Category: United Kingdom

Beverley

Hull today. I noticed from the train how threadbare trackside trees looked now that ash die-back is so established. After a second breakfast we cycled to Beverley and back. I’ve now cycled as much of Hull as I ever want to. On the map it has lots of cycle infrastructure, but in reality it’s bitty, contorted and comes from the age when cyclists were grateful for anything. It was more enjoyable to abandon the signed Sustrans routes and just use minor roads with their fringes of cow parsley and comfrey.

And Hull, outside its centre, is . . . well, not very inspiring. I did discover past traces of prosperity and elegance in West Hull when we came across the (restored) fountain on The Boulevard – tree-lined with traces of Victorian respectability in the old Sunday School, villas and chapels. The smell of joints undermined the vibe somewhat.

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.