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Tag: art
I’ve only read two books by Schama; Citizens, his book about the French Revolution, and this biography of Rembrandt. Both have been excellent. They’re also quite hard work simply because he’s so thorough. Thoroughness is no doubt a virtue in a historian, but it does make for large books. Rembrandt’s Eyes is frankly too large to read in bed, as it weighs a whopping five and a half pounds. The reason it’s so large is that it’s printed on thick glossy paper and full of beautiful reproductions of the paintings. Amazon’s price of £13 is almost worth it just for the pictures.
Self Portrait at an Early Age, from the Rijksmuseum. Click on the image to see a larger version.
I was slightly taken aback when the first chapter of a Rembrandt biography was about Rubens’ father. Schama’s obviously feels that Rembrandt can only be understood in the context of his predecessor (who was born 30 years before him), since he devotes 200 pages, nearly a third of the book, to Rubens. I actually forgot that the book was supposed to be about Rembrandt at one point. This kind of attention to context — not just artistic, but the political and religious background of the region – is perhaps unsurprising given that Schama is primarily a historian, rather than an art critic. He’s brilliant at evoking the everyday reality of life in C17th Holland, as well. There’s one tour-de-force where he introduces Amsterdam by showing the city via the five senses, one at a time. So for example, the section on smell begins:
First, the Zuider Zee itself, sucked through the inlet of the IJ, washing against the slimy double row of palings separating the inner from the outer harbor, carrying with it a load of tangled wrack and weed, worthlessly small fish, and minute crustaceans generating a briny aroma of salt, rotting wood, bilgewater, and the tide-rinsed remains of countless gristly little creatures housed within the shells of barnacles and periwinkles. In the yards behind the first row of houses facing the docks there were better things to smell. Lengths of green timber were stood on end to season, some already bent to form a rib in a ship’s hull. A man might walk down the alleys parallel to the harbor, inhale the sharp tan of fir (for masts) and oak and beech (for hulls), and for a moment think himself in a fresh-cut wood in Norway.
And on through the smells of taverns, the night-soil boats, the tanners, the plague-pits, the nosegay sellers, the bakers; and then each of the other senses in turn.
Having said that Schama is primarily a historian, I still think he does a great job writing about the paintings. That’s just as well, since it becomes apparent during the book that there is very little surviving material written by Rembrandt. There are no journals or essays, and Schama only quotes from letters once or twice. Really, the only times we get direct written contact with Rembrandt’s life is when he’s dealing with the law – buying a house, writing a will, being declared bankrupt, or indeed having his ex-mistress declared as of unsound mind.
Those things are interesting, but by themselves they give a skewed and incomplete view of someone. So Schama has to fill out the gaps though the paintings, and does it admirably. There can hardly be a more appropriate painter to do that with, since Rembrandt was an almost compulsive self-portaitist. Not only did he produce nearly 100 self portraits in different costumes and different personae, but he painted his own face into most of his history paintings as well. There was a part of me that wanted to hear Rembrandt’s voice more directly, to be able to read his words; but perhaps it’s fitting to tell an artist’s story though his art.
Self Portrait at the Age of 63, from the National Gallery.
I can’t think of anything bad to say about this book. I enjoyed reading it, and learnt a lot about Rembrandt, Rubens and the Low Countries in the C17th . Most of all, I was introduced to a lot of beautiful paintings I didn’t know before.
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Kandinsky at the Tate
‘Wassily Kandinsky’; what a great name. Tate Modern currently has an exhibition Kandinsky: The Path To Abstraction, which traces Kandinsky’s development from a painter of Fauvist/post-Impressionist type landscapes to a ‘pure’ abstract painter. It’s confined to the early part of his career, but then I wasn’t very familiar with his work beforehand, so I didn’t have much to compare it to.
The early works use sizzling colours and distorted perspective but are still obviously representational. This is Murnau – Kohlgruberstrasse:
That reproduction possibly makes the colours look even more sizzling than they actually are, but it gives you the idea. Then you get increasingly abstracted landscapes like Landscape With Factory Chimney:
Then you get paintings full of symbolism, which are abstracted but still have recognisable objects in them. In this painting, for example, it wasn’t all immediately obvious, but you can pick out, going anti-clockwise from the dog, a cannon, a row of men firing guns, a cloud with a lightning-bolt, two men waving blue sabres behind the smoke from another cannon, and a boat with a yellow sail carrying four figures, one of which is rowing. The painting is just called Improvisation 11; the titles stop being very useful at this point.
The process of increasing abstraction continues, but the paintings still have content. Certain motifs recur – men on horseback, boats, mountains, waves, cannons – even if they wouldn’t necessarily be recognisable to a viewer who was unfamiliar with Kandinsky’s work. Apparently he was keen on the idea that a new better, more spiritual age was approaching, so there’s a lot of Deluge and Apocalypse going on. For example, this is Composition VI, and in the context of Kandinsky’s work, it’s fairly clearly a deluge painting. The real thing is 10 foot across, so this really doesn’t do it justice:
By the end of the exhibition, Kandinsky had started to produce some of the completely abstract, more geometrical work which apparently was typical of the rest of his career. By this stage he is, as far as I can tell, no longer even using representation or meaning as a starting point for the work. This is Circles On Black:
The exhibition was enjoyable for exactly the reason suggested by the name – seeing the process by which he gave up representational painting. If you’ve been brought up with abstract art, it doesn’t seem like an inherently difficult idea, but obviously at the time, artists had to arrive at it through a process. It’s not just Kandinsky, of course; you can see different versions of the same process in Miro and Mondrian and so on. As so often in artistic and literary development, it feels like there’s a process of building up in complexity as the artist develops and explores new ideas and techniques, and then a stripping back down as they pick out what seems most important and create works which are simpler, sparer and more focussed.
I was unsure, looking at Kandinsky’s paintings, whether he always had in mind that the goal was a complete divorce from representation, but that he had to feel his way towards it, or if that was just the direction his work took him. I daresay an art historian might be able to tell me. Either way, it’s worth going to just to see all the colourful paintings. Kandinsky liked his blues cobalt, his pinks fuchsia and his yellows daffodil; no fannying around with indecisive colours like ochre and olive.
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Constable at the Tate
Tate Britain currently has an exhibition Constable: The Great Landscapes. It focusses on the ‘five-footers’, which are landscapes five foot across and include his most famous works like The Haywain and Salisbury Cathedral From The Meadows. Not only have they collected togther all of the paintings, but also nearly all of the full-size oil sketches he did for them.
View on the Stour near Dedham, 1822
The sketches are included not just because it enables you to see the development of the painting, but because it’s rather unique to do such large preparatory sketches. If nothing else it provides a new way of looking at potentially over-familiar work. There’s also, I think, a feeling that the sketches are more to modern taste than the actual paintings. Certainly I found that in some cases. If you’ve been brought up on the Impressionists, the less finished quality isn’t a problem, and the looser, livelier brush-strokes have their own appeal. They also often have a more dynamic use of colour and tone than the finished painting. In a couple of cases the slightly lurid effect even reminded me of El Greco, something I really wasn’t expecting at a Constable exhibition.
View of Toledo, El Greco, 1597
I couldn’t help wondering what Constable would think if he knew people preferred the sketches to the originals. Peeved, I expect. But there was a tendency for the later paintings to be sketchier and to use more dynamic colour and tone, so perhaps it’s something he would have understood. Although some of the sketches were duller and muddier than the final paintings, so perhaps one shouldn’t understand them as anything other than compositional exercises. Who knows. Unfortunately the Tate exhibition website only has quite small images of most of the works, so I can’t really illustrate the difference between the sketches and the paintings. The picture above is one of the finished works.
I wasn’t a huge fan of Constable and the exhibition hasn’t persuaded me, but it was an enjoyable enough way to spend an hour or so. I guess the fact I preferred some of the sketches suggests my problem with the work – it’s too well behaved, too orderly. I can admire it, but I just find it a tiny bit boring. Mind you, I suspect I’d find landscapes by his contemporaries (except Turner!) even more boring.
Rake art, photographed from the air with a kite (click on the picture to see the whole set):
© Lenny. Via the always-excellent BLDGBLOG.
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‘Undercover Surrealism’ at the Hayward
Going to them one after the other, it’s hard not to see the Undercover Surrealism exhibition at the Hayward as some kind of riposte to the Modernism exhibition at the V&A.
The Hayward exhibition (full title: Undercover Surrealism – Picasso, Miró, Masson and the vision of George Bataille) is about a magazine called Documents which Bataille ran from 1929-30. Bataille was most closely associated with the Surrealists – he had a falling out with the ‘official’ surrealists and was never really a surrealist himself, but that was the circle he moved in. Documents was notable for juxtaposing articles about high culture, popular culture and ethnography. So you get coverage of Stravinsky, Duke Ellington, Picasso, Dali, Buñuel, Hollywood, trashy novels, African masks, Ethiopian iconography, and the development of the horse imagery from Roman coins into the coins of the Dark Ages. To be honest I was unexcited by the prospect of an exhibition devoted to a magazine, but the curators have done a good job of tracking down plenty of the objects that were covered; so there are Miros, Picassos, Giacomettis, as well as African masks, Dark Age coins; all sorts of stuff. Including some music and film, which was a good move. Apart from the intrinsic interest of most of the exhibits, it did a good job of evoking a particular artistic moment. You can see some of the work here.
Documents existed bang in the middle of the period covered by the V&A Modernism exhibition, but while Corbusier and the Bauhaus were building their airy white machines for rational hygienic living, the Surrealists were more interested in violence, sex, fetish, blood, transgression and distortion. Here’s a typical bit of Bataille:
The slaughterhouse is linked to religion in so far as the temples of bygone eras (not to mention those of the Hindus in our own day) served two purposes: they were used both for prayer and for killing. The result (and this judgement is confirmed by the chaotic aspect of present-day slaughterhouses) was certainly a disturbing convergence of the mysteries of myth and the ominous grandeur typical of those places in which blood flows. In America, curiously enough, W. B. Seabrook has expressed an intense regret; observing that the orgiastic life has survived, but that the sacrificial blood is not part of the cocktail mix, he finds present custom insipid. In our time, nevertheless, the slaughterhouse is cursed and quarantined like a plague-ridden ship. Now, the victims of this curse are neither butchers nor beasts, but those same good folk who countenance, by now, only their own unseemliness, an unseemliness commensurate with an unhealthy need of cleanliness, with irascible meanness, and boredom. The curse (terrifying only to those who utter it) leads them to vegetate as far as possible from the slaughterhouse, to exile themselves, out of propriety, to a flabby world in which nothing fearful remains and in which, subject to the ineradicable obsession of shame, they are reduced to eating cheese.
That’s one of the entries from the Critical Dictionary that was a feature of Documents. Somehow I don’t think Bataille would have agreed that less is more. Even the ethnographic stuff feels rather fetishised – even though it is a serious and intelligent effort of early ethnography, there are enough hints through the exhibition to suggest that Bataille’s interest in black people was basically sexual. Mind you, he seems to have found most things sexual. The surrealists, of course, were also a key part of de Sade’s reinvention as an important literary figure; it was that moment when Freud was seen as validating everyone’s sexual quirks, and the quirkier the better.
It’s tempting to see the two things – Corbusier on the one hand and Dali on the other – as somehow two sides of the same coin, or each as necessitating the other. Or at the least as products of the same forces; of the Great War, and a moment of cultural and historical instabiity when everything was up in the air and no-one quite knew where the world was going. As Yeats put it in 1920: The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity. Perhaps it’s unwise to insist too much on the historicity of it, though. There are probably always some people who are minimalists by temperament and others who are surrealists.