Great Catherine

Her name was Sophia Frederica Augusta.  She was a minor eighteenth century German princess of the minor eighteenth century duchy of Anhalt-Zerbst.  In the normal course of things she would have married a minor German prince, lived a minor German life and passed into history, minor and unnoticed.  But destiny had another path and another name for Sophia.  She became Ekaterina.  She became Catherine, Empress of all the Russias, known as ‘the Great’ even in her own lifetime.   

Catherine is one of those figures in history who has an enduring fascination for me.  I’m in Edinburgh at the present.  I came here specifically to visit the recently opened Catherine the Great – An Enlightened Empress exhibition in the National Museum of Scotland.  Marking the 250th anniversary of the coup d’état which placed her on the throne of Russia, it tells Catherine’s story through a collection of letters, diaries, jewellery, paintings, sculptures and dresses. 

Most of the items come from the State Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, including a recently restored giant coronation portrait, on show for the first time since the Revolution of 1917 which destroyed the Romanov dynasty.  The whole thing is a marvel, from the paintings, the porcelain, the grand dinner services and the intimate cameos.  It’s a story of Russia in peace and in war, a story of a Russia made even greater by a cultured, humane and civilized princess who took her adopted home to her heart. 

Catherine came to Russia to marry the Grand Duke Peter, the nephew of the reigning Empress Elizabeth.  If things had gone well she may have lived largely in her husband’s shadows and the shadows of history, like most other imperial consorts.  But they did not go well.  Peter and his new Grand Duchess developed a mutual loathing for one another, each taking a variety of lovers. 

Catherine was later to claim that her son Paul I, who succeeded her in 1796, was not the child of Peter but of Sergei Saltykov, one of her many paramours.  It’s almost certainly untrue.  Paul in character and attitude bore a striking resemblance to Peter, and was to fall from power for much the same reasons.  The two portraits on display in Edinburgh also show a remarkable physical similarity between father and son.

In the course of researching Catherine I came across an old movie called The Scarlett Empress, a 1934 historical drama directed by Josef von Sternberg, with Marlene Dietrich in the title role.  She’s really very good in the part, managing to catch the child-like simplicity of the young princess at one point and the scheming femme fatale at the next.  The movie has a marvellous Gothic cum expressionist quality.  The gargoyle thrones and the skeleton table decoration are really quite something.  The history, though, is as grotesque as the gargoyles, with Peter played as an inanely grinning imbecile by Sam Jaffe.

Peter III was, in truth, a competent and reforming emperor, but he managed to alienate just about everyone of significance in Russia, not just his wife.  With the support of the army and the leading Orthodox clergy, Catherine overthrew her husband in the coup of June 1762, after he had only been on the throne for a few months.  She went on to rule in her own right as Catherine II, while Peter was murdered. 

A black beginning did not presage a black reign; just the contrary.  Catherine was to prove herself the most cultured and civilized ruler ever to sit on the throne of Russia, the friend and correspondent of such luminaries of the Enlightenment as Denis Diderot and Voltaire.  I knew about this.  What I did not know is that she also had reason to be grateful to Charles James Fox, that old Whig bore.  His bust is one of the items on display! 

In the course of her reign, until the onset of the French Revolution introduced a note of caution, Catherine was instrumental in the pursuit of social and economic reform.  She was a great patron of the arts and sciences, encouraging all sorts of new enterprises.   In 1763 she founded Russia’s first College of Medicine.  Russia’s army and navy were hugely expanded, bringing success in war, particularly in successive conflicts with the Ottoman Turks.  Power, majesty and art; it was all a reflection of her glory. 

I loved it all; I spent over two hours in close examination of all sorts of marvellous things, walking in the footsteps of a remarkable woman, Matruschka, a petty German who became a great Russian.  I thought of her and her lovers, particularly of Prince Grigory Potemkin, the great passion of her life, shown here in portrait and sculpture.  

I loved Catherine’s formal paintings, pure expressions of power and majesty. But it was another kind of depiction altogether that wholly beguiled me.  Painted by Vladimir Borovikovsky, it shows Catherine, informally dressed, walking with her dog in the parkland of Tsarskoye Selo, a country gentlewoman, unremarkably remarkable.   The other remarkable painting is that entitled Catherine II in Travelling Costume by Mikhail Shibanov, formally accepted by the Empress though it is unflattering portrait, showing her as an old woman. 

Quite apart from being Russia’s most successful ruler, Catherine was an avid collector of all sorts of objets d’art.  The Edinburgh showcase was but a small cross-section of her collection, antiques and sculpture as well as painting.  And all that sumptuous table ware, porcelain, ceramics, jewels, gold and silver! 

It was such a pleasure also to see some of the court costumes and regimental dresses that the Empress herself wore.  When I was in Moscow I saw the boots that Peter the Great made for himself on display in the Kremlin Armoury Museum.  He was a giant of a man, reflected in his footwear.  Catherine was of more modest stature, reflected in her own costumes.  But as I stood and watched, knowing that she had been there, I still felt myself in the presence of one of history’s giants.  If Russians knew how to read, she once said, they would write me off.  Russians know how to read; they will never write Catherine off.  Such a thing is impossible.  

A King for All Seasons

Writing in the present edition of the Spectator William Cook says the Germany is rediscovering a once taboo part of its heritage (From Prussia with Love, 26 May).  It’s reflection on a new exhibition being held in the Neues Palace in Potsdam.  Under the title of Friederisiko, this celebrates the three hundredth anniversary of the birth of Frederick the Great, Prussia’s greatest and most delightfully paradoxical monarch. 

The suggestion is that that the rebirth, and rebranding, of Frederick is somehow a recent phenomena.  It’s actually nothing of the kind.  In an article I wrote last year (Praising Prussia, 9 March) I touched on the fact even in the old communist German Democratic Republic Frederick was resurrected from the crypt in its twilight years.  It was all part of an attempt to root the decrepit pseudo-state in German history.  An equestrian statue of the king, previously removed from central Berlin in the 1950s, rode right back to prominence in the 1980s.

It’s difficult not to admire a monarch who managed successfully to be all things to all people; who could be admired by Adolf Hitler and Erich Honecker; who could be an avatar for the Third Reich and the Communist Reich.  This was a man, moreover, whose sexuality, for all his military militancy, was as ambiguous as that of England’s Edward II. 

It’s not just Frederick who is undergoing a renaissance in the new Germany.  The old state of Prussia, formally abolished by the Allies in 1945, is also being reappraised with fresh enthusiasm.  Of course this is not the militaristic Prussia, the imperial Prussia, the very thing that Frederick would have been most proud of, but a gentle, cultured and artistic Prussia, the antithesis of the commonly accepted stereotype. This is the Prussia of the Piccolo not the Pickelhaube.  This is not the Frederick of the Seven Years War but the amateur musician and composer, the friend of poets and thinkers, Plato’s philosopher king at his finest. 

Friederisiko is scheduled to run until 28 October.  The chief focus, as I say, is not on his martial but his cultural exploits.  After all, here was a king as much at home in the salon as the battlefield; here was a King who could hobnob with men like Goethe and Voltaire.  The exhibition apparently makes much of his tolerance and philo-Semitism. “All religions are equal”, he said, “Everyone must find salvation in their own way.” 

We invariably recreate the past and past heroes in our own image.  The Potsdam Frederick is most certainly not Hitler or Honecker’s Frederick; he is far too laid back and arty for that!  But it’s comforting to note that he has not been completely divested of his Prussian starkness.  He is the Frederick for this season, for Angela Merkel’s season. He has become, as Cook suggests, a symbol for the current campaign to save the euro, a Spartan figure whose grim asceticism fits perfectly with Auntie Angela’s austerity programme. 

The king himself is buried in the grounds of the nearby Sanssouci Palace.  Apparently those who come in tribute place not flowers on his grave but potatoes!  Yes, that’s right, because it was Frederick who brought the spud to Prussia, a functional symbol for a functional king. 

Alles oder nichts – all or nothing – was Old Fritz’s battle cry, even so far as potatoes.  Personally I’m more than happy for Germany to reclaim him as the philosopher king and gentle aesthete.  But so far as the euro is concerned it may be as well to look to the warrior king, and not to the Battle of Rossbach but to Kunersdorf.  The House of Brandenburg may be a miracle, but the Miracle of the House of Brandenburg is one of those things in history that is unlikely to occur twice.  

Past Spirits

I wrote this article at the turn of the year, shortly after visiting the exhibition in question. I held it over until today to mark the two hundredth anniversary of the birth of Charles Dickens, one of England’s greatest writers and most generous spirits.

I loved all of my grandparents, but father’s father was the biggest single influence in my life. He died when I was twenty, almost six years ago now. I still miss him, I miss the things we used talk about and the stories he used to tell, wonderful stories of his time in India both before and during the Second World War, stories of his life at school, stories of his Norfolk boyhood.

It was he who introduced me to the tingly pleasures of the ghost story. It’s the winter nights I remember best, cold outside, warm within, when he read aloud, fire blazing and lights dimmed (candle light was best), the tales of haunting long ago. It was by his fireside that I was introduced to the delights of Elizabeth Gaskell, Sheridan Le Fanu, Algernon Blackwood, M. R. James (really scary!), E. F. Benson and so many others. It was by his fireside that I first heard Charles Dickens’ tales of the supernatural, not just A Christmas Carol, the most famous ghost and morality fable ever written, but others like The Signalman and The Ghost in the Bride’s Chamber.

Like me, Dickens was introduced to ghost stories early in life. It was the tales told in childhood that left him with a life-long hankering after ghosts, which just so happens to be the title of a rather charming little exhibition presently being held in the Folio Society Gallery in the British Library!

Scheduled to run until early March, A Hankering after Ghosts: Charles Dickens and the Supernatural displays the author’s interest through a variety of printed media. I went not long before Christmas, which added to the general cosiness of the whole thing. So far as I am concerned the way it was laid out could not be bettered. It presents, if you like, a study in ambivalence: Dickens’s fascination with the subject, informed by his childhood influences, on the one hand, and the scepticism of a mid-Victorian rationalist, on the other.

It’s a kind of voyage in several stages, beginning with childhood, illustrations from The Arabian Nights along with a copy of The Terrific Register, a kind of penny dreadful that the writer read in his teens with lasting effect, not surprising, given the lurid nature of its content. He later recalled that it used to frighten the wits out of his head!

But he recovered them sufficiently to treat some of the more farcical Victorian obsessions, particularly with spiritualism, with amusing condescension. Apparitions and other manifestations of the supernatural could be reduced to natural causes, so he believed. In Well Authenticated Rappings, a satirical sketch published in 1858 in Household Words, an uncanny voice in the narrator’s head turns out to be no more than a thumping Boxing Day hangover. There is more of spirits than spirit about you, one is tempted to observe.

While he could mock the spiritualists, Dickens entertained his own fashionable notions, including a belief in spontaneous combustion (think of Krook in Bleak House) and, most particularly, in mesmerism. His own efforts here were to cause a slight rift with his wife Catherine, as an 1853 letter shows, after the author’s magnetism with one Augusta de la Rue appeared to her to be a little too animal!

In the end one is simply left with the ghost story as a story, all rational explanations aside. It’s not about the real or even the surreal world; it’s simply about imagination and the power of imagination. Here Dickens did so much to stimulate contemporary interest. His ghosts, it might be said, are comfortably bourgeois, no longer inhabiting Gothic piles but Victorian firesides; his apparitions are ever more fearful for appearing by the side of something as modern as the railway.

Now let me say a word or two in appreciation of John Leech, the man who created the splendid illustrations that make A Christmas Carol even more memorable. There is the manifestation of Marley, the magnificent Odin-like figure of The Ghost of Christmas Present and, the most chilling of all, The Last of the Spirits pointing to Scrooge’s doom. As an aside here I have to say that a lot of the film adaptations of A Christmas Carol hopelessly miss the point, seeing this encounter as the decisive moment. It’s not; it’s only the final part of Scrooge’s gradual redemption.

Andrea Lloyd, the curator of the exhibition, has written of its theme and purpose;

Dickens is already closely aligned with Victorian ghost stories in many people’s minds largely because of the success of A Christmas Carol. However, Dickens touches upon the supernatural in many of his other works, revealing his thoughts about unexplained phenomena, which in turn reflect the evolving scientific theories and beliefs that were prevalent in 19th century England. At this time people were debating the virtues of mesmerism and animal magnetism, getting caught up in the Spiritualism craze that arrived from America, and actively investigating and recording ghostly phenomena. By engaging with this vogue for the supernatural, and by tapping into the Victorian attraction to the macabre, Dickens created some of his finest works.

He did more than that. As G. K Chesterton once wrote, he did not strictly make a literature; he made a mythology. I thought of Dickens; I thought of the ghosts of Christmas past, not long past, my past; I thought of my beloved grandfather, to whose memory this article is dedicated.

Take a Hot Maiden

The British Library will be illuminating the dull winter months with a new exhibition of illuminations. These are not any old pictures; no, they are from the personal manuscripts of the kings and queens of England, going all the way back to the ninth century, to be shown in an exhibition called Royal Manuscripts: The Genius of Illumination.

The thing that fascinates me about this is that the illustrations in question, and the attendant text, were not simply intended as a diversion, or to focus the royal mind on less earthly pursuits, but as a sort of princely instruction manual, a list of dos and don’ts. Advice is given on whom to marry, what to eat and how to rule, all in the best possible royal tradition.

One of the most diverting, and amusing, is Secretum Secretorum, an adaptation of Aristotle’s avuncular advice to Alexander the Great. Dating from 1327, it was presented to the teenage Edward III by Walter of Milimete, a court cleric, and intended as a "guide to better kingship." Better kingship was certainly needed after the disastrous reign of Edward II, the king’s father, deposed and murdered, allegedly in a particularly gruesome manner.

Dear Walter, though, might have been in danger of an equally gruesome fate if some of the suggestions in his manuscript had been taken seriously. When it came to matters of the heart the text wags a misogynist finger: “May you never trust the works and services of women, and may you not commit yourself to them.” When one considers that the power on the throne at the time was Edward’s mother, Isabella, known as the She Wolf of France, who, with the aid of Roger Mortimer, her lover, had deposed and imprisoned her unfortunate husband, the cleric’s timing may not have been of the best.

In contrast there is 'the good woman', the sort of individual that the king would be wise to marry. She should be “beautiful in appearance, descended from a noble family, well-appointed in limbs, having an agreeable expression and an entire body well-adorned…you may have a majestic wife…with whom you may have sex as often, and when, you wish.” Now I expect Edward was waiting for that.

I’m so intrigued; I wonder if he followed the prescription given elsewhere for a stomach ache –“If you feel a pain or heaviness in your stomach and in your belly then the remedy is to clasp a hot and beautiful maiden or to place upon your belly a wide warm shirt”. Hmm, clasp a hot maiden or take a shirt - what a royal dilemma for a lusty prince. The belly ache, incidentally, is almost guaranteed by the culinary advice, which, amongst other things, suggests a delightful summer dish of veal and vinegar followed by sour apples.

Other details raise a smile with their unintentionally humorous pedantry. Nothing is omitted, even the best advice on how to sleep – “When…you have been restored by food…sleep mildly and rest for one hour upon your right side. Then turn to your left and upon that side finish your sleep, for the left side is cold and requires warming.” Yes, of course it does, but how would he know when his hour was up? Did he have a flunky ready by his side? “Wake up, your majesty; this side is done.” Not something, I think, guaranteed to improve the royal mood.

Other documents on show include the Regement of Princes, written by Thomas Hoccleve in the fifteenth century and presented to Henry V while he was still Prince of Wales. The prince was told that a “monarch is but a man for sure, and no matter how intelligent, he may err and sometimes make mistakes.”

Considering that Henry was to embark on a course of action that brought short term glory and long term disaster for the crown, it’s reasonable to assume that he was no more inclined to take advice from a commoner than any of his predecessors, especially commoners who give every appearance of veering between petty-minded, rule-obsessed bureaucrats and censorious busybodies!

The whole thing looks like being jolly good fun, provided always that you enjoy the pictures and ignore the advice, feeling sure that you are walking in royal footsteps from ages past.

Homage to Catalonia

The Tate Modern in London is running an exhibition at the moment dedicated to the work of Joan Miró, who along with Dali and Picasso is part of the triumvirate of genius produced by Spain in the previous century, shapers not just of their own unique art but the art of the world. But Miró had a unique identity of his own, Spanish, yes, but Catalan, the region to the north-east of the country which had such an influence on his paintings, through its landscape, its folklore and its traditions.

Of the three I far prefer Miró, not just because of the quality of his work, the joyfulness and exuberance, but because he was far less of a political artist than his contemporaries; far less of a communist than Picasso, far less of an eccentric than Dali. Under the title Joan Miró: The Ladder of Escape, the organisers of the exhibition have certainly attempt to give his work a certain political narrative, and those who want to follow this path can do no better than read the essay in the catalogue; otherwise just enjoy the joyfulness of the art.

There really is only one sure thing one can say about Miró – he was passionate about his passion for Catalonia. He may have been linked politically with communism and artistically with surrealism but he was clever enough to keep his distance from both, always following his own independent path.

And what a path it was. I must have stood in front of The Farm, a painting once owned by Ernest Hemingway, for ten minutes or more absorbing all of the wonderful detail. Painted while he was still in his twenties it marks the lifelong engagement of the painter with his land and his home. You will find it in the same room as other less familiar works, including The Rut, Mont-roig, The Church and the Village, House with a Palm Tree and Catalan Landscape (The Hunter), a wonderfully exciting combination of colours and images. One can also see the progression in his work, from the early realism to a more abstract combination of symbols and signs.

It seems to me that there is a unique and personal language in the work of Miró that defies the straightjacket of politics, something that makes him far more interesting than Dali or Picasso. In Dog Barking at the Moon, painted in 1926, the symbolism is as mysterious as it is beguiling. The series known as the Dream Pictures say nothing about external affairs and the outside world and everything about the artist's own personal consciousness.

There are paintings that make a political statement, the most obvious here being Still-Life with Old Shoe painted in 1937, a brilliantly glowing piece of work, and Untitled (Head of a Man), usually interpreted as statements about the Spanish Civil War, as well as the Constellations series painted in the 1940s. But these are the exceptions and, in contrast to Goya and Picasso, more obvious political painters, Miró is far more of a mystic and a visionary, far more poetic in the way that he sees the world.

There is a steady process of simplification, of breaking complexity right down to the most basic elements, simple lines and primary colours. The message is stark and easily deciphered. I look at Painting (1927) and what do I see, a random collection of lines and colours? No, I see desire, I see sensuality.

Over the thirteen rooms you will find more than one hundred and twenty works, not just painting but also lithographs and sculpture. With reference to the latter I particularly liked The Ladder of the Escaping Eye. The ladder, the motif of the whole exhibition, the ladder of escaping, is appropriate enough, though not perhaps in the way that the curators perceived. The escape is in the art itself, the gateway beyond history, the gateway to a parallel universe. It’s Miró’s triumph.

The Rough Guide to Eternity

It’s the most fearsome court you will ever face. There you are, standing in a long hall. At the far end sits Osiris, the god of the underworld. To approach him you have to pass a gauntlet of terrifying mummified gods. If you are not already scared out of your wits the Swallower of Shades, the Bone Breaker and the Eater of Entrails should send you into a condition of total collapse. Just when you think things can’t possibly get any worse, they do. Here comes the prosecutor, Thoth in the shape of a baboon, sitting on top of a pair of scales that will shortly determine your eternal fate.

Nil desperandum. You have long prepared yourself for this court that no mortal can escape: you have taken out an insurance policy; you have in your hands the Book of the Dead, a sort of Rough Guide to the afterlife, with all sorts of helpful hints on how to address the locals, no matter how elevated.



In Ancient Egypt life was nasty, brutish and short. No, let me rephrase that: it was nasty, brutish and very short. Everywhere one is surrounded by a cult of death, by reminders that this life is a mere antechamber to eternity. The Book of the Dead is therefore an essential acquisition for the literate, full of helpful spells and incantations. We call it the Book of the Dead for obvious reasons, but for the Egyptians in the shadow of the pyramids it was known as the Book of the Coming Forth by Day.

This fascinating document is the subject of an exhibition in the British Museum, scheduled to run until March. Do go if you can; it’s a journey that you are unlikely to forget, taking a path trodden thousands of years ago into the heart of Egyptian mythology, magic and mysticism; a path trodden by the ba, the spirits of the dead.

There is a tunnel at the end of which lies the promise of eternal life, provided one can negotiate a way past the terrors ahead, not just the ultimate judgement but all sorts of demons and monsters. The book is full of spells for fighting off crocodiles and serpents, animal and insect terrors of all sorts, including an entity simply known as The Creature that Swallows the Ass!

Using the right words, one is able to avoid decapitation and decomposition. Another possible danger was being turned upside down, which entailed, as the Egyptians saw it, a reversal of the digestive process. The Book is even prepared for this, some versions including a spell “for not eating excrement or drinking urine in the underworld.”

So, the ba has made it this far, through a series of portals, each guarded by a terrifying gatekeeper. Safe passage has depended on saying the right words, all contained in your guide. The most important test of all comes in a place called the Hall of the two Maats, where Osiris presides with his forty-two companions, where one’s earthly conduct is weighed in the balance, weighed on scales presided over by Anubis, the jackal-headed god. In one pan sits the image of truth; in the other your own heart.

This is it; this is the ultimate test. If one has led a good life the scales will balance. If they do not then the next appointment is with the Devourer, a dreadful beast with the head of a crocodile, the body of a lion and the haunches of a hippopotamus. The Devourer feasts on the hearts of those who have failed, which involves a second death, one of complete oblivion. Don’t panic, even if you have not exactly lead a blameless life. Open your Book at spell 30B and repeat slowly;

O my heart of my mother! O my heart of my different forms! Do not stand up as witness against me, do not be opposed to me in the tribunal, do not be hostile to me in the presence of the Keeper of the Balance.



The interesting thing about this is that while the Egyptians were the first to conceive of a direct relationship between one’s eternal fate and one’s conduct while alive, they still believed it possible to avoid unpleasant consequences in death by trickery. Their gods may have been awesome but they were clearly not all-knowing! In theory, therefore, it would have been quite possible to have been a thoroughly bad person in life and still make it into celestial bliss. It was the Christians who carried the process of judgement through to a logical conclusion.

So, you’ve made it; you have found a way through; the court has declared you blameless. What next, you may wonder? The goals are actually quite varied, differing from Book to Book. In one you might sail with Ra, the sun god, in his chariot across the sky; in another you would live in the underworld, blessed by the presence of Osiris. The third and most common possibility was to live in the Field of Reeds, essentially a divine and perfect version of all that you knew on earth. There the corn grew to unimaginable heights.

Corn? But surely that involves sewing and reaping; surely that involves, ahem, work? Again there is no need for concern, for the Book of the Dead is ready to provide you with one final service. Amongst the things you have carried into the underworld is a small figurine called a shabti. Simply recite spell 6 and it will do all the work for you. Relax; lie back and do whatever one does when there is nothing else to do. You have made it into the Egyptian Paradise.

Ways of seeing

The Tate Modern London is holding an exhibition of the work of Paul Gauguin at the moment, scheduled to run until mid-January. It’s quite an occasion, the first major showing of his art in the city for more than half a century. Despite other demands on my time I simply had to go, spending several hours last Saturday looking at the development of his style, being taken to places as far apart as Brittany and Tahiti.

Gauguin fascinates me both as a painter and as a man, though quite frankly parts of his life, aspects of his conduct, his moral turpitude, I have to say, does not reward close scrutiny. The man and the monster in the man have attracted me ever since I read The Moon and Sixpence, the short novel by William Somerset Maugham loosely based on the artist’s life, though his fictitious Charles Strickland is not nearly quite as callous as the real-life Paul Gauguin!

Sorry: perhaps I’m putting you off; that’s certainly not my intention. It’s easy to forget the man in discovering the artist, and what a discovery he is, as you will find if you visit Gauguin: Maker of Myth. He began working in the Impressionist style but quickly rejected what he thought of as the tyranny of mere appearance. I so agree with this; art for me is a search for deeper things, deeper meanings: in colour, in subject, in object, in imagination. The endless water lilies of Claude Monet bore me absolutely rigid!

Gauguin, in contrast, created something altogether more solid, less ethereal, in what was later to be called Post-Impressionism, really the true beginnings of modern art, impacting on people like Cezanne and Picasso. There are so many striking paintings here, paintings from his Breton period, which includes Vision of a Sermon (Jacob Wrestling with the Angel), where women in traditional costume are seen watching the struggle between the two central figures. And I have to make special mention of The Ham, a still life painted in 1889, a painting that does not call for one’s attention, no, it simply demands it!

Gauguin went to Brittany is search of an illusion; he was to continue to pursue the same illusion all the way to the South Pacific: the belief that in the midst of modern sophistication there was a purer, simpler more authentic, more primitive way of life. Primitivism in life, primitivism in art was his quest, attained in the latter, eluded in the former.

The Tahiti paintings, brilliant as they are, brilliant in structure, colour and tone, are really nothing more than a threadbare colonial fantasy. Look hard; this is no paradise; look how detached and sullen his women are, self-absorbed, cut off from the outside world. The paintings tell a deeper story of alienation and demoralisation that the artist is too honest to have missed. In The Spectator supplement on the exhibition Martin Gayford writes that there are moments when Gauguin in his last years brings to mind Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, a novella that depicts the central character’s moral collapse in a tropical colony, though his destiny was squalid rather than horrific.

No matter; it’s possible to enjoy this exhibition without looking for anything deeper than the art itself. It’s unlikely London will ever again see such a comprehensive collection of one of the great masters of modern art, one of the few people to show that there truly are new ways of seeing.

Vincent in Word and Image

I went to Amsterdam last year to visit Vincent and now Vincent is coming to London to visit me! A little later this month a new exhibition of his work opens in the Royal Academy, running until the middle of April. The exciting thing about this show, headed The Real Van Gough: The Artist and his Letters, is that some forty of his letters will also be on display beside sixty-five paintings and thirty drawings. For the emphasis, you see, is on the word as well as the image.

I confess that I don’t know that much about the life of Van Gogh apart from the usual stock images of troubled genius and ear lopper! I’ve never read a biography of the man, though I have tried to understand him as best as I am able through his intense, swirling and penetrating images; a world in motion, a world on fire.

It’s of particular fascination for me to discover that he also loved words, loved to write and express himself in writing. Words impacted on his imagination, on the creative power of his imagination, as well as landscape and people. “Books and reality and art are the same kind of thing for me”, he wrote, a sentiment he carried further, “One has to learn to read, as one has to learn to see and learn to live.”

Van Gogh read books with the same concentrated intensity that he used in painting. Besides his native Dutch he was also fluent in French and English, reading Shakespeare and Dickens in the original. His favourite Dickens’ novel was Hard Times which is the one that I happen to like the least! Still, I think that Vincent and I would have got on famously, for I also share his love of Flaubert and Maupassant.

More broadly, he seems to have been highly knowledgeable about most contemporary French fiction, reading all of Zola’s Rougon-Macquart series and identifying closely with the author’s naturalism. Of these books he wrote to Wilemein, his younger sister, saying that they “…paint life as we feel it ourselves, and thus satisfy the need which we have, that people tell the truth.”

The truth is that Van Gogh as a communicator was too intense for most people in person; too intense for Gauguin, too intense even for Theo, his brother, an art dealer and his main source of financial support. His letters, then, were a way of channelling much of his manic energy into simple imagery and clear ideas, his only really successful mode of communication beyond his art. When he arrived in Arles in 1888, the beginning of his most creative period, brief and overwhelming, he wrote to Theo describing his wonder at his new surroundings;

I notice some magnificent plots in red earth planted with vines, with the mountains in the background of the most delicate lilac. And the landscapes under the snow with the white peaks against the sky as bright as the snow was just like the winter landscapes the Japanese did.

He wanted to paint as Zola wrote, in a natural way, showing life as it flowed around him;

The zouaves, the brothels, the adorable little Arlesiennes going to their first communion…the priest in his surplice who looks like a dangerous rhinoceros, the absinthe drinkers…

I’m certain that this exhibition is destined to achieve its aim, to give a more nuanced view of the man, of his work and of his creative intellect; the man beyond the stereotype of troubled genius and harvester of ear lobes. :-)

Ancient Sex

I’m rather sorry not to be in Athens just at the present, for an exhibition has just opened telling the story of love and desire in the ancient world, the erotica of Eros! Over two-hundred and seventy objects d’art have been put on display in the Museum of the Cycladic Art, where they will remain on show for the next six months. It’s quite an achievement as the artefacts, dating from the sixth century BC to the fourth century AD, have been gathered together from more than fifty international museums.

The exhibition centres on a unifying theme: the evolution of Eros, a powerful Greek god, into the Roman Cupid, an altogether tamer, less potent figure, the mere companion of Venus. But this kind of axis has produced a superabundance of all kinds of sexually inspired artefacts. The director of the museum says that that there was no deliberate intention to shock, though some of the depictions, particularly of Eros’ cruelty towards the goddess Psyche, seems to have caused some unease among early visitors. One cameo shows him dragging her by the hair and hitting her with a mallet, illustrating, one supposes, the dual nature of desire.

After that one proceeds to the upper galleries, where children under sixteen are warned not to enter ‘unattended’ which I imagine will have the said children arriving in hordes, especially as there is no insistence that they be attended! There, in three rooms, ancient sexual union is depicted in all of its inventiveness and variety; from pederasty, anal sex, mutual oral sex to what the exhibition quaintly terms the ‘bucolic love affair’. There are giant phalluses, manufactured as lucky charms, as well as engravings of furious orgies involving satyrs and silens. In a text highlighted on the wall one scribe gives note of his own particular enthusiasm;

I delight in the prime of a boy at twelve. One of thirteen is much more desirable. He who is fourteen is a still sweeter flower of the lovers. And one who is beginning his fifteenth year is yet more delightful. The sixteenth year is that of the gods. And as for the seventeenth, it is not for me but for Zeus to seek it.

So, there! Oh, yes, it would be super to be in Athens. Still better to be there in the company of Aristophanes.:-))