Hockney takes us on a tour of the Fitzwilliam

 

Hockney makes us look at pictures again: not just at his own pictures, but as assembled here, alongside classic art, and, whether his ideas are right or wrong, he forces us to view the familiar images differently. 

The layout is simple. Instead of a room full of Hockney works, his works, and almost as important, his comments, are distributed around the entire Fitzwilliam. Here is an artist willing to engage with the existing historical art – a brave man. He makes so many claims! For example, that the detailed topographical 18th-century works by Canaletto and relatives were probably done using an optical device to display an image on the paper or canvas. Similarly, portraits by Ingres and others used the same tools. He then openly tells you how his own works are done using the camera lucida, or the camera obscura, or simply from photographs. He appears to tear up the rules, or, more precisely, makes you think about what the rules are.

His take on perspective is marvellous: not for Hockney a slavish one-point or two-point perspective, but a painting that appears to converge on the viewer. 

His view of photography? There is nothing wrong with it, except that it has only a single viewpoint. To demonstrate his point, there is a video installation with nine screens, showing the same country road landscape. Except that as you look at the screens you realise that what you thought was nine linked images is  shot from a slightly different viewpoint.  The effect is slightly disorienting, but a remarkable comment on static viewpoints. He claims that as you move around you see a landscape from many different viewpoints, while photography can capture only one. 

Are his own works all based on mechanical devices? It would seem not. Some of this most effective works were done on an iPad, and do not appear to be based on any kind of template. They are in a simplified, caricature-like style that is very distinctive, but respectful of the landscape depicted.

Hockney is humble, which is remarkable for an artist of his stature, and you feel you are looking at the Fitzwilliam paintings with a fresh eye: Hockney’s. 

Sad Wisbech

 

North Brink, Wisbech

Sad Wisbech. The Saturday we visited, there were plenty of people in the town centre, but Wisbech Museum had no other visitors than us, and Peckover House, the town’s other historical attraction, had just six people for the second and final guided tour of the day. 

Peckover House is managed by the National Trust, and it seems to have fallen on hard times. There used to be a café, but that didn’t attract enough visitors, it seems. Now the café is closed, even fewer visitors arrive. There is a lovely garden, surprisingly large (it includes much of the gardens of surrounding houses), yet without a café, there isn’t a great deal to attract visitors. Our guided tour lasted an hour but I cannot say I was excited by much in the presentation or by the house. The house was left to the Trust without any contents, and in any case, it was clear the style of the house was not to the taste of the Quaker Peckover family. There was a room decorated vaguely as a  bank manager’s office, to suggest the Peckover Bank; there was the usual downstairs kitchen, where the servants lived; but I didn’t get a feel for a any of it. We were told the library was worth millions; but nothing about which books were actually in the library. You felt that, apart from the garden, the National Trust had given up with Peckover House.  

Wisbech Museum

Wisbech Museum was in a way even sadder. Last time we visited, the Museum was shut, because of roof reconstruction – thanks to a grant from English Heritage, after the Museum had been placed on an “at risk” register. But fixing the roof is only solving one of the museum’s many problems, as explained to me by one of the chatty staff, who were wonderfully informative and friendly. The museum is currently only accessible via some steps, so there is a plan to build a new access at the rear of the site. Even then, that leaves the wonderful original building from the 1840s, but that is part of the problem: the presentation of the exhibits gives the impression of a 19th-century approach. Wisbech Museum is almost entirely glass cases, with a collection covering a vast range from geology to archaeology to ethnology to the cabinet of curiosities, just like the early Ashmolean Tradescant collection, and the Oxford Pitt-Rivers collection (and it is interesting that at the Pitt-Rivers they seem to have acknowledged that the museum is such a time capsule it would be foolish to try to change it now). The collection is fascinating to observe, for me, but almost useless for educational purposes. Where do you start with a collection like this?

This lump of stone is actually a hole - read the caption

In another room, there is a library, with books from the 19th century, but again, these books are of almost no interest to young visitors (if there were any). Almost next door to the museum is a modern library building, but although the library was open, it looked deserted.

Outside the museum, there was the usual groups of drinkers on the park benches; we heard that kids had been responsible for removing all of the finials from the original metal railings outside  - so another repair expense.

As before, Wisbech parish church remained stubbornly shut.

Yet again we had seen Wisbech, but not really grasped it. Wisbech, after all, has one of the most spectacular urban sights in Britain, with North Brink. But nothing seems to remain from this era, nor from the pioneering anti-slavery and local improvement movement of the 19th century. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a place so resistant to the ghosts of the past, and without replacing it with anything positive of the present-day. Perhaps I should finally visit Great Yarmouth and compare.

Turgenev, Spring Torrents

 

Cristoforo Allori, Judith and the head of Holofernes, Royal Collection: 'her hair fell in a wave like that of Allori's Judith in the Palazzo Pitti'.

This is not a review of Turgenev's Spring Torrents (1872) by a literary critic; this is written by a reader who has just completed the novel. 

I am not unfamiliar with Turgenev; I remembered his lovely Notes from a Hunter’s Album for his comprehension of the serfs, which struck me as very unusual for his time. I had read about his long-term liaison with a famous opera singer, but I did not know the details. 

So I began Spring Torrents and was captured by its seeming simplicity. I read the book with interest (to see what would happened, then bewilderment (as the book seemed to be a standard work of romantic fiction, worthy of Mills and Boon), followed by fascination as the story moved on.   

This short novel, just 163 pages in the Penguin translation by Leonard Schapiro, can conveniently be divided in two parts. In part one, the hero, Sanin, who is Russian, and aged 23, is travelling back from several months in Italy to Russia via Germany. He has a small private income, but he has exhausted his funds. He encounters a poor family who run a patisserie, and within hours, Sanin finds himself involved in a duel to defend what he perceives to be a slur on the daughter’s honour. No sooner is that trial over than he has declared his love for Gemma, the daughter and she accepts him She abandons her fiance for him, and everything seems set for them to lead a quiet and contented life of small-scale bourgeois respectability together. 

In the second part, linked only very tenuously to the first, he travels to Frankfurt to sell his estate. But the woman who has the money to buy his estate, Maria Nicolaevna, turns out to be interested in considerably more than a simple business deal. He is swept off his feet by her forthright views and invitation to intimacy, and abandons his fiance to travel with Maria to Paris, despite the fact that she is still living with her husband (it appears she simply married him for convenience). 

The whole tale is framed by the author looking back 30 years after these events took place, remembering with regret how he fell for Maria Nicolaevna, and how she soon abandoned him. We learn that he never married, and as a kind of epilogue to the novel, he discovers his former betrothed, Gemma, is happily married with five children. 

There are, of course, various ways in which a reader can interpret this tale. The translator, Leonard Schapiro, sees it in biographical terms, since Turgenev spent many years as the lover of Pauline Viardot, a famous opera singer, despite her being married to someone else. But as I know little of Turgenev’s life, let’s leave this interpretation to one side. Another interpretation is, of course, what might be expected to be the mainstream 19th-century view: a romantic liaison with a woman based simply on passion is frowned on. By this view, it is clear which of the two liaisons should be preferred by the reader. 

We have here a contrast between two women, seen from a man’s point of view. One, Gemma, is innocent, young, unworldly, and would appear to have little in common with Sanin, the hero, who is clearly well travelled and, one would assume, widely experienced, although still young, at 22. For me, the crucial pointn is that the tale shows hardly anything about Gemma’s character. We learn a lot about her beauty, but of her mind, her views, we learn next to nothing. Is there any evidence in this novel that Sanin knows her, or she him, in any detail? I don’t think so. 

The other woman, Maria Nicolaevna, is a whirlwind, a force to be reckoned with. She treats her husband with contempt, calling him “fatty”, and is similarly abrupt with other former lovers. She has a very clearly stated view of life: “Cela ne tire pas a consequence”. She succeeds in seducing Sanin, and her triumph wins her a bet she has with her husband – he is clearly reconciled to his very subordinate position in her life. 

What makes the novel fascinating is the character of Maria Nicolaevna, the strong-willed and assertive woman who demands openly what she wants, and, it would appear, usually gets it. Sanin appears to acknowledge he is not in love with her, but after a few hours in bed with her, abandons his future marriage and follows her obediently to Paris. 

How should we interpret this seemingly simple novel? Sanin, reflecting on these events many years later, and looking back as his young self, condemns Maria Nicolaevna, or at least condemns himself for getting carried away. But could he ever have been happy with Gemma? He knew nothing about her; it was an invented, one-sided relationship, he and an artificial image he had of her. 

By comparison, the novel comes to live in the description of Maria Nicolaevna and her fiery, haughty attitude to life. This is a novel that ranks very highly for eroticism (which is considerably rarer than you might imagine in the novel): the scene in the opera house where Maria Nicolaevna more or less seduces Sanin is adult in a way that Dickens, for example, could never achieve. Here is a real character, aware of and celebrating her passion, and unafraid to treat with contempt those who, she feels, do not stand up to her. However impossible it might be to live with such a woman, the depiction by Turgenev of this character was for me totally unexpected after the rather comfortable and small-scale bourgeois love affair in the first part. The novel began with a typical 19th-century novel plot: man falls for a woman about whom he knows nothing, and invests her image (largely because he knows so her so little) with such significance he is prepared to die in a duel for her. Sweet, but pointless. Compare this with his few nights of pleasure with a woman of character, of experience, who knows exactly what she wants and is not afraid to ask for it. 

The Allori picture as it appears in the Penguin edition

Footnote: Even today, in the 21st century, we are frightened by female desire. It was fascinating to notice that Sanin, in his first description of Gemma, compared her to Judith, in the depiction shown above. However, the Penguin image carefully omits the head of Holofernes; all you see is a powerful female face in half profile. Perhaps the full image might have been too off-putting for the average reader. 

The Third Man (1949)

 

 Much of this film is about trying to discover things. We, the viewers, never quite work out who the third man actually was? At least, I’m not sure if I ever found out, although the chances are that it was Harry Lime himself.

References to the third man resemble the references to Rosebud in Citizen Kane. In both films, Joseph Cotten plays the “normal” character, the one against which we measure all the others. He is our moral reference; if he thinks it is right, we do too.

The amazing atmosphere of the film, shot in a largely deserted Vienna, full of ruined buildings; a triumph of exaggerated angles photography with dramatic shadows (Robert Krasker). Much of the action takes place inside decayed grand palace-like buildings, which have their own evocative sense.

Locked into the film is a very demeaning female role, that of Alida Valli as Harry Lime’s girlfriend, Alice Schmidt. Throughout the film, she defends her lover and maintains a kind of “love triumphs all” attitude. It doesn’t matter what he did, I still love him. It tells you something about Green’s attitude to women to create such a role; it has not worn well since 1949, and it made me wince to see such a one-dimensional character.

Undoubtedly much of the film’s rather eerie atmosphere comes from the relentlessly upbeat and trivial zither music. It heightens the feeling of unease and uncertainty that you feel in an unfamiliar environment, rather than simply being enjoyable for its own sake.

Critics have complained that Orson Welles makes the character of Harry Lime too appealing. Perhaps the director, aware that Welles (before he became very overweight) had quite an undergraduate-like charming face, did what he could to stress the sense of menace by focusing on his shoes before we see his face. However, apart from his witty line about the Swiss and cuckoo clocks, he captured reasonably well the attitude of a man who thinks himself above the law, above usual moral principles. He was certainly more convincing than Noel Coward, apparently also considered for the part, would have been

As usual, Greene writes from a simplistic Catholic point of view. It is astonishing that a major novelist could depict such a simple world of good and evil. Joseph Cotton is good; the British forces are good; Harry Lime is evil, as are most of his cronies. If only the world were so simple. There are times when Greene seems only a slightly more elaborate version of G K Chesterton with his proselytizing Sunday-school moral lessons.  

Another weakness of the plot is that Joseph Cotten is supposed to be playing a widely read popular novelist who writes westerns. Cotton looks far too sensitive and educated to play a philistine purveyor of popular fiction, and the scene where he gives a talk on the modern novel falls very flat – because he is unaware of most classic fiction, but is expected to answer questions on it. That is the scene, incidentally, highly praised by Pierre Bayard in his How to Talk about Books you haven’t read, but only because it appealed to Bayard’s very curious fascination with such unlikely situations.

Nonetheless, despite the one-dimensional plotting and attitudes, the film remains magnificent. The locations and camerawork, the stunning images of a deserted, war-damaged Vienna at night. The empty cafes; the fairground; the dreary rooms; these are images I won’t forget in a hurry.

It seems perhaps strange that Carol Reed made only three films considered to be great  – Odd Man Out, The Fallen Idol and this one, all within a few years; his other credits include Oliver! and Trapeze, neither of which sound very exciting. Perhaps that is the nature of film: the perfect film does not exist, The Third Man is not a masterpiece, but we are grateful for a few unforgettable moments, perhaps a camera angle, or a human face, or some movement: not, for me, the chase scenes in the sewers of Vienna, but some of the expressions of fear on people’s faces, or the feeling of an occupying force trying valiantly but without success to control a horrific underworld of thieves and betrayal. The final scene, a tree-lined avenue with dead leaves fluttering down, and Alida Valli walking towards, and then past Joseph Cotton, is gripping.