Down by the Riverside

Finally getting going in 2014; I’m now beginning to accumulate a backlog of exhibitions to write about, which is not what was supposed to happen at all.  I seem to be suffering from a kind of writer’s block on getting down to the job- thanks, Tina, for prodding me into completing this entry….

At the head of the queue demanding my attention is the Dulwich Gallery’s show about James MacNeill Whistler and the role that the River Thames played in his art- this has closed in south London but it’s coming to Amherst, Massachusetts and the Smithsonian in Washington, if any of my transatlantic readers are interested.    This came labelled as “An American in London”, which struck me as a slightly debateable title given that I’m not sure just how “American” Whistler actually was by the time he created most of the art on display.   Admittedly he was born in Lowell, Massachusetts but he spent most of his childhood in Europe (particularly Russia) where his father was involved in railway engineering – which gives him an unexpected link to Giorgio de Chirico, also the son of a nomadic railway engineer.   In reality Whistler lived less than a decade of his life in the US.  He put in three mediocre years at West Point Military Academy before being thrown out for failing a chemistry test- the last straw which finally persuaded the college authorities that the US Army could well do without the young man’s services.   By a strange twist, one of his classmates was a certain Marcus Reno, later to play a controversial role in the Battle of the Little Big Horn.  The two men had been friends at West Point and remained on letter writing terms for many years afterwards.   I can’t imagine Whistler ever ending up facing a court martial accused of excessive passivity in the face of the enemy; though; if he had ended up in the ranks of the Seventh Cavalry he’d probably have got his command wiped out by reckless over aggression (assuming his men didn’t shoot him first…).

After West Point, Whistler (still trading on his father’s connections as a military man?) spent a few months with the US Coastal Survey before leaving for France to pursue his art in 1855.   In 1859 he moved on to London (not least because he saw better chances of artistic recognition and sales prospects there).  Though he travelled widely thereafter, getting as far afield as Chile, and never gave up his foothold in France, he clearly came to regard the city as his home.  When forced into short term exile in Venice after going spectacularly bankrupt as a result of his ill-advised legal action against the critic John Ruskin (notoriously he won the verdict but the jury, which probably felt the case should never have gone to court, awarded him a farthing damages without costs), he felt homesick for London and came back as soon as he decently could.  He never seems to have thought of heading back to the USA to lick his wounds and wait for the dust to settle.   Above all, it seems revealing that, despite a West Point background which would more or less have guaranteed him commissioned rank, there is no suggestion that he ever considered crossing the Atlantic to fight (presumably for the Union) in the Civil War.   This suggests a rather detached view of his native land, to say the least. 

In other words, I don’t think Whistler’s art reflects a particularly “American” eye view of the River Thames; if anything, he came to be a London insider fairly rapidly, while on an artistic level the influence of 17^th century Dutch art, and later of Japanese prints, was far more relevant to his work than any American input.

The exhibition’s basic layout was a combination of chronological and geographical, reflecting the fact that Whistler’s depictions of the river tended to move upstream over time.  He started out in the bustling and at times rather dangerous world of the docks down east in Wapping and Rotherhithe, moved to the rapidly gentrifying environs of Chelsea in the 1860’s where he remained (albeit at a series of different addresses) for much of the rest of his life.   There were some rather awkward shifts in this approach- a series of lithographs from late in his career when he was staying in the Savoy Hotel with his terminally ill wife were slotted in the middle of the show rather out of chronological sequence - but the general structure more or less worked, especially as the geographical shifts correlated quite well with Whistler’s own changing style.

I hadn’t been aware that Whistler, in addition to his large scale works in oils, was such a prolific creator of engravings and other forms of graphic art.  He first made his name with a series of engravings of riverside scenes, mostly in and around the London docks, and throughout his artistic career sale of his graphic works brought in a fair share of his income.   The early engravings are wonderfully detailed and keenly observed (Whistler was an almost obsessive tinkerer with the plates until he got just the effects he wanted when the print was made).    They give a real sense of the vitality of the district- and the distinctly crumbling nature of many of the buildings backing on to the busy highway of the river.   This was a part of London which enjoyed a pretty lurid reputation as a place of crime and vice; there isn’t much explicit sign of that in the engravings, though it’s intriguing that one of them was drawn in the yard of the River Police station and it’s been suggested that the boatmen and dock workers who appear in the foreground of some of the views were in fact Whistler’s hired minders making sure that the well-dressed outsider wasn’t mugged as he took his preparatory sketches.  Whistler appears to have rather enjoyed the rough side of life in places like Wapping and the first painting to establish him as a rising star was also created in this period- see top.  Painted in a pub with a splendid view over the apparently chaotic hustle and bustle of the river, a woman enjoys a drink with a couple of men.   The female model is Jo Hiffernan/Heffernan (both spellings were used), Whistler’s Irish-born model and, living up to artistic stereotype, mistress.   The painting was originally supposed to cast her pretty unambiguously as a dockside prostitute with a client and her pimp; intriguingly Whistler reworked the painting to make her look a lot more “respectable” at the last minute before submission to the Royal Academy for hanging in the Summer Exhibition.   Perhaps he thought he might have trouble getting a work which was light on overt moralistic content past the Royal Academy jury as the “fallen woman” was not obviously on the way to appropriate punishment for her immorality. The result was a work which rather puzzled the critics, who couldn’t work out what the “story” it illustrated might be.    Jo also appeared in the exhibition, away from the river but carrying a Japanese fan and looking particularly lovely- see below.

In the 1860’s Whistler moved up river to Chelsea, which remained his London base for the rest of his life.  His redoubtable mother came for lengthy stays (Jo was packed off out of the way) and was rather put out by catching her son painting on the Sabbath in a grave departure from New England rectitude.  The river here was still a busy working highway, but not in quite the same way as in the East End docklands.   Barges and lighters plied the river as part of the transport networks linked to the docks for imports and exports, small steamers provided passenger transport to and from the City of London and watermen still ferried passengers up, down and across the river (in the 1860’s all the bridges apart from Westminster Bridge were subject to quite steep tolls even for pedestrian traffic and the public transport network was in its infancy).   Chelsea was a place in flux.  It had been a village out to the west of Westminster, popular in the 16^th and 17^th centuries with those well enough off to own their own barges to ferry them to the royal palace at Whitehall or all the way to the City.   Shifts in favoured royal residences away from the riverside and London’s inexorable creep westwards in the 17^th and 18^th centuries had meant that the wealthy moved elsewhere, leaving a lot of crumbling old buildings, near-slums and small industrial properties.   Its even more down market counterpart on the south bank of the Thames, Battersea, was also full of industry- and the last survivor of the grand commercial pleasure gardens which had dominated the area in the 18^th century.  Cremorne Gardens, however, had a pretty louche reputation.  By the mid-19^th century however, Chelsea was on its way back up again as it became fashionable with artists and writers, partly due to grand scale urban and riverside redevelopment (of which more later).   Perhaps the general loucheness and bohemian air imparted by Cremorne and the old riverside pubs helped too.

Whistler obviously relished the area.  His painting style slowly shifted away from the very detailed depictions in his early works to something much more loose and proto-impressionistic, with hazy washes of colour conveying a strong sense of atmosphere and steadily blurring the factories and boatyards of the riverside into a more generic shimmer.  It was during this period that he developed his mature style, with titles marked by musical references (“nocturnes”, “harmonies”) and a clear preference for moments when the bustle of the river was somewhat stilled (by ice floes, for instance) and late evening scenes with muted twilights and ghostly, half-seen, half-sensed objects.   On the way there, Whistler absorbed the influence of Japanese prints; this led to a few rather odd hybrids in which young women in faintly improbable orientalising costumes look out over a misty Thames and where Jo Hiffernan dresses up in a kimono.

The exhibition ended with a focus on one of his finest works from his Chelsea period, depicting Old Battersea Bridge in the twilight with a rocket from a display in Cremorne Gardens sparkling in the sky.   Though not the central exhibit in the Ruskin case in which Ruskin accused Whistler, in effect, of charging fancy prices for throwing a pot of paint in the eyes of the public and Whistler sued for libel, it was raised in the courtroom debates and Whistler was obliged to explain his thinking and methods.  The examination was quoted at some length.  I assume we as the 21^st century audience were being invited to feel very superior to the philistinism of the defence council but the discussion was actually very informative.   It was also intriguing to discover that Whistler was in the habit of writing very rude letters to early patrons or their children if he heard that they were selling his work on at a large profit; perhaps Ruskin had a point on the money side of things.

Old Battersea Bridge was a wonderfully ramshackle wooden affair dating from the 18^th century and something of a favourite subject for Whistler in his Chelsea years.  Of course this piece isn’t a photographically accurate depiction of the bridge (some photographs were included in the show) or even in line with sketches which he made of it on other occasions.   

In particular he gives it a far higher clearance over the river than the rather tunnel-like appearance which its arches appear to have had.  This is probably a case of art imitating art.  A wooden bridge in Edo much loved by artists like Hiroshige and Hokusai has something of the same air as Battersea but was much higher and more curved, more like the bridge of Whistler’s depiction.   The firework display also harked back to Japanese exemplars.

When he painted the bridge in the mid 1870’s, however, its days were numbered.  It was highly unpopular with river users due to the currents and eddies which its multiple piers created- getting past Battersea Bridge was always a far more dangerous process than the very calm progress of the lighter in the picture suggests.   The whole Thames waterside was undergoing massive changes thanks to Sir Joseph Bazalgette’s creation of the Thames Embankment as one element in his wider plans to create a modern sewerage system for London.  One result of the embanking process was that the river was somewhat narrowed and became faster flowing, meaning eventually that the bridges needed to be replaced.  This process was hastened by the passage of an Act of Parliament extinguishing the tolls; traffic on Battersea Bridge immediately increased to such an extent that it became unsafe and access had to be severely restricted (rather defeating the point of removing the tolls).   It was clear that the old bridge would have to go; demolition work started shortly afterwards.   Cremorne Gardens were also finally closed down by a coalition of moral reformers and property developers just after the painting was completed.    The work therefore acquired an air of nostalgia for a world about to pass away, which may not have been entirely intended-Whistler may have enjoyed the old but had no qualms about painting the new world of upper class respectability which developed along the Thames Embankment as the water colour below shows and to the very end of his artistic life the river was a favourite subject.  Nevertheless it made a very fitting climax to an exhibition which showed just how central London’s riverside was to Whistler’s development.

 

All the Queen’s men- and rodents

I know I’m still running horribly behind on writing up the exhibitions I’ve been to see- I guess I’ll have to make a New Year’s resolution to be a bit more timely and assiduous with this blog….

At least the one I’m writing about now is still (just) running if you get a move on and go to the National Portrait Gallery in London.   It deals with portraiture in the reign of Elizabeth I- starting at the top with pictures of the Queen herself and working down through the social classes.   Obviously there’s a limit to how far down the social scale portraiture went; nobody was in the business of painting individual members of the labouring poor just because they had interesting faces (there was no market for that) though one or two favoured servants get into aristocratic or gentry family scenes as in the beautifully depicted nurse holding the infant John Dunch  above  (little John fell victim to the horrendous rate of infant mortality of the time). 

   Nor does there appear to have been much of a taste for the genre scenes drawn from everyday life which make Dutch painting of the 16^th and 17^th centuries something of a window into the lives of fairly ordinary people- even if one which needs to be looked through with caution.   The scene of  festivities in the village of Bermondsey which may (or may not) be by the Dutch artist Joris Hofnagel above is a rarity and a slightly enigmatic one as it’s not certain what the cause of the rejoicing actually is (traditionally it’s assumed to be a wedding on the strength of the very large cakes being carried in procession in the right foreground and the fiddlers playing but there are some problems with this interpretation and it’s even been interpreted as a royal visit to the village).   

The poor (who were, on the whole, getting poorer through Elizabeth’s reign, which was anything but a golden age for the majority of the population) don’t get much of a look in despite genuine efforts on the part of the exhibition curators to find ways of acknowledging them- of which the most startling is the presence of an intact set of clothes in rough brown cloth which appear to have belonged to a sailor (judging from tar residues in the fibres) and amazingly survived the centuries because they became part of a collection of props passed on from artist’s studio to artist’s studio until the late 19^th century.  In some ways this is the most startling item in the show because of the sheer length of odds against the survival of something so commonplace.

With this proviso, it is still noticeable how far down the social scale the commissioning of portraits in Elizabethan England went- indeed contemporary social commentators mocked the vanity of very minor civic dignitaries and petty attorneys in sitting for their portraits.   Perhaps worse, even their wives were getting in on the act, as were the tiny number of women with a professional activity in their own right like the calligrapher Esther Langlois/Inglis/Kello above (strictly speaking she shouldn’t have been in the show as she lived in Scotland for most of her life and only came to London after Elizabeth’s death and the accession of James VI as James I in England- but she did produce beautiful manuscripts for a cross-border elite market).

Brewers and butchers like the aptly named Gamaliel Pye ensured that their looks were commemorated for posterity.  Pye indeed embodies the ambiguities of the age, as a man who was highly respected in his trade, a generous donor to charity- and a convicted breaker of legislation which controlled slaughtering and imposed price controls on meat.  

There was at times a degree of unease about the process of having your likeness taken, at least among those of a more religious cast of mind who worried about breaking the Second Commandment.  This perhaps explains the tendency of portraits- especially those of the ”middling sort” and lesser gentry- to include very visible signs of piety like skulls to assist meditation on mortality or moralising inscriptions.  It may partly also explain the tendency to cite the age at which the portrait was painted- this was evidently used as a stimulus to pious thoughts and reflections on the passage of time itself as the musician Thomas Whythorne explained in his memoirs.

Others, not all of them necessarily that much higher up the social scale, appear to have had fewer scruples about portraiture.   The flamboyant assertiveness of Martin Frobisher (pirate, slaver-trader, Arctic explorer, bankrupt, captain of a Queen’s ship….) doesn’t suggest a man with many scruples about the propriety of having his image recorded, though in an earlier age a semi-literate West Country skipper would hardly have qualified for this sort of immortalisation.  Admittedly this was something of an institutional commission, done on behalf of the Cathay Company which had been set up to exploit trade with China through the North West Passage which Frobisher was seeking in the Arctic.   His navigations in the Davis Strait and into Baffin Bay for a brief moment looked as if they would more than pay their way even without reaching China when rocks he brought back were assayed as containing gold- fools gold, as it transpired, as the voyage to ship back piles of stone for treatment pushed the Company to the edge of bankruptcy and the absence of gold sent it over.  The Queen, who had invested her own money in the venture, was not at all amused and Frobisher was out of favour for years until his services were required to fight the Spanish Armada.  The stone, incidentally, can still be seen in the defences of Dartford….

Portraiture was obviously more of a regular feature of life for an aristocracy much obsessed with lineage and descent- the Elizabethan period stood at the very start of the English elite preoccupation with creating galleries of paintings depicting members of a noble lineage over the generations as one way of asserting the legitimate descent of property and lands.  At times the portraits formed part of displays which set them in a wider context and are now lost or were destroyed as tastes changed, which perhaps leads to an overestimate of just how important each individual painting actually was, but their basic role in preserving the memory of great (or notorious) ancestors is clear.  Not every aristocratic portrait in the show fitted into this model.  For instance the distinctly intimate depiction of  the Countess of Southampton  below is unique and must have been created for very particular reasons, possibly for the benefit of a husband who had drawn the Queen’s displeasure by marrying her at all (they both spent some time in prison as a result). 

  The show contains several more conventional paintings of family groups or husband and wife pairings and I suspect a genuinely representative collection of portraits from the period would contain even more- there’s a natural tendency to focus on paintings which either depict important individuals or are in some way interesting or idiosyncratic.   Perhaps the most unlikely presence in the show is the Sultan of Morocco’s ambassador, who had come to London in the hope of getting English help to open up a new front in the war against Spain (he failed, though the English had little vested objection to collaborating with Islamic states against their shared enemy and when King James made peace with Spain early in his reign a number of English sailors went off to join the Barbary corsair states).

The quality of art on display is pretty variable.   It’s understandable that work undertaken by jobbing painters in provincial centres is pretty stiff and naïve but even the rich and aristocratic could struggle to get a quality piece done and often had to rely on passing Dutch or Flemish artists.  Elizabeth’s court never managed to attract any genuinely top drawer artists from continental Europe (the best of them, Hans Eworth, was hardly in the Holbein league), possibly because her notorious parsimony on everything expect perhaps her personal adornment made it an unattractive place to seek work.  Her Sergeant Painter George Gower’s self-portrait stresses how his artistic skills trump his gentry origins as the basis for his claims to enhanced social status but he, like other English artists of the time, was distinctly old fashioned, happier with the texture of textiles and draperies than in trying to depict a human body in a credible three dimensional space.   

It didn’t help that the most talented artists in England were miniaturists like Nicholas Hilliard or Isaac Oliver; men brilliant at squeezing a depiction into a tiny space (say for a ring or a pendant) but rather at sea when it came to working on a grader scale- a couple of works in the show have been tentatively attributed to Hilliard but they have little of the quality of his miniatures.  

The portraits of Elizabeth herself are therefore a bit of a mixed bag, often longer on recording the sheer magnificence of her frocks and jewellery than on giving a half way credible depiction of what she looked like (this was definitely not a culture in which less was more or where restraint was in any way valued).   Matters got ever more complex as she grew older.   While the portrait at the top of this piece, dating from the 1570’s, probably gives a fair sense of what the queen looked like in her forties (and a formidable lady she appears to be), the same cannot be said of later depictions.  In some cases (for instance when a royal portrait was commissioned by an aristocrat as a visible symbol of loyalty for the Great Hall) the painter might well never have seen the monarch at close quarters and would have to rely on earlier portraits or even the images on the coinage to get a sense of her appearance.   In others there was a simple refusal to depict the ageing Queen as she really was.  

Take the rather odd painting below as an example, in which Elizabeth participates in a procession involving key members of her court (she is not actually being borne shoulder high like some kind of devotional statue in a religious procession- the men are carrying a canopy as she is pushed on a kind of trolley by a couple of Yeomen of the Guard half visible behind her).  This was painted some time after 1600.   It’s probably not a depiction of a specific event and the whole thing has a very stagey look in part because of the thoroughly unconvincing perspective and background.   For all that, the various members of the procession are recognisable, as is the message it’s intended to convey of an elite group solidly grouped round their monarch.   The balding figure in pink in the foreground, the Earl of Worcester, may well have commissioned the work to celebrate his restoration to favour as Master of the Horse (in charge, inter alia, of court ceremonials of this very kind)  after the Earl of Essex was sacked for crossing Elizabeth once too often.  His son, Lord Herbert, is the man in white striking postures on the right- possibly pointing to his newly married wife.   On the face of it, this depicts a cohesive elite united around their queen.  Elizabeth, though, is depicted as if she was still in the 1570’s.  By the time this was painted she was an increasingly frail old woman verging on her seventies, with rotting teeth and a red wig.  The increasingly hysterical courtly adulation of the Virgin Queen in the 1590’s and into the 1600’s (Thomas Morley’s madrigal collection “The Triumphs of Oriana” dates from more or less the same time as this painting) scarcely hid the extreme nervousness of the elite over what was going to happen when she eventually died or what upheavals might occur in her dotage- Essex was to die on the scaffold in 1601 for a crack-brained attempt at a palace coup.  Plots and counter-plots abounded.   Sir Walter Raleigh was up to his neck in them, for instance, including (as historical research over the past fifty years has demonstrated) dabbing in treason with the Spanish.  In the end James VI of Scotland succeeded with minimal stir (not least because key members of the Elizabethan establishment had already put plans in place for that to happen)- the fact that he was an adult male Protestant with children ultimately trumping his Scottishness, especially as the alternative contenders were all female.   The painting depicts a moment when nobody could have been sure that England would avoid a civil war when the old woman died and the official line was to wish that day away by pretending that she was blessed with eternal youth.

I don’t think Elizabeth would have been entirely happy over the fact that she was a bit upstaged in what she would certainly have regarded as her show.   She could probably have lived with the prominence given to the so-called “Ermine Portrait”- after all, its main subject is her, in one of her most fantastical confections of a dress (how on earth did one set about cleaning something like that?  Or was it a one-off, shredded after one wearing with the jewels reused in subsequent gowns?).  The ermine had a respectable place in bestiary lore as a symbol of cleanliness and, by extension, virginity- it was believed that it would pine away and die if its white fur ever got dirty.- and therefore sat nicely within the ideology crafted to glorify the dead end into which she had opted to take her dynasty because she saw no other way of resolving the inherent contradictions involved in being a Queen Regnant in a world where it was axiomatic that a woman was always subordinate to her husband.  

I’m not sure she’d have been so happy with the thought that the star painting in the exhibition and the one which caused most head-scratching over gallery merchandising involved three anonymous children and their pets- see below.   The children look very solemn indeed and the boy on the right looks as if he’s about to strangle his linnet in his efforts to make sure it doesn’t fly away.   The real interest surrounds his elder sister’s guinea pig.  Evidently drawn from the life, this is the earliest depiction of the humble South American rodent in British art.   It must have been a rather exotic pet- guinea pigs, native to Peru, were unknown to Europeans until the Spanish conquest of the Inca Empire- and one wonders how this specimen ended up in England.  Cute it may have been but it had no distinguished pedigree of symbolism and implied meanings derived from antiquity to legitimise its place in a painting and I assume it was there because its owner threatened tantrums unless her pet joined her in the painting.   The gallery shop was doing a roaring trade in cuddly toy guinea pigs; there was no postcard available because the painting is in private hands and hasn’t been put on display very often.   The Virgin Queen should have been aware of the old theatrical maxim about appearing with children and animals……

Happy New Year to my readers- I will try to be more assiduous in 2014, honest!

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.