A most generous and unexpected gift from our two children gave us five days in the Big Apple. In that time we viewed seven great art collections, took in an Off Broadway show and did a bit of the tourist stuff – marvelled from the top of the Empire State Building, exhilarated across Brooklyn Bridge and wondered at Harlem, Soho and Greenwich Village, where in Washington Square, we saw an outdoor performance, by students of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Were they from the nearby New York University, fees 56 million dollars per year?
The propaganda that New York is now a very safe city would seem to be true. I certainly felt more relaxed on the subway there than in a Paris metro carriage covered in graffiti, floor, windows and ceiling, with dubious youths parading up and down. It was striking how often we were aided by African-American ladies, middle-aged and middle-class, proud of their city and ready to help visitors.
If I had come to New York as a young man, I would have been most anxious to see more work by Jackson Pollock and Arshile Gorky, the two Abstract Expressionists I loved. Today, I think of them much as I regard the Bop jazz musicians that I listened to at the time: with respect but with less passion. The painters still represent for me the peak of American Modernism and I was pleased to see more of their work. At the Whitney we started at the top of the building and wandered past much so-what sort of works, greedy of space but not notably inventive, down to the first floor (second floor in American parlance) where there was an exhibition of Hopper and his contemporaries. Hopper was certainly the most consistent of the bunch but there was very worthy stuff from others. I would have dearly loved to get a reproduction of a figure piece in watercolour by Delmuth.
Thanks to the wealth of America’s great industrial barons, New York has a vast collection of European art. It is not seeing the iconic pieces which is so enjoyable for me, but those that I have never seen reproduced. In the Metropolitan Museum there is room after room of paintings from most schools. Among the masses of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist work there are pieces that seem better than those often seen in monographs. Is it just that the works are new to me? We barely touched the galleries devoted to early civilizations. In the shop (store to Americans), I picked up one of the few postcards on sale, a drawing of a horse’s head, taken from a Chinese scroll attributed to Hans Gan (Tan Dynasty). It is a wonderful, incisive piece of draughtsmanship but I didn’t see the complete scroll, if indeed it was on show.
The Guggenheim was showing an exhibition of early Modernism. Two new-to-me paintings I remember fondly were a wonderfully economical snow scene by Van Gogh and a Malevitch peasant painting also in snow.
Manhattan, as everybody knows, is an island dramatically crammed with skyscrapers, of every style from gothic fantasies to the latest that technology and human ingenuity can devise. It is ironic, therefore, that the buildings that housed two of the most enjoyable art collections were distinctly European in style. The Frick Collection in the steel magnate’s former mansion, has so many outstanding examples of the major European artists that it is easier to say what it doesn’t have – no Frans Hals, I think. The Cloisters which is actually built from bits of ecclesiastical masonry brought from France, houses the magnificent Unicorn Tapestries. Its site at the upper tip of Manhattan almost feels like countryside. Rockefeller, who was behind the project, bought the cliffed shore of New Jersey across the water so that it couldn’t be developed.
On our final morning it was raining heavily and we decided to take shelter in the Neue Galerie, with its re-created Viennese café. The decorative paintings of Klimt and Schiele are not great favourites of mine. I actually dislike Klimt’s portraits where the ladies gowns are made up of coloured shapes and gold leaf. But there is another aspect to him. Male visitors viewing a whole wall of his very explicit drawings of women masturbating may wish they had not hung their overcoats in the cloakroom.
Sawing My Beams
The last book I read in 2010 was Sarah Bakewell’s How to Live, not a self-help treatise, but a biography of the French essayist Michel Eyquem de Montaigne. Montaigne did most of his thinking and writing in one of the towers of his chateau where he had his library and where he had the beams inscribed with favourite precepts. As he had been brought up to speak Latin as his first language, it is not surprising that these are all from classical thinkers. I have been wondering which aphorisms I might apply to the beams of my studio if they were visible. Here are ten of them.
1. Not to know what happened before you were born is to remain a child all your life. Cicero
I have a friend who thinks that revisionist history is only about authors selling their books. It would be odd if they were not interested in disseminating their views, but there is such a thing as peer review. If we do not read up-to-date history, we will have a Boy’s Own Comic notion of it.
2. Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction. Pascal
We might have hoped this would be an outdated observation, but it has become more and more relevant.
3. There is no item of information however insignificant, which I would not rather know, than not know. Dr. Johnson
For me to be curious is simply to be alive.
4. Anything that elicits an immediate nod of recognition has only reconfirmed a prejudice. Don Paterson
There wouldn’t be much point in either Montaigne or myself posting a series of wise sayings if this aphorism contained an absolute truth. Nevertheless, it is a good warning about being alert to lazy thinking.
5. It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interests. Adam Smith
Some Scots who are proud of their great Enlightenment figure but can’t take his economic message are always trying to suggest that modern thinkers, who like to quote him, have somehow got his message wrong. Yet there is no way you can say that Adam Smith is talking about a planned economy.
6. La pire chose, c’est de vouloire être à la mode si cette mode ne vous va pas. Poulenc
The music of Poulenc should make any artist confident that there is no need to think that worthwhile art should follow a linear progression. The visual arts may be somewhat derrière garde in this respect compared with what is happening in literature and music.
7. Formal verse frees one from the fetters of one’s ego. Auden
I do deplore the self-indulgence of so much free verse, nearly always read in a special way that tries to say ‘This is so profound, full of deep insights and ultra-sensitive.’
8. I love the correspondence of viva voce over a bottle, with a great deal of noise and a great deal of nonsense. Sir Joshua Reynolds to James Boswell.
A good summing up of what makes a great evening.
9. My watch cost more than your car.
This is apparently a favourite insult of the super-rich. I’ve never been particularly concerned about people having much more money than myself and this sort of inanity makes me even more contented with my lot.
10. The shorter my possession of life, the deeper and fuller I must make it. Montaigne
To end with, one from the great essayist himself. When you think of what Keats and Masaccio achieved before dying in their twenties and Schubert, Raphael, Mozart, Seurat et al who were cut off in their thirties, one can’t help thinking that in these days of longer life expectancy, we tend to forget that we don’t live for ever.
.
1. Not to know what happened before you were born is to remain a child all your life. Cicero
I have a friend who thinks that revisionist history is only about authors selling their books. It would be odd if they were not interested in disseminating their views, but there is such a thing as peer review. If we do not read up-to-date history, we will have a Boy’s Own Comic notion of it.
2. Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction. Pascal
We might have hoped this would be an outdated observation, but it has become more and more relevant.
3. There is no item of information however insignificant, which I would not rather know, than not know. Dr. Johnson
For me to be curious is simply to be alive.
4. Anything that elicits an immediate nod of recognition has only reconfirmed a prejudice. Don Paterson
There wouldn’t be much point in either Montaigne or myself posting a series of wise sayings if this aphorism contained an absolute truth. Nevertheless, it is a good warning about being alert to lazy thinking.
5. It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interests. Adam Smith
Some Scots who are proud of their great Enlightenment figure but can’t take his economic message are always trying to suggest that modern thinkers, who like to quote him, have somehow got his message wrong. Yet there is no way you can say that Adam Smith is talking about a planned economy.
6. La pire chose, c’est de vouloire être à la mode si cette mode ne vous va pas. Poulenc
The music of Poulenc should make any artist confident that there is no need to think that worthwhile art should follow a linear progression. The visual arts may be somewhat derrière garde in this respect compared with what is happening in literature and music.
7. Formal verse frees one from the fetters of one’s ego. Auden
I do deplore the self-indulgence of so much free verse, nearly always read in a special way that tries to say ‘This is so profound, full of deep insights and ultra-sensitive.’
8. I love the correspondence of viva voce over a bottle, with a great deal of noise and a great deal of nonsense. Sir Joshua Reynolds to James Boswell.
A good summing up of what makes a great evening.
9. My watch cost more than your car.
This is apparently a favourite insult of the super-rich. I’ve never been particularly concerned about people having much more money than myself and this sort of inanity makes me even more contented with my lot.
10. The shorter my possession of life, the deeper and fuller I must make it. Montaigne
To end with, one from the great essayist himself. When you think of what Keats and Masaccio achieved before dying in their twenties and Schubert, Raphael, Mozart, Seurat et al who were cut off in their thirties, one can’t help thinking that in these days of longer life expectancy, we tend to forget that we don’t live for ever.
.
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’.
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.
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