Making Connections ~ The Time Line

Having managed to get as far as London once there is now absolutely no holding me.  The National Gallery last month and now, this month, the Courtauld Gallery, tucked away amongst the buildings of Somerset House, just off the Strand.

The Courtauld is one of those small galleries, of which there are several dotted around the capital, where you turn a corner and suddenly come across one of the world's great paintings, like this one by Manet.  If you'd asked me where I thought this was I would have hazarded the National or the Louvre or the Prada.  I wouldn't have expected to find it tucked away down a London side alley.

I had actually gone to see the Toulouse-Lautrec and Jane Avril exhibition.  Jane Avril was one of the dancers at the Folies-Bergeres who Toulouse-Lautrec used as models for the posters and pictures he created for the theatre.  We normally see her dressed in bright colours, legs flying, as she entertains the punters in the can-can.  This was the picture that took my attention, though, showing the dancer in a much more somber mood as she leaves the theatre in the early hours of the morning almost unnoticed in her classic blue suit.  There is something so contained about her in comparison with the abandon she displays in the more well known paintings.  She looks separate, lonely.  This is the canvas I could live with.

I had as much pleasure though from looking around the rest of the gallery.  As well as the Manet they have some wonderful Van Gogh and Degas as well as an interesting collection of paintings by Rubens and it was the Rubens which brought home to me gaps in my knowledge that I know I have to do something about.

Where each of the individual creative arts is concerned I have a reasonably good understanding of the time line through from the medieval to the modern day.  I know where Rubens comes in relation to Degas or when Mozart was composing in relation to Brahms.  What I don't know is how they relate across the artistic boundaries.  So, I find it amazing that Rubens was painting this picture of Moses and the Brazen Serpent at the same time and in the same place as Shakespeare was writing The Tempest.  It isn't that I thought they were from different time periods, I just have no real understanding of how they relate at all.

Well, there is no point in simply bewailing my lack of understanding, is there?  I need to do something about it and I'm going to, but that is for another post.

Oh, and before any of you ask, yes, of course I went to Fortnum and Mason for afternoon tea.  This time I replaced the scones with a slice of Raspberry Yoghurt Cake but unfortunately I can't find a picture of this magnificent confection.  I should have taken one before I demolished it.  Anyway, I can definitely recommend you treat yourself, just be prepared to explain the bill to your bank manager next time you see him!

Don't Rain on my Parade!

A couple of weeks ago I went down to London for the day.  Now, unless you know me very well, you won't realise the enormity of that sentence.  Due to a chronic condition that forced me into early retirement I haven't been able to travel any great distance for the last five or six years without disastrous consequences that laid me low for days.  For the first three years I had a fifteen mile limit and could only be glad that there was so much that I could do locally within such a small area.  Gradually, I've been able to push my boundaries further afield, getting to Stratford two years ago and Oxford last summer.  Now I've managed the two hundred mile round trip to London and although I'm not going to be able to do it very often, I feel as if I've been given the world.  As I walked down Baker Street on my way from Marylebone Station to Trafalgar Square I looked up at the first storm clouds the capital had seen in weeks and bellowed out the Streisand song defying the weather to rain on my parade.  It's a good job people are used to eccentrics in London.  No one paid a blind bit of notice!

I had, in fact, gone specifically to see the Jan Gossaert exhibition at the National Gallery.  I love the Flemish artists of this period (early sixteenth century), especially the wonderful portraits that they painted of both their aristocratic patrons and some of the more mercantile burghers who employed them.  This chap, keeping very careful note of all the financial comings and goings in his business, is a banker.  I would love to know what his filing system was like.  Could he just reach up and find the appropriate note that told you by how much you were overdrawn without even looking.  I bet he could.  Look at that face.  You weren't going to put anything over that gentleman, were you?

But the whole expedition had clearly gone to my head because I kept seeing all sorts of things that I suspect a serious minded art critic would not have agreed with nor approved of.  For example, there is a wonderful cartoon of Adam and Eve in which it is absolutely obvious from the way in which Eve is supporting him that Adam has taken all the apples from the Tree of Knowledge and turned them into high octane cider.  What's more, he's drunk it all!

Then there is a canvas of St Luke painting his vision of the Virgin and Child and I am seriously worried about what one little cherub sitting at Mary's feet is up to.  What need has he to have his hands up Mary's skirt, I ask myself.  Actually, I probably don't want to know the answer.

Anyway, giggling is clearly not the done thing in the National Gallery, so eventually I took myself off down Piccadilly to Fortnum and Mason and indulged in that most decadent of English customs, afternoon tea.

If you ever have the chance to go to Fortnum and Mason for afternoon tea then do take out a mortgage and partake.  (And you definitely do 'partake', any other verb simply wouldn't meet the circumstances.)  Nothing else rivals one of their own individual blends served in a silver plated tea-pot and accompanied by homemade scones, jam and clotted cream.  I was very good and stuck at that.  But if you want to you can go the whole way and add sandwiches and a slice of one of their wonderful cakes.  You won't want to face either your bank manager or the bathroom scales in the immediate future but believe me it will be worth it.

I hope this isn't going to be a one off visit to London.  I just woke up that morning and knew that I could try and I suspect that for the moment that is going to have to be the way I do it.  Planning in advance is likely to hype up my adrenaline levels and undermine me before I start.  But it's a beginning and I intend to build on it.

Civilisation

I just missed out on Kenneth Clark's iconic series, Civilisation, when it was first shown in 1969. I was a student at the time and the digs I was in couldn't run to the expense of a television that could receive BBC 2. And, if I'm brutally honest, I don't remember being that concerned about the fact. I suspect that my mind was far too occupied with live theatre to be really concerned with what I probably then classified as 'dead' art.

So, it was a real joy this Christmas to find that one of the presents under the tree was a box set of the DVDs and over the last couple of days I've watched the first two episodes, the first discussing the period between the fall of the Roman Empire and the Norman Conquest and the second focusing on what he calls the sudden re-awakening of European civilisation in the 12th century, particularly the building of the great Romanesque and Gothic cathedrals.

However (you could hear that coming, I'm sure) while I certainly haven't been disappointed in the programmes I have been struck forcibly by the way in which they have dated both in respect of documentary techniques and in terms of the approach adopted towards the historical periods discussed. Compared with a twenty-first century documentary they are so slow. A programme made now would cover two or three times as much material and there would be far fewer of the long, lingering, panning shots, especially those of fields of rape flowers which seem to have no bearing on the contents at all. What I found even more unsettling was the way in which Lord Clark dismissed the period after the Roman Empire as one with little or no art worth discussing other than such well known examples as The Book of Kells. Definitely for him, The Dark Ages.

Our understanding of this period has changed enormously over the intervening period. Just yesterday, when I was in the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, I was looking at pieces of beautiful jewellery taken from the Anglo-Saxon hoard found locally a couple of years ago. Almost entirely made of gold set with stunning garnets they are examples of exquisite workmanship and no one seeing those could possible claim today that they came from a time when beauty and art were not appreciated. It made me go on line to see if the television series that was made on The Dark Ages quite recently was available, but it doesn't seem to have been released, mores the pity.

I shall go on watching the Kenneth Clark programmes but with as much of an eye towards the ways in which they have become history themselves as to what I can learn about history from them.

Nativity Trail

At this time of year the plans of mice and men are probably best not laid at all. Last week everything came unstuck because of the weather and this week the cause of the disruption is an outbreak of flu which is apparently gathering momentum apace and threatening to reach epidemic proportions. One of the casualties is my friend Margaret, with whom I should have been spending today, and so I filled the space in the diary by going into Birmingham to see the Nativity Trail organised by the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery.

Just before Christmas a friend and ex-colleague came to the University to give a lecture on the nativity as painted by Jan de Beer. In one sense this was another example of the best laid plans because the painting, which is part of the Barber Collection, has been away for conservation and the lecture was intended to celebrate its return to the gallery. However, the work needed proved to be more extensive than had first been thought and so Martin had to speak to slides rather than the original. One of the points that he made was that nativity paintings can normally be pinned down to one gospel version or another. Extremely obvious when you think about it - I'd simply never thought about it. Interestingly, the de Beer is a St John nativity. And yes, there is no account of the nativity in St John, but what Martin was picking up on was the centrality in this painting of the light sources and the recurring idea in John's gospel of Jesus as the light of the world.

Walking around the Birmingham exhibition this afternoon it was clear that his thesis was correct. Even though I am no biblical scholar I could place each of the works in respect of the version of the nativity story it was exploring. What was perhaps more fascinating was the way in which the paintings also reflected the times in which they had been created. The Burne-Jones kings could have walked straight out of one of his Arthurian tapestries and the shepherds in the stained glass window created as a memorial to the fallen of the First World War were clearly men who had known the horror of the trenches.

Perhaps the painting I liked the most was Gentileschi's account of The Rest in the Flight into Egypt. Not the topic you think of most immediately when looking for nativity subjects, perhaps, but still very definitely part of the story. What I love about this, apart of course from the donkey, is the very human face he has given to Mary. I'm not sure how well it's going to reproduce here, but there is nothing saintly or ethereal about this young woman. She is tired and frightened, but still determined to look after the child. I will give Joseph the benefit of the doubt and assume that he has been walking while Mary has been on the donkey. Otherwise I might have 'thoughts' about his lack of concern for his family. He looks as though he might never get up again. Some of the reproductions I've seen have no donkey and looking at the Birmingham version it does appear as if he was a bit of an after thought. Perhaps Gentileschi discovered that the could paint donkeys' heads but not their bodies and so blanked out his efforts with a slab of rock. Now that really would be human.


Annie