Category Archives: United Kingdom

V&A

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The brilliant sunshine of the last couple of days has been replaced by cold rain, and I went to the V&A simply because I was deterred by the long queue outside the Natural History Museum. It wasn’t second best however: it’s always good to get lost in the V&A for an hour or two. This time it was mostly amongst the ceramics. My goodness, but the museum has so much stuff! And not all of it what one would care to keep. As I looked at the tall glass cabinets of china ornaments I almost expected to see a replica of my parents’ souvenir of Helensburgh or a novelty ashtray.

Inevitably I drifted towards what was familiar and ended up in front of tableware designed by Eric Ravilious. There were also designs by Vanessa Bell – looking unstructured beside Ravilious’s neat delicacy. En route I was waylaid by monochrome Chinese pottery (which brought back the Burrell Collection) the composition of different types of earthenware (having forgotten what I picked at the Bowes Museum a couple of years ago) and a pile of misfired Delft plates. I am sure I first learned about these in the Delft museum, but I took no photographs and can’t rely on my memory.

Vanessa Bell and Charles Dickens

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To the Vanessa Bell exhibition in Milton Keynes to see if I could feel more positive about her work. Well, not really – but the journey to that decision was quite interesting.

I’d been to the same gallery to see Laura Knight (1877-1970; Bell 1879-1961) and it was instructive to compare the two exhibitions and artists. Knight’s work (as curated for the exhibition) followed a path from early experimentation to a recognisable style and regular themes; she had to earn her living from an early age and she was sometimes hard up. She accepted commissions, she worked as a war artist, she designed decorative work. She was married to the same man for decades and had no children. In short – at least outwardly – a fairly tidy story of a groundbreaking woman artist and her body of work.

Bell, in contrast, seemed all over the place. She was more experimental (personally and professionally) and her focus was on the “language” of form and colour – but I really couldn’t find a single piece that stopped me in my tracks or pleased me entirely. I had thought of her colour palette as rather murky and muddy, but here there were brighter colours that I hadn’t expected. Nevertheless much seemed slightly unfinished or unthought-through. Her portrait of her sister, Virginia Woolf, was up there with Cassandra Austen’s of Jane: affection but not execution. Whenever something caught my eye, I found myself thinking that someone else had done it better. A painting of the Etchell siblings with featureless faces, for example: it paled beside Gabriele Münter or Roger Fry and looked slightly inept.

I went with a companion, who got quite irritated with a pair of still lifes. The lack of focus: was it form or colour in the wildflowers? Why did one think of felt-tip pens running out of colour? Why the silly cross-hatching on the vase in the more accomplished lilies?

One answer is that Bell did what she liked. For all her involvement with the Omega Workshops, Bell didn’t have to earn her living by her work, and she had help in bringing up her three children. She also ditched conventional morality. And I think this was the one really great thing about her – she had the chance of freedom and she really went for it. The decorations in their Charleston home, the foregrounding of women’s lives, the collaboration with others, the refusal to be confined by one style or theme, the unconventional way of life – that was what was interesting.

I returned to London and a much more conventional and masculine – even macho – experience. I just had time to get to the Charles Dickens Museum to see the copy of David Copperfield that had gone to Antarctica on the Terra Nova expedition. I had to see it. Edward Wilson, Apsley Cherry-Garrard, Herbert Ponting . . . the fascination I experienced when I first read Wilson’s diaries briefly returned as I looked at the blackened, dog-eared pages. And it was a lovely sky as I walked back through St George’s Gardens: perhaps I can compare this afternoon’s moon with Cassini’s map!

Versailles: Science and Splendour

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I’m not sure I’ve ever been in the Science Museum before; if I have, I would have been a child. (I’ve definitely been in the Natural History Museum, but not for over 50 years. Maybe it’s time for another visit.)

This exhibition was about science and bling – what you can do if you are an absolute ruler with vast resources at your disposal. Thanks to Jean Plaidy, I already had a general idea of the generation-hopping longevity of the last three Louis – Louis XIV (1643-1715), his great-grandson Louis XV (1715-1774) and his grandson, Louis XVI (1774-1792). They were great promoters of science and technology as well as the arts. Their reigns cover the Enlightenment and the publication of the Encyclopédie (1751-1772), and I came away with the impression that everybody at that time was discussing Newton’s Principia (1687), looking through gilded telescopes (1750) and ticking off what they could see from Cassini’s map of the moon (1679).

I don’t mean to be facetious. With their immense wealth and power, they were like the pharaohs of Egypt; instead of pyramids, Louis XIV constructed Versailles and its far-stretching gardens – all of which required accurate measurements and engineering. How else could you ensure that the two octagonal pools, 1.7km apart, would appear to be the same size to the king when he looked out of his palace window? Entirely frivolous – but knowledge and skill combined with human labour to make it work. Channels were constructed in the Seine to feed the monstrous Marly Machine to take water uphill to the Versailles fountains: ditto. Horology was crucial – not just for timepieces but to calculate latitude and longitude on the long sea voyages that kept the French empire close. Cassini was enticed from Italy to become the director of the Paris Observatory; he spent eight years observing the moon and to produce his map. He and his descendants also produced a map of France, and it was fascinating to see the triangles stretched across the land to ensure its accuracy. Thinking of Cassini, though, reminded me how knowledge is often in flux and needs constant checking: he began his work at a time when the heliocentric theory was still debatable, and, for all his brilliance in his other discoveries, he was the originator of the suggestion that Venus might have a moon.

Botany and zoology flourished at Versailles. Louis XV was presented with an Indian rhinoceros in 1769 – and here it was (stuffed; another victim of the French Revolution). There were fashions for plants, with Madame de Pompadour popularising Turkish hyacinths, but there was also scientific analysis and recording. Surgery was progressing: there was a display of the slender scalpel that Louis XIV’s surgeon developed to treat an anal fistula along with the small device that looked like an instrument of torture to ensure . . . no, really too much information. But it does bring home to you the uncomfortable reality of how advances are made. (The surgeon “practised” on a few dozen unfortunates with the same condition. Presumably most of his later patients at least must have survived for him to have the confidence to go ahead and tackle the king.) There was a life-sized hand-sewn model of a womb and foetus for the training of midwives: it looked like the kind of doll that a mother might sew for her daughter – which, under the circumstances, seemed appropriate.

Troutbeck

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I’ve been meaning to see the Burne-Jones windows in Jesus Church for years and today I finally did so. A walk from Windermere to Troutbeck via Wain Lane and Robin Lane, then to Orrest Head via Longmire Road. Tufted ducks on Middlerigg Tarn, wigeon by Causeway Farm. A pair of Thirlmere gates on either side of Wain Lane: I had almost forgotten my discovery of Thirlmere gates and siphon wells so was pleased to be reminded of them. Little streaks of snow still on the tops, but by the time I reached Orrest Head it was too hazy for the big view. All in all, a very satisfying day.

Leeds

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Over Christmas I’d watched Alan Bennett’s play “Sunset Across The Bay” from 1975 on BBC iPlayer. There’s a short scene of the bus passing City Square and the old man remembering when the statues were seen as “right rude”. (Heavens, how dirty the Queens Hotel was then! And the nymphs have moved around.) I’ve always rather liked the statues and I’d noticed that there were a few more barely-clothed figures around, so I looked out for them on my walk to the University.

The Stanley and Audrey Burton Gallery has had a change since I last visited. I was oddly taken by the work of Judith Tucker – insignificant, commonplace landscapes that are very familiar and deserve more attention. Then a painting by Wilhelmina Barns-Graham that – despite being “Untitled” – struck me (after a night at the opera) as representing three cellists. Even though I knew it wasn’t, I still stuck to it. And there was a figure by Bernard Meninsky, whom I’d come across in Hull. Not inspiring, but I can add him to my mental list. (Matthew Smith and Jacob Epstein were there too, looking very Smithy and Epsteiny.)

Love Life

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Well I certainly didn’t expect to find a link between The Travelling Players and this exuberant musical, but I did: Brechtian devices.

Music is by Kurt Weill, lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner. It’s a “concept musical” – no plot to speak of, but a theme runs through it. The theme here was marriage: a single marriage stretched across a century and a half, seen against the economic and social forces of the time. In 1791 everything seems simple and homespun: love, a home, a livelihood, neighbours. Perhaps there is a sense that life could be “more”, but circumstances make it implausible until industrialised progress arrives. Then come factories, taking the husband out of the house for long periods each day. Then come railways, taking him away for long periods each year. Then all the opportunities of the twentieth century . . . to become a hustler, a consumer, a self-fulfilment machine. And what about her? Always at home or demanding a vote and a career? And when the career is really just a job that tires you out by the time you return home – what then?

The musical was framed in a vaudeville show, with each act as a kind of Zeitgeisty Greek chorus. It also ensured that it was great fun. How can you not warm to a male octet singing jauntily about progress or a male quartet on economics? Had the audience known the words, they would surely have joined in with the Women’s Club Blues! The orchestra was up on stage as the backdrop, and I began to think of the conductor as a big band leader.

British Library

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Yesterday’s visit to the British Museum altered my focus today. I’d intended to see the exhibition on medieval women at the British Library, but now I was bursting to see a separate exhibition of some of the artefacts taken from the Library Cave at Dunhuang. I managed half an hour before a school group arrived and it was utterly fascinating.

How come I’ve never heard of Dunhuang?! But in a way I find my ignorance inspirational: there may be heaps of other wonderful serendipitous discoveries still to come my way.

So: Dunhuang is an oasis town, once a garrison on the edge of the empire controlled by the Han dynasty. It has several Buddhist cave sites around, including the Mogao Caves (first caves dug out around 366 and more over the next thousand years), which look utterly amazing. The only – comparatively puny – comparison I could pull out from my own experience was Mystras or the monasteries of the Meteora.

The Library Cave (cave number 17 of more than 700 caves) was discovered by a Taoist priest, Wang Yuanlu, in 1900. It contained some 50,000 documents of all kinds, both religious and secular, dating between 406 and 1002. Marc Aurel Stein, a Hungarian-British archaeologist (whose life story sounds fascinating), acquired many of them and brought them to Britain. This included – deep breath to take it in – the Diamond Sutra, the oldest complete printed book with a date in the world.

Which I took a photo of.

There were phrase books (crucial at this multi-lingual crossroads), Tibetan sutras copied out by local scribes (which gave an impression of what work was to be had), artists’ designs, letters between merchants and families, woodblock prints, almanacs, etc etc. Unable to understand a word, I focussed on the charm of the pieces: the holes in the much-folded letter from a merchant, the concertina-ing of a bilingual manuscript which could be read horizontally or vertically depending on the language.


The exhibition underlined what I had grasped yesterday: that goods are not the only things to travel along trade routes. Religions, ideas and practices are just as significant.

After this, the exhibition on medieval women in their own words seemed dull and predictable. My only amusement at the time was in discovering that a charm made from weasel testicles was considered a contraceptive. I appreciate the scholarship that goes into all this, but, really, Jane Austen put the words into Anne Elliot’s mouth over 200 years ago:

Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands.

On reflection, that is a very unfair and sweeping judgement, for it did contain some astounding items: a letter dictated by Joan of Arc and signed by her, for example. And the thread of religious mysticism kept me wondering: was Margery Kempe unusually pious, a charlatan, or had she found her own way to escape the bonds of a medieval woman’s life?