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.'

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.

St Pancras New Church

      St Pancras New Church stands at the busy junction of Upper Woburn Place and the Euston Rd.  Very chaotic and noisy.  The west front now faces a large Neo-Georgian office block* (not bad in itself), but when built, the church overlooked the southern half of Euston Square.  (Sadly, that whole s half of the square was built over between the Wars.)  To the s, where the Bartlett School of Planning and the Memoir Club (a Hotel) stand, there was originally a small group of stucco villas. Not what one expect to see south of the Euston Rd

     I should at this point, I suppose, address the name of the church.  The church was built to serve the spiritual needs of the newly urbanised southern part of the vast and ancient parish of St Pancras.  St Pancras Old Church, which is some 3/4 mile north north east of the new, is the original parish church, around which a number of traditions have accrued, such as a Roman origin.  None of these claims, however, are supported by any evidence.  After consecration by the Bishop of London in 1822 it became the parish church and the Old Church reduced to the status of Chapel of Ease. Since then the original parish has been split up.  The Old church is the centre of the Parish of Old St Pancras and St Matthew and the New church the Parish of St Pancras and Euston.

    The church, and Woburn Lodge, the northernmost of that group of demolished villas, are the work of father and son William and Henry Inwood.  The church is in a monumental Greek Revival style with crisp ashlar masonry.  The order is Ionic, based on that of the Erechthion on the Athenian Acropolis.  The plan follows what was by then a long established Anglican form 'The Basilica after the Ancients', particularly as developed by James Gibbs at St Martin in the Fields, that is a with both a temple front and a west tower.  A bit weak that tower.  The east end is more complex and stranger still.  Where to begin?  Perhaps with the central apse.  I hardly need to say that Ancient Greek architecture did not use the apse.  This one has attached Ionic columns.  And then there are vestries, copies of the famous caryatid porch of the Erecththion.   Because the porches also contain entrances to the crypt, the sculptor of the caryatids, Charles Rossi, departed from the design of the originals to carry inverted torches and water jugs to symbolise mourning and death, while behind, lurking, silent and remote in the shadows, are sarcophagi.  It is all very sculptural, the east end, so that the overall effect is not so far from the English Baroque of Hawksmoor and Vanbrugh.         Unsurprisingly the church has been the subject to much criticism and ridicule over the years.  For me the main criticism is that it just doesn't rise to the occasion.  The detailing is very good, but the location just demands something bolder.

     The interior too disappoints, but in a different manner.  There is a towering octagonal narthex under the tower, but the nave is just one enormous room, daunting, cold, and lacking the numinous.  The ceiling is anti-climactic; again something bolder is required. Where is the 'mysterium tremendum et fascinans'?
      No furnishings of note either, certainly nothing to match the scale of the interior, some fine monuments though.  The most interesting feature are the columns (cast iron?) that support the gallery.  I think Charles Holden added the current columns in the apse, when he designed a new High Altar in 1914, but I may be wrong.

* 'Nettlefold House', 1928, by George Vernon (1870-1942).  As office and showroom for the architectural ironmongers Nettlefold & Son.

London, and The Comyn Ching Triangle, Part 1

       Back to London for a couple of nights this week and the RIBA TAG Summer Party.  It was a busy day; the Zurbaran exhibition at the National Gallery in the morning; The National Portrait Gallery Cafe for a smashing lamington; lunch with a friend in the excellent Fromagerie in Lamb's Conduit St; a visit to St Pancras New Church; dinner at that perennial favourite Caio Bella; and finally the party and afterwards the pub (The Queens Larder, Queen Square).  I didn't get back to my hotel 'til nearly eleven.

     That morning, on the way to the National Gallery, I paid a return visit to The Comyn Ching Triangle.  The redevelopment of the site is an early and, I think, highly successful project by the English architect Sir Terry Farrell (1938-2025).  Before things went a bit wrong.  As an example of urbanism, and the burgeoning Post Modernist style it is fascinating.

     The triangle is bounded by Monmouth St to the nw, Mercer St to the e, and to the south by Shelton St.  (Does Shelton St follow the bed of a lost London river?)  It forms part of the area called 'Seven Dials'; a development of the 1690s of what was then known as 'Cock and Pie Fields'.  The developer was Thomas Neale.  Almost uniquely in Britain, it uses a Baroque urban form known in France as an 'Etoile' , or star, with streets radiating from a central point, or Rond Point.  The Point du Vue is in this particular etoile is a Doric column, an accurate replacement (of the 1980s) for the lost original.
     The subsequent history of the site is bound to Covent Garden, London's wholesale fruit and veg market, to the s.  As the market waxed in size and importance warehouses were erected in the streets to the north, slowly spreading up the slope from the market to Longacre and tumbling down the other side, spreading intermittently along Neal St almost as far as Shaftesbury Avenue. Shelton St to the east of the triangle towards Neal St. still gives a good example of how atmospheric and forbidding this area could be - the street like a deep ravine between tall and austere classical brick facades; a place of almost permanent shadow.  North of the market the demographic became increasingly working class; in some parts of Seven Dials north of the triangle there were slums.

      That said, I think that whole area of Covent Garden before the closing of the Market in 1974 must have been immensely fascinating and evocative - the chaos of the market; the theatres, and the Royal Opera House; the Gentlemen's clubs, such as the Garrick; the classy restaurants and the greasy spoons, the myriad of pubs; and the artisans in small workshops serving the market and the theatres.  All of this just rubbing along.  The BBC documentary of 1972 'How does your Garden Grow?' described it as 'the home of the most urbanised working class in the world - the Covent Garden Londoner'.

     But it couldn't carry on.  The market, sadly, had to go.  The first official official proposal to move the market was made in 1914.  In the 1940s, during WWII, two grandiose schemes were made for the area (and the rest of London); firstly there was the Royal Academy London plan of 1942; and then there was the Abercrombie plan of 1945, which sort of became official government policy. Both plans were high-handed, almost megalomaniac in their scope and ambition, requiring the wholesale demolition of much of the city.  The Abercrombie plan, for instance, required the total segregation of pedestrian and traffic (we have encountered this before at St Cuthbert's Village, Gateshead).  Vast swathes of the Covent Garden area were therefore to be sacrificed for an urban motorway and a housing scheme rather like the Barbican/London Wall.  Finally, when in the early seventies a new market was erected at Nine Elms in s London, the whole area became open to re-development.

     That wholescale re-development did not occur.  It is a long, and possibly complicated story, but it was defeated by a combination of closely related factors: increasing public dissatisfaction with the Post-War architectural settlement, strong local opposition and an increasingly focal, if not forceful, conservation movement.  The defeat of the then status quo at Covent Garden completely changed government policy.  The Abercrombie plan was suspended; with plans for the decking of Oxford St and the wholesale demotion of Whitehall scrapped.  The conservationists had won and the Modern Movement was in tatters. 

Further reading/viewing

Simon Jenkins: Concrete bungle: how public fury stopped the 1970s plan to turn London into a motorway | Planning policy | The Guardian

Though slightly tangential to this post there are some excellent colour photographs of the market in operation here

Terry Farrell, Academy Editions, 1993

Terry Farrell Selected and Curent Works, Images Publishing Group, 1994

The Queen Elizabeth II Memorial, part 2: The Triumph of Mediocrity

  

   Yes, just when you thought it was safe to go in the water....

    Today marks what would have been the Queen Elizabeth II's hundredth birthday.  So, with a rather muted fanfare the final designs for the Queen Elizabeth II Memorial in St James's Park have been placed before the public.  Well, I think I might be rather muted if this is the best that we can do.  The images are from the Cabinet Office, and they cannot even manage to spell 'Commonwealth'.  I really shouldn't complain about this because, as any reader of this blog will have seen, my spelling is, at times, atrocious.
     Anyway, this morning X, nee Twitter, is mildly a-flutter with posts about this, and the tweeters, including myself, are not happy.  There is a sense that the design, which promises to be 'more than a landmark'. does the Late Queen a disservice.  People have been voicing their disappointment that there will be no equestrian statue of her Late Majesty, as illustrated in Foster + Partners submission.  Sadly, it was never that likely, I think - the five designs that went out to public consultation were merely in the way of an 'Early Proposed Design Concept'.  As Foster + Partners later(?) admitted the equestrian statue was merely there for 'scale'.  As I wrote in my previous post on this project, consultation was a P0temkin exercise.  Not only that, it was highly misleading. People supported the Foster scheme on the assumption that a) it was a serious concrete proposal and b) they were going to get an equestrian statue.
     So, what are we likely to get? Well, thanks to Foster + Partners and Lord Janvrin and his committee* we shall have the following: On the Mall we have a bronze statue of the Queen, by Martin Jennings, standing atop a stone pier, and (beyond the gates designed by Sir Aston Webb) an area with a bronze bust of the Queen on a stone plinth, by Karen Newman; followed by another area with a 'Commonwealth Compass' designed by Sir Norman Foster himself. At some point there will also be a bronze statue of the Late Duke of Edinburgh by Martin Jennings, a new bridge over the lake with a balustrade of cut glass inspired by Queen Mary's Tiara, which the Queen wore on her wedding day.  And then there is the sculpture by Yinka Shonibare, 'The Commonwealth Wind Sculpture'.  Apparently, there will be themed gardens with places for relaxation and reflection.   
     The words, reflection reflect and contemplation, re-occur throughout the material provided by the Cabinet Office; the Prime Minister is quoted thus on the Government website: "As our longest‑serving monarch, Queen Elizabeth II devoted her life to public service. The nation will commemorate her extraordinary reign with a memorial that offers a place of reflection for generations to come."  Nice to know everybody is on message.**

     Lord Foster says, "With a serene and contemplative atmosphere, there will be opportunities to rediscover – or perhaps for some to discover – the legacy of Her Majesty."  What does that even mean?

     We told that the design attempts to reflect (that word again) the Queen, as the Chairman of the Committee has written, "Our task has been to recommend a memorial capturing her role, her personality and what she meant to so many of us - whilst being of public benefit which was so important to her."  But how is that possible when so much of her private values, such as her Christian faith is omitted?  The official memorial website, run by Kanda Consulting, does talk about her 'private faith', but does not mention any concrete expression of that.  I remain sceptical.

     The result of all of this seems to be a design teetering on the incoherent.  We are given a bit of this and a bit of that.  Some of it, such as the new bridge - the 'Bridge of Unity' - strikes me as tawdry.  As for the sculptures by Foster and Shonibare, the latter looking rather like the ghost in Jonathan Miller's 1968 tv adaptation of 'Oh, Whistle and I'll Come to You, My Lad', are, a profound level, quite meaningless.  It is the triumph of mediocrity.

     I honestly believe that an equestrian statute would have been enough.

     

* Valerie Amos, Amelia Fawcett, Joe Garner, Alex Holmes, Keay, Sandy Nairne, and William Shawcross.  Nice work if you can get it.

** The Queen Elizabeth II Memorial website is no different.  It just bristles with insincerity.  As I said above the website is run/managed by Kanda Consulting, the Competition Website by Malcolm Reading Consultants.