Author: aides memoires

Courtauld

To the Courtauld to look at the London street photographs of Roger Mayne from the 1950s. They were great in capturing the texture of life at that time, but it was that context that made them so engaging. I found his other photographs of family and Spain very dull – they lacked the charge of say, Chris Killip, or the compositional mastery of Vivian Maier.

There was also a small exhibition of works by Vanessa Bell, including designs for the Omega Workshop. She was also included in yesterday’s exhibition at the Tate; I still don’t “get” her any more than I do Paula Modersohn-Becker – the colours are too muddy and the shapes too blobby. But what do I know?

With the shift in mood caused by the arrival of summer, I was inspired to photograph little things to represent how that feels to me. Shadows, sunlight, blue sky – that kind of thing. What I would also like to include – but obviously can’t – are jumbles of tattoos on arms and legs now that skin is exposed. Some of them are a random collection of inkings, as if they’ve had one done after the other without regard to the overall effect. The effect is bit like an old haversack that you stitched badges onto each time you went somewhere new.

Now you see us: women artists in Britain 1520-1920

To Tate Britain for this exhibition, which covered old and new ground for me and slotted in satisfyingly with recent thoughts. I think this makes the third exhibition solely by women artists have I seen in the past couple of years, so it’s obviously still A Thing. Some of the paintings were really not that good, but visiting the exhibition was like reading Dorothy Whipple: the insights and perspectives it afforded me had my head spinning and far outweighed any lapses.

Lots of women artists have just disappeared into the past or their work has not been attributed to them. There was a painting from the 17th century by Artemisia Gentileschi of Susanna and the Elders that has been misattributed to male painters a number of times during its existence. Nothing by Susanna Horenbout (16th century) is known to have survived, even though she was admired by Dürer.

Many of these women painters were not originally from Britain: Angelica Kauffman, Gentileschi, Horenbout, Levina Teerlinc, Maria Verelst, Mary Moser. And most of these were from families of painters/craftsmen – so perhaps these highly marketable skills pulled people across Europe in search of patrons and commissions and were worth passing on even to daughters.

Suitable subjects for women painters were, of course, portraits (particularly of other women or children) and flowers. History painting was beyond their imagination so they’d best stick to recording real life. Painters like Kauffman kicked against these restrictions, and she produced biblical and literary scenes, sometimes with the woman as the more active figure. A score settled – even though the finished product could be a bit blah.

Actually, my favourites among the earlier works were indeed the flowers! I really couldn’t tell that Mary Delaney’s raspberry was a collage. As for the gooseberry . . .

Joshua Reynolds had a sister, Frances – which immediately set me to thinking of “A Room of One’s Own”. Frances kept house for Joshua and learn to paint by copying his works – a more respectable outcome than for Shakespeare’s hypothetical sister.

The Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (the Society of Arts) was founded in 1754 and offered cash prizes and medals in many categories, including the ‘polite arts’ – e.g. patterns for embroidery, copies of prints, drawings of statues and of ‘beasts, birds, fruit or flowers’, as well as landscapes. Some prizes were specifically intended for young women and could lead to a career.

And a career was possible: Mary Beale and others had already proved that. Some of it does look a bit churned out – Joan Carlile’s re-used silver dress, for example.

The Royal Academy was founded in 1768 (with Kauffman and Moser amongst the founders) for the really serious stuff and showed work by women artists. Materials mattered. Oil paint took a long time to dry (I remember Mary Beale’s husband experimenting with ways of getting it to dry faster to speed up the production line) , but more malleable media were frowned on. Reynolds was very dismissive of pastels, and traditionally domestic crafts such as needlework were beyond the pale.

Florence Claxton’s “Women’s Work” was a brilliant dissection of the female role: essentially man’s servant, but some at the margins were plotting their escape. It put me in mind of Ford Madox Brown’s “Work” in its shape and packed social commentary.

Once women were able to study art (but not life drawing until 1893), things changed. They could paint out of doors (if not à la Caspar David Friedrich, then at least in gardens and orchards), join artistic communities and even paint female nudes. The first woman was admitted to the Royal Academy Schools in 1860, and with the founding of the Slade School in 1871 women were offered an education equal to men’s.

Another blob of red in “The Passing Train”. The way the pattern dominates everything in “The Deceitfulness of Riches”. Too many Ethels though: Wright, Walker (I saw “The Garden” at the Laing, I believe) and Sands.

There was a row of paintings by Laura Knight of women in coastal scenes, which were illuminating. In the watercolour the bathers seemed to blend into the landscape like nereids, but in the later paintings the female form is more dominant. The absence of a horizon in “At The Edge of the Cliff” turns it into a brooding scene.

Oh, the significance of a slipped shoulder strap! (John Singer Sargent’s original “Madame X”, Monica Vitti yesterday, and today “A Modern Cinderella”. Shocking . . . apparently.) And the male gaze again. I’m not sure the theory always holds up: I really couldn’t see any difference between the “gaze” of “Psyche Before the Throne of Venus” and anything by, say, J W Waterhouse or Lord Leighton.

And then more paintings that show that a woman artist is no more pin-down-able than a male artist. After all, what do Elizabeth Butler and Gwen John have in common?

And, finally, the plane trees outside the Tate have been severely pruned as if they are topiary.

Sergio Strizzi: The Perfect Moment

An exhibition at the Estorick Collection of film stills and other photographs by Strizzi (1931-2004). He captured, amongst others, Monica Vitti and Marcello Mastroianni in their Antontonioni/Fellini days. And how beautiful Alain Delon was!

Various things came to mind as I browsed. How Italy personified modernity, beauty and style in the 1960s (Vitti looking sultry at the top of the Torre Galfa in Milan). The “male gaze” thing we’d been talking about in the film session. (Spaghetti straps for her, smart suit for him.) An astonishing photograph from 1954 of Sophia Loren signing autographs for fans (nearly all of them male) that made me think of the scene in “L’Avventura” when the American actress is besieged by men or Anita Ekberg in “La Dolce Vita”. Those scenes have always seemed akin to human sacrifice to me, but perhaps they weren’t overdone at all.

And now I want to watch all these films again!

The alternative gaze

This time the session was on cinema that challenged the dominant narrative, so we blanked the male gaze and looked at feminist films.

Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, Chantal Ackerman, 1975

A film I’ve seen and already thought much about. This time the thing that struck me while viewing a short section was the flashing light outside – as if an alternative life was signalling to Jeanne Dielman that she didn’t have to live the way she did.

Potiche, François Ozon, 2010

I saw this when it came out. It enjoys the clichés of the 1970s when it is set (velour tracksuits and Farrah Fawcett hair) and takes a predictable scalpel to the sexual politics of the time (a bit like “9 to 5”). You’d have to be pretty Victorian (of whatever century) to find this approach challenging, but it was entertaining.

Dorothy Whipple

I’ve just come through a brief Dorothy Whipple phase. Only two of her books so far, but it’s nice to know that she is there in the wings if I’m ever stuck for something to download. Another interwar author (I can’t get away from them) but this time with a focus on the North and the Midlands. Very readable, with plenty to interest and keep me thinking. It chimed with Lucy Malleson’s autobiography: a sense of cheerfulness and modesty that keeps one grounded without being walked over, and always the spectre of real poverty in the background.

High Wages (1930)

Set in a northern town before, during and after WWI. A young woman, alone in the world and having to make her own living, is taken on in a classy draper’s shop and works her way up to her own shop selling ready-made clothes. Whipple has a warm, engaging way of writing that is nonetheless sometimes a little flat-footed and sometimes too contrived. The first page, for instance, when the reader is introduced to Jane . . . and risks confusing her with basil fotherington-tomas:

The whole expanse of heaven was covered with minute clouds, little abrupt things, kicking up their heels, flying off into nothing. They were so madly inconsequent that Jane laughed. And then, as if someone had said to them, ‘Come now! Quietly! Quietly!’ they stopped rioting and settled down together in the rosy glow. They were merged and gradually were lost to sight. A majestic gold arose and suffused the sky, leaving a pool of green in the east.

but it gives you an idea of Jane’s spirit – and, fortunately for her future wellbeing, her idealism is tempered with common sense and an eye for what is fashionable and becoming.

The novel is focussed on the female perspective of the world; a narrow place where choosing fabrics and clothes is a pleasurable escape. The war happens offstage; Jane’s concern is her tiny new shop. The plot, such as it is, is unremarkable; it’s the sense of lived life that is the novel’s great strength, particularly when seen through Jane’s eyes. It’s also very good on the accommodations we must make with real life: having to put up with an employer’s miserliness; overcoming distaste at a co-worker’s habits and focussing on her friendliness; the courage required to step outside your preordained sphere.

The Priory (1939)

A family living in a country house, once a priory, beyond their means, all equally self-absorbed. Into this stagnant life the Major drops a little pebble – a new wife – in the hope of having a household better run than his sister can manage, and the ripples spread far and wide. I thought of it as a novel about imperfect marriages – one where, on the eve of war, various couples fight their own little battles until they arrive at some kind of armistice.

Once again, Whipple is good at ambivalence. Nurse Pye is a monster when she discovers Bessy’s pregnancy but a ministering angel when Christine’s baby has pneumonia. Anthea, the new wife, is really quite a sympathetic character but seems unsympathetic as she gradually eases out each limpet from the house. That’s the best of shifting free indirect speech: the reader has an insight into the feelings and motivations of each character.

There’s a sly amusement in some of the lines and a sense of seriousness in others. Anthea on her enduring quest for happiness:

She remembered a phrase from one of her old books on happiness, in which the necessity for effort was dwelt upon. “Everything worth while,’ said Nietzsche, ‘is accomplished notwithstanding.’ Anthea acknowledged it; notwithstanding [her husband], it was in her case.

Christine’s thoughts on the place of her family’s home and grounds:

She saw for the first time that the history of Saunby was a sad one. It had been diverted from its purpose; it had been narrowed from a great purpose to a little one. It had been built for the service of God and the people; all people, but especially the poor.

‘And now it serves only us,’ she thought.

In the old days, the people from all the villages round about had come to Saunby for help and advice. They had brought their sick and their children. They had come up the avenue and down the drive and the back drive and in at the side from Byford and Munningham. Travellers had broken their journeys at Saunby, and pilgrims rested on their way from the north to Canterbury and on their way back.

It’s the kind of run-down country estate that, post-war, might have been bought and turned into council houses, a school, a surgery and a little parade of shops – a mid-20th-century version of the community that the Priory once offered. As it is, the novel ends with a plan to make Saunby into a privately owned community offering home and work – a rather bolted-on happy ending that was probably what readers wanted in 1939.

But perhaps that was an improvement on the contemporary class-based way of helping people. There’s a bit of a broadside against Lady Bountifuls, those upper-class women who acted as unofficial social workers:

Penelope put down her chocolate cake. Now they should have it.

“You see, I don’t believe in what you are doing,” she said in her cool voice. “I don’t believe in playing with the poor.

“You’ve grown out of your dolls, so you take to the poor. The poor are an occupation for you. Getting up bazaars is fun for you. You haven’t any affairs of your own, so you go and interfere in the affairs of the poor. You go and visit them in their dreadful houses and portion out allowances for a little food and coal and clothing and then you come back to a home like this and eat a tea like this.”

Which is probably the kind of thing that Lucy Malleson was doing in Stepney. The more I read, the more I can see why the country was ready for some kind of socialism in 1945.

Southport

To Southport on a whim. Another one of those railway stations that was designed for more passengers and bigger trains than it receives today. (Skegness is my go-to station for that.) I’m not even sure what the front of railway station looks like, for there was an entrance to Marks and Spencer immediately beyond the ticket barrier and that was how I entered the town centre.

All towns look tatty these days; it’s particularly noticeable in places that were built for the prosperous in prosperous times. Their grand Victorian and Edwardian buildings require constant maintenance, and how can grand hotels survive in an age of Airbnb? I looked at the Venetian Bridge over the artificial lake . . . and read how popular it was in the years before the war with fancy dress and lights and gondolas. Such a disconnect with what I saw on this dull, damp day.

Fortunately The Atkinson – an all-purpose gallery, museum, library, theatre and café – has recently been refurbished and is great. I wandered round the gallery, noting the Laura Knight ballerinas that I’d seen at the Milton Keynes Gallery – and surely I’ve seen that Pygmalion somewhere? It was mostly traditional art – which was fine by me when the contemporary world was represented by a Tracey Emin neon scribble. There was so little to “unpack” there. Whereas “Lilith” . . . oh, my goodness!

There was also an exhibition of paintings by Southport-born Philip Connard – impressionist, WWI artist, decorator, teacher. His dates are 1875-1958, which brings me nicely to the book I am reading at the moment: “The Horse’s Mouth”. (Fourth or fifth attempt, although I sailed through “Herself Surprised” thirty-odd years ago.) The fictional Gulley Jimpson is of a similar era – although it would be libellous to suggest that Connard resembled Jimpson in any other way! Connard’s paintings were a bit “blah”, but he could capture light on flowers beautifully – and he was certainly versatile.

There was also a small exhibition of Connard’s contemporaries, including Sickert, Cadell and Fergusson. I added to my collection of Glyn Philipot paintings too, along with one by Frank Brangwyn which made me realise how sensitised I have become to current preoccupations. I am so used to being lectured by gallery labels on the out-of-date mindsets and values behind so many works of art that it was quite a shock to come across Brangwyn’s painting of a slave market without any commentary. And I realised that I did indeed find it shocking: I thought it needed some context for a younger viewer – which was perhaps a bit patronising of me. (I also rethought my reaction to an earlier Brangwyn painting of the same name, which was an exercise in self-reflection.) I wasn’t even sure if it was a real scene or something conjured up from an overwrought Victorian imagination – like “Lilith” again. (It did rather amuse me that most of Napier’s output on ArtUK are portraits of Victorian worthies – with the occasional nude offering a possible peek into what went on beneath those top hats and bushy beards.)

There was more information on the painting of the Village Belle, which at first glance looked like a pretty girl chatting with the village boys. Unsurprisingly it wasn’t that simple: there had been another painting showing the same girl, now clutching a child and leaving the village under a cloud. Another insight into the Victorian mindset – and/or a warning to pretty village girls everywhere.

Lighter-hearted images were also available, as there was also a Bill Tidy exhibition in the gallery. This was my steal, along with “The Nosegay” and Hawksley.