Charlotte Mullins: A Little History of Art

     It’s an ambitious book, but I’ve enjoyed others in this series, particularly the poetry one, so feeling my knowledge of art history was a bit patchy, I gave it a go. Mullins traces the history and development of various art forms from prehistory, through their use in ritual and religion, and eventually to their current place in temporal and political power, supported by the patronage of the wealthy. She also attempts to range globally, which I think is important and valuable, though it will eventually be interesting to read other critics and historians who also broaden their scope, and see if their judgements come together…

She shows us how, in the Christian world, there was a particular emphasis on art for religious purposes; equally we learn of the central importance of developments during the Renaissance, when the art of the classical world was rediscovered.

There’s an interesting highlighting of a good number of female artists of whom I’d never heard, and rather earlier in time than I’d been aware of, too.

For me, because it links in to the art that I like most and am most interested in, she was very helpful on the emergence of landscape as a subject rather than mere background, as well as the increasing interest in light. And she also confirmed what I’d felt about the way that the emergence and development of photography in the early 19^th century had freed art from mimesis and allowed so much more freedom and experimentation. I liked the way she showed links, developments and connections in a wide range of ways.

Perhaps inevitably, the closer it gets to the present day, the less clear it all becomes, as we move into the disputed territory of value judgements about art from which we have insufficient distance in time. I’ve always found this problem with contemporary literature, too: what, of those works of any kind being created or written now, will survive the test of time? There are aspects of all art forms which can be lazy, derivative, too experimental, too self-indulgent; equally, brilliant things are being created which the future will value.

Necessary explanations of technical terms occasionally became naive and even irritating. There are a decent number of (small) illustrations and reproductions, but in a text covering so many works of art, they weren’t really sufficient: perhaps a linked online resource to more reproductions might have been considered? All-in-all, a useful tome, though.

Jonathan Jones: Tracey Emin

      I have been intrigued by Tracey Emin’s work for many years, and I have often asked myself why, since her art does summon pretty strong responses from many people, and it broadens out into a wider question for me, of what I look for or expect from art. In some ways – and I stress I don’t speak as someone with any kind of artistic background or talent – I find my response similar to the one I have towards literature: I expect it to make me stop and think, in some way. To be elitist for a moment, I suppose I’m not drawn to, or don’t enjoy, easy art or literature…

Although I don’t like his style, Jonathan Jones’ book is a good introduction to Emin’s work, in terms of biography, background, influences: there’s plenty of detail, and the book is copiously illustrated.

There’s a philistine approach one often hears to some of Emin’s painting: “My toddler could have done that/ better than that…” But your toddler didn’t, an adult artist did, so one at least must ask why. There will be, just as in a poem, both inspiration and intention behind it. I find Emin’s art honest, in that it clearly relates to her life and experience, and I find it challenging: again, as with literature, there’s the instant gut response, and then a more reflective response based on looking deeply for a time. And I’m confronted with awkwardness, with uncomfortableness…

There’s originality, too, particularly in the patchwork, or the neon signwork. And the overt sexuality of many of her paintings and drawings requires an adult response; it’s neither traditionally erotic nor pornographic, and to me much of it is intriguing and beautiful in the same way as the art of Egon Schiele, one of Emin’s acknowledged influences.

So for me not an easy artist to engage with, and certainly not one to ignore or dismiss, and Jones’ book gave me a good deal of useful context as well as further food for thought.

John Berger: Ways of Seeing

     This seminal work is now half a century old, and still incredibly valid and relevant. As Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media opened our eyes to how print media actually work on us, this short book takes the lid off how works of art operate on the viewer over time, and how we see, consume, interpret pictorial/ representative art, as well as the factors in its production: nothing is innocent, particularly the interaction between viewer and object. We make assumptions, and in the case of many works, the past comes between as well.

So art, too, inevitably, is political, wherever we find it and look at it. Berger deconstructs the sexual politics of art, too, and the objectification of women in art, particularly though not exclusively, through the nude in art. Art was, and to a large extent still is, something for the wealthy to possess and give value to, more stuff for them to squirrel away with their other ill-gotten gains, and oil painting especially was capitalist art par excellence, shown by the period in which it developed, what ii represented, and what it symbolised.

In our day, art has become publicity – advertising – manufacturing glamour and promoting consumption. In exactly the same ways as in earlier days, art creates dreams: you are what you have, what you can afford to have and show off. For Berger the difference is that in the past, art was saying “This is mine, this is what I possess”, whereas now advertising is saying “This is what you can be, in fantasy if not in reality”.

This is succinct and trenchant analysis that is as relevant today as when it was written. It’s very approachable, with one serious caveat: the production of the book, through numerous editions, has become very poor quality, with the reproductions of the various works of art, in monochrome only, so small and fuzzy as to be almost useless as an adjunct to following Berger’s theses. You need the illustrations, and I found that the way to get the best from the work was in fact to watch the original four-part TV series which went with the book, and can now be accessed online.

On being inarticulate

 

If you’re a regular visitor to this blog, you may feel that I can write reasonably clearly and in detail about literature and explain what it is I like or dislike when I’ve read a book. I’ve found myself provoked to think about why this is so much harder when it comes to art and music. On and off over a couple of days recently I slowly leafed through a hefty tome about Monet, which was copiously illustrated with reproductions of his paintings. I loved it. But why?

The simple answer to my question about art and music compared with literature is that I suppose I have some kind of expertise in the field of literature, as studying and teaching it has been pretty much my life’s work. So I can explain in detail what it is in a novel or poem, whether plot, character, themes and ideas, language or whatever, that I like or dislike; I understand and can explain how words and writers work… Getting beyond the gut response ‘I like it!’ is much harder for me in other fields.

I really enjoy visiting art exhibitions, and some paintings I will happily sit and stare at for hours. I recall a Turner exhibition in Edinburgh about ten years ago; I fell in love with Modern Rome so much that I now have a copy of it on the wall at home. And an exhibition in Berlin a few years ago which juxtaposed impressionist and expressionist paintings took my breath away.

Thinking about Monet and Turner in particular, I realise that a great part of what attracts or fascinates me about many of their paintings is the attention they pay to light. Monet painted certain scenes – most famously, perhaps, the front of Rouen Cathedral – many times, at different times of day and at different seasons, presumably because he was so fascinated by the changes of lighting. Another thing that I find myself reflecting on is the difference between art and photography; to me it seems to have been liberating for artists not to feel obliged to focus on achieving some ‘realistic’ or recognisably ‘accurate’ reproduction of their subject. So the idea of impressionism speaks to me as an evocation of certain places or objects, with associated ideas and feelings, which are sketched out (wrong word, I know) for the viewer to fill out the gaps for her/himself as they choose; there’s an openness to interpretation I like about such art.

Music is even harder. J S Bach I can listen to for hours; I am in heaven. But how? Why? What does he do to me? I get headaches trying to understand anything about musical theory, and one of the regrets I do have is never learning an instrument. But without music, I don’t know where I’d be.

That’s as far as I get, and it doesn’t feel very far, compared with what I can say about literature. Is it because art (and music, for that matter) is rather more open, and rather more likely to affect one emotionally, whereas literature, though it can and does affect our emotions, is rather more analytical, rather more susceptible to analysis and deconstruction?

Jung: Man and his Symbols

     I came back to this, one of the oldest books in my library, which I bought and read as a student. At various points I’ve read some psychology texts, done a very useful and interesting training course in counselling, and read quite a bit about astrology, too – I think the overlap between some ideas between astrology and Jungian psychoanalysis was probably where this book came into my life originally.

At the very end of his life Jung, aided by a few followers, attempted to convey the outlines of his ideas to the intelligent lay reader, hence this book. Jung’s particular focus is on the unconscious, and particularly the way it intrudes into our lives and reminds us of its existence though dreams, which may often be messages about our life which it behoves us to ponder and perhaps act upon. For Jung, civilisation has separated us from a very important part of ourselves, and the unconscious is an integral part of our being, not just a ragbag of assorted leftovers from some primordial past.

Jung intended to lead people to understand and explore for themselves (rather than have an analyst do this for them and tell them everything). He puts together a very powerful case for what we have lost through our overly scientific and rational approach; we haven’t eradicated the unconscious part of ourselves but pushed it away, hidden it or ignored it, and so it affects us in different and initially less comprehensible ways.

Subsequent chapters deepen and broaden Jung’s ideas and flesh them out with examples and more detail. The section on symbolism in the visual arts was the most interesting one for me, and I must admit that overall I found the emphasis on dreams and their (over-)interpretation rather too mechanistic in the end. I ended up thinking that psychoanalysis and psychotherapy has moved on enormously since Jung’s time, not in the sense that it invalidates or negates his discoveries, but in that it has changed how it works with people and the issues they have. There’s an imbalance in too much focus on the dreamworld, and too much room for ‘expert’ input and leading interpretation, rather than allowing a person to discover for themselves. It was interesting to come back to the book, but if you want to explore your own inner life, there are others which will serve you a lot better.

A tour of my library – part three

It’s only relatively recently that I’ve begun to take a serious interest in art, and it’s a pretty eclectic one, given that I have no formal training or study of the subject: it’s a bit ‘this is what I like’, really. I’ve long liked photomontage, having come across the work of John Heartfield when I was quite young; I fell in love with the romantic visions of Caspar David Friedrich, and actually went off to Rügen to see the famous chalk cliffs which he painted: they are quite stupendous, although have not survived in the same configuration today. Turner I came to like when I went on spec to a major exhibition of his paintings of Italy in Edinburgh about ten years ago; since then I have sought out other exhibitions and acquired books of reproductions of his watercolours too. If there’s a particular movement I really enjoy, it’s Expressionism. The one book I will rave about is actually the catalogue from an exhibition I visited in Berlin a few years back, which set great works with similar themes and subjects from the impressionists and the expressionists side-by-side. It was an absolute eye-opener and I spent hours, completely engrossed.

Currently there is a shelf in my study dedicated to Poland and things Polish, including a good number of history books, particularly those of Norman Davies. I have also collected a number of memoirs written by Poles who underwent similar experiences to those of my father during the Second World War, as well as diaries of writers and other cultural figures from that period. The most interesting and curious book in this collection I inherited from my father, who was presented with it on a visit to Poland in communist times, and it’s a very odd book for them to have allowed to be published: a facsimile of – I translate – Index of the Names of the Gentry, originally published a couple of centuries ago. Our family name is listed and we have (had, rather, for one of the first acts of the reborn Polish state in 1919 was to abolish the gentry) a coat of arms! What you need to know, contextually, is that it was the name that mattered, not wealth, status, social standing… you could be a poor peasant family (like us) or stinking rich with an estate.

I gave up the study of history after O Level, taking up English Literature instead, telling myself I could read as much history as I liked when I liked, and have done just that. My reading hasn’t been structured or systematic. Particular interests have been ancient Rome, the Reformation, the Soviet Union, Poland and modern history generally. Roman history I studied at school, and it’s such an important part of the background to European life and civilisation it’s hard to avoid; I also remind myself that the Roman Empire lasted for far longer than the British or American ones… The interest in the Reformation links back to my Catholic childhood and the cultural vandalism that was the English Reformation, as well as my current interest in theology, as I attempt to make sense of my existence. And Polish and Russian history – well, that’s obvious.

On the fire at Notre Dame

I’m one of the many millions of people horrified by the fire and destruction of Notre Dame in Paris. The disaster prompted me to remember that it’s almost exactly fifty years since, as a school student on my first French exchange, I was taken to see the cathedral; I’ve been back several times since. For me and others, it’s not the most spectacular cathedral in France, but its unique site does give it a special aura. And I found myself also wondering, what is is about this enormous pile of stones that exerts such an effect on so many people around the world, many of whom will not be catholics?

I was moved by the comments of the former Afghan leader who said that to see the destruction of Notre Dame pained him as much as when the taliban has destroyed the ancient buddhas of Bamiyan in his country, and I remembered, too, the Islamic state’s destruction of the Roman remains at Palmyra; I has been touched last autumn when visiting the Roman sites at Arles in Provence to see that the local archaeologists had erected a memorial to the curator of the Palmyra site who had been brutally executed by the fundamentalists for wishing to protect his country’s heritage.

From one perspective, these are all piles of stone, old monuments, buildings or statues. Once can visualise far better things on which to spend the hundreds of millions of euros already pledged for the reconstruction and restoration of Notre Dame… and yet, I’m in favour of that rebuilding along with everyone else.

The cathedral is part of France’s cultural heritage, part of Europe’s cultural heritage, part of the Christian past of the world. And statements along similar lines can be made about the other destroyed monuments I’ve mentioned above. It’s the nature of our attachment that interested me. There’s our sense of awe at the endurance through so much time of such a place – over eight centuries for Notre Dame – far longer than any of us will endure, even in the memories of our descendants. There is our connection today with people like ourselves who so long ago created such magnificent buildings. The dimensions are awe-inspiring, the physical beauty breathtaking, and the realisation of the colossal amounts of time and energy our predecessors expended to create such places must bring us up short if we think about it. No cost-effectiveness or economic rationales involved there! For me there’s also the sense that nothing we are building today is likely to last anywhere near that long. And if all these relics from our past did not have a special significance for so many of us, would we in today’s world lavish so much time and money on preserving them for the future?

Then there’s the deeper sense of what ‘the past’ means for us as individuals, the way we see ourselves and our world, perhaps against the background of time and eternity, and whatever one’s attitude to religion may be, I think it’s hard to avoid using the notion of the spiritual to describe the feelings of awe and of reflection that such places steeped in history are able to inspire in us: we are taken outside ourselves, beyond ourselves, in the direction of thoughts and feelings that are very hard to understand. And somewhere, it seems to me, we all can tune in to such feelings and perhaps we all have a need to experience them at different times in our lives…

On photography

I’ve been taking photographs since I was 15, when a Polish cousin gave me a basic Soviet 35mm camera on my first visit to Poland. He was a keen photographer who had a darkroom of sorts at home, and when I got back to school in England I spent more time with a friend in the school darkroom learning about processing black and white film.

One of the first things I bought myself when I moved to Lancaster in the late 1970s was a good quality camera, an Olympus OM10, and I’ve never looked back since then. I’ve never been able to get my mind around very much of the technicality of exposure, depth of field and the like, sadly, having been rather useless at physics at school, so I’m sure I’ve never fully explored what this very rewarding hobby has to offer.

Whilst I do take some portraits from time to time, what I really like most is outdoor photography, of landscapes, nature and buildings, and this is where I take most time and care, because I want my shots to be good. I will spend ages waiting for people to move away out of shot so I get my picture without them; the same with trying to avoid having traffic in my pictures. I like to frame my shots carefully: when I used a film camera this was important because it was expensive to waste shots, and I suppose this is where I learnt the little I know about how to get a decent picture; now that it’s possible to take almost unlimited numbers of pictures with a digital camera, I’m still as careful with framing a shot, obsessive sometimes about getting the exact image I want in the frame. I try to remember the effect of a picture taken from a different height, ie not just at eye-level when I’m standing, and I also like shots that aren’t necessarily level, looking upwards in order to capture interesting aspects of an object or building. And finally, of course, photography allows me to create a record of my travels to enjoy later and bring back memories.

I enjoy going to exhibitions of photography, and am often astonished by what true professionals achieve. When I went to the Otto Dix exhibition at Tate Liverpool last autumn, there was an exhibition of portraits from the 1930s by the German photographer August Sander which was truly stunning, and while in Arles the other week I saw some fascinating monochrome landscapes and close-ups by a French photographer from the 1940s whose name I have, annoyingly, forgotten.

I also found myself reflecting on why I detest all those painted portraits in art galleries – old masters? – which seemed to me to be attempts at photography before its time, if you get my meaning, and yet which I almost invariably find utterly unbelievable and unconvincing. Photography does it perfectly, for me. It has something to do with sharpness of image, as well as use of light and shadow, and the close-ups that are possible with the newer medium. And somehow monochrome can enhance the image, whilst at the same time being less true to life than the colours of the portrait painters of the past. Maybe it’s also the informality that photography allows, that portrait painting couldn’t…. It seems to me, in my relatively limited understanding of both art and photography, that it was the invention of the latter that finally allowed art to break free of the constraints of being representative, and to move in new directions.

It took me a long time to accept digital photography, and to buy a digital camera -a modest Nikon D3100 – but I now do like the ability to take as many pictures as I like and then select and keep the most successful ones. And they don’t clutter up the world like packets of photos and albums did, and it’s a lot easier to spend time revisiting them…

August favourites #28: author

The idea of someone who is widely knowledgeable – a polymath? – is an old one, harder to countenance in these times of so much knowledge and data. It’s been a long time since it was possible for one person to ‘know’ everything that could be known – Isidore of Seville wrote the first encyclopaedia in the seventh century, and Athanasius Kircher in the seventeenth is regarded by some as the last person who knew it all. But in our own times, I was always impressed by the Italian writer, critic and philosopher Umberto Eco, who produced novels, art criticism, philosophy, works on linguistics, and – in his own language, and as far as I know, still largely untranslated – regular newspaper columns on an incredible variety of learned and light-hearted topics. The Name of the Rose is probably my all-time favourite novel. I’d really like to have met him, and I don’t say that about a lot of my heroes.

I’m doing something different for the holiday month of August, writing about some of my favourites: poems, plays, music, art and other things, a short piece on a different topic each day. The categories are random, as are the choices within them, meaning that’s my favourite that day, and is subject to change… And I will try and explain why each choice is special for me. As always, I look forward to your comments.

August favourites #16: Artist

I feel a bit out on a limb writing about art, which isn’t a field in which I can claim any kind of expertise or systematic knowledge; I haven’t got much further than liking various paintings and artists. But, exploring a new kind of creativity has been bringing me much pleasure in my retirement. I’m not terribly interested in portraits, or very representational art (we have photography now); impressionism and expressionism, however, fascinate me. I saw an exhibition in Edinburgh about ten years ago, Turner and Italy, which caused me to explore Turner’s work further, and fall in love with it. My favourite painting then was Modern Rome, and it still is. I’m constantly astonished at how he used light so expressively in so many ways, and although I really like many of his large-scale works, I’m also amazed at his sketches and his watercolours, where he can conjure up so much just with a few, almost random, lines, or patches of colour. I have no desire to draw or paint myself. I’m slowly learning to just sit and look, and really enjoy that…

I’m doing something different for the holiday month of August, writing about some of my favourites: poems, plays, music, art and other things, a short piece on a different topic each day. The categories are random, as are the choices within them, meaning that’s my favourite that day, and is subject to change… And I will try and explain why each choice is special for me. As always, I look forward to your comments.