Tag: art

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Culture

‘Canaletto in England’ at Dulwich Picture Gallery

I almost forgot to blog about the Canaletto exhibition at DPG which I went to on Friday. As the title suggests, it focusses on Canaletto’s time in England. I knew he’d painted a few paintings of London, but I was surprised to learn that he lived here for nine years.

Not surprisingly, the show has been a big hit. He isn’t one of the top gods in my personal artistic pantheon, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Canaletto that I wouldn’t like to own. Elegant cityscapes bathed in sunlight and full of glittering water, with lots of little figures so that there’s always something to look at in the details: what’s not to like?

However, the Venice scenes he’s most known for can feel a little production-line. The Wallace Collection has a whole roomful of Canalettos. Seeing them all together, the sense of a commodity produced for the tourist market is overwhelming. So an exhibition of English scenes not only has local interest, it also offers a different perspective on the artist. This is Warwick Castle, which normally lives at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery:

By no means my favourite picture in the exhibition, or even my favourite picture of Warwick castle, but I couldn’t find many online. I rather liked this one, but the colours look screwy to me in that version.

As a Londoner, I was naturally drawn to the London pictures, although in fact if it wasn’t a few landmark buildings (St Paul’s and Westminster Abbey especially), I wouldn’t have felt confident identifing it as London. The period (1746-55) is just at the start of modern London, and there are enough C18th buildings left in London that the scenes often look generally Londony; but the specifics are almost all different. The skyline is dominated by church spires instead of office buildings, the river is heaving with traffic, and most of the key buildings haven’t been built yet. That in itself is part of the interest, of course.

It’s rather hard to find descriptions of Canaletto that don’t sound like damning with faint praise: his paintings are elegant, decorative, likeable. To some extent this is just a reflection of a shift in taste; we’re all Romantics now, and we’re all suckers for the sublime. In 1826, Hazlitt wrote, in ‘On Depth and Superficiality’:

Elegance is a word that means something different from ease, grace, beauty, dignity; yet it is akin to all these; but it seems more particularly to imply a sparkling brilliancy of effect with finish and precision. We do not apply the term to great things; we should not call an epic poem or a head of Jupiter elegant, but we speak of an elegant copy of verses, an elegant headdress, an elegant fan, an elegant diamond brooch, or bunch of flowers. In all these cases (and others where the same epithet is used) there is something little and comparatively trifling in the objects and the interests they inspire… [long snip]

The Hercules is not elegant; the Venus is simply beautiful. The French, whose ideas of beauty or grandeur never amount to more than an elegance, have no relish for Rubens, nor will they understand this definition.

I’m not sure Canaletto would have been very sympathetic to Hazlitt’s definition either. I’m not sure I am completely, but for better or worse, our taste in places and art has been re-shaped by the Romantics. The Romantic approach has its own pitfalls, of course; insisting that art should have profundity and authenticity tends to result in a lot of fake profundity and fake authenticity. And the borderline between sublime and kitschy is wafer-thin. I really like this painting (Gordale Scar (A View of Gordale, in the Manor of East Malham in Craven, Yorkshire, the Property of Lord Ribblesdale) by James Ward), but its wildness is so theatrical that it’s difficult to take it completely seriously:

No 500 pixel version can do it justice; the real thing is 14′ wide.

Anyway, I’ve wandered off the point slightly. I actually think, despite everything I’ve been saying, that Canaletto’s paintings are just too attractive to be easily dismissed. Here’s one (Old Walton Bridge Over The Thames) which is actually part of the Dulwich permanent collection. Unusually, it has a few clouds, and is perhaps all the better for it:

Nice, innit. For a video introduction to the exhibition, go here.

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Culture

Gilbert and George at Tate Modern

I went yesterday to see the big Gilbert and George retrospective at Tate Modern. The Tate have done their usual thorough job of putting the exhibition online, so that link will give you a fair idea of what the exhibition’s like.

I enjoyed it more than I expected. Not that I expected to hate it, but it wasn’t a show that I was especially excited to see. My usual gripe about contemporary art is that it often seems a bit half-baked; good moments that never seem to be worked through and developed fully. Gilbert and George did at least seem fully-baked. There’s a sense of a lot of stuff in the show – lots of ideas and images and variation. At the crudest level, a lot of work. Not that work ethic is the most sophisticated metric for artistic worth, but it at least predisposes me to be little more sympathetic.

I preferred the works with a more geometrical composition and a more austere colour scheme; there was a period in the eighties when their work became a bit too much like the packaging for a particularly odd range of children’s breakfast cereals (click on any of the images to see an enlarged version):

Generally, the obvious visual parallel with their work is stained glass windows, but actually some of the more geometrical ones remind me of quilts. Whether that’s a good thing or not.. don’t know, really. I’ve always quite liked simple, traditional geometrical quilt designs; when they work, they seem to be doing so much with so little. I don’t know whether that sense of formal restraint really applies to a work like Jesus Said:

In the past few years, they’ve started using computers to do the design work, and I’m not entirely sure that it’s an improvement: they seem overfond of some of the heavier-handed tools in Photoshop. Still, I like some of them.

So overall, I don’t know that I’d like to have many of these pieces actually in my house—and yes, I know that’s another rather simplistic metric for artistic worth, but it’s one way of communicating a gut reaction—but I’m glad I went to the exhibition.

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Culture

Art at Christie’s

I went to the preview today of an auction of Impressionist and Modern Art at Christie’s. It made me think I should go to see art at auction houses more often.

What you don’t get is a curated exhibition, with the pieces arranged around some kind of (hopefully) illuminating theme. It’s a rather random selection of work determined by what happens to come up for sale. But there’s no entry fee, the paintings are well-displayed, it’s less crowded than exhibitions at major London galleries tend to be, and the staff are more deferential, even though they must have taken one look at me and realised that I was unlikely to be splashing out a few million quid for a Renoir. And the catalogue (expensive, but there are copies chained around the place for you to consult) gives loads of information about the work.

There were some nice paintings, too; Cezanne, Picasso, Miro, Kandinsky, Degas, Modigliani and so on. I rather liked Portrait d’Eugène Lamy by Gustave Caillebotte and this bull by Oscar Dominguez, for example, as well as some nice Vuillards. Most unexpected item: Giacometti chairs.

Of course the other thing that makes an auction different from a gallery is that all the work has an estimated price on the label. So you can find out that an awful marshmallowy Renoir group portrait of a lesson is worth 2.5 – 3.5 million pounds:

Isn’t that horrible? It’s interesting, though, trying to get some sense of who’s hot and who’s not in the current art market. Despite the price tag on that one, Renoirs were generally estimated at less than I expected; the Schieles on the other hand were pretty expensive.

It would be quite interesting if places like the National Gallery had valuations displayed on the labels. Would you be able to resist being swayed by the number of zeros? Of course they’d never do something so vulgar, and they’re probably quite keen to appear above such things, but I’m sure museums, academia and the art market have a symbiotic relationship. If an artist’s reputation is on the rise, I’m sure curators and collectors are affected in much the same way.

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Culture Other

the coming of 3D video games

Technological change is extraordinarily rapid, yet somehow it seems to creep up on us. The internet went from being an obscure curiosity for the geeky to part of people’s everyday lives without most of us ever having a eureka moment when the change was brought home to us.

I have had a few such moments, though. I still remember the moment I saw my first proper 3D game, Virtua Fighter — in a Vegas casino, of all places — as incredibly exciting. I would quite seriously compare it to what it must have been like for the audiences when they first saw The Jazz Singer. It was jaw-dropping to see these graphics which were simply unlike anything I’d ever seen before.

It helped that it was completely unexpected. I didn’t read the gaming press, videogames barely made the mainstream media unless there was a moral panic going on, and the internet barely existed – I’d certainly never used it. So I had no prior knowledge; I just stumbled on the cabinet among all the other games and was blown away by it. What struck me most wasn’t the greater realism of the characters, exactly: even in the moment of first seeing it, the blockiness of the characters looked pretty primitive. But the way the characters moved in three dimensions really did make it feel more like you were controlling a ‘person’ rather than just an animation. And more than anything, it was the swooping camera, that moved around the action and zoomed in and out as you played, which brought home this shift from a flat game world to one with depth.

I’ve already compared it the shift from silent movies to talkies; a more exact comparison would be the invention of perspective in Renaissance painting. I don’t want to use hindsight to claim that I saw Virtua Fighter and immediately had a sense of all the ways 3D would have an impact on gaming, but it didn’t take any particular brilliance to see it and know that you were present at the start of something. Perhaps in C15th Italy there were people feeling the same way.

I still like the look of the original Virtua Fighter. I know that the minimalist environment — a bit of texture on the ground and a few clouds — is because of technical limitations rather than aesthetic choice, but I find it appealing. If you see the later versions of the game (they’re currently up to Virtua Fighter 4, with VF5 due out this year), the backgrounds are ever more lushly-detailed graphical marvels, mainly for the sake of eye-candy but also as part of a pointless attempt to build a narrative context. The places they fight are related to the characters’ elaborate back-stories. But really, what’s the point? It’s a beat-em-up; I don’t need to know my character’s motivation. And while I was excited as anyone else by the advances in computer graphics at the time, that lush, hyper-realistic aesthetic gets cloying after a while. It’s about time for a bit of less-is-more.

Comparisons with early cinema and Renaissance painting inevitably bring up the question of games as art. That’s not what I had in mind when I made them, and I certainly wouldn’t pick Virtua Fighter as a case study, since apart from the graphics it was the simplest and most formulaic game imaginable. But even discussing a game this simple, the kinds of things I find myself mentioning — the overall visual styling, the way the 3D characters made it more immersive, the characterisation, set design, lighting, camerawork — make comparisons with various artforms almost inevitable. That’s why it seems certain that descendants of today’s games will be treated as artworks with all the importance of films, novels or paintings. Someone will find a way of bringing it all together and making it into something more.

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Culture

Rodin at the RA

I went to the big Rodin exhibition at the Royal Academy today. It offered one of the simplest of art pleasures – looking at striking objects. His work has real presence, and not just because it’s made out of big lumps of bronze or marble. Their status as representational work seemed less important than the sheer physicality of them.

That’s not entirely true, of course – you can’t separate it out in that way and pretend that they’d somehow be just as effective if they were abstracts. I’m not sure the claim would even mean anything. So what do I mean? I guess there’s a kind of impersonality to them. Whereas a painting is to some extent experienced as a window onto another reality, this work never had that kind of illusionistic quality; they are experienced much more directly as art-objects. Some of that is the medium, some of it is his style.

Much of the work in the show was fairly familiar — a lot of the exhibition is built around The Burghers of Calais, The Kiss, The Thinker and The Gates Of Hell. I didn’t realise he’s done quite so many sculptures of nekkid girls embracing each other, though. They all had different titles — The Earth and Moon, or whatever — but it was hard to avoid the conclusion that he just got a bit of a kick out of doing them. There were also various erotic drawings he’d done that featured girls prominently displaying their lady-bits, so I don’t think I’m jumping to any outrageous conclusions.

It made me think how few famous sculptors there are, especially since some of the most famous artists of the Renaissance (Bernini, Michelangelo) were sculptors. Between the Renaissance and abstraction, Rodin is almost the only really big-name sculptor I can think of, compared to the dozens of painters I could come up with at a moments notice. I guess the great ages of sculpture tend to be when it’s much in demand for architectural dressing; Greek temples and medieval and Renaissance churches seem to have been thick with the stuff. But still, that’s not really an adequate explanation. Even with sculpture relatively out of fashion, there were many thousands of statues, monuments, tombs and so on put up in the C17th – C19th, but somehow none of the sculptors managed to carve out a place in the public consciousness. Which I guess makes Rodin all the more exceptional.

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Culture Nature Other

Fave books of 2006

It’s end-of-year list time. These weren’t all first published this year, and I daresay I’ve forgotten some, but they are at least all books I’d recommend. In no particular order:

Rembrandt’s Eyes by Simon Schama.

I blogged about this before. Simon is a serious historian (rather than, say, a journalist who writes occasional books) who writes brilliantly and is a firm believer in the virtues of a narrative approach to history. So I think he’s usually worth checking out. In this case I think he does a really good job telling the life of Rembrandt and establishing it in context. As a bonus, the book is full of gorgeous glossy plates of the paintings — it would almost be worth buying for the pictures alone.

Animals in Translation by Temple Grandin.

Another one I blogged about earlier. I’ll just quote some of what I said then: “Oliver Sacks fans will remember Temple Grandin as the autistic slaughterhouse designer in An Anthropologist on Mars. She has a particular affinity with animals and has used her talent for understanding them to help her design corrals, feedlots and slaughterhouses which are less stressful for the animals. The subtitle of Animals in Translation is ‘Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior’. Grandin uses her insights as an autistic person to help explain how animals behave and in the process explores the nature of autism itself.”

A Social History of English Cricket by Derek Birley.

The title is an accurate description of the book. On the basis that everything people do is shaped by their times, I guess you could write a social history of English anything – theatre, banking, food – and there would be plenty of subject matter. But cricket does seem especially appropriate, and not just because it’s a stereotypically English pursuit.

The reason cricket neatly brings out some of the tensions in English society is that cricket was the one sport that attempted to combine amateurs and professionals. Of the other English sports, football quickly became a commercial activity, played and watched by mainly working-class men in professional leagues dominated by the great industrial cities. Rugby split into two sports: Rugby League (professional, working class) and Rugby Union (amateur, middle class). But cricket rose to prominence in the gambling culture of the C18th with aristocrats fielding teams against each other for high stakes, and the teams would include talented men from their estates or the local villages – grooms and blacksmiths and so on – who were paid to play. So from the beginning there was a culture of gentlemen amateurs and working class pros in the same team. Given the class-riddled state of English society for most of the past 250 years, a staggering amount of hypocrisy and doublethink was the result.

Grayson Perry: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl by Wendy Jones.

The memoirs of the Turner Prize winning potter. I blogged about this before here and here.

Lorca: A Dream of Life by Leslie Stainton.

A well-written biography of an interesting man I didn’t know much about before. Being a gay socialist modernist poet from one of the most conservative regions of Spain in the 1920s and 30s didn’t exactly make Lorca’s life easy. But it does make for an involving story. The poetry was interesting too, though it’s the kind of work that leaves you wondering how much you’re missing in translation.

The River Cottage Meat Book by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall.

A book about cooking meat which combines practical information — the various cuts, how to choose the best meat and the underlying principles of different cooking methods — with information about different meat production methods and labelling schemes and a thoughtful consideration of the ethical aspects of buying and eating meat. And indeed a lot of recipes and a list of high-quality meat suppliers. A rare example of a food book which manages to be much more than just a list of recipes.

And finally, a book which I didn’t buy or read for the first time this year but deserves a plug – the Collins Bird Guide (to the birds of Britain and Europe) by Lars Svensson, Peter J. Grant, Killian Mullarney and Dan Zetterstrom. I’ve had the book for a bit, but I was struck again by how good it is when I was in Spain this year. You never quite know how good a field guide is until you use it, and this one seems to consistently provide the right information to allow you identify the bird you’re looking at. The illustrations are excellent and the text is thorough and lucid. I’ve used plenty of different field guides over the years, of insects and flowers and birds from different parts of the world. This is certainly the best of them.