Monday 18 March 2024

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. 

Sunday 3 March 2024

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. 


Saturday 10 February 2024

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.


Sunday 21 January 2024

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. 


Wednesday 20 December 2023

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. 




Monday 11 December 2023

Building Jerusalem: The Rise and Fall of the Victorian City (Tristram Hunt, 2004)

 


From the first page of this long book, where the author acknowledges over 20 people, to the last, we are aware that Hunt has read widely, and is familiar with the literature. However, that’s also part of the problem. Familiarity with the scholarship is not the only way to address the history of urban development. And quoting both sides in an argument does not establish that you are neutral. 

This book began life as a PhD thesis, although, to give credit to author Tristram Hunt, it reads much more fluently and entertainingly than a thesis. The book attempts is to pull together in one volume the growth and decline (the author’s words are “Rise and Fall”) leading to the garden city movement along with, and contrasted to, the municipal triumphs of the the big 19th century cities such as Birmingham and Glasgow. 

Where things start to go wrong, for me, is when what I call the casual historical style starts to disagree with me. The “casual historical style” is somewhere between a history monograph and a newspaper article. The author makes a statement, and provides sources to exemplify this statement. But far too  many topics are introduced with just one or two quotes by contemporaries to justify the argument. Cleverly, as a historian, Hunt can hide behind the quotes, as if to say, “Don’t complain to me, after all, I’m just quoting” – a technique which happens to be widely used by the populist right in the UK and the USA. 

Let’s look at a detailed example. Chapter Eight describes the triumph of what Hunt calls “The Municipal Gospel”, a phrase he uses as the chapter title. It’s only in a footnote midway through the chapter that he reveals that Asa Briggs, in his famous Victorian Cities, calls it the “Civic Gospel”, meaning the same thing. Chamberlain’s stunning success at buying out the municipal gas and water utilities for the common good are rightly celebrated. But abruptly, the tone changes as we move towards 1900 with “Municipal Socialism”, a switch from running the city like a corporation (under Chamberlain) to running the city like, well, a socialist ideology. The switch is cleverly characterised by Beatrice Potter rejecting Joseph Chamberlian as a suitor, and choosing instead Sidney Webb.

Beatrice’s amorous transition … can [] be read as an intellectual shift from the municipal  gospel of Chamberlain’s Birmingham to the municipal socialism of Webb and the Fabians. [Building Jerusalem, ch 8] 

Hunt is clearly less fond of socialism than of the corporatism of Chamberlain. he describes how Municipal Socialism was seen by many as a subterfuge for introducing, well, Socialism. 

Does the author remain neutral here? I’m not sure. The attack by business interests on councils is reported in quotes, but then as part of the author’s text:

The increase in municipal trading was threatening to crowd out private enterprise. Gas and water utilities had long since surrendered to the councils, but now electricity, tramway and omnibus companies were all threatened by municipal ambition. 

These are the author’s words, not a quote. Terms such as “crowd out”, “surrender” and “threaten” are emotive, and seem to me to reveal where the author’s sympathies lie, and they are not with the socialists. From our perspective in 2023, we are perhaps less concerned about bus companies threatened by municipal ambition; we have ample evidence of the result of private companies running competing  bus services. Recently I bought a one-day bus pass (“valid for all buses”) in Glasgow, only to find the number two bus I tried to catch was another operator’s number two: the competing bus companies use the same numbers, and don’t share ticketing. My all-day ticket was only valid for some of the buses. And nobody seemed too worried that there were several routes with the same number. 

But Hunt is too busy following his agenda to consider, I think, the people involved. Within one chapter we switch from private interests trying to prevent the incorporation of Birmingham, to Chamberlain implementing some of the finest municipal development of any city in the UK, then suddenly to venality and excess, including spending by councillors on cigars and champagne, as if this one example damned the entire municipal movement. 

But the narrative doesn’t stop there. A few pages further, and we are in a section called “Fleeing the City”. By page 386, “the city was decreasingly regarded as an arena to be celebrated … but instead as a  mode of existence best rejected altogether” and we move at top speed to the garden city ideal. The justification for the move out of the city comes from some appalling quotes by Social Darwinists, on the deleterious effects of city life on “Anglo-Saxons” (by which is presumably meant the indigenous city-dwellers): 

Finding himself at a disadvantage in competition with the immigrants, he goes through many stages before he is finally eliminated. Irregular labour, odd jobs, sweaters’ dens, prostitution, subsistence of charity … are only some of the struggles of the dying Londoner before he pays the debt of nature, whose laws he has no power to obey”. [p398]

Presumably the “immigrants” described here are the Jews, the Irish, and the country dwellers who move into London in search of work. Weirdly, Hunt quotes this contemporary writer without comment, as if this lurid, offensive argument, similar to some of the rabid right-wing Republican sentiment around Trump, somehow justified. In practice, many of the people who moved out of London to new towns such as Harlow and Stevenage had little choice in the matter. They didn't change their opinion about cities.  

I think this demonstrates how Hunt’s text reads well – there are always plenty of vivid quotes, and the narrative zips along – but, perhaps in an effort to includes all his reading about a vast subject, the author is  responsible for abrupt changes in tone which don’t seem to me to be justified. Perhaps for middle-class commentators, and for a present-day academic working in a library, such instant transformations might be feasible, but real lives were very different. I’m less and less convinced by the author’s rather superficial pulling together of a vast range of opinions about city life and urban planning, while maintaining what appears to be a neutral stance. He points out how central government, then as now, did everything in their power to prevent local government tackling the problems of poverty and inequality, by, for example, attempting to prevent the city of Glasgow building houses directly (and by so doing “preventing” private enterprise from its normal business) (the so-called Cross Acts, p360). Today, it is clear that private house-building companies act to maximise their profits by hoarding land rather than building on it immediately, yet councils are prevented from building any new social housing. The situation seems worse today than it was a hundred years ago. 

Yet from this text, the references to the present-day suggest that Hunt is happy with the privatised state of affairs we live under today in the United Kingdom. For me, a historical examination of the Victorian city is in many ways a stunning demonstration of what can be achieved with an effective local authority.