SCULPTURE'S DULL PERIOD

  

Reviewing the current exhibition of Daumier at the Royal Academy, London, Julian Bell reproduces a cartoon by the artist, which shows a sculpture that has become animated.  It is in an enraged state because it is being totally ignored by the Salon visitors. Bell quotes Baudelaire suggesting that naturalistic sculpture is boring and satisfies only hicks and savages because something that can be viewed from all angles gives no scope to the imagination.

I have been thinking about these matters, because earlier this year, I had occasion to view sculptures from four different periods in galleries in Toulouse. The Musée Des Augustins, housed in an ecclesiastical styled building, boasts large collections of Gothic, Romanesque and 19^th century sculpture, while the Musée Saint-Raymond has the best selection of Roman busts that I have ever come across.

I can’t work up much enthusiasm for Gothic carving. Much of it is obviously highly skilled, but it seems to be for the glory of God rather than the appreciation of mere mortals and in its original positions, gets lost in the other elaborations of the architectural style. The earlier Romanesque sculpture, on the other hand can be full of interest. It had a teaching function to tell the stories of the Bible or frighten us into good behaviour by its visions of Hell. Thus the Romanesque tympanum is at viewable height unlike so many high neoclassical pediments copying ancient Greek architecture where the sculpture was for the eyes of the gods not humans: the famous Parthenon frieze couldn’t be seen at all in situ.

The Toulouse gallery had an extensive collection of Romanesque capitols mounted at eye level on steel plinths. Carving a story round a relatively small block of stone seems to have inspired sculptors. It may be something similar to the way in which the restrictions of traditional prosody can lead to inventiveness in poetry and, although the examples at the Augustins were not of the highest quality they were far superior to the collection of eminently ignorable 19^th century pieces. I could imagine a seething mass of furious marble figures coming to life Daumier-like.

Baudelaire may be on to something. On several occasions, I have asked groups of well-informed people, including artists, how many sculptors they can name in the period between the end of the Renaissance and the abandonment of naturalism in modern times. Many can’t come up with any names at all. A few have managed, Bernini, Canova and Rodin while I am sure they could name many more painters without difficulty.

As I have noted in an earlier blog, many traditional sculptures make an architectural contribution to our stone built cities, but this is largely due to the fine proportions of their classically inspired plinths. Aesthetically, what is on top of them, is often little more than a finial, which is why the proposal of the authorities in Glasgow to heighten their Wellington monument, to avoid the general being perpetually crowned with a traffic cone, was so misguided. Meanwhile, unless we seek out images of figures of historical interest we wander round our great capitals disregarding whole populations of marble citizens and horses. Think of Hansen’s parliament building in Vienna with no less than four, or is it six, quadrigas on its roof and all these toga-clad people atop buildings in Edinburgh, London, Paris and elsewhere.

If there is a lack of interest in full-sized sculpture in the period I have described, that is even more true if we consider portrait busts. We may look at Houdon to see what Diderot looked like, Nollekens to have some idea of Fox. But unless the subject looks distinctive, we will probably retain nothing. In Frankfurt a few years ago, I was delighted to find a sculpted portrait of Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, a French enlightenment philosophe in whom I am very interested. Today, I haven’t a clue as to what he looks like. Why is it then that I was so entranced by the Roman busts at the Musée Saint-Raymond? It is known who the subjects of these works are, but that did not interest me. The sculptures themselves have a power and a presence that I can’t explain. There is nothing in Western sculpture that comes anywhere near them unless perhaps Bernini’s busts of the dignitaries of the church who were his patrons. We are lucky to have one of these in Edinburgh.

   

PAINTINGS AND REPRODUCTIONS, LIVE MUSIC AND RECORDINGS

A friend of mine the other day was shocked by my admission, that when I eventually got the opportunity to visit the Museum of Modern Art, New York, I was so familiar with some of the paintings from reproductions, that the actual works bored me. I instanced Van Gogh’s Starry Night, Dali’s melting watches and Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. He thought that this was ridiculous but I explained that I was only honestly relating an experience, not putting forward any principle.

I mention this because I have just visited the National Gallery of Scotland to see Manet’s Mademoiselle Claus, recently acquired by the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. Seeing originals is more important for an appreciation of Manet’s genius than practically any other painter: some of his works in reproduction can seem almost academic, even photographic, only revealing their quality and originality when actually confronted. The economy of his brushwork is astounding and seeing how the dabs of paint coalesce to form perfect illusions of reality, is truly magical.

There is no direct analogy between actual paintings versus reproductions and live performances of classical music versus recordings. A particular CD may be superior, as an interpretation of a composer’s intentions, to a given live performance. Colin Wilson’s On Music is the only case that I have come across where an admission of a preference to listening to recorded music over attending concerts, has been made.

Undoubtedly, there is a lot of snobbishness connected with classical music and there are people who live their lives so vicariously that they seem to feel the need to be attached to celebrity, however tenuously, so that there is a thrill in attending a performance by a famous musician even although they are getting very little from it musically. Charles Rosen has written about how audiences in the past would contain a higher proportion of competent pianists who would know the music being played from direct experience. The equivalent of  recorded symphonic music before the modern age was the arrangements for piano duet that composers like Brahms supplied for home consumption.

I have often thought that, having no musical ability myself, I would not have gained the immense pleasure from classical music that I have had, if I had lived before the advent of recorded music. And it may be true that the musically accomplished get more from of it than I do, although I know quite gifted individuals who close their minds to anything composed in the last hundred years. Before a concert I like to do my homework. I am not going to pay for an expensive ticket and get lost so that I dream.

My last live music experience was the concert by the Arditti Quartet at the Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh. The concert began with Janacek’s first quartet, which I have known for a long time but I was attracted to this concert because of two quartets by Conlon Nancarrow. I had read about him and had duly bought a CD to sample his music. (Generally this is my route to musical enjoyment. It began when as a schoolboy in Orkney  I  read about modern jazz musicians like Charlie Parker, sent for a record from Keith Prowse in London and played it until I understood it.) There were two other pieces in the programme both by Xenakis and they gained  from live performance.

My previous experience of the work of Xenaxis was over forty years ago. On holiday in Paris, I attended with my wife an event in the ruins at the Musée de Cluny, where we lay on our backs on matting, watching a lighting display overhead to the accompaniment of electronic music. It was a fun, holiday curiosity and it didn’t make me want to mug up on Xanakis’ music. Watching the Arditti Quartet producing the gratings, slides and textures from conventional instruments was a much more engaging experience. It gave something I don’t think you would get from a recording.

The piece I have taken to most from my Nancarrow recordings is Piece No.2 for Small Orchestra not the two quartets played by the Arditti Quartet, much as I enjoyed them. l may never have the opportunity to hear Piece No.  2 live.

WITCHES WITHOUT MAGIC

The major art exhibition during last year’s Edinburgh International Festival was entitled Symbolist Landscape. I was apprehensive about the show: there are many ghastly Symbolist paintings. In the event, I was pleasantly surprised. The category was stretched a bit but there were many fine paintings that I had not seen before and several beautifully hung walls. The curator had no axe to grind and he or she (I am in favour of curators having a low profile) had assembled an exhibition of great and interesting paintings.

But ghastly paintings, in every sense do predominate in one of this year’s Festival shows at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. For the exhibition Witches and Wicked Bodies, which is advertised as being a first to explore artists’ view of witches, the curator has obviously struggled to come up with many artists of quality. The show relies heavily on Goya who is represented by one small painting based on a long-forgotten play, The Forcibly Bewitched, and several etchings from The Caprichos that can be seen at any time on request, at the Scottish National Gallery. If, as I understood from an interview on Scottish Newsnight, the curator is making any point about the horrific treatment of women during the witch craze in the 16^th and 17^th centuries, the inclusion of Goya is to say the least problematic.

Goya, as his letters make clear, didn’t believe in witches. Robert Hughes in his scholarly monograph explains how the painter completed a small series of witch paintings for his patron the Duchess of Osuna who was interested in them ‘rather as one might display a faux-naïve or campy taste for horror movies without actually believing in reincarnated mummies or creatures from the black lagoon.’ Without being aware of the context, many of us must have wondered about the great Goya’s Witches Sabbath (1797-98) with its comical billy goat. It’s difficult to take it seriously. And, of course, the witches and hobgoblins of The Caprichos they’re meant to be satirical aren’t they?

Other exhibits too, have a very tenuous connection with the persecution of old women as witches. Fuseli’s Weird Sisters was produced for the dealer Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery and the witches in Macbeth are really a dramatisation of the inner monologue of Macbeth’s demented ambition. No artist has been found who deals with the witch craze at a serious level. Even the painters and printmakers contemporary with the grim realities produced fantasies with a carnival spirit that make them appear sophisticated Halloween events.

I’m sure that a search among popular prints of the time would produce images of the atrocities but there is no evidence that any serious artist bore witness as Goya did, of the horrors of war, or recorded with relish the barbarities of the age. Among Rembrandt’s drawings there are two sketches of a woman on a gibbet but there is no suggestion that she was an executed witch. An axe hangs beside her. Perhaps she struck down a brutal husband. Rembrandt doesn’t turn her into a monster. The mood of the drawings seems even compassionate

So what is the point of this exhibition? If one wants to know about the witch craze there are several well know studies. If one expects aesthetic excitement, disappointment is in store. 

ICONOGRAPHY: INTERESTING BUT IRRELEVANT

I ended my last blog by stating that I didn’t want to know the story behind the Chinese painting entitled, Three Hermits Laughing at Tiger Stream. It has set me thinking about how great visual artworks have to survive the meanings, describable in language, that may have been vital to their creation. I remember wondering a long time ago why there was the decapitated head of an ass in the foreground of Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne. Eventually, I came across the explanation, which I have since forgotten. But it makes no difference whatsoever to my love and appreciation of the work.

I am old enough to remember Edgar Wind’s Reith Lectures Art and Anarchy. In the fourth lecture, entitled The Fear of Knowledge, he claimed that we get a profounder understanding of a work of visual art if we know the background ideas.  ‘The eye,’ he states, ‘focuses differently when it is intellectually guided. At the time, I wanted to believe him.  In the expanded, published version of the lectures, I see I have underlined his sentence ‘Masterpieces are not so secure in their immorality as Croce imagined.’ I would argue now, at least where visual art is concerned, that it is almost the definition of a masterpiece that it is not dependant on its original message.  My favourite work on the Virgin and Child theme is the one by Mantegna in the Ehemals Staatliche Museum, Berlin. It is very obviously a young mother with her baby. I do not need to believe any nonsense about virgin births to appreciate it. The best art on religious themes will survive in a secular age. Two works that I admire greatly, illustrate the lives of two Christian saints, but I have no particular interest in these historical figures. Masaccio’s St. Peter Distributing Alms,  I regard as one of the best Social Realist paintings ever, Raphael’s tapestry cartoon of St Paul Preaching, as a supreme example of figures composed in an architectural setting. Those works that require allowance for religious belief, counter-reformation propaganda for example (see my blog Theology versus Art) or are there to force us to our knees, do not interest me and indeed bore me. Which is not to say that I cannot ignore a halo or two or some other convention or stipulation of the day in a work of real merit.

What holds for religious work is also true of that other great literary source for Renaissance artists, the Greek myths. Mantegna’s complex composition Pallas Expelling the Vices from the Garden of Virtue, is a great favourite of mine. It is self-evident that the figures fleeing in terror from the armoured goddess are meant to be evil but I don’t read them like that. I prefer to think of them as unfortunates, perhaps underclass figures, and only need to think of any narrative vaguely. What draws me to this painting is the complexity of the imagery, controlled in a composition of complete clarity, which can lend itself to multiple explanations.

No painting can be rescued by iconographic interpretation, if it does not please in the first place. I have a great love of the work of Poussin and enjoyed Panofsky’s essay where he points out that the master’s title Et in Arcadio Ego, is usually mistranslated: it doesn’t mean ‘I too lived in Arcadia.’ He illustrates by reference to other paintings with the same title (one of them by Poussin himself) showing a death head on the tomb, that it is death who speaks, saying, ‘Even in Arcadia, I am present.’ Not being expert in Latin grammar, and accepting the mis-translation, I admit that the work was a bit of a puzzle.  Yet, despite enlightenment, the painting remains, for me, one of Poussin’s dullest works, with none of his usual compositional inspiration.

SHANGHAI AND CHINESE PAINTING

I am not a dedicated traveller. The few journeys I have made beyond the cultural centres of Europe have been connected with my children. When my son taught in Beijing about fifteen years ago I visited him on two occasions. I have recently spent a month in Shanghai where he is currently working.

The only other city built relentlessly into the clouds, that I have any familiarity with, is New York, and it is tempting to compare the two. Whereas New York is crowded and dirty, Shanghai is spacious and – apart from the smog – clean. To help with the pollution, trees and shrubs have been planted everywhere, kept in immaculate condition by armies of gardeners. The Chinese city, of course, was developed much later than America’s celebrated intellectual centre, and the difference in modernism and efficiency shows. Where New York scores is in the quality of art on public view. One wouldn’t go to Shanghai to see the best of Chinese art. Beijing is certainly a better bet and I believe a great many of the nation’s treasures were looted to Taiwan.

But Shanghai does have its museums with a selection of bronzes, paintings and ceramics, if not comparable to those in the Palace Museum, Beijing. I came away from the city with a greater understanding and love of Chinese painting thanks largely to a bookshop devoted to Chinese art situated in Fuzhou Road next to the Foreign Language Bookstore.

The difficulty that I have had with Chinese painting hitherto, arose from what are often unsympathetic proportions to the Western eye. Landscapes in the hanging scroll format might be something like 114cm high by 24cm broad. Represented in these dimensions were mountain structures that seemed incredible, appropriate only to fairy stories. Reproduced in normal book size, the detail was barely decipherable. Much more sympathetic were the hand scrolls, akin to the Greek frieze type of composition still being adopted by Picasso, in works like Guernica, and even Jackson Pollock. The Palace Museum in Beijing has three great works in this format. I already had a memento of one of these. Zhang Zaduan’s River Scene on the Eve of the Spring Festival, which makes any Brueghel seem under-populated, and in Shanghai I was able to get an inexpensive book almost in magazine format that gave enlarged details. It is always possible to see some sort of illustrations of Gu Hongzhog’s The Night Revels of Han Xizai and the Five Buffaloes by Han Huang, but to pick up for a few yuan reproductions of both, made up of attached postcards that gave the experience of unrolling a hand scroll, was luck indeed. The Night Revels is the only one of these that I have never actually seen: it wasn’t on show during either of my visits to Beijing. For me, it is the greatest of all Chinese paintings with large figures – large that is in relation to the work’s dimensions. The scroll is only 28.7cm high.

I gorged myself on the magazine-like books mentioned above, each with a particular theme: horses, genre figures, women, social events, monks and Arhats (Buddhist saints). This last category seemed to specialise in extreme characterisation. I have been able to establish that one of the works is by a monk Guan Xiu and another two by Shi Ke, both active in the 10^th century. Shi’s work, with its incredibly free and economical brushwork, would look like late Goya if it wasn’t for the obvious Chinese features of his figures.

And I also bought a couple of books on masters of the landscape, one with English text, and overcame my prejudices. There are as many hand scrolls as long upright pieces, and I now know that the improbable-looking mountains are real not fantasies. Among the intricately rendered features, botanical and geological, you find tiny figures that could be overlooked on an initial viewing - a mule train negotiating a treacherous mountain path, people on the terrace of a perilously perched dwelling. There are wonderfully pantheistic moments: a couple of  gowned men lounge on a flat, projecting rock enjoying the view from a height nearer the clouds than any one of Shanghai’s iconic buildings, a single figure staff in hand entranced by a mountain torrent  that seems to fall from the heavens. More often than not, the works connect man and nature.  A painting by an unknown artist is titled, Three Hermits Laughing at Tiger Stream. There is probably some story behind it but I don’t want to know it. It is a splendid title. 

ART YES, THEOLOGY NO.

 Since my wife started getting The Daily Telegraph regularly, I have been reading the exhibition reviews by Richard Dorment. The work of some art journalists can be looked forward to whether you agree with them or not. Waldemar Januszczak, for instance can come out with observations that are so sharp that I feel compelled to copy them into my commonplace book eg. ‘Compared with the enormous flesh fest (by Jenny Saville) the art of Rubens is a celebration of anorexia.’ Dorment, on the other hand merely irritates.

On the first day of the year I read about him waiting eagerly to see what two curators will do with the work of LS Lowry who he describes as an old bore. (See my blog Curating versus Creating.) Reviewing the mixed media show Dance around Duchamp, he made a comment about Cage’s prepared piano compositions that showed clearly that he had preconceived ideas about them. (See my blog Duchamp in Capitals.) Now with his piece on the exhibition of the work of Baroccio, Brilliance and Grace at the National Gallery, London, illustrated with a reproduction of the painter's Rest on the Flight into Egypt, he continues to annoy.

His first canard is geographical. Is the Marche, where Baroccio worked, due east of Bologna? It would be truer to say that it is due east of Florence though Urbino and Loreto which he mentions are even further south. To say that it is a region that the British have yet to discover is arrogant in the extreme. I am sure I am not the only art lover who has driven over the Mountains Of the Moon, following the Piero della Francesca trail from Arezzo to Urbino via Monterchi and Sansepolcro. And you don’t have to go there to see works by Borocci. There are works in the Uffizi, Perugia  cathedral, the Vatican and the Louvre.

That Baroccio is a highly skilled painter and that his many drawings are very sensitive is undoubted but the greatest artists transcend their periods in a way that he doesn’t. I suspect that many have seen his work and passed it by, because it takes a very definite interest in religious ecstasy to stomach so much Counter-Reformation art. Dormant asks us to remember that the Virgin’s ‘ineffable sweetness is part of the picture’s meaning, since it is a characteristic assigned to her by theologicians of the Counter-Reformation.’ In Dorment’s aesthetic we have to go along with clerical dogma as well as the authority or curators.

One further nonsense: Dorment asks us to notice ‘the sole of the Madonna’s conspicuously bare foot….. it is a realistic detail that helps make the biblical story believable.’ There is nothing believable about this Rest on the Journey into Egypt. Compare it to the several versions by Rembrandt of the subject, which are eminently plausible. Barocci’s work is all fluttery garments in bright blue, red and yellow with spotless white, hardly desert-journey attire.

DUCHAMP IN CAPITALS

 Both London and Edinburgh have mounted exhibitions of the work of Marcel Duchamp surrounded by his heirs. Reviewers are ecstatic. Valdemar Januszczak calls him ‘the most important artist of the modern era,’ Richard Dorment, ‘the most important artist of all.’

From this distance much of the minor Fauve and Cubist work produced at the beginning of the twentieth century has lost its sparkle and can now seem quite scruffy.  Marcel Duchamp’s early work too, was on the scruffy side, but his first mature painting, Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2, is a highly finished, almost monochrome painting, in a Cubist/Futurist style.  A tiny detail seems significant: among the analytical planes are three small arcs of white dotted lines, perhaps more appropriate to an engineering drawing. Were they a signal of the direction the artist was about to take? In a letter, Léger writes of a visit to the Salon d’Aviation with Duchamp and Brancusi where Duchamp exclaimed, ‘Painting is finished. What can be done better than this propeller?’

Duchamp, as we know, is famous for his ready-mades. If they were a great turning point in the history of art then the break-through work should be the bicycle wheel or the bottle rack, which were selected for presentation three years before the more famous urinal. The original urinal of 1917, called Fountain and signed R. Mutt, was rejected and not actually exhibited. It was really something of a prank. The lavatory fitting thrust under the nose of the bourgeoisie was more likely to achieve the desired notoriety than any other mundane manufactured object. But there is a clue to Duchamp’s thinking in his letter to the Society of Independents complaining about the rejection of Mr Richard Mutt’s Fountain (Mutt wasn’t a made-up name but the name of the manufacturer). Duchamp ended with the statement, ‘the only works of art produced by America are its plumbing fixtures and its bridges. Engineering again!

The ready-mades were lost or flung out. But in 1996 a Milanese dealer spotted an opportunity, had some pieces reconstructed, and persuaded the aging artist to sign them.  Nobody, ironically, goes so far as to describe the urinal as Duchamp’s magnum opus. All seem to agree that it is the Large Glass aka The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors that deserves that title. It is no ready-made but a meticulously constructed piece with its complex imagery, some of it cut from sheet lead and lead wire, held between two sheets of glass. It brings together ideas which Duchamp had worked on for years, the chocolate grinder, the water mill, curious pipette shapes that are present in the painting Mariée. With the cylinders of the grinder, the wheels of the mill and a series of cone shapes there is a plethora of ellipses set at diverse angles to one another, that are peculiarly satisfying in their exactitude. What it all means is anybody’s guess and the artist’s notes only add, perhaps intentionally, more mystery. Duchamp liked to downgrade what he called the retinal in favour of the cerebral, but this is a bit of a red herring. He is, after all, a visual artist and the work is a composition of mechanical engineering imagery. It is his answer to that propeller, his way of representing the modern world.

What of Duchamp’s offspring? AA Gill states that 'his heirs are entirely self-referential, mistrusting of craft.’ We can hardly blame Duchamp for that. He himself was a craftsman of watchmaker-like intricacy. When he made the Boxes, his portable museums consisting of sixty-nine copies of his paintings and a celluloid replica of The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, he eschewed reproduction techniques and did everything by hand, several years work. Compare that with the tat at the Edinburgh show, From Death to Death and Other Small Tales at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art where a couple of rag dolls are sewn together and there are several examples of that well known modern cliché where a series of pieces with minimum effort and invention are immaculately framed with deep conservation mounts.

I haven’t seen the London exhibition at the Barbican where Duchamp is at the centre of a multimedia show with Rauchenberg, Johns, the choreographer Merce Cunningham and the composer John Cage but from the review by Richard Dorment in The Telegraph, I can tell he is mainly interested in the urinal legacy. Here is what he wrote on Cage’s contribution, ‘piano pieces by Cage float up from instruments mechanically altered to sound as little as possible like music.’ (My shocked underlining)  Dorment wants to reject craft even when it is present. He would be much happier with Cage’s 4’33, more akin to the urinal as a ready-made of four minutes, thirty-three minutes silence with random background noises. Did Dorment ever even listen to Cage’s piano pieces? Alex Ross wrote of them in The Rest is Noise: ‘The prepared piano his (Cage’s), most famous invention, never fails to surprise listeners expecting to be battered by some unholy racket; the preparation process, involving the insertion of bolts, screws, coins, pieces of wood and felt, and objects between the strings, is conceptually violent but the sounds themselves are innately sweet.’ The junk stuff is carefully tuned in and gives the piano a sound something more like the gamelan. Ross thought Cages pieces have some of the supernatural poignancy of Eric Satie. When I heard the cycle Sonatas and Interludes at the Edinburgh Festival, I thought they were not that far from Debussy.