2010年10月30日星期六
2010年10月23日星期六
Christie Davies wonders why Sargant reminds him of Henry Scott Tuke: <em>Sargent and the Sea</em> at the Royal Academy
Sargent and the Sea
Royal Academy, London
10 July - 26 September 2010
Daily 10am - 6pm (Fridays until 10pm)
Sargent and the Sea is mainly concerned with the artist's work in 1874-9 when he was still learning his trade. It is the juvenilia of the man who went on to become among the greatest painters of the canals and lagoons of Venice, a man who in his maturity really knew now to handle water. Yet if it were not for his later skill and fame, no-one would ever have bothered to organise this assemblage of rather mediocre paintings at the Royal Academy. It is purely of historical interest, telling us of Sargent's early life and of the artists he admired, notably Whistler. There are only a few pictures on show that one would wish to go and see for their sheer aesthetic appeal.
In his early years Sargent travelled to the coasts of Normandy and Brittany and to the shores of the Mediterranean with his wandering parents and his work from this time shows a fascination with the sea, though no real mastery of how to depict it. He was learning but he had not yet learned. In 1876 he went to America for the first time across a turbulent Atlantic which made him realise that the sea has power and ferocity as well as the quiet charm of the seaside.
The curators speak of the influence of Turner on him but Turner he ain't. Sargent may well have admired Turner but he was quite unable to emulate him. The cellars of minor English provincial galleries probably contain many Victorian seascapes of equal quality to those in this exhibition but fortunately we are very rarely able to see them.
There are two splendid exceptions to such a condemnation.
On the Sands, 1877, and Wharf Scene, 1879, that already indicate the talent that would in time mature into genius. On the Sands is just that, a great expanse of shining white sand reaching out to distant bathing machines. It is broken only by a mere impression of two figures in the wind, a girl in white in the foreground and a brightly dressed and darkly parasoled woman in the distance. Sargent knew exactly where to place them; they are unimportant except to break up the bright flatness of the sand.
Wharf Scene, 1879, in grisaille indicates how black and white are merely the end of a very varied spectrum of greys and what can be achieved within that single dimension.
Sargent left the sea and became an assembly line portrait painter of the rich and fashionable and would be celebrated. In some respects he joined their ranks, for in a good year he could have cleared a million pounds (2010 money) and he always painted in a fine bespoke suit; presumably if it got smudged with a bit of flake white, he could afford to donate it to his valet or his butler.
Then in 1884 Sargent had the unpleasant experience of having to go to Sheffield, where unquiet flows the Don. He went there to paint the members of the Vickers family, entrepreneurs who had made a lot of brass out of steel and were to make a lot more from armaments. They were the British equivalent of Germany's Krupp. While at their home in Bloomer Hall, Sheffield Sargent painted his famous appalling portrait of three bright-eyed and bushy tailed sisters, The Misses Vickers , 1884, which the French called "pseudo-Velasquez" and which when exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1886 was voted the "worst picture of the year". Not surprisingly it has remained in Sheffield where it belongs.
However, the kindly Mrs Vickers arranged for him to visit Whitby on the Yorkshire coast, the home of Dracula. As a result of this visit, Sargent produced one of the finest works in the exhibition Whitby Fishing Boats, 1885. We are led in a clear but subdued light from sand, to tide, to sea, to cloud between two exactly placed asymmetrical clusters of hard dark sails. He presented the picture to Mrs Vickers, the mother of the Misses, presumably as compensation for the failure of his ill-arranged, falsely pretty portrait of her three squirrels.
Whitby Fishing Boats is a clear precursor of Venice, Sailing Boat, 1903, in which our eye is guided through the gap between bulky dark quay and square sailed sailing boat in the foreground to a distant ethereal church across the water that floats almost in the air. Sargent had entered his great Venetian decade but that is another story.
In the exhibition Sargent's representations of naked boys on the beaches of Naples and Capri and his Two Nude Bathers Standing on a Wharf, 1879, remind us of the other reason he loved Venice. It was a place where gay men from England and Germany could go to pick up boys without fear of arrest or social disgrace.
You suddenly realise how much Sargent's perceptions have in common with those of Henry Scott Tuke, R.A. who painted naked, splashing Cornish lads for the gay market; Tukes are now once again selling well in that market and prices have risen. Gay readers looking for an art investment should consider a good Tuke.
Tuke was a friend of Sargent's and of the pederasts Charles Masson-Fox and Baron Corvo who had strong Venetian connections. It is difficult to believe that Sargent, who was also close to Oscar Wilde and to the man who was the original for Proust's Charlus, was not involved with this little Venetian coterie. Such a supposition helps to explain both the male nudes that Sargent did exhibit and the near-pornographic ones that he did not. Why does it matter you may ask? It matters because - like his fellow Capri artist, Christian Wilhelm Allers - Sargent has the gaze of the gays.
Christie Davies is the author of The Strange Death of Moral Britain, 2006.
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2010年10月22日星期五
Christie Davies considers Horace Walpole and his cat: <em>Horace Walpole and Strawberry Hill</em> at the V&A
Horace Walpole and Strawberry Hill
Victoria & Albert Museum, London
6 March - 4 July 2010
Daily 10am - 5.30pm (Fridays until 9.30pm)
The artistic collection once owned by Horace Walpole (1717-97), displayed at his famous house Strawberry Hill and now reassembled at the V and A is as exquisite as Strawberry Hill itself, which will be opened to the public in Twickenham later this year. The long, expert and painstaking restoration is nearly completed. The exhibition is both a treat and a promise of treats to come.
Walpole lived an age of architecture that imitated the horrors of the Greek temples of Agrigentum in Sicily with their rows of columns marching round them like hapless hoplites suddenly frozen into stone; Pirandello knew better and lived next door in Chaos. Walpole rejected this rigid Euclidean, compass and ruler only, approach to shape and pioneered the flowing Gothick, a light playful almost frivolous style.
It is quite unlike the heavy-serious, moral gothic of the nineteenth century's sententiously sermonizing Protestant churches and the pugnacious Puginism of their Roman Catholic contemporaries. Walpole (Eton and King's) original love of gothic was inspired by the hours he spent in King's College Chapel in Cambridge looking up at the glorious fan-vaulted ceiling as an escape from the droning prayers and the pip-squeaking of the choirboys. King's has always been a haunt, indeed a producer, of aesthetes and eccentrics. Walpole's successors at King's have included Oscar Browning, William Johnson Cory and John Maynard Keynes who, being too ungainly to become a ballet dancer, married one. I have often wondered what it is that Kingsmen have in common.
Strawberry Hill was a model of dancing eclecticism which merged all manner of real and imagined parts. Strawberry Hill was play. It was a place of affected shadowy "gloomth" yet separated only by its windows from the brightness of nature of bosky, rural Twickenham before it was spoiled by rugby hooligans and Vince Cable the grim political economist. The interior of the house was an intricate play of the shadowy and the well lit. Walpole spoke of its romantic shadows as "Gloomth" as opposed to the glumth of the contemporary great houses, which were all pillars and triangles and no fun.
Walpole filled his house with "fantastic" items to which he could, sometime fancifully, attach particular historical characters. A black obsidian Aztec mirror he attributed to the Elizabethan magician Dr John Dee and claimed that Dee used it to communicate with the spirits. Dee's name means black so it may be a pun; black mirror, black name, the black arts.
Many have condemned Strawberry Hill as a sham, as unserious and frivolous, as mere game playing. But what is wrong with that? There is nothing aesthetically deficient in rococo d?cor or in the paintings of f?tes gallants by Boucher, Fragonard, Jean-Baptiste Greuze and Watteau. The very varied aesthetic pleasures to be derived from Walpole's diverse collections are far superior in honesty of feeling and meaning to the monotonous cerebral deceptions of American abstract expressionism; the latter have as much glowing, tactile qualities as algebra but lack its capacity to enlighten. In the post-modern era which has succeeded that bleak and fraudulent modernity, we can once more celebrate the eclectic blending of styles favoured by this scholarly connoisseur.
Unfortunately Walpole's only real successor in Britain has been William Burges, architect of Castell Coch, Cardiff Castle and the Tower House, Kensington. Together with Strawberry Hill they constitute four tiny islands of joie de vivre.
Every style that preceded the classical was there in Strawberry Hill and is represented in the exhibition. In one exhibition room are stained glass windows and a finely gilded suit of armour. It includes a shaffron, the armour for the head of a horse with high raised protective ear pieces for equine ears pricked-up by excitement and a projecting sharp spike fitted between the gaps that enabled the horse to see. What terror that massive spike-nosed horse must have inspired in Swiss pike men, Welsh longbow men and Taborites alike before it ended up in the Boucherie Chevaline and the tables of the hippophagous. From here the viewer moves to the Holbein chamber where Walpole slept alongside Holbein drawings and a variety of paintings and portrayals of that period; next to Walpole's bed hung his great prize, the broad red Cardinal's hat of the great Wolsey himself.
The library was Walpole's gothick gem with matching bookcases and furniture rising to ogee arches. It was a working library in which he composed the antiquarian works for which he was famous. Walpole also wrote the gothic novel Otranto and the extensive and waspish memoirs published after his death that tell us so much about the eighteenth century.
In Walpole's state apartments hang portraits of his family by leading contemporary artists including Allan Ramsay and Sir Joshua Reynolds alongside earlier works by Lely and van Dyke. Walpole's father, Sir Robert Walpole is portrayed standing next to a table on which sit the great purse of the Chancellor of the Exchequer and busts of George I and II, the two kings whom he served. Also in the picture is Walpole's mother who claimed descent from Cadwaladr ap Meirchion, King of Cambria, one of the sons of Cunedda those men of the North, who in the 5th century AD drove the savage and pagan Irish invaders right out of our island. Some say they have returned but I cannot possibly comment.
What concerns us here is Walpole's wish firmly to embed not only his house but his family in the long history of our nation. Walpole was not lacking in humour, for he also collected satirical prints and was a patron of Hogarth. On display is Gillray's The Introduction with that characteristic mockery of an over-eager, eyes-popping out George III.
Nowhere is Walpole's exquisite and fastidious taste better displayed than in the cases of miniatures painted in watercolour on ivory or vellum and of enamels. He owned 1200 pieces of china including three hundred oriental items collected by his artistic mother.
Walpole's only lapses stem from his perverse desire to collect art produced by women, for he had deluded himself into thinking that there was such a thing as "female genius", a purely expressive outburst of feeling unhindered by thought. We can see some of these errors in the exhibition in the paintings of Lady Diana Beauclerk and in the representations of animals by the cross-dressing sculptress Anne Damer to whom Walpole left Strawberry Hill in his will to be her studio. The caricaturists of the day had great sport with Ms Damer. Their work is not merely bad but bad enough to inspire numerous PhDs in wimmen's studies in some dreadful spinsters' college in New England.
It is interesting to speculate what manner of a man the elegant and fastidious Horace Walpole was. He adored and lived with his mother and was a confirmed bachelor whose only relations with women were with those whom he could not possibly marry, such as elderly dowagers and women who had been exiled from polite society because of their past scandalous conduct. Sometimes they showered him with welcome works of art and sometimes with unwelcome attentions and affections from which he retreated in good order.
Walpole compensated for his lack of family life through his love for his cat and his many close male friendships. Indeed the exhibition begins with the very tub for goldfish in which Walpole's cat Selima drowned. It is a Chinese wonder of floating blue pines, blossoms and clouds. Perhaps the cat thought it too could float, for it crouched on the rim, eyeing the goldfish, and fell in. The grief stricken Walpole asked his dear chum from Eton, Thomas Gray to write a suitably catty elegy for the tragic moggy but Gray rather stretched it out:
Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat (1748)But all that can be viewed in the exhibition is the homicidal Chinese vase that shanghaied the cat on which Walpole had engraved a line of Gray's ode. Why could the cat not have been cremated and its ashes kept for eternity in this oriental ornamental urn?
Twas on a lofty vase's side,
Where China's gayest art had dyed
The azure flowers that blow;
Demurest of the tabby kind,
The pensive Selima reclined,
Gazed on the lake below.
Her conscious tail her joy declared;
The fair round face, the snowy beard,
The velvet of her paws,
Her coat, that with the tortoise vies,
Her ears of jet, and emerald eyes,
She saw; and purr'd applause.
Still had she gazed; but 'midst the tide
Two angel forms were seen to glide,
The genii of the stream:
Their scaly armour's Tyrian hue
Thro' richest purple to the view
Betray'd a golden gleam.
The hapless nymph with wonder saw:
A whisker first and then a claw,
With many an ardent wish,
She stretch'd in vain to reach the prize.
What female heart can gold despise?
What Cat's averse to fish?
Presumptuous Maid! with looks intent
Again she stretch'd, again she bent,
Nor knew the gulf between.
Malignant Fate sat by, and smiled.
The slipp'ry verge her feet beguiled,
She tumbled headlong in?..
Today there are no Horace Walpoles left. He was a limp and elegant product of his time. It is impossible even to imagine a twenty-first century version of this unique collector and connoisseur. That makes it all the more important to remember what he was and what he created and the V and A has done just that.
Professor Christie Davies teaches at Krosno College, Poland.
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2010年10月21日星期四
The Elgin Marbles are going to Dresden - Christie Davies can exclusively reveal
It has long been known that when the Greeks went on their lavish spending spree based on loans from German banks, the collateral for these loans was selected Greece antiquities. Now in return for the German tax-payers rescue of the shattered Greek economy and purchase of Hellenic "gift bonds" it has been agreed that the Parthenon shall be dismantled and re-created atop a sandstone hill east of Dresden near the Polish border.
For the Germans it is a good deal for it will bring tourism and employment to a region that has been in economic difficulties since reunification. It will bridge the economic gap between Ossies and Wessies and at last make true the claim "Wir sind ein Volk" (we are one people). Dresden has a skilled labour force trained by the difficult task of restoring the ancient buildings of that gem-like city so horribly shattered by the shameful Allied bombing of 1945.
It is the only way in which the Greeks can assuage the anger of the German taxpayer at having their Geld und Gut used to support these schnorrers of the south. In return the Germans have promised that they have no further antiquarian claims on Greece and that they will provide special police units to deal with any public disorder in Athens that the removal of the Parthenon may provoke.
The Germans have been in love with Greek culture since the time of Schiller and Winckelmann. One German statesman even believed that the people of Schleswig-Holstein were descended from the ancient Spartans and that this accounted for their distinctive gruel and unrivalled hardiness. Even more strangely a German clergyman was convinced that Jesus was Greek and that this accounted for his charismatic qualities. On this view the Parthenon already truly belongs to Germany, rather than to the profligate people of unknown ancestry who now live on the territory of the ancient Greeks, a people long ago conquered by the Macedonians.
The deal has been secretly negotiated between Antiochus Epiphanes the Greek special envoy for international debt and Professor Dr. Dr. Hermann Starke formerly of Dorpat University and famous for his Gedanken der griechischen Werke, who is now head of the Stifftung Arminius based in Dortmund that oversees all German archaeological projects in the Eastern Mediterranean. Its enormous endowments were provided by Hedda von Zillergut the unmarried heiress of a fortune derived from Germany's biggest import-export business Schlockgesellschaft, in memory of her mother Elma who was born in Izmir.
The sticking point in the negotiations was that the Greeks demanded as they have done for decades, that Britain's Elgin Marbles be returned to their rightful place on the Parthenon. The British have always refused to do this because the marbles would have been wrecked by the corrosive acidic smog from the industrial plants in Piraeus and the endless Athenian traffic jams. Yet so determined were the Greeks to have them that they borrowed money to construct a hermetically sealed capsule close to the Parthenon in which they could be displayed.
The British pointed out that this did rather destroy the point of the exercise. However, Britain's objection has collapsed with the decision to move the Parthenon to the smoke-free hills east of Dresden. The old polluting factories of Karl-Marx Stadt, now once again Chemnitz, have long since been closed or moved to the Kaliningrad triangle. Most of the inhabitants of the cities of the Free State of Saxony go to work by tram because they cannot afford to run a car. It is a contrast with Athens where the better off all have two cars, one with an odd and one with an even number plate, so as to evade restrictions on which days to drive into the city.
The British have been promised in return the Ishtar Gate of Babylon from the Vorderasiatisches Museum Berlin. This will in theory be a permanent move but the Babylonian antiquities will also be collateral for any future loans Britain requests from Germany; Britain would in effect be given preference in this respect over failing Eurozone countries. In this way Germany hopes to gain the most comprehensive collection of antiquities in Europe.
From a European point of view one crucial benefit of Athens losing the Parthenon is that it will crush the nationalist arrogance of the Greeks, end that country's disputes with Turkey and Macedonia and settle the Cyprus problem. One of the causes of the collapse of Greek finances is that in the past the country spent as much as seventeen billion dollars (5.6% of its GDP) on defence, an expenditure the backward little country could not afford and one far greater than other European countries. Who were the Greeks planning to attack? Is the spirit of EOKA and AKRITAS still strong? Why were the Greeks not prepared to rely on NATO for their defence and align themselves with American foreign policy?
With the Parthenon gone the Greeks will be forced to discard their absurd over-identification with ancient Greece. No more absurdly expensive exercises in national boasting like the Athens Olympics which first left Greece with a budget deficit of 6% of the country's GDP. A humbler modern Greece divested of its appropriated past will be willing to concede disputed islands and oil drilling rights to Turkey and to give the people of Macedonian ancestry in Northern Greece the right to self-determination. The present Greek collapse is not as many think the result of individual greed but of collective hubris; the Greeks grossly overestimated their own capabilities and this is the punishment that follows the sin of pride.
We thus have a very welcome win-win-win solution. Germany wins a prize its historically minded people and eager archaeologists have long coveted - the Parthenon complete with Elgin marbles. Britain inherits Babylon and obtains economic security from the only country in Europe with a decent economy. The Greeks have been rescued from total disaster and forced to abandon the false and base cultural assumptions that led them into trouble in the first place.
Christie Davies discussed Greek corruption and predicted the European crisis in an invited lecture in Prague in 2007. He claims no prescience whatsoever.
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