The thing about age,
though you may rant and rage
like a beast in a cage,
is that you can’t disengage
or turn back the page.
And there isn’t a stage
of being worthy and sage
as a long adolescence
goes straight to senescence.
I celebrated my 70th birthday on the penultimate day of 2010. Strangely, I never considered myself old even in my late sixties. Now the nought-ending digit has brought home to me that I am. Everything that Two Brains said about baby-boomers is true about we war babies: it has been easy for us; jobs were plentiful; on one modest salary we could buy a house; and wives, if they so wished, could give up work to look after children. I consider myself personally fortunate too: I got through the scrapes of early adulthood unscathed and my greatest piece of luck was to be able to leave teaching – always un travail alimentaire for me – at 56. These last 14 years have probably been the best years of my life.
When I went to art college in 1958, Pablo Picasso was the painter who most interested me. When I left, the abstractionists Miro, Pollock and Alan Davie were my heroes. Within a year an interest in Marxism had returned me to realism via John Berger and Fernand Léger. A period of intellectual sorting out followed. Working in a sort of representational mode meant going against a prevailing idea that, to adapt a famous limerick by one of the Knox brothers, the history of art ‘was a creature that moves / on predestinate grooves’ inevitabitly towards abstraction. Ironically it was Marxism, with its theory of historical inevitably, that had led me to reject aesthetic historicism. I needed some intellectual support and read Karl Popper’s The Poverty of Historicism. It turned me completely away from Marxism and allowed me to see that the ideas that I had thought progressive, led to anything but humane regimes. I read Popper’s The Open Society and its Enemies and the works of the so-called Popperian Knights, Hayek, Gombrich and Medawar, which have greatly influenced the way I think. Eventually I added Isaiah Berlin, Schumpeter and Oakshott to my personal canon. They are all exemplars of writing in a clear way about difficult things.
Having almost all my time to myself has been wonderful. I listen to more classical music: four string quartets can be played before coffee time, or alternatively, the time can be spent on serious reading. As soon as I left teaching I stopped painting in acrylics, which are more suitable for interrupted work, and took up oils again. In printmaking, I gave up screen printing and reverted to relief printing where I could do all the work except the editioning in my studio. (I imagine the young members of the printmaking workshop asking, ‘Who’s that old, bald guy that’s always on the relief press?’)
I am certainly not going to live to 140, so it’s easy to make the calculation that I am much more than half-way through my life. When I get half-way through a long book, I am always surprised how quickly I read the remainder. I expect it will be the same with life. Inevitably, I wonder a bit how I will end up, but I do not let thinking about it disturb whatever time I have left. Nor do I want to lay down elaborate funeral prescriptions to bother those that might either be a bit sad or guiltily relieved that my life is over. Crematoria are ghastly places, not because they deal with death, but because they are so naff in their designs and arrangements. I would suggest a few simple things for my last rites. I do not want any death professionals, religious or otherwise involved, beyond the clearing up people. Perhaps a friend could say a few words or read a poem. I chose music for both my parents but it was played so softly that it might never have been used. I would want some favourite music played at a decent volume. And anyone turning up should be invited, not to some crummy hotel, but to the flat for some decent wine. As for a humiliating end, what one wants is not the Swiss business, but just some professional help about how to prepare a hemlock bottle from a decent red wine. Then that cheesy euphemism ‘He passed away’ would become ‘He finally passed out’.
The Other John Adams and Others
I have been reading Listen to This, Alex Ross’s newly published book.
It is not as substantial as his masterly The Rest is Noise: Listening to the 20th Century, but essential reading for me. The hostility of so many people I know to any music written in the past hundred years and the absence of young people from classical concerts, is something that alarms me. So, the first paragraph of the book is indeed music to my ears: “I hate ‘classical music’: not the thing but the name. It traps a tenaciously living art in a theme park of the past. It cancels out that music in the spirit of Beethoven could still be written today…” The second paragraph continues: “For at least a century, the music has been captive to a cult of mediocre elitism that tries to manufacture self-esteem by clutching at empty formulas of intellectual superiority...” The third: “When people hear ‘classical’ they think dead…”
Ross didn’t introduce me to John Adams. I had already a couple of CDs and had heard Nixon in China live. But his mention of Harmonielehre led me to seek it out and it hooked me. In the new book he has an essay on John Luther Adams, a composer who lives in Alaska where he has a sound and light installation called The Place Where You Go to Listen. Here, by means of computer technology, seismic and meteorological phenomena are translated into “a luminous field of electronic sound.” It strikes me as the sort of tourist art that has many companions in the visual art world. They are very popular with the general public. I am unlikely to make a pilgrimage but will make a point of hearing some of the composer’s work on CD.
Ross writes of his belated attention to artists in the popular music field. He has essays on Radiohead, Bjork and Bob Dylan. The last is more akin to the more popular music that I listen to – work where the music provides an alternative prosodic structure to sung verse. I loved the series of programmes, Book, Music and Lyric, that Robert Cushman presented on Radio 3 many years ago, and which he followed up with another, New York Cabaret. They made me aware of musicals for intelligent people and singer-song writers of superb inventiveness like Dave Frishberg and Randy Newman. I have also enjoyed the great French chansonneurs, Georges Brassens, Leo Ferré, Boris Vian and Barbara. Even country music can surprise me with interesting lyrics. Cushman illustrated how it could work well in musicals such as Big River, based on Hucklebury Finn, and The Greatest Little Whorehouse in the West. In these related genres there can be great wit, often with a serious purpose, as in Brassens’ song about an escaped gorilla seeking to lose its virginity that turns out to be an anti-capital punishment piece. Some songs deal in a sort of humorous realism. A country song of disillusioned love contains the line:
Is this what I shaved my legs for?
And there is this from a Maltby and Shire review:
I didn’t know I had a prostate,
It’s the march of time.
From an extract from a Radiohead lyric that Ross gives:
You’re so fucking special
I wish I was special
But I’m a creep.
I realise that I’m unlikely to get the sort of verbal wit I like from his research into the non-classical area but he does make a case for the music. I will investigate.
Lest I give a wrong impression of this outstanding writer on music who rarely gets technically esoteric, I will add that Ross writes acutely about Brahms, Schubert, Verdi and Mozart in this book and recall that The Rest is Noise, not only made me enthusiastic about John Adams, but turned me on to Sibelius, thus making me more likely to listen to other composers I’d previously been prejudiced about: Rachmaninov, for instance.
It is not as substantial as his masterly The Rest is Noise: Listening to the 20th Century, but essential reading for me. The hostility of so many people I know to any music written in the past hundred years and the absence of young people from classical concerts, is something that alarms me. So, the first paragraph of the book is indeed music to my ears: “I hate ‘classical music’: not the thing but the name. It traps a tenaciously living art in a theme park of the past. It cancels out that music in the spirit of Beethoven could still be written today…” The second paragraph continues: “For at least a century, the music has been captive to a cult of mediocre elitism that tries to manufacture self-esteem by clutching at empty formulas of intellectual superiority...” The third: “When people hear ‘classical’ they think dead…”
Ross didn’t introduce me to John Adams. I had already a couple of CDs and had heard Nixon in China live. But his mention of Harmonielehre led me to seek it out and it hooked me. In the new book he has an essay on John Luther Adams, a composer who lives in Alaska where he has a sound and light installation called The Place Where You Go to Listen. Here, by means of computer technology, seismic and meteorological phenomena are translated into “a luminous field of electronic sound.” It strikes me as the sort of tourist art that has many companions in the visual art world. They are very popular with the general public. I am unlikely to make a pilgrimage but will make a point of hearing some of the composer’s work on CD.
Ross writes of his belated attention to artists in the popular music field. He has essays on Radiohead, Bjork and Bob Dylan. The last is more akin to the more popular music that I listen to – work where the music provides an alternative prosodic structure to sung verse. I loved the series of programmes, Book, Music and Lyric, that Robert Cushman presented on Radio 3 many years ago, and which he followed up with another, New York Cabaret. They made me aware of musicals for intelligent people and singer-song writers of superb inventiveness like Dave Frishberg and Randy Newman. I have also enjoyed the great French chansonneurs, Georges Brassens, Leo Ferré, Boris Vian and Barbara. Even country music can surprise me with interesting lyrics. Cushman illustrated how it could work well in musicals such as Big River, based on Hucklebury Finn, and The Greatest Little Whorehouse in the West. In these related genres there can be great wit, often with a serious purpose, as in Brassens’ song about an escaped gorilla seeking to lose its virginity that turns out to be an anti-capital punishment piece. Some songs deal in a sort of humorous realism. A country song of disillusioned love contains the line:
Is this what I shaved my legs for?
And there is this from a Maltby and Shire review:
I didn’t know I had a prostate,
It’s the march of time.
From an extract from a Radiohead lyric that Ross gives:
You’re so fucking special
I wish I was special
But I’m a creep.
I realise that I’m unlikely to get the sort of verbal wit I like from his research into the non-classical area but he does make a case for the music. I will investigate.
Lest I give a wrong impression of this outstanding writer on music who rarely gets technically esoteric, I will add that Ross writes acutely about Brahms, Schubert, Verdi and Mozart in this book and recall that The Rest is Noise, not only made me enthusiastic about John Adams, but turned me on to Sibelius, thus making me more likely to listen to other composers I’d previously been prejudiced about: Rachmaninov, for instance.
Imports, Exports
French academics and politicians have worried for a long time about the amount of English words coming into their language. The imports have certainly been substantial. The great chansonneur Leo Ferre in his satirical song ‘La langue francaise’ notes barmaid, darling, travelling, best seller, planning, starter, after shaving, parking, one man show, cash, starlet, scope, very good, baby, jockey, steeple-chase, driver, sleeping car, milk bar, glass, call girl, Kleenex, lucky, sex appeal, black out, standing, self service and there are many, many more. Hostility to the influx has been intensified by endemic anti-Americanism, despite the fact that America was the first to come to France’s aid in the aftermath of its self-inflicted disaster, the Franco-Prussian War and rescued it in the two world wars.
There have been several reactions to this perceived linguistic imperialism. Wasn’t it Clemenceau who said that English was only French badly pronounced? Andrew Hussey, in his book ‘Paris, the Secret History’, relates how the eccentric Anglophobe Michel Fleury would spell ‘weekend’ as ‘ouikènde’. Chirac stormed out of an international meeting when a French negotiator dared to speak English instead of French. In 1994 a law was passed making it obligatory to use the French language in government publications, adverts and workplaces. French words had to be in some cases coined e.g. ‘jardinerie’ for garden centre, ‘ordinateur’ for computer and ‘numèrique’ for digital. The Minister of Culture who shepherded the bill through the Assemblèe was called Jacques Toubon; ‘Le Canard Enchainé’ promptly christened him Allgood.
English has happily adopted words and phrase from many other languages. We even have French phrases like double entendre which the French appear not to use themselves, and I have yet to meet a French person who understands the psychological term folie à deux. Some phrases like le mot juste and sauve qui peut are a bit old-fashioned, even pompous these days, but l’esprit d’escalier, the retort you think of coming down from the salon where you might have shone if you had been a bit more quick-witted, still serves well.
But English could well adopt some very useful words from modern French. In my own field, the visual arts, I find myself already doing so. My favourite is croûtes, a word for lousy paintings, the type of crude landscapes and cityscapes painted for tourists. There is also un travail alimentaire: the sort of job after art school that in my day was teaching, but for younger painters is more and more looking after old people. The late Claude Chabrol described one of his works as un film alimentaire. I suppose we might say ‘potboiler’ but that has become a bit démodé. The generic word for printing in French is tirage, particularly apt for relief printing, my chosen form. It expresses well the exciting moment when you peel off a print from the block with the final colour and see whether all your calculations have worked.
Others in different occupations may well find French words slipping into their vocabulary because they are somehow more suitable than the English available. I rather like the noun corrumpus. We would have to say corrupt businessmen, politicians etc or make the adjective act as a noun by prefacing it with the definite article. Contrary to what we were taught at school as an absolute rule, the French use corrumpus without an article. It would work well in English if we simply sounded the ‘s’.
There have been several reactions to this perceived linguistic imperialism. Wasn’t it Clemenceau who said that English was only French badly pronounced? Andrew Hussey, in his book ‘Paris, the Secret History’, relates how the eccentric Anglophobe Michel Fleury would spell ‘weekend’ as ‘ouikènde’. Chirac stormed out of an international meeting when a French negotiator dared to speak English instead of French. In 1994 a law was passed making it obligatory to use the French language in government publications, adverts and workplaces. French words had to be in some cases coined e.g. ‘jardinerie’ for garden centre, ‘ordinateur’ for computer and ‘numèrique’ for digital. The Minister of Culture who shepherded the bill through the Assemblèe was called Jacques Toubon; ‘Le Canard Enchainé’ promptly christened him Allgood.
English has happily adopted words and phrase from many other languages. We even have French phrases like double entendre which the French appear not to use themselves, and I have yet to meet a French person who understands the psychological term folie à deux. Some phrases like le mot juste and sauve qui peut are a bit old-fashioned, even pompous these days, but l’esprit d’escalier, the retort you think of coming down from the salon where you might have shone if you had been a bit more quick-witted, still serves well.
But English could well adopt some very useful words from modern French. In my own field, the visual arts, I find myself already doing so. My favourite is croûtes, a word for lousy paintings, the type of crude landscapes and cityscapes painted for tourists. There is also un travail alimentaire: the sort of job after art school that in my day was teaching, but for younger painters is more and more looking after old people. The late Claude Chabrol described one of his works as un film alimentaire. I suppose we might say ‘potboiler’ but that has become a bit démodé. The generic word for printing in French is tirage, particularly apt for relief printing, my chosen form. It expresses well the exciting moment when you peel off a print from the block with the final colour and see whether all your calculations have worked.
Others in different occupations may well find French words slipping into their vocabulary because they are somehow more suitable than the English available. I rather like the noun corrumpus. We would have to say corrupt businessmen, politicians etc or make the adjective act as a noun by prefacing it with the definite article. Contrary to what we were taught at school as an absolute rule, the French use corrumpus without an article. It would work well in English if we simply sounded the ‘s’.
The thing about being an intellectual snob,
which earns you the suspicion of the middle-brow mob,
is that it performs a really useful job:
if at some time you don't go through this phase,
you'll avoid the difficult all your days.
We had a good Festival this year. We found that ancient people like ourselves could get two tickets for the price of one, so were able to go to twice as many concerts as we had budgeted for. Looking round the sea of white coiffures and grey beards, it was obvious that we were part of a half-price audience. Young people don’t go to classical concerts these days and there is a danger that this music will have no audience in the future.
If this does happen, current concert-goers will bear some responsibility. At the Festival concerts it was noticeable that attendance was down whenever modern or unfamiliar composers were included. At a recent concert billed The New Romantics – perhaps a ploy to attract a younger audience – there were plenty of empty seats but perhaps a slightly higher proportion of young people. The featured works were Three Places in New England by Charles Ives, two works by John Adams and a piece by another post-minimalist composer, Ingram Marshall. Adams’ Son of Chamber Symphony, with its prepared piano, double battery of percussion instruments and wealth of rhythm and textures, would be an ideal work to engage young people with classical music.
I remember an instance when I was working in Edinburgh’s print workshop, where instead of the usual popular music, somebody had put on a CD of classical stuff. A girl remarked that the piece playing was ‘naff music’. Recognising that it was from La Traviata, I initially put down her opinion as rampant philistinism. But then I reflected that away from the drama of the opera, middle period Verdi must seem very ordinary indeed. They have grown up in an environment where every piece of music — in adverts, in cinema, in jazz and pop — reflects to some extent the developments in classical music over the past hundred years in terms of harmonic complexity, instrumental mix, rhythmic and textural intricacy.
There is a great deal of class snobbishness in today’s conservative classical-music audience, which makes it risky for organisers to put on many modern works. Unlike the intellectual snobbishness of my ‘thingabout,’ which can make people curious about innovation and work at understanding the new, it is wholly negative. In France where we attend concerts in little 11th and 12th century churches during the heat of the summer, expats can be seen dressed up in collars and ties while the performers themselves are casually dressed, as they are more and more in concerts here. There seems to be a feeling that attending concerts is the right thing to do, even if one snoozes or reads the programme instead of listening.
Another anecdote: when I used to teach the history of painting to young people, a teaching aid on the German Expressionists was a set of slides that had to be coordinated with an LP of spoken commentary and music. My pupils were not impressed by Kandinsky and his Teutonic contemporaries, but they all liked the music. It was Schoenberg’s first chamber symphony.
which earns you the suspicion of the middle-brow mob,
is that it performs a really useful job:
if at some time you don't go through this phase,
you'll avoid the difficult all your days.
We had a good Festival this year. We found that ancient people like ourselves could get two tickets for the price of one, so were able to go to twice as many concerts as we had budgeted for. Looking round the sea of white coiffures and grey beards, it was obvious that we were part of a half-price audience. Young people don’t go to classical concerts these days and there is a danger that this music will have no audience in the future.
If this does happen, current concert-goers will bear some responsibility. At the Festival concerts it was noticeable that attendance was down whenever modern or unfamiliar composers were included. At a recent concert billed The New Romantics – perhaps a ploy to attract a younger audience – there were plenty of empty seats but perhaps a slightly higher proportion of young people. The featured works were Three Places in New England by Charles Ives, two works by John Adams and a piece by another post-minimalist composer, Ingram Marshall. Adams’ Son of Chamber Symphony, with its prepared piano, double battery of percussion instruments and wealth of rhythm and textures, would be an ideal work to engage young people with classical music.
I remember an instance when I was working in Edinburgh’s print workshop, where instead of the usual popular music, somebody had put on a CD of classical stuff. A girl remarked that the piece playing was ‘naff music’. Recognising that it was from La Traviata, I initially put down her opinion as rampant philistinism. But then I reflected that away from the drama of the opera, middle period Verdi must seem very ordinary indeed. They have grown up in an environment where every piece of music — in adverts, in cinema, in jazz and pop — reflects to some extent the developments in classical music over the past hundred years in terms of harmonic complexity, instrumental mix, rhythmic and textural intricacy.
There is a great deal of class snobbishness in today’s conservative classical-music audience, which makes it risky for organisers to put on many modern works. Unlike the intellectual snobbishness of my ‘thingabout,’ which can make people curious about innovation and work at understanding the new, it is wholly negative. In France where we attend concerts in little 11th and 12th century churches during the heat of the summer, expats can be seen dressed up in collars and ties while the performers themselves are casually dressed, as they are more and more in concerts here. There seems to be a feeling that attending concerts is the right thing to do, even if one snoozes or reads the programme instead of listening.
Another anecdote: when I used to teach the history of painting to young people, a teaching aid on the German Expressionists was a set of slides that had to be coordinated with an LP of spoken commentary and music. My pupils were not impressed by Kandinsky and his Teutonic contemporaries, but they all liked the music. It was Schoenberg’s first chamber symphony.
I hauled a painting out to trash
and was surprised to find it pleased.
Not for the first time I had the wish
that paintings could be stored on microfiche.
I have been tidying up my studio recently. My problem is that I have an idea for a painting, a print or a visual poem and want to get down to it immediately, but the table – which in my case is a reasonably small item topped with a sheet of chipboard – is piled with cuttings, workouts, books and deposits from other parts of the house which have been unceremoniously dumped there due to my tendency to extend my working area into other parts of the flat. I constantly try to create a place for everything so things can be sorted quickly, but the process has been going on for many years and never seems to be completed.
The biggest storage problem is, of course, paintings, and worst of all those that you think have something but are not quite successful. I spend as much time, even more probably, looking critically at work than actually painting. You can’t make final judgments quickly, either to exhibit or to destroy. Thus, I have propped-up canvasses everywhere that impede access to cupboards, bookcases and other storage. When you come to a firm decision, it’s best to slash the canvas quickly before you change your mind. Alternatively, I might cut out a piece that works on its own as a memento of something more ambitious on which I have spent weeks of my life.
Most painters I know could make much more money than they do if they ditched integrity, if they produced Mediterranean scenes in bright colours executed with a painting knife, or, a particularly Scottish equivalent, semi-abstract landscapes or still lives with lots of red, presented in gold frames. They may be deluded in what they are doing – we all have thoughts of that kind from time to time – but they can only continue with what they do. Many artists worry about what sort of problem they are leaving for their partners and children. A colleague told me that he has instructed his wife that if anything happens to him, she must seal up the attic, crammed with his unsold paintings. Otherwise, she will never be able to sell up and downsize.
and was surprised to find it pleased.
Not for the first time I had the wish
that paintings could be stored on microfiche.
I have been tidying up my studio recently. My problem is that I have an idea for a painting, a print or a visual poem and want to get down to it immediately, but the table – which in my case is a reasonably small item topped with a sheet of chipboard – is piled with cuttings, workouts, books and deposits from other parts of the house which have been unceremoniously dumped there due to my tendency to extend my working area into other parts of the flat. I constantly try to create a place for everything so things can be sorted quickly, but the process has been going on for many years and never seems to be completed.
The biggest storage problem is, of course, paintings, and worst of all those that you think have something but are not quite successful. I spend as much time, even more probably, looking critically at work than actually painting. You can’t make final judgments quickly, either to exhibit or to destroy. Thus, I have propped-up canvasses everywhere that impede access to cupboards, bookcases and other storage. When you come to a firm decision, it’s best to slash the canvas quickly before you change your mind. Alternatively, I might cut out a piece that works on its own as a memento of something more ambitious on which I have spent weeks of my life.
Most painters I know could make much more money than they do if they ditched integrity, if they produced Mediterranean scenes in bright colours executed with a painting knife, or, a particularly Scottish equivalent, semi-abstract landscapes or still lives with lots of red, presented in gold frames. They may be deluded in what they are doing – we all have thoughts of that kind from time to time – but they can only continue with what they do. Many artists worry about what sort of problem they are leaving for their partners and children. A colleague told me that he has instructed his wife that if anything happens to him, she must seal up the attic, crammed with his unsold paintings. Otherwise, she will never be able to sell up and downsize.
The Vatican Tapestries
Waldemar Januszczak, The Sunday Times’ art critic has become very excited at the Pope’s lending four tapestries from the Vatican to be exhibited beside Raphael’s original cartoons. Januszczak even joked that we may risk eternal damnation if we do not go to see them. I am afraid (well not really afraid) that I’ll be risking hell’s fires. Certainly, the tapestries which use gold and silver threads in parts, were very expensive productions, requiring the skills of many weavers over an extended period. But when were man hours an indicator of aesthetic value? After all, Greek sculptors were paid more for a relatively short piece of egg and dart frieze than for complete figures. The pricy threads are only a reminder of the sybaritic lifestyles of Renaissance popes.
In fact, the tapestries are a dreadful travesty of Raphael’s work. The weavers took terrible liberties with them. Accustomed to works where every inch of the surface was covered with intricate designs, they introduced inappropriate detail. The worst example is in Christ’s Charge to St Peter, where Christ’s robe is covered with gold stars. It is as if the Son of God had breakfasted on a dozen or so runny eggs and dribbled them all over his attire. In other tapestries colours were altered upsetting the balance of the compositions. Generally the orchestration of the works is destroyed and Raphael’s powerful compositions are further diminished by the addition of broad, narrative borders of indifferent design.
Raphael was unfortunate that his major mural commission to decorate the papal apartments meant that he had to work with awkward spaces. He did this with great ingenuity, but even his School of Athens, painted on a great vaulted area, forced on him a symmetrical composition. Designing the tapestries, he had no such constraints and could give full scope to his genius. The cartoons are undoubtedly his greatest works. We are fortunate that we can see them at any time as they are on permanent loan from the Queen to the Victoria and Albert Museum.
Turning High Renaissance paintings into tapestries wasn’t really a good idea. Anyone wanting to see tapestries that are great works of art in themselves, should seek out the mediaeval millefleurs pieces. The Lady with the Unicorn in Paris, the Tapestries of the Apocalypse, Angers, The Winged Stags, Rouen would do for a start.
In fact, the tapestries are a dreadful travesty of Raphael’s work. The weavers took terrible liberties with them. Accustomed to works where every inch of the surface was covered with intricate designs, they introduced inappropriate detail. The worst example is in Christ’s Charge to St Peter, where Christ’s robe is covered with gold stars. It is as if the Son of God had breakfasted on a dozen or so runny eggs and dribbled them all over his attire. In other tapestries colours were altered upsetting the balance of the compositions. Generally the orchestration of the works is destroyed and Raphael’s powerful compositions are further diminished by the addition of broad, narrative borders of indifferent design.
Raphael was unfortunate that his major mural commission to decorate the papal apartments meant that he had to work with awkward spaces. He did this with great ingenuity, but even his School of Athens, painted on a great vaulted area, forced on him a symmetrical composition. Designing the tapestries, he had no such constraints and could give full scope to his genius. The cartoons are undoubtedly his greatest works. We are fortunate that we can see them at any time as they are on permanent loan from the Queen to the Victoria and Albert Museum.
Turning High Renaissance paintings into tapestries wasn’t really a good idea. Anyone wanting to see tapestries that are great works of art in themselves, should seek out the mediaeval millefleurs pieces. The Lady with the Unicorn in Paris, the Tapestries of the Apocalypse, Angers, The Winged Stags, Rouen would do for a start.
The Scottish National Galleries' Offerings During the Edinburgh Festival
It may seem an easy option to have as the main Festival exhibition yet another collection of the ever popular French Impressionists, but because of the nature of the Impressionist project – the landscape painters probably painted a canvas a day during large periods of their lives – these exhibitions can still spring surprises and even shift assessment. A show I saw in Vienna last year was full of work I hadn’t even seen reproduced and very credible impressionist works by Gustave Caillebote suggested that he should have a rather more prominent place in the canon. However, a mediocre work by him in the Edinburgh show, unaccountably used in the publicity leaflet, puts that judgment once more in the balance.
Crossing on the ferry from Dieppe, I picked up a leaflet for an exhibition entitled A City for Impressionism in the Musee des Beaux Arts, Rouen. I would love to have seen this show. Pissarro seems to have been the star of it, with a group of canvasses that emphasise the industrial state of the city, with steamboats on the river and factory chimneystacks belching forth. He makes Monet’s sailing boats on the Seine seem old-fashioned and pretty, and his famous series of Rouen cathedral appears to be upstaged by Turner’s painting of the building.
Four paintings in the National Gallery’s ‘blockbuster’ would have justified the entrance fee for me: Manet’s Croquet Players from Frankfurt that is a wonder of free brushwork, Renoir’s Woman with Parasol from the Musee Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid is one of a handful of works by this artist – Le Coup de Vent in the Fitzwilliam is another – that captures an instant impression, Sisley’s stunning snow scene and the long rectangular Bonnard with a woman and a cat.
I wasn’t greatly thrilled by the Christen Kobke exhibition despite the obvious skill of the artist. You don’t need to be an expert in art history to be reminded of Dutch painting of the Golden Age, but compare any of Kobke’s large landscape paintings with the Cuyps still on show at the Queen’s Gallery and you see the problem. His portrait of the landscape painter seated in an interior with table and wall mirror, is not unlike the sort of interiors with figures that Vermeer painted, but in spite of the refined painting it is cluttered. The small portraits sometimes come close to the delightful smallscale portraits by Corot, but never quite get there
It is instructive to take a look at the reproductions in the Scottish National Galleries’ What’s On leaflet. The Impressionists may not appear to be interested in formal qualities, concentrating on a curtain of sense data, but the paintings by Renoir, Van Gogh and Monet show how they were instinctively able to focus in on perfect compositions. This is not true of the Charles Courtney Curran, the James Guthrie and the Kobkes which all have awkward intervals in their arrangements. The best paintings in the Kobke show are two little works of Naples. Relaxed in sketching mode, he was able to get the unity in these which evaded him in his larger works.
Crossing on the ferry from Dieppe, I picked up a leaflet for an exhibition entitled A City for Impressionism in the Musee des Beaux Arts, Rouen. I would love to have seen this show. Pissarro seems to have been the star of it, with a group of canvasses that emphasise the industrial state of the city, with steamboats on the river and factory chimneystacks belching forth. He makes Monet’s sailing boats on the Seine seem old-fashioned and pretty, and his famous series of Rouen cathedral appears to be upstaged by Turner’s painting of the building.
Four paintings in the National Gallery’s ‘blockbuster’ would have justified the entrance fee for me: Manet’s Croquet Players from Frankfurt that is a wonder of free brushwork, Renoir’s Woman with Parasol from the Musee Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid is one of a handful of works by this artist – Le Coup de Vent in the Fitzwilliam is another – that captures an instant impression, Sisley’s stunning snow scene and the long rectangular Bonnard with a woman and a cat.
I wasn’t greatly thrilled by the Christen Kobke exhibition despite the obvious skill of the artist. You don’t need to be an expert in art history to be reminded of Dutch painting of the Golden Age, but compare any of Kobke’s large landscape paintings with the Cuyps still on show at the Queen’s Gallery and you see the problem. His portrait of the landscape painter seated in an interior with table and wall mirror, is not unlike the sort of interiors with figures that Vermeer painted, but in spite of the refined painting it is cluttered. The small portraits sometimes come close to the delightful smallscale portraits by Corot, but never quite get there
It is instructive to take a look at the reproductions in the Scottish National Galleries’ What’s On leaflet. The Impressionists may not appear to be interested in formal qualities, concentrating on a curtain of sense data, but the paintings by Renoir, Van Gogh and Monet show how they were instinctively able to focus in on perfect compositions. This is not true of the Charles Courtney Curran, the James Guthrie and the Kobkes which all have awkward intervals in their arrangements. The best paintings in the Kobke show are two little works of Naples. Relaxed in sketching mode, he was able to get the unity in these which evaded him in his larger works.
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