Dangerous and Brilliant

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.

Henry Moore-the Death of Imagination

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 Butterfly Queen

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.

Night, Terror and Death

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.