Andrew Wyeth (1917–2009) is perhaps not a widely known name outside of the States, but he was one of the greats of middle 20th century American art. His oeuvre was American Regionalism, the realist art movement that depicted scenes from the rural, small-town America of the Midwest. Land and people, painted by an artist with an appreciation for nature and the ability to fire the imagination. He was born in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, into an established art-oriented family, his father being the celebrated artist and illustrator N C Wyeth. Andrew was brought up on the art of Winslow Homer, the poetry of Robert Frost and the writings of Henry David Thoreau, and was thus inspired intellectually as well as artistically.
One of Wyeth’s best-known works is his tempera painting Christina’s World, which is held in the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York; it was painted in 1948, when he was 31 years old. The work depicts his neighbour, Christina Olson, sprawled on a dry field facing her house in the distance, in Cushing, Maine. Christina had a degenerative muscular disorder that rendered her unable to walk, and she spent most of her time at home. She was firmly against using a wheelchair and so would crawl everywhere, and Wyeth was inspired to create the painting when he saw her crawling across the field.
Christina’s World
Christina’s World was first exhibited at the Macbeth Gallery in Manhattan in 1948. It received little attention from critics at the time, but Alfred Barr, the founding director of the MoMA, bought the painting for $1,800 and it gradually grew in popularity to the point that today, it is considered an icon of American art. The Olson house itself has been preserved and renovated to match its appearance in Christina’s World, and because of Wyeth’s profile, it was designated a National Historic Landmark in June 2011.
Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) was a German painter and printmaker and a leading light of the Northern Renaissance. Born in Nuremberg to a successful goldsmith, he lived in the same street where his godfather Anton Koberger was turning Gutenberg’s printing press into a huge commercial enterprise and publishing the famous Nuremberg Chronicle (1493). Albrecht learnt the basics of goldsmithing and drawing under his father and his precocious skills in the latter led him to undergo an apprenticeship under printmaker Michael Wolgemut in which he learnt the art of creating woodcuts for books. After his Wanderjahre – essentially gap years – in which he travelled to study under various masters, he set up a workshop and began to establish a reputation for his high-quality woodcut prints.
Dürer’s woodprints were mainly religious in nature, often in sets such as his sixteen designs for the Apocalypse, the twelve scenes of the Passion, a series of eleven on the Holy Family and Saints, and twenty woodcuts on the Life of the Virgin. He was also particularly renowned for his three Meisterstiche, master prints that are often grouped together because of their perceived quality, namely Knight, Death and the Devil (1513), Saint Jerome in his Study (1514), and Melencolia I (1514). He also made secular woodcuts, such as his famous Rhinoceros (1515), which he never actually saw but created his print using an anonymous written description and brief sketch of an Indian rhinoceros brought to Lisbon in 1515.
However, today we focus on his panel painting in oil, Self-Portrait (or Self-Portrait at Twenty-Eight), held today in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich. Painted early in 1500, just before his 29th birthday, Self-Portrait is the last – and most personal and iconic — of his three painted self-portraits. It is remarkable for its directness – does it remind you of anyone? Yes, its resemblance to many earlier representations of Christ has not gone unnoticed: there are clear similarities with the conventions of religious painting, including its symmetry and dark tones, and full-frontal confrontation with the viewer. He even raises his hands to the middle of his chest as if in the act of blessing.
If that is the case, isn’t that blasphemy? Sounds somewhat dangerous, no? Perhaps we’re projecting too much intolerance onto the fifteenth (well, newly-sixteenth) century, or perhaps Dürer’s motivation was simply a way to (literally) imitate Christ, which could be seen as a good thing. Art historian Joseph Koerner interprets it squarely as a pioneering challenge to the norms of self-portraiture, albeit putting it in that particularly verbose way only art historians can do:
“By transferring the attributes of imagistic authority and quasi-magical power once associated with the true and sacred image of God to the novel subject of self-portraiture, Dürer legitimates his radically new notion of art, one based on the irreducible relation between the self and the work or art”.
Greece has its Iliad and Odyssey, Italy its Aeneid, Portugal its Lusiads, Iceland its Eddas, Germany its Nibelungenlied, Britain its Beowulf and Le Morte d’Arthur, and India its Mahabarata and Ramayana. I am talking of course about national folk-epics, those literary masterpieces that were originally an oral canon of folk-stories percolated down through the mists of time and later written down and integrated into the worldview of its people.
Well, Finland’s was the epic poetry collection known as the Kalevala, which was developed quite late — during the 19th century — but still from ancient traditional folk-tales. The Kalevala was an integral part of the Finns’ national awakening in the era of the Grand Duchy of Finland when they were under the yoke of the Russian empire, and it was instrumental in the development of the Finnish national identity, ultimately leading to independence from Russia in 1917.
This national awakening coincided with the so-called Golden Age of Finnish Art roughly spanning the period 1880 to 1910. The Kalevala provided the artistic inspiration for numerous themes at the time in literature (J. L. Runeberg’s The Tales of Ensign Stål; Aleksis Kivi’s The Seven Brothers), music (Jean Sibelius), architecture (Eliel Saarinen), and of course the visual arts, the most notable of which were provided by one Akseli Gallen-Kallela.
Born Axél Waldemar Gallén in Pori, Finland, to a Swedish-speaking family (he Finnicised his name in 1907), Gallen-Kallela first attended drawing classes at the Finnish Art Society before studying at the Académie Julian in Paris. He married Mary Slöör in 1890 and on their honeymoon to East Karelia, he started collecting material for his depictions of the Kalevala. He would soon be inextricably linked with the independence movement as he produced his scenes from the old stories.
The most extensive paintings that Gallen-Kallela made of the Kalevala were his frescoes, originally for the Finnish Pavilion at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1900, but painted again in 1928 in the lobby of the National Museum of Finland in Helsinki where they can be seen to this day. However, many standalone works exist too; here’s a flavour of his art, though if you want to know what they depict you’ll have to read the Kalevala!
Last Sunday I popped along to see Monet’s iconic The Water-Lily Pond, on loan at York Art Gallery, and very nice it was too, being the centrepiece of a nice collection of key loans featuring various French en plein air precursors to Impressionism. However, whilst there, I was reminded that the gallery had also recently acquired for its permanent collection a piece by an artist a little closer to home, Leeds-born John Atkinson Grimshaw, known not for the Impressionistic brushwork or garden scenes of Monet and his ilk but for realistic nocturnal scenes of urban landscapes. The painting is Liverpool Docks at Night (1870s) and it’s a fine example of Grimshaw’s oeuvre. It was also something of a coup for York Art Gallery, given that it had been accepted by HM Government in lieu of inheritance tax from a collection and had been allocated to the gallery for the bargainous price of £0.
Grimshaw was born in a back-to-back house in Park Street, Leeds, in 1836, and at first looked destined for a normal, anonymous life — he married his cousin Frances at age twenty and got a job as clerk for the Great Northern Railway. However, the young John had an artistic gift and an ambition, and it must have taken a great deal of courage and self-belief for him to dismay his parents by packing in his job and launching himself as a painter, but he did just that, in 1861. His primary artistic influence was the Pre-Raphaelites and true to their style he painted with accurate colour and lighting and with vivid detail. Although he did start out painting a variety of genres, Grimshaw was later drawn to depicting moonlit views of city streets in Leeds and London, and dockside scenes in Hull, Liverpool, and Glasgow. James McNeill Whistler, with whom Grimshaw worked later in his career in his Chelsea studios, said: “I considered myself the inventor of nocturnes until I saw Grimmy’s moonlit pictures”.
Unlike Whistler’s Impressionistic night scenes, “Grimmy’s” nocturnes were sharply focused and almost photographic in their quality, and there is an eerie warmth about them. Rather than concentrating on the dirty and depressing aspects of industrial life (that he would have had no trouble finding), Grimshaw imbued his paintings with a lyrical evocation of the urban landscape and there is poetry in his captured mists, reflected streetlight in wet pavements, and dark figures wrapped up against the weather. His twilight cities became his “brand” and became very popular with his middle-class patrons; he must have done well because by the 1870s he and his wife were living at Knostrup Old Hall, in the Temple Newsam area of Leeds, a far cry from the back-to-back in Park Street.
Here is a favourite of mine, Boar Lane, Leeds (1881), a street we Leeds dwellers have walked down many a time on a winter’s day like this.
If you were to choose any British art gallery to walk into today, you would be sure to find one or more paintings by one or more artists belonging to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. The Pre-Raphaelites were a group of English painters, poets, and art critics, founded in 1848 by William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and others, who sought to reform art and return it to the glory days, as they saw it, of Italian fifteenth century art. That period of art, so-called Quattrocento art, was characterised by abundant detail, colour and complexity; in the following century, however, artists – such as Raphael – were seen by the group as having a corrupting influence on art, ushering in the unnatural and stylised art of Mannerism. Parmigianino’s Madonna With The Long Neck (1540) is often used as an example of Mannerism playing fast and loose with proper perspective, as I’m sure you can see.
Parmigianino’s Madonna With The Long Neck (1540)
Today, we’re looking at a classic of the Pre-Raphaelites, namely Ophelia, the 1852 painting by British artist Sir John Everett Millais (and held in Tate Britain). Ophelia is of course a character from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, a Danish noblewoman driven mad by her love for Prince Hamlet and who ultimately drowns in despair. Her drowning is not usually seen onstage in the play, but merely reported by Queen Gertrude who tells the audience that Ophelia, out of her mind with grief, has fallen from a willow tree overhanging a brook. She lies in the water singing songs, as if unaware of her danger (“incapable of her own distress”), her clothes, trapping air and allowing her to stay afloat for a while (“Her clothes spread wide, / And, mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up.”). But eventually, “her garments, heavy with their drink, / Pull’d the poor wretch from her melodious lay” down “to muddy death”.
Millais paints Ophelia in a pose with open arms and upward gaze in the manner of saints or martyrs (they did love a tragic woman, the Pre-Raphs). In keeping with the tenets of the Pre-Raphaelites, he has used bright colours, with lots of detailed flora and fidelity to nature. Despite its nominal Danish setting, the landscape has actually come to be seen as quintessentially English (Ophelia was painted along the banks of the Hogsmill River near Tolworth in Surrey). The flowers shown floating on the river were chosen to correspond with Shakespeare’s description of Ophelia’s garland.
Fun fact: at one point, Millais had painted a water vole paddling away near Ophelia, but changed his mind (probably correctly) after an acquaintance mistook it for a hare or rabbit. Although fully painted over, a rough sketch of it still exists in a corner of the canvas hidden by the frame, apparently.
Great art comes in many shapes and sizes, from portrait miniatures right up to monumental canvases depicting epic scenes with casts of thousands. Today we’re going to look at an example of the latter, one which hangs in the Louvre and deserves to have the same-sized crowd of admirers that perpetually gather around the Mona Lisa there (and perhaps it does usually, but I do have a memory of being able to admire it unmolested by other people and able to take in its considerable features). It’s Paolo Veronese’s The Wedding Feast at Cana (Nozze di Cana, 1562–1563), depicting the biblical story of the Wedding at Cana, in which Jesus miraculously converts water into wine, thus justifying his invitation several times over.
It’s a whopping 6.77 m × 9.94 m and indeed as such it’s the largest painting in the Louvre. Veronese executed his painting slap-bang in the middle of the period in art known as the Mannerist age (c.1520‑c.1600), in which there was a tendency of artists to take the ideals of the High Renaissance (1490–1527) — proportion, balance, ideal beauty – and exaggerate them such that arrangements of human figures have an unnatural rather than a realistic feel to them. It’s as if artists felt that everything that could be achieved had already been achieved by the likes of Da Vinci, Raphael and Michelangelo, and they needed a different approach.
The canvas was originally hung in the San Georgio Monastery in Venice, until Napoleon’s soldiers nicked it as war booty in 1797. It depicts a crowded banquet scene in the sumptuous style characteristic of 16th century Venetian society but framed in the Greco-Roman architectural style of classical antiquity. There are 130 human figures dressed fashionably in Occidental and Oriental costume alla Turca, and there are indications that we are post-feast, with guests sated and awaiting the wine service.
In the foreground are musicians playing stringed instruments of the late Renaissance, with legend having it that the musician in the white tunic is a depiction of Veronese himself and the other musicians modelled on fellow artists Jacopo Bassano, Tintoretto and Titian. Behind the musicians are seated Jesus of Nazareth, the Virgin Mary, and several apostles. Amongst the wedding guests are depicted many historical personages from Veronese’s day, such as Mary I of England, Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, and Suleiman the Magnificent. There are so many quirky elements to discover– a little dog on the table here, a lady picking her teeth there, a dwarf holding a bright green parrot – that to do so could take up some considerable time.
Here are some details (click on them to enlarge), with the whole masterpiece in its entirety below.
Visitors to the Bowes Museum in the town of Barnard Castle in County Durham are regularly blown away by the treasures housed in this provincial town, miles away from the major cities where art collections of this quality may be expected. The building alone is worth the visit; it is elaborately modelled in the style of the French Second Empire, purpose-built to house the art collection of John Bowes, and opened to the public in 1892.
Bowes Museum, Barnard Castle
The collection contains paintings by El Greco, Goya, Canaletto, Fragonard and Boucher, as well as items of decorative art, ceramics, textiles, tapestries, clocks and costumes. The pièce de résistance, however, is today’s subject, the Silver Swan automaton, created by London jeweller James Cox and the inventor John Joseph Merlin.
The Silver Swan was first recorded in 1774 as a crowd puller at the famous Cox’s Museum of James Cox, an entrepreneur as well as a talented jeweller. The exquisitely crafted swan has an internal clockwork-driven mechanism with 2000 moving parts (designed by Merlin), and at an appointed time each day at Bowes Museum, the automaton is cranked up and goes through its 32-second performance.
The swan sits in a stream made of glass rods and surrounded by silver leaves, and small silver fish can be seen “swimming” in the stream. When the clockwork is wound, the music box plays and the glass rods rotate giving the illusion of flowing water. The swan turns its head from side to side, preens itself, and after a few moments bends down to catch and eat a fish. The swan’s head then returns to the upright position and the performance is over.
The Silver Swan was exhibited at the 1867 Paris International Exhibition, and it was here that John Bowes and his wife saw it, fell in love with it, and in 1872 had the opportunity to purchase it (for £200, or about £20,000 in today’s money, still an absolute steal). The American novelist Mark Twain also saw the Silver Swan at the Paris exhibition in 1867 and described it in his book The Innocents Abroad:
I watched the Silver Swan, which had a living grace about his movement and a living intelligence in his eyes – watched him swimming about as comfortably and unconcernedly as it he had been born in a morass instead of a jeweller’s shop – watched him seize a silver fish from under the water and hold up his head and go through the customary and elaborate motions of swallowing it…
If this inspires you to see the swan for yourself, leave it a few months: it is currently being restored but is expected to return to its public next year.
If you happen to be in Manchester with a spare hour or two, do call into its art gallery on Mosley Street where you’ll find a host of interesting paintings, not least of which is Cheetah and Stag with Two Indians by George Stubbs. Stubbs was an English artist, born in Liverpool in 1724 and who moved to York in 1744 to pursue his passion for human anatomy, studying under the surgeon Charles Atkinson at York County Hospital. He was also a natural and entirely self-taught artist, and worked as a portrait painter in York for ten more years, but he would become famous later not for painting human sitters but animal ones, particularly horses (of which his best-known, Whistlejacket, is at the National Gallery in London).
Whistlejacket
By 1764, Stubbs had established a reputation for his anatomically accurate animal paintings, and attracted the attention of the royal court, who had commissioned him, the year before, to paint Queen Charlotte’s South African zebra. He was, then, the obvious choice when a certain outgoing Governor General of Madras, Sir George Pigot, arrived back in London with a menagerie of “wild beasts and curiosities” as gifts for King George III, and was looking for an artist to paint a portrait of the most exotic of those gifts, a magnificent cheetah.
Easily tamed and trained, cheetahs had been used as hunting animals by the Mogul Emperors for hundreds of years. In that spirit, the King’s uncle, the Duke of Cumberland, was eager to put the King’s cheetah through its paces and so arranged a demonstration in Windsor Great Park, where George Stubbs was present to capture the occasion on canvas.
A stag was duly placed in an enclosure of the royal paddock while the cheetah was prepared by Pigot’s Indian servants. First, they ‘hoodwinked’ the animal by tying a red blindfold over its face, whilst one of the servants held it by a restraining sash around the hindquarters. A servant then pulled back the hood back to allow the cheetah a first sight of its quarry, whilst the other one gestured towards the stag, and the predator was unleashed. What happened next was not quite what was intended: according to the St James’s Chronicle the stag staunchly defended itself and ended up chasing the cheetah off!
The painting has been praised for its sincere rendering and lack of European condescension: in an age when foreign visitors were pictured at best as colourful exotics, at worst as sinister or ridiculous caricatures, Stubbs endowed the servants with a grace and authenticity equal to the magnificent creature they were caring for.
Postscript Cheetahs are no longer to be found wild in the Indian sub-continent: the last three individuals were reportedly shot in 1947 by the Maharajah of Surguja.
Cheetah and Stag with Two IndiansGeorge Stubbs, self-portrait
My appreciation of art spans many centuries. I’ve marvelled at the Greco-Romano art of the classical world; contemplated frescoes adorning Byzantine monasteries and churches in Turkey, Armenia and Cyprus; spent hours in galleries musing over paintings from the Medieval and Renaissance periods, through the eras of Baroque, Neoclassicism and Romanticism to late nineteenth-century Impressionism and on to…well to be honest, when we hit the twentieth century, my enthusiasm starts to wane. Sure, Art Deco was a bona fide, aesthetically pleasing and innovative art movement, and Cubism had its place, but when I start to consider Surrealism, Minimalism and Abstract Expressionism, I’m less impressed.
Sure, sure: it’s eminently possible to sit and enjoy a monumental and vibrant Jackson Pollock canvas in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art — and I have done — and there will always be exceptional and intriguing art to be found throughout the twentieth century. But my contention is that overall these tend to be outliers, and that in amongst the gems there is a broad seam of distinctly uncaptivating art. You can enjoy a Mark Rothko but can you really be captivated by it? I can’t. And don’t get me started on the truly modern “art” of the last four decades, the likes of Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, the Chapman Brothers, Martin Creed et al…please!
Having said that, I’m going to give a free pass to one of the head honchos of Abstract Expressionism, the Russian painter and art theorist Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944). With Kandinsky I can embrace the new century vibe and be inspired by all that art theory behind colour and form. Kandinsky wrote voluminously about art theory: his writing in The Blue Rider Almanac and the 1910 treatise On the Spiritual in Art were bold affirmations that all forms of art can reach a level of spirituality. He founded the short-lived but influential Blue Rider group (Der Blaue Reiter) with like-minded artists such as August Macke, Franz Marc, and Albert Bloch, who experimented boldly with colour, lines and form, and gave priority to spontaneity and improvisation.
Kandinsky’s paintings are expressive explosions of colours, lines and shapes that have an extraordinary force and musical quality about them. Kandinsky recognised that there were important connections between music and abstract art: music is abstract by nature and does not try to represent the exterior world but instead expresses the immediate inner feelings of the soul. That is why Kandinsky referred to his works as “compositions”. I get it. I seem to remember having this composition — 1925’s Yellow-Red-Blue (Gelb-Rot-Blau) — on my kitchen wall in the nineties, and, to extend the musical metaphor, I find it rather jazzy!
As a boy, the Beano was my comic of choice, with occasional forays into the Beezer, the Topper, and the Dandy. Later, Warlord would come along, a now largely forgotten boys’ comic featuring stories centred around Lord Peter Flint (codename “Warlord”), Union Jack Jackson and Bomber Braddock (I would write to the comic for its free pack to become a “Warlord agent” with a badge and everything). By the eighties, all grown up, I had pretty much done with comics, but one notable exception came along in the guise of the series of underground comics written and drawn by Gilbert Shelton and featuring the “Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers”.
The Freak Brothers were a trio of hippie stoners whose lives revolved around the procurement of recreational drugs and whose chaotic lives led them on various adventures. First appearing in 1968 in the underground counterculture newspaper The Rag, published in Austin, Texas, the characters were emblematic of the blooming hippie culture of the late sixties and soon would graduate to a dedicated comic book of their own: Shelton co-founded Rip Off Press in 1969 and published 13 issues of The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers comic between 1971 and 1997 (so no, it was no weekly comic, it was issued as and when Shelton finished his latest piece). How they came onto my radar, I’m not entirely certain, though I was possibly drawn by the vibrant and promising covers:
The “brothers” (who were not actually siblings) consisted of Fat Freddy (overweight, yellow curly hair, moustache), Freewheelin’ Franklin (tall, skinny, bulbous nose, Mexican moustache, cowboy hat, ponytail) and Phineas Phreak (bushy black hair, joint-shaped nose). They live in San Francisco (where else?) and their adventures often serve to foil Norbert the Nark, the inept DEA agent who is continually trying, and failing, to arrest them. Meanwhile, a bonus comic strip at the foot of the page featured feline anti-hero, Fat Freddy’s Cat (which spawned its own spin-off comic series).
With drug use being the dominant theme, the stories are very much in line with the shenanigans of contemporaneous on-screen homologues Cheech and Chong. Far be it from me to confess some kind of fraternity with law-breaking drug-takers conspicuously failing to be model citizens but what can I say, I’m a cultural observer! Shelton’s comics are richly humorous and brilliantly drawn, even if very much of their time. They must have clicked with a whole generation of boomers for whom, as Freewheelin’ Franklin said, “Dope will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no dope”.
Gilbert Shelton
Commentaries on excellence in art, music, film, and literature
