Oh So Primitive

I am enthralled by the works of the so-called Northern Primitives, so I was really pleased to see works by two of them in Sibiu this week. Some might say something about photographs making these paintings redundant but I disagree. The works that van Eyk, Memling and Rogier van der Weyden have left us transcend photographs - although I cannot explain how.

Van Eyk, Man with a Blue Hat, (a portrait of Duke Philippe I of Brabant), painted in 1430; Hans Memling, Portrait of a Man Reading, painted in 1470; Hans Memling, Portrait of a Woman at Prayer, painted in 1470.

Part of the collection of the Bruckenthal Museum's collection in Sibiu, Romania.

The Andrew Problem - a Solution

This house, deep in the Romanian countryside, belongs to King Charles III. It is miles from a good road so it is safe from paparazzi and other pursuers of gossip journalism. The King needs to establish his brother in it. As winter approaches, most of the local bears should be preparing for hibernation so Andrew will be able to go for long walks and think about what his mother might wish him to do with his future.

Recent Reading - Monsieur Ozenfant’s Academy by Charles Darwent

Amedée Ozenfant was once a considerable figure in art circles, a celebrity of a sort, in his own time. One of the books he wrote, Art, in French, and Foundations of Modern Art in its English translation, was widely read, immensely influential and used as a standard teaching text. Ozenfant himself was described by senior figures in the French art establishment as the person who “represented modern French painting in London”. On 3rd December, 1937, he became a pioneer of arts broadcasting when he took part in a BBC programme called Three Artists and a Bowl of Fruit in which, live from the Alexandra Palace, using ten apples, eleven oranges and a pineapple, he produced three pictures - a realist composition; a Cubist still life; and a “Purist” landscape in which he transformed the apples and oranges into rocks and the pineapple into a palm tree. His performance elicited very positive responses from the handful of people then in possession of televisions and viewing that night.

In his youth, Ozenfant was exceptionally close friends with Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, which may seem no great claim to fame, until you realise that Jeanneret is better known as Le Corbusier (a name that Ozenfant himself suggested.) The two men later fell out, but before they did they founded an artistic movement called Purism, collaborating in the writing of an essay, called “Le Purisme”, that set out what the movement aimed to be. The essay was published in 1920 in their own magazine, accompanied by a photograph of the two of them, standing together in the basket of a hot air balloon.

Strangely, despite his considerable fame in the years before the Second World War, as Charles Darwent finds when he begins to research Ozenfant and the Ozenfant Academy of Fine Arts, the school Ozenfant set up in Kensington in 1936 and ran until 1939, the artist seems to have largely disappeared from the consciousness of the art world in the post-war decades.

Darwent’s book is a delight, despite the fact that for a lot of the time he is wrestling with smoke. Ben Nicholson and Henry Moore both taught at Ozenfant’s school but the papers they left for posterity contain no trace of their time there. The papers of Julian Trevelyan, one of Ozenfant’s students at the academy, are equally silent on the subject of both Ozenfant and the school. Charlotte and Ronald Morris, the school’s generous backers (who I can’t help thinking of as a British John and Sunday Reed), “simply fade from view”, Darwent tells us, adding “nothing is known of their lives after 1939.”

One great friend of Ozenfant’s in London, Erno Goldfinger, the modernist architect who, according to David Kynaston’s Austerity Britain, made the lives of journalists at the Daily Worker miserable with his open plan design for their newsroom and insistence on very low toilets to ensure a “more complete…bowel evacuation” has not by any means faded from view. While he was not a student at the school, his wife (the heiress of the Crosse and Blackwell business) was, and it is one of her works made at the academy that is among the very few pieces of art that survives from the work created under the tutelage of Mr Ozenfant. Her strange, even compelling, picture can be seen at Goldfinger House, 2 Willow Road, Hampstead. It is drawn in 9H pencil, the drawing tool Ozenfant insisted on (because it eliminated spontaneity!), and it depicts two ears. Typical of Darwent’s amusing style is his comment on this drawing:

“Goldfinger’s ears… are rendered outlandishly large by her outsized paper [Ozenfant not only insisted on 9H pencils and hated sketchiness; he made students work on the most enormous sheets of paper available]. This, together with the fact that so much effort has been expended on a part of the human anatomy so commonly overlooked in art, makes them seem slightly mad.”

The drawing, along with photographs of other similar works by other students of the academy, (the originals have mostly either been lost or destroyed, although Anne Cobham Said’s extraordinary Jo’s Wild Wood, is in the collection of the Tate), are very arresting and oddly haunting. Surprisingly, if I knew nothing about Ozenfant, I would describe them as surrealist, which given Purism, the movement that Ozenfant co-founded, was in direct opposition to Surrealism, is peculiar to say the least. *1.

Perhaps even more surprising, the most famous student to study at the school, (famous as a visual artist that is - Dulcie Gray was also an alumnus but went on to be an actress rather than a painter), Leonora Carrington, went on to be most definitely a Surrealist. In later years, Carrington spoke about her time studying with Ozenfant at the academy. Among her comments is the highest recommendation a teacher can be given, I think:

“He never left you disheartened.”

Although Carrington (and possibly Francis Bacon) are the only former students of the school to have gone on to become household names, the story Darwent tells of the academy is extremely diverting. Photographs reproduced in the book show its youthful students gathered in front of the building or working inside, in the studio, an enormous curtain stretched in the background, behind which Ozenfant laboured (in my view slightly ludicrously) on his vast obsessional canvas VIE. Looking at them, I sense enthusiasm and cheerfulness, despite the fact that war is coming.

Did they not know, I ask myself - and the photographs take on the poignance of hindsight. Here they all are, endeavouring to learn how to create beauty, unaware that - or trying to ignore their fears that - all such innocence is about to be shattered. Slaving away, day after day, drawing - on Ozenfant’s insistence “at a tar like pace”, as Darwent puts it - with 9H pencils on vast sheets of paper, while their demanding master struggles with a work no one other than him will ever really care very much about, I feel they are all in a pantomime and I want to shout, “Look behind you.”

It is this that, for me, provides the underlying fascination of the book - the glimpse it gives of that strange time. Was there a true innocence to those years, were the students of the academy able to conceive of a tranquil future where fulfilling their ambitions was possible, or were people deliberately fooling themselves, going through the motions of life, knowing in their hearts that peace wasn’t going to last?

In the book’s final section, Darwent provides a translation of Ozenfant’s diaries from the period and these throw some light on the attitudes of the time. Many passages are funny, (especially the section on mud wrestling), there is a great deal of preoccupation with VIE and its progress and fate - but, as the days go by, the political news from the wider world seeps in increasingly, as things become steadily worse.

At one point Ozenfant’s comments seem to be worryingly applicable to our own situation today, (and is it perhaps precisely that - the suspicion that we too are living at a moment just before something truly terrible happens that as yet we cannot quite foresee - that makes reading about the lives of people during the 1930s so compelling?):

“The powerlessness of moderate democracies comes from the fact that, when times are grave, we all count on a mass, which is to say on each other: and nobody does anything.”

At another moment, he is more prosaic on the threat ahead, or at least more personally focussed:

“I have no money. Hitler is a pain in the ass.”

Darwent writes brilliantly about pictures and is never boring. The book he has produced is a glimpse of an all-but-forgotten enterprise that existed during a precarious moment. I hope that the moment we are living through is not in any way the same.

—-

*1. Darwent I think explains this very well when he says of Anne Cobham Said’s works that although the subjects were simply things she found near her house in Wiltshire, “their treatment remained essentially the same: so hyper-real as to become surreal.”

(It should also be noted that post-war, Darwent points out, that one aspect of Ozenfant's work - his chromatic theories - were remembered by one person, David Medd, who, with his wife Mary, worked on the design of primary schools in Britain. As a result, Darwent says, "Generations of English schoolchildren would recite their times tables between walls whose colours had been dictated, at one remove, by Amédée Ozenfant.")

Recent Reading: Strange Meeting by Susan Hill

 

At the start of this beautiful short novel we meet John Hilliard, home in England, on leave from World War One France. He is unable to feel any pleasure in being away from the front as what he has seen and experienced there haunts him and no one in England has the faintest idea about how things on the battlefield actually are.

When he returns to France, he finds that most of the people he knew there before he left for leave have been killed. He discovers that he will be sharing his quarters with a new recruit called David Barton. He is at first a little put out by this development. However, Barton it turns out has the gift of lightening everyone's spirits. Furthermore, he and John form an extraordinarily warm and loving friendship, despite being very different in upbringing and personality.

Susan Hill creates these characters and all the others around them skilfully and provides a vivid and gripping picture of life in the trenches. She makes it very clear thanks to her brilliant descriptive power, that the war both young men are caught up in is little more than a meat grinder for the youth of Europe.

The book is very moving indeed. Hill's imagination is extraordinary and her skill as a writer is superb

Natural Disaster

I went to London's Natural History Museum the other day. In my childhood, I went there regularly with my school. Usually when we arrived we would each be given a clipboard with a blank piece of paper attached. Our teacher would put a box of crayons in the middle of the floor for us to pick from. Then we would spend the afternoon trying to draw one of the museum's stuffed Dodos or a hummingbird in the museum's hummingbird case. 

Sometimes as well we would go into the museum's central hall, which had nothing in it except the cast of a skeleton of a brontosaurus. It never ceased to amaze. A creature that enormous used to roam about! The idea ignited our imaginations:

The museum now says the skeleton we loved wasn't a brontosaurus. More importantly, they have removed it from the splendid hall it stood in and suspended the skeleton of a blue whale there. I've no idea where they've put the brontosaurus. I do remember that the blue whale used to be elsewhere, with an amazing model of an actual blue whale beneath it. The model has vanished and without it, the skeleton dangling high above one's head is hard to visualise as anything much - perhaps a pterodactyl of some kind. I wonder if the removal of the matching fullscale model is less because it is considered inauthentic and more because it might impede the helter skelter rush of people that the museum encourages now.

For the once tranquil spacious rooms have been cut up and cluttered with permanent scaffolding, supporting storyboards and a bewildering clutter of screens. 

I am sure the visitor numbers have sky rocketed since I was little and that this is the thing that will be produced as a defence for the vandalism the building has undergone. But the intentions of the museum's founders have been forgotten, in my opinion. Everywhere you turn, if you look behind the overlay of the modern decor, you see evidence of the early creators' love of the natural, their desire to instil in visitors a sense of wonder and admiration for creation. In its current form, I doubt many visitors leave feeling they have had a chance to learn anything much, let alone to marvel. You need quiet and the opportunity to stand still and stare in order for that sort of thing to be possible. Instead, as a visitor the other day, I felt I was being herded and hurried, mainly towards the shops the museum's administrators have stuffed into spaces carved out of airy old rooms. In those shops, you can choose between objects of varying price and quality, almost all of them made in China and unlikely to bring you much pleasure once you get them home. After cluttering up your house for a year or two, most will eventually end up in landfill. 

And that is odd, as the one thing the museum is now obsessed by is "the environment", as in human made climate change:

The vandals in charge do not seem to notice how much love and care is visible everywhere you look in the original interior. Or worse, they have noticed and they want to hide the beautiful details, because the modern additions - not to mention the wares on sale in the shops - look so third-rate by comparison (I kept having to remind myself that I was in a museum, not an airport, because that was what it felt like, in atmosphere and style). 

Here are some details on walls and pillars, many of them only visible if you look behind the new screens that have been put up to line the walls with visual static:

Have the museum's new masters not noticed these lovely things, or do they actively hate attempts at charm and decorative harmony? 

What has been done to the museum makes me really sad. Wherever possible ugliness reigns, with additions seeming to deliberately obscure the founders' efforts to create beauty. A feeling of scholarly calm has been replaced by a frenzy of electronic gadgetry and climate propaganda (and how odd, given the obsession with being green, that, with all the additional screens and wizardry, more energy must be being consumed now than in the old days, when all you had were the simple, extraordinary exhibits). Once, you would stand in an almost empty space and gaze at a single dinosaur skeleton and let your imagination take flight. Now you are jostled forward until you turn a corner to be faced by a jerky electronic facsimile of a Tyranossaurus Rex that allows no scope for imagination and yet doesn't really convince either. 

(I had thought to recommend the Vienna Natural History Museum as a surviving example of how London's Natural History Museum used to be, but I've just searched for the museum's website and this is the first thing that appeared in response. Perhaps it is an aberration, but I fear that the people there have decided that they must not be stuffy and have swept away all their beautiful wood panelling and ancient glass cases, in a boneheaded bid for relevance. It is one thing to have boneheads on your dinosaur skeletons, but not your administrators, please)

Recent Reading - Loved and Missed by Susie Boyt

One of my children is a teacher and at the end of term she often gets enchanting letters of thanks from those she teaches. In one she showed me the other day, the writer recommended a book, saying "I cried throughout the whole book but it was worth it." I had the same experience with Loved and Missed. I have seldom enjoyed a book so wholeheartedly.

The book tells the story of Ruth, her largely estranged daughter, Eleanor, and her daughter's child, Lily. Ruth is, like the daughter I mention above, a teacher of English literature in a girls' school. She tells her pupils: 

"There is so much in life that doesn't matter, so many things that hold you back, hem you in and throw you off the scent of what's important. Don't get too bogged down in things that don't count or things you cannot influence, and specifically don't worry too much about making sure others know you're in the right, because it so easily gets in the way of what you want and need. Become an expert at shrugging most of life off and free yourself for what interests you. Hone your focus. Don't bother with cleaning or tidiness beyond basic hygiene. Don't make your appearance your primary concern. It will zap all your creativity. Be as self-sufficient as you dare. Sometimes you hold more strength when people don't know what you think or feel, so be very careful whom you confide in. People can run with your difficulties when you least expect it, distort them, relish them even, and before you know it they're not yours any more. Respect your privacy. And earn your own money or you'll lack power. Take good care of your friendships, nurture them and they'll strengthen you. Don't turn frowning at the defects of other people into a hobby, delicious though it may be; it poisons you. Read every day - it is a practice that dignifies humans. Become a great reader of books and it will help you with reality, you'll more easily grasp the truth of things and that will set you up for life."  

Among her favourite books is Russell Hoban's Bread and Jam for Frances, which instantly made me love her, as it is also one of mine. Even without that detail, she is an extremely endearing character, brave, perceptive, (she describes a friend's family has having "those brittle English manners that always seemed to me more like bullying."), full of love and very aware of her own shortcomings. Her life has been difficult - her father disappeared from the family home when she was about six: "Slipping out to the shops, he said, overdressed for the weather, big coat, hat even; hours passed...he had gone" - and after that, Ruth took care of her mother, "a lovely person but even as a child I saw she was young for her age".  Despite the child Ruth's best efforts, her mother tries to kill herself. Ruth makes no complaint - if anything she feels remorse for not having done better - but she does admit that "my childhood required a lot of ingenuity." 

Eleanor, Ruth's daughter, is the product of a short relationship with a man "for whom everyday life involved a series of evasions; secrets and hiding were second nature to him, subtle vanishing acts. He valued his privacy so much he didn't even like being asked how he was." She was born when Ruth was thirty. Ruth's mother died around the same time. Ruth blames herself for the difficult relationship she has with her daughter, feeling that she relied on her too much.  At first all was well between mother and daughter, but "a few weeks after she hit thirteen...she swung her love away from me" Ruth explains, adding "She started staying out all night when she wasn't quite fourteen." Eleanor tells her mother.  'It's impossible for me to breathe when I'm with you".  "Neglect your children and they will be obsessed with you for life", Ruth remembers reading, and then wonders "what about when they neglected you?" 

Although Eleanor reserves an "ice voice" for Ruth, her eyes sending "out flares of contempt", I doubt Ruth is to blame for anything. Eleanor once told her she "had a genius for disappointment" but when the reader gets to know Eleanor this seems extremely unfair. In fact, as a priest who appears a couple of times in the story recognises, Ruth has a genius for kindness - and as the priest observes kindness is "faith in a pure form." 

Ruth becomes the surrogate mother to Eleanor's child, Lily, and she brings her up miraculously, beautifully. The final pages are told by Lily herself and she is a credit to Ruth. Perhaps my favourite line from Lily is this one:

"The people we love are always famous in our heads."

I have deliberately given very little away about the story, as I think it is important to come to the book quite fresh for it to retain all its beauty. The important thing I want to convey is my love for this novel. It is full of wisdom and understanding and I found it enchanting. It is so far my favourite book of the year.

Hydrangeas

I have a number of hydrangeas on my conscience, having tried and failed to grow them in a Canberra garden more often than was sensible. The dry heat of summer got them every time. My admiration for the hydrangeas I've been seeing on walks in Bristol is therefore tinged with envy - not to mention mild remorse.

Hydrangeas are often considered unglamorous. They are usually grown in suburban gardens, and suburban gardens tend to be looked down on by the arbiters of taste. While I would be happy if I never smelt a privet hedge in flower again, (even though one of them did inspire Michael Frayn to write a novel), I love well-tended suburban gardens. 

I find them very reassuring. They suggest that there are people around who want to create beauty - or at least prettiness - and have the patience and discipline to pursue that goal over months and years. In other words, at least for me, suburban gardens - and burgeoning hydrangeas - far from being dull and dreary, (“suburban” as an adjective is too often used to encompass “dull” and “dreary”), are small markers of civilisation.