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Adam Elsheimer at DPG

There’s an exhibition of Adam Elsheimer paintings at the Dulwich Picture Gallery. From the DPG site:

On hearing of Elsheimer’s early death Rubens wrote ‘Surely, after such a loss our entire profession ought to clothe itself in mourning. We will not easily succeed in replacing him; in my opinion he had no equal in small figures, in landscapes, and in many other subjects’. This exhibition is a unique opportunity to re–discover this painter ‘without equal’.

I admit I’d not heard of Elsheimer, but apparently he was an important influence on Rembrant, Rubens and Claude Lorrain. He makes an excellent choice for an exhibition at a small gallery, because he wasn’t very prolific and his paintings were small. That (and the fact that he’s not so well known) has allowed them to exhibit effectively his entire output: 30 of 34 accepted surviving paintings.

The paintings are small because they’re on copper, and apparently copper sheets had to be small for practical reasons. I found myself wondering whether he did small paintings because he liked working on copper or he worked on copper because he liked doing small paintings. I know that it’s not the most sophisticated aesthetic response to get fixated on the size, but I do think there’s quite a profound division between people who are miniaturists by inclination — in painting, poetry or whatever — and those who like the grand sweep.

The distinction is brought out in Elsheimer because many of his paintings have the kind of complex, dynamic compositions that you can imagine being painted ten foot tall by his contemporaries. This picture, The Stoning of Saint Stephen, which normally lives in the National Gallery of Scotland, is one of his larger works, but it’s still only 34.70 x 28.60 cm:

The size means they have less immediate impact, but there’s an intimacy in viewing these paintings; there’s only really room for one person in front of each, and you find yourself standing with your nose practically touching them. And the execution of tiny details is fascinating in itself. Still, I found there was something weirdly constrained about them, as though the practical explanation for why they were small wasn’t quite enough to explain it.

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Hurray for the London Olympics!

I really feel like London was cheated out of a cheerful honeymoon period of harmless excitement between winning the bidding for the 2012 Olympics and the start of the inevitable gloomy stories about spiralling costs. Cheated because, of course, it was the morning after we won that a bunch of devout young men from Leeds hijacked the news agenda.

It was always going to cost more than predicted — it’s a big capital project run by policitians. That’s what happens. And it was always inevitable that there would be a lot of whining from dismal killjoys. But the enthusiast, pro-Olympic side of the argument lost all its momentum just as it should have been drawing people in, and so we’re going to have the six years of gloomy pronostication without having had the chance to enjoy the initial moment.

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Nearly time for the Ashes

Just an hour until the start of the Ashes. Since the play is going to run from something like midnight to 7am, I’m not going to listen to it all, but I want to at least stay up to hear the start of play.

I can’t help feeling that England have less momentum going into this series than the last one, but if our key men play well — Flintoff, Harmison and Hoggard particularly, but the batsmen as well — I don’t think Australia will find it easy. We’ll miss Simon Jones, but we’ve still got match-winning bowlers.

I’m kind of blathering at this point.

*fingers crossed*

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Holiday book report: Bleak House

By Charles Dickens, obviously. I have to admit, this isn’t really my idea of holiday reading: it’s just too long for that. But I half-inched it from a hotel I stayed at in Quito. It was either that or Harry Potter in Finnish.

It’s odd reading Dickens; sometimes he seems so dated — so sentimental, so cosy, so verbose, so typical of everything about the Victorians which has aged least well, like the Albert Memorial and majolica. In Bleak House, this is typified by ‘Esther’s Narrative’, those chapters, probably about 1/3 of the book, which are a first-person narrative in the voice of the angelic heroine of the story. I find the syrupiness of her portrayal unbearable. It sets my teeth on edge.

But at the same time there’s a thick vein of weirdness which is all his own. Dickens’s grotesquery is always tinged with a reassuring touch of comedy, but it’s a fag-paper from being something much more radical and scarier. Jarndyce and Jarndyce, the Courts of Chancery, and Miss Flite’s birds Hope, Joy, Youth, Peace, Rest, Life, Dust, Ashes, Waste, Want, Ruin, Despair, Madness, Death, Cunning, Folly, Words, Wigs, Rags, Sheepskin, Plunder, Precedent, Jargon, Gammon, and Spinach: it seems just a tweak in mood from being Kafka. And one particular chapter, the death of Krook, is not just grotesque, it’s genuinely and stomach-turningly nasty.

I suppose it shouldn’t be surprising that some aspects of a book age better than others, but I still find Dickens a bit schizophrenic. And I know Bleak House is one of his darker books, but even looking at his work generally I think that his enormous popularity, his firm place in the canon and his sentimentality tend to disguise the fact that he’s a much odder writer than his image suggests.