Category Archives: Art

Silk Roads

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My geography failed me completely here. I doubt I could pin Japan on a map, let alone Korea or Uzbekistan. I realised how completely flummoxed I was at having no Eurocentric compass to orient myself at the start of the exhibition as it began with China and dynasties I had never heard of. I encountered lots of new information, which is still sinking in; it may be a while before the dust settles to reveal coherent thoughts.

Λοιπόν. This exhibition at the British Museum focused on trade routes between Asia, Europe and Africa between 500 and 1000 along which silks, spices, luxury and everyday goods, and ideas passed. It began with a bronze figure of the Buddha – made in Pakistan in the late 500s and excavated in Sweden amongst buildings dating from the 800s.

First: the developing links between China (Chang’an), Korea (Unified Silla) and Japan; in the Nara period (700s), rulers in Japan adopted elements of the Tang dynasty and adapted the Chinese writing system for their own language. Buddhism spread eastwards from India at this time to become the dominant religion. Silk was used as currency in China, and it was one of the luxury items in demand along the trade routes.

I found out about Dunhuang, a garrison town, where in 1900 a sealed “library cave” was discovered, containing manuscripts, textiles, paintings and other objects. Empires and peoples I had never heard of were represented by wonderful objects: the Sogdians, for example, and a mural from Samarkand showing a Sogdian ruler and his entourage, or one of an elephant from the Bukhara region.

The Belitung shipwreck was fascinating and mind-boggling. In 1998 a shipwreck was discovered off Belitung Island in Indonesia; a vessel from the early 800s en route from China to perhaps the Arabian peninsula, containing over 60,000 items – mostly Chinese ceramics. (The photographs of crockery on the sea bed reminded me of the Titanic last month.) I could happily find a home for the pretty blue and white dish – which makes clear how the very human pleasure of acquiring attractive objects as well as the essential stuff like salt drove so much global trade.

Ideas, religions, technological knowledge and languages travelled along the routes. There was a concertina of a Buddhist sutra in both Chinese and Sanskrit and a fragment of New Persian text written in Hebrew script; I had to think hard about those. Religions that travelled along the route: not just the dominant Buddhism of this time but also Hinduism, Manichaeism and Zoroastrianism, meeting up with local deities and religious practices, and, later, Islam through conquest.

Such a sense of human activity over so many centuries! Some of it illustrated our worst tendencies: the never-ending desire for more and more luxurious goods and the trading of people as well as commodities.

By the time the silk routes reached the shores of Europe, my sense of wonder diminished: it was all rather familiar. On reflection, I realised how thoroughly and unusually immersed I had been in an exhibition that barely touched on Europe or parts of the world colonised by Europeans. It doesn’t often happen, and it did make me very aware of my ignorance and lack of a compass as I venture into new territory.

After lunch I returned to more familiar territory: a small exhibition of prints and drawings that Max Beckmann had given to Marie-Louise von Motesiczky.

Tirzah Garwood

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To Dulwich Picture Gallery for a delightful exhibition. Everything made me smile, despite the sadness of Garwood’s early death. Basic facts: her dates are 1908-51; she was married to Eric Ravilious, had three children and was widowed in 1942; she was treated for breast cancer in 1942, which later recurred and killed her shortly after her second marriage.

I liked everything: the early woodcuts, the marbled papers she made and sold to publishers and upmarket shops, the embroideries (reminiscent of Marian Stoll), the Camberwick Green shops and houses, and the later Max-Ernst-meets-Douanier-Rousseau oils. There were also some works by Ravilious – including a large watercolour of chalk land which, ironically, would have been my steal from the exhibition – which brought out Garwood’s focus on people and the traditional female spheres of home, children and neighbourhood. She made things for people – a quilt for a friend, items for sale, illustrations in letters – and, from her work, I came away with a very positive impression of the woman: generous, fun, kind, endlessly creative. In contrast, I have no particular sense of the personality of Ravilious (or Gerrit Dou or Rembrandt or any other of the male artists in the gallery). That says something about the curating of the exhibition – and rather more about making art when you are also tied to your roles of a wife, mother and housewife.

(Yes, I do realise that on the plus side the confines of her life meant that she didn’t have the freedom to become a war artist and to die on a mission over Iceland.)

The Lady of Shalott

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Goodness, how the Victorians loved the Arthurian legends. I really can’t be bothered to speculate why they were so drawn to the image of a trapped, cursed woman, so I shall just admire the paintings.

Today I was in Leeds art gallery and looked again at Waterhouse’s entangled lady. (I’m always bothered by the blue squiggle on her white dress. I assume it’s the thread unravelling, but it just looks like a biro scribble.) Two weeks ago it was Holman Hunt’s pirouetting lady in Manchester art gallery. And at the back of my mind she is always the lady from “the broad stream bore her far away” reproduction in my Arthur Mee. (I will get round to looking through the volumes again to check the illustrations I think I remember.)

While roaming online, I discovered that Tennyson wrote two versions of his poem (1832 and 1842), that Waterhouse painted yet another version, and that Atkinson Grimshaw also painted the lady. Which confirms that he really couldn’t do figures!

Victorian Radicals

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I fancied a day out, so the Pre-Raphaelites became my spur yesterday. It’s hard to think of such familiar, over-ripe beauty-in-oils as “radical”, but they did consciously break with tradition in terms of technique and subject matter. (I didn’t notice anything about William Morris’s radical socialism though.) The exhibition started with yet another dull painting by William Etty to show what they were up against. There was also a light focus on Birmingham’s industrial role in spreading the “look” at a rather reduced price, along with the development – and bright colours – of aniline dyes.

I have discovered that Ford Madox Brown produced two versions of “Work”; Manchester has the original, larger version – which was a tremendous relief to me because I was certain I’d seen it the week before in the art gallery there! (There’s also another “Pretty Baa-Lambs” in the Ashmolean.) I saw again “The Last of England” (here twinned with a Windrush-era sketch of “The First of England”) and looked at his other works. I’m not sure of him as a great artist – but he was certainly a great chronicler in his hyper-real fashion and I will definitely go and have another look at his murals in Manchester Town Hall when it finally re-opens.

Speaking of duplicates . . . William Holman Hunt copied “May Morning”, and here it was framed in a circular copper sunburst by C R Ashbee. There were also biblical and Shakespearean subjects to add to the Arthurian one (Lady of Shallot) that I’d seen in Manchester – slightly undermining the “radical” theme.

William Morris prints, Burne-Jones nudes, a return to tempera painting, dresses and jewellery . . . all lovely to look at. (Particularly “Beauty and the Beast”, which erases the nightmare in a dream of gorgeousness.)

Beauty and the Beast, John Dickson Batten, 1904, tempera on canvas

Kurt Schwitters in Ambleside

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After my visit to the Hatton Gallery on Wednesday, I checked the website for the Armitt Museum and discovered that today there was an annual guided walk in Ambleside of places significant to Schwitters, who lived there for the final three years of his life. It also gave me a chance to see what works of Schwitters the Armitt has. Plus other discoveries that caught my eye.

The walk’s focus was primarily on Ambleside and the people that Schwitters was friends with. He painted their portraits – competently if not inspiringly – and sketched and painted for a few shillings to earn a living. It wasn’t really the focus I was after, but nonetheless it was a pleasant and informative walk. There were wonderful views from the first house Schwitters lived in – but, after a fall on the icy pavement, he had to move. I learned that the Merzbau in Langdale was his third and final one, and the only one of which something remains – i.e. the barn wall in the Hatton Gallery. (His Hanover Merzbau was destroyed during the war, and the one he started to construct in Norway when he first fled Nazi Germany was destroyed decades ago.)

The Armitt exhibition was of Schwitters’ portraits of Ambleside worthies. It therefore gave little sense of what a very unusual artist he was. Nowadays Schwitters-type stuff and collages and deeply personal works are everywhere, but he was the ur installation artist*. (I did enjoy one of the group saying that her great aunt had had to clear out one of Schwitters’ rooms and found it full of rubbish . . . like old bus tickets! So not rubbish but artist’s materials.)

And then, since the day had turned into a beautiful afternoon, I walked back to Brockholes via bridleways – some with little rivulets running down them after so much rain.

* But levity will intrude and – unserious philistine that I am – I can’t always take his work seriously. So – Schwitters used porridge as a sculpting material while he was interned as an enemy alien; I’ve just read the following in “Conference at Cold Comfort Farm” (1949):

‘And Messe has promised, as you saw by the advance publicity I sent you, to do us a one-day show of Transitorist Craft work. Do you know his stuff? He won’t use materials lasting longer than one day, and he mostly works in pastry made from national flour, contemporary sausage-meat, and modern dyestuffs . . .’

The Merz Barn Wall

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Merz Barn Wall, Kurt Schwitters, 1947-48

I went to the Hatton Gallery, hoping to see the paintings I’d skipped over on my previous visit when I had been captured by Kurt Schwitters’ Merz Barn Wall. Unfortunately, the gallery was taken over by the graduate art show (very shallow of me to think that, I know) so I returned to the wall to see if I felt the same way about it.

Yes – but without that sense of astonishment I had the first time. The lines and shapes and proportions seem just right somehow. The clean curves offset by the texture of the plaster “scales”. The little areas of colour. I knew it was unfinished, but I didn’t realise- until I read further – that this is not quite what Schwitters created. There were other elements, like a column, but this (restored) is all that remains.

I can feel a visit to Ambleside coming on.

Newcastle

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Newcastle really is a handsome city – it announces the fact from the moment you cross the river and curve into the station. Sunshine helps, of course. It’s looking a bit pinched in other ways, but that’s another matter.

Straight to the Laing and the café, but before I had my coffee I was sidetracked by the corridor display of domestic items: a teapot by Christopher Dresser plus crockery by Laura Knight and Eric Ravilious. His little tureen was a delight.

But I wasn’t there for household items. No, I was there to see Turner’s “Fighting Temeraire”, which is on loan from the National Gallery, and the exhibition surrounding it. As I walked round I felt a small surge of horrified interest in how a battle would have been fought by sailing ships atop a wooden crate riddled with gun holes. Lots of Turner’s watercolours, which – since I know one of the scenes he painted – included a great deal of artistic licence. Sometimes his painting are too undefined and blurry for my taste, and I wasn’t expecting that much of the Temeraire. Well, I was wrong. In the flesh, it is amazing. It blazes and shimmers and is utterly beautiful. Lots of artistic licence here too, but there is still pathos in the old ship that helped to defend Britain from Bonaparte’s forces being led to her death by a new-fangled steam tug. “Burial at Sea” next to it was equally breathtaking. It just glowed.

There was more about shipbuilding and industry on the Tyne, including one photograph by Chris Killip. Afterwards I went into his exhibition of “The Last Ships”. His eye is perfect, but it is perhaps the time he spent on the people and the area that was his invisible power. These photographs of the same street over the course of a couple of years in the mid-1970s:

My room is on the fourth floor and I have a perfect view of the Ionic capitals of the old Assembly Rooms. And of the buddleia sprouting from its masonry.