Poppea might have had simultaneous affairs with Otho, Nero and Claudius is intriguing but bizarre given that she'd have been an infant at the supposed time).
I'm sure some of the game playing with the historical record was deliberate and intended to inspire a frisson from a sophisticated audience who would have known that all the principal characters without exception were going to come to a sticky end- Claudius murdered by Agrippina, Agrippina and Poppea both murdered by Nero, Nero and Otho both failed emperors dead under murky circumstances, Pallas and Narcissus disposed of by the Neronian regime. It casts a rather interesting light on the final chorus which stresses harmony and reconciliation. No doubt an audience of Venetian patricians, well used to intrigue and backstabbing and political manipulation would have nodded sagely. The equivocal ending is, I think, very Venetian- I doubt if a conspicuously amoral ending to a thoroughly amoral story in which nobody bar perhaps Otho could be said to be acting with pure motives would have got past the censors elsewhere in Italy or would have been socially acceptable for, say, a London audience even when set in pagan Rome. The Venetian audience might even have been able to come up with a credible explanation for the gaping hole in the middle of the storyline- it is never stated just why Otho couldn't have been appointed as heir to the throne by Claudius and still marry Poppea. The assumption that the two are totally mutually incompatible is a major driver of the plot but it's never stated why this should be. The librettist is thought to have been a Venetian aristocrat himself and a Venetian audience might perhaps have made assumptions about Poppea's social status based on their own society which didn't need to be explained in the text.
The performance on Saturday evening began with an announcement to the effect that Sarah Connolly, who was singing Agrippina and is one of the great Handel interpreters, would be singing through a nasty throat infection. This sort of announcement always gives the subsequent performance a slight air of a high wire act with some of the fascination being whether the performer will get through the evening or have to be substituted in mid show. Connolly came through in the end and as far as I could tell was only marginally pulling her high notes to preserve her voice. Christine Rice was splendid as Nero (a role written for a castrato), suitably loutish and surly and with an alarming facial resemblance to Kim Jong Il minus the spectacles. The show was stolen however by Lucy Crowe as Poppea, who sang brilliantly, handled the comedy with flair and produced a wonderful depiction of an apparently air headed blonde bimbo who when push came to shove could scheme with the best of them.
She also gets some of the best frocks. This is (inevitably, it seems these days with ENO) a modern dress production (though not as modern as all that- the style sense and hemlines are rather 1970's Hollywood). Agrippina spends quite a bit of the opera wafting round in very sexy black lingerie; Poppea gets a couple of rather nice evening gowns. Most girls I know would kill for some of the outfits on display. I didn't find the modern dress quite as offputting as I sometimes do- after all, this isn't really ancient Rome at all but some kind of baroque opera never-never land. Nor was I too bothered by the way the production played for laughs- I'm pretty sure the original performances were supposed to raise a smile (if this had been a proper operatic tragedy the stage would have been covered with bodies by the end but all the murder plots end up miscarrying and it's clear that, for instance, the scene in which Poppea has her three suitors all hiding from each other in different cupboards was always meant to be funny).
I was however a little puzzled by one aspect. This was a very "sexy" staging. Agrippina is played as a boozed up nymphomaniac with hints of incest and lesbianism to boot (to be fair, the hints of incest go right the way back to the classical historians), Poppea spends the whole opera pulling men in order to manipulate them (though never actually going to bed with any of them), Nero snorts cocaine, picks his nose and chases anything in a skirt- and drops a few four letter words into his recitatives. The production has nevertheless been given unanimously rave reviews. This is fair enough, not least because of its musical qualities- but a little odd as well. A few years back Callisto Beixo's modern dress productions of Mozart's "Don Giovanni" and Verdi's "Un Ballo in Maschera" caused a huge row precisely because of their overt use of what one might call sex, drugs and rock and roll imagery on stage. This, I might add, included one of the leads in "Ballo" dragging up for one act (he looked pretty good too....). The fuss helped to reinforce a sense of crisis about the company, even though this had arisen for other reasons. The fall out of the crisis did long term damage which has still not been completely repaired. Why the difference in reaction- when Nero produced cocaine in qualities which would have got a herd of elephants high and began to snort it wholesale the audience reaction was laughter while drug taking in "Ballo" was greeted in stony disapproving silence and was actually booed in the "Don"? I don't think opera going audiences in the UK are any more tolerant of drugs than they were a few years back. Maybe Verdi and Mozart draw a different, more socially conservative, audience from Handel (which would be slightly counter-intuitive but might have some validity). Maybe Beixo's reputation for controversial stagings went before him and influenced how his productions were viewed and reported. Maybe there's an edge of good old fashioned British xenophobia at work- Beixo is Catalan while David McVicar, who's a regular with the ENO, comes from Glasgow. To be fair, the sex in Beixo's productions was much more blatant and much nastier than anything on offer in "Agrippina" (homosexual rape and necrophilia figured on the menu) and, at least in "Ballo" was distinctly gratuitous and in direct contradiction to the basic plot assumption that King Gustavus is fundamentally a decent sort who is agonised at the fact that he has fallen in love with his best friend's wife. On the other hand, Don Giovanni is supposed to be every bit as amoral and dubious a character as Nero, so the (fundamentally very traditional) argument that this is pagan Rome and of course they behave badly there doesn't quite work. It's an intriguing sidelight on what was a thoroughly enjoyable evening.
| Bronze Gods | for everyone |
My latest artistic outing was to something a little different- the Royal Academy's show of bronzes from early medieval South India. These were created under the Chola dynasty, which dominated the bottom third of the Indian peninsula in the period 850-1250. It was a great age of competitive temple building by successive rulers, each trying to outdo his ancestors in the quality of housing for the gods, and a great age of religious poetry and art as well. A series of holy men and women wrote poems which both honoured the gods of the Hindu pantheon and at the same time relocated them from their original homes in the far away Ganges valley and Himalayan peaks to the very different world of South India by creating myths which embedded them and their deeds in the local landscape. Part of the motivation for this was religious competition. There were substantial Buddhist and Jain groups in the population, both of which had adherents among the local elites. There was therefore quite bit of mutual insult and even harassment (so much for the theory that it's only nasty monotheisms that persecute other faiths........) as well as attempts to strengthen Hindu devotion by the means mentioned above. I should probably have said "pantheons" in the plural, however- there was a good deal of competition within the Hindu grouping between Shiva devotees and those of Vishnu and it's not hard to see how, under different circumstances, these could have developed into entirely separate religions, each with its own set of holy writings and group of venerated holy persons. On the whole the Shivaites seem to have been more popular than the Vishnaivites in the Chola kingdom- at least they had a good deal more "saints" (62 v 12) and the bulk of the art on show came from their tradition. Both groups however (and indeed the other faiths of the region) shared the tradition of high quality bronze religious sculpture
The bronzes themselves are beautiful objects. In a few cases they come with a very rough, earthy surface (in cases where statues had been buried during the troubled times which followed the break up of the kingdom); in others a smooth, rich patina which was the produce of generations of being bathed and oiled before being displayed in processions. One intriguing aspect of this art is that it is still very much a living tradition. Cult statues are still made now in much the same way as they were being cast a thousand years ago and the statues are still processed through the streets on the key holy days in the same way as was done then (echoes of processions of the statues of the saints in places like Seville are strong- despite the sometimes non-naturalistic appearance of the cult statues and the strangeness of the theology to someone used to European Christian art and ritual, a lot of the practice of devotion seemed quite familiar). No doubt they'd mean a lot more if one was better informed on the often subtle theology which underpins why they look the way they do.
The statue I've reproduced is one of Shiva as Lord of the Dance (one of his "official" titles and nothing to do with the adaptation of a Shaker hymn which was rather popular with cringesomely trendy vicars back in the 1970's and 80Ã's, though no doubt the cross-cultural reference was deliberate). The multiple arms remind me (no doubt quite inappropriately) of Futurist art's way of playing with depictions of the human figure to show movement in the context of a static representation. The god himself looks more than a little androgynous and his dancing attire could just as easily go with a female performer. Having said that, the corresponding depictions of his consort Uma bring out her female physical features very clearly indeed- she is endowed with a figure reminiscent of a certain type of cartoon depiction of a thoroughly sexualised woman- so I don't think there's any gender bending intent here.
It made for an interesting excursion into an apparently alien world of elephant headed deities and money gods which turned out to be a little less alien than it appeared at first sight.
And now I'm back on the Brussels treadmill again- off to Belgium tomorrow for a night and a day at the start of another rather tedious run of meetings.
| Italian Satire, Barbed and Otherwise | for everyone |
Another art exhibition to go to. This was the latest show at the Estorick Collection, the gallery which specialises in Italian 20th century art and which is a particular favourite place of mine. It focused on Italian propaganda art of the First World War- the kind of borderland between art and politics which I always find fascinating.
The exhibition's content wasn't quite what I'd expected. Given the Estorick's strong focus on Futurism and the high profile role of the Futurist movement in propagandising in favour of Italian participation in the war I'd expected a display dominated by Futurist works. These weren't entirely absent but they were very much in the minority by comparison with works which adopted a much more conventional and conservative visual language- perhaps a reminder that Futurism's artistic language was a bit too elitist to work entirely effectively as mass propaganda.
A lot of the works in the show- probably about half- dated from the rather strange period of nine months or so from August 1914 to April 1915 when Italy was neutral. This focus is not all that surprising. It was a period of great uncertainly and at times violent debate within Italy over what course to follow. Italy was technically linked to Germany and Austria-Hungary by a formal alliance but few Italians had much enthusiasm for entering the war on the same side as the hated Austrians, the enemy against whom generations of Italian patriots had fought in the 19th century and whose empire still included significant Italian populations in places like Trieste which Italian nationalists wanted to see integrated into the Patria. The argument was whether Italy should enter the war on the side of the Franco-Russo-British Entente or not. It was a debate which deeply divided the political, social and cultural elites and one which transcended conventional political divisions. The pro-war group (the Interventionists) included right wing nationalists and radical leftists (including one Benito Mussolini, at that point still a leading light on the far left of the Italian Socialist Party) as well as the quasi anarchist Futurists. The Anti-Interventionist cause linked mainstream Socialists with conservative aristocrats and devout Catholics.
Curiously the dominant tone of the art from this period included in the show is ambiguity and ambivalence rather than the kind of fiercely opposed and competing views that one might have expected. Perhaps this is because so much of it comes from the pen of one man- Virgilio Retrosi. Retrosi was certainly capable of producing striking images like the one above (sorry it doesn't reproduce too well). This pokes fun at the official Italian line during this period. "Armed Neutrality" is satirised in the shape of a massively complex and heavyweight suit of armour, held down by chains of indecision. The tiny figure of King Vittorio Emmanuelle III (in real life a very short man) peers nervously from between the bars of the helmet's visor (trust me- he's there even if he's just about invisible in this reproduction). But is this an Interventionist or Anti-Interventionist image? It could probably be read either way, as could many of Retrosi's works. The exhibition catalogue explains, all too briefly, that Retrosi was close to the Socialist mainstream. On the whole his art seems to be moderately Anti-Interventionist in thrust, though also increasingly resigned to the inevitability of Italian participation in the conflict and clearly anti-German in sensibility. It's invariably well drawn and skilfully presented but as propaganda, or even satire, I don't see that it could ever have been all that persuasive because its message is so unclear and vacillating. I can't make up my mind whether this is because Retrosi was too genuinely open minded and responsive to the cross currents of the times to be able to take a clear and unambiguous position or because he was slavishly loyal to the increasingly confused position of the Socialist leadership, which came to persuade itself that participation in the war (however lamentable in itself) would force radical political and social reform on to the domestic political agenda.
The material in the show which was produced during the period of Italian participation in the war again has some surprises. Naturally there's a fair bit of venom aimed at the enemy, Austria especially. The aged Emperor Franz Joseph is depicted alternately as a brutal hangman of Italian patriots or a senile beggar while the Austrian double headed eagle is shown as plucked and ready for cooking (at the hands-intriguingly- of a burly Russian rather than ,say, an Italian Alpine soldier or Bersagliero). Germany's Kaiser Wilhelm turns up as an Art Nouveau Medusa. More ominously for the future of Italy's domestic politics, Giovanni Giolitti (the Prime Minister who had tried to keep Italy out of the war) appears as a symbol of the "enemy within", shirking his duty and failing to support the soldiers at the front. The divisions out of which Fascism grew in the post war era were visible even while the conflict was raging. Indeed appeals to national unity are conspicuous by their absence- even the need to defend the nation against invasion after the front collapsed at Caporetto late in 1917 and a substantial area of north east Italy fell under a harsh Austro-German occupation is only alluded to obliquely (another Retrosi image)
The final pieces in the show point forward to the harsh post war world and its divisions. After a brief moment of enthusiasm for President Wilson's idealistic vision, the sense that Italy had been cheated out of the territorial gains it had hoped for and was being done down in favour of the newly created Yugoslav state (depicted as a predatory cat) is clearly discernable. Intriguingly the post war drawings are more overtly nationalistic than those produced before and during the fighting- the myth of the Mutilated Victory was forming fast.
It's an intriguing show based on material which isn't familiar even to those who have an interest in the less well known fronts of the First World War. There is obviously a question over just how typical the works on display might be of Italian graphic art of the period (the number of artists represented is small) and how far the strong showing of Retrosi may slant the impression that ambiguity and uncertainty were the defining characteristics of the Italian artistic response to the conflict. It is however interesting to get beyond the trumpetings of F T Marinetti and the posturings of d'Annunzio in order to see the debates which divided Italy in the winter of 1914-5 though different eyes.
| Happy 2007 to all | for everyone |
Hope you all had a great holiday period. Mine was mixed. I had to do my annual trip to Scotland for Christmas to fulfil my family duties. This is never easy and it's getting harder every year. My aunt is now in residential care and her memory has continued to deteriorate (which is a disappointment; I'd really hoped that the extra stimulation of being beside people in the home would at least slow the process down a bit but it hasn't). She still came round for Christmas Day with my mother and I but it was a huge strain all round. She's becoming increasingly immobile as well which makes it a real issue getting her into and out of cars. I suspect this is the last time she'll be able to come out of the home for a family event, which is very sad.
I got back home for New Year and had an enjoyable time seeing it in with some special friends. We didn't have the atrocious weather in London which ruined the parties further north though it was a bit windy and wet.
One nice thing about the period between Christmas and New Year is that exhibitions and galleries tend to be open and a little less packed than they would be at normal times. I took advantage of this to catch up with the Velazquez exhibition in the National Gallery. This teamed up the Gallery's own holdings (which are surprisingly good- Spanish art enjoyed a late 19th century vogue in Britain which meant that British galleries are better stocked with paintings by Velazquez and his peers than most outside Spain) with loans from other British collections and a number of major works from Madrid. It's probably the most thorough overview of the artist's work we're likely to see in these parts for years to come.
It's interesting to discover that, for all the iconic nature of Velazquez's images of the Spanish court and royal family in the 1630's-50's he actually wasn't all that prolific as an artist. The very social success which took him from the back streets of Seville to a valued and honoured role in the Spanish Habsburg court got in the way of his art since his formal status as a senior court functionary was not just a sinecure- he was expected to spend his time on managing things like the food supply and overseeing the work of court staff. Clearly his main official role was to paint portraits of Philip IV and the royal family, plus those who stood high in royal favour. It could have been pretty stultifying but the results transcended the limitations of the job. He was somehow able to come up with likenesses which met the requirements of the time but still managed to show the king and his family as human beings. Sadly there isn't a reproduction of my favourite portrait readily to hand on the exhibition web site - one of the Infanta Isabella in full court dress even though she was just a little girl of eight. She looks splendid (after all, the painting was destined to go to Vienna where her planned husband, her much older Austrian cousin Leopold, was waiting for his annual update on how his future wife was coming along) but you also feel that she's desperate to get the silly dress off and have some fun. The one I've reproduced above is of her older sister Maria Theresa (who was to end up as the first wife of Louis XIV of France). Velazquez can't hide the fact that she's a rather plain girl almost swamped by a ridiculously fussy hairdo and an almost impossibly elaborate frock (though I know a few girls who'd love to have a go in it!) but manages to show her as a human being prepared for what life might be about to throw at her.
I've never been quite as persuaded by Velazquez's religious paintings or his excursions into classical mythology. In both of those genres the real pleasure comes from the incidental detail rather than the overall composition. In his early art Velazquez rather played to this by pushing the religious imagery into the background while ordinary people get on with their lives in the foreground- as in the picture of Christ in the house of Mary and Martha where the holy figures are seen through a doorway as the kitchen staff get on with preparing a rather frugal dinner (I don't know whether or not there's a specific message in the fact that the dinner in question wouldn't have been kosher). At times this can have a mildly (and surely unintentionally) comic effect, as in the painting of Apollo telling Vulcan that his wife Venus has just popped off for a spot of adultery with Mars. Vulcan and his assistances are shown as inhabiting a thoroughly realistic armourer's forge. They all look with open mouthed astonishment and horror at a slightly epicene Apollo, complete with Christian-style halo, who is delivering the bad news. To a modern eye, however, the effect is somewhat amusing- it looks as if Apollo is just notifying the staff of the local forge that they're about to be shut down on environmental health grounds or something of the sort.
The portraits and the associated pictures of court life are another matter, though. Even here Velazquez plays with viewpoints to interesting effect. Part of the National Gallery's permanent collection is a painting of a royal hunt. "Las Telas" was a rather unusual form of hunting to modern eyes (though by no means unique to Spain in the 17th century)- a large enclosure was created by a series of canvas screens and wild boar released into it to be hunted down by the court grandees on horseback while the ladies followed the excitement from their carriages drawn up inside the screens. Velazquez, however, foregrounds what's going on outside the screens as the horsemen gallop to and fro in the dust among the trees- the servants preparing dinner, looking to the horses and mules and generally doing all the background work necessary for the show inside to run flawlessly.
For me this, and other parts of the exhibition, raised echoes of another recent London artistic spectacular focused on a distant and alien court culture of long ago- the great Three Emperors exhibition on the Manchu court at the Royal Academy. There too the elites were depicted engaged in a rather stagey form of hunting (tigers in that case); there too the artist took pleasure in showing the infrastructure of the show as well as its surface splendour. I don't know if the Italian Jesuit Giuseppe Castiglione would ever have seen any of Velazquez's works (if he had, it would most likely have been in reproduction rather than in the original) or whether it's a case of similar environments producing similar responses from an artist. And not just from the artist. The Quianlong Emperor wrote wryly about seeing portraits about the palace of himself as a young man. Philip IV admitted in a letter in the mid 1650's that he had not sat for his portrait for nearly a decade because he was uncomfortable with the changes in himself which Velasquez's brush would show. When he finally did have a portrait done, the ageing process is all too visible- though also a sense of noble stoic endurance in the face of public disaster (an endless, unwinnable, war with France, rebellions, natural catastrophes) and private tragedy (the death of wife and eldest son). Velazquez himself died not so very long afterwards.
| Henry VIII and typhoons | for everyone |
I think I've hit a lull at last. The travel hasn't done anything to make me enjoy going to Brussels more. On the plus side I did actually manage a bit of time for culture in the form of a visit to an exhibition in the Cinquantenaire Museum. It wasn't very Belgian- indeed it was one which had me thinking of my lovely friend in Mexico, Jessica, since it was on Pre-Columbian American Art. In principle this covered cultures ranging from the Pueblo peoples of the southern USA down to the peoples of Tierra del Fuego but the most spectacular items were from Jessica's part of the world- wonderful sculptures and ceramics from Mexico. Olmec and Toltec and Maya and Aztec- all well represented. I'm sure Jessica would have loved it (though she'd probably have wished the exhibits lived nearer their homeland- the private collection it drew on is Belgian based) and I'd have loved to share her knowledge of the background to the exhibits.
On the negative side I had some rather unpleasant experiences when I found a bar which did a drag show. The performers were really sweet but one of the other clients tried to steal my wallet- unsuccessfully, but it put a bit of a damper on things! This is the second time I've had bad experiences in Brussels bars and I don't think I'm going to be back in that part of the city again.
The other bit of culture I've picked up recently was seeing the Holbein exhibition at the Tate Britain. This covers the years Hans Holbein the Younger spent in London in the 1520's and 30's. Initially he was working for the German merchant community in the city but he was soon recruited to work for King Henry VIII (he needed royal patronage in order to work in England since local guild requirements made it almost impossible for foreigners to run a successful studio otherwise). In many ways Holbein and his staff created the basic image of Henry VIII that every subsequent presentation has imitated- Hollywood's Henry draws heavily on the Holbein version. Understandably it isn't exactly a critical or nuanced image- you'd never know that Henry was already beginning to suffer from health problems and his legs were getting wonky by the time the painting above was created. Holbein was working within strict limits and he knew it. Too much flattery in the wrong places could get you into trouble (as it famously did with his portrait of Henry's fourth wife, Anne of Cleves; Henry claimed that he'd never have married her if he'd know what she really looked like- though it's fair to say that the real issue about Anne wasn't her looks- which were actually quite attractive- but rather that by the time she reached England the foreign and religious policy alignments which had made her a credible bride had broken up and she had become a political embarrassment). Too little and you probably also got into trouble (there are some wonderful cases where we have the preparatory sketch and the finished portrait- and the latter usually makes its subject look just that little bit younger/slimmer/prettier than the former). Nevertheless Holbein's portraits of the members of the Tudor court makes one feel that one knows these people as individuals with personalities in a way that is hardly possible for earlier periods. Given Holbein's German origins, this might be an exhibition for my friend Silke who would, I'm sure appreciate it. She'd have made a perfect model for Holbein, though he wouldn't have had to be flattering to show her in her best light.
It's wet and windy and ridiculously warm in London. Friends from the US Midwest might be intrigued to hear that there was a mini-tornado in north west London this morning- a little cousin of their own twisters. We don't get that sort of thing in this part of the world all that often. Luckily there were no fatalities but quite a bit of property damage. It's been a strange winter already and we're not even at Christmas yet!
| And Wroxeter now | for everyone |
| Wroxeter Roman City then | for everyone |
| Iron bridges and Shropshire breaks | for everyone |
The break is an annual event for me; a long weekend somewhere tranquil to get myself in the right frame of mind for the onset of winter. I go to Shropshire, right on the Anglo-Welsh border and stay in a village called Ironbridge. If this sounds a rather odd name, it's because the main reason the village is there at all is an iron bridge. Not just any iron bridge, though- the very first iron bridge ever built, which was put together to cross the River Severn in 1779. The bridge is still there- they built solid in the 18th century and it was still carrying motor traffic into the 1960's. It looks a little odd to modern eyes until one realises that it was actually designed and built like a wooden bridge. It's probably massively over-engineered by modern standards but it needed to be- the Severn gorge is prone to massive floods (I've been there when most of the houses facing on to the river were under water) and anything less robust would have been washed away in 1795.
It's a lovely part of the world. In a sense it's the scenic face of de-industrialisation. The region was (to borrow the tourist information speak) "the cradle of the industrial revolution" with a clutch of the earliest large scale iron works in England- the sort of place that a certain type of tourist went around 1800 to be amazed by the blaze of the blast furnaces and the crash of industry. By 1850 it had become a backwater, with the ironworks switching to decorative pieces (the sort of cast iron fountain that every self respecting Victorian town had to have or the ornamental railings which went round upper class gardens and disappeared into the smelter during the Second World War) and the main local industries switching to decorative encaustic tiles and ceramic dinner services. In turn these industries faded away in the mid 20th century There were a variety of problems. The local iron ore was worked out quite early and there never was much local coal. The area did not have good transport links- the Severn was only just navigable that far upstream, it proved very complex to try to link the river in with the canal network (there's a wonderful inclined plane where canal boats were raised and lowered on rails between the river and the canal- clever but hideously fiddly for regular shipping) and it was a long time before anyone managed to squeeze a railway in between the hills and the river. The industry hasn't quite departed- the ultimate heirs of the company who built the iron bridge still bash metal in the Gorge, making that ultimate English upper middle class kitchen symbol the Aga stove and, perhaps a nice symbol of British industrial development, there's now a factory making teddy bears in the Gorge too- but most of the industrial sites have fallen into ruin, disappeared back into the woods or have been converted into heritage sites and craft centres.
There's more than just the industrial stuff in the wider area around Ironbridge. Because the region was remote in the Middle Ages there are a series of monasteries, now in ruins. Before that, there were the Romans. There's a full scale Roman city at Wroxeter, much of it still under the fields. It's an enigmatic place. It's not absolutely clear whether the city was a "real" city or something of a Potemkin facade of a place, planted on the extreme north western fringes of the Empire and playing at being a city in a countryside scarcely touched by Romanisation. There's evidence pointing both ways though I think the current view has swing back round to the opinion that the city did have genuine substance as an urban centre and that the grand public buildings really were completed (though the aqueduct never quite ran properly- I suspect there may have been some dubious contracts awarded by the city council). It's certainly the case that Wroxeter appears to have remained a going concern with the baths running (albeit at a very basic level) and the public buildings in some kind of use well after the point at which identifiable sub-Roman activity in Britain would normally have vanished- indeed on some interpretations of the dating the city was still running into the Anglo-Saxon era, which is very unusual indeed. None of this prevented the remains of the city being used as a stone quarry by the locals in later years as the number of robbed out Roman pieces incorporated in Wroxeter parish church shows.
Then there are the picturesque villages like Much Wenlock (where, if you believe the locals, de Coubertin got the idea for reviving the Olympic Games- a bit of an exaggeration), market towns like Bridgnorth with its wonderful views over the river and the great leaning slab which is all that's left of the medieval castle after Cromwell's engineers blew it up (the town was one of the last Royalist garrisons to surrender and was burned down in the process- which in turn led to the rebuilding of a splendid market hall) and the main local town of Shrewsbury, nearly surrounded by the Severn and full of black and white timber framed buildings, fine medieval churches (though the finest has stained glass bought up by the vicar in the early 19th century from the vastly expanded market in medieval stained glass created by the dissolution of monastic houses in Belgium and Germany in the Napoleonic period) and picturesque streets.
It's a really good place to go and recharge oneself for another pile of work. I'm on the road a lot to Brussels in the next few weeks and I’m beginning to get tired of the sight of the place. It would all be a lot nicer if I could have the company of some of my beautiful friends!!..
| Between the journeys | for everyone |
Back from Copenhagen- Brussels again next week. The problem with this is that I'm not the kind of person who actually enjoys travel. I enjoy being in different places but I'm definitely not the sort of person who regards the journey as part of their holiday. I find the process of travel tedious at the best of times, frustrating and stress-inducing at the worst. Since at the moment I'm mostly travelling for work related meetings with limited opportunities for getting out and about and doing the sorts of things I like doing it isn't all that much fun.
At least I did manage a morning for some sightseeing in Copenhagen. This was enough to add it to the (long) list of places I really ought to get back to for a proper visit. There's rather more old architecture than I'd expected given the city's long history of devastating fires in the days when it was mostly built of wood. Quite a lot of this dates from the early 17th century- remembered as something of a Golden Age in Danish history when the country was a major regional power and significant cultural centre in Northern Europe, with its local version of baroque architecture. It's interesting to encounter a Lutheran baroque church given that baroque is normally viewed as a quintessentially Catholic, Counter-Reformation, style. In the Danish version the decoration flows into the church woodwork- elaborately carved pulpits and highly decorated pews.
There's also a lot of interesting early 20th century architecture- a railway station with an interior designed to look like a massive version of how people at that time thought a Viking royal hall looked and a town hall full of folk art influenced "arts and crafts" style touches. Denmark's take on Art Nouveau was rather similar to Hungary's- a selective appropriation of traditional shapes and forms with a distinct nationalist agenda not far under the surface.
In the middle of my travels I managed another night at the opera. More Janacek- "Jenufa" this time; a ripe combination of sex, violence, religion and infanticide in the Moravian countryside. It's grossly melodramatic and could very easily tip over into self parody- indeed it requires all of Janacek's musical skills to stop it from doing so. The original play which he adapted was controversial in its day, partly because of the subject matter (the female author intended it as an attack on sexual double standards and the awful way in which women who had children out of wedlock were treated in rural society) but mainly because urban Czech intellectuals were scandalised at her depiction of the peasantry- normally idolised as the wellspring of true Czech culture and values- as brutal and barbaric.
The ENO performance was musically fine. Amanda Roocroft was a splendidly vulnerable victim/heroine and could almost persuade one that the utterly improbable "positive" ending (in which she marries the man who slashed her face open with a knife at the end of Act 1 because she accepts that actually did it because he loved her so much that he couldn't bear to see her marry his half brother) might work. As usual these days the problem was with the staging. Every production I've ever seen wimps out on the facial disfigurement inflicted on Jenufa (no doubt the Sopranos Union has a veto on its members having to wear nasty scarring makeup on their cheeks) so that fact that Jenufa looks as good in Act 3 as she did in Act 1 even though she's supposed to be marked for life is a little operatic quirk one learns to live with.
The issue lies with the wider setting. For no very clear reason the action has been shunted forward to somewhere around 1970. The problem with doing this to a piece which is very much of its time and place is quite simply that the updating doesn't work- especially when it's done in a very "naturalistic" way that simply invites one to think about the social context. I can just about take the transformation of the mill which the anti-hero Steva owns into some kind of metal bashing workshop- but in Communist Czechoslovakia he couldn't actually have been the owner, which rather messes up some of the implied economic status tensions underpinning the story line. The Czech army of the 1970's didn't draw lots for who was going to be conscripted, which leaves a major plot device looking a bit unreal. More radically, I just don't believe that the social implications of illegitimate pregnancy would have been so devastating even in the depths of rural Moravia at that time. Even if they had been, all Jenufa would have had to do would be get the first bus out to Brno and check in for an abortion at the hospital there- abortion was readily available in Communist Czechoslovakia. Her step mother (who spends the whole of Act 2 praying for the new-born child to die before taking it off and drowning it in the nearest river) would clearly have been prepared to meet whatever costs were required.
I wish one day they'd shock us all and do an absolutely "straight" production- but no doubt that's beneath the dignity of the expensively hired directors the ENO uses.
At least I did manage a morning for some sightseeing in Copenhagen. This was enough to add it to the (long) list of places I really ought to get back to for a proper visit. There's rather more old architecture than I'd expected given the city's long history of devastating fires in the days when it was mostly built of wood. Quite a lot of this dates from the early 17th century- remembered as something of a Golden Age in Danish history when the country was a major regional power and significant cultural centre in Northern Europe, with its local version of baroque architecture. It's interesting to encounter a Lutheran baroque church given that baroque is normally viewed as a quintessentially Catholic, Counter-Reformation, style. In the Danish version the decoration flows into the church woodwork- elaborately carved pulpits and highly decorated pews.
There's also a lot of interesting early 20th century architecture- a railway station with an interior designed to look like a massive version of how people at that time thought a Viking royal hall looked and a town hall full of folk art influenced "arts and crafts" style touches. Denmark's take on Art Nouveau was rather similar to Hungary's- a selective appropriation of traditional shapes and forms with a distinct nationalist agenda not far under the surface.
In the middle of my travels I managed another night at the opera. More Janacek- "Jenufa" this time; a ripe combination of sex, violence, religion and infanticide in the Moravian countryside. It's grossly melodramatic and could very easily tip over into self parody- indeed it requires all of Janacek's musical skills to stop it from doing so. The original play which he adapted was controversial in its day, partly because of the subject matter (the female author intended it as an attack on sexual double standards and the awful way in which women who had children out of wedlock were treated in rural society) but mainly because urban Czech intellectuals were scandalised at her depiction of the peasantry- normally idolised as the wellspring of true Czech culture and values- as brutal and barbaric.
The ENO performance was musically fine. Amanda Roocroft was a splendidly vulnerable victim/heroine and could almost persuade one that the utterly improbable "positive" ending (in which she marries the man who slashed her face open with a knife at the end of Act 1 because she accepts that actually did it because he loved her so much that he couldn't bear to see her marry his half brother) might work. As usual these days the problem was with the staging. Every production I've ever seen wimps out on the facial disfigurement inflicted on Jenufa (no doubt the Sopranos Union has a veto on its members having to wear nasty scarring makeup on their cheeks) so that fact that Jenufa looks as good in Act 3 as she did in Act 1 even though she's supposed to be marked for life is a little operatic quirk one learns to live with.
The issue lies with the wider setting. For no very clear reason the action has been shunted forward to somewhere around 1970. The problem with doing this to a piece which is very much of its time and place is quite simply that the updating doesn't work- especially when it's done in a very "naturalistic" way that simply invites one to think about the social context. I can just about take the transformation of the mill which the anti-hero Steva owns into some kind of metal bashing workshop- but in Communist Czechoslovakia he couldn't actually have been the owner, which rather messes up some of the implied economic status tensions underpinning the story line. The Czech army of the 1970's didn't draw lots for who was going to be conscripted, which leaves a major plot device looking a bit unreal. More radically, I just don't believe that the social implications of illegitimate pregnancy would have been so devastating even in the depths of rural Moravia at that time. Even if they had been, all Jenufa would have had to do would be get the first bus out to Brno and check in for an abortion at the hospital there- abortion was readily available in Communist Czechoslovakia. Her step mother (who spends the whole of Act 2 praying for the new-born child to die before taking it off and drowning it in the nearest river) would clearly have been prepared to meet whatever costs were required.
I wish one day they'd shock us all and do an absolutely "straight" production- but no doubt that's beneath the dignity of the expensively hired directors the ENO uses.
| Sorry for lack of activity | for everyone |
...but I've been horribly busy recently. I'm between trips at the moment- Brussels last week, Copenhagen this. I've never been to Denmark so it should be interesting except that I don't think I'll have much time to look round much.
I'll try to do a proper update some time soon, honest!
I'll try to do a proper update some time soon, honest!
| Hungarian Interlude | for everyone |
I'm back from Budapest without seeing a single riot. I'm not sure if last week's events in Hungary got much coverage in the US, though they did here in the UK and no doubt there was even more on the German media. In brief, the recently re-elected government of Hungary has introduced an economic austerity plan designed to curb a runaway deficit. This would have been unpopular enough (even though there probably wasn't much alternative if the country was to avoid an alarming level of currency depreciation- the forint has dropped from about 320 to the £ to about 400 in the last 18 months, which is nice if you're a tourist but problematic for the locals). To compound things, however, the Prime Minister was brave or foolhardy enough to tell a meeting of his MPs that they'd lied to win the election but now had to face up to reality- and naturally someone taped the speech and leaked its contents to the press. The result was several days of largely peaceful demonstrations and three evenings of trouble.
My impression from the Hungarian press and television was that the scale of the trouble and its media coverage were shaping up to become a political issue in their own right (I don't actually understand more than the odd word of Hungarian but sometimes you can get the drift from the way things are presented). This was no doubt in part because one of the first (and indeed one of the very few) places to be subjected to attack by the violent elements in the demonstration was the headquarters of MTV (Magyar Televiszion, not the rock music channel!)- presumably because its coverage was regarded as too pro-governmental. It was certain revealing just how little visible damage there was in the centre of Budapest- nothing remotely comparable to the wholesale window smashing and looting one gets, say, in London when the anti-globalisation types have a "peaceful" demonstration. The damage was highly targeted- the MTV headquarters and the Soviet War Memorial which is outside it on Szabasag Ter (the US Embassy is on the other side of the square). Judging from graffiti stencilled on some of the walls and from the flags waved by some of the violent elements, the trouble was coming from the extreme right wing nationalist fringe of Hungarian politics which has never quite accepted the dismemberment of the pre-1914 Kingdom of Hungary which stretched from the Adriatic to the Carpathians.
The current government is a Socialist/Liberal coalition whose Socialist element is the restructured and democratised heir to the ruling party of the Communist era, shorn of its Communist true believers. With the 50th anniversary of the 1956 Revolution coming up at the end of October there were always going to be tensions about. 1956 was a civil war too, with quite a few Hungarian Communists, members of the hated AVH party militia and members of the military being killed by the revolutionaries (there are what amount to rival memorial sections for the dead of each side in the Kerepes Cemetery; even though the Communist one looks unloved, names are still being added to individual gravestones as, say, the spouses of the AVH members lynched in 1956 pass away and choose to be memorialised with their husbands). Communism faded away more or less by consent in 1989 but Hungary never saw a major settling of accounts with the past. Having a government with its share of ex Communist apparatchiks (albeit generally ones far too young to have had any real authority back in the bad old days) presiding over the national exercise in remembrance was likely to cause problems, at least in the eyes of some of those who fought the Russian tanks in 1956 or spent years in the Hungarian version of the Gulag. The danger is that the whole memorialisation process could now become dangerously politically polarised.
Of course I didn't go on holiday for a course in Hungarian politics and they didn't impinge that much. I had a lovely time. The weather was almost totally fine and there was plenty so see. Obviously I did the conventional tourist stops apart from the massive Parliament building, which I went round last time I was in Budapest- Castle Hill on the Buda side with its views over the Danube and its wonderfully improbable fake medieval defences created in the late 19th century which (I'm convinced) served as the inspiration for the defences of Gondor in "The Return of the King", Heroes Square with its shifting cast of the heroes of Hungarian history (Habsburgs out, Transylvanian Princes in!.), the massive Synagogue on Dohanyi Ut, the second largest in the world and a wonderful piece of 19th century architecture as well as a memorial centre for the slaughtered Jewish communities of Hungary, the museums and art galleries (I was thinking of Jessica in the archaeological sections of the National Museum- some of the Bronze Age ceramics have disconcerting similarities to material from her part of the world!). Budapest also has a Roman past- the remains of a major legionary fortress are bizarrely buried under the flyovers or poke out amid the underpasses in one of the major traffic junctions on the Buda side to the north of the city and a bit further north there are the substantial remains of a major civilian settlement. I popped out of the city proper on the suburban railway, up the Danube to the highly attractive small town of Szentendre which has a clutch of Serbian Orthodox churches and a museum of icons and eastwards to Godollo with its baroque palace refitted in the mid 19th century for the Emperor Franz Joseph in his Hungarian guise as King Ferenc Joszef but mostly used by his wife Elizabeth, alias Queen Erszebet alias Sissi, who enjoyed living there precisely because her husband didn't like Hungary and she could get up his nose by dressing up in a kind of very expensive aristocratic adaptation of Hungarian folk costume (some of her frocks would I'm sure have had my friends drooling).
I went to the opera, not just for the opera house (wonderful building though it is) but to enjoy a Bartok triple bill. I'm not a huge ballet fan but I enjoyed "The Wooden Prince" well enough; I wasn't so sure about "The Miraculous Mandarin" but in part that was the fault of the staging, which turned what is in any event a dark and disturbing piece into a rather superficial piece of sado-masochistic soft porn. What I was really there for was the opera , "Duke Bluebeard's Castle", which I think is the finest one act opera ever written. It's another dark and intense work, a duet between Bluebeard and Judit (there are no other singing roles) with an ambivalent ending in which Judit appears to accept her fate as the fourth of Bluebeard's dead (or are they?) wives, the one who rules his nights.
A lot of the time, though, I just walked round. The Pest side of the city has so many very fine pieces of late 19th-early 20th century architecture. In the years before the First World War Budapest was probably the fastest growing city in Europe with a population increasing at American rates. Obviously this caused serious housing and social problems but, at the elite level and in terms of public buildings, the result was an explosion of architectural inventiveness. The most interesting buildings were put up in a form of Hungarian nationalist appropriation of Art Nouveau which made use of the forms of folk architecture from the countryside (especially the Transylvanian countryside- Transylvania was viewed as the home of the most "authentic" Hungarian folk culture, hence the music collecting of Bartok and Kodaly and the textiles and ceramics produced in the workshops of the artistic colony which set itself up at Godollo in the 1900s). The results can be stunning. Some have been well restored, others are still crumbling and await restoration- if they don't get torn down in the flurry of new building which has taken root all over the city.
In a way it all fits together, though sometimes in complex ways- opera and architecture looking back to an idealised Hungarian countryside in lands which are now in Romania, a slightly frenetic boom economy, a complex past of violence and loss and heroism leading to a contested present. Budapest is certainly a place worth seeing, riots or not.
My impression from the Hungarian press and television was that the scale of the trouble and its media coverage were shaping up to become a political issue in their own right (I don't actually understand more than the odd word of Hungarian but sometimes you can get the drift from the way things are presented). This was no doubt in part because one of the first (and indeed one of the very few) places to be subjected to attack by the violent elements in the demonstration was the headquarters of MTV (Magyar Televiszion, not the rock music channel!)- presumably because its coverage was regarded as too pro-governmental. It was certain revealing just how little visible damage there was in the centre of Budapest- nothing remotely comparable to the wholesale window smashing and looting one gets, say, in London when the anti-globalisation types have a "peaceful" demonstration. The damage was highly targeted- the MTV headquarters and the Soviet War Memorial which is outside it on Szabasag Ter (the US Embassy is on the other side of the square). Judging from graffiti stencilled on some of the walls and from the flags waved by some of the violent elements, the trouble was coming from the extreme right wing nationalist fringe of Hungarian politics which has never quite accepted the dismemberment of the pre-1914 Kingdom of Hungary which stretched from the Adriatic to the Carpathians.
The current government is a Socialist/Liberal coalition whose Socialist element is the restructured and democratised heir to the ruling party of the Communist era, shorn of its Communist true believers. With the 50th anniversary of the 1956 Revolution coming up at the end of October there were always going to be tensions about. 1956 was a civil war too, with quite a few Hungarian Communists, members of the hated AVH party militia and members of the military being killed by the revolutionaries (there are what amount to rival memorial sections for the dead of each side in the Kerepes Cemetery; even though the Communist one looks unloved, names are still being added to individual gravestones as, say, the spouses of the AVH members lynched in 1956 pass away and choose to be memorialised with their husbands). Communism faded away more or less by consent in 1989 but Hungary never saw a major settling of accounts with the past. Having a government with its share of ex Communist apparatchiks (albeit generally ones far too young to have had any real authority back in the bad old days) presiding over the national exercise in remembrance was likely to cause problems, at least in the eyes of some of those who fought the Russian tanks in 1956 or spent years in the Hungarian version of the Gulag. The danger is that the whole memorialisation process could now become dangerously politically polarised.
Of course I didn't go on holiday for a course in Hungarian politics and they didn't impinge that much. I had a lovely time. The weather was almost totally fine and there was plenty so see. Obviously I did the conventional tourist stops apart from the massive Parliament building, which I went round last time I was in Budapest- Castle Hill on the Buda side with its views over the Danube and its wonderfully improbable fake medieval defences created in the late 19th century which (I'm convinced) served as the inspiration for the defences of Gondor in "The Return of the King", Heroes Square with its shifting cast of the heroes of Hungarian history (Habsburgs out, Transylvanian Princes in!.), the massive Synagogue on Dohanyi Ut, the second largest in the world and a wonderful piece of 19th century architecture as well as a memorial centre for the slaughtered Jewish communities of Hungary, the museums and art galleries (I was thinking of Jessica in the archaeological sections of the National Museum- some of the Bronze Age ceramics have disconcerting similarities to material from her part of the world!). Budapest also has a Roman past- the remains of a major legionary fortress are bizarrely buried under the flyovers or poke out amid the underpasses in one of the major traffic junctions on the Buda side to the north of the city and a bit further north there are the substantial remains of a major civilian settlement. I popped out of the city proper on the suburban railway, up the Danube to the highly attractive small town of Szentendre which has a clutch of Serbian Orthodox churches and a museum of icons and eastwards to Godollo with its baroque palace refitted in the mid 19th century for the Emperor Franz Joseph in his Hungarian guise as King Ferenc Joszef but mostly used by his wife Elizabeth, alias Queen Erszebet alias Sissi, who enjoyed living there precisely because her husband didn't like Hungary and she could get up his nose by dressing up in a kind of very expensive aristocratic adaptation of Hungarian folk costume (some of her frocks would I'm sure have had my friends drooling).
I went to the opera, not just for the opera house (wonderful building though it is) but to enjoy a Bartok triple bill. I'm not a huge ballet fan but I enjoyed "The Wooden Prince" well enough; I wasn't so sure about "The Miraculous Mandarin" but in part that was the fault of the staging, which turned what is in any event a dark and disturbing piece into a rather superficial piece of sado-masochistic soft porn. What I was really there for was the opera , "Duke Bluebeard's Castle", which I think is the finest one act opera ever written. It's another dark and intense work, a duet between Bluebeard and Judit (there are no other singing roles) with an ambivalent ending in which Judit appears to accept her fate as the fourth of Bluebeard's dead (or are they?) wives, the one who rules his nights.
A lot of the time, though, I just walked round. The Pest side of the city has so many very fine pieces of late 19th-early 20th century architecture. In the years before the First World War Budapest was probably the fastest growing city in Europe with a population increasing at American rates. Obviously this caused serious housing and social problems but, at the elite level and in terms of public buildings, the result was an explosion of architectural inventiveness. The most interesting buildings were put up in a form of Hungarian nationalist appropriation of Art Nouveau which made use of the forms of folk architecture from the countryside (especially the Transylvanian countryside- Transylvania was viewed as the home of the most "authentic" Hungarian folk culture, hence the music collecting of Bartok and Kodaly and the textiles and ceramics produced in the workshops of the artistic colony which set itself up at Godollo in the 1900s). The results can be stunning. Some have been well restored, others are still crumbling and await restoration- if they don't get torn down in the flurry of new building which has taken root all over the city.
In a way it all fits together, though sometimes in complex ways- opera and architecture looking back to an idealised Hungarian countryside in lands which are now in Romania, a slightly frenetic boom economy, a complex past of violence and loss and heroism leading to a contested present. Budapest is certainly a place worth seeing, riots or not.
| At the seaside- and heading east. | for everyone |
I'm not a great seaside person and haven't been since I got too old to build sandcastles. I don't particularly enjoy lying about on a beach getting sand in my hair and into my eyes while making sure that the seagulls don't eat the picnic. Nevertheless I decided to go down to the seaside at the weekend. It was a beautiful sunny day (and I doubt if there will be so many more of those this year- autumn is in the air already) and it seemed worth getting a little sea air in my lungs. In addition I'd been meaning to go down to the end of the rail line at Ramsgate for some time- not for the beach (which is a bit shingly anyway) but because of the local maritime museum.
Ramsgate is still something of a traditional English seaside resort though one which has weathered changing tastes in holidays a bit better than some. It's right at the eastern end of Kent at the north end of a section of coast where shipping coming up the Channel from the south in the days of sail had to wait for a favourable wind to get up the Thames. It’s also opposite the Goodwin Sands. The Sands were (and to an extent still are) one of the biggest ship killers in British waters; a massive set of sandbanks planted in the Channel which shift unpredictably over short spells of time. At times parts of the Sands will emerge from the sea completely- there's a Goodwin sands cricket club which makes a point of sailing out and playing a game every time a big enough chunk emerges from the water. There are all sorts of legends about lost villages under the Sands. The very name is supposed to derive from the Godwin who was father of the King Harold who was killed at Hastings and certainly the coastline has shifted enormously in that part of the world over the years so it's possible that there could be Anglo-Saxon era settlements out there under the sea.
One result of the shifting nature of the Sands is that ships will disappear into then for years and then, just as suddenly, reappear centuries later. This is in essence what happened to the "Stirling Castle", a warship wrecked on the Sands along with several others during the great hurricane of 1703 which reappeared out of the Sands in the early 1980's for a short period, vanished again and then reappeared for long enough to allow some serious sessions of marine archaeology in 2000-2. A selection of the finds is in the Ramsgate museum, headed by a massive iron gun and its carriage, both currently sitting in huge water tanks for preservation purposes. Finds from sunken ships are always rather poignant and human scale, in part because they can be so precisely linked to a specific set of people at a specific time. I,ve seen the "Vasa" museum in Stockholm where one has the additional, massive, presence of the hull of the ill-fated warship which sank on her maiden voyage and the "Mary Rose" with its rather more fragmentary hull remains. There's a wonderful museum in Pisa still under development which will hold the finds from the Roman harbour, which was found (complete with about a dozen wrecked ships dating from 500BC to 500 AD) when the foundations of an office building were dug on its site; the most touching find there being a human skeleton found alongside a dog in a small sunken boat where man and animal had gone down together.
Obviously Ramsgate's little museum isn't in the same league but it's still full of the paraphernalia of the ship's crew; a remarkably modern looking broad brimmed leather hat which was part of the crew's winter issue uniform, an officer's purse, even a toothbrush (so early 18th century sailors worried about dental hygene!..). There was even a set of official looking weights which on inspection turn out to be inaccurate- perhaps evidence that the ship's quartermaster or purser was on the take, issuing the men with short rations.
The museum, plus an exploration of Ramsgate itself made for a pleasant day out. The town is not without some interesting buildings. It was something of a boom town in the early 19the century both as a ferry port and, increasingly, a holiday resort as the idea that regular dips in the sea might be good for health caught on amongst the upper and middle classes and then worked its way further down the social scale. The port even laid claim to being "The Royal Port of Ramsgate" because George IV deliberately chose to sail from there when visiting his continental principality in Germany (George IV was Elector of Hanover as well as ruling Britain and its empire); he did so to punish Dover the for warm welcome it had given his estranged wife Queen Caroline when she landed there on her way to cause massive embarrassment at his coronation. Ramsgate Regis? Sadly perhaps the royal connection never quite stuck but Ramsgate has its fair share of grand crescents and parades and churches from this period, balanced by the pubs and music halls and more plebeian establishments from the Victorian era.
I shall be heading eastwards later this week- off to Budapest for ten days. I'm looking forward to seeing the city in rather better weather (last time I was there in February last year it snowed, which had its own aesthetic pleasures but made getting round the city of foot a bit complicated) though decidedly not looking forward to facing airport security at Heathrow.
I shall be thinking of my beautiful friends while I'm there.
Ramsgate is still something of a traditional English seaside resort though one which has weathered changing tastes in holidays a bit better than some. It's right at the eastern end of Kent at the north end of a section of coast where shipping coming up the Channel from the south in the days of sail had to wait for a favourable wind to get up the Thames. It’s also opposite the Goodwin Sands. The Sands were (and to an extent still are) one of the biggest ship killers in British waters; a massive set of sandbanks planted in the Channel which shift unpredictably over short spells of time. At times parts of the Sands will emerge from the sea completely- there's a Goodwin sands cricket club which makes a point of sailing out and playing a game every time a big enough chunk emerges from the water. There are all sorts of legends about lost villages under the Sands. The very name is supposed to derive from the Godwin who was father of the King Harold who was killed at Hastings and certainly the coastline has shifted enormously in that part of the world over the years so it's possible that there could be Anglo-Saxon era settlements out there under the sea.
One result of the shifting nature of the Sands is that ships will disappear into then for years and then, just as suddenly, reappear centuries later. This is in essence what happened to the "Stirling Castle", a warship wrecked on the Sands along with several others during the great hurricane of 1703 which reappeared out of the Sands in the early 1980's for a short period, vanished again and then reappeared for long enough to allow some serious sessions of marine archaeology in 2000-2. A selection of the finds is in the Ramsgate museum, headed by a massive iron gun and its carriage, both currently sitting in huge water tanks for preservation purposes. Finds from sunken ships are always rather poignant and human scale, in part because they can be so precisely linked to a specific set of people at a specific time. I,ve seen the "Vasa" museum in Stockholm where one has the additional, massive, presence of the hull of the ill-fated warship which sank on her maiden voyage and the "Mary Rose" with its rather more fragmentary hull remains. There's a wonderful museum in Pisa still under development which will hold the finds from the Roman harbour, which was found (complete with about a dozen wrecked ships dating from 500BC to 500 AD) when the foundations of an office building were dug on its site; the most touching find there being a human skeleton found alongside a dog in a small sunken boat where man and animal had gone down together.
Obviously Ramsgate's little museum isn't in the same league but it's still full of the paraphernalia of the ship's crew; a remarkably modern looking broad brimmed leather hat which was part of the crew's winter issue uniform, an officer's purse, even a toothbrush (so early 18th century sailors worried about dental hygene!..). There was even a set of official looking weights which on inspection turn out to be inaccurate- perhaps evidence that the ship's quartermaster or purser was on the take, issuing the men with short rations.
The museum, plus an exploration of Ramsgate itself made for a pleasant day out. The town is not without some interesting buildings. It was something of a boom town in the early 19the century both as a ferry port and, increasingly, a holiday resort as the idea that regular dips in the sea might be good for health caught on amongst the upper and middle classes and then worked its way further down the social scale. The port even laid claim to being "The Royal Port of Ramsgate" because George IV deliberately chose to sail from there when visiting his continental principality in Germany (George IV was Elector of Hanover as well as ruling Britain and its empire); he did so to punish Dover the for warm welcome it had given his estranged wife Queen Caroline when she landed there on her way to cause massive embarrassment at his coronation. Ramsgate Regis? Sadly perhaps the royal connection never quite stuck but Ramsgate has its fair share of grand crescents and parades and churches from this period, balanced by the pubs and music halls and more plebeian establishments from the Victorian era.
I shall be heading eastwards later this week- off to Budapest for ten days. I'm looking forward to seeing the city in rather better weather (last time I was there in February last year it snowed, which had its own aesthetic pleasures but made getting round the city of foot a bit complicated) though decidedly not looking forward to facing airport security at Heathrow.
I shall be thinking of my beautiful friends while I'm there.
| Roman Villa | for everyone |
When the rooms were being laid out in London the biggest provider of funding on the Russian side was a certain Mikhail Khodorkhovsky and the company he then headed, Yukos. I was also therefore interested to see how the gallery was going to handle the fact that its founder was now an un-person in the neo-Gulag; stressing the links might endanger the continuing flow of loans from Russia to fill the space but doing a complete Stalinist erasure of the past would not go down too well at the British end. They'd come up with a very British compromise; the commemorative plaque in the foyer referring to Yukos funding was still to be seen but the room called after Khodorkhovsky had been quietly de-baptised.
The exhibition itself was entitled "The Road to Byzantium". This evoked slightly incongruous images of the ghosts of Bob Hope and Bing Crosby in late antique costume- the more highbrow reference might have been W B Yeats, but he sailed to Byzantium in his poetry. As often happens, the subtitle to the exhibition which referred to the luxury arts of the ancient world was closer to the mark. The rather tenous art history justification for the exhibition was to illustrate the survival of classical themes and artistic styles from the pagan world into the Orthodox Christian era. In truth this is hardly a surprise; it's well known that Byzantine cultural elites were stuffed full of pagan literature as part of their education and wrote an increasingly strange and backward-looking form of Greek which bore less and less relationship to how people spoke that language. They also had an amazing ability to find Christian allegories for pagan myths- the Trojan War was turned by one commentator stronger on ingenuity than common sense into a fight over the human soul (Achilles as a Christ figure, anyone?). In this context it's not so very surprising that they might also favour styles of decoration on, for instance, their prestige silverware which looked back to the classical world (it's worth adding that this was very much a minority situation- ordinary inhabitants of the imperial capital seem to have had as hazy and fantastical an understanding of pagan mythology and of their own history which they saw expressed in the statues and buildings of their home city as their counterparts in Rome had).
In fact, however, most of the objects in the exhibition were actually dug up in present day Ukraine during the era of the Czar's empire. This was territory which was never formally part of the Roman or Byzantine empires but had been wide open to Graeco-Roman cultural influences since the 6th century BC. Indeed some of the most beautiful items in the exhibition were made at around that time for the rulers of the nomadic tribal groups the Greeks called the Scythians. There was a wonderful golden cover for an arrow quiver-a quintessentially Scythian item but decorated in an entirely Greek style and (probably) depicting Greek myths relating to the Trojan war (the discovery of Achilles living as a girl among the court maidens where his family had put him to keep him safe from the wars- there had to be a t-girl angle somewhere!). Much of the Byzantine era material seems to have been shipped across the Black Sea as diplomatic presents (or bribes) to local potentates aligned with the Empire. In some cases the imperial workshops even appear to have set their hands to turning out high quality material in "barbarian" styles mirroring those created by the workshops of the nomadic peoples themselves. How this context fitted with the supposed storyline of the exhibition was very unclear. If anything it served rather to illustrate the continuing attraction of luxury items from the Graeco-Roman world as symbols of power to groups outside that world- people for whom the precise symbolic content of any illustrations stamped or engraved in the silverwork was probably a secondary issue.
The exhibition did however put me in something of a classical mood and on Monday I decided to visit a bit of classical archaeology. This wasn't anything remotely as spectacular as the sites my lovely Mexican friend Jessica has been visiting recently- step pyramids and temples are not common in north Kent. Lullingstone Roman villa is however a pleasant place to visit. It's in very nice surroundings just beyond the south eastern fringes of London, set in rolling countryside near a shallow clear stream. The villa isn't huge- the owners were presumably (to use anachronistic terminology) minor country gentry rather than great nobles with masses of slaves to farm their land and serve their every need. It must have been a pleasant place to live even in Roman times- quite well placed for the main road network, far away from the frontier and far enough inland not to be an obvious target for raiders (at least until the point at which Roman authority had so far collapsed that external raiders were probably just one worry among many) but near enough the provincial capital at Londinium to provide a reliable market for the grain stored in the substantial granary which was built where the car park now sits.
Like all self respecting archaeological sites it has its enigmatic side. At Lullingstone this centres on religious issues. There's a basement shrine, apparently related to some kind of water-based cult (at least the remaining wall painting which appears to show water nymphs points in that direction). Above that, however, was a room which was converted into a Christian chapel (fragmentary wall paintings survive from its decoration). It's possible, though not at all proven, that the two shrines may both have been in use for a period. Identifiable shrines of any sort are very rare in Roman villas in Britain; Christian imagery is even rarer. Nobody knows why this villa had quite an impressive chapel.
And then there are the mosaics. They're in what's taken to be a dining room- but one rebuilt and extended in the mid 4th century. This is late. It is possible to imagine that someone who, as a teenager, attended the grand opening party where the owners of the villa showed off their grand new extension might have lived to see in their old age the final collapse of any shadow of Roman authority over its British provinces. Obviously Roman Britain looked a viable enough proposition around 350 to get the builders in and spend a substantial sum on a new prestige room, complete with mosaic floors. The floors echo back to the theme of the Hermitage show. The owners of the villa in the mid 4th century would no doubt have been Christians. Nevertheless their mosaics depicted Perseus mounted on the winged horse Bellerophon- a piece of Greek mythology Christianised into the triumph of good over evil whose artistic depiction flows straight into St George and the Dragon. Harder to Christianise was the depiction of Europa being carried off by Jupiter in the shape of a bull- particularly as the scene came complete with a caption referring back to the poetry of Virgil (the scene illustrated above). Clearly there was social prestige in knowing your classics in 4th century Britain- or at least in looking as if you did. Luxury artefacts and cultural prestige worked in similar ways on the edges of the Roman empire from Britain to the Black Sea.
| Of Modigliani Nudes and Scuffed Cricket Balls | for everyone |
I had thought I'd have a nice cultural weekend, topped off with some sporting action on the Sunday as the final England-Pakistan cricket test match came to a head.
Well, the culture went fine. The exhibition at the Royal Academy entitled "Modigliani and his models" was well worth the visit. The title is a bit misleading since over 90% of Modigliani's surviving paintings were of people so it doesn't actually exclude much of his output. Rather predictably all the advertising focuses on the series of female nudes he produced on a daily retainer from his dealer in the course of 1917 but this is just a smallish part of the show- if the part which seems to attract the most attention from the visitors. The bulk of the exhibition, however, deals with his paintings of his friends in the Paris art world, the portraits of un-named people encountered during his stay in the south of France in the winter of 1917/8 and those of his close female friends and mistresses (intriguingly he never seems to have painted any of his lovers in the nude while his nude models are anonymous girls about whom nothing is known- one wonders how many may have been the wives of soldiers deep in the mud of the Western Front making a bit extra cash to support themselves in the hard times which had fallen on Paris during the First World War).
Modigliani seems to have done his best to live down to every cliche of the Hollywood artistic biopic; handsome, sexually active, tubercular- and dedicated to drinking and drugging himself to death in grand style, a project he achieved by the age of 40. One of his late models- a very respectable Swedish girl whom he'd met in cafe and asked to model for him (with her clothes firmly on) recalled him drinking glass after glass of wine as he worked and then staggering off to the nearest cafe for the serious business of the evening. This hyper-bohemian aspect of the man has, I suspect, helped to explain some of the fascination which his art seems to have inspired ever since. This is a pity since his paintings are well worth seeing anyway. It's fascinating to spot the influences in his art- which aren't always the obvious ones. Modernist he may have been but he was deeply influenced by Italian Renaissance art and echoes of Botticelli pop up in the most unlikely places. It's also fascinating to see how he could somehow create more or less recognisable images of individuals while remaining true to his characteristic style with its elongated necks and mask-like, blank-eyed faces. And his nudes genuinely are very sexy indeed, which is a rare gift. Pity he never did any t-girl nudes!.
And then the cricket went haywire on Sunday. I don't suppose most of my friends will understand this strange game (even though the oldest more or less continually played international cricket match is USA v Canada which goes back to 1848) and (unlike the ending of the football World Cup) I doubt if the bizarre events in south London on Sunday would have made the news broadcasts in the USA or Canada- let alone Germany.
I won't even try to explain the finer points of the game but a bit of background is necessary. England were in the final game of a four match international series against Pakistan. It's been an interesting rather than a thrilling series- both sides were well short of full strength due to injuries. England had already won the series 2-0 before the final game so not a huge amount other than pride hung on the outcome. Pakistan had been well on top for most of this game- a lot of the England side seemed to have their minds elsewhere- but on the Sunday afternoon England were getting back into things a bit and there was the prospect of an interesting finale. Early in the afternoon session the on-field umpires (there are two on the field these days, plus one in the pavilion looking after the video replays which are used to make certain decisions and a fourth official whose role in the scheme of things- other than providing back up if one of the other three were to fall ill- has always been a bit obscure to me) got in a fuss about the state of the ball and ruled that Pakistan had been tampering with it. This is serious stuff. A cricket ball starts out with a prominent seam and an equal coat of varnish on both sides. In the course of play the seam tends to get bashed down and the ball tends to wear unevenly. The bowling side will (quite legitimately) try to keep one side shinier than the other to encourage it to swing in the air- though this effect tends to fade away as play progresses. After a certain point, however, there is an incentive for the bowling side to speed up the damage to the ball by deliberately scuffing or abrading one side in order to obtain what is known as "reverse swing" ("reverse") because it goes in the opposite direction from how it goes when the ball is new). Reverse swing expertly delivered is extremely hard to bat against and deliberately damaging the ball to speed up the point at which reverse swing comes into effect is thoroughly illegal under the laws of the game.
What happened then was a bit odd. The Pakistan side fussed a bit on the field but appeared to accept the call and play continued with a replacement ball. The players went off for bad light about an hour later and tea was taken during this break. The light improved and play was scheduled to resume. The umpires went out. The Pakistan team didn't. There was much toing and froing, much gesticulation all round. The umpires went out again, this time with the England batsmen. Still no signs of Pakistan. The umpires called "play" and then awarded England the game by default. Some time later Pakistan emerged from their dressing room ready to play- but the umpires had vanished and flatly refused to revoke their decision. It was claimed in one of the newspapers that an attempt was made to persuade the video umpire and the fourth official to take over the on-field duties but they refused- this hasn't been confirmed, though. The decision to award England the game stood and the scheduled last day's play today was cancelled amid much confusion. Test matches have had to be abandoned for all sorts of reasons in the past, ranging from monsoon rains through the pitch being unfit for play to rioting. None has ever been forfeited in the 120 odd years of international cricket.
Within the laws of the game the umpires were completely within their rights and the ex cricket umpire in me (I umpired club level cricket round London for many years) applauds their unwillingness to bend the rules out of political expediency. Needless to say, however, it's not that simple. For one thing, deliberate ball tampering is very difficult to prove. There doesn't seem to be any clear television evidence of any Pakistan player doing anything amiss during the period in question (the tampering must have taken place within a period of about 15 minutes). Athough today's London morning freesheet newspaper carried a front page photo purporting to show an unidentified Pakistan player picking the seam of the ball, (which is clearly against the laws of the game) this is a long way from proof positive of evil doing. On the other hand the Pakistan claim that the undeniable damage the ball had suffered was a matter of normal wear and tear rings pretty hollow since it hadn't been hit to the boundary in that period.
In any case it's an open secret that every side in the professional game will go to the very edge of legitimate "working on the ball" if they've got a bowler who can use reverse swing effectively. Pakistan are hyper-sensitive about ball tampering allegations because they've got previous. Many of the tiny number of players who've actually been caught ball tampering have been Pakistani, the earliest exponents of reverse swing in the early 1990s were Pakistani and there were plenty of observers who suggested then that reverse swing could not be achieved by legal means. Rightly or wrongly Pakistan feel that they've been being picked on over ball tampering for years. It doesn't help their case, however, when a member of the current tour party (though not engaged in the test) gives an interview in which he says that ball tampering should be legal (I imagine the interview was given before yesterday's events but the timing of publication was not exactly perfect).
Finally, and most to the point, the umpire at the centre of the row has previous of his own. Darrell Hair, the senior of the two on-field umpires and the one who was clearly running the show, is an Australian noted for a prickly and aloof relationship with the players and a pedantic approach to the laws. Moreover his entire umpiring career has been littered with acrimonious disputes involving Asian sides- especially Pakistan. Appointing him to officiate at the last two games of an England-Pakistan series was not the cleverest piece of scheduling. If there was one man on the international umpiring panel guaranteed to make a drama out of a crisis and go for the nuclear option if something untoward happened it was Darrell Hair- and Pakistan could be guaranteed to make barely veiled accusations of racism if he did.
The thing which puzzles me about the whole sorry story is why Pakistan waited for the tea interval to decide they'd been so mortally offended that they weren't prepared to continue with the game. If they'd lodged a formal protest to the match referee (another official up there in the stands who deals with conduct issues) and discussed the matter at the close of the day's play (by which point they might well have won the game anyway) I suspect most commentators would have sympathised with them. If their captain had led his team off the pitch the moment Hair made the call it might have looked like a bit of childish petulance but could at least have been explained as a matter of passions running high in the heat of the moment. Waiting until the break suggests that someone off the pitch- in the team management, for instance- had got at the players.
Of course it doesn't help that the side involved are Pakistan. Relations between England and Pakistan on the cricket field have(to put it mildly) known their ups and downs over the years though ironically the relationship between the players in the present series has been good. In the current climate, however, where every terrorist action aimed at UK targets seems to have links to Pakistan, where most of those currently in custody for the latest conspiracy are of Pakistani descent, where it's clear that at least a proportion of the Pakistani- descended population in the UK are at best in denial about terrorism or at worst sympathetic with the terrorists and where there's a growing impatience with what are perceived as that community's endless complaints about alleged discrimination, a high profile bust up which appears to show that Pakistani sports teams are only prepared to obey the laws of the game when it suits them and scream racism and Islamophobia when anyone challenges them merely entrenches stereotypes further.
In this context there was an ominous straw in the wind at the weekend. Passengers booked on a charter flight from Malaga to the UK mutinied and refused to board the plane unless two passengers “of Middle Eastern appearance†were removed- which in the end happened. Politicians and lawyers and the police can say that racial profiling is not on the agenda until they’re blue in the face- they may find that the travelling public will start to enforce their own crude version of it.
Well, the culture went fine. The exhibition at the Royal Academy entitled "Modigliani and his models" was well worth the visit. The title is a bit misleading since over 90% of Modigliani's surviving paintings were of people so it doesn't actually exclude much of his output. Rather predictably all the advertising focuses on the series of female nudes he produced on a daily retainer from his dealer in the course of 1917 but this is just a smallish part of the show- if the part which seems to attract the most attention from the visitors. The bulk of the exhibition, however, deals with his paintings of his friends in the Paris art world, the portraits of un-named people encountered during his stay in the south of France in the winter of 1917/8 and those of his close female friends and mistresses (intriguingly he never seems to have painted any of his lovers in the nude while his nude models are anonymous girls about whom nothing is known- one wonders how many may have been the wives of soldiers deep in the mud of the Western Front making a bit extra cash to support themselves in the hard times which had fallen on Paris during the First World War).
Modigliani seems to have done his best to live down to every cliche of the Hollywood artistic biopic; handsome, sexually active, tubercular- and dedicated to drinking and drugging himself to death in grand style, a project he achieved by the age of 40. One of his late models- a very respectable Swedish girl whom he'd met in cafe and asked to model for him (with her clothes firmly on) recalled him drinking glass after glass of wine as he worked and then staggering off to the nearest cafe for the serious business of the evening. This hyper-bohemian aspect of the man has, I suspect, helped to explain some of the fascination which his art seems to have inspired ever since. This is a pity since his paintings are well worth seeing anyway. It's fascinating to spot the influences in his art- which aren't always the obvious ones. Modernist he may have been but he was deeply influenced by Italian Renaissance art and echoes of Botticelli pop up in the most unlikely places. It's also fascinating to see how he could somehow create more or less recognisable images of individuals while remaining true to his characteristic style with its elongated necks and mask-like, blank-eyed faces. And his nudes genuinely are very sexy indeed, which is a rare gift. Pity he never did any t-girl nudes!.
And then the cricket went haywire on Sunday. I don't suppose most of my friends will understand this strange game (even though the oldest more or less continually played international cricket match is USA v Canada which goes back to 1848) and (unlike the ending of the football World Cup) I doubt if the bizarre events in south London on Sunday would have made the news broadcasts in the USA or Canada- let alone Germany.
I won't even try to explain the finer points of the game but a bit of background is necessary. England were in the final game of a four match international series against Pakistan. It's been an interesting rather than a thrilling series- both sides were well short of full strength due to injuries. England had already won the series 2-0 before the final game so not a huge amount other than pride hung on the outcome. Pakistan had been well on top for most of this game- a lot of the England side seemed to have their minds elsewhere- but on the Sunday afternoon England were getting back into things a bit and there was the prospect of an interesting finale. Early in the afternoon session the on-field umpires (there are two on the field these days, plus one in the pavilion looking after the video replays which are used to make certain decisions and a fourth official whose role in the scheme of things- other than providing back up if one of the other three were to fall ill- has always been a bit obscure to me) got in a fuss about the state of the ball and ruled that Pakistan had been tampering with it. This is serious stuff. A cricket ball starts out with a prominent seam and an equal coat of varnish on both sides. In the course of play the seam tends to get bashed down and the ball tends to wear unevenly. The bowling side will (quite legitimately) try to keep one side shinier than the other to encourage it to swing in the air- though this effect tends to fade away as play progresses. After a certain point, however, there is an incentive for the bowling side to speed up the damage to the ball by deliberately scuffing or abrading one side in order to obtain what is known as "reverse swing" ("reverse") because it goes in the opposite direction from how it goes when the ball is new). Reverse swing expertly delivered is extremely hard to bat against and deliberately damaging the ball to speed up the point at which reverse swing comes into effect is thoroughly illegal under the laws of the game.
What happened then was a bit odd. The Pakistan side fussed a bit on the field but appeared to accept the call and play continued with a replacement ball. The players went off for bad light about an hour later and tea was taken during this break. The light improved and play was scheduled to resume. The umpires went out. The Pakistan team didn't. There was much toing and froing, much gesticulation all round. The umpires went out again, this time with the England batsmen. Still no signs of Pakistan. The umpires called "play" and then awarded England the game by default. Some time later Pakistan emerged from their dressing room ready to play- but the umpires had vanished and flatly refused to revoke their decision. It was claimed in one of the newspapers that an attempt was made to persuade the video umpire and the fourth official to take over the on-field duties but they refused- this hasn't been confirmed, though. The decision to award England the game stood and the scheduled last day's play today was cancelled amid much confusion. Test matches have had to be abandoned for all sorts of reasons in the past, ranging from monsoon rains through the pitch being unfit for play to rioting. None has ever been forfeited in the 120 odd years of international cricket.
Within the laws of the game the umpires were completely within their rights and the ex cricket umpire in me (I umpired club level cricket round London for many years) applauds their unwillingness to bend the rules out of political expediency. Needless to say, however, it's not that simple. For one thing, deliberate ball tampering is very difficult to prove. There doesn't seem to be any clear television evidence of any Pakistan player doing anything amiss during the period in question (the tampering must have taken place within a period of about 15 minutes). Athough today's London morning freesheet newspaper carried a front page photo purporting to show an unidentified Pakistan player picking the seam of the ball, (which is clearly against the laws of the game) this is a long way from proof positive of evil doing. On the other hand the Pakistan claim that the undeniable damage the ball had suffered was a matter of normal wear and tear rings pretty hollow since it hadn't been hit to the boundary in that period.
In any case it's an open secret that every side in the professional game will go to the very edge of legitimate "working on the ball" if they've got a bowler who can use reverse swing effectively. Pakistan are hyper-sensitive about ball tampering allegations because they've got previous. Many of the tiny number of players who've actually been caught ball tampering have been Pakistani, the earliest exponents of reverse swing in the early 1990s were Pakistani and there were plenty of observers who suggested then that reverse swing could not be achieved by legal means. Rightly or wrongly Pakistan feel that they've been being picked on over ball tampering for years. It doesn't help their case, however, when a member of the current tour party (though not engaged in the test) gives an interview in which he says that ball tampering should be legal (I imagine the interview was given before yesterday's events but the timing of publication was not exactly perfect).
Finally, and most to the point, the umpire at the centre of the row has previous of his own. Darrell Hair, the senior of the two on-field umpires and the one who was clearly running the show, is an Australian noted for a prickly and aloof relationship with the players and a pedantic approach to the laws. Moreover his entire umpiring career has been littered with acrimonious disputes involving Asian sides- especially Pakistan. Appointing him to officiate at the last two games of an England-Pakistan series was not the cleverest piece of scheduling. If there was one man on the international umpiring panel guaranteed to make a drama out of a crisis and go for the nuclear option if something untoward happened it was Darrell Hair- and Pakistan could be guaranteed to make barely veiled accusations of racism if he did.
The thing which puzzles me about the whole sorry story is why Pakistan waited for the tea interval to decide they'd been so mortally offended that they weren't prepared to continue with the game. If they'd lodged a formal protest to the match referee (another official up there in the stands who deals with conduct issues) and discussed the matter at the close of the day's play (by which point they might well have won the game anyway) I suspect most commentators would have sympathised with them. If their captain had led his team off the pitch the moment Hair made the call it might have looked like a bit of childish petulance but could at least have been explained as a matter of passions running high in the heat of the moment. Waiting until the break suggests that someone off the pitch- in the team management, for instance- had got at the players.
Of course it doesn't help that the side involved are Pakistan. Relations between England and Pakistan on the cricket field have(to put it mildly) known their ups and downs over the years though ironically the relationship between the players in the present series has been good. In the current climate, however, where every terrorist action aimed at UK targets seems to have links to Pakistan, where most of those currently in custody for the latest conspiracy are of Pakistani descent, where it's clear that at least a proportion of the Pakistani- descended population in the UK are at best in denial about terrorism or at worst sympathetic with the terrorists and where there's a growing impatience with what are perceived as that community's endless complaints about alleged discrimination, a high profile bust up which appears to show that Pakistani sports teams are only prepared to obey the laws of the game when it suits them and scream racism and Islamophobia when anyone challenges them merely entrenches stereotypes further.
In this context there was an ominous straw in the wind at the weekend. Passengers booked on a charter flight from Malaga to the UK mutinied and refused to board the plane unless two passengers “of Middle Eastern appearance†were removed- which in the end happened. Politicians and lawyers and the police can say that racial profiling is not on the agenda until they’re blue in the face- they may find that the travelling public will start to enforce their own crude version of it.
| Modernism, Reactionary and Otherwise | for everyone |
I was out at the weekend visiting the Victoria and Albert Museum's latest "movement" exhibition. Over the past few years the V&A has done a series of blockbuster shows on major movements in architecture and the decorative arts beginning with Art Nouveau, followed by Art Deco, Arts and Crafts and now Modernism. All of these have been interesting even if none has been totally convincing. The Art Deco one, for instance, went a long way to persuading me that this term (coined years after the event as a pejorative description of artistic developments in the 1920's and 30's) is in fact meaningless as it lumped together all manner of developments and inspirations, some of them mutually contradictory (while it is just about possible to reconcile an aesthetic which draws on machine-based modernity and a nostalgia for traditional art forms and motifs, it's never going to be an easy mix). By contrast, the Arts and Crafts show tried to argue that a movement which was essentially English (with North American ramifications) and which rapidly mutated into Art Nouveau in continental Europe was in fact a truly international (indeed global) movement with a life span of over seventy years. It's revealing that some of the same objects popped up in more than one exhibition; artistic movements tend to be much more ambiguous and complex than exhibition curators would ideally like.
The Modernism show was the same mix of fascinating and slightly irritating. There were some gorgeous objects on display- a wonderful Tatra motor car from the late 1930's whose streamlined form looked forward to the late 20th century, costumes and sets from Russian experimental theatre shows of the 1920s- as well as ones which were less inspiring but clearly important (it's interesting to see just where the incredibly uncomfortable chairs which were standard office issue when I started work in a Government department back in the late 1970's actually came from in design history terms). The overall content and approach was, however, a little frustrating.
Ironically part of the problem was the inverse of the criticism I made of the Art Deco exhibition. Where that was if anything too wide and sprawling in its definitions (and could comfortably have accommodated most of the items displayed in the Modernism one within its compass), this one was rather narrow in its approach. The road ran from Russian Constructivism and Suprematism via the Bauhaus and Le Corbusier to mass market modernism- in other words, very much the traditional canon of Modernism as created by the ex-Bauhaus types who ended up in American exile in the 1930's with themselves as the primary evangelists as well as the martyrs of the faith. The fact that this view has come under increasing challenge from art historians in recent years was barely touched on in the exhibition (though to be fair the catalogue is a bit more forthcoming). Dada was not mentioned at all (despite its obvious links with the Russian artistic developments covered in depth), Italian Futurism given the barest nod ( even though Sant'Elia's visionary plans for the city of the future which he never lived to build were clearly highly influential- amazingly the vastly high profile Marinetti, absurd as he frequently was, didn't rate a mention) and the Scandinavian contribution to 1920's and 30's art and design ruthlessly marginalised. Curiously there was no coverage of the US or anywhere else outside Europe at all.
The exhibition implied that the application of Modernist approaches to social housing was a uniquely German/Dutch affair when in fact just about every country in western and central Europe had experimental housing estates designed to improve the lot of the working classes and give them the benefits of the latest technology and some of the most interesting experiments were to be found in places like Lyon in France or in the then Czechoslovakia. Less surprisingly, the possibility that such model estates might end up inhabited by the politically well connected lower middle and upper working classes rather than the genuinely poor (which was the fate of the famous Vienna "Workers Flats"), that at least part of the rationale for simplifying the layout of the kitchen and providing labour saving devices there was to make it easier for women to take waged work outside the home while still being able to undertake their traditional family duties and that the estates in question might turn out to leak like sieves in wet weather were never addressed. Similarly, the fact that Le Corbusier's "machine built" houses often required lengthy hand finishing and that Bauhaus designed pots and pans often proved ill suited to the mechanical production essential if they were to be affordable by the masses was glossed over (this of course was an old paradox and one which gave William Morris sleepless nights in his time).
In essence the real issue (common to a greater or lesser extent to all four exhibitions but especially visible here) is a political one- an ingrained reluctance to admit that "good" art/architecture/design might be produced by repugnant political regimes (and not just in the margins of those regimes or underground but in direct response to the commissions and policies of those regimes). The Art Deco exhibition stopped covering Italy after 1922, Germany after 1933 and kept the Soviet Union at arms length throughout. This clearly was not possible for Modernism.
Italy, the most awkward case, was simply marginalised throughout. This is a familiar approach. Futurism has long been treated as the inconvenient loopy great uncle of artistic modernity- undeniably part of the family (alas) but a bit of an embarrassment. Marinetti's enthusiasm for war as national hygene- a view he stuck with even after seeing service in the First World War- could perhaps be glossed over but it's impossible to overlook the enthusiastic support which most Futurists gave to Mussolini before and after he came to power. In turn the Fascist regime dispensed commissions and support with a generous hand to artists of very varying styles and approaches provided they were loyal to it. There was no canonical Fascist style (even if there was something of a drift towards monumental neo-Classicism in the later 1930's) and some thoroughly avant-garde pieces of architecture were put up under the auspices of the state (the local Party Headquarters in Como- which did get a brief mention in the exhibition- being the one example which gets into standard histories but many Italian towns can muster similar examples). There was arguably more modernist architecture being put up in Italy in the 1930's than anywhere else in Europe. Italy, however, was stuck with a small part of a section labelled "National Experiences of Modernism" (by inference, secondary by-paths away from the mainstream).
So was the Stalin era Soviet Union (the Soviet Union of the New Economic Policy era in the 1920's was very fully covered even though it was politically somewhat less pluralist than Mussolini's Italy). This concealed as much as it showed. While it's certainly true that a lot of the artists who had been behind the developments of the 1920's found themselves seriously out of favour (and in some cases ended up in the Gulag) a broader and more watered down Modernism proved perfectly compatible with the requirements of Socialist Realism. This was especially true in architecture for the masses; it's not hard to see the basic gene code of Modernism even in the grim Soviet era blocks of flats which ring Tallinn.
Germany posed particularly awkward challenges given its centrality to the story presented in the exhibition. The basic gospel- derived from the Bauhaus-in-exile- is that modernist art and the Nazi regime were inherently incompatible and that the Bauhaus and its staff were the victims of this confrontation. This was always at best a half truth. Hitler, a failed artist of conservative neo-Classical tastes, clearly imposed an artistic norm which conformed to his own preferences (had Goebbels made policy in the fine arts things might have been different and rather more like Italy). The Bauhaus, venomously attacked in the Nazi press as a nest of leftists and decadent art, was ultimately shut down after the Nazi take-over. The story was however rather more complex. It was by no means inevitable that the Bauhaus would be shut down- negotiations with the aim of keeping it running under politically acceptable management and minus Jewish and overtly leftist staff members ran for some time and there were clearly takers for that outcome within the pre-1933 staff. Individual Bauhaus participants managed to find niches in Nazi Germany -after all, the basic aim of producing high quality consumer and decorative goods which ordinary people could afford on a semi craft- semi-mass market basis was by no means incompatible with Nazi ideology. Even high profile figures who ultimately ended up in exile were not always irreconcilable enemies of the regime. Mies van der Rohe was apparently genuinely baffled at why the Nazis would not give him significant commissions (he had designed a monument to Communist martyrs Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg but was never a Communist party member himself), happily took on what work was offered to him and left Germany very reluctantly- if he'd been offered a major state commission any time before 1941 it's reasonable to suspect he'd have returned at the drop of a hat.
On the other side of the equation, the regime had no trouble with modernism in its place- on the autobahns, for instance. The exhibition touched on the Volkswagen "Beetle"- an iconic piece of modernist design if ever there was one- but clearly had problems fitting it into the story. Nor was it any more comfortable with the vastly more widely distributed Volksempfanger (People's receiver), the thoroughly streamlined, sleek, modernist-looking radio receiver (only capable of picking up German state radio) produced under state auspices in the late 1930's. The concept of "reactionary modernism" coined by the cultural historian Jeffrey Herf for Germany in the 1920's and 30's is very useful in this context- however awkward it may be for the kind of implicitly heroic history of Modernism articulated in the V&A exhibition.
The Modernism show was the same mix of fascinating and slightly irritating. There were some gorgeous objects on display- a wonderful Tatra motor car from the late 1930's whose streamlined form looked forward to the late 20th century, costumes and sets from Russian experimental theatre shows of the 1920s- as well as ones which were less inspiring but clearly important (it's interesting to see just where the incredibly uncomfortable chairs which were standard office issue when I started work in a Government department back in the late 1970's actually came from in design history terms). The overall content and approach was, however, a little frustrating.
Ironically part of the problem was the inverse of the criticism I made of the Art Deco exhibition. Where that was if anything too wide and sprawling in its definitions (and could comfortably have accommodated most of the items displayed in the Modernism one within its compass), this one was rather narrow in its approach. The road ran from Russian Constructivism and Suprematism via the Bauhaus and Le Corbusier to mass market modernism- in other words, very much the traditional canon of Modernism as created by the ex-Bauhaus types who ended up in American exile in the 1930's with themselves as the primary evangelists as well as the martyrs of the faith. The fact that this view has come under increasing challenge from art historians in recent years was barely touched on in the exhibition (though to be fair the catalogue is a bit more forthcoming). Dada was not mentioned at all (despite its obvious links with the Russian artistic developments covered in depth), Italian Futurism given the barest nod ( even though Sant'Elia's visionary plans for the city of the future which he never lived to build were clearly highly influential- amazingly the vastly high profile Marinetti, absurd as he frequently was, didn't rate a mention) and the Scandinavian contribution to 1920's and 30's art and design ruthlessly marginalised. Curiously there was no coverage of the US or anywhere else outside Europe at all.
The exhibition implied that the application of Modernist approaches to social housing was a uniquely German/Dutch affair when in fact just about every country in western and central Europe had experimental housing estates designed to improve the lot of the working classes and give them the benefits of the latest technology and some of the most interesting experiments were to be found in places like Lyon in France or in the then Czechoslovakia. Less surprisingly, the possibility that such model estates might end up inhabited by the politically well connected lower middle and upper working classes rather than the genuinely poor (which was the fate of the famous Vienna "Workers Flats"), that at least part of the rationale for simplifying the layout of the kitchen and providing labour saving devices there was to make it easier for women to take waged work outside the home while still being able to undertake their traditional family duties and that the estates in question might turn out to leak like sieves in wet weather were never addressed. Similarly, the fact that Le Corbusier's "machine built" houses often required lengthy hand finishing and that Bauhaus designed pots and pans often proved ill suited to the mechanical production essential if they were to be affordable by the masses was glossed over (this of course was an old paradox and one which gave William Morris sleepless nights in his time).
In essence the real issue (common to a greater or lesser extent to all four exhibitions but especially visible here) is a political one- an ingrained reluctance to admit that "good" art/architecture/design might be produced by repugnant political regimes (and not just in the margins of those regimes or underground but in direct response to the commissions and policies of those regimes). The Art Deco exhibition stopped covering Italy after 1922, Germany after 1933 and kept the Soviet Union at arms length throughout. This clearly was not possible for Modernism.
Italy, the most awkward case, was simply marginalised throughout. This is a familiar approach. Futurism has long been treated as the inconvenient loopy great uncle of artistic modernity- undeniably part of the family (alas) but a bit of an embarrassment. Marinetti's enthusiasm for war as national hygene- a view he stuck with even after seeing service in the First World War- could perhaps be glossed over but it's impossible to overlook the enthusiastic support which most Futurists gave to Mussolini before and after he came to power. In turn the Fascist regime dispensed commissions and support with a generous hand to artists of very varying styles and approaches provided they were loyal to it. There was no canonical Fascist style (even if there was something of a drift towards monumental neo-Classicism in the later 1930's) and some thoroughly avant-garde pieces of architecture were put up under the auspices of the state (the local Party Headquarters in Como- which did get a brief mention in the exhibition- being the one example which gets into standard histories but many Italian towns can muster similar examples). There was arguably more modernist architecture being put up in Italy in the 1930's than anywhere else in Europe. Italy, however, was stuck with a small part of a section labelled "National Experiences of Modernism" (by inference, secondary by-paths away from the mainstream).
So was the Stalin era Soviet Union (the Soviet Union of the New Economic Policy era in the 1920's was very fully covered even though it was politically somewhat less pluralist than Mussolini's Italy). This concealed as much as it showed. While it's certainly true that a lot of the artists who had been behind the developments of the 1920's found themselves seriously out of favour (and in some cases ended up in the Gulag) a broader and more watered down Modernism proved perfectly compatible with the requirements of Socialist Realism. This was especially true in architecture for the masses; it's not hard to see the basic gene code of Modernism even in the grim Soviet era blocks of flats which ring Tallinn.
Germany posed particularly awkward challenges given its centrality to the story presented in the exhibition. The basic gospel- derived from the Bauhaus-in-exile- is that modernist art and the Nazi regime were inherently incompatible and that the Bauhaus and its staff were the victims of this confrontation. This was always at best a half truth. Hitler, a failed artist of conservative neo-Classical tastes, clearly imposed an artistic norm which conformed to his own preferences (had Goebbels made policy in the fine arts things might have been different and rather more like Italy). The Bauhaus, venomously attacked in the Nazi press as a nest of leftists and decadent art, was ultimately shut down after the Nazi take-over. The story was however rather more complex. It was by no means inevitable that the Bauhaus would be shut down- negotiations with the aim of keeping it running under politically acceptable management and minus Jewish and overtly leftist staff members ran for some time and there were clearly takers for that outcome within the pre-1933 staff. Individual Bauhaus participants managed to find niches in Nazi Germany -after all, the basic aim of producing high quality consumer and decorative goods which ordinary people could afford on a semi craft- semi-mass market basis was by no means incompatible with Nazi ideology. Even high profile figures who ultimately ended up in exile were not always irreconcilable enemies of the regime. Mies van der Rohe was apparently genuinely baffled at why the Nazis would not give him significant commissions (he had designed a monument to Communist martyrs Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg but was never a Communist party member himself), happily took on what work was offered to him and left Germany very reluctantly- if he'd been offered a major state commission any time before 1941 it's reasonable to suspect he'd have returned at the drop of a hat.
On the other side of the equation, the regime had no trouble with modernism in its place- on the autobahns, for instance. The exhibition touched on the Volkswagen "Beetle"- an iconic piece of modernist design if ever there was one- but clearly had problems fitting it into the story. Nor was it any more comfortable with the vastly more widely distributed Volksempfanger (People's receiver), the thoroughly streamlined, sleek, modernist-looking radio receiver (only capable of picking up German state radio) produced under state auspices in the late 1930's. The concept of "reactionary modernism" coined by the cultural historian Jeffrey Herf for Germany in the 1920's and 30's is very useful in this context- however awkward it may be for the kind of implicitly heroic history of Modernism articulated in the V&A exhibition.
| Baltic Visit | for everyone |
Sorry if I haven't been as good a correspondent as I should be but I've been on my travels. Work related, admittedly, but for once somewhere off the normal trudge to Brussels and somewhere I'd never been before- Tallinn in Estonia.
It's the first time I've ever been somewhere which used to be part of the Soviet Union. It isn't all that obvious. The rows and rows of crumbling 1950's era tower blocks on the edge of the city don't look very different at first sight from the estates put up in Budapest in the same period- or indeed from their equivalents in a lot of west European cities (and no passing foreigner would hang round long enough to give the second look which might bring the differences out). While there's a distinct Russian tinge to the townscape in the historic centre, this comes from buildings which date back to the days when Tallinn was part of the Czar's empire- a massive Russian Orthodox cathedral dedicated to Aleksandr Nevskii (the one who was the subject of the Eisenstein movie in the late 1930's- he was canonised by the Orthodox church, presumably for being a successful warrior against the German and Swedish Catholics because he wasn't any more conspicuously holy than any other Russian prince of the 13th century), an equally huge opera house and so on. This goes alongside late medieval walls, a clutch of rather fine Gothic churches from the 15th and early 16th centuries, a splendid 15th century Town Hall (recently lovingly restored)- and what is claimed to be Europe's oldest apothecary's shop still in continuous operation, the place where marzipan was invented. It's an interesting place- even away from the rather touristified old centre there are old wooden buildings painted pastel shades still clinging on between the building sites as the standard office blocks typical of a modern city spring up like mushrooms. I'm sure I'll be back for a proper visit.
Estonian is a Finno-Ugric language noted for its large number of vowels per word (even Estonians make a joke about that aspect of their language). It's related to Finnish- the two languages are just about mutually comprehensible though ironically the degree of bilingualism in Estonia has declined since Estonia regained its independence since the big driver for Estonians to learn Finnish under Soviet rule was the need to understand Finnish TV. Now that Estonia has its own media not under the thumb of Moscow this need has declined- though apparently Estonians of a certain age can be trusted to know all the jingles from Finnish commercials of the 1980's. None of this makes it easy for a speaker of an Indo-European language to guess what signs say- though it feels as if a lot of Estonians speak English.
We were taken out to the countryside into one of the national parks near Tallinn. Estonia isn't that small in land area (it's bigger than the Netherlands or Switzerland) but the population is just over a million so it's pretty empty. There are endless forests and lots of lakes. It's not that hard to see how Estonian nationalist partisans were able to fight on against the Soviets until the mid 1950's. Soviet rule contributed to emptying the countryside, though. The coast was a frontier zone with a barbed wire fence all the way along the shore line. This effectively killed the traditional fishing lifestyle on the coast and the surviving villages are now mostly made up of historic properties are used by Tallinners as weekend residences. There are more bears and wolves and lynxes in the forests than there have been for many years.
The countryside is also dotted with "manors"- what we in the UK would call stately homes built by the landowning elites in the 18th century. They were mostly German speakers whose main links were with Sweden (Estonia was part of the Swedish Baltic empire in the 17th and into the 18th centuries) but who served the Czar's regime as generals or administrators. The money to build their grand homes came from distilling and associated rural industries like supplying firewood (Catherine the Great gave Baltic landowners certain tax privileges related to distilling and St Petersburg is the nearest really big city). The manors mostly fell into Estonian state hands during the First Republic (1919-40), went through a Soviet period when they were used for Young Pioneers summer camps and are now incorporated into the national parks.
It was one of the nicer trips I've had from work- only slightly spoiled by the need to get from Tallinn to Brussels for a meeting there. I had to go via Helsinki- and my luggage didn't make the connection so I ended up hanging round Brussels for three hours waiting for the next flight, when it caught up with me.
Now I'm back to London being sweltered. The office air conditioning is pretty useless and certainly can't cope with the current temperatures. Life's back to normal, in other words.........
It's the first time I've ever been somewhere which used to be part of the Soviet Union. It isn't all that obvious. The rows and rows of crumbling 1950's era tower blocks on the edge of the city don't look very different at first sight from the estates put up in Budapest in the same period- or indeed from their equivalents in a lot of west European cities (and no passing foreigner would hang round long enough to give the second look which might bring the differences out). While there's a distinct Russian tinge to the townscape in the historic centre, this comes from buildings which date back to the days when Tallinn was part of the Czar's empire- a massive Russian Orthodox cathedral dedicated to Aleksandr Nevskii (the one who was the subject of the Eisenstein movie in the late 1930's- he was canonised by the Orthodox church, presumably for being a successful warrior against the German and Swedish Catholics because he wasn't any more conspicuously holy than any other Russian prince of the 13th century), an equally huge opera house and so on. This goes alongside late medieval walls, a clutch of rather fine Gothic churches from the 15th and early 16th centuries, a splendid 15th century Town Hall (recently lovingly restored)- and what is claimed to be Europe's oldest apothecary's shop still in continuous operation, the place where marzipan was invented. It's an interesting place- even away from the rather touristified old centre there are old wooden buildings painted pastel shades still clinging on between the building sites as the standard office blocks typical of a modern city spring up like mushrooms. I'm sure I'll be back for a proper visit.
Estonian is a Finno-Ugric language noted for its large number of vowels per word (even Estonians make a joke about that aspect of their language). It's related to Finnish- the two languages are just about mutually comprehensible though ironically the degree of bilingualism in Estonia has declined since Estonia regained its independence since the big driver for Estonians to learn Finnish under Soviet rule was the need to understand Finnish TV. Now that Estonia has its own media not under the thumb of Moscow this need has declined- though apparently Estonians of a certain age can be trusted to know all the jingles from Finnish commercials of the 1980's. None of this makes it easy for a speaker of an Indo-European language to guess what signs say- though it feels as if a lot of Estonians speak English.
We were taken out to the countryside into one of the national parks near Tallinn. Estonia isn't that small in land area (it's bigger than the Netherlands or Switzerland) but the population is just over a million so it's pretty empty. There are endless forests and lots of lakes. It's not that hard to see how Estonian nationalist partisans were able to fight on against the Soviets until the mid 1950's. Soviet rule contributed to emptying the countryside, though. The coast was a frontier zone with a barbed wire fence all the way along the shore line. This effectively killed the traditional fishing lifestyle on the coast and the surviving villages are now mostly made up of historic properties are used by Tallinners as weekend residences. There are more bears and wolves and lynxes in the forests than there have been for many years.
The countryside is also dotted with "manors"- what we in the UK would call stately homes built by the landowning elites in the 18th century. They were mostly German speakers whose main links were with Sweden (Estonia was part of the Swedish Baltic empire in the 17th and into the 18th centuries) but who served the Czar's regime as generals or administrators. The money to build their grand homes came from distilling and associated rural industries like supplying firewood (Catherine the Great gave Baltic landowners certain tax privileges related to distilling and St Petersburg is the nearest really big city). The manors mostly fell into Estonian state hands during the First Republic (1919-40), went through a Soviet period when they were used for Young Pioneers summer camps and are now incorporated into the national parks.
It was one of the nicer trips I've had from work- only slightly spoiled by the need to get from Tallinn to Brussels for a meeting there. I had to go via Helsinki- and my luggage didn't make the connection so I ended up hanging round Brussels for three hours waiting for the next flight, when it caught up with me.
Now I'm back to London being sweltered. The office air conditioning is pretty useless and certainly can't cope with the current temperatures. Life's back to normal, in other words.........
| The Makropoulos Case | for everyone |
I've been at the opera again. "The Makropoulos Case" by the Czech composer Janacek, to be precise. It's a rather dark and intense piece, based on a play by Karel Capek (the man who coined the word "robot" in another of his stories) whose central character is a 330-odd year old opera singer. Of course she doesn't look her age- she was the daughter of the court astrologer of the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II whose father came up with a longevity potion for the Emperor (a man who was indeed fascinated with occultism and alchemy) and made her take it to prove it worked. Ever since that date in the 1590's, Elena Makropoulos has got through a series of identities, always with the initials "EM", and has been a singer of some kind or another. In the opera she has come back to her roots in Prague looking for the formula of the potion, which has been bundled up with papers which came into the hands of one of her many lovers. These are now part of a court case which has been running for something like a hundred years (the opera is set in the early 1920s); Elena, in her current incarnation as the diva Emilia Marty, involves herself on both sides of the case to get hold of the paper- then when she finally obtains it and tells her story, also says what a burden endless life has become, destroys the formula and dies. Other things happen too, a young man falls madly in love with her and kills himself, one of her lovers from an earlier existence pops up, a totally unhinged old man (and the only person in the whole opera whom she treats with the slightest consideration), she seduces the key figures on both sides of the lawsuit even though one of them is clearly her own grandson. All very operatic, one might say.
Evidently Capek's play was billed as a comedy. Maybe something got lost on translation into English but there don't seem to be many laughs in the libretto Janacek himself crafted from it. It's a pretty bleak affair- Elena (to stick with her real name) is credited with an ability to seduce any man she looks at but is presented as a thoroughly cold and unfeeling woman until the very end when she explains just how awful endless life and youth has become for her. There are interpretations which see it as a reflection of Janacek's own ambivalences towards Kamilla Stosslova, a woman some 40 years his junior with whom he had a very complex relationship in the later years of his life. The whole atmosphere of the piece-libretto and music- is pretty claustrophobic and inward looking, reflecting a world obsessed with what was said and done and meant by people dead for decades (I'm sure a Prague audience in the 1920's would have noted a legal case started in the heyday of the Hapsburg empire was coming to judgement in the courts of the Czecho-Slovak Republic- to give it its official name at that date- without a single reference to all the political and social upheavals which had affected the region in the intervening years).
There are also a few fundamental holes in the storyline when you start thinking about it. Why did old Makropoulos give the potion to his daughter? Admittedly she proved that it wasn't poisonous by surviving the initial application after a week in a coma but, as the libretto itself makes clear, Rudolf himself never risked using it because he couldn't be sure it had really worked. After all, Elena was much younger than him and he never lived to see her failing to age as she should have done. Nor is it clear why getting rid of the formula should be instantly fatal to Elena (rather than just ensuring her biological clock began ticking at its normal pace again). There may perhaps be a hint that the formula is beginning to wear off and the ageing process has begun again- though this may just possibly be a consequence of the role having from time to time become a signature piece for certain performers who fall into the category politely described by press blurbs as "ageless", meaning (less politely) that they're a good deal older than Elena is supposed to appear to be in the opera ( I hasten to add that Cheryl Baker, who sang the role for ENO, doesn't fit into this category). There are also all kinds of logistical and practical issues over how somebody who's supposed to be a sublime and unique singer could manage to flit on and off the stages on Europe for the best part of 300 years without someone somewhere beginning to ask questions (her agents, for a start.....). She's lucky to have operated in a world before identity cards and passports with photographs- which is one very good reason why the opera can't easily be shifted out of its original time and place.
None of this slightly pedantic worrying about practicalities stops it being a remarkably powerful piece, especially when conducted by Sir Charles Mackerras, who's perhaps the greatest Janacek specialist around. Elena's despair at the prospect of, if not endless life, at least extreme longevity in what many of us would regard as its optimum form (fixed in the prime of life and health) can't help making one think about the pros and cons of that situation; it's easy to say that it would be nice to be in one's 30's for 300 years but would it really be that good if everybody else was using up their time at the usual pace? It certainly wouldn't be a recipe for stable relationships. Would Elena have found things a bit easier to bear if she'd been a shy, plain looking homebody whose supreme talents lay, say, in the kitchen or embroidery rather than a stunner with a wonderful voice and a taste for men?
I suppose there's an additional layer of complexity for those of us who adore special ladies. Elena has been spending all her immensely long life playing games with her identity. Even if no I-girl I know has had to conceal the fact that she was born some time in the 1570's, all have at some time to consider the way in which they set about handling tensions about beautiful appearance and sometimes awkward realities, the problems of running more than one name and often having different identities in different places and so on. Perhaps Elena is really a t-girl.......
After all this artistic musing, I should add that I fear culture may take a bit of a back seat for the next few weeks in favour of the World Cup. It is a curious paradox that I suspect the vast majority of my 360 friends won't be in the slightest bit interested in what's going on in Germany at the moment even though the USA have a football team of perfectly respectable quality there- even if I don't think it's quite as good as the side they had four years ago.......
Evidently Capek's play was billed as a comedy. Maybe something got lost on translation into English but there don't seem to be many laughs in the libretto Janacek himself crafted from it. It's a pretty bleak affair- Elena (to stick with her real name) is credited with an ability to seduce any man she looks at but is presented as a thoroughly cold and unfeeling woman until the very end when she explains just how awful endless life and youth has become for her. There are interpretations which see it as a reflection of Janacek's own ambivalences towards Kamilla Stosslova, a woman some 40 years his junior with whom he had a very complex relationship in the later years of his life. The whole atmosphere of the piece-libretto and music- is pretty claustrophobic and inward looking, reflecting a world obsessed with what was said and done and meant by people dead for decades (I'm sure a Prague audience in the 1920's would have noted a legal case started in the heyday of the Hapsburg empire was coming to judgement in the courts of the Czecho-Slovak Republic- to give it its official name at that date- without a single reference to all the political and social upheavals which had affected the region in the intervening years).
There are also a few fundamental holes in the storyline when you start thinking about it. Why did old Makropoulos give the potion to his daughter? Admittedly she proved that it wasn't poisonous by surviving the initial application after a week in a coma but, as the libretto itself makes clear, Rudolf himself never risked using it because he couldn't be sure it had really worked. After all, Elena was much younger than him and he never lived to see her failing to age as she should have done. Nor is it clear why getting rid of the formula should be instantly fatal to Elena (rather than just ensuring her biological clock began ticking at its normal pace again). There may perhaps be a hint that the formula is beginning to wear off and the ageing process has begun again- though this may just possibly be a consequence of the role having from time to time become a signature piece for certain performers who fall into the category politely described by press blurbs as "ageless", meaning (less politely) that they're a good deal older than Elena is supposed to appear to be in the opera ( I hasten to add that Cheryl Baker, who sang the role for ENO, doesn't fit into this category). There are also all kinds of logistical and practical issues over how somebody who's supposed to be a sublime and unique singer could manage to flit on and off the stages on Europe for the best part of 300 years without someone somewhere beginning to ask questions (her agents, for a start.....). She's lucky to have operated in a world before identity cards and passports with photographs- which is one very good reason why the opera can't easily be shifted out of its original time and place.
None of this slightly pedantic worrying about practicalities stops it being a remarkably powerful piece, especially when conducted by Sir Charles Mackerras, who's perhaps the greatest Janacek specialist around. Elena's despair at the prospect of, if not endless life, at least extreme longevity in what many of us would regard as its optimum form (fixed in the prime of life and health) can't help making one think about the pros and cons of that situation; it's easy to say that it would be nice to be in one's 30's for 300 years but would it really be that good if everybody else was using up their time at the usual pace? It certainly wouldn't be a recipe for stable relationships. Would Elena have found things a bit easier to bear if she'd been a shy, plain looking homebody whose supreme talents lay, say, in the kitchen or embroidery rather than a stunner with a wonderful voice and a taste for men?
I suppose there's an additional layer of complexity for those of us who adore special ladies. Elena has been spending all her immensely long life playing games with her identity. Even if no I-girl I know has had to conceal the fact that she was born some time in the 1570's, all have at some time to consider the way in which they set about handling tensions about beautiful appearance and sometimes awkward realities, the problems of running more than one name and often having different identities in different places and so on. Perhaps Elena is really a t-girl.......
After all this artistic musing, I should add that I fear culture may take a bit of a back seat for the next few weeks in favour of the World Cup. It is a curious paradox that I suspect the vast majority of my 360 friends won't be in the slightest bit interested in what's going on in Germany at the moment even though the USA have a football team of perfectly respectable quality there- even if I don't think it's quite as good as the side they had four years ago.......
| Good times in Siena | for everyone |
Well, I'm back on line at last....¦.
Thanks for all the sweet messages from my friends in response to my notification that I'd be away for a bit having a holiday in one of my favourite places- Siena in Italy. It was much appreciated- and it would have been lovely to have you all with me though I'm not sure the old place could have coped with so many beautiful ladies descending all at once. It would also have been lovely to take each one of you individually but sadly not all that practical- and how could I choose just one or two of such a special and wonderful group of people?
Siena was as wonderful as ever. It remains a magical place despite the tour parties (Siena tends to be the sort of place people come for a day trip rather than somewhere they stay). On one level the place swallows them up; the Piazza del Campo at the heart of the city was specifically designed to accommodate assemblies of the whole population in medieval times. On another it's quite easy to lose them; get any distance off a few streets and the tourists vanish. I spent ages just strolling in the medieval streets appreciating the changing falls of light on the buildings and what these changes brought out. There's always something different to notice about buildings which have in many cases been repeatedly rebuilt, starting from the massive tower houses favoured by the medieval urban elites which were chopped back and adapted in to more conventional palaces as time passed. (For the benefit of those friends who would have liked to come with me- be warned that (a) I am an inveterate walker round old cities and (b) in the specific case of Siena it's not a place which is very well adapted to high heels or other sexy footwear as it's largely cobbled underfoot and much of the city is built on quite steeply sloping ground). There are always new things to visit as well; in this case a crypt under the current cathedral which was only opened up a couple of years ago and turned out to be the core of the previous structure, complete with 13th century frescoes. These are rather wonderful, still showing the influence of Byzantine art but also looking forward to the later developments of the Lorenzetti brothers and Simone Martini.
This was the first time I'd been in Tuscany quite as early in spring and so the first time I had a real sense of just how green it can be- not the slightly faded grey-green of the later summer when the only deep green comes from the pine trees and not the rather lush green of an English spring but something in between which is very beautiful. It's a very lived in countryside, one which has been subject to a great deal of human attention over the millennia at least until on gets deep into the hills (and even there the forests are the kind of place to which monks and hermits retired rather than total trackless wildernesses). I suppose the same is true of a lot of countryside- apparently even the Australian outback turns out to be the product of human interference at very ancient times- but one has a real living sense of human engagement with nature in the surroundings of Siena and the results are as impressive as the buildings of the city or the artworks in its churches and palaces.
One of my earlier blogs referred to the enigmatic dancers in the "Effects of Good Government" fresco painted by the Lorenzettis in the room where the medieval governing council of Siena met and the suggestion that they are not in fact the females they've traditionally been taken to be but some kind of medieval drag troupe. I spent a long time looking at these frescoes and I@m still not sure. They all appear to have very short hair (though they might just have it up in some way under the wreaths and head-dresses they're wearing). Their clothing is certainly odd- highly ornamented tabards with quite deep side slits rather than a "normal" dress.
What nobody seems to have commented on, though, is that they're also seriously out of scale when one compares them with the other figures in the fresco. If you take the figures apparently nearest to them as a reference they' be eight or nine feet tall. I know perspective painting was in its infancy in 1340's Siena but everything else seems to be more or less "right". I'm amazed no professional art historians appear to have made much of this oddity. The figures are also slightly awkwardly fitted into the space they occupy, almost as if they were an afterthought which represents a change in the planned pictorial programme (this should be possible to prove or disprove but I don't think anybody has tried and I've a feeling there wouldn't be much appetite for doing so after the monumental row which is still dragging on in the art history world over whether the famous painting in the neighbouring room of a Sienese military commander attributed to Martini and traditionally dated to the 1330's is genuine or a much later pastiche). I've no idea why this might have happened, though the "out-of-scale" aspect of the dancers might suggest that they're purely allegorical rather than real dancers who just happen to represent notions of concord and harmony. I'm sure it's relevant that there are nine of them given that the Council which governed Siena at the time the fresco was painted and held its meetings in that room was nine strong- though even I am not quite bold enough to suggest that what we have is the actual council members of the time dressed up as personifications of the various virtues and doing a little song and dance routine to embody the harmony and concord which prevailed in their government of the city! It's a nice thought, though....
Thanks for all the sweet messages from my friends in response to my notification that I'd be away for a bit having a holiday in one of my favourite places- Siena in Italy. It was much appreciated- and it would have been lovely to have you all with me though I'm not sure the old place could have coped with so many beautiful ladies descending all at once. It would also have been lovely to take each one of you individually but sadly not all that practical- and how could I choose just one or two of such a special and wonderful group of people?
Siena was as wonderful as ever. It remains a magical place despite the tour parties (Siena tends to be the sort of place people come for a day trip rather than somewhere they stay). On one level the place swallows them up; the Piazza del Campo at the heart of the city was specifically designed to accommodate assemblies of the whole population in medieval times. On another it's quite easy to lose them; get any distance off a few streets and the tourists vanish. I spent ages just strolling in the medieval streets appreciating the changing falls of light on the buildings and what these changes brought out. There's always something different to notice about buildings which have in many cases been repeatedly rebuilt, starting from the massive tower houses favoured by the medieval urban elites which were chopped back and adapted in to more conventional palaces as time passed. (For the benefit of those friends who would have liked to come with me- be warned that (a) I am an inveterate walker round old cities and (b) in the specific case of Siena it's not a place which is very well adapted to high heels or other sexy footwear as it's largely cobbled underfoot and much of the city is built on quite steeply sloping ground). There are always new things to visit as well; in this case a crypt under the current cathedral which was only opened up a couple of years ago and turned out to be the core of the previous structure, complete with 13th century frescoes. These are rather wonderful, still showing the influence of Byzantine art but also looking forward to the later developments of the Lorenzetti brothers and Simone Martini.
This was the first time I'd been in Tuscany quite as early in spring and so the first time I had a real sense of just how green it can be- not the slightly faded grey-green of the later summer when the only deep green comes from the pine trees and not the rather lush green of an English spring but something in between which is very beautiful. It's a very lived in countryside, one which has been subject to a great deal of human attention over the millennia at least until on gets deep into the hills (and even there the forests are the kind of place to which monks and hermits retired rather than total trackless wildernesses). I suppose the same is true of a lot of countryside- apparently even the Australian outback turns out to be the product of human interference at very ancient times- but one has a real living sense of human engagement with nature in the surroundings of Siena and the results are as impressive as the buildings of the city or the artworks in its churches and palaces.
One of my earlier blogs referred to the enigmatic dancers in the "Effects of Good Government" fresco painted by the Lorenzettis in the room where the medieval governing council of Siena met and the suggestion that they are not in fact the females they've traditionally been taken to be but some kind of medieval drag troupe. I spent a long time looking at these frescoes and I@m still not sure. They all appear to have very short hair (though they might just have it up in some way under the wreaths and head-dresses they're wearing). Their clothing is certainly odd- highly ornamented tabards with quite deep side slits rather than a "normal" dress.
What nobody seems to have commented on, though, is that they're also seriously out of scale when one compares them with the other figures in the fresco. If you take the figures apparently nearest to them as a reference they' be eight or nine feet tall. I know perspective painting was in its infancy in 1340's Siena but everything else seems to be more or less "right". I'm amazed no professional art historians appear to have made much of this oddity. The figures are also slightly awkwardly fitted into the space they occupy, almost as if they were an afterthought which represents a change in the planned pictorial programme (this should be possible to prove or disprove but I don't think anybody has tried and I've a feeling there wouldn't be much appetite for doing so after the monumental row which is still dragging on in the art history world over whether the famous painting in the neighbouring room of a Sienese military commander attributed to Martini and traditionally dated to the 1330's is genuine or a much later pastiche). I've no idea why this might have happened, though the "out-of-scale" aspect of the dancers might suggest that they're purely allegorical rather than real dancers who just happen to represent notions of concord and harmony. I'm sure it's relevant that there are nine of them given that the Council which governed Siena at the time the fresco was painted and held its meetings in that room was nine strong- though even I am not quite bold enough to suggest that what we have is the actual council members of the time dressed up as personifications of the various virtues and doing a little song and dance routine to embody the harmony and concord which prevailed in their government of the city! It's a nice thought, though....
| "Sir John in Love" | for everyone |
It's actually a rather misleading title for an opera as there isn't any evidence I can detect that Sir John Falstaff is in love with anybody, except himself and, probably, the money which the women his lecherous eye has lit on might be persuaded to given him.
I've been at the opera again. "Sir John in Love" is a genuine rarity. It hasn't received a professional staging since 1958 and I can't honestly understand why this should be the case other than the apparently inveterate indifference of the UK arts establishment towards any opera by a British composer who isn't Benjamin Britten. Vaughan Williams no doubt got pigeonholed as a symphonist with a reprehensibly bad habit of writing identifiable tunes and (worse yet) an interest in English traditional music. "Sir John" certainly has identifiable tunes, some of them traditional folk material (though in fact only a small percentage of the opera's music is directly composed of folk material- Vaughan Williams could write in a folk-ish idiom quite brilliantly when he wanted to and quite a bit of the music which sounds as if it ought to be traditional arranged by him is actually his own composition).
The opera is Vaughan Williams' adaptation of Shakespeare's "Merry Wives of Windsor", though when creating his own libretto he borrowed liberally both from other Shakespeare plays and other Elizabethan dramatists to get singable texts out of a play with far less verse than most of Shakespeare's writings. Obviously there's a comparison with Verdi's last opera "FalstaffÃ", which happens to be one of my favourites. "Sir John" sticks much more closely to the full text of the play, sub-plots and all. Part of this no doubt is a language issue- there are running jokes in the Shakespeare at the expense of the way the Welsh parson Hugh Evans and the French Doctor Caius mangle English which Vaughan Williams can pick up on but wouldn't have meant much when the play had to be translated into Italian for Verdi's librettist Boito. Verdi's Falstaff is a rather more introspective character and you can just about imagine him as a young man who went to the wars and perhaps saw one campaign too many- hence both his great speech in favour of cowardice (which isn't imported into either opera) and his lecture on honour (which is in Verdi but not Vaughan Williams). Vaughan Williams' fat knight clearly spent his whole life dodging the column and skulking in the baggage train- if he ever went to war at all. Both versions however share the strange mix of outrageous self- assurance (which persuades them that attractive middle aged married women are just dying to commit adultery with them) and flashes of self- knowledge and even self-mockery which save the character from becoming deeply unpleasant.
The English National Opera production chooses to set the piece somewhere around 1900. This works reasonably well- Falstaff as late Victorian bounder, setting off on his mission of seduction complete with stridently loud waistcoat and straw boater, looks wonderful- though Hugh Evans' Welsh parson as High Church vicar in shovel hat and Roman collar is a little less convincing. The production does actually raise laughs, which is not an invariable outcome even for an explicitly comic tale when put on the operatic stage. There was one puzzle, though. ENO have decided to go in for "surtitles" ( a device for putting displaying the words above the stage, usually designed to explain the sung words in the language of the audience- my strangest experience of surtitles came when watching a production of Mozart's "Nozze di Figaro" in Budapest with the surtitles in Hungarian). This seems bizarre for a company whose main justification for existence is that it performs the operatic repertoire in English- in translation normally, given ENO's above-mentioned reluctance to put on English operas on stage- and even more bizarre for an opera written in English to start with. The London Coliseum has generally pretty adequate acoustics and is just out of a major renovation programme. Do the people who run ENO have no faith in the diction of their singers- or the willingness of their audience to listen to the words? If they're going down the surtitles route it becomes a little hard to see why they need to continue translation of libretti into English, which, however well done, messes up the integrity of an opera by separating the words from the music.
I've been at the opera again. "Sir John in Love" is a genuine rarity. It hasn't received a professional staging since 1958 and I can't honestly understand why this should be the case other than the apparently inveterate indifference of the UK arts establishment towards any opera by a British composer who isn't Benjamin Britten. Vaughan Williams no doubt got pigeonholed as a symphonist with a reprehensibly bad habit of writing identifiable tunes and (worse yet) an interest in English traditional music. "Sir John" certainly has identifiable tunes, some of them traditional folk material (though in fact only a small percentage of the opera's music is directly composed of folk material- Vaughan Williams could write in a folk-ish idiom quite brilliantly when he wanted to and quite a bit of the music which sounds as if it ought to be traditional arranged by him is actually his own composition).
The opera is Vaughan Williams' adaptation of Shakespeare's "Merry Wives of Windsor", though when creating his own libretto he borrowed liberally both from other Shakespeare plays and other Elizabethan dramatists to get singable texts out of a play with far less verse than most of Shakespeare's writings. Obviously there's a comparison with Verdi's last opera "FalstaffÃ", which happens to be one of my favourites. "Sir John" sticks much more closely to the full text of the play, sub-plots and all. Part of this no doubt is a language issue- there are running jokes in the Shakespeare at the expense of the way the Welsh parson Hugh Evans and the French Doctor Caius mangle English which Vaughan Williams can pick up on but wouldn't have meant much when the play had to be translated into Italian for Verdi's librettist Boito. Verdi's Falstaff is a rather more introspective character and you can just about imagine him as a young man who went to the wars and perhaps saw one campaign too many- hence both his great speech in favour of cowardice (which isn't imported into either opera) and his lecture on honour (which is in Verdi but not Vaughan Williams). Vaughan Williams' fat knight clearly spent his whole life dodging the column and skulking in the baggage train- if he ever went to war at all. Both versions however share the strange mix of outrageous self- assurance (which persuades them that attractive middle aged married women are just dying to commit adultery with them) and flashes of self- knowledge and even self-mockery which save the character from becoming deeply unpleasant.
The English National Opera production chooses to set the piece somewhere around 1900. This works reasonably well- Falstaff as late Victorian bounder, setting off on his mission of seduction complete with stridently loud waistcoat and straw boater, looks wonderful- though Hugh Evans' Welsh parson as High Church vicar in shovel hat and Roman collar is a little less convincing. The production does actually raise laughs, which is not an invariable outcome even for an explicitly comic tale when put on the operatic stage. There was one puzzle, though. ENO have decided to go in for "surtitles" ( a device for putting displaying the words above the stage, usually designed to explain the sung words in the language of the audience- my strangest experience of surtitles came when watching a production of Mozart's "Nozze di Figaro" in Budapest with the surtitles in Hungarian). This seems bizarre for a company whose main justification for existence is that it performs the operatic repertoire in English- in translation normally, given ENO's above-mentioned reluctance to put on English operas on stage- and even more bizarre for an opera written in English to start with. The London Coliseum has generally pretty adequate acoustics and is just out of a major renovation programme. Do the people who run ENO have no faith in the diction of their singers- or the willingness of their audience to listen to the words? If they're going down the surtitles route it becomes a little hard to see why they need to continue translation of libretti into English, which, however well done, messes up the integrity of an opera by separating the words from the music.
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