An Artist of the Golden Age: Zurbarán at the National Gallery

     

      Los santos se han de pintar de manera que no quiten la gana de rezar en ellos, antes pongan devocion pues el principal efecto y fin de su pintura ha de ser esta.

     Back to my flying visit to London the other week, and after I had photographed the Comyn Ching Triangle I headed off to The National Gallery in Trafalgar Square and the current exhibition of work by the Spanish artist Francisco de Zurbarán (1598-1664).

    This was my first in depth encounter with his work, and for that matter, with the exception of Picasso, any Spanish Art of any period.  I think I may only have encountered Zurbarán's work in reproduction to be honest.  I can only therefore describe this exhibition as a revelation.  An intense, at times profound, experience, with the visitor immediately plunged into devotional world of the Spanish Counter Reformation.  The world of the Spanish Mystics, of St Theresa of Avila, St John of the Cross, and St Ignatius Loyola.  What you might think of as the unseen engine of this exhibition.

     Confronting the visitor is a monumental depiction of the Crucifixion - the earliest signed work by Zurbarán - Christ is near to death, the darkness has come upon all the earth, blotting out everything. He is naked save for his brilliant white loin cloth, and his is alone.  Alone as forlorn, alone as the sole focus of devotion.  It is said that his contemporaries thought they were viewing a sculpture, not a painting.

      And then, to the right, there is the breath-taking 'Martyrdom of St Serapion' of 1628.  The saint, who came from the Great Britain and was martyred for his ransoming of Christian slaves in North Africa and is depicted, dressed in the habit of the Mercedarian friars, hanging by his wrists, head on one side, heavy with either exhaustion or death. In reality he was crucified and his body hacked to pieces.  To be honest I don't think I've ever seen a painting quiet like it, the composition is so unusual.  Both paintings point to Zurbarán's supreme mastery of fabric.  In the martyrdom it is almost all fabric.

     Francisco de Zurbarán was born in Fuente de Cantos, in Extramadura, at the mid-point of the Golden Age - the Siglo de Oro - a roughly two hundred year period marked at one end by the completion of the Reconquista, and Columbus's first voyage to the New World, and at the other the Terminus ad Quem of the Treaty of the Pyrenees of 1659, and (according to some historians) the Terminus post Quem of the death of the dramatist Pedro Colderon de la Barca in 1681. A period not only of Spanish military and political dominance in Europe and beyond, but a remarkable expansion in the arts and architecture.  Zurbarán's working life was spent mainly in the city of Seville, a place that was both provincial (a long way from the artistic centres of the Italian Peninsular and the Low Countries) and the hub of trans-Atlantic trade between Spain and her empire.  There was, therefore, a lot of money to be spent on art.

     To put him into an artistic, and European, context, Zurbarán was born, lived, and died  during the nascence of the Baroque, when the city of Rome underwent an extraordinary century long transformation. Bernini was his exact contemporary. In Spain, El Greco had died when Zurbarán was sixteen, and Velasquez, Murillo were near contemporaries.  And yet, except for the possible influence of Caravaggio,* Zurbarán seems hardly touched by any of this.  He eschews the writhing ecstasy, the effulgence of sensation.  And, as pointed out by Jaspreet Singh Boparai, writing in The Spectator (25.4.26), he eschews blood.  Zurbarán's art, in contrast, is sober, possessing an austere spiritual intensity that seems to look back not only to the High Renaissance, but the Late Medieval Art of the Low Countries.** His figures have heft.

     All of this is not so far from 'estilo disornamentado' - aka the Arquitectura Herreriana - the architectural style developed by Juan de Herrera during the construction of El Escorial, the vast palace complex commission by Philip II outside Madrid.  Like the painter, the architect before him rejected the excesses of Mannerism, retaining a preference for the High Renaissance, and like the painting the architecture has a lingering sense of the Gothic. What was produced by these men was a sort of distilled creation, shorn of the extraneous.  Zurbarán's use of tenebrism is, perhaps, part of that process of elimination.

     To return now to the paintings.  The second room (there are seven in all) contains the single picture in the exhibition I actively disliked.  (There always had to be one.)  'The Virgin of the Rosary with the Carthusians', 1648-9.  It hangs between two other paintings, 'The Circumcision' and 'The Adoration of the Magi', which together formed a single tier from what must have been a colossal altarpiece, commissioned by the Carthusians of Jerez de la Frontera.  'The Adoration' I particularly liked.  A fine composition, rather Netherlandish.

     The third room contains of what you might term religious portraits - virgin martyrs in beautifully rendered contemporaneous costume and two depictions of St Francis of Assisi.  One, of St Francis standing, is often used to exemplify Zurbaran's work.  Justifiably so.

     Movingly, in the fourth room, a group of three immense crucifixions, and on the wall opposite two Assumptions of the Virgin Mary. In the fifth, some rare secular work, particularly three (?) paintings from a series of seven of the Labours of Hercules.  Opposite two of larger series of the sons of Jacob, on loan from the Bishop's Palace at Bishop Auckland in County Durham, where they grace the Prince Bishop's State Dining Room.  I think they were the first of Zurbaban's paintings to arrive in Britain.  They are quite different in tone from the Labours of Hercules, and from a lot of work in the exhibition, what with their exuberant costumes and colouring.  And then there is the Giant Head - an enormous painting of a man's head that has relatively recently been accredited to Zurbarán, placed as to visible from the other end of the enfilade in room 3  It's rather compelling.  If not strange.

     In contrast, the exhibition concludes with two rooms given over to small works; still-lives & devotional works. As the popular reworking of a saying of St Theresa of Avila has it: 'Dios anda entre los pucheros.'***  These still-lives illustrate, for me, a recuring element in Zurbarán's work, a sense of distance, if not unreality, which occurs also sometimes, say, in the work of David Hockney.  A sort of disengagement, that seems particularly strong in the pictures of fruit (invariably lemons) in baskets.  Though obviously painted from life there is an air of detachment about them that could be due to the strange use of light and colour. A juxtaposition of hyperreality of the lemons and the almost schematic treatment of the basket.  In general there is a recurrent strangeness, an awkwardness if you will, about Zurbarán's work that sets it apart, and sometimes disturbs the viewer.

      We are also introduced to the work of his son Juan de Zurbarán, particularly his mesmerizing still-life 'Plate of Grapes', of 1639, painted when he was a mere 19 years old.  Masterly.

 

*       Zurbarán has been called the 'Spanish Caravaggio' from his masterly use of chiaroscuro.  However, it seems unlikely that he had any contact with the art of Caravaggio.  It has been suggested that 

**    King Philip II was avid collector not only of Venetian Art, the art of the Low Countries.

*** 'God moves between the pots and pans.'

Something Nice To Eat

     Cookery means the knowledge of Medea and of Circe and of Helen and of the Queen of Sheba. It means the knowledge of all herbs and fruits and balms and spices, and all that is healing and sweet in the fields and groves and savoury in meats. It means carefulness and inventiveness and willingness and readiness of appliances. It means the economy of your grandmothers and the science of the modern chemist; it means much testing and no wasting; it means English thoroughness and French art and Arabian hospitality.  It means, in fine, that you are to see imperatively that everyone has something nice to eat.

     So said that eminent Victorian John Ruskin, and who's to argue with him.  He is thus quoted at the beginning of this beguiling 'short' (some 20 mins) directed by Sarah Erulkar, for the Gas Council.  As the dedicated reader of this blog will know I have a certain soft spot for these short films, documentaries, made to be shown in British cinemas before the main feature.  'Something Nice to Eat' is one of my favourites.  It is erudite, intelligent, playful and deeply stylish. Visually, it is a feast.  It may even be described as quintessential 'Sixties'.  After all, the model Jean Shrimpton does make 'a brief but intriguing' appearance.
     I have written briefly about Erulkar before on this blog, when I made mention of her wonderful film for the GPO 'Picture to Post', which is another visual feast. In 'Something Nice to Eat' her cinematographer was Wolfgang Suschitzky, who was also, you'll remember, the cinematographer for 'Get Carter'.  Between them they create some arresting and inventive imagery; food in particular is photographed in abundance and with sensuousness.  The fruit and veg stalls in Berwick St market are piled high with produce, both mundane and exotic; the butchers and the fishmongers displays are splendid. War and Post-war Austerity, this film may be saying, is over, banished.  Much use is made too of Schlieren photography (by Ronnie Whitehouse). The result is rather Psychedelic.  

     In both films Erulkar was also the script writer.  Here her words are narrated by David de Keyser, and the recipes presented by John Addey.  The cookery consultant was Margaret Costa of The Sunday Times Magazine.  Music by Johnny Hawksworth.

     In all a very classy production, especially when one considers it is essential an advert for the latest gas appliances.

    

 Something Nice to Eat

1967

Producer:               Anthony Gilkison Associates, The Gas Council

Director:                 Sarah Erulkar

Cinematographer: Wolfgang Suschitsky

Currently reading....

 

....'The Great Fortune'.

    Since my latest London trip I have been reading 'The Great Fortune' the first book in Olivia Manning's remarkable 'Balkan Trilogy', and, yes, I have read them in reverse order.  My excuse, if excuse I needed, was that I was reading them in the classic penguin orange spine edition, and it was a question of reading them when I found them.

     'The Great Fortune' was published in 1960, it is set in Bucharest, at that most inauspicious time, the outbreak of World War II.  Guy Pringle, who works for the British Council, returns to the city with his new wife Harriet. Through her eyes we watch as the small British community, and their Romanian friends, react to the approaching cataclysm.  Chiefly among them is Yaki, Prince Yakimov, a beguiling, English educated, down-at-heal Russian aristocrat.  His is perhaps the most memorable character in all three novels of the trilogy, and his story - the story of his downfall - forms their main sub-plot.

    At this point I had written, 'Like her contemporaries, Iris Murdoch and Elizabeth Bowen, Olivia Manning was Anglo-Irish'.  She saw herself as participating in that 'usual Anglo-Irish sense of belonging nowhere'.  However I doubt that either statement carries any water, and in any case I don't get the sense it was so important to her or her literary output as it as it was to Elizabeth Bowen.  
     Anyway, back to the 'Balkan Trilogy'; The Spoilt City' appeared in 1962, and 'Heroes and Friends' in 1965.  All three novels are essentially auto-biographical.  As she said to a friend: "I write out of experience, I have no fantasy. I don't think anything I've experienced has ever been wasted."  Indeed not, for nearly two decades later a second trilogy appeared, The Levant Trilogy.

     In 1987 BBC adapted both trilogies for television, producing a series entitled 'Fortunes of War'.  It starred Emma Thompson and Kenneth Brannagh as Harriet and Guy Pringle.  And it was through this adaptation that I discovered the novels.  Both books and series are recommended.  I think you will enjoy them.

English Cottage interiors

     

    This book originally published in 1989 by Weidenfeld and Nicolson in hardback, as part of the 'Country Series' which may eventually have extended to some 46 titles.  The subsequent publishing history is rather complex.  Then W&N was bought by Orion in 1991 the series was then reissued in paperback under the subsidiary imprint of Phoenix Illustrated.  I believe that the numbering of the books was changed, though I may be wrong.  Eventually the publishing of the series passed to another subsidiary imprint 'Seven Dials Publishing'. 

     Anyway, to the volume in question, the paperback edition of 'English Cottage Interiors', published in, I think, 1991.  The author is Hugh Lander and the photographer Peter Rauter.  Actually, it's never explicitly said who the photographer is; it is merely implied.  While the text is copyrighted to the authors, the photos are copyrighted to the publishers.  For me the photographs make the book.  Whenever possible, Mr Lauter used natural lighting; the results are quite atmospheric.
     It really is a lovely thing, a sort of Coffee table book in miniature.  The interiors featured range from the self-conscious to the utilitarian; the urban to the rural.  It is just the sort of thing that, for both financial and cultural reasons, could not be produced today.

Up on the Downs

Up on the Downs by John Masefield 1878-1967

Up on the downs the red-eyed kestrels hover,
Eyeing the grass.
The field-mouse flits like a shadow into cover
As their shadows pass.

Men are burning the gorse on the down’s shoulder;

A drift of smoke
Glitters with fire and hangs, and the skies smoulder,
And the lungs choke.

Once the tribe did thus on the downs, on these downs, burning
Men in the frame,
Crying to the gods of the downs till their brains were turning
And the gods came.

And to-day on the downs, in the wind, the hawks, the grasses,
In blood and air,
Something passes me and cries as it passes,
On the chalk downland bare.

     As I have done for over a year now, I am beginning the month with a poem.  This month however marks a slightly new tack; previously, using John Clare's 'Shepherd's Calendar', I have been able to couple the poem with the month.  I suspect this will now prove more difficult to do, so I have decided to simply post poems I like.

     I associate this poem with the Uffington White Horse, high upon the downs in south Oxfordshire.  As far as I know there is no other connection other than it was chosen by Sir John Betjeman for his tv anthology 'The Queen's Realm' of 1977, and coupled with aerial shots of the horse, and of other chalk figures.  (The poem was read, to great effect, by the South African born actress Janet Suzman.)  

     I pass the horse a few times a year as I travel between the Infernal city and London, and I try and make the point of looking from the train as we pass.  It is after all the oldest hill figure in Europe.  Twice now I have pointed the horse's presence to groups of American tourists but to little effect.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 

Leon Krier

     Over the weekend I got to thinking about the late Leon Krier - it is just a year after his death - and I wondered if there were currently any plans for a retrospective exhibition of his work here in the UK.  A brief internet search drew a blank.  Perhaps you dear reader know otherwise?  If so let me know.

     

     A retrospective exhibition would be very appropriate, I feel, as Krier, architect, town planner, author, and  polemist lived in London for some twenty years from the late Sixties to the late eighties.  He initially worked for James Stirling and then taught at the AA (1972-74) and the Royal College of Art.  He was part of the intellectual life of the city, a key thinker in the emerging Post Modernist/New Classicism movement.  He was active in the Urban Design Group, as was Terry Farrell; and both were habitues of the Leinster Gardens headquarters of Andreas Papadakis's Academy Editions.  It must have been very exciting, very intense time.  During his time in London he published 'James Stirling: Buildings and Projects 1950-1974' 1975; 'Rational Architecture', 1978; 'Leon Krier; Houses, palaces, Cities', 1984.  And of course, it is here in the UK that, with the patronage of the then Prince of Wales Poundbury, was created.

London, and The Comyn Ching Triangle, Part 2

      

     And so, finally, to the architecture.  As I wrote in Part 1 of this post, the site is triangular, bounded by Monmouth St., Mercer St., and Shelton St.  I think the term for this in Urbanist circles is a boundary block - think doughnut/bagel here.

     At the time of the closure of Covent Garden wholesale market the Triangle belonged to the architectural ironmongers Comyn Ching (they had their showrooms in Shelton St.) and the gardens and yards at the centre of the block had been submerged in workshops, apparently including 3 working forges.  It is an example of the way small scale manufacturing, often highly skilled, developed in the industrial cites of England; think of the workshops of the 'Little Masters' in areas like the Jewry Quarter of Birmingham, or of the cutlery makers in Sheffield.

     Comyn Ching, a family firm, at some point decided to re-develop their property, and 1977 called in the 39 year old Terry Farrell.  Farrell was then in partnership with Nicholas Grimshaw.  As has been pointed out, Farrell's work here represents a stylistic and methodological parting of the ways between the two men.

     Work commenced in 1978 (the year the Urban Design Group was founded) and continued until 1991.  In some ways Farrell's work was experimental, instantiating the ideas that were being thrashed out in places like the AA, the Urban Design Group, and headquarters of Andreas Papadakis's Academy Editions in west London. It soon came to be seen, rightly, as a paradigm of urban renewal, a revival of the Geddesian approach of 'conservative surgery'.

     The 'shanty town' in the midst of the site was cleared away to create a semi-public open space - Ching Court.  The twenty five properties that lined the perimeter of the site were very well restored and the three corner properties sold to a developer who had to work to Farrell's designs.  The detailing is superb, particularly the wooden porches and the two entrances to Ching Court.  The northern one is the more interesting in that it aligns with Tower Court across Monmouth St.  The visitor passes through a dark entrance passage and emerges in a circular quasi-external space at the head of the site that changes the direction of travel, with steps take the visitor down to the level of the paved courtyard.  It is all handled beautifully, quite stage managed, for instance that delicious glimpse the passer-by gets of Ching Court from across Monmouth St.  It is just so London.

     As you might expect from a piece of Post-Modern design there any number of references and quotations in the architecture.  The porches, for instance, are a mixture of Charles Rennie Mackintosh and the Art Deco.  One of my favourite details is the hefty half-buried column on the corner of Shelton St & Mercer St.  Farrell's work here seemed to chart the course for a more considered approach to Postmodern design than that in America, but it was not to be.

    I do like some of Farrell's later work, but rarely, if ever, was it as good as this.