Category: Reviews

Reviews of books. exhibitions, and other stuff I have seen.

St Francis at the National Gallery

August 2, 2023

This free exhibition features works by outstanding artists from many centuries, from a puzzlingly conservative Botticelli through Caravaggio, El Greco and Spencer to Zurbaran, taking in the Marvel comic Francis, Brother of the Universe. The notes gently mock the comic’s version of how St Francis received the stigmata through laser beams, but really it is no more dramatic than several paintings of the same crucial event, or Brother Leo’s actual first-hand account of a six-winged seraph.

The exhibition also features one of Francis’s own habits, presented in a golden frame. I suppose there is a suggestion that the habit can also be viewed as art, and indeed the exhibition offers a modern work using sacking. However, the habit also emphasises Francis’s historicity. Some of his feats (taming a wolf, walking through fire) resemble those attributed to older saints who are legendary bordering on mythical, but Francis is indisputably a real man. That raises the question of whether an exhibition organised around a theme tells us about the art or just about attitudes to the subject.

I suppose the message might ultimately be that artists use a theme to illuminate the concerns that mean most to them and their audience – Stanley Spencer using his own (strangely rotund) father to represent the saint. But whatever the rationale, it’s a great chance to see some fantastic paintings.

Hilma af Klint and Mondrian

July 19, 2023

This exhibition, at Tate Modern, is a curious pairing. The Tate says both artists started from nature and developed a new abstract language: but they never met and did not influence each other, and their motives seem very different. They both used coloured squares sometimes, but that’s about it.

Mondrian painted flowers and landscapes in a conventional style as well as the rectilinear images with primary coloured blocks for which he is known. For me these push abstraction too far, but they are popular (Katharine likes them).

Klint is problematic in some respects. Most of her works were meant to illustrate her Spiritualist beliefs, and they are heavy with obscure meaning. She said that some were done with spirit guidance (which recalls some of Blake’s pictures, and there is a just a hint of his muscular symbolic figures in Klint’s stuff). She didn’t generally exhibit them, and it’s possible she wouldn’t have wanted them shown. I suppose the curators nevertheless see her as a significant gap in the story of art, but she seems well out of the mainstream. I must say that if her work had been shown in the sixties it might have found a following, and prints of her works might now be selling well alongside esoteric Tarot illustrations and mandalas in that kind of shop.

Dr Semmelweis

July 19, 2023

This play, starring and partly written by Mark Rylance, tells the story of how Dr Ignaz Semmelweis discovered that fatal puerperal fever could be almost eliminated just by getting doctors to wash their hands. This radical innovation was not accepted by the profession (and the play makes clear that Semmelweis was, well, somewhat lacking in diplomacy, which didn’t help) and the doctor himself, whose behaviour became increasingly unacceptable, died in a lunatic asylum.

It’s a great production, which includes a group of women who play violins and dance around or with the actors. That sounds weird, but it mostly works, only seeming intrusive a couple of times.

It seems odd now that the simple notion of bacterial infection should have been so difficult to grasp. Part of the problem was that Semmelweis had only sketchy, inaccurate ideas about the mechanism: he just knew, and demonstrated, that washing worked. Sadly it was a long time before the practice was universally accepted.

Karen McLeod

July 11, 2023

Interesting talk from Karen McLeod at Croydon Writers last night. For a long time she worked as cabin crew for an airline, but managed to write a novel In Search of the Missing Eyelash which was published and did very well. Then she found it was hard to write the follow-up her agent pressed her for.
Instead she developed a comedy act based on the character Barabara Brownskirt, the laureate of Penge, which she still performs. But, having parted company with her agent, she is now writer in residence at the Bookseller Crow Bookshop and has a memoir of her flying days coming out next year.

Picasso

June 23, 2023

To mark the 50th anniversary of Picasso’s death, the Musée National Picasso-Paris commissioned Sir Paul Smith to direct a special exhibition, which selects works from their huge collection. We went over to see it.

Many of the pictures have been hung on walls specially decorated with bold motifs taken from the painting itself: I’m afraid this mostly just seems like a distraction. But it is an astonishing collection of works.

There is a connection here with Degas. Picasso admired his stuff and produced a series of works inspired by Le déjeuner sur l’herbe.

The exhibition presents this final picture of the young artist, done in Picasso’s last year, as his cheerful farewell.

Manet/Degas

June 22, 2023

In Paris to see the exhibition of Manet and Degas at the Musée D’Orsay.

This follows well from the Morisot exhibition and indeed includes many portraits of her by Manet…

The exhibition explores the relationship between Degas and Manet, who according to legend met while copying the same painting in the Louvre. Both were from fairly well-off families who intended them for other careers, both served as soldiers in Paris, and both (in different ways) had a complex relationship with Impressionism. Manet, however, was sociable and had a lively romantic life, while Degas was solitary, easy to quarrel with, and quite probably never had sex with anyone. After Manet’s death Degas collected many of his painting and gathered together the surviving fragments of The Execution of Emperor Maximilian.

Some of my pictures seem to have got deleted, but here are some random highlights.

The exhibition is constructed to make a point, and does not include some of the famous works by both artists that are actually on display just upstairs in another part of the gallery!

Berthe Morisot

June 14, 2023

We went to the Berthe Morisot exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery. The exhibition, nicely hung, traces influences from earlier generations of artists. These were noted at the time and Fragonard in particular was mentioned so much it led to a legend that she was literally his descendant, a false claim still widely repeated, on Wikipedia and elsewhere. The pictures don’t even look especially Fragonardish to me.

In any case, the emphasis should probably be on her innovative contribution to Impressionism. Her pictures look very fresh and modern in style, if not always in subject. Her brushwork is free and sometimes she doesn’t bother painting to the edge of the canvas. Nearly all are pictures of women, including the striking self-portrait above, in which she jokingly arranges flowers on her lapel to look like the Legion d’Honneur. She seems to have been a good subject, painted many times by her brother-in-law Manet.

Morisot and her sister Edma had the advantage of coming from a well-off family that was happy to pay for art tutors, but as women could not go to art school, and Edma gave up painting when she married. Morisot’s paintings sometimes attracted patronising comments relating to their ‘femininity’: on the other hand her works were never rejected by the Salon as other impressionist paintings were.

Worth a look.

Dancing at Lughnasa

April 22, 2023

The new production at the Olivier is very good. I’ve read criticism of the stage, but I thought the way it combines inside and outside with a real sense of perspective was very clever and effective. The cast, featuring Siobhán McSweeney and Ardal O’Hanlon (as Father Jack) is very strong. The play itself is a vivid slice of life with strong and interesting characters, living complex lives that are just about to break down. It is clearly about memory, with the protagonist narrating his life in retrospect and providing the voice for his otherwise invisible younger self. At the end of the day, though, I don’t know what it tells us beyond what any bit of a life might do. To mention a small reservation, I wasn’t sure about Father Jack’s accounts of the beliefs of the Ugandans he lived among: are they accurate or just invented? But an interesting evening.

Van Gogh and Hals

April 8, 2023

While we were in Amsterdam we naturally went to the Van Gogh Museum, which is great: and by coincidence we arrived on Van Gogh’s 170th birthday. The gallery shows works by various other artists, highlighting the influence of Japanese pictures and pointillism, for example.

I’m surprised I hadn’t heard of this picture before – it’s by Gauguin, of Van Gogh painting sunflowers!

One other artist admired by Van Gogh was Frans Hals, whose works we saw in Harlem.

Hals’s brushwork was always loose and became extraordinarily free in old age. Lace collars from this period look like random slashes of white paint close up, but when you back off they look perfect from a distance. Apparently at the time some though he was senile, but then other artist’s styles (Turner, El Greco) have been attributed to poor eyesight, and indeed Van Gogh’s to mental illness.

Vermeer

April 7, 2023

I’ve got a bit behind with these posts: we went to the amazing exhibition at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, where the largest ever collection of Vermeer’s works are gathered (and we got in before Girl with a Pearl Earing went back to the Mauritshuis).


With so many works together, it becomes very clear that Vermeer had certain favoured themes. Many of the images seem to have been staged in the same place: a room with a window to the left, a chequered floor, and a map or a picture on the back wall. Posed in this space are women reading, or with musical instruments, and the same pieces of clothing get re-used (that yellow, fur-edged jacket).

I had had the impression that Vermeer’s stuff was pastel coloured and just a little soft focus, but neither of those things proved to be true. A great experience, slightly impaired by the crowds. and I’m afraid these snaps are not great quality. I would urge you to go, but I’m afraid it’s too late.