aides memoires

Perfect Days

Director Wim Wenders with Koji Yashuko

The repetitive, largely uneventful life of a middle-aged Tokyo man whose job is cleaning public toilets – which he does meticulously. It’s slow (though nippy compared to Jeanne Dielman): waking to the sound of a woman brushing leaves from the path, rolling up the futon, ablutions, coffee from a vending machine outside his home (cultural blink on my part there), then setting off on his regular round in his well-equipped little van. He doesn’t wear his watch on working days: the implication is that he doesn’t need to. It could be a dreary, demeaning life, but his approach to each dawn brings a sense of serenity and restful dreams at the end of the day. His connections to other people are fleeting but meaningful.

He’s an analogue man: a film camera to capture the play of sunlight among trees, books (William Faulkner), cassette tapes of Van Morrison, The Kinks etc. (The director too, perhaps – it’s filmed in the academy frame.) It’s an almost wordless film, so we pay attention to what is said. “Next time is next time; now is now.” When the bookseller comments on how Patricia Highsmith teaches the difference between fear and anxiety. We gradually learn that he is largely estranged from his father and sister, that he may come from a wealthy background. He describes this to his young niece as their lives “not overlapping”. This metaphor surfaces again with a man he’s only just met and who hasn’t long to live – the two of them linked by their affection for a woman and, literally, in the game of shadow tag that they play.

I’m sure there’s cultural baggage that I can’t unpack – about Zen and Japanese society and whether his colleague was intended to be as cartoonish as he appeared – but I found it a very moving film. There were hints that he had needed to work on the pleasure he took in his life – that “kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy and equanimity” were a continual work-in-progress . The final scene is of him setting out for another day listening to a tape of Nina Simone singing “Feeling Good” while expressions of joy and sadness float across his face.

It seemed that I had picked a perfect day to go to see this film. I’ve just had four days in London. Not only have I been in countless public-access toilets kept spotlessly clean by an army of moppers and wipers but I am also ready for a return to greenery after so many hard pavements, busy roads and soulless office blocks. I understood Hirayama’s delight in the leafy canopy where he stopped to eat his lunch every day, in the river and its reflections, in trying to look and notice. The mental image of plane trees on Millbank is still with me. And then there was the link I made while watching the film to Tuesday’s Saul Leiter exhibition – another man who looked and noticed and made something fleetingly beautiful out of the everyday:

I happen to believe in the beauty of simple things. I believe that the most uninteresting thing can be very interesting.

and

I take photographs in my neighbourhood. I think that mysterious things happen in familiar places. We don’t always need to run to the other end of the world.

German Expressionists: Der Blaue Reiter

It’s bizarre to realise that John Singer Sargent was only ten years older than Wassily Kandinsky, for a whole era seems to divide their styles of painting and their conception of what art is. Sargent continued a certain figurative tradition, enhanced by the influence of the Impressionists. Der Blaue Reiter looked to a new world where art expressed emotion and spiritual feeling; it embraces abstraction, symbolism and “folk art” from around the world. Its members theorised, wrote, experimented and published: it was art with spiritual significance. From their 1912 “Der Blaue Reiter” prospectus:

Blue Rider . . . will be the call that summons all artists of the new era and rouses the laymen to hear… The first volume . . . reveals the subtle connections between Gothic and primitive art, with America and the vast Orient, with the highly expressive, spontaneous folk and children’s art, and especially with the most recent musical movements in Europe and the new ideas for the theatre of our time.

. . . In our case the principle of internationalism is the only one possible . . . The whole work, called art, knows no borders or nations, only humanity.

In brief, the more wholesome, new-agey alternative to Die Brücke expressionism. Incidentally, I was a little surprised how “old” (i.e. 40s) some of the artists were when they formed their movement (already seeded by the earlier Neue Künstlervereinigung München).

This exhibition is largely the Lenbachhaus’s greatest hits dropped into Tate Modern. (Munich got some Turners in a swap.) It’s little more than a year since I visited Munich, so I remembered most of the works well (except for the Bavarian reverse glass painting, which is a good example of the all-inclusive nature of Der Blaue Reiter). This exhibition takes in modern ideas such as the pigeon-holing of women, gender fluidity and animal theory and skips lightly over old ideas such as Theosophy.

It was interesting to compare two portraits of Marianne Werefkin – one a self portrait and one by Gabriele Münter. Each artist had their favoured shades: I prefer the clarity of Münter, Franz Marc and Kandinsky’s colours to the slightly muddy tones of Werefkin and the washed-out pastels of Maria Franck-Marc.

My steal from the exhibition would be Münter’s portrait of Alexej von Jawlensky listening. I’m not sure if she meant it to be comical, but the way the sausages seem to extend all the way from the plate to the top of his head certainly made me smile.

Sargent and Fashion

Having watched the film at the weekend, such was my sense of déjà vu as I opened the door to the exhibition that I felt I’d already seen it. I was almost weary of Sargent’s portraits (not my favourite genre) before I began – which is very unfair on such a brilliant painter. The exhibition’s focus was on how Sargent used fashion to present a sense of his sitters. As a thread tying together the exhibits, I found it quickly frayed: Charles Worth deserves a mention in “Unpicking Couture”, but here he’s an interloper. It’s the rendering in paint of the chosen fabric and the drape and the colour that matter – not what one wore to the opera.

So why did I come? Basically to see Dr Pozzi. Over Christmas I’d listened on the radio to Julian Barnes reading his book, “The Man in the Red Coat”, about the fascinating life of Samuel Pozzi. Since the painting is normally in Los Angeles, this was my chance to see it.

What did I learn/notice?

Fittingly the last few galleries before the exhibition contained several 17th- and 18th-century full-length, life-size portraits – a good lead-in to Sargent.
Sargent’s use of neutral colours – often together, like a black dress against a black background. He did this even with colour: Dr Pozzi’s startling red robe is on a dark red background.

Sargent admired Hals and Velasquez for their subtle use of monochrome and emulated it in many of his portraits. You could see the influence of Gainsborough and Reynolds too, but Sargent’s portraits were much livelier.
I was reminded of yesterday’s exhibition and how Leiter would often admit only one colour into his largely monochrome compositions; it’s what artists do. (Often red.)
It quickly became hard for me to differentiate portrait after portrait: they became generic and – even worse – started to look like book covers for romantic novels.
“Mrs Carl Meyer and her Children” with its Boucher-style opulence quite brought out the Bolshevik in me.

By the time I reached the room of portraits of professional performers (Ellen Terry, La Carmencita) I felt as if I had already seen enough performers – the Wertheimer family in particular.
Of course there were some wonderful paintings – but they didn’t fit the fashion template. A portrait of Robert Louis Stevenson and his wife, Fanny, was intriguing – as much for the depiction of the marriage as the man.
When not painting to commission, Sargent was, to my mind, much more interesting. There was a cashmere shawl that popped up in three paintings: one a slightly Burne-Jones procession, one a Whistler-type lounger and another a dreamy abstract pile-up of colour and fabric.

For a painter so at home with black, he was also brilliant with light and colour. I do so like “Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose”, and here there were also a couple of quick sketches of the girls’ heads.

After lunch I headed to the Wallace Collection to see something of Sargent’s inspiration. Hals’s “Laughing Cavalier” is still out on tour, but Velasquez’s “Lady with a Fan” is there: black on grey with a hint of red.