ARTISTS AND NATIONALSIM

Must there always be a nasty edge to nationalism? We’ve already had a Scottish writer using the categories 'settlers and colonialists' about the English in Scotland and chuckling on a television interview over the reaction it caused. But artists have a very bad record in this area and much greater figures than Alasdair Gray have been guilty.

Wagner immediately comes to mind. He wrote a notorious essay Judaism in Music 

and after his death, he had the burden of being Hitler’s favourite composer. It worked the other way for the Danish/German painter Emile Nolde. His posthumous reputation was saved by his work being included in Hitler’s Exhibition of Degenerate Painters. He was, in fact, a nasty northern nationalist, a member of the Nazi Party expelled from the Berlin Secession for anti-Semitism.

Some of the Russian nationalist composers known as the Mighty Handful were also anti-Semitic and on occasion it got into their music. It is difficult to see how music can show this vile prejudice, but apparently the Goldenberg and Schumuyle movement from Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition is an attempt. Simon Winder in his history of the Habsburgs, Danubia, writes that Janacek ‘was a thoroughly unpleasant Slav nationalist of a dotty kind’. Because of the settling of nationalist scores after the fall of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, Winder also suggests that Mahler, a German-speaking Moravian and a Jew to boot, and Hugo Wolf, a German Slovenian, were perhaps fortunate to die before the deluge.

There are a fair number of great writers from the past who show a nationalist-hate side. Norway’s Nobel laureate, Knut Hamsun showed his nasty northern nationalism in his obituary of Hitler, calling him ‘a reformist character of the highest order (to whom) we his close followers bow at his death’. He had previously given his Nobel prize money to Goebbels. France also had a very unpleasant novelist of high literary quality, Céline, equally famous for his disgusting anti-Semitic tracts. At least France has not seen fit to name a public building after him. However, in the Norwegian village of Oppeid there is a Knut Hamsun Centre, which has been described as a stunning piece of concept architecture.

We can still to be shocked by what is unearthed about artists we admire. The current Times Literary Supplement has a note about a collection of Scottish war poems edited by David Goldie and Roderick Watson. J. C. comments: “Unmentioned by the editors are the fanatical musings of Hugh MacDiarmid, who wished good luck to Luftwaffe bombers circling over London in the Blitz, and asked, ‘Is a Mussolini or a Hitler / Worse than a Bevin or a Morrison?’ Who would have thought that for all his outrageousness, C. M. Grieve could have been such a horrible N.N.N? 

SCOTTISH PAINTING AND NATIONALISM

Moira Jeffrey, in her Saturday Scotsman review of the J.D. Fergusson exhibition, found a few nice things to say about the artist. But she had reservations. The work could be ‘just too sweet and palatable against the acid flavours of his times,’ there were ‘comically proportioned busts and bottoms’ and ‘the irksome nature of some of Fergusson’s paintings speaks for itself. There is their repetiveness, their monumentality, their unique way of being both saccharine and butch.’ My reaction to this, just before the beginning of the year of the referendum on Scottish independence, was to exclaim out loud, ‘Well, there’s a brave girl!’ It seemed like putting a NO sticker in your window and endangering the glazing.

The Scottish Colourists are sacrosanct for much of the Scottish public. Nationalist-inclined politicians like to be photographed in front of their paintings and buy them if they can afford them. The Colourists’ work forms the visual part of the distinctiveness that separatists hope will be boosted by independence. Superiority over English art of the period is claimed, because the Scottish painters with their bright colours, were more in tune with what might be termed the significant forward stream of art history taking place in France with the Post-Impressionists and the Fauves. There were additional Brownie points for the Scots because Fergusson actually took part in a Paris exhibition with some of the French masters.

Such vicarious claims to respectability, however, are double-edged. If you are not in the field for buying, why be content with the substitutes when you can get the real thing? Why look at Peploe when you can look at Cézanne? Why bother with Cadell when you can see what is perhaps Manet’s best still life in a public gallery in Glasgow and his masterpiece of figure composition at the Courtauld in London. As a non-obligated Scot, some of the English Post-Impressionists do seem to me to be more individual, Wilson Steer, for instance and Harold Gilman. And England has throughout produced an array of artists who stand proudly outside the supposed vital juggernaut of art history: Blake, Hogarth, Palmer, Stanley Spencer, Burra, Lowry. There is no Scottishness of Scottish art like there is the Englishness of English art, as Pevsner titled his Reith Lectures.

This not to say there are no very fine Scottish painters. Ramsay’s royal portraits stand up well with any of England’s numerous continental imports (always excepting Holbein and Van Dyck) and his portraits of Rousseau and Hume are works that we look at not just to see what the philosophers were like, but for the art itself. Raeburn stands in the middle of a triumvirate of painters who could construct a perfect human face from a few broad brushstrokes. As he was a jobbing portrait painter, there are some dull works in his oeuvre, but it is remarkable how many are excellent. Yet I wouldn’t quite rank him as the equal of Frans Hals and Manet who make up the trio.

And then, earlier than the Colourists, there is William McTaggart. He is not popular like the former and has probably suffered from attempts to give him significance by linking him to French art as a Scottish Impressionist. But McTaggart cannot be pigeon holed. In some of his best work, he is an odd mixture of landscapist, genre artist and history painter. He also constructed large-scale works from small plein air sketches. If he is to be judged as an Impressionist these things will downgrade him. Many years ago at the Edinburgh International Festival, when a large exhibition of his paintings was mounted, some academics moonlighting as art critics on radio detected some narrative in his work and did just that. Martin Kemp, the Leonardo specialist, who taught art history at St. Andrew and then moved to Oxford (I’m not sure whether he was an Englishman ‘white settling’ in Scotland or a Scotsman who went on to ‘white settle’ in England or vice versa) said at the time that he thought that the exhibition would finally establish McTaggart as an important artist. He also said that he was less sure of the Scottish Colourists.

Three of McTaggart’s greatest works belong to a group which has been called by a biographer his Celtic paintings.They are Emigrants Leaving the Hebrides (Tate Britain), The Emigrants - America (private collection) and The Sailing of the Emigrant Ship which apparently belongs to the Scottish National Gallery. I have never seen it there. Is it because this historical, narrative painting does not fit with the idea of McTaggart as a Scottish Impressionist? Is it another example of the way that nationalist emotion, in trying to escape an inferiority complex, distorts aesthetic judgment?

LONDON EXHIBITIONS

I neither have the time nor the income to traipse down to London to every exhibition I might want to see but I have been lucky to be able to peruse the massive and expensive tomes that pass for exhibition catalogues these days, for both Shunga: Sex and Pleasure in Japanese Art, at the British Museum, and Masterpieces of Chinese Painting 700 – 1900, at the Victorian and Albert.

There is, of course, plenty of Western erotic art around, some of it from the most unlikely figures. Turner and Lowry I believe indulged, if that is the right word, although I have not seen their efforts in this vein. What I am familiar with does not seem to have much to do with making love. It’s all about male lust often tinged with sadism. There are images on Greek pots and even Rembrandt has a couple of etchings of sex scenes, one of a monk rodgering a girl in a cornfield. Some of Picasso’s erotic images show women alone displaying themselves. Where the other sex is involved, and not in the forms of centaurs, satyrs or minotaurs, they display the same lustful characteristics. The many sculptor and model images suggest that the artist has leapt on his model as Rodin was reputed to do.

The Japanese shunga works are quite different. In the main, they show couples enjoying sex together. Women (I hesitate to write feminists for some are against penetration altogether) should approve, as there is great emphasis on female pleasure. Given the giant scale of the sexual organs of both sexes, there is no disguising the fact of male arousal but the curled toes of the women show an equal involvement. In one print, her furrowed brow, indicated with masterful economy by a tiny line, shows the intensity of the woman’s orgasm.

That said, the majority of images in this huge selection are not great works of art.  They are inevitably very repetitious. I was pleased to find that I have a selection of the very best of them by Utamaro, Shuncho and Kuniyoshi in a Thames and Hudson paperback that originally cost £2-50. One of the finest by Utamaro is not explicit at all. It shows a couple lying on a balcony gently touching each other’s face and neck. All that is exposed from under the loose and beautifully patterned fabrics is a glimpse of the woman’s thigh and slender buttocks.

In the exhibition of Chinese painting at the Victorian and Albert Museum the very lengthy scroll Prosperous Suzhou is the work I would have most liked to have seen. The reproduction in its entirety is too small to make anything of.  Leafing through the catalogue, I noted that the first reproduced detail could have been of the restaurant where a group of us ate on a visit to the city this year, but a fuller image later shows the city much changed. The scroll seems to have been made in imitation of the famous Riverside Scene in the Forbidden City, Beijing, painted about four hundred earlier later in the thirteenth century, which I have seen.

While in Suzhou, I visited the New Suzhou Museum designed by I. M. Pei of Louvre pyramid fame. He has a family connection with the city. There I saw an exhibition by a modern Chinese painter He Xi who works in ink and wash on quite a large scale and not in scroll form. His imagery includes fish, insects, plants, animal skins. His achievement is to bring forward the Chinese classical style in the most successful manner that I have come across. I have written before of a contemporary art cliché consisting of a sequence of identically framed variations usually with minimal content. In contrast to these dull works, He Xi has produced an intriguing version where landscapes in the styles of classical masters are contained in glass bottles of different shapes in a bonsai tribute to them. This was only one small part of a wonderful exhibition. I would have loved to take away a well-illustrated catalogue but none was available.    

One is always wary about passing opinions on work one has not actually seen. For this reason, had I been in London, I would certainly have gone to see the murals from the Burghclere Chapel that are being exhibited at Somerset House while the chapel is being restored. Some regard these as Spencer’s masterpiece. I disagree. Much of Spencer’s work, for me, is flawed by awkwardness and arbitrary distortion and some of these defects seem to be prominent in this memorial work based on the artist’s Great War  experience. The curved tops to some of the panels have led to unsatisfactory compositions. But what makes the total effect very ugly in every photograph I have seen is the white bands, broader than the faces of the largest figures that divide the paintings. If these were easel paintings, you would say that they were atrociously framed. Spencer must bear some responsibility. I have read that the scheme was closely based on a drawing of his. Apparently, he was inspired by Giotto’s murals in the Arena Chapel, Padua. But the dividing elements there are covered in geometric patterns, which make them blend in.

Surely, Spencer’s greatest work is the sequence of paintings he produced of the dockyards at Port Glasgow, as an official war artist during the Second World War. They are now in the Imperial War Museum but I was lucky to see them in an exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh in 2000. The very long, unusually-shaped panels, each dedicated to a particular shipbuilder's craft, welding, riveting, plumbing etc., form tunnels of activity. Everything is lit by the glow of furnaces and welding torches forming harmonies of pinks, oranges and browns with contrasting notes of metallic blues. The figures are not stultified as they might have been if each was based on posed models yet there is not that wilful distortion that can mar some of Spencer’s other work. The actual paint handling is rather beautiful.

 Stanley Spencer (1891-1959) was a contemporary of Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968). Duchamp famously said to Leger and Brancusi, after looking at an aeroplane propeller, ‘Painting is dead.’ His masterpiece the Large Glass uses pictorially, engineering technology, the chocolate grinder and the water mill, that would have been known to Leonardo, perhaps even to the Greeks. Spencer, the eccentric English painter, whose main inspiration was early Renaissance masters, completed his greatest work from imagery drawn from the cutting edge technology of his day.

  

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.