Turner and Constable

     Wednesday afternoon - during our trip to London - and I braved the miserable weather and headed off to Tate Britain on Millbank for the Turner & Constable exhibition.  It was very popular and some rooms quite crowded.  A very middle class crowd at that and too many interminable middle class conversations that would have been bearable if they happen to have been about the art. A little claustrophic at times, but not as crowded or unpleasant as the John Singer Sargent exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery back in 2015. That was downright dangerous.  Not to self: always go as early as possible.

     Anyway, back to Millbank.  This exhibition marks the 250th anniversary of the births of those two artistic titans of British art Turner (1775) and Constable (1776), and is rather like one of those exam questions 'compare and contrast the work of...'.  Each room contains an equal amount of both, and I (like everybody it seemed) zig-zagged between the two, though if it hadn't have been so crowded you could, I suppose, do one and then return to the start to do the other. Their work comes at the end of the 'Long 18th century', that 'long period of Whig Oligarchy', when the pace of change between Pastoral Britain and Industrial Britain began to pick up, and their art both consciously and unconsciously reflects this. And that's about it.  I've really run out of things to say, usually at an exhibition such as this I find something on which I can hang my hat.  But not this time.  The art was beautiful, the watercolours exquisite, and by the end of it I found I liked Constable a little more, and Turner a little less.  It was not however, at least when I was there, a place for contemplation.

     Finally, for a small confession.  I did not like all of the work on display.  I will go even further and say that there were some paintings I actively disliked, and thought were terrible.  In the penultimate room, which was dominated by vast canvasses, there were some absolute shockers.  There, I've said it.

    

     

     We ate at Le Pain Quotidien, Maison Berteaux, and Ta'mini and in the evenings at our perennial favourite Ciao Bella on Lambs Conduit St; Fushan on New Oxford St (I really liked the grilled aubergine); and Fig & Walnut on Marchmont St.  I also ate at the V&A and Tate Britain - the V&A was the better experience

     The real culinary discovery of this trip was, however, 'Aux Merveilleux De Fred' at St Pancras station. Founded by Frederic Vaucamps, this small chain of patisseries specialise in Northern French/Belgian delicacies such as Merveileux, Cramique and waffles.  We were very impressed.

February

 

January by John Clare (1793-1864)

The snow has left the cottage top;
The thatch moss grows in brighter green;
And eaves in quick succession drop,
Where grinning icicles have been,
Pit-patting with a pleasant noise
In tubs set by the cottage-door;
While ducks and geese, with happy joys,
Plunge in the yard-pond brimming o'er.
The sun peeps through the window-pane;
Which children mark with laughing eye,
And in the wet street steal again
To tell each other spring is nigh:
Then, as young hope the past recalls,
In playing groups they often draw,
To build beside the sunny walls
Their spring-time huts of sticks or straw.

Rainy Old London

      Wednesday in London, and it rained all day, at least it felt like it.  I cancelled my trip into the City to look at churches and went to the V&A instead.  For a couple of hours, wandering through that vast and labyrinthine building, I surfeited on the decorative arts.  Here are some images of what I saw and liked. (The first object is the Easby Cross, from Northumbria AD800-820.  The carving is remarkable.  I am put in mind of Byzantine Ivories.  The final image is a head of the Buddha from ancient Gandhara, stucco with traces of colour.  Top knot derived from Greek statues of Apollo.)

Joseph Wright of Derby: Out of the Shadows

     

     To London for a couple of days.  And very welcome it was. Gallery-going and shopping.

     On our first day we went to the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square to see the exhibition 'Wright of Derby: From the Shadows'.  A small exhibition, but rather the eye-opener that caused me to refresh my interest in this most remarkable of painters.  I've known of, and to a certain extent admire, the work of Joseph Wright for years now, but it remained, to me at least, rather sunk in the general miasma of 18th century British art.  I knew some of his work, particularly 'An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump', 1768, and possibly his most famous work; 'An Iron Forge' of 1772; and his arresting 'Portrait of Brooke Boothby' of 1781.  The rest was terra incognita.

     Wright was born in the English East Midland city of Derby in 1734 and was trained in London. He worked in his home town, in Bath and in Liverpool, at various stages of his life. He is connected to both Romanticism and the British Enlightenment.  He was a friend of Erasmus Darwin, Josiah Wedgewood and Joseph Arkwright, and has been called 'the first painter of the Industrial Revolution'. He was a fine portraitist and landscape painter, but we tend to think of him for his dramatic tenebrist paintings - Wright called them his 'Candlelight' paintings - which he painted from the 1760s onwards, of which 'An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump' is the finest, and most famous, example.  A nocturnal, often occluded, world.  Tenebrism, I should explain at this point, is an essentially Baroque technique, an extreme form of Chiaroscuro.  Coincidentally, the work of another, earlier, tenebrist, the enigmatic French painter Georges de La Tour was the subject of an almost concurrent exhibition in Paris, at the Musee Jacquemart Andre.

     Staged within a suitably darkened gallery space, this exhibition, which is on until May 10th before moving on to Derby, concentrates solely on that tenebrism.  The first to do so, apparently. 

     The paintings on display - they are all oils - are accompanied by a wall of mezzotints - quite the perfect media - of those paintings.  Which, I wonder, influenced the selection of the other?

     With the exception of one painting - The Earthstopper of 1773 - these are rather contained if not, at times, claustrophobic images. Perhaps the most extreme and strange - and virtuosic - is Two Boys fighting over a Bladder of 1770.  The bodies of the boys - one in complete and deep shadow - fill the canvas to the exclusion of all else except the bladder which is lit eerily enough from a hidden light source.  That hidden light source is a recurring motif in these works, and it used to great effect throughout.

     Although thought of as an Enlightenment painter. these paintings, in addition to their claustrophobia, have a rather intense dreamlike quality.  We are called to enter into a world of mystery and initiation - an initiation amongst other things into the worlds of craft, science and of alchemy.  A world too, of the Gothic.

'Our Town'

      It is rarely, if ever, that I get to go to a theatrical first night, let alone one that launches a new theatre company.  Friday evening, however, I did just that when the Grand Theatre, Swansea, presented the Welsh National Theatre's inaugural production; Thornton Wilding's 1938 play 'Our Town'.  In some ways an intriguing choice.

     This three act play, which is rather Burkean in its conservatism, is set within the American trope/ideal of the small town - incarnated here as the fictional New Hampshire community of Grover's Corners. Twelve years - 1909-1913 - are portrayed. Nothing much actually happens, and there is an emphasis on community and continuity. A telling detail, or theme, is the increasing tendency of the inhabitants to lock their doors at night.  This essential conservativism, is not quite matched in the staging - the stage is bare, props are minimal and it is all rather 'meta'.  The main character, here played by Michael Sheen - a charismatic stage presence - is the omniscient Stage Manager.  A character that stands between the actors and the audience and engages with both, and is perhaps a manifestation of the divine.

     Changes have been made to both text and staging, which I believe involved input from Russell T Davies. Grover's Corners has been re-located to Wales: Main St has become Stryd Fawr.  A small point, but oddly (or arbitrarily?) many Americanism have been allowed to remain.  Well, the line has to be drawn somewhere.  A gay love affair (partly as a way of explaining a character's alcoholism) appears silently and fleetingly towards the end of the second act. 

     Finally in the 3rd act, at the conclusion of the play the Stage Manager is seen to join the company of the dead.  It works well enough, but the original direction is that the Stage Manager draws a curtain across the stage. (I detect the hand of Russell T Davies here; he has a history of portraying the death of God.) I worry that it undermines the Stage Manager's words at the beginning of the act:

     "We all know, that something is eternal.  And it ain't houses, and it ain't names, and it ain't even the stars...and everyone knows in their bones that something is eternal and that something has to do with human beings."

     

     The notoriously acerbic critic, John Simon, of The New Yorker, in reviewing a performance of the play at the Plumstead Playhouse (The New Yorker, 15.12.1969) wrote '....'Our Town' is recommended only to people with a craving for communal hagiography flavoured with maple syrup.'  On the strength of this production, I don't feel that to be true.  In all an excellent beginning.

'The Weirdstone of Brisingamen'

     I've just finished reading Alan Garner's 'The Weirdstone of Brisingamen'.  A bit of a mouthful that.  I remember my brother reading this to me as a child, and I think it was also read to us at school but I have a notion that for some reason it was abandoned.  Either way, I have no idea now how the book ended.  A year ago I dipped into the Granada adaptation of 'The Owl Service'.  And what a strange, baffling thing that is.  Anyway just before Christmas, in the our local bookshop, and looking for something to read, I decided to revisit the Weirdstone, it being the sort of book to have a cult following.  Rather like HTV's 'Children of the Stones', it shares some themes with the wider 'Folk Horror' genre.

    The Weirdstone is Alan Garner's first published novel.  The debt to the Inklings, particular Tolkien, is obvious.*  The novel is populated with dwarves, trolls and wizards. And other beings some of whom are from Norse mythology and others, one suspects, that are Garner's own creation.  (Though none of the names are as easy on the ear as those of Tolkien.) Not only that, but the protagonists embark on two arduous journeys, (one underground), that bear resemblance to the journey of the Fellowship of the Ring.  It is also a conflict for the possession of an object, in this particular case a jewel called the Weirdstone, which amongst other things, like the One Ring, facilitates access to the Unseen. The setting is not however a fictional world but Northern England - the county of Cheshire and that strange outcrop of rock in the midst of the Cheshire Plain known as Alderley Edge.  A place that has given birth to legends** and a place that Garner knew well as a child.  That specificity of geography brings it close to the artist John Piper's definition of Romanticism.

     Like 'The Owl Service', it is a dizzyingly complex novel.  I gave up trying to remember who was who.  Sadly, it suffers from a lack of characterisation.  We know, for instance, next to nothing about the two main protagonists, the children Susan and Colin, but for all of that there are scenes of incredible drive and intensity.  Some of them quite unforgettable; haunting and unsettling. At times I thought it wasn't really for children at all.

     

* I think there is an influence too of Tolkein's fellow Inkling Charles Williams.

** It is said, amongst a number of other locations in the UK, to be the sleeping place of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. 

Last year in reading....