Two Exhibitions

     Thursday was spent in London, in Mayfair and St James's.  I took in two exhibitions; one a planned visit and the second a happy happenstance. 

     First then off to the RA and, having braved the rather officious woman at the desk, the 'Impressionists on Paper: Degas to Toulouse-Lautrec' exhibition.  This, it has to be said, a slightly misleading title as the hanging did not begin and end with either.  It ended, if I remember rightly, with the Symbolists, or was it perhaps Cezanne? I can't rightly remember. Maybe it was the chest infection that I was incubating, but to be truthful there was a lot of work on display that has completely eluded my recollection. And here I have to confess that Impressionism does not do much for me. I mean it's pleasant enough, the oil paintings and all that, but 'is that all there is?' I always go to this sort of exhibition in the hope that I'll get it, and this particularly exhibition - which in this week's Speccie is described as a 'once-in-a-lifetime show' - sadly, did little to alter my opinion. It really must be me then.
     So what do I remember actually remember? Well, there were a number of studies of dancers by Degas - obligatory, really - some rather brooding studies by Seurat and a couple of fine portraits; a Renoir - rather sugary, perhaps, but a wonderful lesson in the use of pastel and one, all piss and vinegar, by Toulouse-Lautrec.
     And, oh, there were also a couple of watercolours by Pissarro. Alas. I've encountered his watercolours before at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge way back in 2015. I'm never quite sure why they're ever displayed as they really are quite dreadful.  His talents obviously lay elsewhere.  Cezanne's 'Flowerpots on the Terrace of the Artist's Studio at Les Lauves' is a watercolour on a completely different level.
     Afterwards I went to the RA Grand Cafe, which is a space I rather love. Designed by the great Richard Norman Shaw (1831-1912), it still appears fresh and original today. In addition room is decorated with large paintings by RA members.

     I then had a wander around that net work of streets behind the RA, popping into Messums on Cork St. where there were some wonderful ceramics by Makoto Kagoshima were on display. I crossed Piccadilly for shopping and quite by accident found 'One Hundred Drawings and Watercolours from the eighteenth to the 21st centuries' curated by Freya Mitton, Guy Peppiatt and Harry Moore-Gwyn. Much more to my liking than the RA exhibition what with work by Mark Hearld, John Sell Cotman, John Nash, John Piper, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Keith Vaughan, Barbara Jones, Barnett Freedman, Robert Taverner and Edward Bawden. My cup did overflow.

Charles I at The Royal Academy

God gives not his kings the stile of Gods in vaine:

For on his throne his sceptre do they sway....

The Basilike Doron, King James I & VI

....."when it comes to fine pictures by the hands of first-rate masters, I have never seen such a large number in one place as in the Royal palace." These are the words of Rubens written in 1629 after a visit to the Palace of Whitehall, the locus of Charles I's astounding art collection. At the Royal Academy that collection, which was dispersed after the king's execution, has been re-assembled and the effect is almost overwhelming in both its scale and the intensity of its vision.  Indeed Charles's political and cultural vision was bold.  Centred, fatally perhaps, on his court rather than the larger (and inherently riskier) theatre of the public realm - he undertook no progresses like his predecessor Elizabeth I had done so successfully - it combined Neo-Platonism and Aristotelian theory of spectacle, manifested in a cultural, political and religious gesamtkunstwerk, that attempted to symbolize and embody an arcadian vision of Britain drawing on ancient myth and history.  Britain reunited under the Stuarts for the first time since its ancient mythic past, was once again an Empire.  And Charles, appointed by God, ruled as his image on earth.

     "No other English monarch was so intensely concerned with his own image, and in the splendid series of masques that [Inigo] Jones created for him in the 1630s, we may see the royal imagination fashion through the art of his master Surveyor as with Van Dyck and Rubens an ideal realm and ideal self."* 

     Except, as we know, it all fell apart into rancour and Civil War and the eventual execution of the king. This, therefore, is the sort of exhibition that brings with all sorts of cultural and political baggage and the reign of Charles I still has the power to excite political debate here in the United Kingdom and Ireland.

     All that said, Charles was the greatest Royal art collector (yet) in our history.  Not only did he secure the great Gonzaga collection from Mantua, and send out his agents to scour the Continent for art coming on to the market, he was also a major patron of contemporary art.  All of this drew artists to Britain; Le Sueur, Honthorst, Jordeans and most importantly Orazio Gentilische (and later, briefly, his daughter Artmesia); Rubens and, most importantly of them all, Van Dyck. All three produced work on a monumental scale for Charles and his wife Henrietta Maria.

     It fell to Van Dyck, however, who I've long admired, to capture both the culture, and define the image of the king, that we most associate with Charles's reign. And it is perhaps the most striking of Van Dyck's images of the King, 'Charles I in three Positions', that confronts the visitor in the first gallery. Painted in order to provide an image of the King for the Baroque sculptor Gianlorenzo Bernini in Rome to sculpt a bust from. Iconic is a far too heavily used term in our culture at this moment (it's just bloody lazy), however in this instance I think Van Dyck has created an equivalent to an icon, a Neo-Platonic ideal image of translucent beauty, and flickering, sensual paint surface.  That same calm poise of the sensuous and the spiritual is present in Van Dyck's other, monumental, paintings of the king, as though in his body all things can find their resolution, their sublimation.

     There is however nothing half-hearted about Charles I's taste, which was mainly interested in Northern Renaissance, and Late Renaissance and Baroque art from Italy, particularly the Veneto. These are full-bloodied, intense and at times transcendent works of art. Nothing 'nice'.  I'm thinking in particular here of Rubens' swirling, overwhelming Baroque painting 'Minerva protects Pax from Mars' or 'Peace and War'.  An immense tour-de-force. In the foreground is a satyr proffering the bounties of nature to some bewildered, if not downright frightened children. Right to be frightened too of a satyr, a nature spirit for neither the spiritual or natural are 'nice', but fraught with the unpredictable and the transformative (which itself brings danger). Nothing could be further from Matthew Arnold's idea of culture as 'sweetness and light', tempting as that sounds. Anyway, to be honest 'War and peace' is not the sort of work I like; I was much happier, I have to confess, looking at the Northern Renaissance masters such as Holbein, and although the exhibition did not change my views in that regard it did give me an increased appreciation of the achievement of men such as Rubens.  It is an art not at all to be doubted.
     In contrast to those large works that in my memory dominate the exhibition, the penultimate gallery explores the contents of the king's cabinet.  This is a schatzkammer of delight, a crowding of miniature treasures, and for me the culmination of the exhibition, except that the final room held for me one last, absolute delight: a late self portrait by van Dyck.
     The culminative effect, as I have said, was pretty overwhelming and an hour so in the crowded, darkened galleries left us reeling, I for one possibly suffering from Stendhal Syndrome, and we staggered out into the courtyard for fresh air.

* 'The King's Arcadia: Inigo Jones and the Stuart Court' John Harris, Stephen Orgel & Roy Strong (Arts Council Exhibition catalogue) 1973

London: Two exhibitions and one play

   To a warm and sunny London Thursday to see a play and catch a couple of exhibitions.  And a lovely day I had of it.

   First to the Royal Academy and 'The Age of Giorgione' exhibition of Venetian High Renaissance art. The names are familiar: Bellini, Titian, del Piombo, Lotto. I think I may have said before that this sort of art doesn't usually do much for me - just another point on the slide down to the Baroque and 18th century Academic - all that chiaroscuro and rivers of brown varnish.  However this exhibition, in the intimate Seckler Gallery of the RA was something of a revelation, having only really seen the majority of pictures on display in reproduction.  The colours were vibrant and rich - in particular the blues and pinks.  Often rather painterly too, that in a couple of works pointed towards the work of El Greco.  There is in all a distinct sensuality to this Venetian art - which in this exhibition has been divided into four categories (one to a room): portraiture, landscape, devotional works and finally allegorical portraits.  Each section is an exploration of that distinctiveness of Venetian art and how the artists of the city evolved a new language of depiction within the tradition - the difference between between Bellini's 'Portrait of a man' of 1505 and Giorgione's 'Terris portrait' of 1506.  A distinctiveness of composition too, that in some of the work on display can seem awkward, even forced.  All a long way from the art of Florence and Rome, which is perhaps more cerebral. I'm never quite sure as to how centrally the art of Venice is placed by critics. I think on the whole it is seen as provincial except for the artist included here. There are a couple of Durer's on view too to help give context; indeed there is a distinct 'Northerness' to a lot of the art on display.  The long preceding tradition of 'Byzantine' culture in Venice was much less easy to detect. Any influence from further east, which is often now 'bigged up' (overly so in my opinion) in the context of Venice, negligible. The highlights; the tiny pen and watercolour drawing of a watermill by Durer - just exquisite; the two mythological paintings of the myth of Adonis (Though Adonis depicted is no Adonis!) Quite visionary almost like a Blake or Palmer. Also Giorgione's 'La Vecchia' - a piece of sublime portraiture and the 'Terris Portrait' of 1506. A treat too to see Titian's 'Jacopo Peasaro Being Presented by Pope Alexander VI to St Peter' 1508-11.

   Then to the National Gallery and George Shaw's exhibition 'My Back to Nature' where there was plenty of 'north' and landscape on display. The forest to be precise.  Shaw, born 1966, is the current associate artist at the National Gallery and this exhibition represents his response to the collection - the culmination of a two year residency.  As a teenager he became interested in the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, at art college he became a conceptual artist before eventually returning to that deep, detailed painting style that characterized the early work of the Brotherhood in which he utilizes Humbrol enamel paint as his medium.  He uses that technique to explore suburban Britain and here, the fragmented, liminal fringes of the City where countryside and suburban blend uneasily.  Unease often characterizes his work, the best work has a sort of transient radiance. Shaw's forest floor bears the dint of man, scattered with the detritus of the illicit, and Shaw, in the excellent short film that accompanies the exhibition, links that to the debris scattered about the ground in some of the pictures in the permanent collection. I really wasn't sure what to make of this.  I'm not entirely convinced that an analogy can be made between the two like that. Neither am I quite sure of the point he makes about the dichotomy, as I understand it, between nature and the gallery/created object. Having said that some of the work is very  - well, perhaps not beautiful - but haunting, atmospheric and evocative.  And perhaps a little more painterly? However I cannot help but feel that the exhibition space didn't help Shaw's argument.  It's a rather awkward, unlovely space that's also in part a communicating space between grander galleries.  Neither, I think, did the hanging.  The sketches in the first room could have been better presented - framed?  It all seemed a little makeshift.

   And then, finally to 'How the Other Half Love, at His Majesty's Theatre in The Haymarket - the real reason I had come up to town for the day. Incidentally the outside was designed by Nash as part of the Strand- Regent Street improvements post-Waterloo.  The contrasting French Baroque/Rococco interior, I suspect, was the work of that doyen of Edwardian theatre designers Frank Matcham.  Lots of plasterwork, gilding and scagliola.  The play, written by Alan Ayckbourn was published in 1971.  It is a play about adultery and the effects of badly planned deception - a nudge and a wink at the Permissive Society.  The play is a six-hander: Nicholas Le Prevost, Jenny Seagrove; Jason Merrell, Tamsin Outhwaite; Matthew Cottle and Gillian Wright. Familiar names, then.  I hope the latter two won't be insulted if I say that when they made their first entrance I was reminded of' 'Inspector Blakey' and 'Olive Rudge' from the 1960s/70s British sitcom 'On the buses'.  There really was something down-at-heel, if not downright seedy, about the Matthew Cottle character in particular what with all his fears and pomposity, and who seemed to have been trapped in the Late 1940s - a world that was both High Minded and mean.  But I wonder were all the characters in some way the same - all in various degrees suffering from some sort of delusion?   Nicholas Le Prevost, for instance, going around in some sort of daze all the time and quite unable to figure out that it was his wife that was digressive.  Perhaps the most clear-sighted was Teresa (Tamsin Outhwaite).  A knockabout farce in many ways and very funny.  It was very well acted indeed - the second act when there are two dinner parties going on simultaneously was an absolute tour du force of both writing and acting.

Ian Hamilton Finlay at Kettle's Yard

   It's been a funny month; there have been the odd occasions when I thought I'd never get to the end it seemed to drag so, other times when I've felt very well.  I've had a mad-ish day in London, taking in five exhibitions, shopped for a sofa and used my RA friend card for the first time, as well as afternoon tea in 'Maison Bertaux' in Greek Street.  London energizes me somehow.  For the record the exhibitions were:  Moroni (again) and Charles Stewart at the RA, Maggi Hambling and Peder Balke at The National, and Tudor Royal Portraits at the NPG.  I think, if I were to choose one of them to return to, it would be the last, the Tudor portraits. Something deeply satisfying about them.
   And then last week I spent a few days with the bf.  On Thursday I dragged him to Kettle's Yard to an exhibition of work by Ian Hamilton Finlay from the collection of Professor Stephen Bann, a leading expert on Finlay's work.  It turns out that Finlay and Jim Ede, the creative force behind Kettle's Yard - curator/collector as creative artist - had corresponded for a number of years.  Ede had even bought a piece or two from Finlay, and Finlay had carved a pebble with a sort of backhanded compliment about Kettle's Yard being the 'Louvre of the pebble'.  An ambiguous relationship then.
I first came across the work of Finlay in the 1987 exhibition 'Real Architecture' which was held at The Building Centre Gallery in Store St., London.  He was there because of his transformation of his Scottish garden on the western edge of the Pentland Hills into 'Little Sparta' - a landscape garden inspired by Classical myth and the eighteenth century landscape tradition.  This re-ordering of nature, which continued from 1978 until his death and created one of the most challenging and intellectual gardens in Britain, was represented at Kettle's Yard by the showing of a documentary.  Could it, I wonder be categorised as radically conservative work?  Either way it can be seen as highly innovative.
And perhaps that ambiguity is at the core of Finlay's work.  He was part poet, part typographer, sculptor, conceptual artist and part gardener.  Modernist and Classicist.  A Janus figure.  He started as a writer and became interested in Concrete Poetry, where the placing of the poem on the paper, or whatever media, is as important as the words themselves.  And it was, obviously, with the these early works where the exhibition began.  As we progressed other interests showed themselves: there were some beautifully drawn boats in the form of prints.  Other, sinister, machines appeared too: tanks and battleships.  A lot of this work had been printed by the two presses Finlay ran in his life - the Wild Flounder Press and The Wild Hawthorn Press - the latter still going.  As I have already mentioned Finlay was a Classicist.  He had a perennial interest in the myths and philosophy of Antiquity, and in his later work this becomes more apparent, though with it's referencing of the French Revolution and the Nazi period this later work can be unsettling.  Both regimes were haunted by Antiquity, as perhaps has all Western Culture.  Europe, it could be argued, has been in a post-colonial state for the last fifteen hundred years. (And I think it can be argued that this also applies to the Middle East, though to a lesser degree.)  Perhaps that is one of Finlay's themes: how we are haunted by the Classical past.  The giants on whose shoulders we perch.  And I suppose it is the Classicism and the quality of the typography that interested me most, and although the bf hated it, I would certainly buy a print or two should I be fortunate enough to have the spare cash.

   And afterwards a few minutes in the Cistercian austerity of Kettle's Yard house.

Moroni at the RA

   A day in London.  The main reason was the exhibition of the work of the little known Italian Renaissance master Giovanni Battista Moroni (1520 - 1578) at the Royal Academy.  It was a complete revelation; Moroni's portraiture is of a technical brilliance that is accompanied by a intense spiritual and emotive power. There a number of religious works too, but the more monumental ones on display - the altarpieces are, with two important exceptions, rather empty.  Perhaps that is Moroni's weakness; his strength perhaps lays in the more intimate, or should one say, more focused.  One feels in his most brilliant work he has truly come to terms with his subject.  In many the background is almost eliminated, in others a simplified schema of architecture is used - the focus is the sitter.  Somehow in the larger work - the altarpieces - that schema does not work so well, for instance: 'St Gotthard enthroned with St Lawrence and St Catherine'.  I desire more (architectural) detail in those paintings.  After all they do serve a different purpose, though I do understand the reasoning, which perhaps reflects the new emphasis of the Counter Reformation Spirituality.  But that is a minor quibble.  Moroni is a great master.

  The highlights for me were - actually it would be pointless to attempt to list them because there are so many; but if on pain of death I would have to chose one then that would be 'Portrait of an Elderly Man seated with a book'.  It is superb.  Truly superb.
   Without looking yet at the catalogue I would think he was an influenced by, and an influence on, Northern Renaissance art.  Looking at all those sumptuously painted fabrics I can see an echo of Moroni in Elizabethan and Jacobean portraiture. And perhaps it is the influence of Northern Europe (Morini was a northern Italian) that makes me like his art so much. Judging by the work on show Moroni is due a major re-evaluation by art historians; he should be among the greats of Western portraiture - he would be a very worthy addition to the canon.
A revelation too the work of Moretto, Moroni's teacher, whose work is represented by a small number of canvasses including 'Madonna and Child on a Throne between Saints Eusebia, Andrew Domneone and Domno' (1536-37), where the aged St Andrew and the Christ Child exchange a look of such melting tenderness and love.  Praise indeed as I don't usually like the sort of art that followed on from the 'High Renaissance'.  Very good too the more intimate of Moretto's religious work in the exhibition.
   Really I cannot praise this exhibition highly enough....GO!  You have until Jan 25th.

   Afterwards some seasonal shopping and a long lunch at Polpo, Cambridge Circus, with a friend: Pig's Head Crostini; Cauliflower and Fontina; Octopus, Treviso and Barlotti beans, Pork and fennel meatballs.  I then polished off a lovely squidgy Tiramisu.  I'm such a pig!