A Tribute to Perfection

When you see a beautiful woman, what do your thoughts turn to?   This was a question posed on Blog Catalogue.  It wasn’t about the obvious; it wasn’t about sex: it was about aesthetics.

 I didn’t bother answering because it was chiefly directed at men.  But my thoughts immediately did turn, as the poster put it, to the Beauty of a Woman.  For some wholly unexplained reason they turned to Girl with a Pearl Earring, both the painting by Johannes Vermeer and the 2003 movie staring Scarlett Johansson and Colin Firth.  For me the one complimented the other perfectly, a depiction of peerless beauty inside a seductive enigma. 

I saw the painting several years ago in the Mauritshuis Gallery in The Hague.  I was completely beguiled by the look of the subject, the way she stares out, the way she stares inside.  Girl with a Pearl Earring is sometimes referred to as the Mona Lisa of the North, though I find her far more mysterious and captivating than the Mona Liza of the South.

The truth is we know next to nothing about Vermeer, who spent his whole working life in the Dutch town of Delft.  If we know next to nothing about him we know nothing at all about his subjects.  We know nothing about this girl, other than what she conveys by expression alone.  Who was she, this image of perfection, where did she come from?  Was she a member of the artist’s own family, the wife of a patron, or was she, perhaps, simply a household servant?

These questions are unanswerable.  But into the mystery came Tracy Chevalier, who spun a story around this head.  To this story came movie director Peter Webber, who turned a painting and a novel into a cinematic masterpiece, an artistic hymn to beauty and to painting.

I haven’t read the novel, though I’m told it’s very good.  In a way I’m glad because the film, which I saw a month or so ago on BBC iPlayer, depends more on image and mood than words.  The dialogue is wonderfully understated, so much depending, like the painting itself, on look.  Scarlett Johansson might have been born to play this part, not just because she a good actress, not just because she is strikingly beautiful, but because she could very well be the Girl herself, come to life but carrying the enigma with her.

Everything about this film for me was perfection - perfection in character, perfection in setting, perfection in mood and perfection in image.  Axel Ruger, the curator of Dutch art at London’s National Gallery, quite rightly said that it takes the atmosphere and some of the pictorial conventions of the seventeenth century and translates them into cinematic language.  It is, in other words, a moving image of the still painting. 

The premise of the movie, the premise of Chevalier’s book, is based on a supposition – what if Vermeer had been inspired by the beauty of a maid who came to the household to create one of his greatest masterpieces?  And thus it is.  Johansson comes as Griet, a girl from a dignified but impoverished Protestant family to serve with the Catholic Vermeers.  

To begin with the artist pays her little mind, isolating himself in his studio, not just to concentrate on his work but to get away from the demands of everyday domestic life.  It’s only after Griet, who moves around bullied and mostly wordless, is given the task of cleaning the studio that she becomes an object of interest owing to her sensitivity towards light and colour.  She is not just an object of interest to the artist, helping him mix his paint, but an object of desire to Van Ruijven (Tom Wilkinson), his wealthy but boorish patron.  When he fails to possess to possess Griet physically he decides to possess her physically! 

A portrait is duly commissioned, a work in progress, hidden away from Vermeer’s self-pitying and jealous wife (Essie Davis).  There is a wonderful wordless frisson between Griet and Vermeer, lots of smouldering sexual tension all the greater because it is so understated.  That consummation when he finally pins the pearl on Griet’s ear is simply breathtaking, virginal, symbolic and erotic, far in excess of any obvious physical act.  It’s a moment of perfection, in beauty, in desire and in longing, captured forever.  It’s a perfect tribute to perfection.  

Penis Power

I do try so hard not to be a ‘cultural relativist.’  I try so hard to be tolerant of others, of the customs and practices of other peoples and other nations.  But, alas, the demon of prejudice snaps even at my tolerant heels.  Where I fall down and fall down badly is over the marriage customs of South Africa’s Zulus. 

Actually I could not care less about the Zulus or how many wives they are allowed to take by tribal custom.  My problem is with Jacob Zuma, the country’s grinningly inane Zulu president, the butt of repeated jokes when he came on a state visit to London two years ago.  More than a few made me laugh. 

There he was with one of his four spouses, a more ridiculous sight is difficult to imagine.  Apparently they take turns deciding who is to travel with the polygamist president.  How do they do it, I wonder?  Is it a case of eeny, meeny, miny, moe; one wife, two wife, three wife four?  Just imagine the arguments over exactly who is the country’s first, second, third or fourth lady! 

Yes, I find him ridiculous but I’m not alone here: a lot of South Africans also think that he is ridiculous, even within the African National Congress, the corrupt ruling party.  Objections have been raised over the tax-funded support Zuma receives for his wifely quartet.  This is hardly surprising considering what’s officially referred to as ‘spousal support’ amounts to $1.6million.  Enough is enough, the cry has gone up; we are not funding this man’s sex life! 

His sexuality is rather the topic at the moment, raising other issues of concern in the tawdry ‘rainbow nation.’  The thing is, you see, South African’s have recently been regaled with something only Mrs Zuma One, Two, Three and Four normally see – the presidential penis!  Yes, they have, in the Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg, where a painting called The Spear was recently on display.  There he is, Mr President, in a Lenin-like pose with the, ahem, spear in question on prominent display. 

Poor man; he is not best pleased by this insult to his dignity.  He’s applied to the courts to have it removed, a challenge to the country’s liberal constitution which guarantees freedom of expression.  ANC thugs have already forced the gallery to close.  Though Brett Murray, the artist, has impeccable credentials as an anti-apartheid activist his work has been denounced as ‘racist’ on the grounds that he is white.  Some, though, have the wit to understand what it’s really about, including Mondi Makhanya of the South African Sunday Times.  Of Zuma he wrote;

It will be his sexual legacy that we will remember more than anything else. His sexual endeavours are therefore fair game for artists, cartoonists, comedians, radio DJs and tavern jokers.

I personally think he will be remembered for more than his spear; I think he will be remembered for presiding over the final degeneracy of the Mandela legacy.  My, oh, my, how far this nation has sunk in a bog of corruption, how far the ANC has embraced a culture of ‘bling’ in the most vulgar and rapacious forms imaginable. 

It’s gone beyond satire when they can’t even recognise it themselves.  Let me give you one tiny illustration.  At the end of a jamboree in January, called to mark the ANC’s hundredth birthday, Kgalema Motlanthe, Zuma’s deputy, proposed a toast to the plebs in the stadium below – “The leaders will now enjoy the champagne, and of course they do so on your behalf through their lips.” 

Vicarious luxury wine, vicarious jobs, vicarious opportunities and vicarious homes is the reality of the Rainbow Nation.  People of all colours unite; you have the sight of the nomenclature going past in luxury cars to witness.  The simple truth is that politics in South Africa is a racket, with the pigs of the ANC vying with one another to get their snouts in the trough.  I do not believe that this country has a happy future.  All the gold has gone from the end of the rainbow into the coffers of Zuma and his kindred.

Let me leave you on a slightly lighter note.  Let me leave you with another picture of the Spear in action, this time dancing at his nuptials to wife number four.  There he is, all kitted out in traditional Zulu costume, even so far as his traditional Zulu trainers.  

A Riddle Wrapped in an Enigma

It’s one of the most remarkable paintings in the whole of western art – it’s Jan Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait, sometimes known as The Arnolfini Wedding, painted in 1434. It’s one of my favourite paintings, one of the great draws in London’s National Gallery.

It’s remarkable in two senses: for the freshness of Van Eyck’s vision, the intensity of the detail, for the range of objects that might mean something, might have some symbolic significance, or might mean nothing at all, other than that they are objects in a well-appointed room. It’s remarkable also for its remarkable history, passing through the hands of the Habsburgs and the Bourbons into those of Joseph Bonaparte, whose bottom was placed on the throne of Spain by big brother Napoleon. Joseph, I was delighted to discover, was called Pepe Bottles – Joe Bottles - by his less than enamoured subjects, so known for his prestigious intake. Looted by a British officer from the dipso royal’s baggage after the Battle of Vitoria in 1813, the Arnolfini Portrait eventually made its way into the National Gallery.

More than any of this it is remarkable for its subject, a prosperous Flemish merchant couple, the first depiction of ordinary people, people who were not aristocratic or royal, just the middle class from the Middle Ages. It celebrates property, of course, it celebrates domestic comfort and wealth, as other paintings celebrate the landed wealth of the nobility.

But still there is a wonderful immediacy and homeliness to the painting; we know these people in their sheer ordinariness; we can identify with them as real human beings, not some grand statement about power. There is also an abiding mystery about this intense little oeuvre, a sense of otherness which raises all sorts of questions. It’s an enigma that's been taken up by the art historian Corola Hicks in Girl in a Green Gown: the History and Mystery of the Arnolfini Portrait, sadly unfinished at the time of her death last year.

Beyond the fact that it’s a depiction of a merchant and his...his what, exactly? Is she his wife or his girlfriend? Is this a marriage or a betrothal? There is no certainty at all on the point, despite the misleading title. There is certainly a bond between the two, a couple who are, perhaps, already married, or who have simply announced a union to come. Is the lady in green pregnant, as so many have assumed from her bloated appearance? Would a pregnant paramour have been shown at such times in such a way? Why has the painter depicted himself in the mirror in the far wall? And why, as Hicks herself asks, does the man look like Vladimir Putin?

No, he's not Russian. He is, rather, a member of the powerful Arnolfini clan of Italian merchants, well-established in Bruges by the fifteenth century. Exactly who he is, though, and, even more intriguingly, who she is, the lady in green, has proved slightly more problematic, despite decades of speculation and art criticism. It may be one of two Giovanni Arnolfinis, though neither was married in 1434. So far as he is concerned it's certainly a fully-realised portrait of a particular individual (he was to appear again in the work of van Eyck), though she seems to be more of an ideal, a type reminiscent of the painter's Madonnas. Is she there at all, was she there for the sitting, or is she yet to come, not yet emerged from the shadows of the Platonic ideal, a future promise? Oh, and the celebration of fecundity may be no more than a celebration of cloth, another sign of the merchant’s wealth!

Hicks turns her thoughts to several themes, to the symbolism and the significance not just of the central act of union, but the surrounding paraphernalia - the dog - faithfulness? -, the mirror, the rug, the clothes, the glass in the windows, the furnishings, the single lighted candle and even the oranges by the window. Oranges, still a luxurious and expensive import, are another sign that Signor Arnolfini was a man of substance, a display of conspicuous consumption. They are also a reminder of Eve's gift to Adam, a fruit, interchangeable with apples, as the produce from the Tree of Knowledge. Even the bed is a sign of wealth, a sign that this was a man who could afford to put one in his front room! What we are looking at here is a celebrity couple, a kind of illustration from a fifteenth century version of Hello magazine, people who have made it and want others to know that they have made it, a bourgeois ideal!

The title of Hick's book is a clear nod in the direction of Girl with a Pearl Earring, the Mona Lisa of the North, Johannes Vermeer's later masterpiece, another mystery about an unnamed woman, another intrigue, a wonderful vacuum filled by speculation and fiction. Likewise, we will never know any more than we do about the Girl in a Green Gown; we will never come a step closer to her and her individual destiny.

Hicks is good, but she is much better on the history than the mystery, which, paradoxically, I find quite pleasing. Some enigmas are best left as they are, to intrigue and perplex for all time. But the greater mystery is the artist himself, employed at the time of the Arnolfini Portrait as a painter in the court of Philip the Good, duke of Burgundy. Why, and by what manner, did he come to see the world in such a radical and realist fashion, in a fashion completely different from the conventions of late medieval art? We simply do not know.

Meanwhile one central question remains: why does Arnolfini look like Vladimir Putin?

Mirror, mirror on the wall

The best artists are those who offer new ways of seeing and the best pictures are those which offer themselves as a challenge. Hieronymus Bosch died in 1516 but his art still seems astonishingly modern to me, as bitingly satirical in its own way as the paintings of George Grosz in the twentieth century, rather a paradox considering that his style was late Gothic, untouched by the new fashions which had emerged out of Renaissance Italy. Bosch is a Pre-Raphaelite before the Pre-Raphaelites!

Like Grosz, Bosch looked on the world with a bitterly cynical eye. The two men could not be further apart - Grosz the left-wing chronicler of Germany after the First World War; Bosch a Christian pessimist troubled by the apparent ascendency of evil, a theme he touches on time after time.

I have before me a print of Christ Carrying the Cross, a painting in the collection of the Museum voor Schone Kunsten in the Belgian city of Ghent. It’s an extraordinary piece of work, touching on a very ordinary theme in late medieval art. I simply can’t look at this in a detached frame of mind, or look with equanimity at the ugly throng through which Christ and the two thieves make their collective way to Calvary, suffering and death.

The suffering has already begun, the devils already at work in taunting and mockery. There, on the right-hand side, are the two thieves. At the bottom is the bad thief, turning on his tormentors in defiance, ugliness returned for ugliness. At the top the good thief, sneered at by a particularly vicious looking friar, already looks corpse-like in hopeless resignation.

In the middle of this human storm, and in the middle of the painting, is Christ with his cross, a little like the eye in calm serenity, ignoring all of the malevolence, deeply introspective, the only sign of emotion being a single tear forming on his lower lashes. His serenity is mirrored in that of Saint Veronica on the bottom left, looking down at the veil which she has given Christ to wipe his brow, the cloth now showing an imprint of his face.

The noteworthy thing about the crowd, friar and all, is that it is not Biblical, at least not so far as dress. These are the people of sixteenth century Flanders, people the artist would have been familiar with: merchants, clerics, soldiers, some prosperous burghers of the day, judging by their headgear and general apparel. The figure to the right-hand side of the good thief even looks like a Duke of Burgundy.

Bosch was a Catholic and this work, thought to have been painted some time after 1500, possibly on the threshold of the Reformation, is an act of faith in a time of uncertainty. But what is it saying, exactly? Is there a message in that malevolent friar, I wonder? He, representing a mendicant order, an order given to charity, is the most malign among the crowd, teeth like fangs, his face showing no grace or Christian mercy whatsoever. Why put a friar in a picture that lifts him out of his own history and places him among the first century Jews of Palestine? Is this an observation on the state of the Catholic Church, the church of those monster popes Alexander VI and Julius II? These are just questions. I don’t have any answers.

This is a dark painting, pessimistic in outlook. There is no humanism here, the intellectual fashion of the day, and precious little humanity. Simon of Cyrene is present, certainly, the man who helped Christ carry his burden, but he, looking upwards, is cast into the shadows under the Cross. Then there is the blind side, the fourth wall, occupied across the ages by other spectators, shifting members of that crowd, people like me and like you. Do we participate? Are we, too, among the mockers? Is this a mirror?

Michael Prodger, writing some weeks ago about this painting in the Spectator, points out that Carl Jung, the psycho-analyst, claimed Bosch as an early discoverer of the unconscious. In fact Jung is not the first to make such a claim, even though the terms used were different.

José de Sigüenza, a Spanish historian and theologian born later in the same century that Bosch died, wrote of him that “The difference between the work of Bosch and that of other painters lies in the fact that the others depict man as he appears on the outside. Only Bosch dared to paint him on the inside.” Look, see; it’s not a very comfortable suggestion.

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.

A million tragedies

An important new book was published earlier this year. It’s called Drawings from the Gulag, containing an extraordinary and disturbing collection of sketches by one Danzig Baldaev, a former official in the NKVD, Stalin’s security police. I was fully aware of the horror of the Soviet camp system from the work of people like Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Varlam Shalamov among others. But these graphic drawings give the sheer savagery of it all a terrible immediacy.

Baldaev himself has an interesting history. The son of a rich Mongolian intellectual, he was born in 1925 in the south-east of the USSR. Like so many others, his father was arrested during the Great Terror of the 1930s, while he and his sister were consigned to an NKVD orphanage, set up specifically for the children of ‘enemies of the people.’ One does not have to imagine too hard to conjure up the treatment children received in places like this.

Later, after leaving the orphanage, Baldaev was ordered to become a guard in one of the NKVD labour camps. To amuse himself he starred to sketch the various tattoos displayed by the criminal fraternities. On learning of this his superiors encouraged him to continue, believing such designs supplied valuable intelligence on the links between inmates and the criminal underworld outside the camp system. Baldaev was therefore given permission to travel from camp to camp, recording tattoos along the way.

Unbeknown to his superiors he was compiling a secret dossier, detailing the various outrages that were such a feature of the whole gulag system. His sketches show scenes of torture, degradation and execution, by the NKVD as well as that practiced by prisoner upon prisoner. There are scenes of sexual torture, of mass rape, of an axe being raised as criminals make ready to decapitate one of their fellows. For once the cliché applies: an image really is worth a thousand words.



Compared with the flood of information about the Nazi camp system, including movies like Schindler’s List, so many people in the west are still comparatively ignorant over the horrors of the gulags. So far as I’m aware the only English-Language film featuring the Soviet camp system is the British adaptation of Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch, made in the early 1970s. Hollywood has never tackled the subject.

I discovered from a review article by Olrando Figes in The Times that a new movie touching on Stalin’s camps is to be released this month. The Way Back is really about a prison break, a highly improbable one at that, only featuring camp life in a fairly brief slot at the beginning. There is still something lacking here, something revealing about our lack of interest in the mundane horrors of the Soviet camp system compared with the grotesque horrors of the Nazis. Figes makes an excellent point:

We do not feel as close to Russian peasants as we do to Western European Jews. We’re not sure that the Russians are “like us” at all. Maybe that’s why there hasn’t been a film to engage us in the tragedy of the gulag. It is in part a legacy of the Cold War. Perhaps we feel that the Russians brought their suffering on themselves – victims of a revolution that went wrong. Or perhaps, in some former left-wing quarters, we still cling to the old romance about the Soviet Union that puts its victims out of sight – a rose-tinted view of the revolution that can be seen in Reds (1981), Warren Beatty’s love song to Bolshevism, which still colours views in Hollywood. In 2008 it was voted one of the ten best epic US movies by the American Film Institute.

It is, I think, time for a new song, a song to all the victims of Bolshevism, a song that will help us understand the terrible human suffering involved; to understand that a million deaths is a million tragedies.

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.

In England’s song forever

In an online history group I belong to there was a discussion of the merits of J. N. W. Turner’s painting Rain, Steam and Speed. It’s a fine painting by a fine artist, arguably the greatest, most original English painter of the nineteenth century. It’s impressionist before the impressionists, a great swirl of energy and movement, conveyed by whirlwinds of colour.

It’s not my favourite Turner painting, though; that honour belongs to The Fighting Termeraire, not just because of the brilliant execution, vivid colours and painterly technique but because of the story, the melancholy pathos of the subject, telling of the passing of one age and the advance of another, the eclipse of elegant romance and the rise of ugly functionalism.

The painting’s full title is The Fighting Temeraire tugged to her last Berth to be broken up, 1838, one of the permanent exhibits in London’s National Gallery. The subject is essentially a prosaic one: an obsolete battleship, one that had served as the second ship of the line with Nelson and the Royal Navy at Trafalgar, no longer of any practical use, being taken away by a steam tug to be scrapped, the timber salvaged for other purposes. Here we are, in the midst of the Industrial Revolution, an age of utility, an age without the patience for nostalgia and sentiment.

But Turner, who witnessed the final passage of the Temeraire while sailing on the Thames to Greenwich, has transformed the subject, given it a mythical quality in a scene of death and transfiguration. There is the great ship, the HMS Temeraire, known for her past glories as the Fighting Temeraire, in subdued and ethereal colours, her time long-past, already dead, grand and ghostly in the mist.

She contrasts sharply with the tug, squat and ugly but clearly defined, most definitely of the present age, a demon belching out fire and smoke, as Thackeray wrote. Adding to this most symbolic of all Turner’s paintings is a vivid setting sun, heightening the general sense of loss and nostalgia, the sense that there has passed away a glory from the earth. The age of sail has gone; the age of steam arises.

In his account of the painting John Ruskin was particularly expressive;

We have stern keepers to trust her glory to-the fire and the worm. Never more shall sunset lay golden robes on her, nor starlight tremble on the waves that part at her gliding. Perhaps, where the low gate opens to some cottage-garden, the tired traveller may ask, idly, why the moss grows so green on its rugged wood; and even the sailor's child may not answer, nor know, that the night-dew lies deep in the war-rents of the wood of the old Temeraire.

But thanks to Turner and his painting the vanished Temeraire is now as immortal and as mythical as Jason’s Argo. Paradoxically it is more real than the unnamed tug, representative itself of an age that has been submerged by the endlessly changing tides of time.

There's a far bell ringing
At the setting of the sun,
And a phantom voice is singing
Of the great days done.
There's a far bell ringing,
And a phantom voice is singing
Of renown for ever clinging
To the great days done.

Now the sunset breezes shiver,
Téméraire! Téméraire!
And she's fading down the river,
Téméraire! Téméraire!
Now the sunset's breezes shiver,
And she's fading down the river,
But in England's song for ever
She's the Fighting Téméraire.

This is not a pipe – the art of Rene Magritte

All art should inspire thought though it seems to me that surrealism goes that step further: surrealism is about thinking. In particular I love the way in which surrealist painters take commonplace objects and reinterpret them in an unusual, sometimes in an unsettling and vaguely sinister way.

I have in mind the paintings of the Belgian surrealist Rene Magritte, my favourite from the school, who takes the most banal subjects, reproducing them in an almost deadpan way, and then adds a penetrating visual joke. One of my favourites is his Ceci n'est pas une pipe- This is not a pipe- which happens to be a straightforward depiction of, well, a pipe! In one version, just to emphasise the point, he has smoke curling up and on to the picture’s frame.

He is quite right, of course - it’s not a pipe; it’s a painting! Next time, even when you are looking at the most conventional art, do remember that what you are seeing is not a thing but a vision, a single interpretation of a thing.

Dangerous and Brilliant

If there was ever an artist to whom the words mad, bad and dangerous to know apply it really has to be Michelangelo da Caravaggio, known simply as Caravaggio, a great painter and an altogether infamous human being! He was a hard-fringing, hard-living, hard-fighting man, whose actions did not stop short of murder.

His reputation as an artist opened doors, just as his actions as a man quickly closed them again. At one point he was even enrolled among the Knights of Saint John on Malta, only to be expelled in December 1608 as a “foul and rotten member.” Even the precise circumstances of his death in 1610 are still shrouded in mystery. Supposedly dead of a fever, no body was ever found and no grave exists.

But as an artist he is one of Italy’s greatest, and a personal favourite of mine. In some ways he was a political artist, a propagandist for the Counter-Reformation, not just in the devotional subjects he chose but the style, the new life he breathed into religious painting that had been dominated for so long by the dead hand of Mannerism. In technique he was a naturalist, who made the most inventive use chiaroscuro, the sharp contrasts of light and dark, giving a heightened sense of drama, vivid, wonderful and intense. I see in Caravaggio the beginnings not just of Baroque but a great many subsequent trends in art. This is painting at its most passionate, no matter if the subject is sacred or profane.

Henry Moore-the Death of Imagination

I don’t know much about art but I know what I like, so the cliché goes. My version goes like this: I know quite a lot about art and I know what I hate. And what I have particular hatred for is the fraudulent, the talentless and the bogus. I hate those who are accepted as good and lasting simply because the art establishment says they will be good and lasting. It is the classic tale of the emperor’s new clothes. Only those with no taste could fail to see the merit in, say, Damien Hirst; only those with no taste could fail to see the merit in the sculptures of Henry Moore. I loathe the sculptures of Henry Moore, those ghastly blobs that inhabit city centres across the world. There; the child has spoken!

I make this confession against the background of a major exhibition of Moore’s work in the Tate, running until the beginning of August. I went, I saw, I left. Not that I expected to be convinced that the time had come to look again at an artist whose work is rather falling out of fashion. No, I suppose it was just to confirm a prejudice, not against contemporary sculpture, just against Henry Moore. There they are all lined up, those graceless shapes, not ugly, just pointless, a confirmation of how little talent the man truly had.

Please do not assume this arises from an animus against forms of art which do not adhere to traditional classical forms. No, there is a lot that I admire in artists who break conventional boundaries. I admire the work of Barbara Hepworth and I adore the Futurists, having a particular love of Umberto Boccioni’s Unique Forms of Continuity in Space.

Then there is Moore; shapes struggling for life and never quite getting there; lumpy and leaden and almost completely devoid of imagination, of truly creative intellect. There is no animation, there is no focus; there is just the same thing, time after time. No matter the subject it gets the same treatment to the point it becomes meaningful to say that if you have seen one sculpture by Moore you have seen them all; reclining figure, king and queen, mother and child, no matter; you’ve seen them all. It’s a bit like a pianist who was never able to progress much beyond chopsticks.

There is nothing in Moore that challenges, nothing that demands a second look. The curators describe his work as “abject, erotic, violated and visceral”, which seems to me to be just a succession of rather meaningless words. One review I read asked how they could possibly tell. My comment is simpler; if they think this stuff is ‘erotic’ they really need to get out more. But Moore became the fashion of the age, a comment less about art and more about the age, more about the death of imagination.

The Butterfly Queen

The National Gallery is presently holding an exhibition of the work of Paul Delaroche, a nineteenth century French painter much given to depicting subjects from English history. His work includes such paintings as Strafford Lead to Execution, showing Thomas Wentworth, 1st Earl of Strafford, one of the principal advisors to Charles I, being blessed by Archbishop Laud, himself imprisoned, while on his way to the block, The Princes in the Tower and the recently rediscovered Charles I Insulted by Cromwell’s Soldiers, which for me conjures up aspects of medieval depictions of the passion of Jesus.


However, the centrepiece of the show surely has to be the enduringly popular The Execution of Lady Jane Grey. First exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1834 it was an immediate sensation amongst a French audience, at least some of whom would have remembered the execution of Queen Marie Antoinette. It depicts the last moments, the last fraught moments, before Jane’s execution for treason in 1554. Jane, who ruled England as butterfly rules a day, was beheaded on the orders of the Catholic Queen Mary.

It’s a wonderful painting, one of my personal favourites on an event in history. There she is, the blindfolded teenager, like a martyr in white, all of the light focused on her, groping for the block. In the background her attendants collapse in grief, while to the right the executioner waits with his axe. It’s grand, intense, full of melodrama and pathos. Do go and see it if you can, and remember the Butterfly Queen.