Work of art of the month
January 2025
Ai Wei Wei
Straight
2008-12, steel rods, collection of the artist
In 2008 an earthquake devastated the Sichuan region of south west China. The damage and loss of life was appalling. One crucial reason why so many lost their lives was that corrupt property developers and planners had allowed large numbers of buildings, including schools, to be constructed with substandard concrete which didn’t meet regulatory requirements and was always going to be prone to collapse.
What Ai Wei Wei then did was anonymously to collect tonnes and tonnes of the steel reinforcing rods, sometimes knows as rebars, from amongst the rubble. These were twisted and buckled but Ai Wei Wei employed a team from the local population to hammer them back into their original shape – dead straight. These have then been arranged as you see in the photographs above. The work has been shown at various exhibitions around the world including the Royal Academy in 2015.
The stacks of rods resemble gently rolling hills, riven with fault lines, seen from above; alternatively, seen side on they could resemble the characteristic curves of a seismic graph. In one sense the whole enterprise is or was a vain one. Can an artist or a work of art put right something that was so obviously wrong? Clearly not. But can an action like this signify the desire to do so? Yes. In this case the collective effort required to straighten all those hundreds of steel rods back to true, and then their arrangement into folding swells and rises, as if those of a benign landscape, offer some sort of riposte to our impotence. Its sobriety takes us beyond anger which, I suspect, was Ai Wei Wei’s starting point. He himself was arrested, beaten and imprisoned by the authorities for his pains.
December 2024
Albert Marquet
Notre Dame from the Quayside
1922, oil on canvas
I’m afraid I can’t find out where this painting is, nor how big it is. But I do know that I’m a great admirer of Marquet’s work and feel it deserves more recognition.
Albert Marquet was a lifelong friend of Matisse – the two met as young art students in Paris in the 1890s and showed their early works together at the Salon d’Automne in 1905, the infamous exhibition that prompted an art critic to label them as Fauves, or wild animals, most particularly for their use of excessively bright, unnatural colour. The first radical art movement of the 20th century was created, in other words, not by the artists themselves but in the media.
This isn’t a particularly feral painting, though admittedly it’s a later work made when Marquet had refined his own métier as a painter of cityscapes. Both he and Matisse lived in small apartments in a building on the left bank, the Quai St Michel, overlooking Notre Dame. Matisse painted this view a few times himself and his paintings are much more overtly avant-garde.
Where Marquet excels in his mastery of tone, or more precisely in deftly manipulated tonal differences. Here it’s seen in the way he’s deployed small dabs of darker paint: the two foreground figures, the lamppost, and more gently on the bouquiniste’s stalls lining the embankment, clearly assert themselves against broader sweeps of subtly brightening colour. Behind them the cathedral rises in the morning light; the more distant bridges and rooves remain indistinct as greys morph into pale blue to meet the yellowing sky. Is it early spring, a chill, still start to a warming, bustling day? Whatever the case I suspect there’s quite a lot he’s left out. One of Marquet’s other gifts was to eradicate the inessential.
One last thing to note on the bouquinistes that line the banks of the Seine. How wonderful that Paris should give such prominence to reading right in the heart of the city. We have some occasional bookstalls under Waterloo Bridge but they’re not quite the same. Not far from the view seen here were the premises of the publishers Shakespeare and Co. who produced Joyce’s Ulysses in 1922, the same year Marquet painted this view. What a dawn that was.
November 2024
Stanley Spencer
The Resurrection, Cookham
1924-27 oil on canvas, 274 x 548cm, Tate Britain
Spencer first exhibited this vast painting in London in 1927 whereupon it was promptly acquired by the Tate, in recognition that he had produced something extraordinary. It depicts a strangely naïve vision of the Resurrection, set in the crumpled space of the churchyard at Cookham, a village on the Thames where Spencer was born and brought up. Despite its monumental dimensions there is something immediately endearing about seeing this cataclysmic event take place in so modest and particular a location. In much the same vein, Spencer himself, quoting the seventeenth century poet and cleric John Donne, described Cookham as ‘a holy suburb of heaven.’
God the Father and Christ are seen in the porch with prophets stretching their limbs on stone seats to the right. To the left, just beneath the porch, a group of black figures lift themselves out of the earth. Their presence lends the image a wider geographical reference, since there were few Afro-Caribbean people living in the Thames Valley at the time. At the same time Spencer focuses mostly on the familiar. His wife, Hilda, for example, appears three times: crossing a stile, smelling a flower, and sleeping on the tomb in the centre. To the left, a woman brushes the dust off the back of a man’s jacket – apparently a memory of the artist’s mother. There are other light, imaginative touches of comedy: for example, some of the figures are reading the epitaphs on their own tombstones. Spencer wrote of them all: ‘No one is in any hurry in this painting… they resurrect to such a state of joy that they are content.’
October 2024
Berthe Morisot, Reading
oil on canvas, 1873
46 x 71.8cm, Cleveland Museum of Art
In western art history the act of reading used to be a male prerogative. It was St Augustine or St Jerome, the authors of works which defined the Early Church (City of God and the Vulgate translation of the Bible respectively), surrounded by books in their studies, and accompanied in Jerome’s case by a lion, which provided the template for images of scholarly activity. Morisot, with subtle subversiveness, gives the book to a woman sitting outside on the grass. The model was her sister, Edma, who was also a painter before she gave it up to raise a family. She dominates the composition but, interestingly, her face appears almost veiled. The emphasis is on what she’s doing not who she is or was.
Morisot painted in what was then a radically modern manner. The Impressionist style was criticised for not being properly finished; interestingly its lack of precise drawing was characterised at the time as a feminine trait. What Morisot has done here is to establish the main elements of the image in thinned almost aqueous washes of colour, placing thicker, unblended strokes of stronger colour on top: the black choker, the green sash on her hat, the foreground flowers, the lilac book cover (repeated on the hem of her dress and the fan to her side). There’s a deft energy to these touches which contrasts with what appears to be a leisurely activity, in turn contrasted with the world of work hinted at by the agricultural cart in the background.
Morisot was one of a handful of women who exhibited with the Impressionists in late 19th century Paris, a decision that would have been incredibly audacious. This work was shown at their first ever show in 1874. She was married to the brother of Edouard Manet, the leading modern artist of his day, who encouraged her to paint, which she continued to practise even after having children herself. At the time women were not allowed to undergo a formal art training, were not permitted to draw from nude models, could copy other artists’ works in museums but only if accompanied by a chaperone. In other words their artistic talents were treated as an accomplishment but not a professional option. Given all these restrictions, it’s probably no accident that Morisot’s figure is herself unaccompanied here. The umbrella, to shield her skin from the sun, and the fan, to protect her face from the male gaze, have both been lain aside in a quiet assertion of independence. As Morisot herself said of her male Impressionist colleagues: ‘I know I am worth as much as they are’.
September 2024
Michelangelo, Palazzo dei Conservatori, Piazza di Campidoglio, Capitoline Hill, Rome, 1536-46
Can you imagine having to design a building for the Capitoline Hill in Rome? Whatever your architectural ideas might be, they would have to reflect an immense burden of history: for this was the very centre of the first Western empire and before that one of its first and most successful republics. It overlooks the Forum to the east and sits on the cradle between the hill’s two peaks upon which stood the ancient temples to Jupiter and Juno.
Michelangelo’s Palazzo dei Conservatori is a solemn, elegant construction of brick and stone. Grand vertical accents created by a giant order of Corinthian pilasters span both storeys. On the ground floor a loggia opens the building to the piazza, a beautiful cambered oval with a bronze equestrian statue of (what was believed to be) the Emperor Constantine on a central plinth. These apertures are flanked with smaller Ionic columns and they create a secondary rhythm as an understated counterpoint to the Corinthian. Other decorative touches, such as the sculpted figures on the balustrade at roof level, are similarly discreet. The whole is as sober and dignified as a clean shaven, toga-ed senator from the days of the Roman Republic.
It’s all serious stuff but between the scrolls of these smaller Ionic capitals, just above the egg and dart motif, Michelangelo designed tiny grotesque heads; each one is different. These details are irreverent and humorous, a reminder that there is another side to life than that of high-minded politics and statecraft. It doesn’t and shouldn’t dominate, but it’s there. The devil, as they say, or in this case more accurately the Dionysian, is in the detail.
August 2024
Cézanne, Great Pine Tree at Aix oil on canvas 1895-97, Hermitage, St Petersburg
This has to be one of Cézanne’s greatest landscapes and I very much hope it might be included in the forthcoming exhibition at Tate Modern. It normally resides, however, in St Petersburg, so given the current situation it’s unlikely it’ll be allowed to travel to the west. Alas.
By the late 1890s Cézanne was at the height of his powers. He has deployed them here above all, I think, to convey the vigour and strength coursing through this majestic tree and out into the surrounding countryside. First, two small whitewashed and terracotta tiled farm buildings either side of the trunk establish a sense of scale. Then there’s the cropped composition, the deliberate placement of the trunk off centre, the emphasis on the diagonal energy of the branches – all of which create a sense of the tree trying to burst out of the confines of the picture’s frame. Thirdly, there’s the colour. Like his Impressionist friends and colleagues, Cézanne had for years limited himself to a spectral palette, that is the seven colours of the rainbow, without the deadening addition of any black or grey. You’ll notice too how often he places an orange next to a blue, a complementary contrast which further increases luminosity and impact. Finally the clusters of short, parallel brushstrokes, some vertical, others diagonally orientated, with which he’s described the foliage and foreground create a sort of percussive rhythmic pattern that surrounds the more solid form of the tree itself.
At this point in his life Cézanne was a recluse in his native Provence, almost totally forgotten or ignored by the public. But in 1895 an entrepreneurial young picture dealer, Ambroise Vollard, had put on a small exhibition of his work in his tiny gallery not far from the Opéra in central Paris. It was from here that a wealthy Russian businessman bought a number of his works, hence its current location in the Hermitage. A younger generation of artists, including Matisse and Picasso, also frequented Vollard’s gallery and slowly, after years of obscurity, Cézanne’s reputation began to grow. It was Matisse who wrote much later of the small Cézanne canvas he bought from Vollard: ‘it has sustained me morally in the critical moments of my venture as an artist; I have drawn from it my faith and my perseverance.’
July 2024
Vincent Van Gogh, View of Arles with Irises in foreground, ink on paper, 1888 (Rhode Island School of Design)
There is an extraordinary economy in the style of this drawing, made soon after Van Gogh had moved from Paris to the southern French town of Arles where he hoped to set up a colony of like-minded artists. His dream would be disappointed by illness, but here the energy of both the marks made by his Japanese reed pen and the vigour of the plants and trees themselves, speak of a moment of great optimism and hope. The scene has been reduced to a series of curt marks, a sort of visual shorthand. Similar touches, varied only by the amount of ink on the nib or pressure applied by the hand, are repeated over the sheet yet are used to describe very different things. For example he uses a dot like mark to describe the grass in the foreground fields; the same dot is used for the trees amongst the distant buildings, but here they are closely bunched to create an effect of density while for the grasses they are more widely separated. In this way he was able to exploit the white of the paper to create a sense of light and movement, as though a breeze were blowing over the field. These strong, beautifully controlled graphic rhythms expressed his own sense of nature’s benign vigour. Van Gogh used to sign off his letters with the phrase, ‘With a firm handshake, Vincent’: something of the same muscular energy can be felt in this drawing.
June 2024
Mona Hatoum, Present Tense 1996 soap and beads, 5x235x289cm Tate Britain
Mona Hatoum was born in Palestine, spent her early childhood in Lebanon, and has since lived in the UK and France. This work has an added poignancy given the terrible events of the last few months, albeit an unintended one since it was made in 1996. 2,200 bars of olive soap are arranged in a grid on the floor. Hatoum then added scores of tiny beaded pins which demarcate the boundaries of land in Gaza and the West Bank which Israel had theoretically agreed to hand over to the Palestinians during the Oslo Peace Accords agreed in negotiations in 1993. That has never happened.
Olive soap has been made in Palestine (and more widely over the Middle East) for centuries so the work is redolent of an ancient culture. The mass of olive blocks, uneven with their shadowed gaps, could almost suggest a desert landscape. You can still just about smell the soap now in Tate Britain. Hatoum records how its scent had an immediate impact on viewers when it was first exhibited in Jerusalem in 1996. The title is suggestive – the ‘present’ situation (as it was in 1996) was certainly one of tension – but those two words also invite us to compare the contemporary failure of modern politics with something much, much older. We have yet to find any kind of reconciliation between the two. Other contrasts suggest themselves: the rectilinear grid versus the curved lines of the beads, for example; and while both grids and maps could be viewed as instruments of order and control the connotations of soap (which cleanses, fades and washes away) are completely different.
One has to be very careful with words dealing with these issues but I would say that while it is not an unpartisan work neither is it angry in tone. Hatoum’s comments are implied, discreet, understated. It is also no accident on the part of the Tate that, for the sake of political balance, this work hangs next to a painting by Kitaj of a Jewish wedding.
May 2024
Henry Moore, Recumbent Figure 1938 Hornton stone, 89×133×74 cm Tate Britain
Moore’s figure is presented in organic terms: it’s clearly unnaturalistic but at the same time very natural. Curved and cantilevered forms swell, dip, stretch and fold in on themselves in ways that evoke not only flesh and bone but also the undulations of landscape; so do the striations in the stone itself where tiny fossil remains are left exposed. Hornton stone is an unusual choice of material for a sculpture: as you can see it is friable and flaky. For this piece three separate blocks were glued together – the seams are clearly visible. But it is a very English stone, warm in colour and appealing in texture, which is why Moore chose it. It is not the first work in which Moore used holes but they are fully exploited here: they unite front to back, making it emphatically three dimensional, inviting even insisting that you walk around it, something a single photograph fails to achieve, as does displaying it too close to a wall.
This sculpture has had quite an eventful life. It was commissioned for the garden of a modernist house in Sussex designed by the architect Serge Chermayeff. Moore intended the piece to act as a soft, curved transition between the rolling hills of the South Downs and the rectilinear, vertically aligned forms of the house. When Chermayeff went bankrupt it was bought by the Tate. In 1939 the sculpture found itself stranded in New York, having been loaned for an exhibition there when war broke out. On display outside it was damaged first by the freezing temperatures and second by vandalism; fortunately it has survived, albeit a bit battered. Then, in 1972 it was chosen as one of 12 sculptures for a ground-breaking exhibition at the Tate for the blind where visitors were encouraged to touch the works in gloved hands. I imagine that must have been very consoling. So, although it was made outside, in the garden of Moore’s cottage in Kent, to stand outside in a Sussex garden, it now finds itself stuck inside in Pimlico.
April 2024
Jacopo Pontormo, Deposition, tempera on wood, c.1525-28, 313 x 192 cm, San Felicità, Florence
This is a very, very odd painting. The church where it hangs, San Felicità in Florence, just south of the Ponte Vecchio, is undervisited and has eccentric opening hours so be careful but definitely try to get there if ever you can. The painting’s just on your right as you enter. Resist the temptation to put coins in the light box, at least to begin with.
Cleaned and restored relatively recently, Pontormo’s Deposition looks unnaturally high keyed. The moment of the Passion shown, Christ’s removal from the Cross and Mary’s desperate swoon, is one of overpowering sadness; yet the dominant blues crackle, far brighter than one would expect. Mary’s robes, for example, would traditionally be a deeper, richer, darker hue. The pink, yellow and green in the figure of John, who supports Christ’s lifeless body on his shoulder, seem shockingly artificial. Then there’s the absence of familiar landmarks. Most extraordinary, we see no Cross, but also no hill, no Roman soldiers, no thieves. Christ’s body seems out of proportion, his legs and forearms too small, his torso too big. And John, we realise, is bearing its weight balanced preposterously on his toes. In the cluster of hands surrounding Christ’s head and left arm it’s not altogether clear whose hand belongs to whom. Then, as you survey the facial features of any the figures, we find they are all variations of the same face, one that beguilingly suits both male and female protagonists. This I can’t explain, though it reminds me of Christina Rossetti’s withering sonnet (In an Artist’s Studio) on her brother’s repetitive, obsessive, and possessive appropriation of a particular model’s face in his paintings.
But I think I can explain the palette – the family chapel where this altarpiece still hangs is dark and Pontormo’s strangely unsettling colour choices were needed, partly, to stand out from the shadows. The other oddities, anatomical and compositional, I’d explain as follows: the whole design acts as a visual metaphor, a cascade of grief, more elegiac than tragic perhaps, but nonetheless an orchestrated, serpentine descent of the limp corpse towards the unseen tomb. Seen in situ, however, we might also remember that during Mass when the priest lifts the Host in front of the altar, this image of slow sinking death is literally counteracted by the raising upwards of the transubstantial reality of resurrection and new life.
March 2024
Kasimir Malevich, Black Square, 1915, oil on linen, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow 79.5 x 79.5cm
More than any other work, Malevich's fame rests on this one painting. The cheek of it is still fairly astounding, an important part of its dark brilliance. When it was first shown in 1915 it made Malevich the leading figure in Russian avant-garde circles. The black square quickly became a cult object. Malevich's mother knitted jerseys with squares on them; his pupils wore black squares as insignia on their cuffs. What follows is made more complex by the fact that Malevich was born in Ukraine.
The intention was to produce a work that cleared the decks of everything painting had been in the past – recognizable subject matter, light, space, colour – to make way for an art that was utterly new, one that would adorn a comparably radical, reformed society.
At the same time Malevich wished to stress the Russian-ness of his new paintings when they were first exhibited. For example, we know that Black Square was hung high up on the wall across the corner of the room, a location loaded with meaning for this is where an Orthodox icon would be placed in a home or tavern; anyone passing would bow or make the sign of the cross. Strange as it may seem for an image that appears to be such an uncompromising statement of denial, it’s crucial to bear in mind that Malevich’s motives were ultimately spiritual in nature.
For the next few years Malevich’s style of painting, which he named Suprematism, was welcomed by the revolutionaries. While Malevich painted his idealistic abstractions, the Bolsheviks were creating a new Communist state. Under Stalin everything changed. Modernism was banned, Malevich was arrested and only escaped with his life by reverting to a figurative style. The original painting, relatively recently recovered from storage, is now poignantly cracked and flaking.
Malevich died in 1935. He was given a state funeral in Leningrad . Laid in a Suprematist coffin, a hearse decorated with black squares drove his body to the station from where it was taken to a cemetery outside Moscow. His grave, also marked with the black square, was destroyed in the Second World War.
February 2024
The Horses of San Marco, Venice, bronze, 2nd/3rd century AD?
The Horses of San Marco that overlook the Piazza, above the main entrance arch to the most splendid and important of Venice’s churches, are replicas. The originals stand now inside, in a rather dark corner on an upper floor, moved here in the 1980s to preserve them from atmospheric pollution. It’s rather an unprepossessing spot for sculptures with such an illustrious history but at least it’s normally quite quiet, not crowded, and conducive, if you’re so minded, for a quick chat.
All four trot or walk with animated stride, expressive faces, ears erect, open mouthed, carefully coiffured. Skin ruckles on their necks and where foreleg meets chest, veins bulge above the knees and nostrils. The chariot and rider they used to pull, many centuries ago and long lost, would have moved at a jaunty, perky pace.
What stories they could tell, if they could speak. No one knows for sure when they were made: but we do know they were in Rome, possibly in the Forum or the Stadium of Domitian (now the Piazza Navona) at the height of her empire. In the 4th century AD the first Christian emperor, Constantine, took them to his new capital, Constantinople, where they stood above the Hippodrome, within sight of the imperial palace and, a couple of hundred years later, the construction of the Hagia Sophia. In 1204 they were stolen by the Venetians and placed on the façade of San Marco as trophies celebrating Venice’s naval and economic hegemony over the East. There they remained until Venice fell to Napoleon in 1796, whereupon he took them to Paris to sit on top of the Arc du Carrousel outside the Louvre. Twenty years later, after Waterloo, British engineers returned them to Venice. They had a brief holiday back in Mussolini’s Rome during the Second World War where they were taken for safekeeping before returning again to St Mark’s.
So much of our history, then, is bound up with them: in many ways they are our history. Classical and Christian Rome, out of whose ruins medieval and Renaissance Europe emerged, followed by the bloody birth of our modern nation states – they’ve seen or heard it all. For one thing, while they were outside, they’d have heard Monteverdi’s Vespers seeping out from the choir as the sun set over the lagoon. And consider how many different languages they’ve listened to through the centuries: in their earlier lives Latin, both golden and silver, in Rome, and Greek in Constantinople; then in Venice the former’s transformation into Italian, alongside the guttural accents of the Venetian dialect, the polyglot languages of the medieval world’s merchants haggling in the piazza below; and French, briefly, in post-revolutionary Paris and then the German and English of the first tourists, Goethe’s lyrical eulogies to the republic, the aristocratic accents of Shelley and Byron taking coffee in one of the cafés or, a few years later, Hemingway’s ramblings dimly audible from the doors of Harry’s Bar. I wonder how many words or phrases they began to recognise, and remember.
January 2024
Giotto, Adoration of the Magi, fresco, 1305, Scrovegni chapel, Padua
If you can, the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua is one of those places you should definitely make time to visit. It was painted in fresco by the great Italian artist Giotto in the early 1300s. Matisse visited it in 1906 and the memory stayed with him all his life. The chapel itself was commissioned by Enrico Scrovegni to abut his family palace (no longer standing), possibly as a means of assuaging his guilt for accumulating great wealth as a money lender. Allied bombs destroyed the church next door in an air raid in 1944. Giotto’s frescoes escaped by a matter of a couple of hundred metres.
The episode shown here is the Adoration of the Magi. The eldest of three kings kneels in front of Christ, having taken off his crown. True kingship, in other words, must be expressed in service. Immediately below this scene, and not by accident, Giotto painted Christ washing the disciples’ feet, another unexpected reversal of regal power.
Above the beautifully constructed, foreshortened wooden canopy Giotto has included the star, but unusually it has a tail. Scholars propose this is Halley’s Comet because Giotto had seen the comet himself in 1301. I saw it from a garden in southern England in 1986. I only discovered this week that the European Space Agency sent a satellite up to photograph it that year. The satellite was named Giotto. Halley’s comet returns every 76 years or so, so most of us get one chance to see it; it’s due next in 2061 which may be a bit late for me. Even so, this miraculous cycle suggests we are all connected, encircled and enfolded with light.
December 2023
Poussin Confirmation 1637-40, oil on canvas 95.5cm x 121cm, on loan to the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge from the Duke of Rutland’s Trustees
It took me many years to enjoy Poussin. He was too cold, too cerebral, too calculated, clean and clinical; his paintings lacked passion, sensuality, warmth. His brushwork was too meticulous, his colours, paler versions of something more full blooded and so often limited to the primaries, lacked vitality. Though some may agree, I do believe I was wrong.
Born in Normandy Poussin lived and worked for almost all his life in Rome. As a young man he made two or three attempts to get there from Paris only to have to turn back through lack of funds. When he did get there, early promise was followed by failure and frustration (a commission for an altar piece in St Peter’s was cancelled), but then by a slower success, in which he found favour from a small group of loyal patrons and collectors. In this way working in private for an erudite audience, he was able to embark on the careful and considered development of small scale pictures like this.
It’s one of a series of works he made of the seven sacraments for one of his learned patrons. A group of men, women and children, all in classical Roman dress, set the event in an imaginary early Christian Rome. It’s located in a classical architectural space based on the actual church in via Babuino where Poussin was living (not far from the Spanish Steps and only one street down from via Marguta where Gregory Peck had his apartment in ‘Roman Holiday’, and also pretty close to the apartment where Keats would die).
The main attraction here, precisely what repelled me earlier, is the artifice. The rhythm of it, its musicality – the sense of slow progression from left to right – is articulated in rhyming pose and repeated colour as our eye is drawn to the climactic moment of blessing. One child, in white, reverses this flow, attracting the attention of the kneeling woman in yellow whose gaze also acts as a counterpoint to the dominant axis leading towards the right. But his hesitation only reinforces the sense of how momentous this ceremony is. Then there’s the architecture itself – those vertical accents which counteract and dynamically balance the horizontal flow in the figures. Consider too the weight of empty space in the dark interior, taking up half the composition, with the judiciously placed pin pricks of candle light, adding to the solemnity.
This is not anecdotal art, it’s conceptual. These figures are not nameable individuals but neither are they allegorical personifications. Each has their part to play in a ritual that is bigger than they are – it’s the collective, communal nature of the sacrament that is being celebrated here.
November 2023
Cy Twombly, Untitled (Bacchus), 2008, oil on canvas, 317 x 474 cm Tate Modern
This paintings is huge: over three metres tall and nearly five wide. If you stand in front of it, it will dwarf you. It is one of three, painted on the same scale, so the whole experience is meant to be overwhelming. The trick is to see the colour and shapes, and to feel the texture of the pigment, in some kind of metaphoric manner that links to the title – in this case to the classical god of wine, Bacchus or Dionysus. Massive loops of red swoop and rise in invigorating circular movements – intoxicating and ecstatic. They were made with a brush attached to a long pole or broom handle. Part of the visual attraction of these rhythmic, pulsing arcs is to see how the brush, fully loaded, starts with thick, saturated colour which gradually fades before the brush is dipped again. By contrast drips of the same paint run downwards reminding us of gravity and hinting that this dance can’t last or comes at a price. To an extent the artist would not have been in control of exactly how these drips fell, though we should bear in mind it was his choice to thin the paint before he applied it, knowing that this is what would happen.
Twombly himself was an American artist who lived most of his life in Rome, and often responded to the world of classical mythology in his abstract works. To my mind he was able to produce paintings that suggest strongly that the old gods, with all their mischief and malevolence, are very much alive. In this case he offered us two Greek epithets as alternative ways of reading these works. The first is ‘Psilax’ – literally meaning ‘wings’ or ‘winged’ but suggesting a sense of uplifting inspiration and energy; the second is ‘Mainomenos’ meaning crazed, furious and violent. The first would logically link to wine and its liberating, loosening effects on human inhibition and creativity. The second is obviously more disturbing. In this scenario the drips take on a different mien altogether: this vivid red is blood. I’m reminded of Yeats’ phrase from his poem The Second Coming, ‘the blood dimmed tide is loosed’ and the terrible fate of Pentheus, a haplessly curious young fellow who wanted to watch what Dionysus’ followers got up to and was mercilessly ripped to pieces by a group of Bacchantes who mistook him in their frenzy for a deer.
October 2023
Peter Lanyon, Thermal, 1960 oil on canvas 183 x 152 cm Tate Britain
Leonardo da Vinci made birds eye drawings of the Tuscan landscape five centuries before the invention of the aeroplane. Maps are intellectual constructs that serve our need for communication and power and use the same idea of the aerial view. In the ancient myth of Icarus the human aspiration for flight becomes a metaphor for hubris. By contrast, in a metaphorical reversal, humanity’s loss of divine grace is described as the Fall. In other words, both the impulse to fly and its counterpart are powerful presences within our collective imagination.
Peter Lanyon was born in St Ives, Cornwall, in 1918, just at the moment when the destructive power of aircraft had first been unleased in the First World War. Lanyon himself fought in the Second World War before becoming one of the St Ives’ school of artists along with Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth. He took up gliding in 1959. Thermal is one of a number of large paintings he made in response to his experience of flight. In his own words,
'The air is a very definite world of activity as complex and demanding as the sea. The thermal itself is a current of hot air rising and eventually condensing into cloud. It is invisible and can only be apprehended by an instrument such as a glider. The basic source of all soaring flight is the thermal – hot air rising from the ground as a hot bubble.
The picture refers to cloud formation and to a spiral rising activity which is the way a glider rises in an up-current. There is also a reference to storm conditions and down-currents. These are all things that arise in connection with thermals.’
The way Lanyon translates all this into paint is visually very exciting. Works like this are not abstract, but neither are they literal descriptions. Instead, they seem to lie somewhere between the two. He combines superimposed layers of transparency and opacity, thick impasto with areas where paint is more liquid or in some parts scraped or scratched away to reveal a brief sharp edge. There is both energy and stillness, focus and blur, visual tension and release; all are used as equivalents for the sensation of flight amid the flux and flow of the clouds. The majority of Lanyon’s other paintings focus on Cornish landscape and ultimately it would be the land that called him back. Tragically his desire for the freedom of flight could not outstrip earth’s gravitational pull; Icarus-like, Peter Lanyon died in 1964 following a gliding accident.
September 2023
Joseph Paxton, The Crystal Palace, 1851, iron and glass, Hyde Park
The Crystal Palace itself no longer exists, surviving in memory as the name of an area of south west London and a football team. It burnt down in the 1930s having been moved from its original location in Hyde Park, built as a massive hall to display the fruits of British, Imperial and indeed globally manufactured goods for Prince Albert’s Great Exhibition of 1851. Somewhat anachronistically, the Victorian élite evidently gathered towards the centre, beneath the barrel vault (added to the original design to save a huge elm from being cut down) surrounded by a display of classically inspired sculpture but the real innovations were in the things made by modern technology: the prototype bicycles, the steam powered machines, the printing presses and so on. A firm ran by Messrs Schweppes provided soft drinks for sale; there were loos (cost: a penny); Thomas Cook’s travel company offered cheap excursions by rail for those living outside London. By the end of the year over six million had visited including one woman who walked all the way from Penzance. Tickets cost 1 shilling if you were working class; £3 if you were a gentleman, £2 if you were a lady. The massive profits paid for the new museums on Exhibition Road: Natural History, Science, the V&A.
The Crystal Palace was only intended as a temporary structure, not really architecture at all. It was designed and built by a gardener, Joseph Paxton, who came up with a proposal that was cheaper and quicker to build than any other. The key was prefabrication. All the parts, iron struts and girders to make the frame, and the glass panes (300,000 of them in all) were made off site to standard sizes and transported in bulk to Hyde Park to be rapidly put together. The result is a building that is transparent; there are no walls. There is no real sense of mass, only volume or enclosed space where interior and exterior permeate. There are no decorative details or flourishes; it was air conditioned. Turn it on its head and it would almost become a skyscraper.
At the same time it was constructed, only a couple of miles away in Westminster, work was underway, slowly and painfully, on the new Houses of Parliament. This was serious architecture: expensive and state funded, a symbol of national identity. Appropriately for a commission of such grandeur, it was built in stone, in a Gothic style which went back to medieval times rooting our political centre in an ancient heritage. But I wonder how many of the eminent Victorians, in their corsets and cravats, who promenaded around the mythological statuary beneath Paxton’s central vault, realised that the architectural future of our cities was actually where they were standing.
August 2023
Peter Paul Rubens, Dying Tree, covered with Brambles pen, ink, chalk with watercolour, c.1618, Chatsworth, 35 x 29 cm
Rubens was the most high profile, the most prolific and the most successful artist of his generation. European monarchs queued up, figuratively speaking, for his works. Charles I of England failed to persuade him to come to London as his court painter because Rubens, quite simply, had more important clients to attend to. What made him so famous and his public works so desirable was his ability to produce huge, lavish, dynamic and rhetorical tours de force, often in the service of Roman Catholicism or of royal or aristocratic dynasty.
What, then, makes this drawing special is that it was done in private. As such it’s something of a privilege to see his work in more intimate surroundings, without the flourishes, the cartouches, the theatrically swirling draperies. There are no saints or mythological gods in sight but a humble, everyday glimpse of a tree trunk and tangled undergrowth. It’s quite a large drawing, if you imagine its dimensions, but I don’t think it was done as a sketch for a larger work. If that’s the case then it has to have been made for its own sake, for the sheer beauty and importance of an overlooked piece of Flemish countryside. Maybe he made it as a form of escape from his professional obligations towards institutional ideology.
I also wonder if Rubens made it outside in front of his subject matter? If he did and if it was autumn, did his hands get cold? Maybe he used the chalk outside and then worked it up with ink in the warmth of his studio. The inscription in Flemish bottom right reads ‘fallen leaves and in some places fresh green grass pops through’. I’m reminded of that great line from Autolycus the clown in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale: ‘For the red blood reigns in the winter’s pale’ and the consoling thought that in nature even as things die new life emerges.
July 2023
Donatello, Habbakuk or ‘Lo Zuccone’, 1423-25, marble, 195 × 54 × 38 cm, Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, Florence
If you can get in to the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo in Florence to see this sculpture in the flesh, and if no one’s looking or the guard doesn’t mind, lie down on the floor and look up. The reason is that it was made to be seen from below – its original location was in a niche half way up the bell tower which stands next to the cathedral or Duomo high up above the city’s central piazza. Seen from this perspective certain aspects of the figure make more sense: the tapered form of his body is less elongated; his left hand, strangely, is more visible from below than at eye level. But be warned: you’ll also find yourself staring directly into his face.
The figure is thought to represent the Old Testament prophet Habbakuk, though no one is entirely certain as much of the documentation in the cathedral archives is missing. Vasari, the first biographer of so many Italian Renaissance artists, described this as Donatello’s greatest work. He also describes how Donatello himself, whilst carving the figure, was heard to cry out to his unfinished creation, ‘Damn you, speak!’ This of course is a reference to the legend of Pygmalion and may well not be literally true – but the link to a classical tale would have been intended as the greatest accolade possible at the time. Ironically, and one I like to think that Donatello would have rather enjoyed, it was Habbakuk who said ‘Woe betide him who says to the wood, wake up, to the dead stone, bestir yourself.’
There is a crackling tension in the drapery, in particular the tunic we see on his left side: a visual metaphor for the electrifying energy prophecy brings in its wake. What I admire most about the piece is Habbakuk’s face and head. Donatello had a penchant for the strange, the grotesque and the bizarre, all of which can be felt here in the shape of Habbakuk’s head, the slightly protruding lower jaw, the sense too that he has a squint or lazy eye. I can imagine this figure spitting or drooling involuntarily as he speaks. The sculpture’s nickname, ‘zuccone’ means idiot. Divine revelation does not always come through official channels. In Christian theology the point is quite the opposite: God’s message comes through the poor, the lowly, the side-lined, the overlooked, the ridiculed. It seems to me that this is one of the things Donatello’s sensitive to here. Looking up into the zuccone’s face may well be disturbing, and the hard floor may be uncomfortable, but that’s the price we have to pay for the sense of awe.
June 2023
Le Corbusier, Notre Dame du Haut, Ronchamp, France, 1955
I was very pleased when I read Germaine Greer likening the exterior of this extraordinary chapel to a mushroom. Judging by the shapes of its walls and roof, she’s referring, I think, to the penny bun or cep or porcini, the royalty of the fungal kingdom. It may seem surprising that a building by Le Corbusier, an architect infamous for saying that a house is ‘a machine for living in’, should lend itself to an organic simile. But this is a late work and unlike his earlier designs, nothing is straight: walls bulge and curve, varying sized windows are placed in seemingly random clusters. The material is reinforced concrete, mostly painted white, while the massive sections of the roof have been left untouched with the imprint of the wooden shuttering (these are the planks used as moulds into which the concrete is poured) still visible.
There’s something hefty and solid about it all, but what’s really special is the way the whole seems to thrust upwards. The roof, in particular, soars skywards. One section, to the right in the photograph above, resembles the underside of a massive hull turning the building into an ark-like vessel of salvation. On the inside it becomes apparent that there’s a tiny gap between wall and roof, creating a delicate horizontal sliver of light. It’s noticeable on the exterior, too, though less obviously, but plays an important part in the building’s dynamic defiance of gravity.
Le Corbusier was commissioned to replace a 4th century chapel that had stood on this spot but was destroyed in the Second World War. The thickness of the walls, their rough textures, the mystical light that is diffused through the slanted window apertures, the shapes of the bell towers – all these details seem intended to recall much older traditions of church building from an architect who was demonised as a brutalist. In truth, this is a hymn, both ancient and modern.
May 2023
Piet Mondrian, Composition with Red oil on canvas, 1939, 105.2 x 102.3 cm Guggenheim New York
Mondrian was an artist who wanted his paintings to put us in touch with the infinite.
As I understand it, this is how a painting like this one is meant to work. First, Mondrian reduced his visual language to only the most basic, pure and essential forms: black and white, vertical and horizontal, one or more of the three primary colours. Only these forms, he felt, could be used in images that sought to express an infinite, eternal spiritual realm that lies beyond our understanding and our senses. So rigid was he in this belief that he had an irrevocable row with a colleague who dared to use a diagonal line and a green (in Mondrian’s eyes both were compromises, base and impure). Second, these forms had to be arranged in a series of binary oppositions that reach a kind of dynamic, unpredictable equilibrium: black/white, vertical/horizontal, colour/non-colour, thick/thin lines, enclosed/open rectangles.
What I find so satisfying and exciting about his works is that these sparse, austere, asymmetrical grids, pared down to something so reduced and basic, can be read as fragments of something much, much bigger. The grid of lines, by a simple stretch of the imagination, can be thought of as extending beyond the four edges of the frame. In this way we know where a black horizontal line is heading but not where the next intersection with a vertical will occur; we can see that a rectangle of red extends downwards beyond the bottom edge but not where it terminates. Thus, the means Mondrian employs are immediate and understandable, but their arrangement suggests that what we see is merely a tiny glimpse of an endlessly changing, infinite whole, one that lies beyond our comprehension.
It mattered to him massively, by the way, which way up these icons of modernist spirituality were hung. Each of these abstract visual metaphors for the eternal is signed with his initials – in this one just above the tiny section of red.
April 2023
Bellini, Madonna of the Meadow, c1505, oil on canvas, 66.5 × 85.1 cm National Gallery London
The Christ Child lies sleeping in the Virgin's lap, while she looks down at him with her hands arched in prayer. Behind them unfolds a coolly-lit and delicately ordered contemporary, sixteenth-century Italian landscape. A hill-top town perches in the background while before it are laid out neatly demarcated fields populated with a few men, animals and birds. The wooden structure to the right is a well. Bellini excelled at forging discreet symbolic connections between his figures and their settings. The carrion bird, sitting in a dead tree in the left corner, alludes to death. So too does the season of the year: it is a bright, chill autumn day. The leaves on the trees are golden; nature has come to end of her annual cycle. The Christ Child's pose also anticipates his own death. In this way Mary’s calm, meditative expression could be seen as dimly presentient of her son's destiny. To her left, however, a white bird attacks a rearing snake. This may well refer to Christ's eventual victory over Satan and death. These links between figures and landscape are reinforced by the design. Blue triangular mountains in the distance mimic the shape of the Virgin's cloak. Hers and Christ's flesh-tones are repeated in the architecture.
More generally it may be said that Bellini loved to create bonds of sympathy between the human, natural and the divine. Mary has no halo: this is a radical departure from tradition. Look instead at the way the clouds interact with the fine details of her headdress: to the left grey clouds come up against white drapery, neatly reversed to the right. Thus Mary’s head is fixed within the composition with unobtrusive, natural symmetry. In fact, the painting’s whole arrangement suggests the idea that nature carries within herself the message of divine grace.
When I was studying this painting for a university dissertation I used to spend long hours sitting in front of it at the National Gallery. On a few occasions, I fell asleep and a couple of times was woken up by the guard in the room tapping me gently on the shoulder. He too had a natural sympathy.
March 2023
Barbara Hepworth, Pelagos, elm, string and paint, 1946, 43 × 46 × 38.5 cm, Tate Britain
Hepworth made this sculpture in St Ives, North Cornwall, where she moved to live in 1939, one of a number of British artists who settled in this Cornish fishing village making it one of the most culturally significant locations for British art of the twentieth century. The title ‘Pelagos’ is the Greek word for sea. The spiralling, ovoid form was carved out of the wood and then polished to accentuate the grain which contrasts with the smoothly painted, curved inner plane. In other words it has clearly been carefully and meticulously crafted; yet the whole is also reminiscent of something natural: a shell, a breaking wave or a pebble washed smooth by the tide. Thus, while the sculpture is clearly something that has been made, it has the purity of shape and texture of something organically formed, something that could almost have been found. Incidentally, the Latin word ‘invenio’ means ‘I find’ but it’s also the root of our word ‘invent’: both meanings, I feel, are relevant here. The two arms of the spiral are linked with seven taut strings that could nearly be those of a rudimentary musical instrument. I am reminded of Homer singing with his lyre of Odysseus’ journeyings across the seas, though I have no justification whatsoever for thinking so. But I would say, with more conviction, that Hepworth’s sculpture is both modern and natural yet simultaneously suggestive of something very ancient.
February 2023
Marcel Broodthaers, Casserole and Closed Mussels 1964, 30 x 27 x 25cm, Tate Modern
This sculpture always makes me smile. If you look closely you’ll notice that all the mussels tumbling upwards out of this heavy cast iron pot are closed. The title tell us so too. As such you wouldn’t want to eat them in real life, but here, in a sculpture it doesn’t seem to matter. Neither does the fact that they are leaping up in a column lifting the heavy iron lid, breaking the laws of thermodynamics, gravity and probably one or two others. Picasso and his collaborator Georges Braque started a trend in modern European art of including objects taken from real life into their artworks. It was picked up and developed by the Surrealists and many others since then, including the Belgian artist Broodthaers. Moules frites are of course a national dish in Belgium. For this work he used the pot owned by his family and mussels purchased from a favourite restaurant. I like the heaviness of the pot and lid, their deep, smooth and somewhat worn, metallic black complemented by the elegantly crumpled iridescence of the shells; the dark colours and the weighty iron belie the comic spirit that has performed this magic culinary trick. Maybe the mussels have come back to life and are making a bid for freedom? Maybe they simply want to be eaten and are throwing themselves at us? Either way there is a discreet joie de vivre about the piece. We only have, on average, 60,000 lunches and suppers which is or isn’t that many, depending on how you look at it – let’s make the most of them and pop off the lids that hold us down while we’re about it.
January 2023
Paul Klee, Föhn in Marc’s Garden, 1915, watercolour on paper, Lenbachhaus, Munich
