Feliu Elias, a 20th century artist

 

Elias, Tools, 1935

This show, at MNAC (the National Museum of Catalonian Art), Barcelona, was a real revelation. Here was a painter and caricaturist who rather vociferously turned his back on the artistic movements of his time (he was painting in the first decades of the 20th century) yet convinces the viewer from the sheer force and energy of his works, both cartoons and paintings: all are executed with an intensity and immediacy. Remarkably, for his ‘serious’ painting, he manages to achieve this both with portraits as well as with still lifes. 

Still lifes

Let’s start with still-lifes: a genre where, you would think, every possible approach in a realistic style has already been done. Yet Elias succeeds by choosing the most mundane objects - alarm clocks, books and saucepans, yet invests them with a respect that captures your attention. You feel that depicting such objects with such care compels you to take the objects and their depiction seriously. A picture of fruit, or tools for interior decorating, becomes in some way intense.

Caricature

Elias, Antonio Gaudi

Yet Elias (working under the pseudonym “Apa”) can at the same time create wonderfully vivid caricatures. In these works he is not pulling any punches. It would appear from his rather feisty relations with his contemporaries that his uncompromising views extended to his conversations. Clearly, from his depiction of Gaudi, Elias was not a wholly committed convert to Gaudi’s vision. 

Portraits

Elias, portrait of his son, 1915

Remarkably, for an age where photography would appear to have removed all the need for a painted depiction, Elias proves us wrong and presents the ambition, and the innocence, of his children. Similarly, his portraits of his peers present the person in their public persona, how they would like to be seen:

Elias, portrait of Francesc Pujols, 1920 

The males are excellent, but unfortunately, his female nudes display exaggerated curves in a male-gaze style that makes them very dated.  

Finally, his depictions of individuals in a domestic or work setting is remarkably evocative. 

Elias, La Galeria, 1928

What was Elias’ aesthetic, his view of painting? It’s difficult to relate what he says to his own work. “Real painting doesn’t exist since Turner and the impressionists”, he stated, yet his work bears little or no sign of impressionism. He is disdainful of cubism and is always very representational. Yet with painting as sincere and powerful as this, who cares? 

On looking at some of the details, the realism is not quite photographic; you notice, for example in the still life of 1933, objects are not correctly in perspective. More interesting, the patten of the wood table surface seems to be slightly melting in the reflections of the objects placed on it. This is a very sophisticated realism: 

Elias, The Apples, 1943

Who was Elias?

How can this artist be at the same time intensely serious, highly political, and yet fully capable of caricature? He seems to have been in the wrong place at the wrong time at several points in his life. Arrested for offending the Spanish government in 1911, he fled to Paris, and was awarded by the French Government for his satirical cartoons in support of the Allies. In the 1930s, he fled Francoist Spain, first in 1937, then again in 1938, only to be sent to a concentration camp when the Germans take over France in 1939. Several of the late still lifes date from this period, when he must have been under the utmost stress: which makes all the more remarkable these works of intense calm and repose, perhaps only possible through art. 

Robert Macfarlane, The Old Ways

 

From the praise lavished on Robert Macfarlane by the critics, I expected this book to be something extraordinary. “Outstanding”, “magnificent”, “utterly beautiful”, “sets the imagination tingling” are words from the paperback edition (published 2012). 

The book

This is an account of several walks (or boat trips) that the author made. At the same time, it is an anthology of writing about walking. The book includes references to many of literature’s well-known walkers, including Rousseau, Wordsworth, Clare, Borrow – it’s no surprise that the bibliography cites the anthology The Vintage Book of Walking. But it is not just a set of references to well-known walkers and nature writers. 

Vocabulary

The book is consciously poetic: he constantly strives for artistic effect, yet the result is far less effective than W G Sebald, because Macfarlane seems to be trying so hard to write beautiful and arresting prose, rather than having something to say: or, to be more specific, because I don’t much like what the author has to say, in Macfarlane’s case.

His technique is to stop you in your tracks while reading, by choosing an unusual word, or by using a word in an unusual context. For example, on the first page, describing the tracks made by human walking, he compares natural tracks to walking on asphalt and concrete, “substances not easily impressed”. Once or twice this trick makes you think; but every time it happens, you stop and read again when you encounter an unusual word or context. The author builds up a list of similar words, pointing out how they “become a poem or rite” (just to remind us of the poetical associations): ”holloways, bostles, shuts, driftways, lichways … “ and so on. Then we have path markers: “cairns, grey wethers, sarsens, hoarstones, longstones, milestones … “ Yet after enunciating all these magic terms for natural walks, Macfarlane walks across a golf course for his first chapter: golf courses, the negation, almost the denial of landscape. Golfers are in the landscape, but do their best to ignore it. 

 Elsewhere, you feel a thesaurus has been brought into play. “Wordsworth’s … knobbly legs … were magnificent shanks” [p16]. Dorset is “webbed with paths”. Walking is also described as “tramping”, and “meandering”.  The trope of switching subject and object occurs frequently, for example “when a white object achieves perfect tuning against snow … so the object is absorbed into the snow – or, audaciously, absorbs the snow into it.” [p412]. The trick of using words to highlight polysemy is emphasised: “they exist on two planes (plains)” [p412], as if the multiple meanings enrich the text. 

Is this vocabulary intended to convey meaning, or simply a vague “poetic effect”? I can’t help feeling sometimes that the words used are less specific than Macfarlane suggests. Names of plants, animals and birds are used frequently and appear to me to be far more specific than  is possible. In Sussex, the author walks along the edge of the River Cuckmere : “my boot marks joined the tracks of heron, cormorant, gull and egret”. I don’t imagine all of those prints would be distinguishable by him. Instead, it is another example of a piling up of names. 

Walking and paths

“Paths are the habits of a landscape”. Does he mean the apparel, what a landscape wears? Does he mean the common activities carried out in the landscape? Or the parts of a landscape that are so familiar to us? None of the meanings quite fits; the narrative does not flow. But that seems to be the intention. 

“Paths connect. That is their first duty and their chief reason for being.” I don’t agree; Macfarlane’s use of paths is not to go anywhere. The use he describes is leisure walking, where you are happy to walk towards no particular destination, simply for the pleasure of the walk. The purpose of the path is for you to immerse yourself in an imaginary natural universe where plants and animals have more of a chance than in the rest of the built environment. You like it when the trees overhang and the vegetation is slightly wild. You are seeking an experience of “nature” as somehow being more authentic than the modern world we live in for most of the time. Macfarlane walks the Broomway path to Foulness Island, and when he gets there, he turns round and comes back again, partly because you aren’t allowed on Foulness without a permit, although he doesn’t mention this. Nor does he mention there is a perfectly good road to Foulness Island.

 “Paths are consensual … because without common care and common practice they disappear”. I would argue that most footpaths in England, and probably elsewhere, are anything but consensual. They may have their origin in ancient rights of way and  droveways, but the reality is that they only exist today because the authorities, often reluctantly, concede their official existence; the local interests are usually keen to remove them, to make them as unpleasant as possible, to make it clear to users that their use by the public is tolerated at best. Farmers and land-owners lock gates, make stiles impassable, and it is only rambling organisations who fight to preserve access. That is an aspect of paths that seems not to interest the author, who displays a curious innocence on this point. Not everyone loves footpaths. In Palestine, where you might get shot for walking on a path, he describes his fear – but that is a war zone, and is an exception to his typical depiction of paths. 

Perhaps the best descriptions of nature are those that don’t set out only to be descriptions. Such descriptions are like the worst kind of poetry, which sets out, within the limits of its metrical framework, to state something beautiful. Darwin describes nature very well; he is interested in what he sees, and describes it very carefully, but he is also interested in what it means; not only in how beautiful it is, but how it came to be what it is today. For me, Darwin (in The Voyage of the Beagle) conveys the magic of landscapes, as well as awakening my curiosity. He demonstrates for me that a scientific interest need not eliminate an awareness of beauty and ugliness. But my reading of The Old Ways is that it is fundamentally an exercise in the beautiful: despite references to the modern world, it is fundamentally about a mythical countryside that no longer exists, and probably never existed. 

I don’t find the people, and many of the places, mentioned by Macfarlane stir my curiosity to discover more. One figure, that of Edward Thomas, however, is central to the whole book. 

Edward Thomas

Edward Thomas is an unlikely hero to be selected by an arts professor. On the very slim evidence provided by the book, the verse is not great: 

Whatever the roads bring

To me or take from me,

They keep me company

With their pattering,

 

Crowding the solitude

Of the loops over the downs,

Hushing the roar of towns

And their brief multitude.

 

The author and his attitudes

Macfarlane is very coy about himself. There is no biography for him in the paperback edition I read (published 2013). His Wikipedia entry, and references to him on his books, state simply he is a Fellow. The website for Emmanuel College Cambridge states he is Professor of Environmental Humanities, which sounds to me unique (although Fiona Stafford, despite being a professor of literature, in The Long, Long Life of Trees has compiled what in some ways is a a similar miscellany that comprises mentions of every English and American author, it seems, who has mentioned a specific tree variety). 

I am not happy about Macfarlane's macho attitude to nature. A walk cannot simply be a walk; it has to be life-threatening in some way. His walk to Foulness Island is full of tales of how dangerous the walk is, how many people have gone missing. If it is so dangerous, why does he feel the need to walk it, especially since there is a perfectly sound road for vehicles he could use? When he walks the Icknield way, he starts by cycling frantically, falls off and breaks a rib or two. But he carries on walking. Why? Who is he trying to impress? He walks for over ten hours, damages his feet, and sleeps outdoors. Should we be impressed? Are we admiring nature or Mr Macfarlane’s exploits? On a boat trip near the Hebrides, he sails at night in a boat that has no lights. In Spain he falls asleep on a mountain ledge and then notices that vultures are hovering overhead. Is this clever? 

Only on page 363, the penultimate page of the book, do we discover that Macfarlane has children: “Suddenly I feel a tidal pull homewards, to my own children, wanting to keep them safe against harm and time.” This is rather abrupt, given that the rest of the book depicts an author alone, a man who wants to sleep outside by himself (more than once he sleeps by himself in the “wild” rather than sharing accommodation with the others in his party).  The author seems almost to admire that Thomas walked away from his own family and children in World War One when, at the age of 36, he enlisted, although he was not obliged to join the armed forces. 

Cruelty

Macfarlane describes cruelty without comment, which suggests some kind of acceptance. He seems to have no problem with the barbaric practice on the remote Scottish island of Sula Sgeir of killing gannets. Two thousand birds are killed each year, and the wings tossed aside and left on the island. From Wikipedia [“Sula Sgeir”]:   

The Sula Sgeir hunt, which would otherwise be illegal under the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981, receives an annual licence from the government, which allows it to continue … The Scottish SPCA describes it as "barbaric and inhumane" and believes it causes unnecessary suffering to the birds, with many taking several blows to be killed. 

Neither does Macfarlane condemn the peculiar Steve Dilworth, in the chapter Gneiss, who collects human and animal skeletons and decaying corpses. 

When he [Dilworth] was a student in art college he’d taken an air rifle into the life-drawing class, sat by an open window that overlooked a stand of trees, and shot any squirrels that appeared. [p177] 

I don’t imagine this charming activity improved the quality of his own or of his fellow students’ life drawings. 

Macfarlane and alcohol

The author makes it clear he enjoys drinking – nothing wrong with that. But there are worrying references to a culture of drinking. “Within a few minutes of arriving I was at the kitchen table with a coffee in one hand and a gin and tonic in the other.” [p171]. In the episode described above where he sees a vulture circling overhead, he continues: “I sat upright, making vigorous signs of life and freedom, and it veered away. I didn’t need any help damaging my liver.” 

Macfarlane the traditionalist

Ships are always “she”. Weights and measures are given in imperial units. There is an emphasis on British writers, artists and poets. Three-quarters of the book is set in England and Scotland; the remaining chapters are set “abroad”. 

Lack of specificity

There are so many references to places and to walks in this book, but not a single map. I start to think that the references to places, using wherever possible local names, are a tool for surrounding the subject with mystery. Macfarlane’s preference is for walks where there is no map; where you get instructions from someone you meet, who tells you vaguely where to go. It seems to be somehow more exciting when you don’t know exactly where the path is.    

For a book about paths and walking, The Old Ways is very lacking in signposts. Chapters are given a cryptic title that does not indicate their contents. Chapter 3 is “Chalk”, while Chapter 14, also set on chalk downs, is called “Flint”. Chapter 11 is “Roots”, yet is no more or less about roots than the other chapters.

Conclusion

I love walking and I love nature. Sadly, I do not recognize the nature or the attitudes described in this book. If Robert Macfarlane invited me to join him on a walk, I don’t think I would want to join him. For him, nature is there to provide danger, but to be conquered, either alone or (mostly) in the company of other males. The Old Ways seems to me to be traditionally male in its attitudes, and they are not traditions I am particularly interested to share.

Why John Wayne walked away

 

From the poster for The Searchers 

At the end of The Searchers, Ethan Edwards, the character played by John Wayne, after seven or more years of searching, finally returns to what remains of his family carrying the kidnapped niece he has just “rescued” from the Indians, and does a very strange thing. Here is the climax of the film, the searched-for object found. He brings her to the doorway, but then walks away. He doesn’t set foot inside the house.  

Why does he walk away? In that moment, that gesture, for better or worse, Ford has created a myth, a clash of cultures, an undoubted (if uncomfortable) achievement of film-making. There are of course many interpretation of why he walks away. For me, that walking away represents the sheer impossibility of his character’s homophobia, racism, sexism, and belief in violence co-existing in an (equally mythic) world of communities and families, the “everyday” that we, the viewers, believe we inhabit.

After watching The Searchers, the first Western I had seen for several years, I couldn’t stop thinking about the character played by John Wayne.

Like most boys of my generation, I grew up saturated by Westerns: books, films, games, actors. If it wasn’t a Western movie, it was a Western TV series. There were series for kids (The Lone Ranger), series for adults (The Virginian, Rawhide) quite apart from individual Western movies, of which there must be thousands. John Wayne is simply the tip of the iceberg; most of these artefacts displayed the culture of the Western, the myth of a new America, the image of the frontier, the dream of self-sufficiency assisted by a bit of honest hand-fighting and the occasional use of the gun.  

After an upbringing in which the Western was a such component of everyday life, so taken for granted, it is very difficult to stand back from such a barrage of propaganda and to realise how odd it all was. For John Wayne to learn to be an actor in those days, one key requirement was to learn to ride a horse; I didn’t realise that such a skill, essential in Western world, had to be learned.  

Seeing another western movie after several years made it apparent how peculiar that world was. I remember reading chivalric epics such as the Morte D’Arthur to my children when they were young, and how they fell about laughing at the ludicrousness of the situations that clearly did not create mirth when first written: the very title “Sir Beaumains”, for example, could be the name of a pantomime character today, but clearly was a perfectly acceptable name when Malory was writing.  

What struck me about The Searchers not the landscape, or the shooting, or even the cowboys versus Indians, all part of the stock Western ethose, but the deeply unpleasant and uncivilised character of John Wayne in all his unredeemed misanthropy. He spends the whole movie as if afflicted by a personal religious quest; not for him the trivia of a wedding party, or a social event. Like Captain Ahab in Moby-Dick, he is obsessed. Like Ahab, he is a monster. But unlike Ahab, Wayne is the hero of the film. We are expected to admire, or at least to accept, his racism, sexism and inability to form any kind of equal relationship with others. For director John Ford, this is the subject of the movie. It’s not about the Indians (although, inevitably, they come off worse): it’s about Wayne’s monomaniacal quest, which, for all I know, is probably still underway today.  

I’m not the only one to be disturbed by the character of Wayne; let’s see what other critics make of him. Gary Will (yes, the historian who writes about Abraham Lincoln and George Washington), in his John Wayne: The Politics of Celebrity (1997), looks a good place to start. Wills is accurate about what Wayne stood for:  

Wayne […] stood for an America people felt was disappearing or had disappeared, for a time “when men were men”. [p14]  

Anecdotes of John Ford’s drinking sessions seem to suggest that Ford himself believed he was one of those men out of their time. Wills gets to the heart of The Searchers by describing that very moment when Wayne walks out at the end:  

Wayne’s deep fires of revenge burn so fiercely through the picture that extinguishing them in the final scene looks contrived. [p17] 

Not so much contrived as impossible to believe in the context of the traditional white settler, love and marriage narrative of the average Western. Wayne is doomed at the end of The Searchers to wander the world retelling his story, like the Ancient Mariner. And, just as I would do if I ever encountered the Ancient Mariner, I would give Wayne a wide berth.

Fantasizing about our ancestors

 

I haven’t finished Ancestors, by Professor Alice Roberts (the word “professor” appears with the author’s name on the cover)  – this is a long book, around 133,000 words, for a popular science book - but I wouldn’t complain if the text justified the length. Sadly, from the first few chapters, I don’t think I have the interest to continue. 

Choice of subject

Archaeology, as the study of prehistory, without written records, is often of necessity based around inferring a background from the sometimes very partial evidence. But if that evidence is very sparse, it may not be possible to reach any reasonable conclusion. What should we do in this case? Speculate wildly, knowing there is no way to refute our ideas, or simply refrain from making inferences in the absence of more concrete data? 

On the basis of the first two chapters, it would seem that the seven subjects chosen in this book are finds of very early, palaeolithic, remains, a period that is challenging for researchers because of the lack of evidence in and around the sites. Often, there is not much that can be stated with certainty; yet the author is not short of ideas. However fascinating Roberts might find these excavations, it is very unsatisfying to this reader to be presented with so much speculation. The “Red Lady” is a case in point. This collection of human bones found in a Welsh cave included the so-called Red Lady,  the subject of much unwarranted fantasizing by the Reverend William Buckland, who studied the bones during the 1820s. Subsequent examination suggested the bones were of a male rather than female, but Roberts continues to refer to the bones by their romanticized title. You can’t help thinking that, potentially, the real subject matter is the dreams and assumptions that researchers assign to their finds. To study this would require the author to be more aware of her own daydreams, but instead of following this strand, she indulges in further speculation that clearly has little evidence behind it: in the absence of evidence, nobody can say she is wrong.  What researchers imagine (and what popular science authors dream) tells you more about them than about the remains, but this does not seem to be investigated by Roberts. 

Did the Neanderthals bury their dead? There is no general agreement about this, it seems:

While all the evidence from Sima de los Huesos … is inconclusive, there are other sites that suggest at least one other human species did practise burial. The debate – you won’t be surprised to learn – is far from settled, but there are a handful of discoveries … that suggest that Neanderthals themselves may hav e buried their dead. [p98]

We then get 20 pages on one excavation, which seems to suggest (according to the excavator) that it was a Neanderthal burial. But even if this was an example of a burial, it is clear that “[burial] certainly wasn’t the norm. Very ancient burials are few and far between – sporadic. Only a small number of people were ever treated in this way when they died.” That looks to me like stating the position four times over. And what conclusion should we draw? The author suggests that now we should think of the Neanderthals “less like unfeeling brutes. More like cousins”.

You might think this an unwarranted interjection of modern ideas about what burial means, based on our own preconceptions, but the author reassures us. It’s OK, states one of the research team, as long as we are looking at each site with “the utmost rigour and with as few preconceptions as possible”.

If I felt the author had been more aware of her own preconceptions, it might have made a more interesting book. Plus, of course, taking a red pen to the many unnecessary words – for example, you don’t examine remains, you “painstakingly comb through the remains” (p110) .  

Fantasizing

The chapter on the Red Lady ends with two pages of fantasy, imagining how the “Red Lady” might have got into the cave:

“We can imagine the day of his burial. He could have been a murderer, or murdered. But let’s imagine him as a fallen hero.” 

This is followed by three pages of pure imaginative reverie. Yet, elsehwere, the author warns us against too much speculation: “Such tantalising suggestions of grave good and perhaps even stones placed as grave markers. But it’s so important not to let the imagination run wild”. [p113] 

When I read a popular science book, I like to be told about what has been discovered. I’m perfectly happy with uncertainty, but above a certain level, uncertainty just leaves me (the typical general reader) dissatisfied. 

Compared to this book, I found other popular science authors such as Francis Pryor (for archaeology) and Steve Jones (for evolution and genetics) far more informative and readable. And less idly speculative.

The Voyage of the Beagle: the best popular science book ever?

 

Darwin in 1840, by George Richmond (Down House)

The Voyage of the Beagle might not be the first ever popular science book, but it certainly has a claim to be the first significant example, and today remains one of the best popular science books ever written. Even today, with thousands of popular science books on the market, Darwin’s account compares very favourably. It’s interesting to examine why that should be. 

By “popular science” is meant to convey scientific thinking in a format that non-specialists can follow. It means more than simply exposition. It certainly does not mean a textbook, which starts from the premise that the author knows but the reader does not.

The popular science genre

There are examples of earlier science books for the general reader, but the genre seems to have emerged during the 19th century; according to Wikipedia, the earliest popular science book was Mary Somerville’s On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences (1834), probably best known today because Whewell created the term “scientist” in a review of this book. 

Today, popular science is a well-established component of trade publishing. For some authors, their academic reputation has not suffered as a result of their popular writing (Steven Jay Gould and Douglas Hofstadter spring to mind). Wikipedia contains a list of no fewer than 200 popular science authors, the majority of them still alive today. Its popularity, it would seem, has never been greater. But there is one great difference between science today and in Darwin’s time: the growth of the science academy has transformed and professionalized the study of science, and in many areas limited or removed the role of the amateur. Today, there is often an expectation that science will be practised (or written about) only by professionals, and this affects the tone and style of writing science for the common reader. Here is Steve Jones, professor of genetics at University College London, and well-established popular science writer, writing about evolution and religion: 

Today’s biology emphasises how little relevance the subject has to the issues so often and so tediously discussed by non-biologists. [Darwin’s Island, 2009, Preface] 

In other words, non-scientists should keep out of this discussion: biology is for (professional) biologists only. Cat Jarman, writing about genetics and archaeology, uses the pronoun “we” to mean, not all of us, but professional archaeologists, not including the reader: 

… the new isotopic and genetic evidence on migration has forced us to rethink the interpretation of these burials … The remarkable shift in the way we are learning from the past and the scientific evidence … is having a tremendous impact.  [Cat Jarman, River Kings, 2021, pp 150-152] 

There is a very different feel when we travel with Darwin on the Beagle: we feel we are sharing his discovery as he sees new unexplained rock structures, new evidence of extinct animals. We don’t feel that he knows, and we do not. Crucially, we often don’t know what we are going to find: this is true of people, plants, animals, and rocks. 

Darwin avoids lecturing by sharing his thinking. Although for each new landing, Darwin is happy to present what is already known on a topic, as a result of his background reading, he soon moves on to his hypothesis, which he shares with us: not to tell us that he knows and we don’t, but to say “I think this might be the cause … what do you think?” In other words, he respects the reader. We all notice what is around us when we travel, and we make observations, but not quite as incisively as Darwin. The most commonplace objects and events start him thinking. For example, he is crossing the Cordillera Mountains between modern-day Peru and Argentina, and then, presumably during a rest halt, notices the mule train carrying their luggage: 

In a troop each animal carries on a level road, a cargo weighing 416 pounds (more than 29 stone), but in a mountainous country 100 pounds less; yet with what delicate slim limbs, without any proportional bulk of muscle, these animals support so great a burden! The mule always appears to me a most surprising animal. That a hybrid should possess more reason, memory, obstinacy, social affection, powers of muscular endurance, and length of life, than either of its parents, seems to indicate that art has here outdone nature. [The Voyage of the Beagle, 2nd edition, chapter 15]. 

You can almost see Darwin’s thought processes in action; and you feel encouraged to look, and to think, for yourself. When he writes about “the upraised recent shells along more than 2,000 miles on the western coast” of Latin America, you suddenly think, yes, of course, that’s how to demonstrate earth movement on a large scale. Unlike much other popular science writing, Darwin’s Voyage makes you want to go out and to look for yourself. I’d love to know how many people became scientists as a result of reading Darwin’s account of his epic journey. 

Is the Voyage just a popular account, a travelogue? It’s certainly not a fully-fledged scientific treatise; it is an account of a voyage, with, afterwards, separate specialist publications examining the various finds from the expedition. Nonetheless, I bet that for every reader of the books about the specialist findings, there are a hundred readers of this book. And, unlike the specialist accounts, Darwin gives us a gloriously joined-up account. He pulls everything together, displays the evidence he has found, gives his interpretation, but appears to make you think that your opinion is valued.  You can disagree.

Darwin the observer

For Darwin, his focus on science does not prevent him responding to non-scientific events. During the voyage, he encounters people and places that he responds to, quite openly. In Brazil, he is horrified by the evidence of slavery: 

On the 19th of August we finally left the shores of Brazil. I thank God, I shall never again visit a slave-country. To this day, if I hear a distant scream, it recalls with painful vividness my feelings, when passing a house near Pernambuco … [The Voyage of the Beagle, 2nd edition, chapter 21]

Some of his attitudes are of course out-dated; in Mauritius he praises the English-built roads and compares them unfavourably with the earlier French colonial infrastructure (and you suspect not without a little national pride). He takes a great dislike to everyone in New Zealand. But we can make allowances for what appears as prejudice to modern eyes. Certainly, Darwin’s five-year journey was not value-free, whatever Steve Jones claims: 

As Darwin put it in The Descent of Man, ‘We are not here concerned with hopes or fears, only with the truth as far as our reason allows us to discover it.’ Science can do that, and no more.  [Steve Jones, Darwin’s Island, preface] 

For me, the unfortunate distinction between “the truth” and everything else is what science has lost in the last hundred or so years. For me, the Voyage represents science at its best: thinking, questioning, no doubt sometimes wrong, but always observing. The experience of reading the Voyage is to share one scientist’s inquisitive examination of everything he sees. Right at the end of the book, Darwin asks himself if he would recommend a similar journey to anyone: “If a person asked my advice before undertaking a long voyage, my answer would depend upon his possessing a decided taste for some branch of knowledge, which could by this means be advanced.” For me, the magic of Darwin is the distinction between his taste for knowledge, and his openness to discovery of things he did not know when he set out: genuine scientific enquiry, and genuine inquisitiveness.

A quick tour of museums in the Netherlands

 

The Depot Boijmans van Beuningen: ostentatious  example of conspicuous consumption

Three days, three art galleries in the Netherlands. The impression from two out of three of them was excellent; one was very disappointing.

The Hague Kunstmuseum, courtyard and cafe

First, the successes. The Kunstmuseum in The Hague was a revelation: a glorious 1930s design by H P Berlage. Having visited The Hague a couple of times before, I am astonished that I didn’t see this gallery, but perhaps it has something to do with the museum’s title: until 2019 it was called the “Gemeentemuseum”, which doesn’t convey (to me) what the museum actually is: a collection of art. It is a joy to wander round this purpose-built gallery, with concealed ceiling lights and tile decorations throughout. Although the museum is vast, there are small, intimate exhibition spaces as well. The exhibition we saw (Josef and Anni Albers) was well presented, and the café (located in courtyard, formerly open to the elements, now enclosed) was a dream.

The Museum de Lakenhal (that is, “cloth museum”  in Leiden was another great success. Here was the best kind of local collection, a museum that showed artists with a connection to Leiden, but most of all to show the history of the cloth industry in Leiden. Where better than the building where the cloth was authenticated as genuine before being sold? Paintings took up less than half the exhibition space; the rest of the vast building showed cloth-making details, something about the siege of Leiden, and some fascinating early 20th-century art. This museum had been closed for some years for refurbishment; it was worth the wait.  

It is a good idea that art galleries are periodically refurbished; but what do you do with a museum during the building works? The Rotterdam Boijmans Van Beuningen museum is an example of how not to do it. Alongside the main building is a highly impressive egg-shaped building covered in reflective mirroring. This building, the Depot, we are told, is the future of museums. For the first time ever, the museum store was being opened to the public. This store, comprising five floors, with a restaurant at the top and a roof garden above, is big enough, we are told, to hold all the museum’s artworks – no fewer than 151,000 objects. For 20 Euros, we can buy a ticket to see the store. But what do we see? There are precisely 14 pictures on display with captions. To view these, you queue and are admitted a few at a time to the single room with these works on display.

This room has the 14 paintings on display from the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen (not, admittedly, just from the back, but if the pictures were against the wall, you could show more).

I quite understand why museums need to close. But to charge €20 to see 14 paintings seems to me a not very fair transaction. Almost alongside this room, which had a queue of visitors waiting patiently for admission, there was a much larger room that was completely empty. It would have been possible to show not 14 but 140 paintings on the walls of this room, complete with captions. Why was this not done?

To be fair, the museum website states quite clearly that the highlights are just 14 pictures. But there is no explanation why only 14 are shown. Worse, an accompanying wall display explains that the presentation of just 14 paintings was “made possible” by a sponsor. Is the display of works of art not what a gallery is for? Does it require a sponsor to show 14 works? 

The astonishing explanation for the 14 paintings that were on display

Had the museum not used “crystal easels”, many more paintings could have been displayed in the one room. On another floor, there was a vast empty room, which could have held, in my estimate, ten times as many paintings. In other words, it was clearly not lack of space to display the pictures. The impression overall of the depot was that space was not at a premium; there was a vast atrium through the centre of the building. No expense had been spared in building the depot.

What made things worse was that dotted around the store were many objects that had been clearly put on display, but without any information about the object. There was a complete lack of the kind of information I would expect from a gallery – who created this artwork? When was it done? – and instead, a smug presentation that made it clear that the museum knows what it is doing, even when it doesn’t. 

Objects displayed to demonstrate the museum's display skills, but not, it seems to tell us anything about what they are

To give a further example. One of the multimedia displays comprised several large numbers, which on closer examination were totals from a search of the  collection’s digital catalogue. By interrogating the catalogue, the display proudly told us, we can see how many objects in the collection have no image. Or have no metadata. In other words, the online catalogue is not complete – yet this is presented as a kind of achievement, rather than a failure. 

Similarly, the museum had a room dedicated to a project based around slavery. This comprised one picture, of a 19th century sugar plantation in Brazil, that had been annotated, like this:

This is an example of labour, just in case you hadn't noticed

There were similar captions for “slavery”. The aim seemed to emphasise to the visitor that the museum was fully aware of the issues raised by some of its collection, and had taken action. Now we all know this represents labour, so there is nothing more to worry about.

In summary, I would give The Hague Kunstmuseum and De Lakenhal 10/10; The Rotterdam Boijmans van Beuningen, 0/10, for a patronizing and unwelcoming attitude to its visitors. 

Impressions of Carnival at Kettle’s Yard

 

Paul Dash, detail of The Float

If you hadn’t seen the title as you entered this show, you could be forgiven for not knowing what is was about. The title is actually Paint Like the Swallow Sings Calypso, which doesn’t tell you much either, until I noticed the introductory text explaining that “The Mighty Swallow” was a calypso singer protesting against inequalities. But I didn’t see much sign of inequalities in the works of the show.

The phrase “Impressions of Carnival” actually appears on the Kettle’s Yard website describing the exhibition. It serves as a reasonable title, if you interpret it (very) broadly. But the problem for me was not just with the show title, but also at the micro-level, reading and understanding the captions, which contained many unexplained references – for example, what a Schönbartbuch is. Like much in this show, I had to resort to Google and to Wikipedia to get some idea about things being described. It didn’t help that the captions to the works appeared to be in reverse order, so the caption that told you who Paul Dash is appears in the corner of the room opposite the entrance.

Unbelievably billed as bringing together the collections of Kettle’s Yard and the Fitzwilliam for the first time, it looked to me that the genesis was an invitation to three artists, Paul Dash, Errol Lloyd and John Lyons (who is also a writer), to see what they found interesting in the two collections, and what comparisons could be made (or “in dialogue”) with their own. So this kind of explains why we get two Crucifixions, one by Graham Sutherland, and one by the curators – but what does that have to do with Carnival? We also get an abstract work entitled “Torture”, and a sweet little work by William Orpen accepting an invitation to his friend Charles Conder’s party. There is a Picasso print, mistakenly called an oil painting, about the Minotaur, although I fail to see any connection with carnival. If there is one, could they tell us, so we can all share it?

On the positive side, if we become a bit more relaxed about the ostensible theme, there are some lovely works. Paul Dash does some very good scenes of groups of people, done almost entirely with pen and ink.

Avinash Chandra, detail of Black Feast

Avinash Chandra has a tumultuous scene that could be many people, or could just be an abstract pattern, in a lovely combination of yellow, orange and black. A 17th-century engraving of a Bacchanal shows putti dancing in an exquisite horizontally oriented print. Fritz Moeser’s Monstrous head breathing is a fine linocut. 

John Phillips, Spanish Carnival (no date)

And, finally, a real gem from the Fitzwilliam collection, Spanish Carnival, by John Phillip. It sounds a hackneyed topic, and I’ve never heard of the artist, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it has never been exhibited in the galleries. But the painting, viewed close-up, has a wonderful immediacy; two figures have just removed their masks, and the woman seems to be captured in the act of turning to face the viewer, while the man, holding a guitar, is intimately close behind her. It would be an achievement for a photography to capture such immediacy.

But for me, this show would be all the better for some further investigation: where did the Caribbean carnival originate? Was it brought from Europe via the masked ball? In this show we have a masked ball (although I struggled to find any masks in it). It shouldn’t be difficult to document the connection, the development, and the modern-day manifestations. Wikipedia has no fewer than 16,500 words on the topic “Carnival”. That would make a useful start.