The Great Wave

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To the Whitworth (while I waited for an iphone repair) for an exhibition of Japanese wood prints, mostly by Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849) and Utagawa Hiroshige (1797-1868). In one room landscapes, in another more urban scenes and beautifully-rendered figures of actors and courtesans. They are examples of Ukiyo-e – “pictures of the floating world” from the Edo period (1601/03-1868), a time of peace, creativity and comparative stasis. Prints that now line the walls of art galleries were once cheap and commonplace; I thought of the woodcuts and engravings of artists like Dürer, but it was the colour of Japanese wood prints that was so striking. A print by Kunisada of a printer’s workshop gave an idea of how production was shared out, from the cutting and smoothing of the woodblocks to the manufacture of paper and paints to the eventual printing.

To my untutored eyes, they hover between sublime and strange. The Great Wave, for example: so decorative but with a sense of terror when you notice the tiny boats and even tinier humans inside them.

The change in their status over the years from commonplace “illustrations” to “art”. Hiroshige, for example, drew for the “Illustrated Guide to Famous Places in the Sixty-odd Provinces”. (I love that “odd”: hadn’t they counted them?) And Hokusai did similar collections for waterfalls (which he may never have visited) and Edo. Is that a bit like getting John Piper to illustrate the Shell Guides? Or those beautiful watercolours that illustrated botanical guides before photography? (Flashback to Edward Wilson in Antarctica.)

The various interpretations assigned to The Great Wave – e.g. contemporary anxieties about Japan being overwhelmed by the US and Europe, or modern concerns about the environment. One could even place Fukushima in the wave’s path.

The workshop element of production – which made me think all the way from Duccio’s altarpieces to Bridget Riley and Damien Hirst’s use of assistants. It takes you away from the idea of The Artist.

The two-way influences between Europe and Japan. At first I thought only of Japan’s influence on artists like Van Gogh, or how Hokusai’s “Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji” was reflected in Monet’s endless paintings of Rouen cathedral or haystacks. But it worked the other way too: Dutch works influenced Japanese artists, and western synthetic dyes were eagerly adopted.

The Good Boss (2021)

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Director Fernando Léon de Aranoa with Javier Bardem

A black comedy that would have been something-and-nothing without the central presence of Bardem. He plays the smug, hypocritical, paternalistic boss of a manufacturer of scales (a metaphor that the film balances on) who has to contend with some potential PR disasters while the company is in the running for a prestigious award. His smarmy charm turns nasty as things escalate. There’s a kind of comeuppance; the fact that it’s engineered by a young woman is satisfying, but, as usual, it’s the Poor Bloody Infantry who suffer.

The Laing

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I always like going to the Laing art gallery. Today I wandered again around the “Northern Spirit” gallery, focussing on the glassworks (Sowerby, Davidson’s) which grew up around the Skinnerburn and Ouseburn, and Maling Pottery. I noticed that J Atkinson Grimshaw’s children also became painters. I looked more closely at Ralph Henley’s paintings – some are a bit twee, but something like “Seeking Situations” is worth thinking about. And I compared two landscapes: one by John Atkinson and the other by Duncan Grant.

Dark River (2017)

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Director Clio Barnard with Ruth Wilson and Mark Stanley

A bleak and gruelling film. The ever-flowing blackness of wicked deeds. Woman returns to family farm after abusive father’s death and comes into conflict with her brother over ownership. They are both damaged and inarticulate; the scene where he gets drunk and violent is interwoven with her expertly skinning and gutting a rabbit. Like Ken Loach and Andrea Arnold, the grimness is leavened all too briefly by encounters with the natural world and moments of connection. It was well done: the photography was good (although my reaction to sheep-cropped hillsides may not be as swooning as a nature-deprived townie’s), the actors excellent, and the film got under the skin of a narrow farming life and its particular knowledge and skills. The contrived ending irritated me somewhat: she emerges cleansed by the storm while he spends the rest of his life “atoning”.

The Great White Silence (1924)

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Ponting filming the metal-clad hull of the Terra Nova cleaving its way through the pack ice

I’ve returned to Antarctica. This is Ponting’s first film of the Terra Nova expedition. A silent with a discreet modern score (thankfully not by the Pet Shop Boys); Abide With Me over the final photographs of Wilson, Scott and the rest certainly had me sniffling. It was brilliant, giving rise to so many thoughts that swung between today’s way of thinking and that pre-WWI Empire-venerating, masculine, Christian mindset that had its own virtues of stoicism and comradeship. It’s mostly about the journey from New Zealand to Antarctica and the wildlife they encountered. The images (penguins, seals, whales) are fairly standard stuff today, but Ponting was truly ground-breaking and courageous. The intertitles were very anthropomorphic, and I would have liked more about the men – but the film was a record of a doomed scientific exhibition, not a photo album.

I have now found an online copy of Priestley’s “Antarctic Adventure” about the gruelling experiences of the Northern Party. I’m hoping the “Boys Own” vibe of the title is belied by the account itself, but I’m not expecting anything as moving as Wilson’s own diaries or Cherry-Garrrard’s generous and insightful account.

Manchester Art Gallery

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I was in Manchester so went into the art gallery. They have recently acquired a painting I saw last year at Tate Britain – Women’s Work: A Medley by Florence Claxton (painted when she was only 22). They’ve hung it right next to Work by Ford Madox Brown, so it’s instructive to compare the two. His is much bigger and (it must be admitted) more skilfully executed, but hers has a pull all its own. The figure in the bottom right with her gaoler holding the key suggest psychological incarceration, but, looking at some of her other work, I’m not sure how much of a feminist she was throughout her long life. However a work of art has a life separate from its author – and this was as much of a packed social commentary as Work.

Chatterton Square by E H Young (1947)

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A novel that could have done with editing to remove the repetitive flab, but nonetheless interesting. It’s about family life/husbands/sons around the time of the 1938 Munich Agreement (although the tone sometimes seems positively Victorian or Edwardian). Two contrasting families live side by side in a degentrifying square in “Upper Radstowe” (Clifton), the Frasers and the Blacketts. There’s a lot going on: Mr Fraser has abandoned his large family; Mr Blackett is unwittingly a monster of smug self-centredness; Mrs Blackett has honed a carapace of detached acceptance, but it has come at a cost:

They had each lived in a mean little world, his of self-satisfaction, hers of pandering to it for her own amusement and hers, she feared, was the meaner.

Ouch! Neither is a bad person, but traditional marriage – male authority, female deference – has warped both of them into twisted shapes. Mrs Fraser – husbandless but with happy memories of her marriage and ready to embark on another loving relationship – is a bit of a cliche of life-affirming femininity. To complete the options open to women, we also have the unmarried woman: Miss Spanner, who has also been through the family mangle – this time the handle turned by her chisellingly strict parents (now mercifully deceased). The slight chance of a happy marriage is represented by Mrs Fraser’s daughter.

Like Dorothy Whipple, Young is very good (if prolix) at portraying people’s inner lives. What doesn’t work so well is her preoccupation with the previous and coming wars. (And why couldn’t she just use proper nouns rather than allude to Hitler and the Sudetenland, I can’t fathom.) The older men have been affected by WWI: Fraser’s temper, Lindsay’s body and Blackett’s amour propre at having avoided it. The younger men – sons and son-in-law – will be called upon to risk their lives in the next. Characters presented sympathetically are against appeasement; those like Mr Blackett are relieved at the Munich Agreement – but, again, there is too much of it. There is a parallel in the final pages between Mrs Fraser’s lack of action in bringing her marriage to an end, the Blackett’s uneasy truce and the country’s postponement of action that will have to be taken – but I’m sure there was a shorter route to The End.

In its depiction of the Blacketts’ marriage, this book reminded me a little of A Lady And Her Husband: the self-effacing wife and the self-satisfied husband.