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.

Nude

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? :-)

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.