I tolerate this century, but I don't enjoy it.
All of the ephemera that is far too trivial to be bothered with elsewhere on this site or, depending on your point of view, a meta-commentary on it. This ephemera includes, but is not limited to art, music and literature. Most of the content here will be discussed in terms that are as abstract as possible, reality being a singularly overrated concept.
Sunday, March 8, 2009
For as long as I can remember, walking around the City of London at the weekend has been a disquieting experience. It's streets have invariably been deserted, its shops closed as if some great cataclysm had overtaken the city's inhabitants. At present, this sensation of the deserted city is exacerbated by the fact that many of the shops have not just shot for the weekend but have shut for good. The prospect of London as a skyscraper graveyard opens up before us.
One of the particular aspects of London that always unsettles me is its grafting of raw and cavernous concrete structures onto a medieval streetplan. The result is often claustrophobic and overwhelming at the same time. Nowhere is this more true than at the Barbican. Conceived of as an attempt to impose order on the unruly chaos of the London streets, the complex seems folded in on itself, hostile to stragers and resistant to their attempts to penetrate it. Pleasant gardens with fountains sit alongside concrete pillars encased in scaffolding. The reason for my visit is an exhibition about Le Corbusier; not my favourite architect by any means but one I still feel I should learn more about, if only in the interests of giving him a fair hearing before condemning him. Much of the initial exhibits reveal a puritanical classicist that is little removed from my prejudices, interested only in reducing items to their basic form rather than delighting in them. Initially a disciple of arts & crafts, his work was intended to adapt man to the machine age, hence his tendencies for 'garden city skyscrapers' and his willingness to co-operate with regimes from Moscow to Vichy and New York. Like Wren or Haussmann, his designs would have demolished and reconstructed almost entire cities. His painting, influenced by Leger and Picasso seems rather more of interest than his architecture. The later work perhaps seems of more interest, when his interest in 'type objects' gave way to an interest in found textures and the poetry of objects. The result was an emphasis on biomorphic, which at least softened the designs at Ronchamp and Chandigarh. The most interesting structure for me is easily the Philips Pavilion, constructed jointly with Xenakis and Varese. The exhibition shows the Daliesque video projected onto the pavilion walls, as it was lit up in different colours - the result must have been rather like a sixties happening. The building itself seems more reminiscent of Gaudi or Calatrava, in its use of hanging techniques that have only really become widely available through computer modelling. To me, it looks like a geometrical ribcage.
Later, I walk around the nearby areas of the city; the lost graveyards of St John Zacharay and St Anne & St Agnes, the Wax Chandler's unicorns, the ruins of London wall, the barber's herbal garden, the ruins of St Alphage, St Albans and the Pewterer's dragons. I'm pleased to note that St Giles Cripplegate is open; a rather austere post-war interior, interrupted by some surviving Baroque and Tudor monuments, as well as busts of Cromwell, Bunyan and Milton. I look at the heraldic crests on the walls for the Salters, Brewers, Cutlers, Wax Chandlers, the Stock Exchange, Chartered Institutes and so on. I wonder through Postman's Park, the Holborn Viaduct, the Prudential Assurance, St Luke's and find the interiors of St Mary-at-Hill and St Mary Pattens open.
I return the following week to go to Hampstead, a part of London that retains the winding roads of a village but also its appearance. One exception to this is 2 Willow Road, the former home of Erno Goldfinger. Goldfiner makes an interesting contrast to Le Corbusier, whose style of 'white box' architecture (typified in the mot too distant Isokon building) Goldfinger rather disdained, preferring instead a tradition of 'structural rationalism.' 2 Willow Road has many of the hallmarks of modernist design; much of the wall space is window and the base level is supported by concrete pillars. However, the building is designed in the same brick as the nearby Georgian houses, whose order and proportion Goldfinger professed to admire. For me at least, the result is rather nondescript combining some of the blander aspects of Georgian construction with the puritanical aspects of modernism. The interior is a little different though, not because of any difference in the design but in terms of it containing Goldfinger's art collection. For a house lacking any form of decoration it seems odd that the inside seems so cluttered, with very little space remaining on the walls, window sills and shelves. I'm struck by a Delaunay drawing of the Eiffel tower, a cubist interpretation that makes it look like a gothic cathedral, a large pebble painted by Ernst to transform nature into artifice, a wooden sculpture from Moore combining the soft curves of the wood with geometry of stringed lines, a Duchamp rotorelief, several Riley paintings, Man Ray photos, kinetic sculptures that use magnetism to attach rings to a surface but leaving them mobile, and corrugated triangles used to form a canvas that allow a work to be seen with different shapes or colours depending on whether one stands to the left or to the right. Ethnographic items line the window sills; African masks, Iranian pottery, skulls and so on.
I walk across the heath to meet a different view of classicism; Adam's Kenwood House. The grounds are dotted with sculpture; Hepworth's Monolith Empyrean and Moore's Two Piece Reclining Figure. As ever, I prefer the former, with its resemblance to a petrified figure. From the exterior, the fundamental design of Kenwood House is essentially conservative, a classical design used for thousands of facades. However, Adams has enlivened it with decorated reliefs in stucco; the delight in surface decoration seems very un-English when compared to the earlier Palladian styles or more austere approaches to classicism. This is particularly evident when one comes to the Library; the ceiling is decorated with frescos and the walls painted with blues, pinks and coated in gold. It comes perilously close to rococo, even with mirrors on the wall facing the window. A bust of Zeus-Ammon stands in residence. Other rooms have similar examples, as with a chinoiserie fireplace. Like Willow Road though, much of the interest derives from the art collection, much much of the emphasis being on Dutch art: a Cuyp painting of Dordrecht harbour, Van De Velde seascapes, a De Witte painting of a church interior, Ruisdael landscapes, a Rembrandt self portrait and Vermeer's Guitar Player. There's also an extensive collection of English art, with the set of sixteenth century paintings of the family especially striking, accompanied by assorted Gainsboroughs and Reynolds. Although some of Reynolds paintings of famous actresses in a variety of dramatic poses are rather diverting (for instance, one painting shows Emma Hamilton in one of her 'attitudes') I'm more taken with some of Guardi's Venetian scenes.
This is mirrored afterwards by a visit to South London and Nunhead Cemetery. In many ways the least interesting of the Victorian cemeteries I've visited, it lacks the famous or notorious internments of its Northern counterparts and mostly lacks their architectural flair too. One exception is a tomb modelled on the Lycian Payavan tomb from the British Museum; originally accompanied with two weeping statues destroyed in the war, it would fit better into Pere Lachaise. Nearby is a terracotta tomb equipped with romanesque designs that remind me of the Watts Chapel, although it would seem more likely to be by Henry Peto, given the resemblance to his Doulton and Tate tombs at West Norwood. Finally, there's an obelisk to the Scottish martyrs, political radicals exiled to Australia by Pitt. A cherry tree is in full blossom in one corner of the graveyard, framing a view of St Paul's, while a pair of green parrots chatter in the trees. At the centre of the cemetery lies the ruined Anglican chapel, an unusual octagonal structure whose interior was gutted by fire in the seventies. It seems to lack the faded grandeur of its counterpart at Abney Park though, the stabilisation and restoration work robbing it of decay's poetry.
The following week is taken with visit to some Oxfordshire villages. The church of St Mary at Kidlington is a typically English bricolage of styles; Baroque memento mori wall monuments, medieval stained glass, medieval tiles, Victorian stained glass, green man corbels. The nearby church at Hampton Poyle has an odd column showing medieval knights with linked hands forming a circle around the circumference of the column, several stone tomb effigies, a carved stone block with a hole for heart burials and Minton tiling. Finally, I go to the ruined village of Hampton Gay. Unlike Minster Lovell, the Jacobean manor here is a ruin in the true sense of the term. It is neither preserved nor maintained. Thick ivy vines prise mortar and stone apart, smothering the walls in a sea of dark green. Sheep wander through the door and out the other side. The church is small, with a somewhat misshapen wall monument and a carved wooden heraldic shield below the barrel organ.
At one point in Betjeman's Trains and Buttered Toast, Betjeman complains that Pugin and Morris were escapists and fantasists, their work being essentially analogous to stage scenery. It's a charge that could also be levelled at Betjeman himself, with his tendency to idealise picturesque country cottages whose lack of decent sanitation or heating he wasn't obliged to endure himself. It's a little tiring to continually read references to 'the slave state' as code for the welfare state, complainst about artistic types ruining rural towns, or to come across jokes about birch rods being the most suitable item to be included in a church children's corner. In his radio talks during the war, he advances christianity as an counter-balance to such progress myths as fascism or marxism (progressive committees and civil servants frequently seem placed in the same category as the Nazis as part of modern barbarism). For better or ill, his work is almost entirely insulated from the currents of modernity, preferring instead to dwell in a Burkean reverie upon the age of chivalry and wondering in his lecture on wartime reading whether the nation was not simply trying to escape into the past (never mind that these reveries had been denialist fantasies for Morris as much as Pugin in the context of a rapaciously commercial and industrial nation; much the same applies to today's idylls of smalltown Americana). In his lectures on Edwardian literature, Gissing is the only name to survive amidst a great mass of forgotten poetasters (Joyce is briefly referenced but the likes of Eliot and Woolf are entirely elided). Essays on such luminaries as Henry Newbolt, briefly reference Yeats in passing. I can't help but feel awkward in reading Betjeman. I don't share his Tory sympathies or his Anglican affiliation but I do mourn the apparent passing of English liberalism. His nostalgic conservatism could be aptly characterised as the English disease, the daydreams of a nation ill at ease with its present and with a glorious future firmly behind it. At the same time, it's difficult to feel that his complaints about modernist architecture weren't justified.
Mishima's Spring Snow is a novel that offers up a commentary on its own events in the form of the theories and reading of Honda, with their critique of Western ideas of free will and Meiji bourgeois decadence alike; "Europeans believe that a man like Napoleon can impose his will on history. We Japanese think the same of men like your grandfather... you have one characteristic that sets you apart: you have no trace of willpower." Honda limns a world where the age of glorious warfare ended with the Meiji restoration leading instead to an era of the wars of emotion are fought where Kiyoaki lives "in a world of feeling." Nonetheless, the novel seems to have an ambivalent attitude to such commentary. The depiction of Kiyoaki as infected with the effete degeneracy of ineffectual aristocrats like Ayakura, shows him as effeminate, emotionally unstable and lacking a true self (only wanting Satoko when it is forbidden having previously wanted to punish her for loving him). But equally, once his love for Satoko is declared, Linuma sees "a hidden determination that had never shown itself before." Similarly, his grandmother sees him as a true grandson of his warrior grandfather his disgrace; "how remarkable that this grandson, who seemed so effete at first glance, should have revived the spirit of that age." As such, Kiyoaki emerges as both heartless rake and lovelorn fool, just as women such as Satoko feature in the novel as both Kiyoaki's victim and glamourous but dangerous threats to the homosocial order ("a woman will destroy the friendship of men").Labels: Architecture, England, Literature, London
posted by Richard 2:29 PM
Sunday, September 21, 2008
I visited Bevis Marks Synagogue a few years ago as part of Open House weekend and in the meantime I had acquired a rather long list of otherwise closed places I wanted to visit this year. So, I started with GE Street's design for Law Courts on the Strand. One enters into a great hall that, unsurprisingly for Victorian architecture, is rather reminiscent of a cathedral (Street had left one pillar deliberately unfinished, a notion like a deliberate error being introduced into Turkish carpets), only much more empty and stark, lacking pews and only decorated with the occasional bust or painting. To each side stairways lead into a labyrinthine series of courtrooms and corridors, some of the lower ones rather resembling crypts. Only one room is at all ornate; unsurprisingly it is called the Painted Room. I follow this by walking along Fleet Street until I come to the Daily Express. While its vitrolite and glass exterior has a certain cold elegance to it, it's difficult not to see it as the progenitor of scores of more utilitarian modernist structures. The interior lobby is rather more what one expects of art nouveau though; all gilded in silver, with Indian styled reliefs, curved patterns on the floor and swirling spiral staircases.
I then walk to Westminster and visit Scott and Wyatt's foreign office. Scott had originally wanted to construct the building in gothic, but had been overruled by Palmerston. It's rather difficult not to imagine Scott scowling at having to design a classicist structure (albeit one where some of the corridors rather resemble St Pancras and the cupola of the grand staircase has a somewhat Byzantine feel). A lot of the rooms, such as Wyatt's Durbar Court or the Muse's Staircase, is wonderful, but much of it also looks as if it could have been designed at any point in a period covering around three hundred years. It seems to lack individuality. Finally on that day, I visit Holy Trinity in Kensington. This is another building I had walked past many times without seeing the interior. As it proves this is one of Bodley's later works, but with an especially ornate set of gold reredos and stained glass windows.
The following day begins with a more straightforward means of following my visit to Bevis Marks; by travelling to Lauderdale and New West End Synagogues. Both Victorian redbrick affairs, the former is a domed structure in Maida Vale, with a light green interior illuminated by bright stained glass decorated with natural patterns and dominated by dark wood furnishings. The latter is close by to the Orthodox cathedral and rather resembles it in many ways; although the ceiling is in plain white the design is essentially Moorish with the lower area decorated in marble and gold. Walking back, I briefly enter St Matthew's church, a Victorian gothic affair with Burne Jones style reliefs, side chapels with ceilings painted blue and a black and gold studded nave ceiling.
I then travel to Westminster and enter Westminster Hall. I'm rather reminded of the Tithe barn I'd seen at Great Coxwell; although this is more ornate the cultural continuity between these two different buildings seems enormous. Stone kings line up on the walls, wooden angels line the ceiling while the floor is annotated with notes concerning the trial of King Charles, Monarchs lying in state or the trial of Warren Hastings. The end of the hall leads to a long corridor that serves as an entrance to the Victorian Houses of Parliament; Minton tiling, statues of figures like Pitt, Fox and Clarendon, paintings of scenes from British history (a Jacobean ambassador visiting India, Elizabeth and Drake) mosaics of St Stephen. It's probably a lapse of taste but I can't help preferring Victorian gothic to its medieval counterpart. Finally, I visit the Inns of Court where I find the Temple Church open for the first time. As one would expect the interior is a mongrel of styles. The round section is entered by a Romanesque arch into an area dominated by Templar graves. Romanesque designs in the Triforium are followed by gothic arches and gargoyles below, including a figure whose face is being attacked by an animal. The font is also typically Romanesque, with various animals and mythological scenes shown on it. This section leads through to a gothic chancel, which still retains various Tudor and baroque monuments. Although the Victorian restoration has not survived, the bright blue modern stained glass is rather striking. Nearby, the Middle Temple Hall is also open; a dark hammer beamed ceiling above white walls and paintings of monarchs from Elizabeth to Anne. Much of the Elizabethan carving remains, with figures guarding the entrance ways.
A few weeks later, I travel to Hackney to visit Abney Park Cemetery. I rather like the Egyptian revival gates that Pugin so disapproved of, although the interior of the cemetery lacks any similar monuments and is mostly rather more restrained. The place is surprisingly bustling with people walking their dogs, assorted youths, vagrants and cruising men. As a nondenominational cemetery Abney Park was not set aside solely for cemetery use by Act of Parliament, and was not formally consecrated as burial land. Perhaps more so than any other it was entitled to be considered as a park as well as a cemetery; Abney Park was unique in being the first arboretum to be combined with a cemetery in Europe. I find myself amused by a squirrel frozen on the side of a tree trunk with a large nut in its mouth, presumably in the hope that it would not be observed. Falling leaves gently stray to the ground, like snow blowing in the wind. The most striking thing is the ruined chapel that sits at the very centre of the cemetery. The rose window at the front is a shattered hole partially covered by wooden boards, like a smashed eye. The front is covered in dead ivy above locked gates that allow one to see the derelict interior with another shattered oculus at the apex of a decaying arch, but not to gain access. I note that someone has written 'watch your skin peel' on the walls. Conversely, one can walk into the interior of the towers and see to the summit, past wooden boarding and cracks in the walls. The nearby grounds are a mixture of war memorials and statues in honour of the non-comformists who were the first to be interred here.
It's often been observed that counterfactuals are a politically confused genre. On the one hand, they tend to be predicated on a whiggish view of history, presenting alternative histories where the course of events has been deformed from how it should have progressed. On the other, they tend to assume that history is not so much born of deep social causes as hinging upon the actions of a few individuals. Philip Roth's The Plot Against America is very much a specimen of these contradictions; the narrative had history derailed by Roosevelt's defect at the hands of Charles Lindbergh, of progressive forces routed by reactionary opposition. At the same time, the narrative essentially hinges upon Walter Winchell's assassination, precipitating as it does the demise of the Lindbergh administration. While much of the narrative is told from the viewpoint of one Jewish family, Roth seems to struggle to achieve a consistent view of history; although much of the text depicts mass riots, other parts describe American fascism as an a temporary aberration, the result of a blackmail plot against Lindbergh's son. Conversely, Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union manages to present a counterfactual that eschews any discussion of why this history differs from our own; Israel's settlers were massacred and the Soviet Union never existed and that is all there is to it. Chabon appears ambivalent at the prospect of a world without Israel; the novel is highly critical of Zionism but also depicts the Jewish homeland of Sitka in Alaska as a miserable backwater. There's no definitive sense of what the 'right' version of history might be; perhaps that's why the novel is rather more successful than Roth's at establishing the actions of his characters as meaningful and significant rather than historical ephemera.
Reading Hofmannstahl's short stories, I noticed that his characters frequently have epiphanic moments of revelation (where "I saw all of existence as one unity. The mental world did not seem to me to be opposed to the physical"), but which often prove to lead only to disaster. Finally, in The Lord Chandos Letter language itself denatures; "abstract words.. disintegrated in my mouth like rotten mushrooms." Hofmannstahl comes over as a thwarted platonist, raising the spectre of the infinite only to dismiss it. Something similar seems to apply to Andrei Biely's St Petersburg, a novel that is ostensibly concerned with the acts of terrorism in Tsarist Russia that were leading to the Russian revolution. The theme is misleading as the narrative tends to approach events symbolically rather than through the lens of historical realism. Instead of social tensions, events are depicted through a set of chiastic oppositions; reason and unreason, occidental and oriental (at times it reads more like Sax Rohmer than Conrad's The Secret Agent). St Petersburg is at once a real city with places that can be found on the map and also a Escheresque labyrinth made unreal by mists ("he wondered as in a dream about the relation of appearance to reality"); the geometry of the enlightenment reverts to the swamp that lies beneath it. Unsurprisingly, the mutability of language emerges as a recurrent theme; "my words get entangled... a modernist would call it the sensation of the abyss and search for an image."
I was surprised by Kangaroo; there's a markedly dialogic element in all of Lawrence's work but it seems markedly stronger here than elsewhere, with the novel almost forming a debate between Lawrence and Frieda, between differing aspects of Lawrence's personality. As Harriet waspishly puts it; "I've seen you fiddling away hard enough many times.. why, what do you do, all your life, but fiddle some tune or other?" At the heart of this debate is Lawrence's division between the normal self and their central absolute self, a state from which women like Harriet are barred; "in short, he was to be the Lord and Master and she was the humble slave.. she was to believe in his vision of a land beyond this charted world.. and she just couldn't." The novel deconstructs Somers' vision in several ways; by his arguments with Harriet, with Kangaroo and with himself. For example; "Him, a Lord and Master!.. he was the most forlorn and isolated creature in the world.. so isolated he was barely a man at all." And later; "the bulk of mankind haven't got any central selves. They're all bits." A central part of Lawrence's absolute self is the implicit theme of Lawrence's repressed homosexuality, a theme that is disturbed by Kangaroo conceiving of it simply as conventional love rather than as worship of Lawrence's dark god; "he half-wanted to commit himself to this whole affection with a friend, a comrade, a mate. And then, in the last issue, he didn't want it at all... all his life, he had cherished a beloved ideal of friendship - David and Jonathan... it took Lovat Somers some time to admit and accept this fact." Kangaroo responds in exactly the same terms; "the perfect love that men may have for one another" but Somers can no more respond to him in this way than he can to Harriet - he is too isolate; "I don't want to love anybody... Somers would never be pals with any man. It wasn't in his nature."
The same sort of issues manifest themselves in the novel's social concerns and its depiction of Australia; "some men must live by this unremitting inwardness.. they must not let the rush of the world's outwardness sweep them away." As far as the normal social self is concerned Australia is in many respects the model of Lawerence's vision; as far as his absolute self is concerned, quite the converse. The novel begins with Lawerence praising the inhibited, Whitmanesque character of Australian life; "like a full river of life... for the first time felt himself immersed a real democracy," only to promptly retract it; "and this was what Richard Lovat Somers could not stand... you admit the necessity for rule... the colonies make for outwardness. Everything is outward, like hollow stalks of corn" At this point and beyond, the novel leaves the point open; "Richard was wrong... you can get on for quite a long time without rule.. is it merely running down? Aah, questions!" Hence the novel ends with Somers unable to give himself to Australia or anything else; "you won't give in to women.. you wouldn't give in to Kangaroo. You won't give in to Labour or socialism." Lawrence talks of his worship of the dark god as taking men "nearer the magic of the animal world," a state that the inaptly named Kangaroo finds absurd. But in practice, Lawrence is revolted by the 'unthinking masses;' "the masses are always strictly non-mental... this is the state where they society, tribe, herd degenerates into mobs... the disintegration of the social mankind... a herding together like dumb cattle, a promiscuity like slovenly animals." All of a sudden, the magic of the animal world seems tenuous. Mobs are seen as weak souls lacking direction and discipline, hence Lawrence's attraction to Kangaroo's fascism (and the various anti-semitic comments in the book, not lease making the fascist leader a Jew); society can only exist as a hierarchy.
In common with figures like De Sade, Bacon was the type of artist who cannot exist without a contrary that defined him. In his case, this meant all that was theological, transcendent and metaphysical. Perhaps this is why his is an art of pastiche, taking Velasquez's painting of Pope Innocent and counterpointing it to the dying nurse in Eisenstein, or recycling imagery from Michaelangelo, Van Gogh landscapes, Physique Pictoral, war photography and counterpointing it to images of the crucifixion. Conversely, although his art frequently cited literary sources, such as Eliot, he disavowed narrative in favour of sensation; "Some paint comes across directly on to the nervous system, other paint tells you the story in a long diatribe through the brain." Throughout he is a materialist, obsessed with the sexual and the decomposing body alike but depicting it in the terms of religious iconography. The current exhibition at the Tate dwells on his paintings of man and animal alike, showing both in terms of their ravening maw; a form of Darwinian iconography. This is followed by the figures in his 'space frames,' constructs that recall prisons or zoo cages. In each case, the features of the face and any sense of individuality are effaced. The focus on the individual in isolation recalls Hopper and could well be interpreted as a commentary on a pre-Wolfenden society, but the screaming faces has more in common with horror film imagery than Hopper's poignancy. The images of entwined figures leave it impossible to tell if the two male figures are lovers or wrestlers, emblems of violence or death. In the same way, his crucifixion scenes clearly guesture towards Nazi concentration camps or simple charnel houses, but conjoin this with religious imagery. Flesh melts in the same way it seems to in Dali. I'm left feeling reminded of Helene Cixous's rather simplified observations about Western culture being characterised by a set of dichotomies between male and female, eros and thanatos, sacred and profane and so on. Bacon's work could easily be construed as a riposte that seeks to take these chiastic oppositions and blur them.
At the same time, the other Tate gallery is holding an exhibition dedicated to Rothko. The two artists could not be more dissimilar; more essentially programmatic, the other abstract to the point of constantly having to defend himself against accusations of simply being a decorative artist. Most of the paintings here do not even have titles. On the one hand, Rothko withdrew his paintings from appearing in the context of the Seagram building's restaurant, preferring instead the environment of the Rothko chapel. Pollock's epic canvases are horizontal, like cinema screens. Rothko's - such as Number 10, 1950, which once belonged to the architect Philip Johnson - are vertical, like skyscrapers. He was also particularly interested in the hanging of his paintings and of how the size of the canvas affected the space (arguing that a small work is dominated by the viewer, while a large canvas dominates the viewer). On the other, the octagonal design of this structure uses no conventional religious design and the paintings do not correspond to any religious symbolism. There is no content, only layers of closely related colours; greys and blacks, purples and maroons, browns and greys, blacks and blacks.
During the 1960s, Rothko's paintings become poised between the materiality of their surfaces and forms, and the emergence of an image, even if it is an image of nothingness, or an image denied: a blank black screen, or a simple near-horizontal division which we unavoidably see as a horizon, between grey and brown, or black and grey. Rothko believed that all serious art was about death and sought to pursue what he called the 'tragic.' Hence his paintings, appear with frame-like forms painted over bloody depths, as if the canvases were windows or portals. The Rothko chapel utilises doorways that lead nowhere, that evoke the closed doors at the corners of Michelangelo's New Sacristy at San Lorenzo in Florence; Michelangelo similarly used sealed doors and sealed windows for one reason: to suggest death.Labels: Architecture, Art, Literature, London
posted by Richard 11:14 AM
Sunday, June 29, 2008
I saw the work of Vilhelm Hammershøi during my visit to Copenhagen a few years ago, but I can't say with any honesty that it made any great impression on me at the time. This is perhaps unsurprising; understated paintings in grey tones of spartan and austere subjects are comparatively easy to miss in the midst of other works; it's only when one sees the paintings together that one realises the obsessive theme driving them.
Hammershøi's loose brushwork and restricted palette immediately associate him with his contemporary Whistler, but seventeenth century Dutch painting was also a significant influence on him. As with Vermeer, Hammershøi is frequently found depicting figures in interiors, showing the play of light from nearby windows. Where the Western tradition is for the subject to stare out of a painting and challenge the viewer, Hammershøi follows Vermeer in denying this, having his figures (or figure; his wife was his persistent model) turned away from the viewer to give a hermetic aspect to the painting. In tandem with the grey, barely furnished interiors (photographs of the same rooms show them filled with furnishings and decoration), where the light from a window largely serves to suggest that life is somewhere else, this creates the melancholic air that pervades his work. Durer's figure of melancholy was turned away from the viewer as well. Hammershøi returns again and again to the same interiors, the same piano, the same pictures, the same bowls. But his work also rather resembles Escher or Piranesi, showing long corridors with successions of doors, looking out into interior courtyards through layers of interior windows, with doors that are slightly warped and distorted against the overall geometry of the work. There's a disjoint between the realistic, objective, settings and his imprecise impressionistic brushwork; what is being depicted is an objective correlative for his own state of mind.
The other component to Hammershøi's work is his landscapes, both rural and urban. Whether showing the Danish countryside, Copenhagen's royal palace or church spires, the British Museum or a London street, the scene is always devoid of people and depicted with grey wintry skies that seem somewhere between Whistler and Atkinson Grimshaw. I recall Copenhagen as a colourful city with painted buildings and red church towers surmounted with verdigris encrusted baroque spires. But I recall being fascinated by the same buildings, showing the same empty streets. I discover a certain fellow feeling for Hammershøi that I'm rather unaccustomed to.
The following week I return for two exhibitions near Trafalgar Square. I start with an Wyndham Lewis at the National Portrait Gallery. I recall Angela Carter complaining that all of Lawrence's women were just clothes without bodies, as opposed to his meticulous depiction of male physicality. Something similar can be said of Wyndham Lewis's paintings. The subjects of these portraits are puppet or simulacra. They have the quality of remaining just what they are, fixed in a particular epoch to furniture which is now dust (hence Froanna's liminal character in her Red Portrait as she fades ino the background). "The process and condition of life, without any exception, is a grotesque degradation." The stress on dehumanisation in his writing manifests itself in his painting by his focus on clothes rather than people. The portrait of Edith Sitwell shows her with her eyes shut, her face turned from the viewer, buried in a mass of clothes. Sitwell thought her hands to be her finest feature; here, Lewis hides them altogether (the same applies in his painting of Mrs Schiff, unlike Edwin Evans whose hand blends into his trousers). Hats and helmets abound throughout the paintings. Depicting TS Eliot, he gave the poet a "gioconda smile." Sketch after sketch shows the face left unworked till last. Eliot looks downwards, Pound closes his eyes. Like Modigliani or Picasso (albeit without their primitivism), Lewis saw the face as a mask, indistinguishable from the hat he always painted himself wearing.
Confronted with demands for a return to the classicism of Raphael, Lewis responded by suggesting Shakespeare as an exemplar, praising the famous woodcut of the playwright as serene and empty. Lewis develops various personae in his painting and writing like 'the enemy' as his satirical response to the literary and art world, or his embodiment of satire, the tyro. Lewis caught sight of his face in a cracked mirror and saw "the mask of a syphilitic Creole." Whatever was worth recording in life, he asserted, could be mapped in surface forms. On the whole, I find myself thinking tht Lewis is a rather more sympathetic as a painter than as a writer. His painting of Froanna is a particular masterpiece; red tones predominate excepting the blue of her eyes as she stares directly at the viewer, one of the very few subjects to do so in the entire exhibition.
I follow this with the nearby Divisionism exhibition at the National Gallery. Like Pointillism or Impressionism, Divisionism was a response to new scientific theories of light and colour, like colour wheels. Nonetheless, where French art often has an art for art's sake philosophy, with low-lifes or nudes (Longoni's pickpocket painting is the nearest to that here) featured to epater les bourgeoisie rather than for political ends. By contrast, Italian artists were unhappy with technique alone. Italian reunification has created considerable social upheaval, poverty and inequality that lent itself to a realist style of portrature that much of the rest of Europe had already explored. Equally, symbolism offered a more escapist response to the same conditions, one that especially appealed to Catholic artists. Often, divisionist artists would veer between these extremes. Nomellini paints grey scenes of striking workers at one point in his career, and then paints an extraordinary indigo blue symbolist work showing the sea, entitles Symphony of the Moon. Segantini's nature scenes remains sufficiently detailed to sit alongside Pre-Raphaelite painting, but his later symbolist works show a bizarre depictions of sins being punished in hell. His Return from the Woods is the most perfect fusion of the two strains shown in the exhibition; showing a peasant woman dragging wood in a snow scene, but withthe church spire at her destination is reminiscent of David Friedrich (the same applies to some of Grudicy's autumnal scenes; I'm struck by the spider's web drawn on the frame of one of them). Some of the realist paintings, such as those by Morbelli could have been painted fifty years earlier in terms of their technique, even if light falling through windows is a particular theme. Morbelli also painted melancholy quasi symbolist works of sunsets though. In other works, the divisionist technique, so effective in Segantini's Alpine scenes, imposes a stillness and imprecision that fits oddly with the social agenda of the paintings. Morbelli's luminscent painting of women working in the rice fields utterly fails to convey any sense of misery; it's much too tranquil and beautiful. Either these artists assumed that a method that was 'scientific must be allied to social progress, or the political posturing was actually an alibi for aestheticising the predicament of the working class. Much of the symbolist work is also quite socially engaged though but in a more reactionary fashion, as with Previati's paean to the virtues of the madonna. Volpedo's country scenes are reminiscent of Sisley but show christian processions. Many of the forms are religious, such as the tondo or the polytych. At the very least, religious symbolism is used to evoke a sense of secular national identity; Mazzini had argued that Italians must develop a "religious concept of their nation."
It wasn't until futurism that the techniques developed by divisionism could be applied to a specific programme, albeit one where the interest in light was often centered on electric lighting. The exhibition depicts a move from Boccioni's early pastoral landscapes to a picture of a seamstress (albeit one where the focus is on her cobalt blue dress) to his explicitly futurist painting of a dam being constructed. Other works by Balla and Carra show the futurist depiction of movement in still life or the energy of technology.
As I child I recall seeing a particular statue during a visit to Osbourne House on the Isle of Wight; a black basalt statue of Antinous. I couldn't place my interest in it exactly at the time, presuming it to be due to the exotic Egyptinate character of the statue. I now presume that my interest was mostly taken by the frank sexualisation in the semi-nude depiction of Hadrian's lover. No wonder Winckelman had been so enthused at the imagery that showed Antinous as being somewhere between Athena and Apollo. The story of the doomed youth is one of the central myths of gay history, alongside that of Edward the Second. It's the prospect of seeing Antinous that attracts me to the Hadrian exhibition at the British Museum. The depictions of him are many, from the Egyptianate statue of him as Osiris (with whom he had shared a death day), Ephebian depictions of him as Bacchus (another arisen deity) with vine leaves in his long hair or versions of him as a Greek fertility god. In some of these he conforms to the Roman ideal of the beautiful youth (shown here with the inclusion of the Warren cup), in others his sexuality is more aggressively that of an adult male. I find myself wryly amused at the prospect of his cult competing with christianity; if only it had won. Otherwise, the material at hand is rather more conventional; accounts of Hadrian's brutal suppression of Jewish rebellion, retrenchment and consolidation of the empire's borders after Trajan's overly ambitious expansion, the amnesty on public debts, construction of the Scottish wall (admittedly a turf bank for much of its length that could have served little defensive purpose, instead presumably it served as a means of channelling and controlling the border), anf finishing with the construction of buildings like the Pantheon, his Mausoleum and the architectural fantasisa of his Tivoli villa. The images of Hadrian himself seem surprisingly individual, with his beard setting him out (cited as evidence of his love of all things Greek or a means of covering his blemishes, depending on your preferences) as well as a dimple in his ear that may be evidence of heart disease. Giant busts and statues alternately show him as emperor, priest, warrior and deity. Some of the reliefs from Tivoli, showing Parthenon style depictions of naked figures alongside detailed carvings of vines, birds and squirrels also stand out, but I'm especially drawn to two beautiful peacocks that formerly were in place on the walls of Hadrian's mausoleum.
The great court of the Museum currently has a striking work by Zhang Wang inside it; following the Chinese inclusion of weathered stones in gardens, Wang has taken the image of such stones and encased it in silvery metal, which looks as if it were frozen mercury. This questioning of the relationship between nature and art is counterpointed by some temporary gardens outside, where a genuine stone can be found amidst the dogwood, wisteria, lacquer tree, willow, bamboo and peony. An exhibition of Chinese nature painting inside continues this theme. I'm struck by the role of literary allusion in the paintings and ceramics shown; many of the flowers and animals are chosen for their symbolic connotations (like the lotus) others by homophones suggested by their names (bamboo sounding like congratulations, narcissi sounding like immortality) or for compounds formed from the combination of different items. A few weeks later I'm revisiting Silchester and an archaeological dig is on. A small garden has been created illustrating the sort of plants found in a Roman garden and illustrating their symbolic functions. There are some overlaps with the Chinese symbolism, as with peony being used in protective amulets.
Walking around the city, I visit the interior of St Mary Alderdmary, an exercise in hyperreal gothic by Wren. The effect is quite odd; the fan vaulting is decorated with floral patterns that seem to belong rather more to the baroque period. The effect of the interior being coated in white plaster is rather sepulchral, giving it the effect of an alabaster tomb and contrasting oddly with the colourful Victorian tiling on the floor. While I'm there the organ starts playing Bach's Toccata and Fugue. I move onto Wren's St Stephen Walbrook. The interior here is more like a playfully decorated version of the pantheon; unlike Hawksmoor whose eccentric designs seem to match the English character, Wren would have been a much greater architect in a catholic country, where his designs could have made with red marble rather than Portland stone and his interiors gilded and painted. One detail I am struck with is a totentanz on one of the pillars, showing a bride dancing with a skeletal death. This evening, I go to Monteverdi's The Coronation of Poppaea at the Proms. Even if Monteverdi is best known for his ecclesiastical music, this amorality tale does rather confirm the reputation of renaissance Venice as indifferent to religion at best. The plot begins with Cupid asserting her primacy over Virtue and thereafter protecting Poppaea as she schemes her way to becoming Nero's wife, displacing the rather more virtuous Octavia. Poppaea's mother attempts to dissuade her from this course, but only on the grounds of practicality, advising her to go for someone less ambitious instead. Similarly, Octavia's nurse attempts to persuade her to take a lover as a form of revenge. Seneca is depicted as the moral centre of the play but also as a tedious windbag. The only character to receive any punishment is the wronged Octavia, while the assassin Otto is allowed happiness with Drusilla. The staging attempted to draw attention to later events (Poppaea' death at Nero's hands) by having him come close to slapping her as well as introducing an unscripted (and historically inaccurate) scene where Nero drowns Lucan. Since the drama is essentially concerned with Poppae's triumph, I wasn't especially sure I appreciated these interpolations, even if the original audience would have been well aware of Poppaea's eventual fate and that she would have achieved her ambition by remaining faithful to Otto. The Skakespearian approach to casting works bettwe, with both Nero and Poppaea played by women (Nero would originally have been played by a castrato) and various female parts like the nurse played by men (the nurse here bears a disturbing resemblance to Margaret Thatcher).
Later at the Proms, I listen to Tchaikovsky's Sleeping Beauty. The full version is rarely performed in ballet (the story being slight, Tchaikovsky had padded it with various dances). I find myself surprised at the idea of Tchaikovsky writing an opera under the influence of Rameau, although the idea of parallels to Wagner and Brunnhilde's sleep is more natural. In later works, Rimsky-Korsakov's Kaschkey the Immortal inverts this, with the hero's kiss to an evil witch killing her and releasing the princess. I follow this with Dvorak's Slavonic Dances and Janacek's Osud. The latter is quite odd, reminding me of the role of neuroticism in Schnitzler or the sense of impending fate in Kafka (Mann also leapt to mind, prompted by the spa setting). The first two acts describe a conductor's love affair and its end in madness and death. His opera is only written to comprise two acts and the third has his describing the above events it to music students at its premiere, thereby forming the third act.
The following weekend, I go to a Taraf de Haidouks concert in Cheltenham. Much of their music is intended to take orchestral settings of gypsy music by the likes of Bartok and Albeniz and to place in back into its original context, playing it as dance music on the violin, accordion, bass and cymbalum. The result is rather like rock music and it's difficult not to think that where nineteenth century Europe preferred to take folk music and to apply it to orchestral works, twentieth century America preferred to allow black artists to pioneer jazz and blues. The irony of re-appropriating Bartok is born out by the venue, a rather gaudy regency affair. The audience look as if they go there often to attend classical concerts; standing for this one they occasionally manage to sway a bit (aside from one rather energetic elderly lady). It's also worth mentioning the supporting act, the London Bulgarian Choir, who performed a capella folk songes dressed in traditional costumes.
Cheltenham itself, with its rows of regency buildings, seems rather tepid to me. I'm more struck by my visit earlier in the day to Tewkesbury Abbey. It reminds me of Southwell, another place where the isolated location seems to have helped the building survive with comparatively little destruction or alteration. The exterior is rather ungainly; a squat central tower is flanked by various side chapels and fronted with a facade composed of two towers dwarfed by a central window, recessed back as if it were a romanesque arch. The interior is dark, supported by round pillars (each with a face as a corbel facing its counterpart opposite) above a gothic ceiling painted green and white. The effect is rather like a forest. After the rood screen the effect becomes more markedly gothic, with Victorian Minton tiling below matched by white, blue and red patterns above. England's oldest fan vaulting in some of the chantry chapels, some of it still painted. One of them has an effigy of its knight suspended above it, others show statues of mouldering corpses, others show fights with the devil. I'm also quite struck by the lady chapel, with a Byzantine mosaic and icon of St Benedict.
The following day is taken up with a brief visit to Glasgow. I find the Victorian buildings in red sandstone mixed with baroque church spires, Marcochetti statues, greek revival art galleries, elaborate corbel figures and art deco building fronts quite wonderful. I'm equally delighted with the police boxes I keep on seeing on street corners. The back of Prince's Square behind the City Chambers is labyrinth of arches that reminds me of Piranesi. In front, I'm struck by the column surmounted by Walter Scott. London has no statue of Shakespeare, let alone dedicating Trafalgar Squate to him. I walk out to the cathedral and walk around the graveyard. The monuments are eroded and weathered, decorated with skulls and morality symbols. The symbols seem wraithlike when corroded in this manner. On one of them Minton tiling has been badly blackened by industrial pollution. Several more modern tombs are caged in with rusted iron, the interior overgrown with weeds. I walk over to the Victorian necropolis. The presence of the tombs on this hill reminds me of Prague, as does the presence of an old town next to a new one on a grid layout. Presumably Mackintosh would figure as the Glaswegian Gaudi. Paths spiral around the hill, as one passes celtic crosses, Egyptian tombs, funerary urns, all encrusted with rust and weeds as they crumble to dust. The style of the monuments seems rather diverse, from Moorish gothic to Romanesque chapels. Returning, I enter the cathedral. Its stone is quite black with the roof covered in a rich, dark wood. The modern stained glass is a lovely blue. The interior seems as labyrinthine as the necropolis with a crypt where Saint Kentigern's tomb had rested. Medieval German stained glass creates phovist patterns on the floor of a side chapel. Here alone the walls are painted in white and I notice a roof boss in the shape of a skull. Elsewhere, the sacristy's floor is lined with Minton tiles. I look at the funerary memorials in the cathedral. Unlike even those in Tewkesbury they are brightly painted, somewhere between gothic and Tudor in their design.
Lautreamont's Maldoror follows in the path of Baudelaire and Nerval in delighting in contradictions, even as Lautreamont condemns it in his poems. Similarly, the poems are explicit in rejecting the romanticism of Byron, even as Maldoror follows in the path of Manfred, Goethe and Maturin (although he also speaks of tragedy, such as that of Mervyn, as moral, exciting pity and terror). Where, Maldoror denounces god the poems state that "I reject evil... man never fell from a state of grace." Maldoror itself is far from monologic. At one point, Satan is Maldoror's great rival, elsewhere god is essentially identical to satan ("I created you so I have the right to do whatever I like to you... I am making you suffer for my pleasure") at another the archangel speaks of Maldoror in the same terms as Lucifer himself, a fallen angel they would welcome back as one of their own. Since the text accepts the binary logic of christianity throughout, it is split between salvation and damnation as mutually exclusive choices, even as the narrator rejects god as an evil tyrant; "this god who is insensible to your prayers.. this shapeless and bloodthirsty idol... I should like to love and adore you but you are too powerful and there is fear in my prayers." Since man is made in god's image it follows that man is as corrupt and vicious as his creator ("the creator who ought never to have bred such vermin"), making murder a moral act. Applying Blake's dictum that one should soon smother a child in its cradle than nurse unacted desires, Maldoror emerges as a Sadeian rebel in the same way Blake envisaged Milton's Satan. But at the same time the narrative voice can still shift to utter conventional homilectics; "that torch of unjustifiable pride that is leading you to your damnation."
Roderick Hudson reminded me of an observation I'd heard that while homosexuality forms an obvious subtext in many novels by gay authors, the sense can permeate other works (the example cited was a rereading of 1984 as story of gay love and persecution). Here, there are grounds to suspect a subtext; Cecilia introduces Roderick as "a pretty boy" while in Venice Roderick and Rownland watch "a brown breasted gondolier making superb muscular movements." The core of the novel can as easily be read as concerning Rowland's unrequited love for Roderick as it can for Mary. In spite of the depiction of Mary, women essentially figure throughout as sexual threats that destroys men of talent as much as Rowland's interference; "a buxom, bold faced, high-coloured creature... she used to beat him and he had taken to drinking." Then later; "he had married a horrible wife.. it was said she used to beat poor Savage." Similarly, Christina is "as cold and false and heartless as she is beautiful... her disrelish of a man who lacked the virile will."Labels: Architecture, Art, England, Glasgow, History, Literature, Music
posted by Richard 8:14 AM
Sunday, May 20, 2007
Stowe's landscape gardens were designed to reflect the Whiggish views of Viscount Cobham, representing allegory as architecture. It coincidentally depicts a palimpsest of architectural and garden design, with the move from Baroque to Palladian and Augustan styles and from thence to Brown's Serpentine designs. I feel ambivalent on several scores, preferring the Gaudiesque playfulness of Hawksmoor or Wren to the classically correct Palladian style embraced by Burlington and Kent, whilst the continent preferred rococo. Palladianism was closely associated with the Whigs and Kent's designs follow that (although the relationship was fraught; Kent's Augustan style followed a Roman model that was redolent of Roman tyranny rather than Greek liberty, hence the subsequent Greek Revival and James Stuart), depicting figures revered in the Whig tradition like Locke, Socrates and Milton. Conversely, the Tory Gibbs preferred the Baroque style and built an early example of the gothic revival from ironstone that is common in this part of Buckinghamshire and Northamptonshire. Gothic was justified as being suggestive of the country's Germanic heritage and commitment to liberty. As was common for early gothic revival buildings, it doesn't look as if Gibbs was entirely sure of what gothic was or how to construct it; the capitals here look more Egyptianate than Gothic. Equally, Brown's mimicry of natural landscapes is entirely dependent on the population of said landscape with various classical temples; I always feel I'd prefer the earlier formal style which admitted no division between nature and art. The grounds were at least home to a wide variety of nature outside of Brown's tamed vistas; lilies, rabbits, copper beeches, squirrels, horse chestnut, coots and geese. This period was also that of the faked ruin and Stowe does have these (along with a Chinese house), but The Temple of Friendship was perhaps more interesting in this regard; it was originally inhabited and decorated and was only perserved as a ruin after a fire. There's something particularly forlorn about its empty rooms, particularly given the surreal aspect given them by the retention of wooden doors and seats.
By contrast, Polesden Lacey is a more mannered affair, largely the creation of an ostentatious Edwardian heiress. The gardens combine formal planting with rock gardens and statues of griffins. The interior joins Edwardian ostentation (a saloon with the walls covered with gold gilt) with an antiquarian interest; Grinling Gibbons carving from an old Wren church, a picture gallery with a plaster ceiling in the style of a Seventeenth century long gallery. Each room is filled with Chinese or Imari vases, Maiolica plates, Ormolu clocks, Boulle and Chippendale furniture, Chinese lacquer and Persian rugs. Some Italian (though derived from Arabic) marquetry of walnut, bone and ivory was especially striking. The gallery is predminantly composed of Dutch (Velde seascapes, Ruisdael landscapes, a Van Der Neer frost fair) and Sienese altar paintings. It also included Corneille De Lyon miniatures and a Ter Borch painting showing an ambiguous scene wherein the characters seem to be playing out a moral fable (a brothel scene), something which typically tended to show low status characters but which here depicts recognisable middle and upper class figures. The gallery also contained a Roman sarcophagus, with elephants shown on its side.
Returning to Highgate, I found myself especially struck by the East Cemetery. When I last visited in Winter the grid plan this necropolis was laid out on was clearly evident and the place had a logical and orderly air to it. In summer, the trees had closen in and the paths beneath them seemed as hidden and secret as those in the West Cemetery. I look at gravestones shattered by ivy vines as thick as lianas, graves written in Arabic, Chinese and Hebrew, graves for obscure figures like magicians (the Human Hairpin) and forgotten inventors. Then there is Karl Marx, an anachronistic monument out of place in North London and out of time now that its kin have been pulled down in Eastern Europe. A single red flower rests on the mausoleum while a black cat flits quietly between the headstones. Within the West Cemetery foxgloves, roses and buttercups are flowering but the cover of the trees in full leaf only leaves the place more dark than on my previous visit in winter. It's difficult not to feel like Alexander Humboldt or Frederick Catherwood. I hadn't realised that this is one of the few places in London with a Giant Redwood. Monuments formerly surmounted by vases now witness them lying broken at their bases, crushed by bindweed.
Reading Museum is not especially noteworthy but it does have some interesting exhibits; green man capitals and animal voussoirs from Reading Abbey, black and white frets from Silchester, the Ogham stone, a Roman tombstone, an Iron age horse effigy and a head from a statue of the Egyptian God Serapis from a Silchester temple. At the time of visiting, the museum had an exhibition dedicated to Sir John Soane to coincide with the restoration of the Simeon Monument. Amongst other things it included various paintings by Joseph Gandy of the Bank of England. Reading Bach Choir also organised a set of peripatetic concerts, flitting from one Reading church to another. Beginning at St Giles (a high church interior filled with baroque monuments, paintings, Bavarian statues of st Mary, candles and Victorian mosaics of the saints) with Summer is Icumen in, then to St Mary's (a former evangelical chapel with a beautiful stained glass simple with a tree design) and Benjamin Britten before finishing at Reading Minister (high church adornments mingling with Saxon arches) and Tallis.
The exhibition of John White's drawings at the British Museum recalls Hakluyt's complex descriptions of native cultures. It begins by showing White's drawings of native cultures from Greece, Turkey and Uzbekistan as well as his Calibanesque imaginings of Pictish warriors. Many of his descriptions of Inuit and Algonquian Indians were to follow the same poses and tropes established by these depictions of savagery, most obviously in the scenes of violence shown with Frobisher's encounter with the Inuit while searching for the North West passage. Nonetheless, his drawings were also intended to assuage such fears of hostile savages and encourage would be emmigrants to Roanoke, and veer between the depiction of noble savages (stressing their agrarian expertise in the growing of maize, their ordered villages and craftsmanship in kayak construction) and objects of curiousity (the skinning of their dead and entombment in special huts, the dances around totem poles surmounted by human faces while draped with tobacco leaves and depictions of cannibalism). The drawings consequently emerge as a form of prospectus, reflecting the linkage between commerce and colonialism that was to set the pattern for the British Empire. White also meticulously recorded the flora and fauna of the places he visited; pineapples, flying fish, jellyfish, plantains, crabs, hoopoes and scorpions while the exhibition also contains some excellent Hilliard miniatures and an appearance from John Dee's scrying mirror (as well as a frontpage of a treatise on navigation showing Elizabeth at the helm of an exploring vessel, wherein Dee prepared the intellectual foundations for colonisation by using the term 'British Empire' for the first time).
Elsewhere in the V&A, an equally interesting exhibition on James 'Athenian' Stuart shows the drawings he and Revett made of buildings like the Temple of the Winds and the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates, frequently showing both of them wearing Ottoman dress. As well as depicting the architecture Stuart also had an ethnographic care in depicting the people of Greece, their dress and habits. The background narrative of avoiding plague and brigands alike nearly obscure his architectural achievement but Stuart was the first person in centuries to design structures like censor tripods or doric temples, with the rest of the exhibition showcasing designs and artefacts from places like Kedleston, Shugborough and Nuneham Courtenay. Later, I noticed Rysbrack's original statues of Thor and Sunna on display; if anything I preferred the weathered and encrusted copies that are still at Stowe.
Appelfeld's Badenheim 1939 is an uneasy compromise between realist and historical specificity on the one hand (in the vein of Solzhenitzyn's A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich) and an allegory that recalls La Peste, The Magic Mountain and The Trial (most obviously in the case of the two guards that come for Frau Zauberblit). As with the latter category of novel, Appelfeld deliberately isolates the events from their historical context, thereby implicity separating them from any meaning. The anomie and restlessness experienced by the inhabitants of Badenheim, whether manifested in a longing for the woods or for a Polish childhood, seems as generalised as the alienation experienced by Hans Castorp even if Appelfeld elsewhere identifies "a kind of neuroticism, a restlessness, a permanent alertness, a kind of insecurity" as an integral aspect of the Jewish consciousness. Equally, Appelfeld also elsewhere suggests that "a society without true roots is a society without a future...Without a deep belief, without a deep philosophy, mysticism, you cannot got through it." Nonetheless, the experience of collective memory in Badenheim 1939 is a deeply ambivalent one. For all of the scorn directed at self-loathing assimilated Jews who sneer at Buber and Herzl, the characters who embrace their Jewish identity most keenly in the novel are those that also embrace their journey to the Polish concentration camps. In a perervse sense the holocaust is envisaged as a form of pilgrimage, the longing for roots equating to a death drive in a way that perhaps recalls the exchange of European emnity for Arab emnity. The metonymic force of the novel is an undirected one that escapes the stark simplicity of the metaphor he employs of fish in the tank.
White's The Vivisector is cast in the same vein as Mann's <>Doktor Faustus and Bernhard's Correction in exploring the idea of the artist as a Faust figure (in depicting the embalmed remains of a vivisected dog it even touches of similar themes to Correction where stuffed animals are emblematic of the blurred distinction between nature and art). The difference is that White also considers the artist as being akin to god ("Yes, I believe in him... othrwise how would men come by their cruelty - and their brilliance?"), who is often described as the divine vivisector, the same term White uses for Duffield. Elsehwere in the novel, the relevation of god's purpose is through a wasp siting rather than by seeing eternity in a grain of sand. Art is a priestly function, of revelation ("the endlessly changing coloured slides in his magic lantern of a mind... were focussing into what might be called a vision.. these paintings are my revelations") but also of cruelty and dissection. In short, the faustianism is inverted, with christ and the devil being one and the same. This combination accountsfor the duality of Duffield as a character; he is often not consciously cruel to the people in his life. He is, for instance, horrified by Hero's drowning kittens and sending her adopted child back to his poor parents, something that is deliberately counterpointed to the actions and attitudes of his own parents (who are nonetheless seeking to treat the child as a work of art, to be moulded or disfigured). Such describes the novel's central fabula, but it is one complicated by class and repressed homosexuality. Caldicott and Cutbush represent the third sex, with the suggestion that the dislocation caused by their sexuality enables them to experience revelation. His liminal position between classes further displaces him from any sense of belonging.
Reading a selection of Emily Dickinson's poems, I felt quite strongly that she reminded me of Hopkins in her approach to language, to sexuality and to religion. The principal difference seemed to be although her work can be viewed as having the concepts of instress and inscape implicit within it, her work has a rather more modernist approach to the role of literature and language. Her poems present a spectrum of views on this from the disavowal of art in I would not paint a picture and Drama's vitallest expression is the common day to its elevation above nature in I reckon - when I count at all.
The Lives of Others is an anomaly, starting from the premise that East Germany was hospitable to art in a way that was not true for a unified Germany that lacked anything to believe in or to rebel against. It's a premise that creates the drama while obviating historical accuracy. In practice, a Stasi agent would not have been assigned sole responsibility for such an operation and would not have been able to collude with his victims; in describing Wiesler as a good man the film does blur the distinction between perpetrator and victim. In a certain sense, there is even a sublimated homosocial love story between Wisler and Dreyman.
Although art if assigned a redemptive quality in the film (as with Wiesler's reading of Brecht's poetry, as his sterile life is counterpointed to Dreyman's), its role is an ambiguous one. For example, the metaphor of acting permeates the script; the Stasi are seen as directors while the ketman practiced by the Easy Germans is characterised as acting. The main character uses this metaphor to persuade Christa to both be true to her husband and to betray him. As a consequence, few ideas presented in the film are seen as clear and stable; the communist bigwigs do not believe in communist ideology even as they enforce and abuse it (Margot Honnecker, gives Dreyman a book by Solzhenitsyn strictly prohibited to ordinary people), and even as Dreyman remains faithful to the cause. Fiction is repeatedly metamorphosed into the reality that originally produced it; the surveillance transcripts refer to an imaginary play and are then turned into a novel, undermining the role of art in bearing witness.Labels: Architecture, Art, England, Literature, London
posted by Richard 12:40 PM
Sunday, November 12, 2006
"High the vanes of Shrewsbury gleam
Islanded in Severn stream;
The bridges from the steepled crest
Cross the water east and west." (AE Housman)
Shrewsbury is one of the best preserved towns in England, with streets lined with half-timbered buildings (one of them stayed in by Henry prior to the Battle of Bosworth Field), a castle on a hill and a profusion of churches from a number of a variety of different periods. Outside the town and besides the Severn lie the remains of the old Benedictine monastery (including a rather eeriely isolated refectory pulpit standing outside) and the present Abbey. The red sandstone exterior left me rather reminded of Hereford. The interior remains largely gothic, with the remains of St Winfrid's shrine having an orthodox icon of the saint by them (it's not really my sort of reading but I did always rather like the alternative story of Winifrid's arrival in Shrewsbury from A Morbid Taste for Bones), Tudor and Norman tombs, Norman remains, a font made from an upended Roman column as a font and Victorian reredos depicting Winifrid.
Within the town lies the church of St Mary the Virgin, with the third largest spire in England (half of it from the original sandstone, the rest much later). This is one of the most impressive churches that I've seen; the windows are filled with 13th to 16th century stained glass from Belgium and Germany, purchased at the same time as the Lady Chapel of Lichfield Cathedral. The 'Tree of Jesse' window showing Edward the Third is 14th century, Saxon tomb slabs, the floor is covered with Minton tiles, while the wooden ceiling is filled with elaborate angel carvings. Nearby is the more modest St Alkmund, a Victorian church with a painted East window and St Chad, a baroque round tower church with a circular nave. Outside, yellow and red leaves had fallen and covered the ground around the large tombs. Over the road is a park with a classical war memorial containing a statue of the angel Gabriel. Past a statue of Darwin outside the library, lie the remains of the castle, as red as the Abbey. A tower built by Thomas Telford when an earlier part of the structure collapsed stands overlooking the river. Down in the town, the museum houses a number of interesting exhibits from the Roman city of Virconium (Wroxeter), including soldier's gravestones (originally garishly painted) and Samian wear.
Elsewhere, St Michael's in Lichfield is set in one of the largest graveyard in the country. Though it lacks the elaborate tombs in the London Victorian cemetery, one of the larger tombs had it's own clock and gas supply to light it up. St Mary and St Hardulph, or Breedon on the Hill, is siutated atop a hill above the surrounding plain. Originally, the site of a Monastery, the largely Norman church is notable for its extensive Saxon carvings; an angel like the one at Lichfield, Vine scroll above the altar and Anglian beasts. Seventeenth century slates tombstones line up in the windswept churchyard, each decorating with elaborate neo-classical etchings that have survived well. A Tudor family memorial depicts the deceased at prayer as well as showing a skeletal corpse beneath. A wooden pew surives that served as the box for the local gentry during services. Nearby is St Michael and St Mary at Melbourne, a Norman cathedral in miniature, with thick columns and round arches supporting a gallery that runs the length of the church. A wonderful medieval mural of the devil survives on one of the walls, near to columns where Saxon carvings of animals remain, including a Sheela-na-gig, a pagan fertility symbol. Further on is St Mary at Tutbury, a rather more restrained affair which does nonetheless have an extraordinary Norman arch in alabaster (another shows scenes of boar hunting). Finally, I had been to Repton before, but was interested to note the same slate tombstones outside and the statue of St Wystan bearing a metal sword above the door.
Autumn is my favourite time of year, with the world transfigured with green thoughts to shades of bronze, gold and burgundy and where the fallen leaves are suddenly siezed and thrown through the air by the unseen force of the wind. I think what I increasingly like about looking at buildings and the natural world is a sense of transfiguration, something similar to Shklovsky's concept of ostranenie translates as 'making strange.' I think of how buildings take on different characters in different lights, of how the fog I can currently see from the window makes the innocuous and familiar sinister and hidden, of how autumn leaves transform the living into something artificial. Autumn has come late this year and it still feels more like October than November. Travelling into London to the Velasquez exhibition at the National Gallery, the sun is bright and the air still seems gentle. The exhibition itself shows Velasquez as a consummate realist, concerned with the mundane in his genre paintings (in spite of the number of religious or mythical subjects), while also continually suggesting, as with Foucault's analysis of Las Meninas, the limits of representation, as with the two kitchen scenes shown here where christ is seen as being somewhere else beyond everyday concerns. The same applies to The Rokeby Venus, where the mirror image only shows a dim reflection of Venus and one that is at the wrong angle (although most of the portraits show the subject facing the viewer, Velasquez also has his sibyl turned away and hidden). Two other small exhibitions were being held, of Cezanne and Dutch winter scenes. The former seems striking for Cezanne's almost cubist approach to nature painting while the highlight of the latter was Jan Beerstraten's The Castle of Muiden in Winter and Avercamp's Scene on the Ice Near Town. Elsewhere within the gallery, I walked through the Sainsbury wing, responding to the colours, but as ever, finding it hard to respond to the subject matter of works like The Wilton Diptych, until we come to the lascivious mythological painting of Florentine artists like Botticelli, Di Cosimo (though a Crivelli altarpiece with real jewels and gold embedded in it was rather striking), Cranach's Greek allegory of Cupid Complaning to Venus and Venetian portrait painters like Bellini's portrait of The Doge Leonardo Loredan. Van Eyck's The Arnolfini Portrait also stands out for me and I next visit the Dutch section, with its Vane De Velde maritime paintings, De Hootch allegories (although he always seems more amused at vice than outraged) or Ruisdael landscapes. Other striking works included Moroni's aristocratic portraits set in the midst of ruins and Rosa's proto-romantic scenes.
Like several other Icelandic sagas, Njal's Saga depicts the conversion of Iceland to Christianity. Njal is himself shown as an unearthly figure gifted with second sight and whose death has all the hallmarks of a saint's martyrdom. Zola's Therese Raquin shows less of a conflict between physiological and environmental considerations than that seen in his later works, cleaving to a theory of the body as the wellspring of all action (Therese and Laurent do not act consciously but are instead two people, driven by their physiogonomy), something that looks back to the medieval humours and forward to Ballard's instinct driven idea of consciousness rather than inahbiting a conventional idea of character. The results can be somewhat uncomfortable; Therese's actions are attributed to her African blood. Nonetheless, Zola is far from being consistent in this regard; Therese speaks of having her upbringing made her into a hypocrite and liar, while Laurent's suffering is seen to induce a change in his body and character, making him more nervous and feminine. While Laurent is held to act only out of fleshy desire, Therese is supposed to take pleasure in knowing why she acts. Their very guilt seems to product of consciousness rather than the instincts of the flesh, while such tropes as the ghost and their eventual suicide seem to suggest the structure of a moral fable.
The figure in the carpet is often cited as a characteristic of Jamesian fiction. The Europeans exemplifies this through the way it depicts its characters in relation to their environment (America and Europe) but elides description of those environments. Felix resembles a Turgenev protagonist while Eugenia resembles Flaubert's most famous heroine. But both Turgenev and Flaubert depict their characters as part of a complex web of social relationships, while James only briefly limns such matters in. Whereas earlier novelists like Dickens and Eliot had assigned a deterministic element to a character's environment, no such element exists for James whose characters are rather more unpredictable, with the lackadaisical Felix settling down while Gertrude discovers herself out of kilter with her home.Labels: Architecture, England, History, Literature, Weather
posted by Richard 7:39 AM
Sunday, September 17, 2006
Bevis Marks Synagogue is the oldest site of Jewish worship in Britain, dating back to Cromwell and the reformation. I was a little surprised to be asked to wear a Kippah skull cap, not having had any such request in Prague's synagogues, though I rather concluded that I liked it. The interior, in wood, white plaster and gold leaf is similar to Wren's churches, just as some of the Prague synagogues took on the guise of Baroque churches. I was also able to gain access to several Wren churches; St Botolph (elaborate Victorian stained glass with stuccoed angels in line across the ceiling), St Bride's (rather Catholic, with the eye streaming light from the altar beneath a barrel vault, suprisingly homoerotic photographic depictions of the crucifixion on the walls) and St Dunstan in the West (a gothic building, now filled with Orthodox icons). St Bride's crypts were open and were especially intriguing, showing both the foundations of succeeding churches and cleared gravestones. Finally, St Sophia, the Greek Orthodox Cathedral, represents what Westminster Cathedral may one day come to look like, with the mosaics created by the same artist, Boris Anrep. I had been to Brompton Cemetery before but hadn't realised that it is laid out in the plan of a basilica, albeit one with whose plans were incomplete with several chapels and bell towers never having been completed and the catacombs left largely unused. Unlike Highgate or Kensal Green, Bunhill Fields cemetery is only just outside the city of London and represents an outcast's cemetery as much as the Jewish cemetery in Prague (which is what it most reminds me of). Containing the graves of Blake, Defoe and Bunyan as well as assorted Cromwells and Wesleys, the tombstones are packed in thickly and are mostly unostentatious, bar the weathered skull motifs found on many of the graves. I walk to St Giles Cripplegate before travelling to the Tower of London. The tower is a rather hyperreal construct, a process that began as early as the restoration when the Crown Jewels were put on display there (originally so that the king's majesty could be touched, until one of the crowns was damaged) and wooden heads of past kings were put on display to legitimise the monarchy once more (Elizabeth had a special place alongside relics of the Armada and later the Jacobite rebellion). Another curiousity was a Venetian winged lion taken from Corfu, on display inside the White Tower. The white tower itself was only painted and gabled later, while much of the tower is a Victorian reconstruction of the original. Nontheless, what does tend to be interesting about the tower is the Chapel of St John the Evangelist or the graffiti scrawled on the walls by the likes of Arundel or by an astronomer sent to the tower by Bess of Hardwick on suspicion of sorcery. Before I leave I notice a seagull making of with meat intended for the ravens, three of whom indignantly fly in pursuit.
I go for a walk in Greenwich, beginning with St Alfege, whose interior rather reminds me of the churches in Denmark; white plaster and dark wood. Greenwich reminds me a little of Oxford; a place outside of civil society throughout history and whose confrontation with modernity has left it as a fly in amber. I go for a walk around the Naval College Chapel and the Cutty Sark before walking the Greenwich foot tunnel to east London. Here, I return to St Anne's Limehouse and am able to see the interior. Damage due to damp was all too visible, with the elaborate blue plaster horribly disfigured and decayed. The following day is witness to a St George's Cathedral. The building was shorn of its spire the second world war and is consequently rather drab and forgettable. leaving a marked sense of incongruity when one walks through to the beautiful interior. I then walked around the park that was formerly the grounds of the Bethelem Royal Hospital and are now adjacent to the Imperial War Museum (former site of Bedlam); within it grows the 34 native trees that colonised Britain after the ice age. Today, the grass has shrivelled and the tree's leaves are curling and withering in the heat. London silver vaults reminded me of Highgate's Egyptian avenue of funerary vaults; one descends downwards through a series of maze-like passages and stairwells. Upon arrival, corridors stretch off into the distance with doors on either side. Each shop is effectively a walk-in safe, with each of them selling the same kinds of candelabra and assorted ephemera. Visiting Convent Garden, I noticed the church there now has its own orthodox icon, showing the madonna, flanked by st paul and st genesius, the patron saint of actors.
The Holbein exhibition at the Tate represents the point at which art became full human and secular. Although Holbein did produce religious works they could most charitably be described as inferior imitations of renaissance painting. With most devotional work proscribed in Britain, his painting of Erasmus shows the scholar in the guise typically reserved for saints while other works are created as roundels in imitation of classical coins. Holbein pioneered painting where the subject looks directly at the viewer, so that his works acquire a peculiarly intimate quality (the subjects loom large, taking up the entire canvas). Merchants sought pictures that were true to life to send to far-fling contacts and family, thereby displacing classical and religious paintings. Elsewhere, the Tate had a painting of Abd el-Ouahed ben Messaoud ben Mohammed Anoun, Moorish Ambassador to Queen Elizabeth I and the peculiarly surreal painting of The Cholmondeley Ladies. The later section of Blake was also especially interesting, showing Blake's work in the context of artists between the wars who responded to his vision of a New Albion, such as Nash's paintings of the Mansions of the Dead and the Flight of the Magnolia as well as Robin Ironside's Daliesque paintings. Other interesting works include John Singer-Sergeant's paintings of the Middle-East and Whistler's surprisingly traditional Crepuscule in Flesh Colour and Green: Valparaiso , Piper's paintings of Bath destroyed by the Luftwaffe's Baedaeker's raids and Rossetti's The Annunciation. That evening I watched fireworks exploding over London, tracing patterns in the sky with sparklers and watching Millbank Tower silhouetted and Battersea Power Station being lit up by the lights.
Caesar's The Conquest of Gaul exhibits many of the same ambivalent attitudes to civilisation shown by Tacitus; the relatively civilised Gauls prove easy to conquer while the barbaric hunters of the German tribes cannot be vanquished. In a similar fashion, Thucydides records during The Pelopennesian War that the habit of dressing lavishly had been abandoned in Athens as being decadent in favour of Spartan simplicity.
Angela Carter's The Magic Toyshop ends with its two protagonists fleeing from the burning shop, a moment Carter saw as being akin to the expulsion from Eden (though the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah was perhaps the more obvious metaphor). However, the novel has two such Eirenic moments elsewhere (once in Melanie's garden at home and once with Finn in the pleasure gardens) with the surfeit of symbolism consequently overwhelming precise interpretations (particularly given the question of whether Uncle Philip represents the devil or a totalitarian god in the narrative). Antal Szerb's Journey by Moonlight affords a similar problem. Szerb was heavily influenced by Lukacs and the idea of the problematic individual, and the novel accordingly presents a disjunction between society and the bohemian aspirations of the novel's characters. Conversely, Szerb was also heavily influenced by Karl Kerenyi, a Jungian scholar of Greek myth Lukacs drove into exile. The character's bohemian rebellion is accordingly expressed as thanatophilia, through doors to the underworld and an Etruscan Eurydice leading Orpheus back down to Hades for their union to take place. The two narratives barely interlock and instead proceed in parallel with one another, the notion of Marxist alienation being aborted in favour of a view of society as despiritualised.
One of the advantages of the layout of the Globe Theatre is that it affords far more possibilities than a normal confined stage arrangement. The last production of Titus Andronicus saw the action spill out of the stage and around the rest of the theatre. Confetti is hurled from the galleries down to the conquering heroes and Emperors of Rome. Bassinius is thrown into a pit into the arena, where scaffolding is errected and moved for hangings and speeches. The actors move amongst the crowds in the arena, all of which seems apposite for a play that is often concerned with bread and circuses. The play itself is an anomaly; its bleak rejection of worldly affairs has more in common with King Lear and Timon of Athens than with the other early works. Like much of Marlowe's work, it seems well characterised by Artaud's ideas; "The Theatre of Cruelty has been created in order to restore to the theatre a passionate and convulsive conception of life, and it is in this sense of violent rigour and extreme condensation of scenic elements that the cruelty on which it is based must be understood.
This cruelty, which will be bloody when necessary but not systematically so, can thus be identified with a kind of severe moral purity which is not afraid to pay life the price it must be paid." As in Artaud's manifesto, the play uses symbolism to work with the emotions and to remove the audience from the quotidian, to attack their senses through violence and to use the grotesque (a late Bakhtinian concept that has lost its vital connection with renewal; much of the play can really only be directed as carnivalesque farce or burlesque. Hence Bloom's comment that the play should really be directed by Mel Brooks). Whereas later works, like A Midsummer Night's Dream carefully balance the claims of the wild greenwood and civilised Athens, Titus Andronicus lacks any such symmetry. The play opens with Titus mercilessly ordering the death of Tamora's son in spite of her entreaties and slaying his own, creating a question mark from the outset as to whether Rome is more civilised than the barbarous Goths (throughout, I found myself reminded of Cavafy's Waiting for the Barbarians). Later, the ascending of Tamora to becoming Rome's Empress further blurs that distinction, as much as the use of a Goth army by Lucius to liberate Rome from a despotic ruler. Walking back along the Embankment, I notice that all the trees have had blue and white fairy lights layed over their boughs, vesting the place with an oddly ethereal feel. Two men lovingly kiss underneath the leaves.
Coetzee's Slow Man marks an understated sequel of sorts to Elizabeth Costello, continuing in the same anti-novelistic tradition. Coetzee places the central elements of the novel in the background, whether it is narrative (events are understated, abandoning resolution in favour of the indeterminacy of life) or consciousness (the central character being essentially hollow, experiencing a series of reactions towards Marijana, none of which can be fully characterised as emotion or feeling). As a fable, Slow Man is non-existent, its protagonist gaining no
redemption, resolution or closure, simply a dying fall.Labels: Architecture, Art, Drama, History, Literature, London
posted by Richard 7:37 AM
Monday, August 28, 2006
In many respects, Copenhagen resembles Amsterdam with its docks reclaimed from the sea, its gabled merchant's houses and its canals. Unlike Holland though, Denmark has no history of republicanism and was an absolute monarchy for much of recent history. The city is accordingly filled with towering baroque churches with copper spires, moated palaces, domes and towers. Statues of mythical creatures rear out of every corner. Copper statues fill all the parks, from the monsters in front of the Radhus to the Greek statues in the Botanical Gardens. Beginning in fron the Radhus's gothic towers, the lure singers statue and the three gothic gargoyles by its balustrade, I walked past Tivoli, the last pleasure gardens in Europe, down the main shopping street to the Vor Frue Kirke, the city cathedral. The interior is white and spartan, showing a distinct neo-classical influence; the only ornament is from Thorvaldsen's statues of the saints, which line either side the nave. Although the tone is in keeping with Lutheran theology, the results nonetheless seem odd for a Protestant church. The rest of the building was designed by C.F. Hansen, who also created neo-classical designs for the law courts and palace chapel. Nearby is the Sankt Petri Kirke, the oldest preserved church in the city centre of Copenhagen. Nearby to that is the Rundetaarn is part of the Trinitatis Kirke with its white interior and occasional gold ornament, the gothic interior being relieved by baroque ornamentation. The tower served as an observatory and affords a view as far as Sweden. A whitewashed spiral walk leads up the summit and a wrought-iron lattice railings. Near to this is the Sankt Nikolaj Kirker, now a rather poor art gallery. I feel rather ambivalent to this; I have little to no sympathy for religious belief but am concerned as to the implications of its welcome retreat for the beautiful buildings it has created. Few notable pieces of architecture reflect anything other than commercial ostentation, aristocratic conceit and religios progaganda, none of these boding especially well.
I had been to exhibitions with many of the works from Dahlerup's Glyptotek, but was still impressed with seeing them in place, the red hippopotamus from the gardens of Sallust in the winter gardens. Foremost amongst the exhibits was a bust of Ptolemy, cut from the same black basalt as earlier statues (as well as more impressives statues, such as one of Anubis) but showing a face in the Grecian rather than Egyptian style. One Egyptian stelae shows Octavian making offerings to the Egyptian gods as if he were Amenhotep. This was followed by a set of Roman busts from differing periods and places, the Hellenistic, Republican (a more realistic style prior to idealised Julian statuary), Palmyran, Flavian and Severan. Notable figures included Antinous and a rather ephebian Dionysus (who assumed a more promiment role over time as attitudes became more fatalistic and mystery religions worshipping him or Demeter spread). Some busts retained the ceramic eyes originally placed in their sockets, given them a hauntingly natural sensation in contrast to the glacial and ephereal nature of most unpainted Greek statuary (one surviving bust of Caligula has a painted version alongside). Conversely, Greek statuary has tended to prefer bronze, with less of it surviving as a consequence, with one replica of Heracles also being striking for retaining its white and black ceramic eyes against the verdigris of the copper. Many of the museums in Copenhagen seem to have an unusually large Etruscan section, showing the brilliant colouring on the tomb frescos and statues (one Sphinx in particular), the black pottery and copper tools like mirrors. Where the exhibition also showed Fayum mummies, early rectangular Egyptian coffins, later mummy cases and carved Roman sarcophaguses, the Etruscans created funerary caskets in the shape of houses or even as seated statues (bearing Persephone's pomegranate in one hand) of the deceased placed before banqueting tables in their rock tombs as part of an ancestor cult. More generally, the museum also had ceramic walls tiles from Babylon, depicting lions and mythological beasts.
The Glyptotek also showcases sections on Danish art and French sculpture. Rodin's sculptures, such as The Kiss, depict scenes from Dante, with most of the French sculpture being either religious (the reaper seizing a young girl) or classical (Perses slaying Medusa). The Danisch sculptures are not dissimilar but Frend's works tend to concentrate on Norse myth, showing Odin and the Valkyries. Many of the paintings show the idealised influence of Constable (such as Lundbye's paintings, though some of his paintings of dolmen are more interesting), as a defeated and impoverished nation (after Nelson's naval bombardment and a disastrous alliance with Napoleon leading to the loss of Norway to Sweden) sought refuge in escapism and in paintings of Mediterranean scenes, such as the Temple of the Winds and the ruined Coliseum, painted by Rørbye. The paintings of Dahl (his nighttime pictures of Vesuvius) and Købke (winter landscapes) particularly stood out from this. The Glyptotek is in many a normal gallery today but its central palmhouse and an extension modelled on the statue of Halicarnassus, note that its history is not typical. Created by the Carlsberg brewing magnate, Carl Jacobsen, who had also created some kitsch and grandiolquent (rather Stalinist) architecture at the factory in Frederiskberg; four elephants guarding the gates and tiled paintings of the founders while the nearby worker's housing was rather more dour.
The National Museum also includes many ancient exhibits, such as a giant black basalt scarab, Jewish ossuaries, Christian Syrian mummies, a Phoenician/Aridian sarcophagus where the features were Grecian despite otherwise resembling an Egyptian mummy and Roman silver cups depicting scenes from the Iliad and Odyssey in exquisite detail. Elsewhere, the ethnographic section included Peruvian mummies, Javanese shadow theatres, and Aztec jade mummies. For the most part, the museum dwelt on Danish history though, such as wooden church sculptures, ivory goblets with spheres inside spheres from the royal kunstkammer, the Trundholm sun chariot, rune calendars and spells written onto wooden lengths in runes, golden altars, drinking horns, gold reliquaries, paintings reflected in a central cylinder to become visible, nautilus shells, eighteenth century chinoiserie tapestry and red lacquered panels. Much of the interest in runes seems to have originated with Ole Worm, an antiquarian equivalent to Stukeley or Dee, who was also interested in taxidermy, fossils (determining that certain horns came from narwhals and not unicorns) and helped established the botanical gardens in Copenhagen. Finally, there is a room dedicated to rune stones, contained several showing Swastikas and Triskeli as well as Futhark inscriptions (though it has to be said that it would seem preferrable for these stones to remain outside).
The Slotsholmen area is home to one of the older royal palaces and the current Parliament, separated from the rest of the city by canals. Just outside it, the Holmen's Kirke is decorated in the baroque style, but with the carving in unvarnished wood. This was the naval church and a wooden ship model remains suspended from the ceiling. The church lacks a tower, instead forming a cross with equal lengths on all sides. Within the area, lies the Thorvaldsen Museum. Like the Soane Museum, Dulwich Picture Gallery and the Victoria & Albert Museum cast court, the museum serves as a mausoleum to the sculptor, including many of his sculptures, casts, collections and personal effects as a form of grave good. While the museum does feature his church sculptures, most of his work is classical and explicitly erotic, if not homoerotic. There are three versions of Ganymede (one showing him with the eagle), Adonis, Jason, Apollo and Mars. The building itself appears designed on its interior to ape Nero's palace while the exterior has a frieze showing Thorvaldsen's works being put in place (the tone of hagiography is often rather marked with busts and statues of Thorvaldsen being found throughout the museum). The upper floor displays Egyptian canopic jars, Greek red & black vases, Roman busts as well as a Brueghel that seemed more reminiscent of Bosch's hell paintings. Overall, Thorvaldsen's preference is for neo-Italianate painting in the Renaissance style. Nonetheless, the museum also has more Romantic depictions of Danish landscapes, such as more Dahl nightscenes.
The Botanical Gardens contain a variety of terrains, from Greek mountains, coniferous forests, herbaceous borders, bamboo glades and a lake complete with lilypads and a Monetesque bridge. Fat black and white ducks nestle nearby while a snake slides through the grass. The gardens are exhibiting poisonous plants, such as Belladona and Snowberry. Classical copper statues dot the grounds, such as a discuss thrower. At the centre is a glass Palmhouse, containing cycads, lillies and citrus trees. Some butterflies flit through the air in one of the houses. Nearby to it is the Rosenborg Slot, surrounded by a moat this was the palace of Christian the Fourth and was in use from the sixteenth to eighteenth century. The interior is accordingly varied, featuring the contents of the King's Kunstkammer; a winter room whose walls are studded with Flemish pastoral and winter scenes, a marble room decorated with silver-lined mirrors, amber (Northern gold) caskets and chandeliers, ivory ship models, serrated paintings that display either the king or queen depending on where it is viewed from, black lacquered chionoiserie panels, a room were the walls are entirely covered in mirrors and gold Thorvaldsen statues. Finally, the upper floor houses a throne room, with a decorated stucco ceiling, narwhal throne, Flemish tapestries, silver lions and silver clocks and mirrors. Passages lead off to glass and porcelain cabinets, modelled on Charlottenberg in Berlin. The treasury in the basement houses the Gallehus horns (depicting a horned god), planet and eclipse machines, rock crystal goblets, an altar set with a skull at the base of the chalice and the crown jewels.Nearby is the Hirschprung Museum, featuring nineteenth century 'Golden Age' art. As with the Thorvaldsen museum, this covers material like Eckersberg's portraits, Lundbye's pastoral landscapes, Købke's melancholy paintings of Frederiksberg through to later works like Ejnar Nielsen The Blind Girl (a Klimt like affair, showing a figure in black encircled by a gold river), Harald Slott-Møller's Pre-Raphaelite Spring while other works like Theodor Philipsen View of the Road to Kastrup and works by Johannes Larsen's were more impressionist. The grounds outside the rather funereal building are pleasantly rural, filled with lakes. A tree stump has been carved in the image of a turtle while a heron pauses at the water's edge. Fungi grow from tree trunks. Walking back towards the waterfront, one comes to the Marmorkirken, a baroque green and gold dome. Otherwise known as Frederik’s Church, its grey marble interior is largely baroque, occasionally relieved by bright blue stained glass and gold mosaics. Next to its stands the three gold domes of the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral. Walking past it to Nyhavn, leads onto the island of Christianhavn and the Vor Frelser's Kirke. Constructed as an unmissable testament to absolute monarchy (or totalitarianism as we might call it now), its black and gold spire has a spiral wrapped round that was modelled on the interior of a snail (designed by Laurids de Thurah, who also conceived the nearby Charlottenberg Palace near Nyhavn). Walking round the spiral exterior was rather like becoming a figure from Escher's Ascending and Descending or perhaps Tatlin's Tower, Brueghel's Tower of Babel or a funfair helter skelter. The interior is white with a ceiling studded with gold stars, angels lining along the altar rails, a giant wooden barqoue organ supported by two elephants and a gold crown handing above the font.Otherwise, the area is reminiscent of nothing so much as London's Docklands (though the further island of Nyholm retains its position as a naval base and the same crane seen in nineteenth century churches), as warehouses are concerted into offices, save for small pockets like Christiania.
Venturing further afield, I came to Roskilde and its cathedral. Formely the capital of Denmark before being outstripped by mercantile Copenhagen, Roskilde is perhaps best described as being analogous to somewhere like Winchester. Built from red brick and plastered white on the inside, beautiful pre-reformation floral patterns lost in Copenhagen's churches remain here, often depicting local devils (Tutivillus the "patron demon of scribes" or of calligraphy). More modern paintings of figures like Harald Blutooth now join these. The Danish royal family are interred here, often with later extensions to accommodate them; Christian the First's chapel features Renaissance marble tombs in the style of ancient temples. Frederik the Fifth's chapel is neo-classical, filled with black coffins with gold clawed feet and guarded by Sphinxes. Christian the Fourth's chapel is more gothic, with a blue ceiling studded with gold stars where frescos of Biblical scenes line the walls. Finally, a tomb for the wife of Tsar Alexander and mother of the last Tsar is filled with Russian icons - it may now be returned to Russia, the Tsarina having escaped on a British destroyer. Ancient gravestones line the floors. Near to the entrance, there is an astronomical clock, with the roar of the dragon and St George striking the hour. Otherwise, the interior is flawlessly pure, save for gold altars, royal pews and organs. Finally, I visited the Viking ship museum by the fjord. Tiny fish and jellyfish dart through the water while swans glide overhead. Arriving back in Copenhagen, I went to the Helligånds Kirke for an organ recital by Gillian Weir. The church is, once more, white plaster, with dark wood panelling and gilt. It was the only church to still retain stained glass windows. Gold angels appeared on a frized at the back of the church before the baroque painted altar. The recital included Liszt, Durufle, Mushel, Jongen and Slonimsky.
The final day began with a visit to Malmö. Southern Sweden has been Danish for longer than it has been Swedish, and the new landbridge has once more joined the two cities. The city itself is lined by a canal, parks and graveyards (rather less ornate than British equivalents, often featuring natural motifs and still retaining iron railings). Within the city are many half-timbered buildings, a Dutch-style townhall while a Moorish synagogue stands outside the city. A windmill stands outside the moat of the castle. The cathedral is Germanic in style, built by German merchants who has travelled to the Øresund region to exploit the herring trade (the equivalent of the English wool trade), though one of the chapels retains wall painting very similar to that at Roskilde, showing George and the Dragon. The interior is extremely plain, with only a few baroque ornaments. The castle, a former prison, now houses a design exhibition. This covers a range of design periods; Italian and Flemish Renaissance painting (including a Bosch-like Dutch painting of Orpheus in the Underworld), Delft and Maiolica vases, vases in the classical style, with gold Egyptian handles and black ceramic, mirrors with black and white Wedgewood figures, large Art Nouveau vases dominated by dragons and peacocks as well as Art Nouveau stained glass with spider's webs and peacocks. Most striking was the peasant art, with woven tapestries and painted wood. A historical exhbition contained another rune stone, showing Christ painted in gold and red. The castle's rooms had been restored to something like their original state, including paintings of James and Mary Stuart (whose husband was imprisoned in the castle).
Returning to Copenhagen, I visited Kastellet, a citadel similar to that built at Malmö though still in use as a military base. The Little Mermaid statue rests in the waters here, between this and the industrial and naval complexes at Nyholm, as well as a statue of the Norse Goddess Gefion. Another oddity is the church of St Albans, an English church built to serve the British embassy (the Swedish embassy seems to have taken over an old church). I was left ambivalent over the Scandinavian social model; high costs mean that wages can be kept high across the board rather than being driven down as in the Anglo-American model. While this funds an exceptional welfare state and public services, the number of vagrants suggests that it can make it difficult for many to make ends meet. Conversely, working hours seemed much less than in England, suggesting a much greater focus on quality of life than on economic growth.Labels: Architecture, Art, Copenhagen, History
posted by Richard 7:36 AM
Wednesday, June 7, 2006
Anthony Giddens sees modernity as a condition whereby pre-modern (traditional) culture have given way to modern (post-traditional) culture; identity becomes more reflexive and self-consciously constructed. Roles are negotiated rather than assigned by convention. Anthony Trollope is consciously writing in The Way We Live Now as an opponent of modernity, counterpointing the morals and dignity of an increasingly impecunious aristocracy with the corruption of the self-made men of the rising mercantile classes; "his position is a sign of the degeneracy of the age". However, the novel also questions conventional ideas of identity; the stereotypically Jewish aspects of the portrayal of Melmotte's venality is balanced by the portrayal of Mr Breghert as he is wronged by members of the upper classes unwilling to accept that times have changed for social acceptance of Jews. Similarly, Marie Melmotte proceeds from being a hapless victim to revenging herself on her father and taking on property. Equally, the fact that Melmotte is brought down the avarice of the aristocracy and the dissipation of figures like Sir Felix, serves to deconstructs the opposition at the heart of the novel between old fashioned order and middle class rapacity. The novel acknowledges some of this in its discussions of how Melmotte himself is viewed; "as the great man was praised so too was he abused... the working classes were in favour of Melmotte... from their belief he was being ill-used.. that occult sympathy for crime, when the crime committed is injurious to the upper classes... it came to be said of him that he was more sinned against than sinning."
Similar concerns appear throughout Zola's The Kill, where Haussman's rebuilding of Paris serves throughout as a metaphor for the disorientation and the Durkheimite anomie of modernity. As such, Paris is seen as artificial and inauthentic, no longer the organic product of social evolution; "a strange feeling of illicit desire at the sight of this landscape that had become unrecognisable, so worldly and artificial." The preoccupation with the artificial and contrived point clearly to Zola's affiliation with Huysmans. As traditional roles fall into desuetude, so too do traditional ethics of abstinence; "the main preoccupation of society was with knowing how to enjoy itself." Sin becomes a form of consumption, of refinement. Similarly, sexual roles also become fluid once they are no longer constrained by traditional norms; "the sign of his boyish debauchery, this effeminisation of his whole being... he seemed born and bred for perverted sensual pleasure. Renee enjoyed her domination." Renee assumes the masculine role, Maxime the feminine. The paradox in many Zola novels is that while the central fable of his novels is concerning with condemning the immorality of modern, post-traditional society, the syuzhet draws much of its sensational interest from depicting them. As such, The Kill is loosely based on a moral fable, with Renee being betrayed by Saccard and Maxime. However, Saccard's indifference to her adultery goes a long way towards aborting that moral framework, with the cash nexus replacing normal social relations.
Hans Christian Anderson's stories depict a world where, as a character in The Ice Maiden puts it, "antiquated ways are discarded" so that mermaids and telegraph wires co-exist (memorably, the eyes of the ice maiden are described as being like the barrels of a shotgun) and the conventions of folk tales (of the kind described by Vladimir Propp) become contested and dispersed. A tale like The Tinderbox recognisably belongs to the same world as that of the Brothers Grimm; a hero is offered the chance of fame and fortune and is ruthless in his will to power, in contrast to the moral fable of Big Claus and Little Claus or The Ugly Duckling. However, in later stories this is sublimated, either into a thanatophilic concept of virtue being rewarded in the afterlife (as in The Little Mermaid, The Marsh King's Daughter or The Story of a Mother) or where aspiration and virtue alike are thwarted (as in The Shadow). Contingent upon this is a world that is far less centered around the protagonists, where everything from animals to inanimate objects have become anthropomorphised, as cats and storks become participants and commenters within the narrative. The fate of creatures like The Snowman or The Fir Tree is more suggestive of Kafka's Metamorphosis than the Brothers Grimm. Equally, if the stories frequently see female sexuality as threatening (particularly with the Ice Maiden or Snow Queen) then they also displace the role of the hero in favour of female characters, like Gerda in The Snow Queen or The Marsh King's Daughter.
Lessing's Memoirs of a Survivor is one of the most interesting dystopian novels I can think of. Whereas the majority of apocalyptic science fiction, from Wyndham to Atwood, revolves around the causal factors (technological, ecological, political, economic etc) for whatever has changed society from its familiar state, Lessing elides this; "for 'it' is a force, a power... 'it' can be, has been, pestilence, war, the alteration of climate, tyranny." The novel is deliberately dislocated from any specific sense of time or place and instead concentrates on the consequences of social breakdown from feral packs of children to tribal migration. Nonetheless, Lessing undermines the dystopian aspects of the novel in a number of ways. Firstly, dystopian fiction, whether 1984, Day of the Triffids or The Handmaids Tale tends to emphasise individual agency in the face of events. By contrast, Lessing repeatedly stresses that governments are powerless in the face of change while her characters take no actions to change matters. Offered the choice of moving to safer areas in the countryside, they do nothing. Submission is the order of the day (Lessing's interest in Sufism comes through strongly in how she handles time, viewing all phenomena as manifestations of a single reality, or Wujud i.e. being). She also expresses little sorrow for the loss of 'the age of affluence,' implying that the experiments in communalism that emerge represent an improvement on the society that had marginalised people like June Ryan; "all property worries gone; all sexual taboos gone... free, at least from what was left of 'civilisation' and its burdens." By repeatedly 'cutting' to descriptions of Emily's childhood, Lessing also appears to characterise the family in Laingian terms as a source of neurosis whose loss is not necessarily to be mourned.
From Zola's view of the novel as a scientific experiment to Wolfe's 'new journalism,' the novel has attempted to purge itself of all assocations with artifice and imagination, preferring instead to present itself as something objective and factual. If inherent in the idea of realism, it nonetheless represents a problematic conception, if only because if the act of observing something can change a subject, how much more can the act of narrating change it. The most notable example of which being Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, a 'non-fiction novel' relating the murder of four people on a Kansas farm in 1959. Bearing this in mind, the idea of creating a film depicting the writing of the book is an oddly postmodern one (a representation of a representation), particularly since the sparse and austere cinematography appears to be trying to emulate the novel's journalistic style.
Wimpole Hall, designed by Sir John Soane and James Gibbs, appears at first a model of neo-classical symmetry and proportion. However, the interior easily belies this, as corridors snake in on themselves leading to dead-ends. His main contribution is a drawing room with a large domed ceiling, not unlike some of his works at Lincoln's Inn. The main contribution from Gibbs was a Wedgewoodesque book room. The highlight of the interior was a small collection of Gillray prints, mostly lambasting the Prince Regent and the Broad Bottomed Ministry (as well as some more unusual ones with hunting as their target). I was also struck by a Grandfather clock, where a ship rocked on the waves in time with the ticks and tocks.
An interior chapel is painted with a trompe l'oeil effect (something of a theme; there's also a painted playing table, complete with painted cards). The grounds are home to a small church (with a large wing filled with marble monuments of the house owners) and a set of gothic ruins in the distance. The gardens have been restored to their original formal patterns (reversing Capability Brown's vandalism), though landscaped pleasure grounds filled with a wide range of trees and shrubs remain (including the national collection of walnuts). The sky was a brilliant shade of turquoise inbetween dark rain clouds, while the flatness of the Cambridgeshire landscape reminded me strongly of a Trent Valley that had never been industrialised.
Perched high above the Thames, Cliveden feels as if it should be a gothic castle. Instead, the Italianate building and formal gardens look as if they should be nestled within the gentle slopes of a valley. I'd forgotten the sheer amount of Roman and Italian sculpture in the grounds, such as the Borghese balustrade with its dragons and eagles as well as more modern conceits like the turtles on one of the fountains. The Wisteria was flowering alongside the Acer in the Chinese water garden (it felt as if cherry blossom should have been correct for the pagoda, but the Wisteria made a more than acceptable substitute). Ducklings splashed about in the waters around the Botticelli fountain. Further along the Thames and one comes to Windsor. The castle here towers well above the Thames (the site was chosen by William the Conqueror on defensive grounds) though the presence of the town nestling beneath it softens the scene somewhat. I find a meadow by the river, go paddling in the water and watch the swans glide by. Rather inevitably, the town itself has a rather kitsch feel to it, largely due to the continuous citing of often rather trivial historical associations; HG Wells working as a draper or Nell Gwyn and Shakespeare staying in local taverns. You do have to go back quite a long way before anything actually happened at Windsor. Even much of the castle has a rather Ruritanian feel to it, presumably due to the changes made by George the Fourth. The castle has been redesigned and redesigned so often that its medieval appearance is illusory and hyperreal. The town does at least have a more concrete feel to it, with a Guildhall designed by Wren and the nearby church St John the Baptist, home to an anonymous Renaissance painting of the last supper and beautiful altar mosaics and corbels, designed by the same artist that worked on Westminster Abbey.
Further down the Thames again and one comes to Richmond. When the likes of Hampton Court and Ham House were built here, courtiers would sail to the city on barges establishing its role as a rural suburb early on. Ham House was originally designed in the Jacobean period and much like its rival at Hampton was extended during the restoration. The house reached its apotheosis at this point, described by Evelyn as comparable to the finest villas in Italy and furnished like a palace. Nonetheless, its owner fell from favour at court, penury beckoned and the house was left to stagnate for centuries. Visiting in 1770, Walpole described it as dreary, ancient and decayed, a place barricaded away from the rest of the world and liable to defeat even his passion for the antique. Today, the house seems rather less formidable, in spite of the busts of Roman Emperors filling niche after niche in the redbrick walls at the front of the house. Nonetheless, the house looks out from a long avenue towards the Thames, as parakeets fly overhead. The restored gardens provide a glimpse of what Evelyn meant, with a wilderness area populated by statues of Hermes, hornbeam hedges and secluded gardens, formal gardens planted with lavender and box and overlooked by Bacchus and kitchen gardens (there is also a still chamber for the preparation of perfumes, conserves and cordials). One room contained detailed plans for rebuilding Inigo Jones' Westminster Palace, the subject of much speculation in Defoe's Tour Thro' the Whole Island of Great Britain and a good example of the many unfulfilled projects of what London could have been.
Like Hampton, the planting of myrtle, lemon, oleander and almond trees is of the period (tulips and pineapples are incorprated into statues and gates throughout the gardens). Conversely, the interior tends to illustrate the decayed grandeur of the place. A great hall hung with paintings by Lely and Kneller leads to a grand staircase, with an elaborate wooden balustrade. The North Drawing Room above is hung with Flemish tapestries (still retaining much of their original colour; a later room has Spitalfields tapestries copying Watteau designs), white marble chimneypieces and ionic columns and ivory cabinets. This leads to a long gallery, where dark black wood is gilded with gold, and Van Dyck paintings of the Royal family line the walls. A strange self-portrait hangs above the door, showing him with a sunflower, symbolic of art and nature, sovereign and subject. Marquetry and Japanned furniture, often with blue and white Kangxi porcelain line the walls. A closet leads to a collection of miniatures of subjects like Elizabeth, Lucretia's suicide and a love in flames (he who does not burn will die). Finally, an elaborate four-poster bed forms the centrepiece of the Queen's bedchamber, decorated with Van De Velde paintings.
Lacock in Wiltshire was once the home of an abbey that offered a home to the unmarried daughters of wealthy families, and to a village that grew wealthy through the wool trade. The Abbey was dissolved in the reformation while the nineteenth century cotton imports had a similar effect on the village. The combination of these factors with the relative isolation of Lacock led to them becoming a form of time capsule. The village remains full of half-timbered buildings, while the church of St Cyriac still houses a Lady Chapel where paint remains on the ceiling alongside especially elaborate gargoyle carvings. The church has a window above the chancel arch, indicative of the customary 'wool gothic' style of Cotswolds churches. The walls are still whitewashed, presumably indicative of no Victorian changes. The exterior of the church is equally elaborate, while the size of the tombs testifies to the wealth of the community. The abbey has rather less of a sense of continuity with that period, save for its cloisters. After the reformation, it was converted into a country house and an octagonal tower added to the side. The interior is dominated by a circular table, supported by three satyrs, while much of the house is dominated by images of the scorpion from that owner's crest. Later owners provided good examples of early gothic revival. The great hall comes with a barreled ceiling studded with crests, a rose window and wall niches filled with extraordinary terracotta figures representing death and the scapegoat. Later owners experimented with camera inventions and translation of cuneiform and populated the house with the likes of geological specimens and stuffed pangolins. The grounds are more classical, ranging from a stone sphinx to a botanical garden.
Nearby lies Great Chalfield house, a fifteenth century manor house complete with a moat. The church of All saints lies within the moat and includes a beautiful painted pre-raphaelite organ and wooden rood screens. Swallows nesting in the rafters looked down curiously on the visitors. The grounds bear witness of plants overspilling the paths and forcing their way through the cracks between the lichen covered paving stones (looking rather like Mariana's moated grange), a welcome correction to the meticulous restoration of the house itself. The great hall on the interior is much as one would expect, save for mask-like faces looking down from the galleries with empty eye-sockets (designed for the lord to spy on servants). Red paint remains on the rafters of the hall, while perhaps the most impressive aspect of the rest of the house are the oriel windows.
Having been to Highgate Cemetery earlier this year, I returned to London today for more of the Victorian way of death. The 'mighty seven' cemeteries represent a form of ritual, as much as photographs, death masks and portraits of the recently deceased produced by the Victorians, as well as jewellery that utilized a locket of the dead person's hair, extravagant funerals and the wearing of black crepe. After a stroll round the Kyoto gardens in Holland Park, were I watched the peacocks lazily strut about and a wagtail flit from one stone pagoda to another, I began at Brompton Cemetery. More like a landscaped garden than Highgate, ferns have nonetheless grown thickly across much of the grounds while squirrels scamper across the tombstones. The layout is also more formal than Highgate (based on the structure of a cathedral), with a central avenue leading to a chapel modelled on St Peter's Basilica, which is flanked by long colonnades. The tombs are also more impressive than the majority of those in Highgate, with Neo-classical, Gothic and Egyptian mausoleums lining the central avenue. The most impressive tomb is that of James McDonald (Chairman of Anglo-American Oil), a gothic affair complete with Pre-Raphaelite angels and stained glass windows. Conversely, the names of the dead are rather less noteworthy than either Highgate or Kensal Green; Emmeline Pankhurst being the most well known. The cemetery is also a rather blatantly obvious cruising ground; albeit by coincidence rather than by design, there's something rather reassuring (and oddly apposite) about desire persisting in the midst of death.
I then travelled north to visit Kensal Green, the first of the Victorian 'mighty seven' cemeteries to be constructed and perhaps the most impressive. While the trees were still leafless when I went to Highgate, Kensal had a perversely bucolic aspect in the sunshine with buttercups and daisies flowering while a Green Woodpecker perched on top of one of the graves. Kensal Green would certainly have been rural when it was built, but today the cemetery is dominated by the rusting skeletons of two gasometers and the louring presence of Erno Goldfinger's brutalist Trellick Tower. Kensal is by no means as formally laid out as Brompton, though it does have a set of Greek Revival Chapels (complete with catacombs and hydraulic catafalque) and a central avenue. The tombs along this are especially striking. On one side is the tomb of William Casement (four male statues supporting a stone canopy, in the manner of the Erechtheum), Andrew Ducrow (an Egyptian tomb decorated with scarabs and guarded by two sphinxes), Edmund Molyneux (Italian Gothic in red Peterhead granite) and Henry Edward Kendall (a Gothic cross decorated with Minton tiling). On the other side is Mary Gibson (a Corinthian canopy surmounted by four Pre-Raphaelite angels reaching towards the sky), and the quack doctor John St John Lang (a classical statue standing within a circular canopy) who died of the affliction his medicine purported to cure and William Mulready (a gothic statue lying in state in a classical canopy).
Kensal also has the advantage of the reputations of those interred there, from many writers and artists (Thackerary, Hood, Collins, Trollope, Waterhouse and Grossmith), engineers and scientists (Brunel and Babbage), disgraced royals and fascinating figures like Dr James Barry (a successful army doctor and duellist who was only unmasked as a woman after her death) and the Duke of Portland (an eccentric recluse who had built underground ballrooms and mazes under his estate, and was claimed to have faked his death as part of the Druce affair).
Beginning with Shadwell and Hawksmoor's church of St George in the East before travelling to Limehouse and St Anne's church. I'm always stuck by Hawksmoor's buildings; they make few concessions to architectural tradition and often feel as if they should be stage scenery; viewed from the front they are striking and impressive while viewed from the side they seem two-dimensional. St Anne's also happens to have an unexplained pyramid in its graveyard (drawings in the British Library suggest Hawksmoor may have planned pyramids on the turrets, while Christ Church in Spitalfields does rather resemble a pyramid from the front), possibly a Masonic reference. Walking around these areas, it was difficult not to be struck by how they are changing. High property prices elsewhere in London seem to be driving new property development, with cranes and tall blocks of luxury flats leaping up all around. This gentrification sits alongside the still all too visible poverty of East London and makes for an uncomfortable contrast. Walking back to the Limehouse station, I passed an old public library with a statue of Clement Atlee (Limehouse was his constituency). The architect of the welfare state was decaying badly and was missing his hand; a fitting comment on what was happening around him.
Travelling back into the centre of London took me to another Hawksmoor church, St Mary Woolnoth, a bizarre structure that barely looks like a church at all, lacking as it does a tower or a spire. I then walked around some of the other buildings in the area, like Wren's gothic church of St Mary Aldermary and his more baroque St Stephen Walbrook, before changing location again to the other side of the Thames and Lambeth. The gates of Lambeth Palace adjoin onto the former church of St Mary-at-Lambeth, now home to the Museum of Garden History. The sight of a Victorian graveyard, filled with the typically ornate Victorian funerary monuments and planted with sisal, poppies, roses, foxgloves and acanthus, was an odd indeed.
Passing by, I returned to north of the Thames, returning back to the city and The Museum of London. The first exhibition here was dedicated to Pre-Roman settlements in what was to become London. I was struck by the note that since the Thames is notoriously prone to flooding, entire sections of land could suddenly be left underwater. An excerpt from Pepys' diary captures this well; "digging his late Docke, he did 12-foot under ground find perfect trees over-Covered with earth, nut-trees, with the branches and the very nuts upon them, some of whose nuts he showed us, their shells black with age and their Kernell, upon opening decayed; but their shell perfectly hard as ever. And an Ewe-tree he showed us (upon which he says the very Ivy was taken up whole about it), which upon cutting with an adze, we found to be rather harder than the living tree usually is." Manmade objects seem to have survived well too, with the Walbrook having developed as a religious site, with votive offerings thrown into it to appease the gods (I was struck by a panel paralleling this to Bedivere throwing Excalbir back into the lake); a practice that seems to have continued well into the Roman period. This section showed a number of such offerings, typically carved from evergreen woods.
The Roman section was mainly noteworthy for displaying the statues from the Mithraeum found near St Paul's. As one would expect, several depictions of Mithras and the demon dull abound, along with statues of Minerva and Egyptian deities (apparently the Eastern cults proved more popular in this part of the Empire than the Roman ones). This also included the recently discovered sarcophagus from Spitalfields, decorated with shells throughout. The rest of the exhibition seemed somewhat lacklustre, though I was rather taken by a Victorian automaton called 'Psycho,' who was able to play cards and perform mathematical calculations. Due to the removal of internal workings (or hidden actors, depending on the extent of one's cynicism) the explanation for these feats has been lost.Labels: Architecture, England, Film, History, London, ScienceFiction, Victorian
posted by Richard 7:29 AM
Sunday, October 9, 2005
Autumn is my favourite time of year. The weather is hesitant and uncertain, with blackened clouds and rain interrupted with bright sunshine and deep blue skies. Silver birch remains green, Stag's Horn (Sumac) turns bronze while Ivy turns crimson red. I'd recently seen an old tree stump with lavender growing around it and bracket fungi growing out of it. Tonight, I noticed something odd growing in the nearby borders. Parting the foliage I found an odd looking toadstool, red with white blotches. As far as I can tell it's fly agaric (Amanita muscaria), a type of mushroom noted for its hallucigenic properties amongst the Siberians, American Indians and the Japanese. I don't think I'd ever seen one before.
Arriving at the Watt's Gallery in Surrey, I noticed an odd looking red church on a nearby hillside and decided to walk back to have a look. Initially obscured from view by the churchyard's Irish Yew trees, the building proved to be the Watts Chapel, designed by Mary Watts in memory of her husband. Mary Watts was an exceptional artist in her own right, a painter and potter who worked with Celtic and art nouveau styles.
The structure of the rather squat chapel is cruciform (though essentially a rotunda intersected by the stations of the cross) and surmounted by a somewhat incongruous campanile. The exterior is ringed with a band covered in Celtic ribbonwork patterns made from terracotta and supported by three corbels on each section of the wall. The band's imagery is somewhat pantheistic, drawn from Egyptian and Sanskrit sources as much as The Book of Kells. Built from local red clay, Mary Watts had apparently hoped it would 'tone down' as it aged over time, but my suspicion is that the colour is only slightly less vivid than it was after it had been built. Surrounding it, much of the gravestones are made from the same clay and combine Burne Jones style angels with Celtic patterns. As you might expect, the overall effect is bizarre, more resembling a Byzantine or Italian church than something to be found in England; Romanesque design (the dome, Greek cross and lozenge shaped windows) with Celtic imagery. The interior, complete with white and marmalade guard cat (lying in wait for visitors and demanding to be stroked), is different again. The style is late pre-raphaelite or art-nouveau, showing gesso angelic figures and the tree of life, save for the altar where one of Watt's symbolist paintings hangs.
In truth, Watts himself is not one of my favourite Pre-Raphaelite painters. His work lacks the colour and vividness of Rossetti or Leighton (not to mention their rather decadent glamour) and, while anticipating the impressionists, lacks the dreamlike aspect of Monet's paintings. Looking at the works in the gallery he seemed to me to resemble William Blake more than most of his contemporaries, with all of his paintings being loaded with symbolism borrowed from christian and classical sources as well as an essentially private mythology. Like Blake, much of his work has a very direct aspect of social criticism (ranging from sympathy for 'fallen women,' anger at poverty and inequality and even concern about animal cruelty). In many cases, even his portraits seem to burst into the allegorical, with one such portrait having been changed from an original depiction of a neiad. The back of the gallery houses ajunk roomsculpture collection, littered with casts of his large public sculptures (like Physical Energy in Kensington Gardens) and one odd Egyptian sculpture that Watts had designed to look as if it had been ruined and devastated. Finally, the gallery has a small room dedicated to other Victorian painters like Arthur Hughes and Albert Moore.
The Edvard Munch exhibition at the Royal Academy. The range of personae on display is often surprising. Where Frida Kahlo always represented herself in broadly similar terms, it is often difficult to credit that Munch's paintings are of the same man. Partly, this is due to the fact that the paintings span his entire life, but equally he changes from naturalistic depictions where the flesh is whole to ones where the skin seems scarred (equally, his paintings often seem like acts of self-mutilation, showing his murdered or dissected corpse, his decapitated head, his skull and eyeball; Munch left his paintings out in the rain to be warped and distorted, inverting Dorian Gray's picture) to ones where his face has been all but erased completely. Equally, Munch's features displace those of any number of mythical and historical personae; John the Baptist, Marat, Orpheus. Women figures in any number of roles; whore, virgin, muse. Munch often simply allows paint to slide down the canvas, creating a particularly disturbingly liquid effect when he is painting blood, or even hair in the case of The Vampire; but again the range of painting styles were many and varied over his career. The early paintings are characterised by their sense of bohemianism; as if Wilde were being painted by Leighton. The later styles are clearly more symbolist, but unlike Kahlo there is no sense of an hermetic personal mythology. I was especially struck by one painting, Murder where the entirety of the painting swirled around a central point in the distance; it reminded me of how camera angles zoom in onto a central figure, especially in Hitchcock's films.
Der Edukators (or Die Fetten Jahre sind vorbei as it was originally titled) rather left me feeling that matters had been resolved rather too neatly. Much of the film revolves around contested ideas; in one instance, a group of activists who break into the villas of the wealthy, rearranging the furniture and leaving notes saying that the owners have too much money. In the other, the owners of one of the villas that they are keeping prisoner after things go wrong. For much of the film, it isn't clear whether his statements of former activism and sympathy for their ideals are genuine or whether he isn't simply manipulating them; the ending does seem to answer this question a little too equivocally for my taste, though it was rather noticeable that their prisoner's claim that it is simply natural for some to lead and others to follow receives rather more credence than might be expected from the way in which he almost over from them.
A pleasant day was spent with a walk around the Roman ruins at Silchester, leading to the incongruous discovery of a field in the middle of the old city housing some young llamas. I visited St Mary's Church and looked at the pre-reformation wall paintings (mostly floral). I also managed to spot a sparrowhawk almost floating over the walls.
A History of Violence sees David Cronenberg shedding the elements of science fiction in his films in favour of a more ostensibly naturalistic genre, the thriller, where a married man in Midwest America is confronted with his past with the mob. However, it seemed rather clear that this was a false distinction, with Cronenberg using the trappings of normalcy to disturb in precisely the same manner that the surrealism of his previous films did. What particularly achieves this effect is that the film seemed to suggest that violence isn't something that is repressed and periodically erupts but is rather something that forms an intrinsic part of normality, blurring moral distinctions between the Midwest family and the gangsters.
When I've reviewed Juan Goytisolo's novels on past occasions, I've tended to describe them in relation to the ideas of the Russian formalists Mikhail Bakhtin. In his essay collection, Cinema Eden, he himself raises Bakhtin in the first sentence of the first essay, characterising the Arab world as one where discourses are intermingled, between the sacred, the profane and the satirical; "this happy blend of licence and piety." Throughout, he adheres to this precept, mingling fantasy and reality in a piece imagining Gaudi living as a hermit in Cappadocia. Nonetheless, Goytisolo seems to introduce a further ambiguity, noting that many of these traditional elements of Arbaic culture help people "not to deny modernity but to co-exist with it," but elsewhere suggests that such arrangements are threatened by progress and Islamism alike and that they are better described as "a new form of shelter against the rootlessness and alienation created by modernity." It's difficult not to wonder at the extent to which these discourses really are entangled; the homosocial love of mystics or the soldier and the charcoal burner depends on homosexuality as a practice while leaving it castigated as an identity. The qualities he sees in the inhabitants of Cairo's city of the dead contrast to the antiseptic values of the West but also seem to come close to endorsing a form of social Darwinism in a society where life is nasty, brutish and short.
Reading the Laxdaela Saga, I found myself reminded of Ruth Benedict's distinction between shame and guilt cultures in The Chrysanthemum and the Sword. In guilt cultures personal morality is specific to the individual and their relationship to god, whereas in shame cultures morality is a social concept relating to community opinion (for instance, Hrafnkel The Priest of Frey sees its protagonist expelled from his lands for having been so foolish as to spare Hrafnkel's life earlier). The saga depicts Iceland's transition from one to another. Iceland as a society lacked executive government, meting out punishment through exile, ostracism and private compensation; something that became more complex with the introduction of christianity. One consequence of this is that the saga depicts character with unusual complexity (the concept of the individual being essentially inapplicable for the majority of other medieval texts where personality is seen in relation to religious and social categories). Gudrun is depicted against both a christian scheme of private sin and repentance and a pagan scheme of moral attrition and atonement where guilt is shared and negotiated (not unlike Aeschylus and The Oresteia).
Engel's The Condition of the Working Class in England struck me as vacillating between a number of opposed concepts; between a desire to both prevent ("it is high time too, for the English middle-class to make some concessions to the working men who no longer plead but threaten; for in a short time it may be too late") and to spark a revolution to end the class structure ("the revolution must come; it is already too late to bring about a peaceful solution"), between an idealised account of earlier more pastoral social structures (speaking of its 'idyllic simplicity;' "leading a righteous and peaceful life in all piety and probity; and their material position was far better than that of their successors.") and a view that their destruction was an advance towards the creation of communist society ("in a well-ordered society such things could only be a source of rejoicing; in a war of all against all, individuals seize the benefits for themselves."), even celebrating the creation of an internal proletariat and the deadening of national characteristics in the English working class. To a large extent, Engels is both awed and horrified by London, observing that "I know nothing more imposing than the view which the Thames offers...all this is so vast, so impressive that a man cannot collect himself, but is lost in the marvel of England's greatness," before detailing the sacrifices required to achieve it.
Barnaby Rudge is one of only two historical novels written by Dickens and it's interesting to observe how the constraints of a genre typified by Scott conflict with the more gothic and sensational elements that are more characteristic of Dickens. On the one hand, the historical genre demands a detailed observation of social and individual change. On the other, the gothic and sensational elements demand a more Manichean approach. As such, the narrative lacks a generic centre, perhaps due to its centre being the blank slate of Barnaby himself. In terms of social observation, Dickens frequently notes how much smaller London was at the time of the riots; "Nature was not so far removed, or hard to get at, as in these days... which turned into squalid courts." Social criticism is as present here as in any of contemporary social novels, as with the depiction of Sir John Chester's dissipated character. However, he also condemns Sim Tappertit for his opposition to the state of urban society; "the degrading checks imposed upon them were unquestionably attributed to the innovating spirit of the times, and how they united therefore to resist change." Accordingly, the social dimension of the novel is a complex one. Equally, the gothic and sensational elements complicate this further; George Gordon and Barnaby's father are both depicted in almost demonic terms to begin with ("prowled and skulked the metropolis at night... a spectre at their licentious feasts, something in the midst of their revelry and riot haunted and chilled him."), with the rioters also compared to devils. Innocence in the novel is no protection, either for Barnaby himself or for Miggs, the parody of his more virtuous heroines. The result is that Dickens is ambivalent in his attitude to the riots; "composed for the most part of the very scum and refuse of London, whose growth was fostered by bad criminal laws, bad prison regulations and the worst conceivable police... stimulated by their own headlong passions, by poverty, by ignorance" The riots emerge as both something unnatural and something manufactured by society, where the commons can revenge themselves on their oppressors.
Keith Robert's Pavane struck me as being quite odd; like many counterfactuals (such as Bring the Jubilee or even His Dark Materials; Pullman's vision of Geneva becoming the centre of christendom being the inverse of Robert's vision of Rome as remaining dominant in England) it is essentially whiggish, presenting a version of history where a vision of progress based on science and technology has gone awry and a vision of superstition and feudalism triumphed. It's an odd vision that ignores the fact that capitalist economies began to thrive through the renaissance more than the reformation. Conversely, its a fantasy, crafting a land still where faeries and old gods still hold sway; the peculiarity is that such a vision fails to lend itself to the same kind of pastoralism to be found in Tolkein.Labels: Architecture, Art, England, Film, Literature, Weather
posted by Richard 7:07 AM
Thursday, September 15, 2005
Vienna is the strangest of cities. During the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, it began to expand and absorb immigrants from elsewhere in the Hapsburg empire, most obviously the Jews that were to be at the heart of its cultural and economic life. Its cuisine began to resemble that of Bohemia, Hungary and even Italy more than that of the German states. With the demolition of the city walls encircling the medieval city, the construction of the Ringstrasse began and the city's architecture became progressively more and more heavily influenced by French and Italian baroque and neo-classical designs. As the seat of the Holy Roman Empire, Imperial Rome was a model for the iconography of much of the city. The older gothic buildings in the inner city became the exception, not the rule. In short, Vienna became increasingly deracinated, something that inevitably lead to anti-semitic backlashes. In music, the likes of Schoenberg, Berg and Webern pioneered forms of music utterly disconnected from traditional forms. In art and literature, a preference for the surreal and the fantastic emerged in the likes of Klimt's paintings. Freud dedicated his work to the interpretation of dreams and in Schnitzler's Dream Story portrays Vienna as an unreal mirage, behind which the machinations of the unconscious lie. Even more traditional art, like that of Strauss or Roth is all surface.
Arriving, I walked around the boulevards of the Ringstrasse, starting with the Byzantine fortress that is the Museum of Military History. Since the ring was designed to be broad enough for the easy military suppression of dissent and protest, this was designed as the city Arsenal. Nearby is the elegant French gothic of the Votivkirche, through to the Rathausplatz. The ring is where most of Vienna's artistic life emerged, from its national gallery, museums, music halls, academies and opera houses. It is also where Vienna's most chaotic and schizophrenic aspects emerge, with differing architectural styles at every turn. Here, the baroque Burgtheater and neo-classical Parlament are confronted by the odd sight of the modern Flemish gothic of the Neues Rathaus, one of the few examples of modern gothic in the city. Like much of the city the platz is occupied by parks and fountains, filled with statues of musicians and kings. From here, the strasse leads to Karlsplatz. Again, much of the trees and fountains are dominated by the bizarre sight of Fischer Von Erlach's KarlsKirche dome and its two flanking pillars, both in imitation of Trajan's column. More oddly still, a Henry Moore sculpture rests in the pond in front of the church. The frescos on the interior were being restored and it was possible to ascend to a platform under the dome and see them in detail. Elsewhere in the platz are Otto Wagner's pavilions for the underground, Jugendstil creations in white marble and gold. Scorning 'folk art' Wagner's designs were every bit as radical as Klimt's paintings. Wagner rather reminded me of Soane's plans for a London modelled on Imperial Rome or Wren's plans to recreate the city along the lines of the great European capitals. Wagner drafted design after design for a Vienna that was gleamed in white and gold art nouveau. As it happened, only his underground station designs, a church some villas and a few other buildings were ever to come into being. Nearby is Joseph Maria Olbrich's even more outrageous Secession building, white marble surmounted with a gold dome. Finally, one comes to a Russian monument for Soviet soldiers which would seem more at home in Moscow (written into the terms of the state treaty, the Austrians were not permitted to demolish it). Finally, the strasse comes to a conclusion with the Stadtpark, filled with statues of the likes of Strauss and Schubert.
Within the Innere Stadt, the street lines of the medieval city remain but, like London, the majority of the buildings are as modern as those in the Ringstrasse. The exception lies at the epicentre of the city; the Stephansdom. few buildings merit the term 'gothic' (in its modern sense, at least) as this. In spite of the tiled green and yellow roof, the exterior is blackened while precious little light filters into the dark interior, while beneath it extend the catacombs, filled with the bones of plague victims. Although baroque paintings have been placed at the bases of many of the columns, medieval wooden sculptures remain above them and very little seems to have changed in the cathedral for hundreds of years. Much the same can be said of the nearby Kaisergruft, which contains the tombs of the Hapsburg Emperors. A Capuchin church, its vaults are filled with pewter coffins decorated with images of skulls, swords and bat wings. Other churches, such as the eighth century Ruprechtskirche with its plain white interior and ivy covered exterior also reflect the city as it was when it retained its walls. But beyond these, the Innere Stadt is as diverse as the Ringstrasse. Wagner's secession Ankerhaus has a Jesuit plague column in front of it, while the second most striking church is the baroque dome of the Peterskirche. Others baroque churches, such as the Jesuitenkirche were decorated with elaborate trompe l'oeil effects alongside the typical red marble and gilt. Other churches, like Griechische Kirche reflect the increasing multi-cultural character of the city as it grew. Designed in mock Byzantine style for the Greek immigrants, the redbrick exterior hid the most ornate gold interior.
On the edge of the Innere Stadt lies the original Hapsburg Palace, the Hofburg. Entered through a baroque gateway surmounted by a copper dome, the palace is a confusing labyrinth of passages and courtyards, until one passes through to the Volksgarten and the Burggarten. The former of these is dominated by a replica of the Thesion in Athens, while the latter now houses a jugendstil butterfly house, containing White Tree Nymphs and Green-banded Swallowtails from Malaysia and Red Helen butterflies from South East Asia, as well as a number of moths and birds (rather portly and apparently grounded).
In time, the Hapsburgs created a new palace outside the city. Schoenbrunn lacks the idiosyncratic character of Sanssouci at Pottsdam but makes up for it in scale. Its park is enormous, lined through with lime and beech trees and inhabited by brazen red squirrels and ravens. The park is dotted with various follies and fountains, most strikingly a set of fake Roman ruins (once more intended to reinforce the Roman character of the Hapsburg Empire) a maze, Japanese garden and the large Victorian Palmenhaus. The Crown Prince Garden next to the palace is filled with fig, orange and lemon trees; a yew tree lies at its centre to commemorate the prince's suicide. After this, the building is nondescript; a squat structure painted in a nasty mustard colour. The interior is more promising, with rooms like the Chinese Cabinet (white walls inset with black and gold lacquer), the Porcelain room (decorated with blue and white plaster) and the Millions room (rosewood inset with Indo-Persian miniatures). Leaving the palace, one is confronted with one of the most ornate of Otto Wagner's U-Bahn pavillions, while the surrounding area is home to many of his villas and tomb in the nearby Friedhof. The pavilion was built for the Emperor, whose disdain for modernity meant that he only travelled through it twice. Though the most clearly successful Hapsburg was Maria-Theresa, the personality of Franz-Josef is stamped throughout Schoenbrunn. Haunted by tragedy (his bother and wife were both assassinated, his son committed suicide) he still seems an oddity, more like George the Third than Queen Victoria.
Further oddities came into being as the city expanded beyond the Ringstrasse. Here two houses lie within a few streets of one another; one designed with austere precision by Wittgenstein, the other the famous HundertwasserHaus and the KunstHaus Wien. Hundertwasser's reputation was that of a latterday Gaudi, the disdainer of the straight line and creator of strange and colourful buildings. In practice, I was rather more inclined to view his buildings as being essentially grimly functional but with the esoteric grafted onto them in a way that seemed annoyingly comic, like a rather forced joke. Further afield within the former Jewish ghetto of Leopoldstadt lies the Augarten. Once a formal garden where Mozart and Strauss gave concerts is now presents a rather sad spectacle, being dominated by the crumbling ruins of two of Albert Speer's World War Two flak towers. These massive concrete towers are almost certainly amongst the largest of Speer's buildings to remain in existence. Around them, the park is largely untended and is being turned into a nature reserve; a sad fate for a park whose beauty Roth had the protagonist of The Emperor's Tomb lament for in Siberia. Nearby lies the Prater fair and its famous ferris wheel. The entire area here reminds me somewhat of the disreputable Southbank (albeit in the age of Vauxhall Gardens rather than in the age of Tate Modern); a seedy and disreputable area given over to pleasure.
In front of the Hofburg on the Ringstrasse lies the Kunsthistoriches Museum. The first floor of this is taken up with the Hapsburg's painting collection. I began in the Italian section, which houses a formidable number of works by the likes of Bellini, Raphael, Giorgione, Bordone, Tintoretto and a particularly extensive Titian collection. The undoubted highlights were the few Caravaggio paintings and some Belotto views of eighteenth century Vienna (the views and buildings were still easily identifiable). The collection then passes on, via a few Velasquez paintings to Germany and the Netherlands where gothic styles were being combined with renaissance painting techniques by Durer, Holbein, Cranach, Bosch and, above all, Breughhel. For all of these is fascinating to see how religious themes were beginning to be combined with realism; for example, paintings of the crucifixion turned essentially into landscape portraiture or realistic scenes with allegorical connotations replacing straightforward Biblical scenes. The later sections with the likes of Rembrandt and Van Dyck showed the outcome of this process, excepting oddities like Arcimboldo and his veering away from realism altogether, depicting faces made up of elemental forces like fire and water. A further highlight was a solitary Vermeer towards the end of the collection.
The lower floor was occupied by Egyptian, Greek and Roman exhibits. The Egyptian section was especially noteworthy, with an entire tomb being built into the building and the supporting papyrus stalk pillars being taken from an Egyptian temple. Much of the statuary represented familiar stylised design, but there a number of Roman influenced realistic figures lacking headdress. Conversely, the Greek section was heavily influenced by Eastern designs, with a Cypriot statue showing clear Egyptian and Assyrian influences. A particularly beautiful statue of Isis, where the robes and figure were cut from different stone was particularly striking; if only in that showed such a clear basis for later representations of the Virgin Mary. This section was largely striking for having an especially good collection of Graeco-Roman crafts beyond statuary and stonework though; painting, bronzes, mosaics, metalwork, glass and even textiles. The highlight was clearly the Brygos-Scythos and its beautifully detailed depiction of Priam's supplication to Achilles. Within the Hofburg was a further museum of ancient history, mostly containing exhibits from Ephesos and Samothrace. This was perhaps more striking, containing octagonal tombs from Ephesus, a statue of Artemis and the Parthian frieze depicting Roman victory and the deification of the Emperor Varus.
The other principal gallery in Vienna is the Belvedere. Formerly a palace for Eugene of Savoy it still contains cabinets gilded with gold and a formal garden dotted with sphinx statues. Its lower gallery is dedicated largely to medieval art, dwelling in particular on the paintings of Michael Pacher, an early example of combining gothic forms with renaissance techniques. Oddly, the pictures of the Virgin Mary proved an interesting example to the principal works in the upper Belvedere, Klimt's most famous paintings. His painting of Adele Bauer, all covered in gold is very clearly drawing on the same iconographic techniques. Sadly, much of the permanent collection was unavailable (so no Munch or Van Gogh) though an exhibition of Finnish art had some striking paintings by the likes of Magnus Enckell and Akseli Gallen-Kallela, mostly based around the Kalevala. Finally, there was the Leopold Museum, a rough equivalent to the Tate. Although this has some interesting nineteenth century Austrian landscapes by the likes of Emil Jakob Schindler and modern works by the likes of Oskar Kokoschka, its collection is heavily dominated by the works of Klimt's contemporary, Egon Schiele, and his intense self portraits and paintings of Bohemian towns. Outside, the belvedere lies the Vienna Botanical Gardens, current residence of a Wollemi pine, a living fossil from the Jurassic period that was formerly thought extinct. A combination of eighteenth century formal gardens and more modern design, the gardens include some small tropical houses, a pinetum and an alpine garden.
Having one day to hand, I wanted to see how Vienna compared to the other capital of the Dual Monarchy; Budapest. As it happens, Budapest is rather more like Prague than Vienna; bisected by a river, one side is dominated by a hill surmounted by a castle and churches where the national galleries and museums are housed. The other is where the more modern city has grown. Arriving at Keleti train station, a nineteenth century structure dominated by a massive glass window, I walked downwards to the Danube. Unlike Prague, this area of the city was clearly impoverished, its buildings characterised by dilapidation and decay (as integral to its aesthetic as that of New Orleans) and the Parisi Udvar arcades seeming more like street markets. With that said, this was rather less disturbing than Vienna's inequality and the sheer number of beggars on its wealthy streets, and the anti-immigrant posters plastered around the city by the far-right Freedom Party (showing social democrat politicians with mosques in the background); though in fairness to Vienna I should note that it has always tended to vote for socialist and social democrat parties. Nonetheless, compared to that Budapest's poverty seemed less disturbing than it perhaps should have; in theory I feel that poverty without inequality is worse than prosperity with inequality, but in practise this seemed less justifiable.
My walk took me through Budapest's old Jewish quarter, with its Moorish and Art Nouveau synagogues until I arrived by the river, crossed into Buda and began climbing up the hill of Varhegy to the castle. The centrepiece of the castle is the Holy Trinity Square, home to the Matyas Templom and the Fisherman's Bastion. Although the red and yellow roof of the former is pretty it gives little idea of how beautiful the inside is, with every inch of the interior being painted so that it seems to blaze with colour. By contrast, the Fisherman's Bastion's is pure white but is like the Matyas Church in that it is a hyperreal construction; the church reconstructs the thirteenth century structure through modern eyes, while the bastion is an attempt to give Hungarian myth and history a concrete form, its seven turrets representing the seven Magyar tribes. Oddly though it reminded me most of Gaudi's Greek theatre at Parc Guell. Crossing back into Pest over the chain bridge and into the Belvaros and Lipotvaros districts, the first building I came across was the art nouveau Gresham Palace before walking along the Danube to the Hungarian Parliament. The other striking building here is St Stephen's Basilica; like St Paul's it is possible to climb to the top of the dome from where the entire city can be seen.
As mentioned, Viennese cuisine is esoteric and meals in Vienna included horse goulash (served with fried egg and gherkins), Wiener Schnitzel, Potato salad, and coffee laced with liqueur served with torte in the likes of Cafe Central and Cafe Demel (the imperial confectioners). More interesting was Heurigen in Heiligenstadt, historically a vineyard licenced as a wine tavern for a brief period. The traditional costumes seemed a little arch to someone for whom such things reek of morris dancing but the sturm new wine was rather pleasant; not unlike fermented grapefruit juice. Austrian dark and wheat beers are also particularly recommended.Labels: Architecture, Food, History, Vienna
posted by Richard 7:05 AM
Monday, September 13, 2004
Through Germanic eyes, Prague was a dark and gothic city, quite different to the stately neo-classicism of civilised Berlin. Leppin depicted Prague as not just culturally other, but other in terms of being female and Jewish as well; ironic since the Jews were more germanicised than the Czech population. Rilke, in spite of his sympathy to Czech nationalism, dwelt on macabre stories of Dalibor and suicides from the towers of the Hrad in his Prague Stories, while Meyrink dwelt on the Jewish legends of the Golem. Meyrink proceeds through all the various tropes of gothic fantasy; from doubles and prisons to somnambulism and hidden rooms. What is most striking about it are the anthropomorphic depictions of Prague, where the lights of street lamps in the fog are seen as eyes in the dark, where the Vltava rages as it pounds against the Charles bridge and the sunless houses speak to one another at night. Equally, Csokor saw houses dripping with blackness, ready to pounce. The defining images of the city in this Germanic view were the blackened gates and towers such as those of the Tyn Church with its carious spires heaped on spires. Even the more recent buildings are wreathed in gargoyles of owls, eagles and demons with eyes that seem to follow you around.
It's difficult not to sympathise with this view. More than London, the sondergotik of Prague reminds me of an Oxford where the stones were never cleaned to reveal their warm colours but remained as blackened as they were in the last century. There's even a street that has two bridges of sighs along it. However, the Czechs saw their city in quite different terms, seeing the blues and pinks its houses were painted with, the cheerful Dutch gabling and mansard roofing, the jostling of baroque and secession architecture. In this respect at least Prague reminded me of Barcelona with its modernist eruptions amidst more restrained nineteenth century buildings (Andre Breton's description of Prague as "the magical metropolis of old Europe" comes to mind). But then, more than most cities Prague is defined in terms of how its visitor wishes to see it. Nor is the city shy when it comes to offering places from which it can be seen; the great steeple of St Vitus's Cathedral, the replica of the Eiffel Tower at Petrin, the Klementium's observatory tower and the many other towers and gates that are scattered throughout. Never was there a more narcissistic city. This is hardly surprising; in a sense Prague is a hollow city, many of its treasures looted by successive invading armies throughout its history. To see the originals of the Adriaen de Vries statues in the Waldstein Palace gardens, one would have to go to Drottingholm Castle in Sweden, or to see some of Arcimboldo's paintings one would have to go to the Museum of Fine Arts in Vienna. But if the city itself is the main exhibit, it isn't just the architecture; like Barcelona, Prague's hills and streets are wooded, with the Petrin woods giving way to Strahov monastery's orchards. Like Amsterdam's canals or the Thames, the Vltava languidly coils underneath the many bridges, sunlight glinting across its surface (the river defines the city, a proxy for the seashore Shakespeare bequeathed Bohemia in The Winter's Tale).
Architecture and the visual arts were then the crowning glories of Bohemain culture in the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, since the loss of the Battle of White Mountain ensured both Catholic dominance and the decline of Czech as a written language. Where Protestant England succeeded in literature more than art and music, sensuous baroque architecture became the hallmark of Prague, with each Viennese confection being a mausoleum for the Prague that had once been.
As it happened, my first experience of Prague was that described by Leppin and Meyrink; Josefov, the area of the city's Jewish quarter. The present district stands in the ghetto whose demolition was recorded by those writers and seems little different from the surrounding old town; at this point the Jewish community was doing its utmost to assimilate into Austro-Hungarian society and the majority of the synagogues (especially the Klausen and Maisel synagogues) here are little different from the baroque churches they stand beside. On the other hand, there are the dark crenellations of the Old Synagogue, the Hebraic clock on the town hall (which goes backward in direct opposition to the more conventional timepiece above it) and the haphazard decay of the Jewish cemetery. More unusual than any of these is the Spanish synagogue, whose interior is certainly more beautiful than that of any other religious building in the city. Walking through the door little can prepare you for the blazing fire of the colours, the dark reds and blues embroidered with gold against dark wood. Though the name of the building obviously suggest the style (that is, suggesting the religious tolerance of Moorish Al-Andalus in contrast to Christian Spain), modern eyes still find the arrangement of the David star into arabesque patterns and the vine imagery of the stained glass set in Moorish arches odd and not more than a little saddening. In another of the synagogues the cause for such sadness is evident; written on the walls are the names of all the Czech Jews killed during the Holocaust.
The following day was taken up by the Hrad. I travelled to it through what has arguably become Prague's defining feature, the Charles bridge and the Brokof statues that adorn it, is a rather peculiar experience. As an exercise in hagiography the sheer weight of saints seems more like an excessive invitation to kitsch; Wenceslas, Ludmila, Nepomuk, and (rather inevitably) George. Perhaps fittingly, most of the statues are copies, some of the originals being in the city's lapidarium, others entombed inside Vysehrad's casements. The Hrad itself is a medieval castle on a hill, softened by the centuries as it was surrounded by formal gardens and baroque palaces. At the centre of this, ensconced with a set of courtyards is St Vitus's Cathedral. The nineteenth century painter Ludvik Kohl's painting of the Cathedral imagined this as a symmetrical affair, with gothic spires on either side instead of the single steeple with its gently gabled spires. In spite of Josef Mocker's efforts leading to the declaration of the Cathedral's completion in 1929, it remains unfinished in many respects; some chapels have their ceilings decorated, others do not. Some windows are stained, others are not. Of those that are, one is an art nouveau affair by Mucha, others striking modernist mosaic and others more traditional. Where I had imagined an interior more like that of the Peter and Paul Church at Vysehrad with its ceiling covered in painted greenery and gold leaf, it proved to be rather disappointingly monastic. The oddity is accentuated by the Plecnik's modernist alterations; the gold sphere fountains or black and gold bull gates.
Alongside the Cathedral is the Old Royal Palace, whose plain ribbed ceilings in the Vladisvlav Hall rather reminded me of a more spartan Hampton Court (the Palace was largely empty of furniture, save, rather oddly for large green tiled stoves), a Romanesque basilica and the various towers that compete with the ivy to line the walls. Beyond that lies a wooden stag ditch and the formal gardens beyond it, one of which was hosting a falconry display patronised by bored owls. Amidst the azaleas, almond trees and singing fountains of the Royal Gardens, Music Palaces and Summer Belvederes, tulips were naturalised into Europe from Turkey; now it settles for brazen red and black squirrels. Further down is the Waldstein Palace, current home of the Czech Senate, whose formal gardens include an rather awkward faked grotto, an aviary (more bored owls) and a pond filled with voracious carp. Of the buildings here, the nearest that any of them come to recalling the days of the Rudolfine cabinet of curiosities is the Strahov monastery, with its odd collection of shells, stuffed animals and the occasional narwhal tusk.
The lower town on the other side of the Vltava from the Hrad, sharply accentuates the city's contrasts, a confusion of buildings like the Estates Theatre and Klementium. Art nouveau halls and baroque palaces stand alongside the gothic tower that houses the Horologe. The baroque St Nicholas Church sits opposite the gothic Tyn Church in the town square.The interior of the Tyn Church is one of the most striking in Prague, where plain whitewashed buttresses and walls descend to black and gold altars and wooden tombs, like that of Tycho Brahe. The stately buildings of the national revival here, the National Museum, Opera House, National Theatre and Rudolfinum are, perhaps rather oddly given contemporary Czech antipathy to the Germanic, the parts of Prague that most reminded me of Berlin, the National Theatre's sculptures being rather like that stop the Brandenburg Gate. Finally, the botanical garden has a small tropical and desert greenhouse and a garden dedicated to South Asian plants (thief time inhabited by black squirrels), but is overall more another garden than anything like Kew. I was rather disturbed by a bird fair in the greenhouses; the parrots and finches seemed less than comfortable in their cramped cages.
Vysehrad is another castle on the hill, or rather a place where one might have been supposed to be. The hill is saturated with stories that seems a Czech answer to the Arthurian myths and its park is filled with statues of knightly figures, but the only trace of any latterday Camelot are the Hapsburg fortifications and the casemates within them. Today, its role is more like that of Highgate cemetery, the churchyard having a pantheon style monument to the likes of Mucha, Gocar and Kubelik, while Neruda, Capek, Dvorak and Smetana are buried nearby.
As mentioned above, Prague lost many of its treasures through looting; the Sternberg gallery on the Hrad is a rather slight affair, having an excellent Rembrandt, two Brueghels and a Hals and little else of interest except an engraved Dutch nautilus shell. However, the nineteenth and twentieth century works remain. Prominent amongst these is the Mucha museum. Although for many artists their greatest work is rarely the one that impinges on the public consciousness, this doesn't seem the case for Mucha. His own view of his greatest work, the Slav epic series of paintings, can often be sentimental and tainted by a rather awkward mysticism. Equally, his art nouveau posters are a trifle insubstantial, which leaves the works that made him famous; the posters of Sarah Bernhardt, as Medea, Hamlet and Lorenzo de Medici, where the darker themes of the plays perfectly balance Mucha's frothy style.
The other artistic style for which Prague is notable is cubism, being the only city where this became a form of architecture as well as design and painting. Cubist villas are dotted through the Vysehrad suburbs and the new town (as well as a cubist lamp-post of all things), where the House of the Black Madonna can be found. This is probably not the best example of the form, but it is the most idiosyncratic; painted in a burnt orange (where all the others are grey and have become somewhat dilapidated; the Czechs seem bemused by foreign interest) and bearing an icon of its namesake on the outside. I was especially taken with the idea of a cubist spiral staircase, with most of the landings apparently trying to become a mirror maze in miniature. The interior displays Emil Filla's Braquist paintings and the more exuberant responses by Josef Capek and Vaclav Spala, the latter having created paintings that more resembled Picasso (especially les Demoiselles d'avignon), Gauguin and Cezanne. But his cobalt blue painting of the Vltava was the finest work I saw in Prague. The rest dwelt on design, showing Janak's odd crystalline boxes and Gocar's jagged chandeliers.
The main gallery in Prague is the modernist Trade Fair Palace, tucked out of mind in the northern suburbs. The Palace has a bright white (rather cavernous) interior courtyard of the Corbusieresque Trade Fair Palace can be ascended by a somewhat unnerving glass elevator (rather unintentionally reminiscent of Roald Dahl). Its exhibition of twentieth century Czech art, dwelt largely on the Cubists again but also included Frantisek Kupka's peculiar brand of surrealism, where the paintings are often named after musical terms and alternated between resembled the mandelbrot set and some of Mondrian's more famous works. The most interesting part of the gallery was the nineteenth century Czech collection. This traces Czech landscape painting from the Constablesque paintings of Karel Postl to Bredrich Havranek, Julius Marak and August Piepenhagen's more romanticist conceptions. At this point Czech art diverges into differing strains, like Max Svabinsky's symbolism and Slavicek's impressionism. Amidst this, Caspar David Friedrich apparently counts as Czech, and his small North Sea in Moonlight is one of the highlights of the collection. The gallery does have a section for foreign painters; limited interest save a stunning Klimt painting, two excellent Munch paintings and surrealist seediness from Ernst. There is a separate section for French art, housing works by Delacroix, Corot, Daumier, Pisarro, Sisley, Monet, Degas, Lautrec, Seurat, Gauguin, Cezanne, Derain and Braque. Again, towering above these was a Van Gogh (who apparently counts as French) called Green Corn.
The Bilkova Villa is largely interesting for the dark building itself, which although designed to be in keeping with natural motifs (the pillars on the outside represent sheaves of corn), stands starkly against the trees that surround it. The interior seems similar to the arts and crafts love of the medieval but is a more ascetic variant; whitewashed walls, plain wooden furniture and stone clad lintels. Frantisek Billek's symbolist sculpture has more of an organic quality, its fluid line worked with the grain of the wood they are made from, just as all the villa rooms are interconnected and flow into one another.
The first concert I went to in Prague was held in the St Nicholas Church in the old town square. Most of the concert was played on the organ on an upper gallery out of sight, and one could only look round the paintings on the domed ceiling, the oddly orthodox (for a Hussite church) painting of Jesus above the altar and the enormous glass chandelier hanging like the sword of Damocles above as Bach's Prelude and Fugue in E Minor and Liszt's Prelude and Fugue on a Theme of B-A-C-H reverberated around the walls. The other organ work (Toccata from Suite Gothique), by someone I hadn't heard of before called Boellman was also exceptional; all organ works should be as deranged. The other pieces were performed by a brass ensemble, working rather better with pieces I knew like Handel's Messiah than Suite D Major by Telemann. The second concert was held in the art nouveau Municipal House, an odd building sitting next to one of the blackened gothic gatehouses, whose interior is all red marble corridors with gold decorations, with the Smetana Hall itself being white with a illuminated glass ceiling and impressionist murals covering the walls; oddly the stage furnishing was dark wood. Sadly the performance of Mozart's requiem could only be described as workmanlike (the orchestra was rather ragged in places and the gyrations of the conductor are best left undescribed), in spite of good choral and soloist performances.
Walking round Prague it is somewhat disconcerting to realise that the languages being spoken are as likely to be any other European language as Czech (especially since one's own presence can only contribute to this), partially as a result of tourism, partially as a result of foreign property ownership having priced the Czechs out of their own capital. The city seems little different to anywhere else in Europe, filled with branches of Tescos, Lush and McDonalds (though clearly not all of these are for the Czechs) and largely lacking the scars all too evident in Berlin and Leipzig. On the other hand, one does not have to look too far before seeing a skyline filled with panelaks. Communism has certainly left traces on the city. The Hotel International, an hideously predictable example of Stalinist wedding cake architecture has murals on its walls of smiling peasant women standing next to chemical factories. The star at its summit is green, probably at the recent behest of its new Western owners. The ball games hall in the Hrad gardens has had its renaissance graffito adjusted to show one of the muses holding a sickle and Stalin's five year plan. The Museum of Communism recalls the horrors of communism, but equally treats it as amusingly nostalgic kitsch, rather begging the question of whether one would wish to see a Museum of Fascism in Madrid or Rome.
The food was especially enjoyable; lunch on the wooded Zofin Island (condemned by Berlioz since "immodest young males and females indulge in brazen dancing, while idlers and wasters .. lounge about smoking foul tobacco and drinking beer."), sipping Turkish coffee in the Austro-Hungarian Cafe Imperial or eating boar in a gothic cellar. Though coffee is the preferred Czech drink, there are some good tea houses in the city. The notion that tea was introduced into Prague by Bakunin is one of those patently false myths that deserve to be cherished. While Czech beers live up to their reputation, Moravian wine deserves to be better known; sweet, like Italian wines. The best food has to be at the Hanavsky Pavilion, an exercise in Baroque Chinoiserie that has possibly the best of all the views over Prague. As I sat down, the day faded and orange glow of street lights shimmered across the Vltava. Birds wheeled overhead, crickets serenaded the night and fireworks bloomed in the sky above the city. Words like magical were meant for moments like that.
The city has been having a cow parade, scattering identical fibreglass cows across the city but giving each a different design. I rather liked the cow with the horologe clock face splashed all over it, a chessboard, worthless communist silver coinage and an delightful cow with antennae and the wings of a red admiral butterfly. Damien Hirst would love it; one hopes that the Czechs have been advised to deny him a Visa.Labels: Architecture, Art, Prague
posted by Richard 6:49 AM
Friday, April 16, 2004
Oxford is beautiful at the moment; cow parsley and buttercups flower in the parks, accompanied by horse chestnut, rhododendrons and laburnum. I'd gone to see the Radcliffe Observatory at Green College. This is actually rather larger than the observatory at Greenwich and much more elaborate, being modelled on the Athenian Temple of the Winds (another copy of which exists at West Wycombe Park) and accordingly decorated with astrological and mythological sculpture; an excellent combination of the scientific and the artistic. The building gains from being set in the college gardens, which are rather more impressive than most of the college gardens and were originally used as physic gardens. Various herbal and poisonous plants remain but overall it is as much of a botanical garden now, with wisteria, redwood, catalpa (Indian bean tree) and goldenrain trees. The actual University Botanical Gardens are also rather fine at this time of year; the grounds were filled with irises, tree peonies, anemones and euphorbias while some of the Chinese trees (such as dove trees and Kousa dogwood) with bright blue and white blossom were especially striking. The glasshouses seemed to have similar plants to the gardens at Montjuic; many South African and Chilean plants as well as lily house. On the other hand, the didactic bent of many botanic gardens was rather too apparent in the insistence on featuring plants like papyrus, cardamom and ginger, known for their utility rather than botanical or aesthetic interest. Finally, the gardens were host to a rare plants sale, so I am now the proud owner of a cycad, a living fossil I've always been fascinated by.
The University Botanical Gardens also own the Harcourt arboretum. At this time of year the collection of Lebanon cedars, giant redwoods, monkey puzzle and Moroccan blue cedars is complemented by hosts of rhododendrons throughout the gardens, with everywhere being lit up with purple and red. Most of the gardens are taken up with bluebell woods filled with oak, ash and beech, but many of the glades and walks are also host to less traditional denizens; Acers and Bamboo. The grounds were patrolled by a number of peacocks (apparently indifferent to humans, if their occupation of some of the benches was anything to go by), whose beautiful plumage was perfectly balanced by their horribly shrill calls as they prowled around the irises bordering one of the ponds . Again, the gardens at Montjuic, a section was dedicated to plants from high places (Magnolias from the Himalayas, berberis from Chile and so on.
One of the Sir John Soane Museum shows many of his unexecuted designs, covering such buildings the Houses of Parliament and Royal Palaces, all apparently designed to recreate the splendour of Imperial Rome; a bridge design crosses the distance between the Thames and the Tiber. As his austere design for the Bank of England shows, Soane was very much an architect in the style of Wren, with his failed Palladian designs for London (unlike Haussmann's Paris, Schinkel's Berlin or even Cerda's Barcelona) reflecting a similar intent to Gilbert Scott's gothic design for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (or Albert Waterhouse's design for the Strand law courts), but his own house seems more of monument to baroque fancy, a cabinet of curiosities (perhaps not entirely surprisingly; his interest in Roman ruins is a product of the romantic era as much as the enlightenment, while his taste in painting and architecture both betray an interest in the gothic).
Each room is crowded with curiosities from Rome, Egypt and Greece, but both normal and curious convex, fish-eye mirrors are used to create the illusion of space. As corridors and chambers cluster around a central courtyard, the result is much the same as Palau Guell; a confusing Escherian building where space seems to fold in on itself; Soane was greatly influenced by Piranesi and it is not hard to see the resemblance (there is even a portrait of Soane's Bank of England reimagined as a Roman ruin). The most impressive rooms are perhaps the breakfast rooms and library; the latter painted red in imitation of Pompeii and decorated with Chinese chairs and vases, where the windows are occluded by arches and a profusion of Apulian vases. The breakfast room in No.13 is covered with a vaulted ceiling arranged in a starfish shape from each corner of the room to a domed ceiling, which is covered in the aforementioned fish-eye mirrors. The breakfast room in No.12 has a ceiling covered in with vine and flowers painted in the style of a pergola; they even spill out onto the walls. The Hogarth paintings certainly live up to their reputation; the best is probably The Election, which is worthy of Gilray, where The Rake's Progress is perhaps more moralistic than satirical today.
The oddest thing I've read recently is William Bligh and Edward Christian's The Bounty Mutiny, a collection of firsthand accounts. Any expectation that such source would permit a judgement on the events in question is largely thwarted by the text though; if ill-tempered Bligh would hardly seem to have provoked Christian with any adequate motivation for the mutiny, even on the basis of Edward Christian's own accusations against Bligh. Most interesting was the least known part of the narrative; the anti-Rousseauist fable of the mutineers on Pitcairn Island.
Angela Carter's Wise Children, is a picaresque novel where the carnivalesque world of music hall gives way to the more constrained world of television. With a number of intertextual references to Shakespeare's comedies; except that here the anarchic aspects of carnival triumph. Edmund Crispin's The Moving Toyshop is really rather impressive. While writers like Agatha Christie moved detective fiction towards a more realist strain (The Forsyte Saga with more corpses), Chrispin instead took the more playful aspects of Conan Doyle and Chesterton and produced something rather more surreal. My favourite part is a rather postmodern little paragraph where the detective, Gervase Fen, decides to pass the time by 'making up some titles for Crispin.'
By now I have read so much Kundera that each novel begins to seem the work of someone trying to imitate a Kundera novel) represents another dialogic novel featuring Bakhtinian themes of laughter as a subversive force and folk art (whose status is more ambivalent). To a large extent the novel resembles Lessing's The Golden Notebook, in that a set of differing narrations converges at the end, but Jaroslav's opposed reaction to Ludvik retains a dialogic quality that staves off any simple convergence or resolution in the ending. As always with Kundera the most dialogic aspect of the novel is the comedy of errors that ensues from the character's misperception of each other. On the one hand Ludvik states that "the virulence of his (communist) faith was alien to me." But Jaroslav sees him differently; "He had the look all communists had at the time. He looked as if he'd made a secret pact with the future and thereby acquired the right to act in its name;" the same principle applies to Ludvik's misjudgment of Lucie and Helena's misjudgment of Ludvik. Similarly, the character of Kostka even deconstructs much of the basis for the novel; "No great movement designed to change the world can bear to be laughed at or belittled. Mockery is a rust that corrodes all it touches." The most interesting aspect of this is the role of folk art in the novel, as it revolves around a folk ritual depicting the ride of a king. On the one hand, this is a source of collective tradition against the corrosive effects of capitalism ("We needed to purge our musical culture of the lifeless hit tune cliches that the bourgeoise had used to force-feed the people. We needed to replace them with an original and genuine art of the people."), but later as a symbol of the communist dereliction of tradition ("nothing but good old romanticism with a thin veneer of folk melody."); it is only as Ludvik ceases to see it as a symbol, as much as he sees other as symbols that it can be revived.
Much of Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London is as much polemic as documentary, two genres that never seem entirely reconciled. This respective sections on Paris and London each conclude with polemical sections that cleave to socialist conventions, asserting that "there is no difference between rich and poor" anymore than there is a difference between white and black, while demonising the rich by snidely commenting of American hotel guests "perhaps it hardly matters whether such people are swindled or not," essentially the inversion of the fear of the mob he had denounced previously. More strikingly, themes of false consciousness appear in the descriptions of waiters; "waiters are seldom socialists, have no effective trade union.. they are snobs and find the servile nature of their work rather congenial." However, the book has many differing views on poverty. Most obviously, Orwell contradicts his own argument on equality by observing that "and educated man can put up with enforced idleness, which is one of the great evils of enforced poverty... the man who really merits pity... faces poverty with a blank, resourceless mind." Equally, Orwell may well be sanguine as to swindling American hotel guests, but seems to dislike the same attitude when demonstrated by others, such as a communist waiter; "He had a curious, malignant spirit. He told me, as a matter of pride, that he had sometimes wrung a dirty dishcloth into a customer's soup.. just to be revenged upon a member of the bourgeoisie." Elsewhere, when reviewing the inhabitants of a hotel, Orwell writes that "poverty frees them from ordinary standards of behaviour, just as money frees them from work," a view that seems more to romanticise poverty, casting it as a form of freedom rather than of oppression.
Given this, it hardly seems surprising that Orwell excites such divergent attitudes (For instance, the recent account of him as someone who dressed his conservatism in progressive rhetoric persistently attacking the legitimate socialist movements of his time. He blamed the poverty in Wigan on the failure of socialists and the rise of tyranny on the success of socialists. Presented with any given problem, he was more enraged by the failure of the left than by anything else), but it's difficult to avoid wondering if it isn't more a case of 'all things to all men,' since the account of poverty in Down and Out in Paris and London is such that it can easily accommodated into any number of political creeds. Orwell's political philosophy seems as occluded as the trouble with Hamlet, to borrow TS Eliot's description.
Another peculiarly inconsistent figure was Derek Jarman, whose Smiling in Slow Motion I have just completed. On the one hand, his vision is one of inclusion and social equality; "queer people should demand equality in all aspects of life" while decrying the fact that "lesbians and gay men have no way of sanctioning of their relationship" i.e. marriage. On the other hand, he can proclaim that "it is the assimilationists are the enemy," and celebrates the polymorphous perversity of queer, denouncing social conformity; "why does he wants us to fit into a pattern of life that is so obviously outmoded.. if this is what gay has to offer, I'm glad I'm queer." Although the term 'gay' is frequently used as with invective it is also often used as a mark of identity, reflecting the ambivalence of wanting equality and denouncing that with which equality is sought and wearing the red badge of the outcast with pride. For example, Jarman can relish the prospect of cathedrals being burned down; "It is a delightful outcome that the church should tear itself apart. I hope it as destructive as possible to that prison of dreams and desire. let the trumpets blast the walls of the churches till they fall into a picturesque ruin." But when he visits Durham Cathedral he finds himself holding back any invective to the clerics he meets and follows a life redolent of tradition. To some extent, it's impossible not to be reminded of his own complaint against Wilde; "an infuriating icon for queers - the complicity with snobbery and writing less interesting than the life."Labels: Architecture, Flora, History, Literature, Oxford, ScienceFiction
posted by Richard 2:59 PM
Monday, September 8, 2003
"The flâneur is the creation of Paris. The wonder is that it was not Rome. But perhaps in Rome even dreaming is forced to move along streets that are too well-paved. And isn't the city too full of temples, enclosed squares and national shrines to be able to enter undivided into the dreams of the passer-by, along with every shop sign, every flight of steps and every gateway? The great reminiscences, the historical frissons - these are all so much junk to the flâneur, who is happy to leave them to the tourist. And he would be happy to trade "all his knowledge of artists' quarters, birthplaces and princely palaces for the scent of a single weathered threshold or the touch of a single tile - that which any old dog carries away." - Walter Benjamin
In many ways, Barcelona is the untidy city of the flaneur rather than the tourist; one can only get to know it by walking round it, rather than by visiting individual sites (just as well since the dreadful transport system exists for the sole purpose of educating foreigners as to what Orwell meant when he observed that Spain would be a fascist state par excellence, though not as efficient as the Germans. As Houellebecq observed, travel does tend to reinforce national stereotypes). As such, upon arrival, a walk by Port Vell (Looking down into the water I noticed a jellyfish lazily drifting by; not something I had expected to see so close to the harbour) and then down the Ramblas, (seeing ordinary buildings with beautiful ceramic tiling and others such as the Liceu) with it's predictable array of living statues and painters, and less predictable array of tarot readers and poultry or exotic bird sellers was in order. But before that, I climbed to the top of the Columbus tower at Port Vell, (which, depending on your point of view, either looks forward to the Americas or is simply turning his back on the city) and looked over the city, with its avenues of palm trees hemmed in by the Mediterranean on the one side and steep hills on the other, especially Montjuic with the Palau Nacional at its summit. After this, I began to walk.
The Palau Guell, one of the few architectural masterpieces in the old town, is the most interesting example of Gaudi's early work; ostensibly a palace for his nouveau riche patron, it more resembles a fortress in many ways, not least of which must rank its battlements. This most hostile of buildings has an elaborate interior design which contributes to a somewhat convoluted and claustrophobic feel, aided by the grey marble, black iron and dark wooden panelling (ironically, the most colourful room was the servants area with its traditional tiled ceiling). On the roof, the chimneys and ventilation stacks had been covered with coloured tiles and had been contorted into the same organic shapes (like an inverted image of the pillars in the cellar) that would characterise his later work up to the small lizard sculpture resting on one of the stacks, but which seemed oddly out of place here. The later Casa Mila, or La Pedrera, seems similar in many ways; a bland stone exterior mixed with black ironwork on the balconies. However, the undulating surface of the exterior, the glass door with octopus tentacle-like iron frames, the inner courtyard painted in the colours of forests and seas, suggest further development.
The two works that most seemed to fulfill this promise were Parc Guell and Casa Batllo. Of these, the former combined strange earthen pillars, sometimes surmounted with sisal, alongside the paths with the shining greek theatre area, a mosaic made out of largely white tiles, but which suddenly erupts into colour, as with the famous lizard fountain at the base of the steps or the bench back rests. The gateway buildings are amongst the most eccentric Gaudi designed, while the house that currently forms the Casa Museu is much more conventional, save its pink icing colour. This forms a museum now, set amongst a tranquil garden filled with such items as Gaudi's iron fencing (in the shape of seeds and palm leaves) and tiling (patterned with ammonites and starfish). Within the museum, the Ibarz-Clapes furniture (more explicitly art nouveau that Gaudi's own modernism) is perhaps the most striking exhibit, alongside the Casa Calvet mirror. The latter is perhaps the most beautiful building in the city, with its 'house of the bones' balconies jutting out of a sinuous exterior that increasingly resembles fish scales as it reaches the roof. Inside, the light wooden furniture and window frames, the stained glass windows as well as the white and blue inner courtyard (as a result of which it all becomes rather like walking round an aquarium), show the contrast with the earlier Palau Guell, the centrepiece being the way the front room ceiling swirls around the central light fitting.
On the other hand the temple of the Sagrada Familia, had me wondering whether Orwell might not have had a point in his intense dislike for it. The stone has weathered and darkened over time, something that normally enhances the beauty of gothic cathedrals, but which would seem to have had the opposite effect here, especially given the bright colours of some of the ornamentation. What enlivens the cathedral is the sculpture, such as the rather weary tortoises that sit underneath the columns or the snails and sea urchins that crawl across them. On the other hand, the rather harsh modern sculptures that cover the angular facade seem utterly at odds with the Gaudian aesthetic (the facades that do exist somewhat resemble melted wax) and I am unconvinced that concrete is an appropriate medium to continue the construction.
In all honesty,I was more impressed with Montaner's Hopital de Sant Pau. Donemech Montaner easily demonstrates the problems of speaking of modernism in Barcelona, since much of these total works of architecture draw heavily on traditional styles, creating a perhaps rather stronger resemblance to arts and crafts (the same applies to Gaudi, but where Gaudi redefined the language of architecture, Montaner subverted it, turning this redbrick building into a secular cathedral with elaborate ornamentation). That said, these examples of Viennese architecture have some interesting parallels to Gaudi.
Montaner's own house, the otherwise rather modest Casa Montaner is covered in murals) than art nouveau. The same can almost be said of the Palau de la Musica Catalaner, where the ornamentation has become some profuse that it outweighs the normal aspects of architecture, as with the stained glass skylight that bulges downwards in the aspect of a raindrop, the ubiquitous flower ornamentation with the pillars being trees and everything so brightly painted as to remind one of the witches' house in the Brother's Grimm tale of Hansel and Gretel.
The other great Catalan architect, Puig Cadafalch, is perhaps simpler, having a penchant for gothic with elaborate stonework and crenellations, something which can be somewhat staid in the case of the Casa Macaya, but which can equally be extraordinarily effective as with the Casa de la Punxes with its green and red tower (resembling Gaudi's chequered red white and green Casa Vicens) and sundial, or the Moorish Casa Amatler. The latter, next to Casa Battlo and near Montaner's Casa Lleo Morera on the Mansana de la Discordia formed a particularly breathtaking sight, though sadly I was unable to see the stained glass on the interior of Casa Lleo Morera (I did note the same egg shaped style sculpture atop the building as at the Palau de la Musica, a bizarre fixation also displayed by Dali).
Montaner also designed one of the buildings for the Citadel Park (the building is now a zoological museum, and with its dark brick and crenellations looks oddly like a Cadafalch design), the site for an international exhibition, a rather delightfully idiosyncratic place where you can never quite guess what is round the next corner. Next to the boat lake, there is one of the most elaborate and ornate fountains I have ever seen, requiring a large flight of steps to reach he summit, while next to it is the model of a Mammoth. Elsewhere, the park has the city's Museum of Modern Art, which is perversely filled with nineteenth century art and nothing from the twentieth century. Walking inside, I disturbed some rather noisy green parrots that seem to have taken residence in the trees there (the more common sight in the city is the pigeon and stray cats; walking to the Park, I had looked inside a closed nineteenth century market and observed that its sole occupant was a sunbathing cat). Though Spanish art does seem to veer between the conservative and the derivative (at least until Picasso, Dali and Miro), it did have some impressive pieces, such as Maria Fortuny's painting of Morocco and the battle of Tetuan, or the paintings of Casas and Rusinyol of Parisian and Barcelonan life, though it must be said that the best exhibits were those showing design rather than art; the furniture that the architects designed for many of the above houses. Finally, a rather surprisingly conventional painting of Dali's father was rather well done.
The other gallery I visited, the Palau Nacional, has a rather more slim collection of Gothic and Romanesque art (which impressed in terms of colour if less so in terms of artistry and subject matter; there are only many martyrdoms one can tolerate). This is a rather bombastic neo-classical affair at the summit of Montjuic, which was perhaps more notable for its nearby Botanical garden. This covered Mediterranean style environments from a number of countries; so that Canarian pine grew alongside palms, alongside scarlet bottlebrush, paradise flowers, broom, euphorbia, crassulae and strawberry trees.
Outside Barcelona, I visited Tarragona, a rather nondescript and unlovely town along the coast, which has a number of Roman ruins, including an amphitheatre and the remains of the circus and forum. A more interesting part of the town was the archaeological museum, with a wonderful mosaic of the Medusa, red Roman lamps and rather fine glass funereal vases (and more idiosyncratically, a marble phallus with an inscription that read 'hic habitat felicitas'). But the most interesting part was the Casa Castellarnau, onetime residence to the Hapsburg Emperor. Painted scenes as well as painted columns adorn the walls, creating the aspect of Versailles within a small villa, the upper sitting room in particular having an enormous chandelier. The most pleasant room was probably one with Louis Quinze furniture upholstered in blue and large windows looking out onto a tiled balcony, but the most tranquil was an inner courtyard filled with plants, and the sound of a small fountain.
Since Catalan cuisine is now apparently equally worthy of mention as its architecture, I should mention some of the food, such as eating at Els Quatre Gats a restaurant founded by Casas and Rusinyol, build by Cadafalch and which was later to house the first Picasso exhibition. Eating at such places is rather nice if only for the venue, but the food was rather good. Over the week, at various restaurants (including one dedicated to Eastern European cooking called Vildsvin) I became acquainted with cuttlefish, reindeer and goat, and obviously dishes like squid and cuttlefish paella cooked in black ink. Another holiday pursuit worthy of mention is examining the coinage; the number of non-Spanish Euros was quite high, about half of them though predictably lower in Tarragona, with the coins mainly being from France, then Germany, Italy and some from the Netherlands and Portugal.Labels: Architecture, Barcelona
posted by Richard 2:48 PM
Thursday, September 19, 2002
After Amsterdam last year, Berlin was quite a different experience; though permissive and liberal in most matters it is rather more restrictive in other matters then comparatively illiberal Britain. Certainly, few people in Britain would put up with the Gestapo-trained museum attendants. Berlin itself is a rather impressive city, in spite of the further reconstruction needed by the East and the architecture destroyed
in the War (Potsdammer Platz in particular now resembles New York more than
most European capitals, fulfilling Weimar Republic ambitions; the commercial grandiloquence seems a poor substitute for the former countercultural city described by Highsmith and Isherwood). I began by walking the length of the Tiergarten,
the forest area that used to Frederick's hunting ground, to Siegessaule,
the victory column from the top of which the entire city can be seen for
miles around. At the end of the wooded area the Brandenburg gate demarcates
the beginning of the city, with the Reichstag next to it. This looks somewhat incongruous from a distance; the Germans have been far more diligent in precisely reconstructing damaged buildings
in all other matters and the sight of an eighteenth century building with a glass dome rather than the original copper one is decidedly odd. However, the dome does look rather more impressive at close quarters (the idea was to symbolise transparency in viewing the deliberations of the Parliament below; needless to add one cannot actually see those deliberations from the dome, proving once more the triumph of symbolism over fact. Similarly, when Joseph Roth visited the building in the thirties he recorded that the main doors were kept shut, so that the bourgeois-democratic representatives came and went through a small tradesmen's entrance at the side.) and the views from the roof are again impressive.
Passing through the gate and down Unter den Linden (containing some of the city's finest buildings such as the Humboldt University), it does not take long to realise that Berlin's architecture was conceived on a grand scale (though I was somewhat unsettled that the first thing I saw in the East was a branch of Starbucks). Mostly constructed under the direction of Friedrich Von Schinkel, much of it would seem to have been a response to the cultural inferiority Germany felt towards France at the time. Much of Germany's cultural development occurred in a comparatively compressed period of time. For example, Schinkel's buildings are mainly neoclassical, yet his paintings are typically romantic depictions of medieval society and gothic building. Much of his buildings destroyed in the war were apparently experiments in brick (though more of that survives than Nazi period architecture). Many of Schinkel's paintings are contained within the Old National Gallery on the Museum Island
and show a skilled, if not brilliant, painter. The highlight of the collection
has to be the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich though, showing a talent for landscape painting similar to Constable but also to Turner, and with one painting that even resembled Whistler.
The other noteworthy aspects of the collection are paintings from Carl Blechen,
Arnold Bocklin (including a rather amusing portrait of a somewhat overweight dragon as well as his rather more famous Isle of the Dead painting) the paintings of Berlin in the nineteenth century by Gaertner, and a good selection of impressionist paintings including Cezanne, Gauguin and an excellent Renoir. I also briefly visited a collection of Picasso's paintings from a Jewish private collector. I must admit to not especially liking Picasso, though his early phase under the influence of Braque was quite pleasant, if a little austere. Another slight disappointment was the Bauhaus Archive, although it did have an interesting painting by Klee. On the other hand, the Brohan Museum, for art nouveau, art deco and functionalism was wonderful, containing Tiffany glasses, Guimard's (most famous for designs of the Paris Metro) furniture designs and Hagemeister's paintings.
The old gallery is next to the Pergamon Museum, which is a further testament to grandiloquence, containing an entire temple from Pergamon, a three storey gateway from Miletas, a balcony from Balbeck, and a palace from Jordan. I was mainly interested in the gateway and ramparts from Babylon, where the blue ceramic tiles remain extraordinarily vivid. Next to them was a rather unmarked exhibit, which I presume to be the original tablet of the Code of Hammurabi. The city's Egyptian Museum is in a similar vein, containing numerous gateways and mummies, though the most extraordinary thing about it is the bust of Nefertiti, one of the first and most iconic moments in western art.
Outside Berlin, Pottsdam contains the Sanssouci palace and estates, in much the same manner as mad King Ludwig, Frederick the Great's palace has an almost unhinged quality (literally if one considers the deranged parrots crawling across the walls in the Voltaire room) to it's splendour, resembling Tennyson's palace of art (One might have said that the New Palace built later on the same estate was more restrained, were it not for the ballroom whose walls were festooned with seashells). There is a separate gallery for Frederick's painting collection, though little of it was to my taste, excepting a typically gory Caravaggio. The estate was rather vast, though I did have time to look
at the Chinese house (largely characterised by a rather poor conception of what was or wasn't Chinese) and the somewhat incongruous presence of a windmill. Similar architecture was to be found at the Charlottenburg palace back inside Berlin. Built for Sophie Charlottenburg, the ground floor is
quite similar to Sanssouci, though the upper floor is rather more interesting, having rather more esoteric portraits. The Schinkel Pavillion on the grounds was also well worth visiting.
The final item of note from Berlin was the Botanischer Garten, which boasted considerable grounds and a very large set of glasshouses. While containing all of the usual suspects (cacti, insectivorous, succulents, ferns and so on), it was interesting to note that they have followed the lead of the Eden Project and introduced animal species; upon one sign a lizard rested, and in one room zebra finches filled the air with their song. In another, terrapins rested next to stepping stones across a pool; as one crossed one became aware that carp beneath appeared to be behaving in a manner rather
more expected from pigeons in Trafalgar square.
Moving on from Berlin by train (most of which network is better than Britain even in the East, though I was a little unsettled by the fact that the doors would open before trains had quite stopped; though the warning signs were nothing if not direct), it was somewhat depressing to view all of the derelict factories and dilapidated housing in the East, where reconstruction has many years to go. That said, arriving in Leipzig via Wittenberg (only catching a glimpse of the Cathedral en route), one can only pay tribute to how far they have come; the city is now indistinguishable from any other city in Western Europe. Leipzig is a rather quiet city (though the number of skinheads, punks and goths was markedly higher than in Berlin), proud of its cultural heritage (Bach and the Luther-Eck disputations), though the quiet was undermined somewhat by the election with the PDS campaigning
on the day I arrived and the SPD on the day I left. The Bach Museum and the Thomas Church were and adequate diversion, though the truth is that there is very little there.
More interesting was something the city was rather less enthused about; Colditz. The trip there was not easy, as it was necessary to take a train out to an unpleasant town in the middle of nowhere, with a six minute transfer to a coach I had no idea how to find, which only left once every two hours. In the end the journey was completed without incident, and I arrived. The castle's museum depicts something almost like a public schoolboy's game. As with the prison camp in Vonnnegut's Slaughterhouse 5 the inmates had few diversions; sunbathing, music, pantomime, bridge and bizarre escape plans, which each nationality created in secret from prisoners of other nationalities. These
included destroying Colditz with dry rot, walking out disguised as a woman (only foiled by an overly helpful British officer who told the German guards that the lady had dropped her watch) and building a glider out of floorboards, cloth and glue. The most alarming thing about the last plan is that it would probably have worked (as shown in a later experiment) had not the war finished
first.
I read Franklin's autobiography during the trip; not the most interesting of documents, it must be said, and the quasi-puritan work ethic (occasionally slipping into schadenfreude at the failures of those he is pleased to call the less industrious) was not especially agreeable.Labels: Architecture, Art, Berlin, History
posted by Richard 5:59 AM
