Legacy 4- John Martin

Back at last- with a bang...

Dec 1, '11 10:19 AM for everyone

Well, this is rather an epic “sorry for the length of time since the last post”; it feels a bit like a blogging version of the raising of Lazarus.

It would take far too long to explain what happened in detail.   Put simply, I had a kind of purging crisis of the kind many girls know all too well, did a lot of deleting of my various on-line e-identities (including the Flickr account which sort of ran in tandem with this blog, so I’m afraid the cross references to pictures there don’t exist any more) and then came back to Flickr with a new identity.   I wasn’t sure about trying to resurrect this blog after so many years- in fact I wasn’t even sure it still existed.  Then a very lovely Flickr friend told me I really ought to.   Ruth, this is for you……

What have I been doing in the interim?   In some ways not much.  I’m still working for the British Government in more or less the same job (after two changes of ministry and several office moves- and having ducked the bullet of redundancy a couple of times).   The aunt whose health was worrying me back in 2008 sadly died a couple of years ago and now I’m worrying about my mother again.   I still love the same things I always did- art, music, travel, history.   I can’t hope to catch up on all the exhibitions I’ve been to in the past four years or even the places I’ve been (a certain Central European focus here- Prague, Vienna, Budapest but also Trieste and the Italian north east out in the largely tourist-free territories of Friuli).

I’ll just start up again as if I’d never been away- though with something of a bang since it’s hard not to think of the art of John Martin without very loud noises in the background.  The current Tate Britain show of his work is entitled “Apocalypse”, which gives the general idea.

Martin looks a very Victorian figure these days, though in fact he’d come to national celebrity well before Queen Victoria ascended the throne.   He was born in 1789 in Newcastle upon Tyne and learned his painting in a London ceramic painter’s workshop rather than by conventional “fine art” channels.   He came to fame with a number of very large canvases on biblical themes, particularly one on “Belshazzar’s Feast”, which was widely toured round the country with accompanying improving lectures (it’s worth noting that the art of ancient Assyrian and Babylon was just beginning to impinge on the European public in the 1820’s thanks to the work of men like Sir Claudius Rich- not that Martin’s imaginary Babylon was particularly archaeologically accurate).   By the 1830’s he had taught himself mezzotint and engraving and embarked on a massive subscription series of biblical illustrations.   In the short run this brought him a good income but he’d bitten off rather more than he could chew and subscribers fell away.  He also became involved in grandiose schemes to provide London with a new sewage and suburban railway systems and spent a lot of money trying in vain to get Parliamentary approval for his plans.   His fortunes were finally restored by the three massive paintings on the Last Days which are the core of the show- “The Great Day of His Wrath”, “The Fields of Heaven” and “The Last Judgment”.  These were toured the length and breadth of Britain (and beyond- they went to the US and even Australia) and publicity material issued after Martin’s death when they were still on the road claims that they had been seen by over eight million people by that date.   The Tate displays them with a kind of son-et-lumiere accompaniment every half hour or so, presumably based on the “script” that went with the paintings when they were on display.   It’s an interesting idea but I’m not sure it entirely works- it’s a bit too slick and self-consciously melodramatic.  The show ends with some of his smaller and less bombastic works- though even some of them have a distinctly apocalyptic theme (“The Last Man on Earth”, “After the Deluge”) and a brief summation of his influence on contemporary artists.

Martin’s posthumous reputation had some fairly dramatic highs and lows.  He had always divided opinion; popular with the masses (and some at least of the social elite), viewed sniffily by most of the cultural and artistic establishment.   His work began to go out of fashion a decade or so after his death- one reason the family kept the Apocalypse trilogy show on the road for quite as long as they did appears to have been that they couldn’t sell the paintings for an acceptable price.  By the early 20^th century he was remembered, if at all, as the epitome of Victorian bad taste and his works consigned to the vaults of art galleries (one of the works in the Tate show was thought to have been destroyed by a flood in the gallery’s own cellars until the current show was being planned and it turned out not to be so ruined as to be past restoration).  There were occasional exceptions- D W Griffith’s Babylonian set in “Intolerance” was based on Martin’s “Belshazzar’s Feast” so his work exercised a degree of indirect influence on Hollywood for years before it was formally “rediscovered”- but basically he was forgotten.   He came back into fashion with the rediscovery of Victorian art more generally in the 1970’s and proved an instant hit, particularly with science fiction illustrators, comic book artists and makers of disaster films.  From there he worked his way back into favour as a “respectable” source of visual influences and post modernist quotations for contemporary artists, especially when they wanted to explore apocalyptic themes.

One reason why he came back into some kind of fashion was perhaps that it was possible to construct an interpretation which made Martin into a plucky outsider underdog; a kind of British precursor of artists like Douanier Rousseau.   From there it became fashionable to see him as a covert social critic- Belshazzar’s feast as veiled critique of the Prince Regent- with his fondness for apocalyptic themes and his plans for sanitary engineering read in socially revolutionary terms, albeit a social revolution with a hefty religious filter.   This interpretation still has a fair bit of life in it- one of the books being sold at the gallery shop linked to the show was based on the premise- but (as the exhibition catalogue points out at some length) there is very little evidence for it.   To some extent there’s an element of “guilt by association” at work.   Martin’s brothers certainly were stormy petrels; one was a cranky inventor who claimed that both George Stephenson and Sir Humphrey Davy had stolen his ideas for a miner’s safety lamp and waged pamphlet war against the theory of gravity while the other was a preacher who threatened to shoot the Bishop of Oxford and tried to burn down York Minster.   He eventually died in a lunatic asylum and some of Martin’s financial problems in the 1830’s were caused by expenses run up assisting this brother.

Martin, however, did nothing of this radical nature.  If he was sniping at the Prince Regent or anybody else in power the satire passed unperceived even by his sternest critics.  His sewerage and transport schemes were clearly drawn up with profit every bit as much in mind as wider social benefits.  He was not above a bit of sharp practice, marketing engravings based on a first sketch of “Belshazzar’s Feast” even after he had sold the painting itself to a showman/lecturer- though he went to court to protect his own intellectual property rights when he thought they’d been infringed.  If anything he was a slightly obsessive social climber- one exhibit in the show is a cabinet he designed to show off the honours he had received from individuals and institutions in Britain and beyond (citations from foreign royalty very welcome)- whose biggest regrets seem to have been than he missed out on Royal Academy membership and (maybe) a knighthood.   Even his fondness for apocalyptic themes is more mainstream than suggested; research has been suggesting for some time now that apocalyptic messages in some form or another retained a considerable audience across the social spectrum in Victorian Britain for a lot longer than the traditional narrative of growing secularism would have suggested- there was for instance a considerable flurry of millennialist publishing during the Crimean War, which broke out around the time of Martin’s death.  The thought of massive paintings depicting the end of the world being regarded as suitable entertainment in the music halls may seem strange to modern taste but the incongruity doesn’t seem to have been felt in his time.

Leaving the social history aside, what about the art?   I’m not sure having a show solely of Martin’s art actually does it a lot of favours.    It shows up some of his weaknesses.  He wasn’t much good at painting people, who (even in the paintings which don’t have a catastrophe or a grand event in biblical or classical history as their subject) usually end up as tiny figures in the lower register.   His colours tend to the garish- possibly affected by his background in ceramic painting, possibly also a side-effect of the circumstances in which his paintings were likely to be displayed (they may well work a lot better in flickering gaslight).   His landscapes, even the ones which depict real places, have a kind of grandiose and unreal vagueness.   And of course the regular depiction of doom and disaster becomes a little repetitive.   In fact his engraving and mezzotint work is often more impressive as some of the bombast gets filtered out by the requirements and scale of the medium.

On the other hand, it’s hard not to be impressed by the sheer energy of Martin’s art at its most kinetic.   Mountains erupt fire, the heavens darken, hapless humanity scurries for cover, ideal cities tremble on the edge of destruction or are tossed in the air and tumble back upside down.  Immense, half-seen, armies do battle (there are strange echoes of Altdorfer’s “Battle of Alexander at Issus” in Martin’s depiction of Joshua stopping the sun to allow the Israelites a total victory, though I can’t imagine he can ever have seen the German work).  The Diabolic Hordes sit in the lurid surroundings of a massive neo-Classical Pandemonium as Satan delivers his rallying cry from Milton.    Everything is on a massive scale and there’s an air of total conviction which defies the viewer not to suspend disbelief.  

This is true in spades of the great Apocalyptic trilogy.   This works a bit like a three movement piece of music, with ethereal harps and pastoral tones framed by thunderous percussion and the brass of the Last Trumpet.   Read chronologically it’s a valiant attempt to impose a coherent visual order on the somewhat confusing events of the Book of Revelation.   “The Great Day of His Wrath” collapses the various plagues and catastrophes of the early chapters into one overwhelming cataclysm, “The Fields of Heaven” depict the ideal millennial order which emerges from this while “The Last Judgement” covers the final resurrection of the dead and the definitive sorting out of who goes to eternal bliss and who heads to eternal torment (this broadly follows the Revelation script, though the fact that there are in essence two periods of torment separated by a thousand years of bliss can be very confusing).  

The intriguing thing about Martin’s view of the End Times is how (relatively) secular it is.   There’s no sign of the Beast of the Apocalypse or the Anti-Christ; the Whore of Babylon is equally absent unless she’s to be identified with a figure obviously meant to represent the evils of Popery about to be cast into the Abyss on Judgement Day.  Given Martin’s pyrotechnics in other works, Hell is surprisingly short on hellfire. Unlike most depictions of the Last Judgement which rather revel in the torments devised for sinners and put the Devil and his staff very visibly on display, the damned slither off to the right of the picture as a vast abyss opens between them and the blessed, into which some of them are already falling.   Barely visible in the background a railway train plunges into the abyss - which leaves one with the irreverent thoughts that (a) someone has managed to keep the railway network running even through the thousand years of millennial bliss but (b) everybody who uses that form of transport is inevitably damned (not a comforting thought for a commuter).  God may be in His heaven with the Elders of the Apocalypse and there’s a fair amount of angelic traffic overhead but the saved seem more interested in getting to know each other than in processing to the heavenly Jerusalem visible in the background. Interestingly Martin makes at least a nod to multi-culturalism here; the ranks of the blessed include at least one member with a stereotypical Chinese hat and several dark skinned figures, as well as a rather eclectic range of celebrities, including Benjamin Franklin, King Alfred, Raphael and a number of Reformation worthies.   The damned, by contrast, are rather more symbolic, though a phalanx of High Church Anglicans (identifiable by their vestments) are clearly destined for the worst.   Along with anti-Catholicism (pretty mainstream in the Britain of the 1840’s) this is the nearest to a clear cut politico-religious position expressed in the work.  

For all the spectacle and terror of Martin’s vision there’s something curiously comforting about his Apocalypse.   The awful things which happen are reassuringly physical and comprehensible, the stuff of successful disaster movies.   I wonder how Martin would have set about depicting the kind of apocalypse which is currently in the news columns, an economic event potentially triggered by arcane movements on almost invisible financial markets?