The Blue Rider Movement at the Tate Modern (May 2024)

 

Kandinsky, Improvisation - Deluge (1913)

There are some great paintings in this show (at the Tate Modern), but I found the catalogue, and the interpretation provided, very unhelpful.

This exhibition should be entitled “Women and The Blue Rider Movement”. It’s not about Expressionists generally, and it doesn’t even provide an introduction to the Blue Rider movement. I had to go to other books, and to Wikipedia, to get a better idea of what was going on. For example, if  you wanted to know about the Blue Rider Almanac, the group’s only major publication, there is indeed an article about it in the catalogue, which begins:

References to the publication of The Blaue Reiter Almanac in the autobiographical writings of Wassily Kandinsky range from the egotistical to the whimsical. [p184]

Nothing about what the Almanac was. I haven’t found any general introduction to the Almanac. Instead, the catalogue tells you how egotistical and whimsical Kandinsky was, and how the Almanac only included two female artists [p184] (or three female artists [p79]). As for Kandinsky, responsible for some of the first ever abstract works, which are some of the most magical paintings in the show, he is dismissed in the following way:

Kandinsky’s confidence in his art’s power of course had to do with his privileged position. His abstract modes incorporate (appropriate)  the decorative, feminine and ‘exotic’, transforming abstraction into a supposedly universal ( read white male) mode.  [Bibiana K. Obler, p80]

I can imagine some abstract art perhaps as male, but I simply don’t see Kandinsky’s abstract works as incorporating “feminine” elements – I thought we had moved beyond that kind of simplistic assignment of “masculine” and “feminine” attributes. I think Kandinsky’s achievement is to create colourful and dynamic works that are more than simply decorative. And I certainly don’t see his works as “male”; you might perhaps interpret Jackson Pollock as male, although I think what is actually meant is “aggressive”, but not Kandinsky.

Let’s summarise from external sources about what was actually going on. The Blue Rider Movement was founded by Marc, Kandinsky and Macke, and only existed for  three years, from 1911 to 1914. It was responsible for two exhibitions and one Almanac. It ended abruptly at the start of the war, during which two of the founders died: Marc in 1916, and Macke in 1914. The Almanac contains, alongside essays, a huge variety of works including Henri Rousseau, folk art, 13 children’s paintings, Schoenberg music scores, Japanese drawings, and medieval German woodcuts. The catalogue authors criticize the Almanac for not providing attributions to the non-European works, but it seems perverse to complain about a more international scop  and wider range of art than any movement had assembled at that time; and attribution was not seen at the time as important as it might be today. I don’t think it would take long to find Picasso’s use of non-attributed African models. Is it Colonialist? Yes, of course, but by that token, so is Shakespeare nationalist and misogynistic. Better would be to concentrate on the reasons why we still look at works by Marc, Macke and Kandinsky.

And, let’s face it, some of the paintings in this exhibition are just bad, for example, the folk-religious works on glass by Gabriele Münter, and the Girl with Toddler by Maria Franck-Marc. There are many black-and-while photographs by Gabriele Münter from her visit to Tunisia in 1905, and to the US in 1900, but I simply don’t think you can make a case for them as countering “Orientalist stereotypes”.  I haven’t yet found anything in the catalogue that makes me look at these works in a genuinely enlightening way. I’ll remember the wonderful images of a non-rational, non-specifically Western, universe of the (if you like) spiritual, but I would simply describe as "non-rational".  

In summary, an exhibition with some great paintings, but unhelpful text. For a better introduction I would suggest Roger Cardinal’s Expressionism (1984). Or just look at the pictures and respond to the sheer sense of release from hundreds of years of art-historical convention.

How to read a book

Reading a new book is a bit like encountering someone new. Your view of the book, or the other person, is at first rather cautious; you don’t want to trust this new resource too much until you have a better view. Initially, you have probably heard something about the book, perhaps a recommendation from a friend, or a review, or the subject matter, or even, heaven forbid, the jacket design, appealed to you. Whatever the case, you retain an element of uncertainty before you fully open yourself to this book. You ask yourself, I will devote several hours to this book, so I want to think it will be worth it. How, in other words, do you assess a new book? Let’s take an example: The Seduction of Place (2000).  

I live in Cambridge, which for possibly accidental reasons is situated quite close to several new and planned cities: Milton Keynes, Letchworth, Stevenage, Harlow and Peterborough, to name a few. Does this conscious urban design make people happier? More broadly, what is the relationship between cities, their buildings, and their inhabitants? When there is a new development, such as a shopping centre, or a bypass, or a community garden, is there any way to measure the effect on the inhabitants? I recently visited Dundee, and in my opinion, the siting of the new Tay Bridge bringing traffic to the middle of the city centre had a disastrous effect on people’s lives.

So I was looking for a book that  examined the relationship between the built environment and people’s lives. I want a stimulating but entertaining read.

Joseph Rykwert’s The Seduction of Place (2000) struck me as a possible answer to these questions: the subtitle is “The History and Future of the City”. The blurb for the book describes how Rykwert “assesses how and why urban projects from the past succeeded or failed and what lessons can be drawn”. That sounds like the right book to me. He is a respected writer (Wikipedia describes him as “one of the foremost architectural historians and critics of his generation”). There were no fewer than fourteen plugs (praise from reviewers) for the book on the covers and the first page, and the twenty-eight people thanked for their comments by the author before we get to page one. I had a train journey, so I took the book with me and settled down to be instructed, and hopefully entertained. 

It seems a bit churlish after all that to say I was disappointed. There is no question of the author’s learning; perhaps indeed that proved to be the challenge. 

My method for appraising a book is simple. I proceed on two fronts. The first assessment is at the macro level, the same as the appraisal of a journal article: is the author answering the question proposed by the title? One would hope, both for articles and for books, that the question may need some elucidation, despite the presence (for the journal article) of an abstract, but it seems pretty clear that this book is about “the history and future of the city”, as the strapline states. But after fifty pages, I had discovered some points about the history of the city, but almost incidentally. I wasn’t sure what the first 75 pages, around a quarter of the book, were for.

If this is a book about the history and future of the city, do we need to have a chapter devoted to the Industrial Revolution? Do we need to have a potted history of agriculture? Do we need to know the details of why Voltaire and Rousseau came to Paris, and why they didn’t like it? Do we need the details of Pugin’s Contrasts, which I have never envisaged as a study of things urban? In Rousseau’s case, his reason for coming to Paris was to earn enough money so he could leave and write his Confessions. Fascinating - but irrelevant. Here is part of the passage devoted to Rousseau, to show Rykwert’s fascinating yet rambling style:

As Rousseau admired Turin, so Voltaire admired London as the model of a truly meritocratic city. And he was right, since even the pre-Hanoverian English crown never succeeded in establishing a powerful centralizing court, though the Stuart kings tried, and one of them, Charles I, lost his head in the process. Their failure was clearly represented by the ramshackle modesty of the palaces at Whitehall and Saint James’s, which were never aggrandized, despite plans to do so and reconstruction after fires. This was the great age of European palace building when very modest sovereigns indeed, like the prince-bishops of Wurzburg, built themselves residences the British Empire would never equal (p22).

This is an aimless walk rather than an argument.

Secondly, I read a book on the micro level, examining each sentence. when I encounter a statement about which I have some knowledge, I compare what I know with what the author knows. Or, simply, I use my common sense to ask “is this statement likely?... Am I satisfied that  this author is using reasonable argument to make his point?” It’s somewhat like a conversation with a taxi driver. You exchange a few platitudes, and then the driver launches into his theory of why the country is going to the dogs  - and you bite your lip and keep quiet for the rest of the journey.

Here are a couple of examples of Rykwert’s detailed statements. On page one, the author describes the situation at the end of World War Two:

Building became the highest social priority: in the first half of the century, any young man in a Latin-speaking country, whether in Europe or South America, who needed a university degree but had not special interests, often studied law; but after 1945, many of them gravitated to architecture.

This is a strange, rather cavalier claim. I’m confident to think there was an increase in the number of students studying architecture, but moving from law to architecture? Why from one to the other? Why “young man”, not “young woman”? What is a “Latin-speaking country” anyway, and why just these countries? Does Rykwert mean Spanish, or classical Latin, which hasn’t been spoken for over a thousand years? Did people not study architecture in Japan or China after 1945?

Rykwert refers to the computer game SimCity (not Sim-city) and misrepresents it. SimCity is an exception among computer games in that money is not the only measure of success; it is an attempt, simplistic of course, to create a simulation of managing a city that takes into account multiple factors, including providing work, leisure, transport, and attempting to keep the population happy by reconciling these often conflicting goals. For Rykwert “because the computer has to quantify, success and failure cannot be measured in more complex terms”. In contrast, SimCity measures success by a range of criteria, just as a city authority has to. I don’t state that it is perfect, but it is certainly about more than money. It is a remarkable  simulation because it presents the player with difficult choices: there is no single way to build a city successfully.

Rykwert’s book is an interesting comparison with a typical journal article. STEM (science and medicine) articles make claims and attempt to provide evidence for each statement they make. By contrast, Rykwert’s style is to proceed in an ambling fashion, introducing many details that are neither to the  point nor evidenced. An example is a paragraph devoted to the epic poem Gilgamesh, on page 13. Ostensibly, this is included because it is a conflict between the “urban” Gilgamesh and the “nomad” Enkidu, leading the author to link it to examples of rulers being reminded of their rural origins. How did we get here? Before I come to terms with that paragraph, I encounter another discursion into Hesiod’s ages of gold and iron, and then to Atlantis, and so on, for a further three or four pages, until we come to a theme: “what strategies are open to citizens who wish to shape their habitats in ways that would conform more closely to their wishes”.  That question is not the same as the subject on the cover. It’s an interesting topic in its own right, but it seems to reveal the rambling, discursive technique of the author, like a long Sunday supplement article where you keep reading because you like the author’s style. Personally, I’d prefer to state the subject and stick to it, and to reduce the discursive rambling.

The Voices of Morebath: an elegy for a lost Catholic England?

 

Morebath Church, photo by Lewis Clarke (CC BY-SA 2.0). The church and tower will have been familiar to the people described, but of course the objects within have long since disappeared . 

Eamon Duffy’s The Voices of Morebath (2001) is a real gem. Using the remarkable survival of parish records for one small Devonshire village of 33 households, Duffy provides a history of the English Reformation, but not from the top, but this time from  below. In this book, we are down to counting individual sheep and altar cloths. The local saint, St Sidwell, plays a major role, before being written entirely out of the script by the end. The records exist for the 54 years when the priest, Sir (the title is apparently traditional for a priest at the time) Christopher Trychay (pronounced “tricky”) was vicar of the parish. 

Duffy is a Catholic, and for much of the book, it reads like a lament for a local community that was surprising for the extent of social activity and generosity. The author himself describes the book as exploring “the world-view which was the religion of most English people on the eve of the Reformation, and impact of radical religious change on the majority who would have liked things to stay more or less as they were.”  The parish records record the existence not just of the church wardens, roles that still exist today, but as many as six separate groups of parishioners, some of the men, and some women’s groups, all raising funds and carrying out activities for the community, but primarily to embellish the church fabric and altars. Reading it, I kept thinking of two comparisons. First, obviously, comparing tiny Morebath to present-day local groups here in the centre of Cambridge: the local residents’ association, and local politics, and the extent to which residents combine (or don’t) for some collective action. Like many historians, Duffy presents before us an image of a kind of golden age, partly created through the exceptional vicar, who captured so much of the life of the village.

Second, there is the obvious contrast between Catholic and Protestant England. The transition was very messy, with interludes (under Edward and Mary) of undoing everything that had been done by their predecessors. What makes this book exceptional is the questions it raises. To his credit, Duffy at the end moves slightly away from the simplistic vision of a local Catholic golden age , but in so doing, leaves this reader dissatisfied with the sudden reversion to the big picture. After chapters full of painstakingly documented evidence of how the village was happy to remain worshipping saints (including St Sidwell) and keeping candles burning for them, we suddenly shift to grand statements such as “a sign of the deepening gap between rich and poor which marked and darkened the hungry later years of Elizabeth”. With that sentence, the spell is broken; we want evidence, we are no longer satisfied with such wide-scale assertions. There are disturbing mentions of the introduction of a “cucking stool” late in the period, for the punishment of women, and a reference to historians who feel it indicated something wrong in the social order. 

And, indeed, this book makes you start to think about the astonishing changes during 16th-century England. In 1500, church building and church adornment was still part of every town and village activity. But at some point in the 16th century, church building in England more or less came to a halt. It wasn’t just the abolition of chantries and saints’ altars, it was a complete cessation of new sacred architecture (the only exception was tombs for the rich, something not mentioned by Duffy, probably because it doesn’t appear that the church of Morebath ever had any such grand tombs). 

For any history book to inspire the reader to see a moment of vast societal change is a great achievement. I can hardly complain if Duffy leaves me in the end unsatisfied, because I can’t help feeling there is more to the story than he reveals. The book raises so many questions! At the start of this book, this tiny village was dedicating a large portion of its surplus revenue to adorning the church building. By the end of the 16th century, condemnation of “popery” was universal and popular. How did popular opinion move so dramatically away from Catholicism? I don’t mean the major beliefs, but the seemingly abrupt change in popular feeling. And how could an entire population switch so dramatically from building and adornment for faith, to the feeling that plain walls and lack of decoration were somehow better? And how could the priest switch so decisively from promoting Catholicism to the latest version of orthodox Protestantism? It was the same vicar, before, during, and after the events. Duffy talks about the secularisation of the church accounts, but leaves me wanting much more. Sentences such as this leave me gasping for more information:

The process of secularisation of the parish was more than all this: it was in train before the break with Rome … it owes as much to the extension of strong government, and the  multiplication of responsibility within local community, as to any ideological shift. [p282]

That seems at odds with everything Christopher Trychay describes in his records, a diminishing, rather than growth, of local community.

The Reformation was clearly an enormous turning point for modern society, and is of course something that can not be explained in any single book. Perhaps the very fact that I want to know more, that I have so many other questions at the end when Sir Christopher dies, is a tribute to this fascinating book.