By ‘eck it’s grim oop North

I have to confess that I’m not the world’s greatest fan of the works of L S Lowry, which I tend to find tedious and repetitive when viewed in bulk- all these grim northern townscapes with joyless crowds scurrying to and fro under a leaden sky (surely by the law of averages the sun must have shone once or twice in Salford during his long life….).   Perhaps it doesn’t help that he’s become a kind of visual cliché, endlessly recycled on the covers of books with even the most tenuous relationship to industrial England in the first half of last century.   So I hadn’t actually planned to go to the Tate Britain show of his work- except that the exhibition I did intend to go to (one on fashion and art in Tudor and Stuart England in the Buckingham Palace gallery) turned out to be booked solid on the day I turned up and I didn’t want to waste the journey into London.

I’m not sure I emerged a greater enthusiast for his paintings but I certainly came to a greater appreciation of the complexity of the man and his work.   For one thing, it came as a faint shock to discover that his “matchstick men” really were a conscious aesthetic choice.   As some of the graphic works in the show demonstrated, he was a competent if uninspired draftsman of the human body (though he did tend turn faces into something faintly cartoonish- if he’d grown up in France or Belgium one could imagine him  becoming a successful strip canton designer).   It was also fascinating to see just how far he seems to have contributed to his own myth. 

It’s very easy to slip into thinking of him as a self-taught eccentric, a spare time painter with a day job- a kind of English Douanier Rousseau with a much less lurid imagination, consciously marginal to a British art scene which patronised him when it bothered noticing his existence at all.   In fact he had a thorough formal artistic education, mostly from Adolphe Valette, a thoroughly competent second division Impressionist who made a career teaching art in Manchester in the early years of the twentieth century.  Some of Valette’s works were in the show and it was interesting to see how he responded to the same surroundings- in his depiction Manchester became a city of twilights and autumnal mists with edge of slightly sinister romanticism, dark satanic mills looming like castles in the gloom- see below

 Lowry clearly had his ups and downs with Valette and certainly didn’t paint like him (then again he didn't paint much the Pre-Raphaelites, whom he admired).  He  never formally graduated from art school but he was most assuredly not self taught or amateurish.  Nor was he particularly marginal.   In the late 1920’s-early 1930’s he was contributing regularly to exhibitions of contemporary art in Paris, gathering favourable critical views and sales.   Indeed around 1930 he was probably better known in France than many “bigger” names in British art.   He was never short of commissions and became enough part of the British art establishment to be elected to the Royal Academy.   He would have had his knighthood too (offered in a splendid piece of trans-Pennine ecumenism by that professional Yorkshireman Harold Wilson, probably unaware of Lowry’s staunchly Tory politics) except that he refused it, as he refused all honours on principle.    He also turned down job offers from the then-“Manchester Guardian”, which wanted him to serve as the paper’s art critic.    His work even figured on postage stamps during his lifetime.  While it’s true to say that not everybody was happy with this, the hostility appears to have been prompted by a feeling that putting Lowry’s grim industrial scenes on display world wide did nothing for the image of the UK rather than contempt for the artist’s professional competence- I wonder how the critic in question would have responded if he’d known that the Lowry which the Government commissioned in the 1960’s ended up in the British Embassy in Moscow during the Brezhnev era….   This isn’t quite what the myth of the northern painter of the Common Man spurned by a snobbish metropolitan art establishment would suggest.

This isn’t to say that Lowry didn’t potentially have issues with that establishment.   His politics were a bit problematic for a mostly left-leaning artistic world.  His employment as a rent collector was potentially even more of an issue and perhaps helps to explain why Lowry was notoriously evasive and unreliable over details of his biography.    By all accounts he was good at his job and popular with his “clients”; rent collectors were in practice rarely the hated and hateful figures of romantic middle class leftist demonology.  They may not have been part of the community they worked in but they needed to know its ins and outs very well indeed if they were going to do their job effectively.   One gets a sense of that slightly distanced understanding in Lowry’s art. 

 He never gives a sense of belonging to the world that he paints but he knows its codes and concerns and pleasures; the fever van taking a diphtheria sufferer on what was usually a one way trip to hospital (with the consequence that the family’s goods and possessions might well be impounded or even destroyed), punch ups in the streets, demonstrations, funfairs and football matches (Lowry was a football enthusiast but he doesn’t seem to be part of the crowd watched as its members head to the stadium).   

He was an outsider, of course, though the economic distance between him and the better off part of his clientele probably wasn’t enormous (socially matters were rather different in the England of the 1920’s and 30’s with its minutely calibrated social hierarchies).   His family were rather precariously lower middle class.  His mother, to whom he was very close, was musically talented and narrowly missed out on a career as a concert pianist.  His father was an insurance company clerk.   The family’s financial circumstances deteriorated during Lowry’s childhood and they had to move into a barely respectable district only just a cut above the slums where he collected his rents.   One can speculate on how that insecurity may have affected him.  It may well have persuaded him to go on with the rent collecting (a nice secure job) rather than risking becoming a full time artist or even a newspaper art critic for a paper whose overall political line he probably didn’t greatly relish.   It didn’t give him the embittered hatred of the working classes which often afflicted people with his background; he was a high Tory, not a Fascist, and prepared to see the good in people whose politics he didn’t share.  He was, for instance, supportive of the National Health Service when that was largely decried on the right, but never bought into the slightly millennial rhetoric which surrounded much of the Attlee Government’s social policy, suggesting that the people he dealt with weren’t really any happier as a result. 

The sense of personal remoteness and detachment in his work goes even wider, though.   This emerged in the works he painted during and immediately after the Second World War.  Although he was appointed an official War Artist and did his bit as an Air Raid Warden and Fire Watcher one doesn’t have the sense of personal solidarity with the wider national struggle which emerges from, say, Stanley Spencer’s paintings and drawings of workers in the Clydeside shipyards.   Uniforms are surprisingly thin on the ground in his depiction of VE day celebrations, and the joy seems a bit restrained, even in the pub.    

One of his rare works focused on people (rather than people set in and somewhat dwarfed by the industrial environment) was a cruelly Otto Dix-like depiction of disabled men (presumably war victims, judging from the date), which occasioned some negative comment when it was painted.   There are complexities here which weren’t really explored by the show.

Nor did really get into the oddly static and timeless nature of Lowry’s work.   As seems to be the wont of the current Tate Britain management, he was fitted into a discourse of modernism.   This is a bit odd; his artistic training might have looked radical in certain British contexts but Valette was hardly cutting edge by French standards.  I suppose it was his subject matter which sees him cast as a painter of modern urban life.   In a way this is fair enough- but Lancashire in the 1920’s and 1930’s wasn’t exactly the new world which it appeared in the days when Engels knew the city (and went foxhunting in the countryside, though strangely he never appeared in hunting pink in any of the depictions of him in Red Square during the Communist era….).   Even in Lowry’s youth it was already a bit backward looking, not quite the industrial museum it had become by the 1950’s and 1960’s but beginning to struggle in a world powered by electricity rather than steam where other parts of the world were increasingly able to produce textiles at competitive prices.   A genuine painter of modernity in, say, 1935 would have been depicting the new light industries somewhere like Slough or the nascent suburbia inhabited by Richmal Crompton’s William Brown.  To the extent that Lowry ever painted a simple vision of the world that he saw around him (and I don’t for one moment think he did), it was a melancholy depiction of a region which didn’t just have serious social problems in its own time but was also increasingly failing to come to terms with a changing world.

It is noticeable just how far the series of large scale townscapes like the one at the top which he painted in the 1950’s elide out the changes which would already have been visible in the world around him.   Motor cars and power lines are visible but wedged awkwardly in among the rows of terraced houses, scrubbly open spaces, polluted waterways and factory chimneys of the by then traditional northern cityscape.   Admittedly these landscapes are rarely meant to depict anywhere specific (and there are a few sly jokes buried away in some of the paintings which underline their generic nature) but they contain remarkably little visible recognition of the changes afoot when they were being painted.   Slum clearance had begun even before 1939 but became a major preoccupation of post war governments, both at national and local level.   New theories of urban development were given considerable play, not always with happy results.  Lowry’s native Salford apparently had one of the highest levels of demolition and rebuilding of any English city.  None of this is visible in Lowry’s work, which remains resolutely fixed in the 1930’s at the latest (it is, incidentally, intriguing that several of his later large scale works involve depictions of mining villages in South Wales, which almost certainly saw a lot less modernisation than the urban north of England in this period- see below).   Lowry admitted as much in interviews and I suspect it accounts for a large part of his popularity.   One hears a lot about rural nostalgia as a factor shaping appreciation of certain British artists (rarely seen as a positive) but Lowry seems to have become increasingly an artist of urban nostalgia, appreciated (perhaps slightly guiltily) by the upwardly socially mobile children and grandchildren of the matchstick men and woman in his paintings for whom the urban past represents a kind of authenticity.  I suspect the old Tory would be rather amused.

Lost Cities, Enigmatic Lives

Back writing at last.  I seem to have a ridiculous amount of travel lined up between now and Christmas, some of it through choice but a lot work related.   At least it’s a bit more varied than the usual shuttle to Brussels, with Vilnius and Milan (or at least Milan airport…) on the agenda.

Before I went off on the holiday to Italy which gave rise to the photos on my Flickr account, I went to see the British Museum’s exhibition on Pompeii and Herculaneum.  This was wonderful; sadly it’s over now.   I first encountered the buried cities of Vesuvius many, many years ago as part of a family holiday and I’ve never forgotten the impact Pompeii made on me- a place where people actually lived once and where their presence seemed very real.   The British Museum exhibition recaptured that sense of intimacy with the past rather brilliantly.

At times one has a sense that after years of increasingly sophisticated archaeological study we actually know rather less about the two towns than we did, say, a hundred years ago.   Take the date they were wiped out.  For centuries it was an unchallengeable certainty that this was 24 August 79 AD because that was the date apparently given in the earliest surviving manuscript of the letters of Pliny the Younger, an eye witness whose uncle died while trying to stage a rescue operation.   Admittedly other dates popped up in other manuscripts, but they were assumed to be errors.  In the past few years, however, a number of factors (the relatively heavy clothes people were wearing, heating braziers deployed in rooms, the fruit and vegetable remains analysed) have led to a reassessment.   While the traditional August date hasn’t quite been abandoned- nothing has come to light which makes it absolutely impossible- the tendency now is to slide the date back later in the year, towards October or even a bit later. 

Or consider the question of what sort of state the towns were in when the volcano blew.   For the past half century or so it has been received wisdom that Pompeii was in deep trouble.  There had been a major earthquake in 62 (or possibly 63) and, the argument ran, the place never really recovered- especially when one took account of the upheavals of the wars which followed the overthrow of the Emperor Nero and the fact that members of the Neronian establishment ha links with the region (his notorious second wife Poppea came from a local family).   The clear evidence of industrial or artisanal activity on the ground floors of even some of the grandest houses was taken as evidence of downward social mobility, a town deserted by its elites and facing deep social problems.   This view was particularly associated with Amadeo Maiuri, who was superintendant of both sites for some forty years.  Given that his tenure ran from the early 1920’s to the 1960’s, one would like to know more about him.  It’s very tempting to suggest that, whatever his technical abilities as an archaeologist, he must have been a consummate time server to survive the upheavals of Italian history in that period.   He must have been able to give a convincing enough show of loyalty to the Fascist regime or he’d never have got the job- classical archaeology was an affair of state in a regime which presented itself as the heir to the empire of the Caesars.  How far his political views- and his personal experience of an Italy wracked with war and social upheavals which often did a very bad job of coping with natural disasters- shaped his interpretations can only be guessed at.  

The current view, based mostly on looking at the same evidence but with a few more high-tech tricks to help in its interpretation, is that he was totally wrong.   Pompeii on the eve of the eruption may still have been a building site but it wasn’t a ghost town or a squatter camp.   Public buildings has been largely repaired (with major kudos being awarded by the town council to the local citizens who chipped in to pay for the work) and houses were being redecorated- in one case the painters were actually in mid-job when they had to flee, giving valuable information on how Roman house painters organised a major project.    Most properties appear to have been occupied.   There was nothing at all strange or aberrant about having business premises inserted into the houses of the rich- they were probably a nice little earner and a good way of multiplying the patronage which mattered so much to the Roman elites.   Indeed in some cases the rich house owner might be the proprietor of the business- like Terentius Neo the baker who can be seen with his wife here.

Obviously there are no end of enigmas which may never be resolved.   To take one example, Pompeii is covered with graffiti.  Much relates to the annual electoral cycle (needless to say there’s much debate over how far the elections were genuinely hotly contested affairs or basically charades fixed by the local elites- and the presence of electoral propaganda on the walls isn’t a knock out blow in favour of the former view; there were lots of election posters in the Soviet Union….).  Other scrawlings are in the lonely hearts category- or make insulting suggestions about the price of the local barmaid’s virtue.  It’s a wonderful source. The successive overpaintings with different names give a chronology of who was running the town and provide linkages to people who can be identified in other ways (like Terentius Neo, whose activity in local politics can be detected from graffiti).   They suggest that literacy levels were pretty high- even that a certain superficial familiarity with literary classics went well down the social scale (tellingly the quotes from Virgil tend to be the same ones, the Roman equivalent of “To be or not to be”…).   By contrast Herculaneum has next to no graffiti.   As far as is known, the political structures of the two towns were identical- Herculaneum would have had annual elections too.   Is this confirmation that (as some other evidence hints) Herculaneum, a much smaller town (maybe 5,000 inhabitants as against 15,000 in Pompeii) was a rather more select sort of place where they collected the rubbish better and threw graffiti scribblers to the lions?   A result of more subtle social differences- Herculaneum also seems to have had a very high percentage of ex-slaves among its population?   It remains a puzzle.

The exhibition was organised loosely round the layout of one of the grander houses in Pompeii, with artefacts related to the activities which would have taken place in a given space grouped there (food preparation in the kitchen, for instance, or sleeping/intimate family life/sex in the bedroom).   This worked pretty well- for once, despite the numbers going to the show it didn’t end up hopelessly crowded in places.   It also served to bring the reality of daily life very close to see pieces of furniture (mostly from Herculaneum, where the physics of the pyroclastic flow which buried the town were just right to preserve wooden items in a slightly charred but intact state) which didn’t look so very far removed from what one can buy at Ikea or jewellery which I’m sure my lovely friends would be very happy to wear.   They might find the cosmetics a bit more alarming, though- I could just about imagine moisturisers based on crushed beans popping up in Lush or Bodyshop but I don’t think lead based foundation creams would find much of a market.  

The approach also brought certain aspects of Roman life into sharper focus.   I was aware that the fish sauce called garum (a kind of remote cousin to Worcester Sauce or Vietnamese Namh Plah) was important in Roman cuisine but hadn’t realised just how central it was to daily life- it ranked just below bread and wine as a staple item.  Fortunes could be made from making and trading it; one of the grandest properties in the region belonged to a man who had made his pile in the smelly business of garum manufacture.  There was even a market for kosher garum, a jar of which was on display.   It was intriguing to encounter a little ceramic jar in which dormice were kept while they were fattened up for the pot- after years of debate it is now accepted that Romans did indeed eat dormice as literary sources suggest.   Perhaps the most striking exhibit in the food section, though, was an intact, if blackened, loaf identical to ones shown in frescoes (round, with markings suggesting it would normally be broken up into eight slices).   

Not dissimilar loaves can still be seen on sale in modern bakeries- though hopefully these won’t have the grit content to be found in Roman loaves (due to millstone grit getting into the flour) which in the long run ruined Roman teeth.  Overall, though, evidence from one of the sewers in Herculaneum suggests that the population enjoyed a pretty healthy and varied diet with lots of fruit, nuts and fish products (the latter clearly shared with the cats…). 

On the other hand kitchens (where these existed- the less well off would at best have had a charcoal brazier to heat things up and there appears to have been a busy street food sector to supply that market) had a nasty habit of being in very close proximity to the privy (where that existed).  Contrary to certain stereotypes, Romans were not especially strong on personal hygiene.   Running water from the aqueduct, when it was piped into private properties rather than feeding the public fountains, was far more likely to be used for elaborate garden watering installations than to supply domestic washing facilities.  Chamber pots were the norm; privies existed but were pretty ghastly.  Only a few of the hyper-rich had full private bathing facilities and the much famed grand public baths were a good deal less hygienic than was implied when I was at school- water in the bathing pools was rarely changed and often filthy.   I suspect that Pompeii and Herculaneum would have smelled pretty rank to modern nostrils- especially as it’s not certain that the streets were cleaned very often either.  Pompeii may have had a one way system but the chances are that the street paving disappeared under horse and mule droppings for much of the year…..

Obviously there were elements of the exhibition one could quibble with.  It was inevitably weighted towards the life styles of the better off- the sort of folk who gave dinner parties, had loads of clients calling to pay respects every morning, lived in houses with lavish fresco or mosaic decorations and possessed gardens or at least wonderfully painted bowers depicting nature scenes

The only classic Roman multi-occupancy tenement building (familiar from other Roman cities like Ostia and the sort of place where the urban lower classes tended to live) which has been dug thus far is in Herculaneum.    There are however bits of Pompeii which appear to have been occupied by the less well off- and predictably they generate fewer interesting finds, though paintings in the show which appear to come from the décor of a tavern cast a sardonic eye on the propensity for the lower class Roman male to drink too much, gamble and get into fights.

One of the beauties of the exhibition and something which gave it a real emotional punch was a very clear sense of human contact with identifiable individuals across the centuries.  This came from artefacts like the portraits of Mr and Mrs Neo or the wonderful “warts and all” bust of Lucius Caecilius Iucundus, auctioneer and money lender (whose business records have also survived to give an added dimension).   

Perhaps strangely I found these more compelling and “human” than the examples of the famous casts of the dead from Pompeii included in the show, whose perfect capture of the sheer agony in which the individuals died left a slightly uncomfortable impression of being a spectator of another person’s ghastly end.    This strong “human interest” aspect does however carry its own dangers.  There is, for instance, a very strong temptation to see the inhabitants of Pompeii and Herculaneum as “just like us”.  On some levels this is clearly true, and at more than just the level of some cliché about “common humanity”.   They lived in a complex and sophisticated urban society, surrounded by artefacts which (as noted earlier) look remarkably like things one might find in one’s own home.  Aspects of their life look very familiar to 21^st century eyes- a notice from Herculaneum setting out precisely where one person’s property began and another’s ended in a shared dwelling suggested some very modern disputes..   It is all too easy to overlook just how very different aspects of these people’s society was from what a modern “western” audience would regard as the basic norms of civilised life- and how that must have affected the way they interacted with their surroundings.

I don’t suppose Roman attitudes to sexuality seem as strange now as they did a hundred years ago, though I suspect a modern visitor projected on to the streets of Pompeii a week or two before Vesuvius blew would have come to raise an eyebrow at the sheer omnipresence of depictions of male sexual organs on every imaginable surface (supposedly this had religious/ritual origins, though I wonder if that could be true in every case…..).   Some aspects of sexuality, however, can still bring one up short.  One of the more intriguing items in the exhibition was a statue of the god Pan engaged in sexual intercourse with a nanny goat.   Obviously Pan has the lower parts of a he-goat and as far as one could judge both parties were enjoying the experience- Pan was stroking his partner’s chin in an affectionate way.   When the statue was found in the 18^th century, it was immediately put under lock and key, only accessible to bona fide classical scholars and artists.   In the exhibition it appeared to arouse a kind of uneasy amusement amongst the visitors- and I’m not going to include a photo either here or on Flickr in case I get into trouble with the morals police……

Other aspects of Roman society might be more alienating.   The sheer amount of religious rital which was an absolutely routine part of daily life might seem a bit excessive- though the (intriguingly sexually ambiguous) folk below seem to be enjoying their Dionysiac rituals.

The exhibition skated rather lightly over the gladiatorial “barracks” on the edge of Pompeii even though it is clear from the graffiti that the shows staged there were a subject of considerable popular interest- indeed the only time Pompeii attracted contemporary notice before its destruction came in the 50’s when violent crowd confrontations with people from a neighbouring town at the amphitheatre left many dead and the authorities imposed a ten year ban on gladiatorial games in the town (the riot was commemorated in a wall painting, which was part of the show).   In other words, this was a society where many people paid good money to watch other human beings try to kill each other for sport.

The really big issue, though- so big that it becomes almost invisible at times- to my mind is slavery.  This was a world in which it was a simple unquestioned reality of life that one could buy and sell other human beings and ,as their owner, treat them pretty much as one chose (there were some legal constraints on extreme ill usage but they were pretty limited and largely ineffectual).  Slaves were literally everywhere in a Roman household of any size (slave ownership went well down the social scale)- dossed down on the floor of workshops and kitchens, serving dinner, working in the gardens, helping the lady of the house to dress- even in the bedroom when master and mistress were having sex, if the wall paintings are to be believed. 

It wouldn’t be fair to the exhibition or to the associated lavishly illustrated book (not exactly a catalogue, more of an interpretative study based on the artefacts in the show) to imply that slavery was ignored- it wasn’t.   One sensed however that the references to sexual abuse and other unpleasant aspects of slave societies were just a little bit pro forma.  There was rather more emphasis on the factors mitigating slave status- the absence of any clear cut racial element to Roman slavery (almost anybody could become a slave- even if most slaves in Pompeii or Herculaneum would probably have come from the fringes of the Empire), the inclusiveness of the Roman household, which included everybody living under the same roof, the right to build up private savings which could be used to buy freedom etc.  Above all there was a great deal of stress on the central role of ex-slaves- freedmen and women- in Roman society.  According to the book, they may have represented about a third of the population.   On this reading, Roman society was marked by considerable social mobility.  Other than a certain sniffishness about vulgar parvenus in elite-authored literature (think of Petronius’ Trimalchio) there was no entrenched social prejudice against ex-slaves and few if any legal restraints on what they could do in business terms.   Some became very rich, many became (in anachronistic terms) solidly middle class.   It was relatively easy to become a full Roman citizen- some of the papyrus work on specific cases survives in Herculaneum, whose citizen body seems to have contained a very high percentage of freedmen.   While freedmen could not stand for election to the town council, their sons could (and did).  There was also considerable stress on the strong, often affective, links between ex-masters and their former slaves, which could ramify over several generations.   Freedmen would for instance as a matter of course adopt their former master’s family name (meaning that over time it can become increasingly hard to separate their descendents from each other- and it was suggested that a Roman family would rather see its name live on amongst its ex-slaves than die out for lack of heirs).

I’m sure this is all very true and a necessary corrective to a view of slavery which universalises the norms of plantation slavery in the 18^th century West Indies or 19^th Century Deep South.   I couldn’t help feeling it was a little cosy at times.  Did no former slave ever resent having to adopt a whole new name for the rest of their life?  The social expectations on freedmen (and their wives and families) were burdensome, with lots of forelock-tugging to the ex-master and his heirs to go on top of a requirement to give them a slice of your profits.   How many of those who turned up to pay their respects on a virtually daily basis did so with glad faces but rebellious hearts?   We can never know, obviously.   These people are at once so very close to us and infinitely far away both in time and mental processes- and perhaps that was the ultimate message which I took from a wonderfully rich and informative exhibition.

Normal Service will be resumed-honest

Just in case anybody is wondering why there haven't been any posts lately- I haven't dropped out again, I've just bene on holiday (Lucca and Genoa in Italy- gorgeous) and since my return I've been very busy with ridiculous amounts of foreign travel (I'll be in Lithuania much of next week....). I'll try to find time to publish something in a couple of weeks!

Mexico beyond the Murals

It’s funny how one’s schooldays sometimes come back.    More years ago than I care to count, back when I was still a schoolboy in Scotland, we had Graham Greene’s “The Power and the Glory” as a set book in English.  It was a rather daring choice- Greens would still have been very much a living author and his rather obtrusive if complex Catholicism wouldn’t have endeared him to everybody in late 1960’s Scotland (I went to a “normal” state school, not a denominationally defined Catholic one).  I actually enjoyed it- unusually for something inflicted on one at school, especially as I don’t always like Greene’s work.  Even back then I tended to look at the world though history-tinted lenses and was prompted to do a bit of reading about Mexico in the first half of the 20^th Century.  There wasn’t much, and I was left with an ongoing curiosity about the background to Greene’s story of persecution, moral weakness and redemption in the steamy tropical lowlands of Tabasco State.

These memories of long ago schooldays were prompted by the current Royal Academy exhibition on art in Revolutionary Mexico.  In all honesty this is a faintly unsatisfactory affair, rather crammed into the “secondary” exhibition space of the Sackler Galleries while the Summer Exhibition fills the main space.  As every review I’ve seen points out, the biggest problem is that the most important Mexican artistic movement of this period- Muralism- is not represented.  This isn’t exactly the RA’s fault- how exactly do you set about displaying paintings which, like medieval frescoes, are an integral part of the buildings on which they’re painted?- but it is a problem.   Given her feminist icon status, I’m surprised that more hasn’t been made of the virtual absence of the individual Mexican artist who probably has the highest name recognition these days, Frida Kahlo.  She’s represented by one tiny self portrait about the size of an Elizabethan miniature- painted as a keepsake for Leon Trotsky after the end of their brief affair but left behind when the Trotskys moved out of the home Kahlo shared with her husband Diego Rivera.  It’s an exquisite little piece and its history symbolises several of the sub-themes of the exhibition but it would have been nice if there had been a bit more of her work included.

The Muralist issue is just one facet of a more general problem with the exhibition.   Inside one fairly small show there are at least three separate themes all intertwined.  One concerns the trajectory of Mexican art and artists in the period 1910-40- from the conventional starting date of the Mexican Revolution(s) to the quite possibly fraudulent presidential election in 1940 which saw General Camacho of the ruling Mexican Revolutionary Party (PRM) installed in office amid violent scenes recorded by Robert Capa’s photographs, a point equally conventionally taken to mark the end of the genuinely radical era.   A second covers the responses of the large number of foreign artists who visited Mexico in the 1920’s and 30’s to what they found there.  As a kind of cross-cutting theme, the development of photography of Mexican subjects by locals and foreigners alike also gets a large slice of the limited space- a mix of reportage pictures (many from the decade of violence in the 1910’s) and more self-consciously artistic efforts.   Capa’s images of the 1940 election perhaps tick both the reportage of violence and artistic boxes.

Of the three shows within the show, the second gets by far the most satisfactory coverage- to such an extent that I wonder if it might have been a better idea to focus entirely on art made by foreigners in or in response to Mexico.  This is also true of the catalogue.  This isn’t actually a catalogue in the normal sense of that term; authored by Adrian Locke, it’s more of a book length study of the exhibition’s themes, with a lot of illustrations which aren’t part of the hang and coverage of artists and art forms which don’t fit into an art gallery- novelists, poetry, cinema etc.   By contract to the rather cool critical reception for the exhibition, this has mostly been given favourable reviewer comment.  It’s certainly well worth a read but I found it frustratingly vague and opaque on several issues, all of them to do with the wider Mexican scene in which the artists operated   Like the show, it’s a lot happier dealing with the foreign visitors.

And foreign visitors were not in short supply after Obregon came out on top in the violent chaos of the 1910’s and managed to impose some degree of stability.   They came for a whole range of reasons, often overlapping.  Greene was in Mexico because he was paid to be there- he was on a reporting assignment.   Evelyn Waugh- every bit as Catholic as Green but with very different political views- was also paid to go to Mexico in the late 1930’s.  In his case he was lavishly (if surreptitiously) funded to produce a hatchet job on the Mexican government by people in the UK who had lost out when President Cardenas expropriated their oil interests.   Malcolm Lowry drifted in and stayed because the booze was cheap- tequila tipped him over the edge into chronic alcoholism until the authorities tired of his disorderly antics and kicked him out of the country.   Europeans facing visa issues in the US entered Mexico as a place to stay while their status was fixed- D H Lawrence and Robert Capa both fell into this category.  Americans came to get divorced or to pursue alternative lifestyles (there was a tenacious and entirely false perception in the US and Europe that Mexico was a vastly more open and tolerant society when it came to issues of sexuality than it actually was).   The French playwright and theatre director Antonin Arnaud dabbled in mind bending drugs in an early adumbration of 1960’s drug culture.

Many came because Mexico was perceived to be a cheap place to live, where a small dollar or pound or franc income went a lot further than it did at home.  The very presence of visiting artists encouraged a certain amount of tourism as their friends and acquaintances went off in search of free lodgings- the British artist Edward Burra dropped in on Lowry in Cuernavaca and pushed his tequila consumption up to even more alarming levels than usual. 

There was a complex mix of slightly more elevated reasons at work as well.   For many left-leaning intellectuals, Mexico was a fascinating case study.  It was  revolutionary, run by governments which proclaimed their commitment to progress and equality; a kind of New World counterpoise to the Soviet Union which (its admirers hoped) might be able to reconcile the requirements of economic modernisation in a very poor peasant-dominated society with fairness and social justice but without the coercion and regimentation of the Soviet model.    It’s interesting that, although a few Soviet artists like Mayakovsky and Sergei Eisenstein worked in Mexico (the latter producing an unfinished film of epic proportions and cherishing the ability to work without an NKVD operative overseeing every camera angle and script change), links between the two avowedly revolutionary regimes were never close and the Mexican Communist Party led a precarious semi-clandestine existence even in the periods when it wasn’t banned outright.  The Cardenas regime’s welcome to Trotsky symbolised this rather hostile distancing rather well.  

There were specifically artistic reasons for some outsiders to go to Mexico.  There was a genuine interest in the Muralist movement in certain artistic circles both in the United States and Europe and some (mostly American) artists managed to get public sector commissions to create murals in Mexico themselves.   One of the frustrations of the Locke catalogue indeed is how little it addresses the issues of patronage and who was paying for the elaborate programmes of public art which underpinned Muralism as a movement; the impression given is that money dried up after Jose Vasconcelos stopped being Education Minister in 1924 but it’s apparent that major commissions were available well into the 1930’s.  On the other hand, it seems strange that some of these went to American incomers at a point when the big names of Mexican Muralism were pitching for the Yankee dollar north of the Rio Grande- Rivera, despite his sometimes strident leftism, seems to have had few scruples about taking work from major US corporations, even if the collaborations had a habit of ending in tears.  There’s clearly a back story here, possibly linked to the shifting sands of politics within the PRM at national and state level, but these issues are never really explained in the catalogue.

Another draw, perhaps particularly for Europeans, was a sense that Mexico was (in a wholly positive sense) a more primitive and therefore “authentic” place than Europe, full of interesting archaeology, strange and exotic myths, and colourful peasant communities living a century or so out of synch with the developed world.   For people like the Surrealists this was a major attraction.   Though some Mexicans got rather irritated by the rather patronising tone of passing Europeans (Kahlo was a bit snippy with the French founder of Surrealism, Andre Breton, over this even though they were close politically), this self-conscious primitivism interestingly intertwined with certain priorities of the post-Revolutionary Mexican regime, which found expression in the art it favoured.  

The PRM, though largely run by European-descended Mexican elites, made a very big thing indeed of the indigenous “Indian” and mixed race masses.  In artistic terms, this translated into a fondness for Muralist schemes which selectively glorified the pre-Hispanic civilisations which had grown up on Mexican territory and even claimed that there was something innately “Mexican” about mural art (based on then-newly discovered Maya frescoes in Yucatan).   In a more minor key, this also fed into a fondness for themes majoring on regional folklore.   As a result, a kind of leftish “Blood and Soil” nationalism inflected much art produced by Mexicans in the 1920’s and 30’s.   Not everybody found this persuasive.  D H Lawrence, himself more than a little drawn to blood and soil themes and authoritarian leadership, found the resurrection of pre-Hispanic Mexican themes initially fascinating but ultimately rather scary and alienating and, in the hands of the state, more than a little fraudulent too.  I’m no great fan of Lawrence (and “The Plumed Serpent”, the novel he wrote based on his time in Mexico is virtually unreadable) but I think he was basically right to suggest that much of this amounted to the deployment of a cardboard “Indian” with precious few links to actual indigenous populations.   I find much of the Muralist glorification of the pre-Hispanic past bombastic and even a bit counterproductive in its uncritical idealisation of a generalised “Indian” civilisation which collapses the very different Aztec and Maya and Toltec (etc) cultures into each other (you end up wondering where the human sacrifices central to Aztec cosmology have gone…..).   Even at a slightly more human level I’m not persuaded.  The Rivera painting at the top of this piece was used by the RA to advertise the show; it records a fiesta with traditional dancing in Tehuantepec.   It strikes me as thoroughly creepy- the male dancers look as if they’ve just stepped out of their flying saucer and nobody actually seems to be enjoying themselves.  The whole display, including the rigidly standardised “traditional” costumes, reminds me of the highly structured State Dance troupes from the old Soviet Union and its satellites which use to appear at places like the Sidmouth Folk Festival, presenting a state-approved, professionally choreographed version of folk culture performed by classically trained singers and dancers who hadn’t been quite good enough to get into the national opera or ballet companies.

I can’t believe that there were no tensions between this glorification of an idealised Indian past and peasant present and the desire of the PRM regime to present Mexico as an advanced modern state, or at least one well on the way to modernity under the PRM’s watchful gaze.   There was one blinding obvious friction zone over the role of religion, where a syncretic folk Catholicism was central to large parts of peasant life.  The PRM on the other hand was viscerally anti-clerical, reflecting a hostile view of the social role of the Catholic church in Mexican society.   The massive “Cristero” rebellion of the late 1920’s, which cost tens of thousands of lives and was put down with great brutality on both sides rates on throw-away reference in Locke’s account.  I can’t believe it had absolutely no effect on artistic production- and even if that was the case, it would be an outcome so counter-intuitive as to require some explanation.  

One also senses the Muralism really needs more analysis than it gets.  It appears to have been a movement held together by little more than a desire to paint on a very large scale on the walls of public buildings- and a hunt for state patronage.   There wasn’t much stylistic consensus between the movement’s big names (nor indeed does the PRM and its agencies appear to have tried to create one, tolerating Rivera’s brand of Socialist Realism alongside Siqueiros’s expressionism).  Nor were they exactly a band of brothers in other ways; Rivera welcomed Trotsky into his home while Siqueiros was sent into exile for involvement in a failed attempt to assassinate the exiled revolutionary, Rivera was accused of indirectly encouraging mobs to deface Orozco’s work and so on.  Was there really a movement there at all?

The Mexican works I found most interesting all sat at the chronological ends of the show.  I’m not sure if Jose Guadalupe Posada exactly counts as a “fine artist”, though his work inspired a lot of interest from people like the Surrealists as an example of “primitive” art.   This simply shows how little the Surrealists knew.  Posada’s woodcuts illustrated broadsheet ballads of a kind that would have been instantly recognisable on the streets on London or Paris well into the 19^th century; as publishers like Catnach proved in Britain, this was anything but a primitive form of enterprise, requiring quick turn round of stories into poetic form and sophisticated distribution channels to get them into the hands of the masses before the news went stale.  It could also lead to crass reporting errors.   The broadsheet announcing the death of Zapata (the image is based on an iconic photograph of the general- another indication of how “old” and “new” technologies might intertwine) was wildly wrong; Zapata outlived Posada by a good six years.   Nor can one take it that the skeletal figure galloping out of the following poster was dead- Gomez was also very much alive when Posada created the woodcut (though, ironically, he would face a firing squad in the 1920’s for trying to stage a coup against Obregon) within the context of the All Souls Day “Calaveria” custom in which skeletons are depicted busily engaged in the day to day activities of their lifetimes and the living and dead mingle.

On the other hand the rather gruesome skeletal figures in Francesco Goitia’s painting were well and truly dead.   Goitia had joined up with Pancho Villa’s northern army as a kind of official war artist (typical of Villa, who was an acute self publicist- though he did perhaps take things to extremes when he signed a contract with a US newsreel company committing him to fight battles only in optimal filming conditions….).   The bodies of men hanged for every possible offence, real or imagined, were part of the Mexican landscape during the Revolution.  In this case Goitia claimed that he had exhumed the bodies of soldiers killed at Zacatecas in 1914 and hung them up himself, hiring a watchman to ensure that they weren’t cut down until they had reached a suitable state of quasi-mummification.   Given Goitia’s reputation for bizarre behaviour, this is quite credible- though he was also notorious for “improving” parts of his life story so he may have invented it all.

Non-muralist art led a rather marginal existence in the 1920’s and 30’s but interesting work still got created, especially in the later 1930’s.   By then the PRM had consolidated its position, still given to leftist postures (giving Trotsky a home, nationalising the oil industry, supporting the Spanish Republic to the extent of housing its Government in exile for years after Franco has won the war on the ground) but increasingly authoritarian and reliant on a web of patronage to control the countryside, get out the vote (Mexico never formally became a single party state) and ensure that the masses toed the line.  Grand dreams of land redistribution to the masses led to tightly controlled quasi-collectives dominated by PRM- aligned peasant unions; the only great estates broken up were those that belonged to irreconcilable foes of the party.   Antonio Ruiz’s bicycle race in Texcoco casts a subtly subversive eye over the world of the Mexican countryside.   Cycle racing is clearly modern and to be applauded- but nobody has bothered making up the dirt road the cyclists race over (there would have been a mass strike if you’d expected the riders in the Tour de France or even the Giro d’Italia to race on that kind of surface in the late 1930’s) and a kid grazes ominously close to the riders.  “Official” Mexico fills the stands decked in the national colours- all in their Sunday best from the looks of it.  Presumably that’s where you’ll find the leaders of the PRM-linked unions, petty bureaucrats and the local middle classes (and their wives).   A gaggle of what look to be off duty soldiers in uniform are in the background; one or two onlookers in “modern” city dress prop up the high wall.  The peasantry, however, are literally pushed to the margins; up trees, sitting on the top of the wall, getting ready to do small scale trading in the bottom left corner.   There’s a sense of improvisation, of a gap between rhetoric and reality- even that not a great deal may have changed since the bad old days before the Revolution.

.Finally we have Jorge Covarrubias’s even more overtly satirical depiction of the rural schoolmaster.   Prim, dressed in impeccable “city” clothes whose effect is slightly undermined by the clunky boots on his feet, he clutches his oversized umbrella slightly nervously.  His red-white-green PRM badge is very visible.   One suspects he’s been summoned in to the regional party headquarters to report on developments in his bailiwick.  He’s probably indigenous in origin or at least mixed race- on one level an admirable example of upward social mobility promoted by the Revolution, based on spreading the reach of state education to the remotest hamlets.   The incongruous bone on the floor gives the game away; in Mexican slang a “bone” meant a patronage sinecure job.  One suspects that our man owes his appointment more to his party loyalty than his pedagogical abilities- as long as his village votes the right way it won’t matter too much if the schoolchildren end emerge from his care barely literate or if he fiddles the school funds to his private profit.   It’s not surprising that Covarrubias made his career mostly in the US as an illustrator for the “New Yorker”.

I suppose I know a lot more about Mexico in the 1930’s than I did back in those far away schooldays when I tried to get the background which would put Greene’s whisky priest and the police lieutenant into a wider perspective and help me to understand what drove them.   I still feel I don’t know as much as I’d like to- and the RA exhibition only partly filled the gaps.