'The Broken Road', Patrick Leigh Fermor

     Last week I finished reading 'The Broken Road - from the Iron Gates to Mount Athos' by Patrick Leigh Fermor, or rather to be accurate, written by Patrick Leigh Fermor and assembled and edited by Artemis Cooper and Colin Thubron.  It is the third and final book describing the journey the eighteen year old Leigh Fermor made on foot in the year 1933 from London to Constantinople - one imperial capital to another.  The first two books - 'A Time for gifts' and 'Between the Woods and the Water' were published in 1977 and 1986 respectively.  

     This third instalment never appeared in Leigh Fermor's life time, finding it difficult and then - as age over took him - impossible to complete.  I have to confess I read this sort of trilogy in a funny order starting with the second book (bought at the superb 'Byzantium' exhibition at the R.A.) before reading the first book - alas I have yet finish, losing him somewhere in Austria.  Another reason for this post is to show you some work by John Craxton - the book covers for those first two books.  I presume the two men must have known each other living in Greece, certainly they shared a love for the place.

   The cover for 'The Broken Road' has been designed by Ed Kluz, who just so happens to be one of my favourite contemporary artists.  The publishers, Murray, couldn't have chosen better.

   The three books are a outstanding literary achievement, evoking a world that has almost vanished, a world destroyed by totalitarianism, war and Modernity.  A sense of loss, a poignancy, unsurprisingly, pervades the books, and I detect the influence of Chateaubriand's 'Memoires d'outre-tombe'.  That remarkable journey also marks a change in Leigh Fermor's life, from a directionless teenager, expelled from several schools, to living a life that we mere mortals can only dream of; an interesting War, and then a life living on the Greek isles writing travel books.
   'The Broken Road' starts with Leigh Fermor crossing the Danube into Bulgaria and follows him as he explores the landscapes - he has a keen eye for the natural world - and culture. All three books, it has to be said, are full of the most fascinating details. He travels south into the valley of the Maritza before heading north back over the Danube to Bucharest - the cosmopolitan life there is much to his liking, so much so he would return there later to live for four years with Princess Balasha Cantacuzino, a member of an ancient Byzantine noble family who had one member ascend the Imperial throne.

   However back to the narrative: with the onset of Autumn Leigh Fermor resumes his journey returning to Bulgaria and the Black Sea Coast. He visits Mesembria, and is nearly drown on his journey south from there. The continuous narrative finishes abruptly at Burgas.
   As he travelled Leigh Fermor kept a notebook/diary and the editors have used that to complete the journey to the Imperial City.  However, as the they themselves readily admit, the notes Leigh Fermor took of his time in the city are scanty; there is no record, for instance of the impressions made on him by the architecture. The narrative does not however end there.  With a letter of admittance from the Ecumenical Patriarch Leigh Fermor travelled into northern Greece and the great monastic republic of Mount Athos, the Holy Mountain, one of the most important centres of Orthodox spirituality. I think it is telling that the most complete section of the diary covers the time he spent on the Holy Mountain.  It is tempting to see his journey as one of faith, a sort of pilgrimage, perhaps one not conventionally religious (I'm not sure whether Leigh Fermor converted to Orthodoxy, but I would like to think he did) but a search for the Pre-Modern

The Rampant Lions Press at the Fitzwilliam

   The Craxton exhibition was not alone.  By chance the bf and I discovered in the museum shop that there was a retrospective on the work of The Rampant Lion Press.  I suspect that this was more to the bf's liking.  And because I came to it fresh, rather than freighted with preconceptions and the like, it was a serendipitous delight. In a quiet self-effacing, English, sort of way. The gallery itself is a small octagon linking two larger spaces.  There were six glass cases around the room and in the centre a case containing the Kelmscott Press 'Earthly Paradise' and the Clover Hill Editions 'The Story of Cupid and Psyche' (1974).  There had been a previous exhibition of the work of The Rampant Lions Press in 1982 and this current exhibition was a brief survey of the work of the press had undertaken since then.

   The Rampant Lions Press was established between the wars by Will Carter, (1912-2001), a cousin of the designer and illustrator Reynolds Stone.  The press continued until 2008, under Will's son Sebastian who had joined his father in the 1960s.  They produced a series of beautiful books, sometimes experimental, collaborating with a number of writers and illustrated by the likes of John Piper and Michael Ayrton.  I particularly like the use of coloured papers, as above.  The Dante font illustrated below, I find, is singularly beautiful. In addition Will Carter worked with the Cambridge University Press. The exhibition also reminds us that Cambridge has and continues to be an important centre for craft and art production in Britain.

   There are a number of editions still available to buy: www.rampantlionspress.com where you can also read a much fuller history of the press.

   The exhibition continues until May 18th.

John Craxton at the Fitzwilliam

   On Sunday, with the bf, I went to the Craxton exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. It was a relatively small affair, and only touched upon his graphic work, which I particularly like. More of that in a future post. Outside the gallery in the lobby space was a video playing of Sir David Attenborough (just him?) talking about the artist. The space was small, crowded at times and too loud. We didn't stay to find out if anybody else appeared.
   Craxton, like many of his contemporaries, such as John Piper or Osbert Lancaster, worked in a number of disciplines – illustration, ‘fine art’, theatre design. In fact compared to a polymath such as Piper, or say Robert Harling, Craxton’s reach seems rather narrow – but that’s only relative. Luckily for them there was less specialization than there is now and I suspect that the width and indeed depth of their knowledge was greater than today too.
   Craxton was born in 1922 into a middle class family. His entry into the art world seems to have been quite precocious but due to circumstances Craxton’s formal art education, at least at a tertiary level, was quite limited. Unfit for active service he spent the War in London sharing a studio with Lucian Freud. The two men spent the time honing their drawing skills. They were also courted by luminaries of the London art scene. They were funded by Peter Watson and went drawing in Pembrokeshire with Graham Sutherland. The first work on display dates from this period. It is deeply Neo-Romantic, dark and brooding, and some of it surprisingly monumental, but essentially graphic work in ink and none the worse for that. (If the selection made for this exhibition is anything to go by the oils of that period tend to be small.) Nature is transformed into something writhing and menacing; trees, for instance, mutated into something massive and fleshy like tentacles; figures are submerged in the foliage or hide in the trunks of ancient oaks. There is his famous study of a dead hare, (Craxton and Freud drew a lot of dead animals), revealing incidentally a love for use of coloured paper – usually a mid-tone that enabled him to use both black and white media to build up volume and texture. These are my favourite works in the exhibition, although a couple of portraits done later in Greece were a revelation: small and intense, they could have been the work of a Northern Renaissance master. I suspect that like John Minton, Craxton was really a graphic artist, and that it was only through dint of hard work that he managed to ‘think big’. The ‘Pastoral for PW’, 1948, (80” x 103”), shows him struggling with scale.
   By then Craxton had visited Greece and had fallen in love with both people and landscape. He eventually settled there, semi permanently, until his death in 2009. It was to have a profound effect on his art. Not only does the work become brighter and more colourful, but his discovery of the mosaics of the Easter Roman Empire and early medieval Italy (by their nature monumental), finally gave him the language, the ability, to work on a larger, monumental, scale. I suspect the increasing use of a thick line of paint (the width of a tessera?) around each separate object or volume is a direct influence.
I wonder, in retrospect, whether Craxton had, at any one time, two vocabularies: one was employed when he was drawing from life, and I think was pretty constant and was honed in those years working with Freud – what one might consider empirical; and the other a more stylised, perhaps even self-conscious, manner of the public art in which the imagination and the intellect come into play. Sometimes that come close to each other, other times there is more distance.
   In preparing this post I’ve re-read the chapter on Craxton in Malcom Yorke’s ‘The Spirit of Place: Nine Neo-Romantic Artists and their times’ (Constable, London, 1988), and found myself in sympathy with the opinions of some of the critics. There is just something missing, particularly in the later work with their acid colours and frankly decorative quality – ‘a bit GayTimes’ commented the bf about a group of their sailors eating and drinking about a taverna table. It was hard to disagree.

Work in progress....

   Here's an update on the watercolour drawing I posted yesterday plus another arch from the 'Extraordinario Libro' by Serlio.

Work in Progress

    Thanks to Vaughan Hart's book on Nicholas Hawksmoor, I've become interested in the work of Sebastiano Serlio (1475 - 1554), particularly the 'Extraordinario Libro di Architettura' (Hart refers to it as the 'Libro Extraordinario').  Several of the plates (showing gates) in the 'Extraordinario' are used in Hart's book to illustrate the influence of Serlio on Hawksmoor.  Inspired myself by the designs I have begun a series of watercolour/mixed media drawings based on the designs.  This one is the first one I feel any confidence about.