If there was ever an artist to whom the words mad, bad and dangerous to know apply it really has to be Michelangelo da Caravaggio, known simply as Caravaggio, a great painter and an altogether infamous human being! He was a hard-fringing, hard-living, hard-fighting man, whose actions did not stop short of murder.
His reputation as an artist opened doors, just as his actions as a man quickly closed them again. At one point he was even enrolled among the Knights of Saint John on Malta, only to be expelled in December 1608 as a “foul and rotten member.” Even the precise circumstances of his death in 1610 are still shrouded in mystery. Supposedly dead of a fever, no body was ever found and no grave exists.
But as an artist he is one of Italy’s greatest, and a personal favourite of mine. In some ways he was a political artist, a propagandist for the Counter-Reformation, not just in the devotional subjects he chose but the style, the new life he breathed into religious painting that had been dominated for so long by the dead hand of Mannerism. In technique he was a naturalist, who made the most inventive use chiaroscuro, the sharp contrasts of light and dark, giving a heightened sense of drama, vivid, wonderful and intense. I see in Caravaggio the beginnings not just of Baroque but a great many subsequent trends in art. This is painting at its most passionate, no matter if the subject is sacred or profane.
I don’t know much about art but I know what I like, so the cliché goes. My version goes like this: I know quite a lot about art and I know what I hate. And what I have particular hatred for is the fraudulent, the talentless and the bogus. I hate those who are accepted as good and lasting simply because the art establishment says they will be good and lasting. It is the classic tale of the emperor’s new clothes. Only those with no taste could fail to see the merit in, say, Damien Hirst; only those with no taste could fail to see the merit in the sculptures of Henry Moore. I loathe the sculptures of Henry Moore, those ghastly blobs that inhabit city centres across the world. There; the child has spoken!
I make this confession against the background of a major exhibition of Moore’s work in the Tate, running until the beginning of August. I went, I saw, I left. Not that I expected to be convinced that the time had come to look again at an artist whose work is rather falling out of fashion. No, I suppose it was just to confirm a prejudice, not against contemporary sculpture, just against Henry Moore. There they are all lined up, those graceless shapes, not ugly, just pointless, a confirmation of how little talent the man truly had. Please do not assume this arises from an animus against forms of art which do not adhere to traditional classical forms. No, there is a lot that I admire in artists who break conventional boundaries. I admire the work of Barbara Hepworth and I adore the Futurists, having a particular love of Umberto Boccioni’s Unique Forms of Continuity in Space.
Then there is Moore; shapes struggling for life and never quite getting there; lumpy and leaden and almost completely devoid of imagination, of truly creative intellect. There is no animation, there is no focus; there is just the same thing, time after time. No matter the subject it gets the same treatment to the point it becomes meaningful to say that if you have seen one sculpture by Moore you have seen them all; reclining figure, king and queen, mother and child, no matter; you’ve seen them all. It’s a bit like a pianist who was never able to progress much beyond chopsticks. There is nothing in Moore that challenges, nothing that demands a second look. The curators describe his work as “abject, erotic, violated and visceral”, which seems to me to be just a succession of rather meaningless words. One review I read asked how they could possibly tell. My comment is simpler; if they think this stuff is ‘erotic’ they really need to get out more. But Moore became the fashion of the age, a comment less about art and more about the age, more about the death of imagination.
The National Gallery is presently holding an exhibition of the work of Paul Delaroche, a nineteenth century French painter much given to depicting subjects from English history. His work includes such paintings as Strafford Lead to Execution, showing Thomas Wentworth, 1st Earl of Strafford, one of the principal advisors to Charles I, being blessed by Archbishop Laud, himself imprisoned, while on his way to the block, The Princes in the Tower and the recently rediscovered Charles I Insulted by Cromwell’s Soldiers, which for me conjures up aspects of medieval depictions of the passion of Jesus. However, the centrepiece of the show surely has to be the enduringly popular The Execution of Lady Jane Grey. First exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1834 it was an immediate sensation amongst a French audience, at least some of whom would have remembered the execution of Queen Marie Antoinette. It depicts the last moments, the last fraught moments, before Jane’s execution for treason in 1554. Jane, who ruled England as butterfly rules a day, was beheaded on the orders of the Catholic Queen Mary.
It’s a wonderful painting, one of my personal favourites on an event in history. There she is, the blindfolded teenager, like a martyr in white, all of the light focused on her, groping for the block. In the background her attendants collapse in grief, while to the right the executioner waits with his axe. It’s grand, intense, full of melodrama and pathos. Do go and see it if you can, and remember the Butterfly Queen.
I read in one of my history journals that five hand-painted stained glass masterpieces from sixteenth century Germany have been discovered in South Wales. The pieces in question were removed from Steinfeld Abbey near Cologne in 1803 during the French occupation of the district
The glass, which had previously been put into storage by the monks, was sold to a local dealer when the Abbey was secularised. From there it was sold to an expatriate German business man by the name of John Christopher Hamp, who was based in Norwich. Hamp sold them on to various wealthy clients, who either installed them in their own houses or donated them to local churches.
During the last century scholars discovered various panels in houses, chapels and churches in Hertfordshire, Cheshire, Norfolk and Bristol. In 1928 the Hertfordshire panels were bought by Ernest Cook, the grandson of the travel agent, who donated them to the Victoria and Albert Museum, where they remain to the present day.
The Welsh panels are the first fresh discoveries in twenty years. Although gratifying it still represents only a tiny fraction of the collection that is still missing, possibly broken up, or possibly close to where you live, somewhere in the manor houses and churches of England and Wales. Who knows what you are looking through? :-)
Marcel Duchamp’s A Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 is one of my favourite works of art of the last century. Painted in 1912 it was first exhibited at the Société des Artistes Indépendants, later becoming a centre-piece at the New York Armory Show the following year, where it caused a huge sensation.
Too revolutionary for the age, it was subject to all sorts of outrage and parody, being compared to a collapsing suit of Japanese armour, amongst other things. Newspaper cartoonists created their own versions, lampooning the works as An Explosion in a Shingle Factory or The Rude Descending a Staircase. A reward of ten dollars was offered by The American Art News to the first reader who ‘could find the lady’ amongst the inter-locking planes and jagged lines, though what gave them the impression that the Nude was ‘a lady’ I really can’t say, other than the absence of a, ahem, member in motion!
Neither Cubist nor Futurist, in brilliantly captures elements of both in the progress of the figure through space, with dynamic movement and a train of afterimages.
Move your arm quickly. You will see the ghostly traces as it goes from start to finish. It was this that Duchamp tried to capture, a combination of movement in space and time frozen in one stunning instant. It shows more than anything the revolutionary impact photography had on painting, offering new visions and insights. It shows the influence in particular of the English photographer Eadweard J. Muybridge, whose Woman Walking Downstairs appeared in his 1887 collection The Human Figure in Motion. If anything it’s a synthesis of Muybridge in a single image-so it must be a woman after all. Can I get the ten dollars? :-)
Max Beckmann was a German painter often associated with Expressionism, who later became a leading influence on the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) in the 1920s. The one painting of his that moves and disturbs me most is The Night, painted just after the First World War, during which the artist, who was a medical orderly, had a nervous breakdown in the face of the suffering he witnessed.
The Night is one of his most recognised works, a brilliant but bleak painting, depicting a world of arbitrary violence, violence without redemption or purpose. It is a violence that comes from everywhere and nowhere, and was to be a prophetic image of Germany-and Europe's future. The pictorial vision derives ultimately from Matthias Grünewald and the German Middle Ages.
I went to Amsterdam last year to visit Vincent and now Vincent is coming to London to visit me! A little later this month a new exhibition of his work opens in the Royal Academy, running until the middle of April. The exciting thing about this show, headed The Real Van Gough: The Artist and his Letters, is that some forty of his letters will also be on display beside sixty-five paintings and thirty drawings. For the emphasis, you see, is on the word as well as the image.
I confess that I don’t know that much about the life of Van Gogh apart from the usual stock images of troubled genius and ear lopper! I’ve never read a biography of the man, though I have tried to understand him as best as I am able through his intense, swirling and penetrating images; a world in motion, a world on fire.
It’s of particular fascination for me to discover that he also loved words, loved to write and express himself in writing. Words impacted on his imagination, on the creative power of his imagination, as well as landscape and people. “Books and reality and art are the same kind of thing for me”, he wrote, a sentiment he carried further, “One has to learn to read, as one has to learn to see and learn to live.”
Van Gogh read books with the same concentrated intensity that he used in painting. Besides his native Dutch he was also fluent in French and English, reading Shakespeare and Dickens in the original. His favourite Dickens’ novel was Hard Times which is the one that I happen to like the least! Still, I think that Vincent and I would have got on famously, for I also share his love of Flaubert and Maupassant.
More broadly, he seems to have been highly knowledgeable about most contemporary French fiction, reading all of Zola’s Rougon-Macquart series and identifying closely with the author’s naturalism. Of these books he wrote to Wilemein, his younger sister, saying that they “…paint life as we feel it ourselves, and thus satisfy the need which we have, that people tell the truth.”
The truth is that Van Gogh as a communicator was too intense for most people in person; too intense for Gauguin, too intense even for Theo, his brother, an art dealer and his main source of financial support. His letters, then, were a way of channelling much of his manic energy into simple imagery and clear ideas, his only really successful mode of communication beyond his art. When he arrived in Arles in 1888, the beginning of his most creative period, brief and overwhelming, he wrote to Theo describing his wonder at his new surroundings;
I notice some magnificent plots in red earth planted with vines, with the mountains in the background of the most delicate lilac. And the landscapes under the snow with the white peaks against the sky as bright as the snow was just like the winter landscapes the Japanese did.
He wanted to paint as Zola wrote, in a natural way, showing life as it flowed around him;
The zouaves, the brothels, the adorable little Arlesiennes going to their first communion…the priest in his surplice who looks like a dangerous rhinoceros, the absinthe drinkers…
I’m certain that this exhibition is destined to achieve its aim, to give a more nuanced view of the man, of his work and of his creative intellect; the man beyond the stereotype of troubled genius and harvester of ear lobes. :-)
I’m rather sorry not to be in Athens just at the present, for an exhibition has just opened telling the story of love and desire in the ancient world, the erotica of Eros! Over two-hundred and seventy objects d’art have been put on display in the Museum of the Cycladic Art, where they will remain on show for the next six months. It’s quite an achievement as the artefacts, dating from the sixth century BC to the fourth century AD, have been gathered together from more than fifty international museums.
The exhibition centres on a unifying theme: the evolution of Eros, a powerful Greek god, into the Roman Cupid, an altogether tamer, less potent figure, the mere companion of Venus. But this kind of axis has produced a superabundance of all kinds of sexually inspired artefacts. The director of the museum says that that there was no deliberate intention to shock, though some of the depictions, particularly of Eros’ cruelty towards the goddess Psyche, seems to have caused some unease among early visitors. One cameo shows him dragging her by the hair and hitting her with a mallet, illustrating, one supposes, the dual nature of desire.
After that one proceeds to the upper galleries, where children under sixteen are warned not to enter ‘unattended’ which I imagine will have the said children arriving in hordes, especially as there is no insistence that they be attended! There, in three rooms, ancient sexual union is depicted in all of its inventiveness and variety; from pederasty, anal sex, mutual oral sex to what the exhibition quaintly terms the ‘bucolic love affair’. There are giant phalluses, manufactured as lucky charms, as well as engravings of furious orgies involving satyrs and silens. In a text highlighted on the wall one scribe gives note of his own particular enthusiasm;
I delight in the prime of a boy at twelve. One of thirteen is much more desirable. He who is fourteen is a still sweeter flower of the lovers. And one who is beginning his fifteenth year is yet more delightful. The sixteenth year is that of the gods. And as for the seventeenth, it is not for me but for Zeus to seek it.
So, there! Oh, yes, it would be super to be in Athens. Still better to be there in the company of Aristophanes.:-))
All official art contains an element of propaganda. Let me give you a specific example. If I mention the name of the English king Henry VIII does this conjure up a specific image in your mind? Yes? Well, if it does, I think I can probably guarantee that it is the same confident and bull-like presentation that most people have: a man of boundless arrogance and limitless self-regard. This is the image that has made its way into popular culture, and possibly makes Henry one of the most recognised monarchs in all of history. In my estimation this puts Hans Holbein in the first rank of 'propaganda' painters. His paintings are not about people: they are about power.
It was Thomas Cromwell, the great Machiavellian, who first detected Holbeins's potential as the 'official' artist of the Reformed party in England, commissioning him to create anti-papal illustrations for books and pamphlets. In 1536 Holbein reached the very top of his profession, when he was appointed as the King's Painter. All images for public consumption were now his responsibility, and he depicted the Tudors very much in the fashion desired by the king, including the huge mural he painted in the palace of Whitehall. But of course being the painter of the rich and powerful also had dangers. Flattery and magnification became second nature to Holbein, who even did his best with the unprepossessing Anne of Cleves, Henry's mail-order bride. The gap between the 'ideal' and the reality was to lead to the fall of Cromwell, and the partial reversal of the English Reformation. Such is the power of art!
Damian Hirst, whose latest exhibition has been mauled by the critics, says that anyone can learn to paint like Rembrandt; that the Dutch master was no genius. All I have to say to this is, yes, perhaps anyone can paint like Rembrandt, just not you.
I like experimental art; I like art that challenges, that stimulates the imagination; I just don’t like Damian Hirst; I never have. For me he is nothing more than a poseur and showman rather than a true artist, the P. T Barnum of the art world, the kind of person who lives by critical adulation and just as readily dies by critical damnation. His comments on Rembrandt are so revealing, saying much about him and the ‘industry’ that is Britart:
Anyone can be a Rembrandt. I don’t think a painter like Rembrandt is a genius. It’s about freedom and guts. It’s about looking. It can be learnt. That’s the great thing about art. Anybody can do it if you just believe. With practice you can make great paintings.
At last it’s possible to see that the emperor has no clothes, he never had any clothes. People like Rembrandt, or Picasso, or Puccini, or Purcell are born, not made. People could labour all of their lives and come nowhere near the standards that they have set. That seems to me not be the very nature of genius, inspiration not perspiration. But the Hirst type is manufactured, not born.
He has perspired, that much is true, but to what ends? Why, marketing himself; what else? His ‘art’, if it can be called that, is no more than reproduction and self-promotion, nothing besides. And he did well from this, very well by any standard. Unfortunately he also began to take himself seriously. Hirst’s mistake, you see, was to give up dead sheep in formaldehyde. Sticking to that no one could see him for the fraud he truly is. But he took to painting, perhaps to test his Rembrandt thesis, and the scales fell from the eyes of the benighted critics. Tom Lubbock of The Independent offers a fairly typical comment on these daubs;
They're thoroughly derivative. Their handling is weak. They're extremely boring. I'm not saying that he's absolutely hopeless. But I'm not saying he's any good either. ... Hirst, as a painter, is at about the level of a not-very-promising, first-year art student. He is in his mid-forties.
I would be truly amazed if Hirst is even remembered in, say, fifty years from now. He is a dead end; his work is a dead end; it always was. He was never more, you see, than a dead sheep.
