Two Cambridge Colleges: Newnham and Robinson

 

Newnham College Hall

A visit to two Cambridge colleges on the same day can be very revealing. One college, Robinson, was by architects trying to create a major statement; the other, Newnham, looked to me a space where people would be happy to live and study together. Put simply, one college looked happy, the other forlorn, as if the humans survived in it, rather than benefitting from the environment. 

Newnham College

The look and feel of Newnham was established by Basil Champneys (responsible for the buildings from 1875 to 1910), whose goal seemed to be to create a human-scale collection of buildings, each self-contained but linked by passageways, creating a partially enclosed area with a garden laid out in fairly regular beds. This is not an attempt at a major statement, and is all the more creditable for that. 

Recent additions to the original complex have if anything enhanced the space, completing an informal quadrangle with a cafe on one side. I enjoyed a cup of coffee looking at this view of the original gatehouse, now no longer the main entrance. This is human-scale architecture, with clever designs in the brickwork; not ostentatious, but thoughtful. I could imagine becoming very fond of this mixture of buildings and gardens. 

It was very instructive to cross the road and walk through the nearby Sidgwick site, with several of the main University buildings, including the History Faculty, the Library, and the Faculty of Law. Here were buildings without reference to each other, with a dreary paved environment all around. It was a confusing and messy group, that revealed all the more the sensitivity and tranquillity of the Newnham campus. 

Robinson College

Robinson, like Newnham, is made of red brick; but there the similarity ends. It is one big L-shaped development (no separate buildings), built 1977-80, designed by the firm of Gilliespie, Kidd and Coia – highly regarded modernists. Sadly, the result feels neither collegiate nor unified. The site was rectangular, and presumably the idea was to create buildings that resembled a castle entrance, with very high walls on two sides facing Grange Road. The entrance is certainly impressive: a powerful diagonal overlapping of blocks above a tall entrance,  with a lovely walkway up to the main gate. Inside, the intention was clearly to create a Corbusian walkway in the sky connecting all the main components. But the result is brick passageways, just more brick. As with many Oxford and Cambridge colleges, the gardeners do what they can, but they have little chance at Robinson. For much of the walkway, the gardeners have abandoned any attempt at introducing greenery. In my photo of the main walkway, there was a tiny signboard indicating a café – but the café was a sad, dark affair, and I didn’t go in.  A couple of people were smoking on the walkway. Pevsner optimistically describes the walkway as “bringing constant animation in term-time”. I would imagine the animation is from the users hurrying to be somewhere else: it’s not a space where anyone would willingly linger. 

Sadly, the garden side of the college isn’t much better. The monolithic structure of the college does not integrate with the garden. Climbing plants were introduced on the wall of the main hall, with disastrous results to the brickwork. When I visited, the plants, which were clearly damaging the structure, had just been removed, and the resulting brick looks dreadful. This is not a garden that you feel belongs to the college. 

There didn’t seem to be a very clear way through the college to the garden. I got lost and then found myself walking over a very noisy stream running underneath the college buildings. If there was a clearer route, I didn’t find it.

 Conclusion

Colleges are special places in which the users have little or no choice over the environment they inhabit. My conclusion from looking at these two colleges is that architects have a responsibility to create a congenial, as well as collegiate, space, that will be home for some years, for the students. One college achieves this magnificently; the other strikes me as an architectural statement that fails to create an integrated building and garden, a space that you would use, because you had to, but never celebrate. I would have sleepless nights at Robinson dreaming of the drawbridge being raised and having to walk all night along those brick walkways. 

The York Art Gallery

 

Grayson Perry, Melanie, 2014

Having responsibility for an art gallery is something of a challenge these days. When I visit a gallery with a permanent collection, such as York, I imagine the curators having sleepless nights about how to present it. Outside, the world is shouting (quite rightly) for equal rights, sexual equality, political justice, much which seem to be diametrically opposed to many of the works in the collection. Like most galleries, York has plenty of old paintings: a Saint Sebastian with arrows through him, a St Barbara being whipped, a male model strung up with cords, and so on – not the kind of images you would want to present without some explanation. How does a gallery deal with this challenge?

York Art Gallery’s response is quite dramatic. The main gallery is largely handed to members of the York LGBT community, who appear to have chosen the paintings displayed and added captions to them. A second room devoted to paintings is entitled “Treasures from the Stores”, although it includes some of the best-known pictures from the collection. Finally, a couple of big rooms are allocated to the ceramics collection, a highlight of the collection. 

When it comes to ceramics, you feel the curators breathe a sigh of relief. I didn’t see any pots with arrows stuck in them, and you would think that for the most part ceramics are sufficiently abstract for them to cause no offence. There was a quiet, contemplative feel about the ceramics galleries that is welcome; one wall, the Wall of Women, was dedicated to female artists. The almost homely feel was greatly helped by the lovely display of the Anthony Shaw collection, over 1,000 pieces, displayed in what feels like a domestic environment, with rugs, a fireplace and mantelpiece. The individual works are not captioned, although with a bit of detective work you can find out who did what. Overall, there is a warm feeling to the space. 

York Art Gallery is distinctive for its collection of contemporary ceramics, which, they say, is unequalled in the UK. It’s certainly one of the most imaginative presentations, something like Kettle’s Yard for porcelain. 

As for the paintings, you feel the gallery curators are almost embarrassed by their collection. As a gesture, they invited local gay people to select paintings from the collection and to add their comments alongside. 

Many of the captions seem to be determined to read things into the picture that do not seem warranted by the work itself. For example, one gay commentator claims that Anna Hudson’s The Visitor “is representing her own reality as a queer individual … the figure’s obscured facial features suggest a struggle with identity”. Well, it may be, but Sickert, Hudson’s contemporary, painted many figures with obscured faces, and we don’t immediately jump to similar conclusions about them. 

My final example of imaginative over-readings of a painting things is Composition, by John Banting. This work is a kind of still-life: a depiction of a classical bearded head (stated to be Greek in the caption, but could equally be Roman), a couple of mussel shells, plus a blackboard with an upturned squiggle. Out of this the commentator suggests “Does Banting long for Greece and its queer, starlit beaches?” Difficult to imagine, from the work in front of us. 

Of course, the main thing is that galleries are visited. There was a healthy number of people visiting the gallery on the Saturday afternoon when we were there, and they represented a wide range of ages – both a good sign. There was a tiny but inviting café, and a shop selling very interesting ceramics. All in all, a satisfying experience. Even though I never worked out why the medieval painter should focus on St Barbara was being whipped, I did enjoy Grayson Perry’s Melanie: a lovely, rounded figure, full of joie de vivre. 

Do we care what William Blake means?

 

Blake, Newton (1795) (Tate)

What are we to make of William Blake? The author of some of the most famous lines of English poetry; the creator of some of the best-known images in art (Newton, Glad Day). Yet his work seems to many like a locked chest of mystical texts full of cryptic allusions, which literary specialists attempt laboriously to elucidate and to decipher (Northrop Frye spent ten years writing his 462-page book on William Blake, and his book is still regarded as one of the essential books on the artist and poet).

Do we all need to spend years trying to make sense of Blake’s visions? The current exhibition at the Fitzwilliam, Blake’s Universe (2024), tries to present Blake in his contemporary setting. The curators make it clear that they struggle to understand much of his writing and allusions, so they are by no means full Blake believers. Their approach seems to be as follows.

Blake, for them, was just one of many European artists and thinkers who saw history in chiliastic terms, and who attempted to reconcile (or to reintroduce) Christianity with history, often in a mystical fashion. Blake might have been mad, in other words, but so were plenty of others around the time of the French Revolution.

The problems start with the best-known images: what do they mean? For me, and perhaps for many other contemporary viewers, Blake’s art at its best conveys a dynamism and power that are unique for the art of his day. His Newton (1795), not in the exhibition, is an example: it is the basis of the popular image of the scientist. For me, there is something wonderfully vital and alive in the image of Newton carrying out his scientific experiments. Yet for Blake, this image of Newton represented, according to the introduction to the catalogue by Esther Chadwick, “a narrow concern with … ‘Vegetative and Generative Nature’ (the material world) … as opposed to imaginative inner vision (connected with faith in Christ, ‘regeneration’, and eternal life”). That sounds pretty negative to me. Presumably Blake wanted us to condemn Newton; yet Eduardo Paolozzi, creating a work of public art at the entrance to the British Library, replicates Blake’s figure, but now as a sculpture celebrating the way Newton changed the way we see the world. 

Eduardo Paolozzi, Newton (1995) British Library, London

When I look at this work, I don’t believe we are expected to condemn Newton every time we enter the British Library, but to feel somewhat in awe of him. I don’t imagine the Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences, at the University of Cambridge, were delivering a rebuke to Newton for his narrow attitudes when they accepted Paolozzi’s donation of the model for his sculpture. I can think of few examples of an artist’s meaning being diametrically reversed in this way.

This switch from negative to positive is, I think, rather telling. At this exhibition, I looked at the famous images by Blake, yet as far as I could see, I may well have been reading Blake, like Paolozzi, in the opposite way to that intended. The images are powerful and attention-grabbing, but what exactly do they mean? Do we know what they mean, and are we bothered when they turn out to mean something very different to what we think they signify?

Blake, Europe: a Prophecy, Frontispiece (1794)

One of the other most famous images by Blake, the frontispiece to his Prophecy Europe, seems to be similarly misinterpreted. Again, there is a pair of dividers. According to the curators “Urizen [Blake’s name for the Creator] is seen with a pair of dividers, his head beneath the line of his shoulders, emphasising his cramped, inward-looking materialistic vision.”

For me, this image represents one of the most successful responses to the  challenge of how to express creativity, an almost impossible task for artists to convey. I think it is a thrilling image. I’d like to ask visitors to the exhibition what they think of it, and if they agree with the curators’ view (and with Blake’s view). Do we like Blake for the pictures, without worrying too much about what he meant? Perhaps, if this is true, Blake can take his rightful place in a museum of art, which is, after all, a collection of great images celebrating outmoded ideas no longer taken seriously. 

The Cromwell Museum, Huntingdon

 

Not many museums include the Ladybird book on the subject alongside primary sources

This museum was a revelation: a great topic, fascinating and informative displays, interested and chatty staff, and the museum packed with visitors. I’ve been to many small museums in the past few years, and they are usually silent, well-meaning, but out of date. This one is a glorious exception. 

You would think that Cromwell is a sufficiently interesting topic, controversial even today, for any museum, but a contrast with the Cromwell House in Ely is very revealing. The Cromwell House is kitted out as a 17th-century domestic house, but contains nothing of relevance to Cromwell himself. As the staff in Huntingdon described it, they’ve got the building, but we’ve got the stuff. And so they do! Just one room, but packed full of items belonging to, written by, or associated with Oliver Cromwell. And not just meaningless memorabilia, for the most part.  Each of the bays shows a different part of Cromwell’s life, with the first bay showing a Ladybird book from 1963 about Cromwell, and the final bay showing his influence, including a model of the British Railways steam engine, the Oliver Cromwell, built 1951 (at which time it was clearly acceptable to name an engine after this controversial figure) and the title page of Carlyle’s Speeches of Oliver Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches (1845). 

Like many major figures, Oliver Cromwell means different things to different generations. I was fascinated not only by the way public opinion seems to have shifted from revulsion (after his death in the 17th century) to rehabilitation (from Carlyle and others) leading to his statue being placed in Parliament Square, where it remains today. For much of the 20th century he was a hero, if the Ladybird book (by I du Garde Peach, 1963) is anything to go by. The Ladybird book, ostensibly for children, begins: 

Oliver Cromwell was one of the most important figures in English history. In the time in which he lived, a great man was needed to lead the people of England in their fight for freedom and to-day we still enjoy freedoms which we won for us. [p4]

I'm not sure how many children would grasp this idea of freedom, and it's probably not how we would describe him today, and certainly not how the Irish would describe him, I would imagine. In academic circles, Christopher Hill represented the orthodoxy in the seventies and eighties, but today revisionist scholars such as Ronald Hutton seem to be in the forefront.

As for parallels with other despots, Cromwell appears to be more on a par with Lenin than with Putin, in that he at least started from a principled and justifiable position, even if he could not justify all his actions, whereas typical dictators act from self-preservation and appealing to the worst instincts of the populace.

Valiantly, the museum attempted to cover the historiography as well as the objects (paintings, hats, letters). In addition, the museum included a timeline of Cromwell’s life and contemporary affairs, several information boards, question-and-answer panels (“Did Cromwell abolish Christmas?”), together with the usual dressing-up items of armour and clothing for children, plus Cromwell tea towels and fridge magnets, and even ended with an illuminated quiz so you could compare your view of Cromwell before and after visiting the exhibition. 

Finally, as if that wasn’t enough, the museum had free admission (compared to £6.50 for standard admission to the Cromwell House in Ely), and stated it receives no government support. It sets a standard for other museums to try to match. There will never be agreement about a figure as divisive as Cromwell, but that’s no bad thing. On leaving the museum, there were campaigners in the market calling for an end to immigration and to “ideological teaching” in schools. I can’t help feeling that a museum like the Cromwell Museum generates reasoned discussion rather than mindless ranting. When I got home and showed my Cromwell quotations tea towel there was general derision in the household; but you don’t have to agree with everything he said to take him seriously.

What the public library means today

 

Highfield Branch Library, Sheffield, opened 1876

What do you think of when you hear the term “library”? Proud representatives of universal education for all; or dreary, soulless spaces where you were forced to study because you couldn’t get access to the books in any other way; or passports to a magical childhood world of imagination and discovery. Buildings with hardback copies of romantic fiction that could be borrowed in bulk, several books at a time.  I’ve seen or experienced all of these, but on balance, the term library still has optimistic associations for me. Libraries can be magical spaces, but that is difficult to reconcile with the phot above. 

The present-day appearance of many public libraries in urban areas can be something of a challenge. The sad, unloved façade of Highfield Library, in the suburbs of Sheffield, covered in graffiti, is an example of the contrast between the original vision and present-day reality. When it was built, in 1876, it must have represented a proud expression of civic pride, of belief in the transformative effect of reading available to everyone. There is even a sculpture over the entrance (which I didn’t manage to see) showing the benefits of reading. 

From the excellent Reading Sheffield blog, I was taken back to the opening ceremony of the library, on 1 August 1876, when Highfield Library was opened, the local MP stated: 

Twenty years hence there will be a new Sheffield – a population almost all of whom will be educated, and more or less delighting in the enjoyments and pursuits which education affords. 

Yet it looks like Highfield Library is providing essential services to the community, perhaps not quite in the way originally intended, but perhaps even more relevant today than ever. I see there is a family centre, a children’s reading section (there was no area dedicated to children’s books when the library was originally opened – the first children’s library in Sheffield dates from 1924). There are almost certainly fewer periodicals than when it originally opened – all the periodicals in my nearest branch library in Cambridge are provided by local donors. 

Of course, we no longer today believe that providing the most improving books (whichever they are) will mean they are read. That was one of the less exciting discoveries of Pettegree and der Weduwen’s The Library (2022) – the simple provision of books is usually insufficient. Plenty of libraries have been built, yet the public did not come. In fact, I would argue, although Pettegree and der Weduwen disagree, that an effective library need not have any books, or at least, the books are only one aspect of the library provision. Meeting rooms, PCs for those who don’t have access to them, a place to find out – these are all things a public library can provide. Pettegree and der Weduwen, both academics, praise the use of library spaces for meetings and events, but can’t bring themselves to detach the success of a library from the books in it: 

It is hard not to think that the health of the library will remain connected to the health of the book. [p413]

Their history of libraries, enjoyable as it is, fails, for me, to capture what the public library is all about. It is perhaps more difficult today than 150 years ago to keep a public library going. But for me, this sense of libraries persisting in their mission, despite their woeful and diminishing funding, is where the excitement lies. The sad decay exemplified by the façade of Highfield Library but the efforts of the staff to make use of the space available is an indicator, despite the very visible and shocking decline of civic investment in the UK, of the willingness and commitment to work for the community. Children can still find magic in the spaces there. The building might look sad, but what takes place there is vital. 

Art Exhibitions of the year 2023

 

Elias, Bodegon, 1933

This year, I’ve written about ten exhibitions, ordered in approximately reverse chronological order of viewing: 

• Frans Hals (National Gallery)
• Real Families (Fitzwilliam)
• Black Atlantic (Fitzwilliam)
• Rubens and Women (Dulwich)
• Morandi (Estorick)
• Labyrinth (Fitzwilliam)
• Sussex Landscape (Pallant House)
• Islanders (Fitzwilliam)
• Cezanne (Tate)
• Feliu Elias (MNAC, Barcelona)

Of those, my top three were:

Feliu Elias, a painter I’d never heard of before seeing this exhibition, and what a revelation! A painter who could move confidently between cartoons, and still lifes and portraits in oil, and impresses by the seriousness and thoroughness with which he approaches both. The most mundane, everyday objects, such as saucepans, are treated almost with reverence.  

Rubens, for his ravishing depiction of women – even his works of classical mythology end up having the same figure as his wife. I don’t think the TLS review of this show (by Breeze Barrington) did the exhibition justice. She complained that the women in the paintings are “not the focus”, and  “it would help to say more about who they [the women in the paintings] were in their own right”. Yet we don’t ask Frans Hals (or any portrait painter) to tell us all about the characters. The job of the portrait painter is to bring the sitter to life through their expression, their form. 

Frans Hals, whose paintings stand out so powerfully that you can recognize then at the other end of a gallery. If portrait painting is bringing a figure to life, then Hals reveals a whole living world. 

All in all, a great year for art, even if (as I noticed most in the Real Families exhibition) there is an increasing tendency to curate art exhibitions by criteria very different to quality of the artwork - a rather worrying trend.  

Frans Hals: the man who brings the seventeenth-century to life

 

Hals, Portrait of Catharina Hooft with her Nurse, 1619-20

Frans Hals, National Gallery, September 2023 - January 2024: What a wonderful show! Hals is so unlike the typical C17 Netherlands artist. Most painted details; he painted people, with little or no background. Most painted interiors or landscapes;  he painted almost exclusively portraits, and even his portraits are unlike any of his contemporaries. Nobody had Hals’ spectacularly bold use of brushstrokes, nor his ability to capture character in a face, both males and (exceptionally) females. So many of his female faces are real people rather than figureheads, representatives of a social class, demonstrating their wealth and social standing. Of course he painted the wealthy classes, but you feel he has caught something of their character, that he is almost presenting them as an equal. 

Frequently, he manages to capture both social status and character, as if to say “you commissioned me to paint this person, but the money is only a small part of it: I have captured who you really are." Frequently, the character is brought it to life by the angle of the sitter, or a leaning chair, or their hand on their hips, or, in one case, by introducing another person, as in the Portrait of Catherina Hooft and her nurse.

What really hit me on leaving this exhibition was how tame other painters are by comparison to Hals. I found myself in the Italian Renaissance gallery, and apart from some late works by Titian, none of the other painters had Hals’ focus on individual figures, combined with such carefree, lively brushstrokes. It may simply be the difference between two eras, Renaissance and Baroque, but what a difference! What unashamed concentration on the single figure, seeming to breathe in front of the spectator.

Hals, Portrait of Susan Baillij, c1645, detail of gloves

A very telling anecdote suggest that Hals was anything but subservient towards his sitters. He abandoned a group portrait after executing around half the individual portraits, because he no longer wanted to travel from Haarlem to Amsterdam – he wanted his sitters to come to him. They refused; he walked away from the commission (and it was completed by another painter).

Some of his best works are small-scale, children and everyday figures. Memorable is the portrait of Jean de la Chambre, a calligrapher, who looks as though he has just been interrupted at his work. 

Hals, Portrait of Jean de la Chambre

While I’m not very keen on the idea of an artist’s late works being an indicator of great profundity, there is an even looser use of the brush in some of Hals late works that is simply astounding to observe. You have to approach these pictures very closely to see just how free the strokes are. One of the greatest is a portrait of an Unknown Man, in the Fitzwilliam Museum, painted around 1660. The sitter may be unknown, but his character is revealed at a mere glance at the painting. 

All in all, it felt such a privilege to share the vision and insight of this remarkable artist, who brings to life his sitters like nobody else.