Apart from making myself bankrupt, I wouldn’t get any work done if I insisted on travelling to every exhibition that I might want to see. An Edward Burra collection at the Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, certainly interested me, all the more so since a TV presentation made me doubt the severe judgment I had made about this artist. This was that he had produced three superb works, one of which was in the National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, but that the rest of his work fell below this high standard.
I contemplated at the very least buying a catalogue of the exhibition. However, after the frustration of a few unanswered calls to Pallant House, I put off the purchase. When, a few days later, I was passing the Central Library I popped up to the fine art section to see if they intended to order the book. They did and I was offered the first borrowing.
The book is now with me and I am beginning to revert to my former opinion. The three works which I rate highly are: Issy Ort’s, the Scottish National Gallery, Silver Dollar Bar, York City Gallery and one of Burra’s rare oil paintings The Snack Bar, the Tate. What seems to me to go wrong in so many of his other pieces, is that he reverts to mechanical modelling and space-filling detail that brings him nearer to the likes of Beryl Cook. It’s a kind of laziness and it’s emphasised when a George Grosz watercolour is reproduced alongside Burra’s paintings. In Grosz’s German work, there are never lapses of technique or imagery.
Burra has paintings like Minuit Chanson and Zoot Suits that come near to his best. And the landscapes, many of which are new to me, have their successes. But here too. there are disappointments. One such work. English Countryside, shows a road going over low, undulating hills. There is a band of fields of bare earth of a red/orange hue in the middle of the work. Through this is a sequence of delicately formed light-coloured pylons. The flanking fields are either light green or of dark foliage. The tiny silhouette of a plane is seen rising from an airport over the horizon. This might have been a masterpiece if Burra had only put into the landscape the sort of sharp drawing that holds together William Gillies’ border landscapes. Similarly, Burra shows fine unexplored imagery in paintings of traffic-clogged country roads. Waldemar Januszczak in a favourable review of the Pallant House exhibition, alludes to Burra’s Thomas the Tank Engine lorries. It is an accurate observation and damning. Surely Burra could have found a better way to depict his heavy traffic.
In the end, I was glad I didn’t buy the catalogue. Instead of sitting down to the delight of leafing through reproductions of works that I could admire unreservedly, I would have feelings of frustration and sadness. I cannot think of any other artist that brings out in me these emotions.
The Frenchness of Scottish Art
I am old enough to remember Nicolas Pevsner’s Reith Lectures entitled The Englishness of English Art. They featured Hogarth’s Anglo-genre paintings and prints, Stubbs’ very English classicism, the work of Blake and Samuel Palmer. I do not remember that there was much about more modern artists but Stanley Spencer, Paul Nash, Graham Sutherland, Edward Burra and William Roberts are just a few of the artists that could be grouped under Pevsner’s title.
It is impossible to imagine any presentation on 20th century Scottish art having a similar heading. It wouldn’t make sense. It would have to be The Frenchness of Scottish Art. Certainly in the early 20th century, the group of artists known as the Scottish Colourists were following the example of French painters, the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists who they took to be the progressive forces of the day, the obligatory track. Although they were not unhappy about it, they were in the position of the young man in the limerick by one of the Knox brothers:
… who said ‘Damn!
I have suddenly found that I am
A creature that moves
On predestinate grooves
Not a bus, as one hoped but a tram.’
Meanwhile the 20th century English painters mentioned above, and even others who did show the influence of the French school, always seemed to drive like the free moving bus in more individual directions wherever their fancy took them.
Viewing the current exhibition of Francis Cadell at the Gallery of Modern Art Edinburgh, I found I could get little pleasure from it because I was always conscious of how much better the French originals did this sort of thing. Cadell invited comparison and came off badly.
I know enough of the work of the other members of the group to be pretty sure that I will have the same reaction to each of the painters that will be given an exhibition in an ongoing series. There are Scottish artists before and after the Colourists who are much more individual, but they are not so popular. The crowds viewing the Cadell exhibition were obviously in raptures. I felt a bit sorry for them. Have they never looked keenly at Manet’s paintings?
It is impossible to imagine any presentation on 20th century Scottish art having a similar heading. It wouldn’t make sense. It would have to be The Frenchness of Scottish Art. Certainly in the early 20th century, the group of artists known as the Scottish Colourists were following the example of French painters, the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists who they took to be the progressive forces of the day, the obligatory track. Although they were not unhappy about it, they were in the position of the young man in the limerick by one of the Knox brothers:
… who said ‘Damn!
I have suddenly found that I am
A creature that moves
On predestinate grooves
Not a bus, as one hoped but a tram.’
Meanwhile the 20th century English painters mentioned above, and even others who did show the influence of the French school, always seemed to drive like the free moving bus in more individual directions wherever their fancy took them.
Viewing the current exhibition of Francis Cadell at the Gallery of Modern Art Edinburgh, I found I could get little pleasure from it because I was always conscious of how much better the French originals did this sort of thing. Cadell invited comparison and came off badly.
I know enough of the work of the other members of the group to be pretty sure that I will have the same reaction to each of the painters that will be given an exhibition in an ongoing series. There are Scottish artists before and after the Colourists who are much more individual, but they are not so popular. The crowds viewing the Cadell exhibition were obviously in raptures. I felt a bit sorry for them. Have they never looked keenly at Manet’s paintings?
Exhibiting Small Paintings
For the first time, I submitted two paintings (the maximum number allowed) to the RSA Open, running at the Royal Scottish Academy’s galleries from 12th November until 18th December. There is always a danger in entering for this sort of show: you may find your work rejected and then find the exhibition crammed with the sorts of works which you try hard to avoid. However, my pieces were duly hung. I show them above. One is based on a sketch I did when sailing down the Forth. Modern ships have been intriguing me, particularly container ships which look like Paul Klee’s magic squares afloat. The neatly arranged caravans on the Fife shore allowed an interesting interplay between two sets of rectangles. This is the first of what I hope to be a series.
The RSA Open has a size restriction of no more than 60cm. in any direction. The works are displayed in groups, triple-hung in some cases, forming shapes with spaces between. Although it makes for a rather dinky effect, I cannot see how so many small pieces could be shown otherwise. Small pieces of sculpture, even from distinguished practitioners always tend to look a bit like ornaments.
Being a long established venerable institution, the RSA has a varnishing day and a private view, unlike in France where the word for private view is a varnishing (un vernissage). I popped into the academy to have an unobstructed view of the work. Most people will be familiar with tales of J.M. Turner actually repainting parts of his works at RA varnishing days. I did not come equipped to tamper in any way with my pieces, but I would have liked to have adjusted the tones of the frames. Never before having exhibited small paintings, I was unaware of the larger part played by the frames. Normally I use a rule of thumb method: print frames with their white mounts I frame with an off-white lime wash effect, for oil paintings I use a warm, dark grey. This works well enough with large paintings, but I now see that with small works the tone needs to be varied. Bright paintings with lots of light areas need a lighter tone of frame. For economic reasons I sometimes have to re-use print frames. When I framed these paintings I thought that this was permanent but I have learned something which I will remember if I submit to this exhibition in the future.
Appreciating Foreign Poetry
I have read one or two translations of the Swedish poet, Tomas Transtromer, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature this year. Whether or not he is a worthy winner I cannot say because I do not understand Swedish. Several people who do not read Spanish, tell me that Neruda was a great poet. Likewise non-Gaelic speakers have extolled the stature of Sorley MacLean. I wonder how they can make these judgments.
Can poetry in an unfamiliar tongue ever be fairly evaluated? I suspect not. But we can get a better idea of works in foreign or dead languages if they are translated again and again. For many years, the poet James Michie, set The Spectator weekend competition and one of his inspired ideas was to call for translations of Rimbaud’s Au Cabaret-Vert. With four or five published winners, we could get a good idea of the flavour of the poem, though the French original wouldn’t present much difficulty to people of my generation who would all have done some French at school.
Michie was no mean translator himself. I find his versions of the epigrams of Martial better than any of the others I have read. He also translated Catullus, Horace and La Fontaine. Probably, no poem has been more often translated than Horace’s ode addressing Pyrrha, Book 1 no.5, a who’s-kissing (or something more Anglo-Saxon) -her-now poem. Michie’s translation begins, ‘What slim youngster, his hair dripping with fragrant oil, / Makes love to you now, Pyrrha, ensconced in a / Snug cave curtained with roses?’ It then goes on to deal with Horace’s metaphor of shipwreck that awaits the new lover, finishing with, ‘My plaque tell of an old sailor who foundered and, / half drowned, hung up his clothes to, / Neptune lord of the element.’ This requires a note, explaining that shipwrecked sailors dedicated the clothes they were rescued in to the deity. Boris Johnson, who read Classics at Oxford, has written that Michie’s translations are so accurate that they can be used as cribs.
There is, however, another way of rendering a poem from an unfamiliar language, one that will be of no use to scholars but will bring it alive for new readers. Instead of scented oils and lavish roses, Anthony Hecht begins his version, ‘What well-heeled knuckle-head, straight from the unisex / Hairstylist and bathed in “Russian Leather,” / Dallies with you these late summer days, Pyrrha, / In your expensive sub-let?’ And after predicting the ingénu’s swamping and dismasting inserts an extra note of bitterness by changing the lady’s name in the last line to Piranha.
An excellent modern imitation of Rimbaud’s Au Cabaret-Vert by Fay Hart was published in The Spectator though not as an entry to the weekend competition. Entitled At Casa Verde, five in the afternoon, the gender of the speaker is necessarily changed and the setting is now South America. Instead of ‘Depuis huit jours,j’avais dechire mes bottines,’ we get, ‘I ripped my feet to bits walking the pilgrim trail…’ and replacing Rimbaud’s buxom barmaid whom he suggest wouldn’t be averse to an encounter, is a ‘Cuban-heeled boy, able-bodied, slicked-back, skintight jeans and a scowl’ of whom the poet says, ‘he could have me in a heartbeat that one.’
I would love to give both these re-creations here but it is one of the unintended consequences of the copyright laws that they impede proselytizing.
The Swedish laureate’s work may not be suitable for this sort of treatment and perhaps we will have to go in ignorance of his poetic achievement unless we learn Swedish.
Can poetry in an unfamiliar tongue ever be fairly evaluated? I suspect not. But we can get a better idea of works in foreign or dead languages if they are translated again and again. For many years, the poet James Michie, set The Spectator weekend competition and one of his inspired ideas was to call for translations of Rimbaud’s Au Cabaret-Vert. With four or five published winners, we could get a good idea of the flavour of the poem, though the French original wouldn’t present much difficulty to people of my generation who would all have done some French at school.
Michie was no mean translator himself. I find his versions of the epigrams of Martial better than any of the others I have read. He also translated Catullus, Horace and La Fontaine. Probably, no poem has been more often translated than Horace’s ode addressing Pyrrha, Book 1 no.5, a who’s-kissing (or something more Anglo-Saxon) -her-now poem. Michie’s translation begins, ‘What slim youngster, his hair dripping with fragrant oil, / Makes love to you now, Pyrrha, ensconced in a / Snug cave curtained with roses?’ It then goes on to deal with Horace’s metaphor of shipwreck that awaits the new lover, finishing with, ‘My plaque tell of an old sailor who foundered and, / half drowned, hung up his clothes to, / Neptune lord of the element.’ This requires a note, explaining that shipwrecked sailors dedicated the clothes they were rescued in to the deity. Boris Johnson, who read Classics at Oxford, has written that Michie’s translations are so accurate that they can be used as cribs.
There is, however, another way of rendering a poem from an unfamiliar language, one that will be of no use to scholars but will bring it alive for new readers. Instead of scented oils and lavish roses, Anthony Hecht begins his version, ‘What well-heeled knuckle-head, straight from the unisex / Hairstylist and bathed in “Russian Leather,” / Dallies with you these late summer days, Pyrrha, / In your expensive sub-let?’ And after predicting the ingénu’s swamping and dismasting inserts an extra note of bitterness by changing the lady’s name in the last line to Piranha.
An excellent modern imitation of Rimbaud’s Au Cabaret-Vert by Fay Hart was published in The Spectator though not as an entry to the weekend competition. Entitled At Casa Verde, five in the afternoon, the gender of the speaker is necessarily changed and the setting is now South America. Instead of ‘Depuis huit jours,j’avais dechire mes bottines,’ we get, ‘I ripped my feet to bits walking the pilgrim trail…’ and replacing Rimbaud’s buxom barmaid whom he suggest wouldn’t be averse to an encounter, is a ‘Cuban-heeled boy, able-bodied, slicked-back, skintight jeans and a scowl’ of whom the poet says, ‘he could have me in a heartbeat that one.’
I would love to give both these re-creations here but it is one of the unintended consequences of the copyright laws that they impede proselytizing.
The Swedish laureate’s work may not be suitable for this sort of treatment and perhaps we will have to go in ignorance of his poetic achievement unless we learn Swedish.
Exhibition
ROBERT CROZIER
RECENT PRINTS
4th - 15th October 2011
Tuesday to Saturday 11am to 5pm
The Gallery at McNaughtan's Bookshop
3A & 4A Haddington Place, Edinburgh
My exhibition Recent Prints opens next week at the gallery attached to Edinburgh’s premier antiquarian bookshop. I originally conceived it as something different. It is good economic practice to make small prints from scraps of material and off-cuts of the tosa shojo paper I use, left over from bigger works. Having made a number of these over the years, which I exhibited mainly in Glasgow, I had the idea of collecting them under some such title as Some of My Little Ones. But the economics of this proved less sound. A small frame has four corners just as a larger one and although it may use a little less moulding is not much cheaper. I toyed with the idea of mounting groups of the prints in large frames, but when this proved unsatisfactory, I decided to show my larger current work.
My small prints could be described as genre pieces. I based them on sketches produced on public transport, in cafes etc. In my latest work I have been using a different sort of figure composition, more cohesive, less aleatory. In the absence of a grand theme what evolved were prints of people engaged, as participators or spectators, in rather absurd leisure activities. I hope it says something about the modern world.
Another group in the collection consists of one or two garden images. I know a garden in France whose owner is not there all year. He has tried to make it drought-proof and weed-resistant with low, ground-covering plants from which the more architectural ones emerge. He did not manage, however, to achieve all-year-round flowering. I became intrigued by the variety of greens on display and I tried to produce the effect within the limits of lino cutting.
Integrating into the Digital Community
I have metamorphosed from a digital immigrant into a digital emigrant, recently. My website has not been updated for ages and I haven’t posted a blog in months, the latter fact only partially accounted for by a hard drive failure. I do have a basic mobile phone (pressed on me by my wife) but I rarely use it. Actually, I seldom use a traditional phone.
Having an internet presence has proved worthwhile to some extent: the odd sale has come via my website and an all expenses-paid invitation to exhibit further a field. But there can be disadvantages too. A gallery owner has told me that she regards anything displayed on the ether as not virgin work and not worthy of being exhibited. Then there is the sort of bait that I’ve had from a New York gallery, offering to promote me for a fee. I’m not going to pay to practise as an artist.
A retreat from the computer may be more general as people become aware of the time wasted in front of keyboard and screen addicted to pointless googling. Readers of the philosopher Karl Popper may remember his searchlight theory of the mind about the futility of collecting random facts.
A digital device I do love is my radio. Test Match Special is my favourite working background and I’m able to listen to it without interruption from the Shipping Forecast and the Daily Service. I’m spared outbursts from my wife who seemed to think that the presence of the programme on Radio 4 long wave, was a personalised persecution with which I was somehow involved. Now she has her own digital set which helps to preserve domestic harmony. I only ever watched cricket on television during a coffee break. These days, even if it returned to terrestrial TV, I’m not sure I would be able to get the right channel, now that we have that little black box on top of our set.
I realise that I’m never going to pass myself off as a digital native and there is pride in keeping up ethnic traditions, consulting reference books accumulated over a lifetime, reading print without a light behind it.
But I will still continue to blog from time to time even if it is only to sort out my own thoughts. Looking at the map of my hits, there seems to be a cluster in Alaska. Perhaps Sarah Palin is a fan.
Having an internet presence has proved worthwhile to some extent: the odd sale has come via my website and an all expenses-paid invitation to exhibit further a field. But there can be disadvantages too. A gallery owner has told me that she regards anything displayed on the ether as not virgin work and not worthy of being exhibited. Then there is the sort of bait that I’ve had from a New York gallery, offering to promote me for a fee. I’m not going to pay to practise as an artist.
A retreat from the computer may be more general as people become aware of the time wasted in front of keyboard and screen addicted to pointless googling. Readers of the philosopher Karl Popper may remember his searchlight theory of the mind about the futility of collecting random facts.
A digital device I do love is my radio. Test Match Special is my favourite working background and I’m able to listen to it without interruption from the Shipping Forecast and the Daily Service. I’m spared outbursts from my wife who seemed to think that the presence of the programme on Radio 4 long wave, was a personalised persecution with which I was somehow involved. Now she has her own digital set which helps to preserve domestic harmony. I only ever watched cricket on television during a coffee break. These days, even if it returned to terrestrial TV, I’m not sure I would be able to get the right channel, now that we have that little black box on top of our set.
I realise that I’m never going to pass myself off as a digital native and there is pride in keeping up ethnic traditions, consulting reference books accumulated over a lifetime, reading print without a light behind it.
But I will still continue to blog from time to time even if it is only to sort out my own thoughts. Looking at the map of my hits, there seems to be a cluster in Alaska. Perhaps Sarah Palin is a fan.
Postcards
Foreign travel for me has always been about seeing art. Of course, I take in other things, but visiting galleries and museums has always been central. When I was fifteen I made my first visit to the Louvre during a school trip, and in my early adult years, I was able to see the Prado, the Brera, the Uffizi, the Venice Accademia and many other smaller collections. For many years the family holiday was always in Italy, based around one or other mural cycle or architectural figure. My family was usually interested or tolerant, although I remember my daughter going through the several miles of the Vatican Galleries neither looking to left or right, waiting for the bribe of an ice cream. In Verona she sighed and exclaimed, ‘Dad and his Sanmicheli gates,’ signalling that she well understood adult madness. In recent years it has become my custom to have a short break early in the year to visit the galleries of northern Europe: The Netherlands, Germany, Vienna. I have still to visit the Hermitage. This year I have already had the good fortune to see ten collections in New York and France.
The great change that I have seen over the years has been in museum shops. At one time, major museums would stock postcards of practically every work in their collections. Today they sell books, toys and anything on which they can stamp a reproduction of a well-known work, from wine bottles to cushion covers. There may still be a handful of cards of signal works – the very last ones I will need any prompting to recall.
The primary reasons for visiting the great collections is to see in actuality, the masterpieces of European art already known from reproductions. Collecting postcards, for me at any rate, was a way of retaining some memory of minor or unusual works that impressed. It consolidated the experience of the visit. I was often disappointed in smaller museums. I would see a small work, by Signorelli for instance, that seemed to me better than anything he achieved on a grand scale, or something in one of the minor galleries in Milan that contradicted the rule that paintings by the Leonardo followers are uniformly awful. By the very nature of the problem, my list of missed opportunities to get any memento of these aesthetic experiences is small. Any impression of these finding has escaped for ever. Among the cards that I treasure are those of a series of small murals by Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo, (who is for me a more interesting painter than his prolific and accomplished father), from the Ca’ Rezzonica; Venice, a painting of a flute player with a white horse from the Musee des Beaux Arts, Rouen, attributed to Watteau, (it convinces me that it can only be by the master); and portraits by da Messina from the palazzo galleries in Genoa.
In a gallery shop, I am not going to buy a guidebook illustrated with works that are known worldwide. Nor am I going to buy heavy tomes that I can consult elsewhere and certainly not tat that uses great works of art inappropriately. From the now lapsed practice of stocking inexpensive reproductions of a large range of a collection’s exhibits, I have a personally selected gallery in miniature of works that would be difficult to track down even in a good library. I regret not being able to add to it.
The great change that I have seen over the years has been in museum shops. At one time, major museums would stock postcards of practically every work in their collections. Today they sell books, toys and anything on which they can stamp a reproduction of a well-known work, from wine bottles to cushion covers. There may still be a handful of cards of signal works – the very last ones I will need any prompting to recall.
The primary reasons for visiting the great collections is to see in actuality, the masterpieces of European art already known from reproductions. Collecting postcards, for me at any rate, was a way of retaining some memory of minor or unusual works that impressed. It consolidated the experience of the visit. I was often disappointed in smaller museums. I would see a small work, by Signorelli for instance, that seemed to me better than anything he achieved on a grand scale, or something in one of the minor galleries in Milan that contradicted the rule that paintings by the Leonardo followers are uniformly awful. By the very nature of the problem, my list of missed opportunities to get any memento of these aesthetic experiences is small. Any impression of these finding has escaped for ever. Among the cards that I treasure are those of a series of small murals by Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo, (who is for me a more interesting painter than his prolific and accomplished father), from the Ca’ Rezzonica; Venice, a painting of a flute player with a white horse from the Musee des Beaux Arts, Rouen, attributed to Watteau, (it convinces me that it can only be by the master); and portraits by da Messina from the palazzo galleries in Genoa.
In a gallery shop, I am not going to buy a guidebook illustrated with works that are known worldwide. Nor am I going to buy heavy tomes that I can consult elsewhere and certainly not tat that uses great works of art inappropriately. From the now lapsed practice of stocking inexpensive reproductions of a large range of a collection’s exhibits, I have a personally selected gallery in miniature of works that would be difficult to track down even in a good library. I regret not being able to add to it.
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