Vienna, one traveller’s experience

 

The Vienna Natural History Museum, viewed from the Kunsthistorisches Museum, with the statue to Maria Theresa between them. Lots of people in the shade, not so many in the full sunlight.

Vienna is famous as one of the great examples of 19th-century urban planning. The Ringstrasse (which Wikipedia baldly translates as “ring road”, although it is hardly that) was built around the historic city, using the space created by the removal of the city walls from 1857. The planners seized the opportunity to build a large number of trophy buildings, all of monumental scale, using a wild variety of styles, including Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque, to celebrate the Habsburg Empire. They include the University of Vienna, the Opera House, the Town Hall, and the Parliament Building. The Ringstrasse is generally accepted as quite an exceptional development: for example, it is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

This holiday, my first visit to Vienna, was based almost entirely around or within the Ringstrasse, so it did not look at any of the social housing for which Vienna is famous. The story of how the Ringstrasse was built, and funded, has been well told by several historians, notably Carl Schorske (1979).

My experience in the centre of Vienna was uncomfortable, and the Ringstrasse didn’t help. It was mid-summer, and the temperature was up to 30 degrees Celsius, in other words, hot. This was not the best weather to be looking at the outside of buildings. The Ringstrasse buildings, in all their grandeur, had to be approached in full sun with no convenient shade available.

Vienna is a city that takes its culture very seriously, so my heart sank initially at the thought of a space dedicated to multiple museums. Anyone who has approached the Kunsthistorisches Museum will recognise the deliberately overwhelming impression produced by the gigantic-scale architecture. Inside and out, the building is designed to intimidate you.

The view from the foyer of the Kunsthistorisches Museum: you can see where the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge got its ideas from.

Was this kind of grandeur ever enjoyed by the users? The Ringstrasse buildings are similar to the superhuman scale of Haussmann’s redevelopment of Paris. A walk down the Champs-Elysées is not a pleasant experience, in a similar fashion. Both the Ringstrasse and the Champs-Elysées are major traffic thoroughfares. They are noisy and smelly, and do not please the eye for pedestrians, who enjoy things to look at on a small scale.

The Museums Quarter during the day

In contrast, the Museums Quarter, despite its name, is relatively small and enclosed. It is a space created to one side of the Ringstrasse, creating a square (small by the standards of the Ringstrasse itself), with a museum at each end: the Leopold Museum at one end, and MUMOK, the Museum of Contemporary Art, at the other. There are several other institutions around, such as an Architectural Institution, but they are barely visible from the main square. In the square itself there is a variety of open-air cafes, and, most importantly, both mature and young trees and plants. You can pay to sit at cafes, but there are also seats where you can just sit for free. The cafes are very relaxed, providing anything from a drink to a full meal, of many different cuisines: the café we went to provided anything from Chinese to Japanese to Italian, with several styles in between). In the evening, people walked their dog, or went out with their families, and I noticed that rarity, single people dining in the cafes, unnoticed.

The Museums Quarter in the evening: modern art, several cafes, loungers for anyone to sit.

The Museums Quarter provided a central-Vienna equivalent to some of the smaller streets, which, even if not traffic-free, had lots of street cafes and planting, with a speed limit of 10 km/h. During the day, there was quite a bit of traffic in these side streets, but in the evenings, many street cafes opened up, using a part of the carriageway, and the road surface had been changed to a tiled brick, to slow the traffic down.

One of the side streets away from the Ringstrasse. This is a road that cars could use - but few cars were seen in the evenings.

To my mind, this is what a pleasant city is all about. It’s rare in London, because there are so few traffic-free locations (don’t even think about using a London square for social events, for the most part). I love art galleries, and the opera, and grand buildings, but the Museums Quarter showed how it was possible to combine grandeur and small-scale.

The Shape of Things: the exhibition and the curators

 

Poppy Jones Water Glass and Thistle (2024)

There seem to be two or more exhibitions taking place at the Pallant House Gallery exhibition of modern British still life art. On the one hand, a presentation of the quintessential still life genre, and how it has survived and been constantly refreshed through wars, artistic movements, and changing fashions. On the other hand, there is a somewhat frantic effort by the curators, the authors of the catalogue (The Shape of Things, Pallant House Gallery, 2024) to drag the show towards displaying the history of the last hundred years of art in Britain, almost as if still life in itself were not sufficient. Linked to this is a selection of works that aim to shock, deceive or fool us. Typical of this approach is Jane Simpson’s Our Distant Relatives, a Morandi-like assembly of what looks like porcelain vases and containers, except that they are made out of rubber rather than porcelain. You can’t see this from the objects displayed, and since we can’t touch the objects, we have no idea what they are made of; the joke is rather wasted on us. What’s the point? On the subject of things that can’t be seen, “Fergusson’s still lifes often had strong sexual overtones: other examples of his blue lamp still lifes include a small pink box … which is said to have contained Fergusson’s condoms.” This is a reference to something not visible in a painting not displayed at the exhibition.

To be brutal, the show is not sufficient even at showing the classical still life tradition and how it continued into the 20th century. Cezanne is described in the catalogue as ““arguably the father of modern still life” – so why not include anything by Cezanne in this show? He painted over 200 still lifes, so there are plenty to choose from. He wasn’t British, but does it matter? Or do we need to draw a line around Britain, and only include artists who practised here?

The quiet magic of still life is perhaps insufficient for the curators, but to be fair, the artists themselves were frequently happy to condemn much of the art around them. Paul Nash, in 1931, wrote “The tyrannical reign of Nature Morte is, at last, over. Apples have had their day”. But he didn’t have any coherent description of an alternative; he called for two seemingly contradictory ideas in art, first, intensity of design, but second, “Juxtaposition of paraphernalia”. The Smithsons in 1956 described the Pop Art of their generation as “the equivalent of the Dutch fruit and flower arrangement, the pictures of the second rank of all Renaissance schools … “. There are many dreary fruit and flower paintings, but this exhibition shows some examples of what could be done with these subjects. They aren’t all dreary.

Similarly, the curators are not sparing in their condemnation of much of this show. Describing the work of Bawden, Cedric Morris and Frances Hodgkins, they state “these works became commodities in themselves and took their place on the walls of fashionable society homes, becoming, in the words of the critic R H Wilenski, “wall furniture”. Well, if it were wall furniture, we wouldn’t be looking at it with such interest today.

 

More questionable still is when the curators going off in their own directions, not always related to the work. Describing still life in the 1930s, the writers come up with a gloriously ungrammatical claim: “A genre with a fraught relation to its own gendered implications, artists worked to unravel still life’s proximity to the domestic in the wake of newly won emancipation for women”. [page 60]. This is shortly before discussing the work of Winifred Nicholson. John Bratby’s Still life with Chip Frier “problematises the masculine individual’s conflicted position in the postwar home”. The catalogue section devoted to the 1950s and 60s is more a history of Pop Art than a study of still lifes.

 

At other times, the curators are keen to detect signs of Britishness in the art, for example, Edward Wadsworth’s Bright Intervals: “in his concern with maritime instruments and depictions of nautical life, it is possible to detect … “the consciousness of an islander”. I think that reveals more about the curator than about the work.  

 

My impression from the show is that there is a magical appeal of still lifes, and towards the end the curators rather grudgingly accept this. Michael Bird tries desperately to avoid using the word “domestic”, instead using “sociable”, and describing still lifes as depicting “objective reality where order reigns”. But he catches something of the magic when he describes the “stillness, lucidity and calm” of the best still lifes.

 

Towards the end of the catalogue, there is some kind of acceptance of what I would describe as the quiet tradition of still life at its best: 

For all its mundanity and portrayal of humble objects, still life has the capacious ability to express the human condition and shared experience, a manifest of the time and society in which it was made. It is perhaps in this, that still life acquires its contemplative, reflective qualities. [Melanie Vandenbrouck, p143]

That understated subject matter, combined with exquisite detail, is seen beautifully in Poppy Jones Water Glass and Thistle (2024), bringing a fine tradition up to the present day.

Still Life at the Pallant House Gallery

 

Ethel Walker, Flower Piece no 4 c1930

The Shape of Things is the title for this charming exhibition of still life by British artists from around 1900 to the present day. Like many of the best Pallant House exhibitions, it makes considerable use of the remarkable Pallant House permanent collection, based around Nash, Nicholson, Bloomsbury, Ravilious, and a few others. Curator Simon Martin describes it (in the catalogue on page 12) with just a touch of exaggeration as “a history of modern and contemporary British art through still life”. It comprises around 150 works, of which perhaps a third are by living artists, a very healthy proportion. Commendable also was the complementary exhibition at the Pallant, of works by members of the local community, called Significant Objects, objects that have a value to the creator.

Walking around the show, I realised that still life is a term we often use but without always thinking about what it means. Several of the works in this show didn’t look like still life to me. So here is a definition – and let’s see what fits, and what doesn’t:

Still life: a genre of representational art of motionless objects, usually arranged, such as flowers or fruit, but not including the human figure. It is distinct from landscape painting, where the artist depicts a view of what they see, and from botanical illustration, which depicts for information and education, even though many early still life works are astonishing for their verisimilitude and detail.

Although still life, by this definition, has existed since earliest times, it emerged in Western art as a genre in the Low Countries during the 16th and 17th centuries. Within the overall grouping of still life there have been popular subjects and topics, for example, depictions of flowers, dead animals and game, bowls of fruit, Vanitas (expressing the vanity of human desires) and Memento Mori (reminder of death).

Still life was traditionally considered “low” art, depicting the everyday, contrasted with “high” art (of heroes and saints), but has always been popular. Some of the greatest 19th- and 20th-century artists have produced still life, including Cezanne, Van Gogh, and Matisse.

That definition enabled me to raise a few questions – for example, is there anything distinctly British about still life? The catalogue states explicitly that still life was not a British invention, and crosses many national boundaries. There is nothing specifically British about a bowl of fruit.

Yet the Pallant House director, Simon Martin, confidently and curiously asserts that the still life genre “can be seen as a manifestation of Britain’s status as a former maritime power, and the long legacy of empire” [p8]. I can read lots of things into still life, but I hadn’t expected that interpretation. His observation, or justification, is that many artists who carried out still life painting were immigrants to the UK. His long list of first- or second-generation painters includes many from Europe, which seems to defeat his argument; all in all, I don’t think it is a very helpful way of looking at still life.

Works that don’t appear to me to be part of still life include Katie Paterson’s Ending, a dial of 100 different pigments, representing nothing; and the very prominent jars by Lindsey Mendick, covered in writhing creatures. I also felt the surrealist works with imaginary items fell outside the remit of still life. 

Sickert, Still Life on a Table, 1913

It doesn’t help to be too doctrinaire on this point. Sickert’s lovely Still Life on a Table has some figures in the background, but they don’t really affect the main still life in the foreground. 

Anwar Jalal Shemza, Still Life, 1957

Anwar Jalal Shemza’s Still Life, was remarkable – a rich mix of ochres, reds and blues.

But for me, the highlights of the show were some of the flower paintings, by Winifred Nicholson, Cedric Morris, and Ethel Walker. Flowers seem to bring out the best in some painters (Ben Nicholson’s son said very aptly that his father’s paintings of flowers in vases was all about the vase rather than the flowers), and it was thrilling to see the enthusiastic brush-strokes, rather than nit-picking attention to detail, in these works. Flowers full of life like these are a wonderful inspiration; they seem free of the heavy-handed use of the skull that was still continuing in the 20th-century, and which appeared to be a clumsy and outdated attempt to convey significance. Walker’s painting seems to proclaim, “Look at these flowers! Are they not magical?” For me, the best still lifes are unpretentious (and unportentous) examples of low, rather than high life, and all the better for it. 

 

    

Santiago Rusiñol and Sitges

 

I always enjoy a trip to a seaside resort. For someone who lives over an hour from the sea, I find in a resort there is such an emphasis on pleasure, such a contrast to the drab inland towns, and so it is disappointed indeed to go to the seaside only to discover towns like Great Yarmouth or Margate that have lost all the pleasurable aspects they must once have had.

That’s why a day trip to Sitges, around 20 km from Barcelona, is such a pleasure. Of course, there is the sea, which is necessary, but not sufficient. Here it is in the form of several bays; the beaches, each one with a slightly different character; and for one of the beaches, the most central one, a long row of seaside cafes, selling everything from cocktails, tapas, to full set meals. While you eat, you can see various enjoyable public sculptures of curvy classical nudes and notable Sitges residents (not in the same sculpture, I should add) that seem to have been chosen to provide pleasurable associations while you eat and look at life on the beach.

There are probably stylish venues in Sitges, but for the most part, the town has a turn of the century charm, the air of a minor resort that was initially developed in the late 19th century, and then grew dramatically, and with considerably less charm, in the 1960s and 70s with dreary nondescript apartment blocks, which don’t have anything like the charm of the few blocks of the historic centre. 

But there is one aspect of Sitges that seems to combine the vulgar and the refined in a very charming way: the local museum, which is actually two separate collections. There is the municipal gallery, with the expected miscellany of fine and applied arts, but there is also Cau Ferrat (something like “the iron den”), the former house of Santiago Rusiñol, which provides the quirkiest and most entertaining view of the town. The Rusinol house contains a plethora of objects of all kinds: iron, glass, tiles, high and low art, all stacked several deep on every wall.

The best view from the museum is the view from the loo.  Inside the toilet at the Cau Ferret Museum, there is a plain glass floor-to-ceiling window; but there is little chance that you will be seen – the Museum is built right over the sea, and this window looks straight out to the Mediterranean. The view is like an infinity pool, with no buildings to enable you to judge the distance. The view seems to pay tribute to the magical sea, which you have the opportunity to contemplate for a few minutes.  

I’m not sure if Rusiñol was responsible for putting Sitges on the map, but he didn’t do the town any harm by his long-term association with it. Difficult to sum up Rusiñol as an artist: although not a world-shattering painter, his drawing and composition skills were excellent, and he seems to have been equally fluent in writing novels, plays, as well as painting, quite apart from being a major collector. His house in Sitges, although it has a bedroom and a kitchen, seems more suited to display than to everyday living, and doesn’t appear to be large enough for more than one person, even though it could (and did) host banquets for many. I don’t get the impression that anyone other than Rusinol stayed there, and in fact Rusiñol deserted his wife and child for several years to “live the life of an artist”, which he felt he could not do at home. Since he had inherited enough money to never have to work, it seems rather strange that he  couldn’t be an artist with his family, but whatever the case, one result is that he drew exquisite depictions of the local Sitges brass band, which I found far more appealing than conventional insipid portraits of young girls holding a carnation.

The Cau Ferrat, containing the Rusinol collection as he left it, is quite something to behold. It is a typical 19th-century art collector’s trove, where different art forms, periods and styles are all jumbled up in the most amazing cacophonous collection. The result is a jumble that makes more sense as a whole than by the individual works.  It reminded me of the Burrell Collection in Glasgow, with individual artistic creations dragged out of their context and displayed alongside completely.