Art

John Atkinson Grimshaw’s Boar Lane, Leeds (1881)

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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.

 

Boar Lane, Leeds (1881)
John Atkinson Grimshaw
Film, TV, and Theatre

Spencer Tracy in Bad Day At Black Rock (1955)

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The Cottage Road Cinema in Headingley is the oldest indie cinema in Leeds and has been continuously showing films since 1912. As such it is regarded with fondness by much of the north Leeds community and long may it continue. Anyway, it has a classics night every month, where viewers can watch a series of nostalgic ads and previews from back in the day, prior to settling back with a fairly-priced box of popcorn to enjoy a classic movie, selected for its historical, cultural or aesthetic significance. Last month, for example, I went to see Hitchcock’s Rear Window; next month I’m tempted by Irving Rapper’s Now, Voyager; and this month I went to see the subject of this blog, John Sturges’ Bad Day at Black Rock.

Bad Day at Black Rock is a 1955 American neo-Western film starring Spencer Tracy and Robert Ryan with support from Walter Brennan, Anne Francis, John Ericson, Ernest Borgnine and Lee Marvin. The term “neo-Western” does not signify a western movie as such, and instead implies the use of certain themes and motifs redolent of westerns but set in more modern times (in this case, 1945). Really, it’s a crime drama but it contains the wide, open plains and desert landscapes of the western, and Spencer Tracy’s “stranger comes to town and is met with unfriendly suspicion” persona is top-drawer Clint Eastwood.

Tracy plays a one-armed stranger, John Macreedy, who disembarks from the train that rarely stops in the isolated desert hamlet of Black Rock and is soon put under hostile scrutiny from the locals who lounge on the wooden verandas of the saloon and bar-and-grill and wonder who the hell this new guy is and what the hell does he want? At this point I should say that if I were harbouring a dark secret – which you can be sure these Black Rock locals certainly are – and a stranger comes to town asking questions, I would put on a friendly and cooperative façade to deflect suspicion. This lot, however, opt for the acute hostility and evasiveness approach and thus come across as guilty as sin from the get-go, with Borgnine and Marvin in particular pushing the envelope in the “I’ve clearly got something to hide” department.

Still, Macreedy’s been asking questions about a certain Japanese-American gentleman named Komoko, but nobody seems to want to engage. Robert Ryan’s character Reno Smith is clearly in charge and holds the rest of the town in his thrall, including the ineffectual, alcoholic sheriff. Smith claims that Komoko was simply interned during World War II but also reveals his virulent anti-Japanese sentiment developed after Pearl Harbor – we the audience are only too aware that something dodgy has gone down and not only that but Macreedy himself needs to be in fear for his own life. Macreedy gradually breaks down the omerta of the townsfolk and begins to separate the real culprits from the simply scared, some of whom are inspired by Macreedy to step up. It’s a tour de force of psychological drama, with great tough-guy dialogue and the stunning backdrop of the Mohave desert, and well worth my punt in venturing out on a Wednesday night!

Let’s watch Macreedy, despite his one arm, getting the better of thug Coley Trimble (Ernest Borgnine), in this tense encounter.

Spencer Tracy and John Ericson in Bad Day at Black Rock
Music

The Animals’ The House Of The Rising Sun (1964)

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If you’re a music history enthusiast, hours of fun can be had perusing the Roud Folk Song Index (https://archives.vwml.org/search/roud), the online database of around a quarter of a million references to nearly 25,000 songs collected from oral tradition in the English language from all over the world, and named after its compiler Steve Roud. It correlates versions of traditional folk song lyrics independently documented over past centuries by many different collectors across the UK and North America. Take Roud number 6393, for instance: The House of the Rising Sun.

Although widely known from the most successful contemporary version, recorded by the Animals in 1964, The House of the Rising Sun is a traditional folk song with deep roots: it was first collected in Appalachia in the 1930s, but probably goes back much further, emanating from the tradition of so-called “broadside ballads”. A “broadside” was a sheet of cheap paper used between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries to distribute news and so on, but also, most popularly, ballads. “Ballads” were narrative rhymes and songs developing from the minstrelsy of the earlier fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and which told folk stories on every topic under the sun, from legends and heroes and religion to the more prosaic side of life.

The House of the Rising Sun ballad tells of a person’s life gone wrong in the city of New Orleans, and is a classic cautionary tale, appealing to his listeners to avoid the same fate:

There is a house in New Orleans
They call the Rising Sun
And it’s been the ruin of many a poor boy
And God, I know I’m one

Folk song collector Alan Lomax noted that “Rising Sun” was the name of a bawdy house in at least two traditional English songs, and a name for English pubs (Leeds dwellers may be familiar with the one on Kirkstall Road, albeit now sadly disused). He hypothesised that the location of the said drinking hole-cum-brothel was then simply relocated from England to the US by roaming performers. In 1953, Lomax met Harry Cox, an English farm labourer known for his impressive folk song repertoire, who knew a song called She was a Rum One (Roud 2128) with two possible opening verses, one beginning:

If you go to Lowestoft, and ask for The Rising Sun,
There you’ll find two old whores and my old woman is one.

The oldest known recording of the song, under the title Rising Sun Blues, is by Appalachian artists Tom Ashley and Gwen Foster, who recorded it in 1933. Ashley said he had learned it from his grandfather who had got married around the time of the Civil War, suggesting that the song was written years before the turn of the century.

In 1941, Woody Guthrie recorded a version; Lead Belly recorded two versions in the forties; Joan Baez recorded it in 1960 on her eponymous debut album; Nina Simone recorded a version for the live album Nina at the Village Gate in 1962; and Bob Dylan recorded the song for his debut album, released in March 1962. But it was the Animals, Newcastle’s own blues-rock band made up of Eric Burdon, Alan Price, Chas Chandler, Hilton Valentine and John Steel, who scored a transatlantic number one hit single with it in 1964 and made it their signature tune.

The Animals, The House of the Rising Sun

 

Music

John Newton’s Amazing Grace (1772)

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Amazing Grace is one of the most recognisable songs in the English-speaking world – who hasn’t been exposed countless times to these iconic opening lines?

Amazing grace, How sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me.
I once was lost, but now am found,
Was blind, but now I see

It was written in 1772 by English Anglican clergyman John Newton (1725-1807), drawn very much from personal experience. He had grown up without any particular religious bent and after a time having been pressganged into service with the Royal Navy, he became involved in the Atlantic slave trade. However, in 1748 he was on a vessel caught up in a storm so violent that he begged God for mercy and underwent (having presumably got his feet back on terra firma) something of a spiritual conversion. Thereafter, Newton gave up seafaring, studied Christian theology, and became a vocal abolitionist. He once was lost but now was found.

Newton was ordained into the Church of England in 1764, and took a post as curate at Olney in Buckinghamshire, where he met and began to write hymns with William Cowper (who himself would become a celebrated poet and hymnodist). They wrote Amazing Grace to illustrate a sermon Newton was giving on New Year’s Day 1773 with the message that forgiveness and redemption are possible regardless of sins committed and that the soul can be delivered from despair through the mercy of God. It debuted in print in 1779 in their collaborative Olney Hymns.

At this stage, Amazing Grace, like all the other Olney hymns, was still relatively obscure but it took off in the United States when it was picked up and extensively used by Baptist and Methodist preachers during the Protestant revival movement of the early 19th century (the so-called Second Great Awakening). In 1835, American composer William Walker set the words to the tune known as New Britain and this is the version you’ll hear today.

The song has unsurprisingly become a staple of Gospel music, and has also crossed over into secular music with a particular influence in folk music. It’s been recorded thousands of times in the twentieth century, from Elvis Presley to the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards; today though, I offer a version by American folk singer Judy Collins, recorded in 1993 with the Boys’ Choir of Harlem.

John Newton
Film, TV, and Theatre

Phil Cornwell and John Sessions in Stella Street (1997)

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A British TV comedy series that perhaps fell under the radar a little bit (you can actually find people who never saw or heard of it), Stella Street was nonetheless a great find when it began airing in 1997 and continued over four series to 2001. Its somewhat bizarre premise is that an ordinary street in suburban Surbiton is peopled by a group of bigtime celebrities going about their lives in ordinary, suburban fashion, but adhering to some well-known and exaggerated stereotypes pertaining to said celebs.

The show was conceived and written by John Sessions, Phil Cornwell and Peter Richardson, with the main characters played by Sessions and Cornwell (and Ronni Ancona for some episodes). The celebrities chosen to live in Stella Street were presumably influenced by the performers’ ability to do great impressions of them and whose personas lent themselves to some great send-up comedy. The programme takes the form of a mockumentary with filming done on a handheld camera and Cornwell as Michael Caine talking directly to the camera to introduce characters and situations (just as he does in the 1966 film Alfie).

Jack Nicholson is portrayed as the inveterate womanising bad-ass of his stereotype (or his real personality?) complete with bad taste Hawaiian shirts not exactly suited to the British climate. Michael Caine is full-on Sixties’ Michael Caine with the trademark laconic vocal delivery, shock of ginger hair and horn-rimmed glasses. Roger Moore is the quintessential English gentleman with impeccable manners, and with a loneliness theme ruthlessly exploited by Sessions. David Bowie is the self-effacing and slightly awkward superstar staying true to his Bromley roots. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards run the local grocery store, Mick with massive enthusiasm, Keith with time-worn, devil-may-care cynicism and a gleam in his eye.

Let’s enjoy a montage of Cornwell and Sessions bringing these characters to life: the mayhem of Mick and Keef’s corner shop, and then a glorious vignette of David Bowie and Roger Moore exchanging spectacularly mundane Christmas presents (with Roger Moore taking politeness to the next level when gifted an underwhelming £10 book token).

Mick and Keef
Film, TV, and Theatre

Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927)

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A few months ago I went to a screening of the 1920 silent horror film The Cabinet of Dr Caligari at local venue the Old Woollen in Farsley. The film is a quintessential piece of German Expressionist cinema from over a century ago and a fascinating insight into celluloid creativity during the era of the Weimar Republic. As fun as it is, with its story of a mad hypnotist inducing a brainwashed somnambulist to commit murders, I wanted to look at an even more quintessential movie from the era, one that most people have come across at some point, the great 1927 science-fiction masterpiece, Metropolis, directed by Fritz Lang (1890-1976).

Lang has been cited as one of the most influential of filmmakers of all time, and he is credited with pioneering both the sci-fi genre (Metropolis, Woman in the Moon) and film noir (M). He didn’t shy away from producing epically long films, either, like the 4.5 hour Dr Mabuse the Gambler or the two-part Die Nibelungen based on the epic poem Nibelungenlied, but the one film that captures the zeitgeist of the auteur’s work is undoubtedly Metropolis.

It was written in collaboration with Lang’s wife Thea von Harbou and based on her 1925 novel of the same name. Metropolis is set in a futuristic urban dystopia prefiguring Blade Runner and bringing to mind themes from Orwell and indeed Mary Shelley with its own Frankenstein’s monster in the form of the scientist Rotwang’s iconic robot the Maschinenmensch.

Meanwhile, the film’s aesthetics, with Gothic touches, draw heavily from the Bauhaus, Cubist and Futurist design movements of the time. We see a world of colossal skyscrapers from which a wealthy elite lords it over the down-trodden masses of the underground who toil in abject conditions to keep the machines of the society running.

One day a member of this elite, one Freder Fredersen (Gustav Fröhlich), has an epiphany when presented with what life is like for the poor, by the saintly Maria (Brigitte Helm, who also plays the Maschinenmensch), and the two conspire to change the society and bring about social justice. As such, it can be construed as a rather simplistic morality tale, but there’s no simplicity in the stylisation and brilliant technical effects, which serve to create a remarkable world, both visually beautiful and powerful. Enjoy the theatrical trailer, below, with an excellent soundtrack by Gottfried Huppertz.

Fritz Lang
Music

Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures At An Exhibition (1874)

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The Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky (1839-1881) wins my ‘coolest composer’s name’ award, with honourable mention to German composer Engelbert Humperdinck (1854-1921) who of course is not to be confused with mellow British pop singer Arnold Dorsey who used Engelbert Humperdinck as a stage name. Mussorgsky was one of the “The Mighty Five” alongside Mily Balakirev, César Cui, Alexander Borodin, and (another contender for the cool name award) Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. Together, these five fashioned a distinct national style of Russian classical music in the second half of the 19ᵗʰ century.

Mussorgsky’s works were inspired by Russian history and folklore, such as his opera Boris Godunov (about the Tsar who ruled Russia between 1598 and 1605), Night on Bald Mountain (a series of compositions inspired by Russian literary works and legends), and Pictures at an Exhibition. This latter piece is a piano suite in ten movements, written in 1874, and inspired by an exhibition of works by architect and painter Viktor Hartmann at the Imperial Academy of Arts in Saint Petersburg. Hartmann was as devoted as Mussorgsky to making intrinsically Russian art and the two had become firm friends. Each movement of the suite is based on an individual artwork.

Art critic Vladimir Stasov described the piece as Mussorgsky “roving through the exhibition, now leisurely, now briskly in order to come close to a picture that had attracted his attention, and at times sadly, thinking of his departed friend.”

The composition has become a showpiece for virtuoso pianists, but has also became widely known from orchestrations and arrangements produced by other composers, such as Maurice Ravel’s 1922 adaptation for orchestra. The excerpt below is the opening promenade from the Ravel version, as played by the National Youth Orchestra at Carnegie Hall, New York. This is another tune where I say “I bet you know it…”.

Incidentally, prog rock trio Emerson Lake and Palmer did a version of Pictures at an Exhibition, just as they did a version of another blog topic here, Aaron Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man.

Modest Mussorgsky
Art

John Everett Millais’ Ophelia (1851)

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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.

Millais’ Ophelia (1851)
Music

The Jackson Five’s I Want You Back (1969)

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It was Gladys Knight who first made a call to legendary Motown founder Berry Gordy to tell him about an exciting new act she had overheard from her dressing room on the second floor of the Regal Theater, Chicago. Gordy never returned that call but a short time late Motown was approached again, this time by Bobby Taylor of Bobby Taylor and the Vancouvers who told A&R Vice President Ralph Seltzer about this sensational act that had opened for them at the High Chaparral club. So it came to pass that the Jackson Five – for it was they – went to Detroit to audition for Motown, and Gordy signed them up right away.

In October 1969, the Jackson Five’s first national single, I Want You Back, was released, and became their first number one hit on 30ᵗʰ January 1970. It was performed on the band’s first television appearances on Diana Ross’s The Hollywood Palace and on their milestone performance of 14ᵗʰ December 1969, on The Ed Sullivan Show.

The song was written and produced by the production team known as The Corporation, comprising Motown chief Berry Gordy himself, Freddie Perren, Alphonso Mizell, and Deke Richards. Originally considered for Gladys Knight & the Pips and later for Diana Ross, the song was re-worked to suit its main lead vocal being performed by a tween, the then-11-year-old Michael Jackson. Here’s Jackie Jackson’s memory of the event:

“I remember going into the Motown studio and hearing the track coming through the big studio monitors right in our face,” says Jackie Jackson. “It was slamming. The intro was so strong. Berry always taught us to have a strong intro to get people’s attention right away. And I remember the Corporation teaching us the song. Michael picked it up so fast; it was easy to learn for all of us. They kept changing it here and there for the better. We told them it was great, but the next day Freddie and Fonce added more things to it. They wanted to make it perfect. Michael did these ad-libs at the end of the song. They didn’t teach him that; he just made up his own stuff.”

And “slamming”, it certainly was: an exuberant pop masterpiece that remains one of my favourite all-time songs. It’s joyful – even if it is about a lover who is ruing his hastiness in dropping his girl! Enjoy the whole package here: the glorious costumes, the boys’ voluminous Afros, the well-rehearsed dance moves, and of course the genius of Michael Jackson manifested at a precociously young age. Recorded in the Goin’ Back To Indiana TV special in 1971.

The Jackson Five

 

Literature

Mark Twain’s Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn (1884)

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Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835–1910) was of course the great American writer and humourist better known by the pseudonym Mark Twain, and lauded as the father of American literature. His novels include The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) as well as A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889) and Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894). The latter novel I had on my bookshelf as a boy although I must admit I don’t remember reading it; Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, on the other hand, was a staple of my generation that everyone read.

Clemens used a litany of pen names: before “Mark Twain” he had written as “Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass”, “Sieur Louis de Conte”, “John Snook” and even just “Josh”. There are a number of competing theories about the pseudonym he conclusively decided to adopt, my favourite being the riverboat call from his days working on steamboats: “by the mark, twain” (referring to sounding a depth of two fathoms, which was just safe enough for a steamboat travelling down the Mississippi). However, another theory talks about his keeping a regular tab open at his local saloon and calling the bartender to “mark twain” on the blackboard, and I get the impression that he enjoyed the speculation and never conclusively confirmed one or the other.

He was raised in Hannibal, Missouri, which later provided the setting for both Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. In his early years he worked as a printer and typesetter, and then, as mentioned, a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi River, before heading west to join his brother Orion in Nevada to speculate unsuccessfully in various mining enterprises. Finally, he turned to journalism and writing which soon won him success and praise from his critics and peers, and led him to his true vocation.

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is written throughout in vernacular English and told in the first person by Huckleberry “Huck” Finn. The book comes across as an authentic portrayal of boyhood and it is awash with colourful descriptions of people and places along the Mississippi River. Set in a Southern antebellum society marked by the prevalent practice of slavery and its associated societal norms, it often makes for uncomfortable reading, but at the same time it is a scathing satire against the entrenched attitudes of those days. The novel explores themes of race and identity long before that was a phrase, but also what it means to be free and civilised in the changing landscape of America.

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 1st edition
Mark Twain

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