Art

Giovanni Piranesi’s Imaginary Prisons (1761)

June 21, 2019 davewheeler2@hotmail.com 1 Comment

Venice had been one of the great trading powers of medieval and Renaissance Europe, but by the 18th-century its political dominion was waning. Although past its heyday, the republic still possessed great appeal to the emerging tourist market; it was a preeminent destination for the thousands of prominent young adult males embarking on the “Grand Tour”. Capitalising on the tourists’ desire to secure a memento, there developed the genre of view painting, spawning a plethora of paintings of the Rialto Bridge, the Grand Canal and St Mark’s Square, by the likes of Canaletto, Bellotto, and the Guardi brothers.

As well as real city views, the artists sometimes liked to let their fancy fly and paint imaginary views (capricci) that placed buildings, archaeological ruins and other architectural elements together in fictional and often fantastical combinations. The name of one such artist, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, is not particularly well-known these days but nonetheless left to history a series of etchings whose influence is felt to this day: the so-called Imaginary Prisons (Le Carceri).

These prisons of Piranesi’s imagination were dark, labyrinthine depictions of a nightmare world. Ever since they were published – the first edition in the late 1740s, the second, even darker one in 1761 – Piranesi’s images have inspired designers, writers and architects alike. We can see elements of them in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and in Michael Radford’s adaptation of George Orwell’s 1984. The etchings foreshadow M C Escher’s playful explorations of perspective, and we can even see their influence in the moving staircases at Hogwarts.

Piranesi’s prison interiors have no outer walls; each vista is cut off only by the frame of the image itself. The spaces are large and continuous: they may not even be interiors; this may be a city that has grown into a world, where interior and exterior are no longer definable. We see strange devices suggestive of torture: wheels with spikes, pulleys, baskets big enough to contain a person. You don’t quite know how they work, or what the thinking could be behind them. Prisoners undergo mysterious torments, chained to posts, whilst high above them spectators gather on a vertiginous walkway. It is impossible to tell at times who is a prisoner, who a guard, who a visitor, and in the end you suspect that everyone in this place is a prisoner.

Art

Mary Cassatt’s Young Mother Sewing (1900)

June 7, 2019 davewheeler2@hotmail.com Leave a comment

When we think of the Impressionists, we tend to think about Monet, Renoir, Degas, Cézanne…and quite rightly, because they were titans of their art. However, less well-known to us (always the way, unfortunately, eh ladies?) were “les trois grandes dames” of Impressionism, namely Marie Bracquemond, Berthe Morisot and the subject of today’s blog, Mary Cassatt. These women more than held their own amongst their male counterparts; all three produced wonderful art and exhibited successfully at the Paris Salons.

Mary Cassatt was a young American artist who arrived in Paris in 1866, having quit the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts back home, due to the lack of inspiration and patronising attitude of the male students and teachers there. Although we associate the birth of feminism with the early 1900s, the first wave of feminism began as early as the 1840s, and some doors were opened to women, particularly in cosmopolitan Paris, to which Mary was drawn.

Not all doors were opened, however: women still couldn’t study art at the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts so Cassatt signed up for private study with Jean-Léon Gérôme, (the Orientalist I wrote about back in March) and she became an advocate for women’s equality all her life. She became a friend and collaborator of Edgar Degas, too. They had studios a five-minute stroll apart, and Degas would regularly look in at Mary’s studio, offering advice and helping find models.

Cassatt’s art centred on the lives of women, and in particular she painted many works depicting the intimate bond between mother and child. It is that aspect I am showcasing here, with a gallery of pieces featuring some often touching depictions of mother and child, beginning with Young Mother Sewing, painted in 1900 and purchased a year later by influential art collector and feminist Louisine Havemeyer, who fittingly used it to raise money for the women’s suffrage cause.

Poetry

Edward Lear’s The Owl and The Pussycat (1871)

May 24, 2019 davewheeler2@hotmail.com 1 Comment

Everybody knows The Owl and the Pussycat, the nonsense poem by Edward Lear. There’s no rule that impels its inclusion in the primary school curriculum; it is just one of those pieces of our culture that gets passed down and which everyone has heard by the time they’re ten. Perhaps by osmosis. Or more likely, its appeal to many a nursery school assistant charged with entertaining a roomful of children, due to its delicious use of language, rhyme, and imagery.

First published in 1871 as part of his book Nonsense Songs, Stories, Botany, and Alphabets, Lear wrote the poem for the daughter of a friend. And like that other great Victorian purveyor of nonsense verse, Lewis Carroll, Lear had that exquisite talent for choosing just the right made-up nonsense words. ‘Runcible’, for example, as in the phrase “…which they ate with a runcible spoon”, was one such coinage, right up there with Lewis Carroll’s ‘galumphing’ and ‘frumious’ from Jabberwocky. Lear went on to use this wonderfully meaningless adjective to describe his hat, a wall, and even his cat. Incidentally, wouldn’t “The Runcible Spoon” be a great name for a café? In fact, there already is one: I came across this in the village of Hinderwell, whilst on holiday in Runswick Bay:

The Owl and the Pussy-cat went to sea
In a beautiful pea-green boat,
They took some honey, and plenty of money,
Wrapped up in a five-pound note.
The Owl looked up to the stars above,
And sang to a small guitar,
“O lovely Pussy! O Pussy, my love,
What a beautiful Pussy you are,
You are,
You are!
What a beautiful Pussy you are!”

Pussy said to the Owl, “You elegant fowl!
How charmingly sweet you sing!
O let us be married! too long we have tarried:
But what shall we do for a ring?”
They sailed away, for a year and a day,
To the land where the Bong-Tree grows
And there in a wood a Piggy-wig stood
With a ring at the end of his nose,
His nose,
His nose,
With a ring at the end of his nose.

“Dear Pig, are you willing to sell for one shilling
Your ring?” Said the Piggy, “I will.”
So they took it away, and were married next day
By the Turkey who lives on the hill.
They dined on mince, and slices of quince,
Which they ate with a runcible spoon;
And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand,
They danced by the light of the moon,
The moon,
The moon,
They danced by the light of the moon.

*vermonious? I just made it up, of course!

Film, TV, and Theatre

Christopher Guest’s This is Spinal Tap (1984)

May 10, 2019 davewheeler2@hotmail.com Leave a comment

When I was young, not yet a teenager, I inherited from my elder sisters a number of vinyl LPs, among them David Bowie’s The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, Cat Stevens’ Teaser and the Firecat, the Moody Blues’ In Search Of The Lost Chord, and an album that apparently didn’t need much of a title: Led Zeppelin II. Although I loved all of these records, it was the latter album that informed my immediate direction in music; riffing guitar, crashing drums, shrieking vocals: what was not to like?

Soon I would encounter Deep Purple, Thin Lizzy, UFO, AC/DC and Black Sabbath, and by my mid-teens, a (largely young male) cross-section of the country would be in the grip of the so-called “New Wave of British Heavy Metal”. Seemingly all of a sudden, there was a superabundance of bands comprising long-haired, leather-, denim- or lycra-clad rockers: Judas Priest, Saxon, Iron Maiden, Def Leppard, Angelwitch, Praying Mantis, the list went on and on. And oh, the gigs! I attended many of those. You would find your senses assaulted by very loud music, bright lights, dry ice, a seething crowd of headbanging fans, the smell of sweat and patchouli oil – it was certainly a thrilling experience. However, the idiosyncrasies of the genre, along with some of the bands’ increasingly theatrical stage shows and themes, would make them ripe for satire.

Enter Christopher Guest, a British-American screenwriter, actor, and comedian who would become known for his series of comedy films shot in mock-documentary (mockumentary) style, and beginning in 1984 with his hilarious take on the heavy metal movement, This Is Spinal Tap. Directed by Rob Reiner, it stars Guest, Michael McKean, and Harry Shearer as members of fictional British heavy metal band, Spinal Tap, and we follow them on their American tour. The film satirizes the behaviour and musical pretensions of rock bands, and to those with an inside view of the British heavy rock scene, the result is a painfully accurate and utterly hilarious pastiche.

Let’s start with the band members’ names, all great choices: David St. Hubbins (McKean) and Nigel Tufnel (Guest) on vocals and guitar, bassist Derek Smalls (Shearer), keyboardist Viv Savage, and drummer Mick Shrimpton. Most of the film’s dialogue was improvised and dozens of hours were filmed, and given that the principal actors were American, the fidelity to the Britishness is outstanding.

The film is packed with great scenes of on and offstage antics and drama, but to keep it down I have selected three classics for your amusement: the scene wherein Nigel Tufnel takes us on a backstage tour of this guitars and amps (including the ones that “go up to eleven”); the scene wherein the band get lost trying to find the stage door; and the hilarious Stonehenge scene, in which the band, playing its set-piece epic, is flabbergasted to see the expected 18-foot-tall stage props of “Stone’enge” descend to the stage at the crucial moment in dimensions constructed erroneously and underwhelmingly in inches. Priceless.

Derek Smalls, Nigel Tufnel, and David St Hubbins of Spinal Tap

Poetry

Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy (1320)

April 26, 2019 davewheeler2@hotmail.com 1 Comment

“Abandon hope, all ye who enter here”. No, not to this blog (though it’s a consideration) but to the entrance to Hell, this inscription appearing on the gates thereof in the early part of Dante Alighieri’s Inferno, Book I of his Divine Comedy (Divina Commedia). Thus begins an epic journey through the Inferno (Hell), the Purgatorio (Purgatory), and the Paradiso (Heaven). And we are talking epic here: 14,233 lines of terza rima (three-line rhyming scheme in the pattern aba bcb cdc ded etc), begun in 1308 and completed in 1320, a year before Dante’s death. It is widely recognised as one of the greatest works of world literature; indeed, in T S Eliot’s estimation, “Dante and Shakespeare divide the world”.

The narrative describes Dante’s travels through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven, allegorically representing the soul’s journey towards God. He is accompanied throughout by a guide: in Hell and Purgatory it’s the great Roman poet, Virgil, whilst in Heaven it’s Beatrice, thought to be Dante’s “ideal woman” and based on a real Florentine woman he had admired from a distance.

In Hell, Virgil shows Dante the poor souls suffering a punishment directly related to the nature of their sin. This is contrapasso (“suffer the opposite”): for example, the punishment for soothsayers and fortune-tellers (who had tried to see the future by forbidden means) is to walk with their heads on backwards so that they cannot see what is ahead. The lustful, who allowed their passions to blow them astray, are now constantly buffeted back and forth by stormy winds. Such poetic justice is similarly meted out to the gluttonous and greedy, the wrathful and violent, the fraudulent and hypocritical, and to the heretics and blasphemers. Many real personages of Dante’s time are named and shamed, damned by their incontinence in life. It paid to live an upright life in Dante’s day!

Purgatory is conceived as a terraced mountain to climb, representing spiritual growth. Dante discusses the nature of sin, vice and virtue, and moral issues prevalent in the Church and politics of the day. The 13^th century was a rich time for medieval theology and philosophy, and Dante draws heavily from the body of work produced by philosophers such as Siger of Brabant, Bonaventure and Thomas Aquinas.

The third and final part, Heaven, is depicted as a series of concentric spheres around Earth, and here, Beatrice takes over the role of guide from Virgil, representing divine knowledge superseding human reason. Here we encounter the cardinal virtues, such as prudence, fortitude, justice and temperance, and ever upward, Dante finally has a vision of the ultimate and in a flash of understanding that he cannot express, he sees God himself.

If you’re imagining that a reading of the Divine Comedy could be a great adventure, you’d be right, but if you’re baulking at its length, an excellent alternative is to seek out the audio book narrated by (of all people) John Cleese, who does a smashing job of narrating this great poem.

Film, TV, and Theatre

Ken Loach’s Kes (1969)

April 12, 2019 davewheeler2@hotmail.com Leave a comment

I’m from Yorkshire and, like all Yorkshire men and women, am very proud to be so (you may have encountered this probably not-unannoying phenomenon if you’re not yourself from Yorkshire). The county is known for the rugged beauty of its Dales in the north-west, and its Wolds and Moors in the north-east, though it is associated too, in the west and south, with a bleaker, more industrial landscape, where social deprivation and poverty has played its part. One such area provides the setting for Ken Loach’s 1969 film, the classic (and often very moving) “Yorkshire film”, Kes.

The film, adapted from Barry Hines’s novel A Kestrel for a Knave, follows Billy Casper, a sensitive and downtrodden 15-year-old from working-class Barnsley who finds solace in training a kestrel. It is a gentle drama about harsh circumstances, and I remember its impact: it was something of a sensation, and it won the young actor, David Bradley, a deserved BAFTA for his role.

Billy’s brother bullies him and his family neglects him. At school, most of his teachers ridicule and reject him, especially sadistic Mr Sugden (Brian Glover, with a bravura performance you’ll see below). Billy appears headed for a menial job with no future and consequently has no motivation and nothing to look forward to, until the day he finds a kestrel, a European falcon, which he befriends and cares for. He raises, nurtures, and trains the falcon, whom he calls “Kes”, and encouragement from one of his more sympathetic teachers (played admirably by Colin Welland) offers Billy hope.

The naturalism achieved in the film is testament to Loach’s directorial skills and his desire for authenticity. The schoolkids that he directs play their parts for real, with little apparent self-awareness. It often feels as if the viewer is watching via a hidden camera. Take this classic football match scene, below, wherein Mr Sugden bosses the kids boorishly (though, it has to be said, highly amusingly), eliciting much banter, rich with local jargon and accent, from kids on and off camera. It will perhaps prompt recollection of cold, muddy sports pitches from your own schooldays; it does me. However, it is a charming piece of social realism that you will enjoy even if you don’t catch every bit of dialogue!

Art

Jean-Léon Gérôme’s The Carpet Merchant (1887)

March 29, 2019 davewheeler2@hotmail.com 2 Comments

In July of 1798, Napoleon marched into Egypt and defeated the Turks at the Battle of the Pyramids, weakening past breaking point the waning Ottoman Empire. He was driven out a year later by the British, but in that small amount of time he had already changed everything: because following him came first a trickle and then a torrent of westerners into the Near and Middle East. They came and they journeyed through Turkey, Iraq, Persia, Egypt, Lebanon, Palestine, Arabia and North Africa. Many of them wrote about their experiences, sparking a deep fascination with these exotic, mysterious lands.

The artists came too, and they painted what they saw: bazaars and souks; robed and moustachioed Arabs smoking hookah pipes; mosques and minarets; Turkish baths and harems. With time this became an art movement and today we call it Orientalist art. I love it for the way it conjures up the exotic, and although it is clear that some artists let their imaginations get the better of them (I’m thinking of the harems, which no artist can have actually seen), their depictions of these lands must have inspired many a beating heart to visit.

One such Orientalist was French painter, Jean-Léon Gérôme. In 1856, he visited Egypt for the first time and followed the classic grand tour of a typical occidental visitor to the Orient: up the Nile to Cairo, then to Abu Simbel, across the Sinai Peninsula and through the Wadi el-Araba to the Holy Land, Jerusalem and finally to Damascus. He gathered themes, artefacts and costumes for his oriental scenes, and then set to work, soon establishing a reputation back home which saw him become honorary President of the French Society of Orientalist Painters.

There’s a gallery, below, of several of his Orientalist works, giving a good flavour of what he was about, and below that my favourite piece of the lot, The Carpet Merchant. I have travelled quite extensively myself in these lands, from Istanbul, Beirut and Damascus to Marrakesh, Petra and Cairo; and nothing quite beats the simple pleasure of wandering the snaking alleyways and souks of an old quarter, and taking in the sights, sounds and smells of life there. The Carpet Merchant captures that feeling perfectly.

Music

The Rolling Stones’ (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction (1965)

March 15, 2019 davewheeler2@hotmail.com Leave a comment

In April 1965, the Rolling Stones embarked on their first headlining tour of the United States. They had already had two US top ten hits (Time Is On My Side and The Last Time) but in terms of the British invasion they were still a notch or two below bands such as Herman’s Hermits and the Dave Clark Five. One song, written during this tour, would soon change that.

The story behind that song is enshrined in rock folklore. Midway through the tour, in a motel in Clearwater, Florida, Keith Richards woke up in the middle of the night with a tune in his head. Fumbling in the dark for his cassette recorder, he hit the record button and played the eight-note guitar riff. He also mumbled a lyric – “I can’t get no satisfaction” – and then fell asleep. In Richards’ own words: “On the tape you can hear me drop the pick. The rest is me snoring”.

Richards didn’t think his riff would turn into anything commercial; nonetheless, Mick Jagger was inspired to flesh out the lyrics and when the band’s tour took them to Chicago just three days after Richards’ nocturnal ramblings, they dropped into Chess Studios (home to their heroes Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley and Muddy Waters) and laid down the song.

This first attempt was actually an acoustic, folksy version of the song, sounding nothing like the swaggering stomp it would turn into. It didn’t take long for that transformation to occur, however: just two days later the band re-recorded the song, this time in RCA Studios on Hollywood Boulevard. Richards had just acquired a Maestro FZ-1 Fuzz-Tone pedal, Charlie Watts put down a different tempo, and the band gave the song a far more aggressive feel.The song was released as a single in the United States in June 1965. It was a smash hit, giving the Stones their first US number one and setting the band on their trajectory to become the “Greatest Rock and Roll Band in the World”. Here’s a suitably electrifying performance delivered by the band and filmed during a quick tour of Ireland a few weeks after the song hit number one.

Literature

Joyce Lankester Brisley’s Milly-Molly-Mandy Stories (1925)

March 1, 2019 davewheeler2@hotmail.com Leave a comment

One of life’s great pleasures is reading to your children at bedtime, and your blogger, accordingly, has read many a children’s story to his own girls (and provided, incidentally, many an amusing voice to bring characters to life and make the story more interesting – I didn’t live through years of Jackanory for nothing, you know!). Some of the books we read were contemporary, and some were hardy perennials from bygone eras enjoyed by preceding generations. One of the latter, from nearly a hundred years ago now, and which stands out as a paragon of charm is Joyce Lankester Brisley’s 1920s collections of stories about Milly-Molly-Mandy, the little girl in the nice white cottage with the thatched roof.

To this day, from time to time in our house, we return to Milly-Molly-Mandy and read one of her stories, each one a miniature masterpiece and the literary equivalent of comfort food. Now, it is pretty obvious that these stories are not “relevant” to today, and they are vulnerable to claims of sentimentality and a rose-tinted depiction of a simple and long-gone world. But such objections don’t matter a jot to a child to whom the story is being read; nor to me, the narrator, frankly. Children don’t need “relevance”; they need to be transported…and Joyce Lankester Brisley’s world certainly does that.

We are invited into a world of rural charm, in an unnamed village with a school, a blacksmith’s, a grocer’s, and a baker’s, along with copious fields used as shortcuts by Milly-Molly-Mandy, Little Friend Susan, Billy Blunt, and Toby the dog, as they walk to and from school or run errands for Mother. Each story begins with “Once upon a time”, and is followed by reassuringly unspectacular goings-on in Milly-Molly-Mandy’s life, be it running to the shops with a sixpence for a skein of wool for Grandma, feeding milk to a baby hedgehog, or having a picnic in a hollowed-out tree trunk with her friends.

The magic lies in the way Joyce Lankester Brisley weaves her simple stories, the words and phrases she uses, and the charming illustrations, drawn by the author herself, that accompany the narrative. Such simple childhood pastimes as “mending” a puddle by adding pebbles and stones into it, or getting wet and flapping and quacking like ducks: who doesn’t relate to that?

So to those to whom Milly-Molly-Mandy’s world is still culturally comprehensible, be warned: these stories can give you a lump in your throat, as you mourn a disappeared world trodden underfoot by the pitiless forces of modernism and globalism! Nevertheless, the stories are an absolute delight and solidly deserve their place in the pantheon of childhood literature.

Art

John Singer Sargent’s Madame X (1884)

February 15, 2019 davewheeler2@hotmail.com Leave a comment

One of my favourite artists is John Singer Sargent, the great Edwardian-era portrait painter. Born in Florence to American parents, he lived an itinerant early life in Europe, his parents moving regularly between sea and mountain resorts in France, Germany, Italy, and Switzerland (alright for some). Sargent’s early signs of artistic talent led the family to Paris where he gained admission to the École des Beaux-Arts and studied with the noted French portraitist, Carolus-Duran.

In 1879, at the age of 23, Sargent painted a portrait of Carolus-Duran and exhibited it at the Paris Salon. It met with such public approval that his future direction was sealed. He quickly accumulated commissions for portraits and his fame spread. He painted commissioned portraits right up until his death in 1925, but in between commissions he would paint friends and colleagues for fun. It was one such non-commissioned painting, Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose, that grabbed my attention at the Tate Britain and turned me into an instant fan. However, the subject of today’s blog is the painting that became Sargent’s headline-grabber, Portrait of Madame X.

Just as we saw when I blogged about Edouard Manet, Sargent’s successful career was not without scandal. In 1884 he submitted Portrait of Madame X to the Paris Salon. “Madame X” was “professional beauty” and socialite, Virginie Gautreau, the American wife of a French banker. Sargent actually pursued her to paint her, rather than the other way round. It’s a deeply alluring piece, with the sitter standing in profile, and the deep black of her dress emphasising the “aristocratic pallor” of her skin. With cinched waist, the elegant bone structure, and with one shoulder strap seemingly about to fall off the shoulder, the image could only suggest one thing – the erotic – and it was this, inevitably (for the time), that precipitated the scandal at the Salon. It was only a temporary setback (and Sargent responded by repainting the shoulder strap in a “safer” position), and I don’t suppose a little bit of scandal is too harmful to the career of a gifted artist, after all.

In June of 1999, Nicole Kidman was the cover girl of Vogue, and in her cover story, she posed for photographs in a number of John Singer Sargent re-imaginings (including Madame X) by the photographer, Steven Meisel. The photogenic Kidman suits these pictures perfectly so I thought it well worth showcasing them here, alongside their originals…starting with the beguiling Madame X.

Occasional Glimpses of the Sublime