Best Vincent van Gogh book I ever saw because you never saw half of these (at least 190) pictures before, so on every other page there is a full-colouBest Vincent van Gogh book I ever saw because you never saw half of these (at least 190) pictures before, so on every other page there is a full-colour gasp! wow! effect for all you Vincentistas. So I'm just saying that if you're looking for a Christmas prezzie for anyone of that persuasion, this is the one.
At this point the Goodreads star rating system breaks down completely.
For beauty, exuberance, glorious graphic art and all-round awesomeSCREAMADELICA!
At this point the Goodreads star rating system breaks down completely.
For beauty, exuberance, glorious graphic art and all-round awesomeness : FIVE FANTABULOUS STARS!!!!
For narrative interest and coherence : a poxy TWO STARS and that is being generous.
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Why this bizarre discombobulation? Because Steffan Kverneland is a great artist with no more idea of what makes a story worth telling or interesting than my cat Hatter. In this magnificent book, Munch
moans on about life
I don’t know how my nerves tolerated it. I sat there at the table and could never bring myself to say a word.
moans on about his family
Why had I not told him everything – then he would have understood why I was so impetuous – so nervous – so often unyielding and callous – why had I not remained home when he asked me to…
Strikes poses
I saw all the people behind their masks – smiling, phlegmatic – subdued faces – I saw through them and there was suffering in them all – pale corpses who restlessly scurried about along a tortuous road whose end was the grave
And drinks with his mates and drinks alone in his bed and paints rather a lot and then does it all again. And again. He's a right pompous bore. Now, that may not be so bad – we have enjoyed books that sound remarkably like this (Earthly Powers). But Steffen makes a – for me – disastrous editorial decision which he explains in the introduction:
I want to hear Munch’s and Strindberg’s own voices…I’ll make my own “Dogme rule” : the entire text has to be made up of the authentic quotes and it’s strictly forbidden to rewrite or add anything yourself
So, pages of great graphics art with stilted melodramatic Munchtalk :
The man reels deeper and deeper into the abyss, unresisting, powerless, and rejoicing at the prospect of being able to tumble as passively as a stone. And yet he cannot escape the vampire, nor the pain. And the woman will be there for all eternity biting him with a thousand serpent tongues, with a thousand venomous fangs.
So all right, we get that Munch was a big fan of Edgar Allen Poe. A lot of people were. But, you know, spare me.
For me, unlike for Steffan, Munch’s voice (and those of his cronies) was stilted, screechy, artificial and wearing. I hated him and I hated the lot of them.
Of course, the paintings of Edvard Much are stunning, sick and utterly scrummy. (That is a technical art term.)
E.g.
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Munch is not the first great artist who was a jerk.
So the only reason to get this book is because of the 275 pages of wonderful art… you see how difficult this book is to rate?
I have slagged off Steffan’s Munch-in-his-own-words concept, but at various points in the book Steffan and his friend Lars Fiske break into the story and appear as themselves, discussing Munch, drinking a whole lot, and visiting Munch-related places, as two fans would do. These parts are really fun. They say stuff like
The Scream is kinda like a mental self-portrait. Munch distilled the raw angst he felt on the hillside over there into a bald embryo dude. It’s the sickest self-portrait ever, like Ben Kingsley with planets for eyes.
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The whole book should have been the other way round, with Steffan and Lars being the main characters and Munch popping up here and there.
The other brilliant thing SK does is effortlessly create panels and pages in about five or six completely different styles, from photorealism to comedy cartooning. I loved all that.
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Finally, one continually disconcerting aspect to the whole thing was the resemblance between Munch as Basil Fawlty.
Edvard Munch as portrayed by Steffen Kverneland
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Basil Fawlty
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If you’re not a fan of that sitcom this will not bother you but if you are, it’s kind of weird to see Basil Fawlty painting The Scream.
But the hell with it, this book is wrongheaded, but it’s just great. So 5 stars for Steffan. ...more
It's very provocative of me to give this book 5 stars and tell you how great it is because you can't buy it. It's a RARE BOOK. When I look at the smalIt's very provocative of me to give this book 5 stars and tell you how great it is because you can't buy it. It's a RARE BOOK. When I look at the small print it says
Published January 1991 in an edition of 3000 copies on the occasion of Barbican Art Gallery's exhibition Stanley Spencer : The Apotheosis of Love 24 January - 1 April 1991
- but I have a copy. MWAAA haha! Okay there is ONE SINGLE other copy for sale on Amazon, some creature is charging £98 ($143) for it. Personally I think that anyone charging a price like that for a book however ravishingly beautiful should be hunted down and put on trial and shut up in a prison.
So I should give you an idea of Stanley Spencer's art, right? He was an English visionary, mystic if you will, who mingled his religious fantasies with the English village he lived in. Here are some favourites.
First, St Francis and the Birds:
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From a series called The Beatitudes:
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Self portrait as a young man :
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Christ in the desert:
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One of many Resurrection pictures
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First wife, daughter, and dolls :
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Second wife with Stanley - a fantastic study of impotence. There is a grotesque leg of lamb in the foreground because it's all meat.
The brilliant painter Jan Vermeer lived a short life - 1632-75 and knocked out 34, maybe 35 paintings. The earliestTHE JAN VERMEER/NICK DRAKE PARALLEL
The brilliant painter Jan Vermeer lived a short life - 1632-75 and knocked out 34, maybe 35 paintings. The earliest is dated 1655 when he was 23 so that was a production rate of 1.75 per year from then on. Not great. When he died he was unknown outside Holland and it stayed that way pretty much for 200 years. Then, a French art critic Étienne-Joseph-Théophile Thoré discovered him & began buying up his stuff. A lot of it was attributed to other more famous painters, so that was a problem. By the end of the 19th century Vermeer had arrived, from zero to hero, he was everyone’s favourite naturalistic Dutchman.
He then had a second revival when in 1999 Tracy Chevalier wrote Girl with a Pearl Earring which is all about Vermeer, followed by the movie in which Colin Firth gets to play the man himself. So now EVERYONE knows about Vermeer.
The (some say) brilliant singer songwriter Nick Drake lived an even shorter life - 1948–74 – and recorded three short albums before he died, which sold pitifully, partly because he wasn't up to doing any live work or promotional interviews. So not surprisingly he got lost in the shuffle. He was a namecheck for musicians to drop in the 1990s but still no one was buying; then came THE ADVERT whereby a guy called Ron Lawner – chief creative officer of Arnold Communications – put together a one minute ad for the new VW Cabrio in 1999. Wiki quotes Ron’s press release as follows:
The song is very special. It's an old song by a guy named Nick Drake. It's called 'Pink Moon' and is actually a very good introduction to Nick Drake if you're not familiar with him. It's very transporting. And to us seemed very fitting for a beautiful drive in the country on a very special night.
And Wiki continues
The Volkswagen Cabriolet commercial, directed by Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris and filmed by Lance Acord, led to a large increase in record sales, and a number-five placing for Pink Moon in Amazon.com's sales chart
For me, the Nick Drake/VW ad singlehandedly reversed my thinking on that issue, because it showed me what was possible in mixing art with marketing. The ad successfully positions Nick Drake and Cabrio as the perfect choices among a certain set of thoughtful (and attractive, of course) young people. If the mission of the modern commercial is not to “sell a product” but to connect that product with a desirable lifestyle, then the Cabrio ad is a smashing success. It’s not selling a car so much as it’s selling a dream—almost literally, given the ad’s beautiful, hypnotic marriage of sound and image.
So now we all know about Vermeer and Nick Drake. Maybe it was inevitable. It took more than 200 years for the painter and 25 years for the songwriter (and who is to say that a record, that single combination of voice, instrument, melody, rhythm and lyric, isn’t the equivalent of the single combination of paint, technique, perspective and vision in a canvas – not me).
So - all you artists, painters, authors, poets, sculptors, songwriters, musicians, whatever - don't worry that everyone's totally ignoring you right now. We will get to you all in the end. It just might take a while.
Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind Cannot bear very much reality
- TS Eliot, Four Quartets
If that’s true, this glorious book won’t find many takers. Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind Cannot bear very much reality
- TS Eliot, Four Quartets
If that’s true, this glorious book won’t find many takers. But maybe HYPERrealism hasn’t got that much to do with reality. The labyrinth beckons. What is real?
The illusion of reality is real. You remember that old Greek unlikely story about the painting competition. No? Well, there was a paint-off between two painters as to who could do the most realistic painting. First guy unveiled his painting, and lo, birds from the sky flew down and tried to peck the grapes right off of the canvas, so he figured he’d won. Second guy asked the first guy to pull back the curtain to display the second guy’s painting, and when he tried, he found there was no curtain, that was the painting, so the second guy won. In western art you had centuries of trying to make images as realistic as possible, whether their subject was of this or an imaginary world.
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Van Eyck, Vermeer, Holbein, Canaletto, the pre-Raphaelites, all the way down to 1907 when
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some artists figured that reality had become TOO MUCH for realism. Speed and psychology, anarchism and Einstein, the merging of the eye with the I, a cultural explosion going on everywhere and they were in the middle of it, discovering cubism, fauvism, abstraction, postimpressionism, symbolism, all that ism all over everything.
You know the story of 20th century art, of how the avant garde in only a few decades moved from the outer fringe of crazed unacceptability into stage centre, and took over, so that by the 50s there was no more modish & sought after painter than Jack the Dripper, and later on, Andy Warhol and Damian Hirst with his sharks and cows and Tracy Emin with her bed.
The photorealist movement began in the 70s and this book documents its current state of health which is good. The photorealists were of course rebelling against the rebels who had become the establishment. They painted photographs; sometimes they turned a little snapshot into a 15 feet by eight feet giant canvas; sometimes they took their own photos of things that were there already; sometimes they manipulated reality, such as by driving an old car round America & photographing it in various places & painting the photographs. Anyway a lot of establishment types hated this kind of thing.
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hmm, let’s try another one
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You see my problem – as this book says,
many of these paintings defy reproduction, as once reproduced they return to the appearance of the photographs on which they are based.
Photorealism became hyperrealism which apparently now goes by the name Exactitude, but what’s in a name – it’s still a rather kitschy agglomeration of precisely delineated urban landscapes, diner cruets, industrial desolation, old cars, boys toys like motorbikes and trucks, ever so shiny, poolside scenes, mournful landscapes, reflections, shimmers, deserted American back roads, baroque architecture, rust, groceries, kids toys, garish confectionery, and more depopulated streets. Some of the photorealists have a sweet melancholy tang of alt country Americana, almost to the point of cliché (John Salt apparently never met a busted old car he didn’t paint) and you can see that the oh so confrontational post-artists of the 2010s are not going to be impressed with five brilliantly finished pickle jars or some kind of curly sprocket from a lawnmower.
The failure of the media and large art institutions to embrace this art only intensifies its outsider status, consolidating it as an avant-garde movement.
It will not escape fans of irony that the meticulous adherence to the world as it appears to the human eye now occupies the same cultural space that the cubists once did almost exactly 100 years ago. The wheel has turned.
In fact I don’t think these wonderful paintings do look much like photographs, or if they do the photographs must be on acid. It’s an art of extreme intensification of mood through precision. My kind of poison.
"an encyclopedia of ways to merge images and text"
This enormous book is a hubristic folly which is hard to love but impossible not to admire.
FOLLY :
a"an encyclopedia of ways to merge images and text"
This enormous book is a hubristic folly which is hard to love but impossible not to admire.
FOLLY :
a costly and foolish undertaking; unwise investment or expenditure; a whimsical or extravagant and often useless structure built to serve as a conversation piece, lend interest to a view, etc.
This is the third volume of a gigantic undertaking which, in its editor’s words
Was always meant as an art project, part of the ages-old tradition of visual artists using classic works of literature as their springboard... It turned into a lot more – a survey of Western literature (with some Asian and indigenous works represented) , an encyclopedia of ways to merge images and text, a showcase for some of the best comics artists...
So what you get is a one page (sometimes one paragraph) summary of the author of the work to be illustrated, a discussion of the work itself, its position in the canon, the reasons why the artist chose this particular work, and a short précis of the artist. That’s a hell of a lot to cram into a page (or a paragraph).
Then you get the illustration. This might be one page only -
here's 1984:
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or up to 12 pages.
What is this canon anyway? Who sez? It’s the usual problem, same as that encountered by the notorious 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Have Dinner. Russ Kick’s version includes short stories, poems, essays, plays, Freud, Colette, Sartre, diaries and a song (“Strange Fruit”), along with the usual-suspect novels. A real supermarket dash of the written word. So the format of this book means that Rudyard Kipling’s repulsive poem "If…" gets 6 pages, and Infinite Jest gets – 6 pages.
Some entries try to graphic-novelise the whole work, here's an example :
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- the ones for short stories do that especially. Many choose one “significant” scene from a novel. (Like playing your guitar version of one minute from someone else's symphony). Most splash their pix with lots of text from the work but some are wordless. Is this anything more than beautiful (and often God-damn ugly) but pointless, occupying precisely the no-man’s land between graphic art and literature, a forced hybrid to be regarded with curiosity which no one will particularly love except graphics fans who can treat this as a large exhibition catalogue displaying the work of 75 or so artists? Interesting for them, I guess. But for lit fans, it’s neither fish nor fowl. If you don’t know the artist and you haven’t read the work, your encounter with it here may permanently put you right off – I’m never going to read Gorky now!
I loved some artists! Sonia Leong mangarises a Saki story and it’s just de-lovely. Bishakh Som does an obscure DH Lawrence story and it’s a delight. And here’s Animal Farm :
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I want a whole book of that, please! And Steve Roiston’s version of Hemingway’s essay is great :
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But for every ladder you climb up there’s a snake you slither down – for instance, Crumb’s beautiful text-rich 9 page version of Sartre’s "Nausea" has all the text in French. Great. And then there’s moments when the choice of work by the big name author is way too cute – for William Faulkner they dig up a story which was omitted from all his collections because it’s a piece of juvenilia. Same thing with Thomas Pynchon.
Even so, in every page there is the strong feeling that the artists themselves really believe in what they’re doing. Maybe I just don’t get this thing. Three baffled stars. ...more
So his girlfriend could take a photo of him doing so in the middle of dangerous rush-hour traffic which Why did the conceptual artist cross the road?
So his girlfriend could take a photo of him doing so in the middle of dangerous rush-hour traffic which he could then exhibit in the Lower East Side in New York in 1969 as part of a piece called Look Both Ways And Die which challenges the impossibility of gender relations under patriarchal capitalism whilst also rendering acutely the futility of the art itself and, axiomatically, protests against the Vietnam War.
You know that old rhyme
Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite ’em And little fleas have lesser fleas and so ad infinitum
Well, I think the Conceptual Artists were
THE LITTLER FLEAS
biting away at the back of the Art beast.
The whole thing coincided exactly (according to this book) with the rise and fall of the counter-culture/hippy movement late 60s/early 70s thing, so 1965 to 1973 which is strangely the exact lifespan of The Byrds, but they don’t get a mention in this tiring volume.
Sometimes, in moments of despondency, I think that all art is merely a series of footnotes on the work of a handful of real geniuses – Shakespeare and Joyce in literature, and in the visual arts Picasso and Duchamp. These conceptual artists appear to be grappling the whole time with variations on Duchamp’s famous readymades. In which, back in 1913, he would stick a urinal in a gallery and give it a title (“Fountain”) and declare it to be art. Or a bottle rack or a bicycle wheel, whatever. So maybe art is just what artists decide it is? Is that it? Half a century later, a bunch of young artists, disgusted with the “art world” and especially the “art market”, they didn't like art being part of the oxygen of capitalism, they were utopian, and being of a leftist persuasion, and naturally, you didn’t even need to ask, being 99% white and male, and they sought to stage a kind of insurrection, like student sit-ins but in art galleries; and they did this by exhibiting a whole string of works which might be described as serious jokes, like Duchamp did.
They hated art being turned into a commodity and sold to collectors; they hated its elitism and all of that. So they sought to dematerialise the art object. So there would be no more buying and selling. (What were they then to live on? Ah, that's why the first wave of conceptual artists drifted away in 1972/3. No more grants. )
For instance, and this is possibly my favourite work, an exhibition of work by Robert Barry in Amsterdam in 1969 was staged. When people turned up to the gallery to see it, there was a notice on the door : “DURING THE EXHIBITION THE GALLERY WILL BE CLOSED”.
Another way of describing Conceptual Art is that it is art having a nervous breakdown. It can’t carry on in the same way, nothing makes sense for it anymore.
Traditional art is, almost by definition, about quality and success – about “perfection”. But it is part of a commitment to the everyday in Conceptual art to look at, and live with, failure.
Trying to get rid of the art object made them do stuff like create giant patterns in an obscure part of the world (Spiral Jetty) or write directly onto the gallery walls or have a giant block of ice melt slowly over a week or do spoken or written word pieces or photograph the gallery floor and then lay the photographs exactly over the gallery floor which was photographed, all kind of strange and silly stuff like that. Some of it veered off into agitprop political gesturing and some fizzled and squelched along in that hello sky Yoko Ono Grapefruit manner :
let 500 people think of the same telephone number at once for a minute at a set time.
Walk all over the city with an empty baby carriage.
Whatever squirming the conceptual artists did they could not do the impossible – they could not shake free of the art market without not being artists (which some of them realised and gave up, fair play to them). The dealers saw all this craziness and thought okay, no art object? No problem. We will photograph the artist doing his thing and sell the photograph. We will chip off the gallery wall with the writing on it. We will film the ice melting and sell that.
Conceptual Art lives on sporadically – what is most of Damien Hirst’s stuff but conceptual-style jokes and tomfoolery, along with Tracy Emin’s bed and all that Saatchi Gallery stuff. I've been there... I loved most of it!
But being post-everything, 21st century artists never agonise about their contradictions like the late sixties earnest types did. They’re done with suffering now.
PIERO MANZONI DECLARES A WONAN'S ARM TO BE ART BY SIGNING IT, MILAN, 1961
Note - this review possibly not suitable for work. But in a way, that's what I'm trying to work out. Is it, or isn't it? What is the status of the fem Note - this review possibly not suitable for work. But in a way, that's what I'm trying to work out. Is it, or isn't it? What is the status of the female nude as an object of contemplation for men and women? The more I think about it, the more fraught the question gets.
1) PETE AND DUD AT THE TATE
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Pete : Have you seen the Rubens? There's one over there. He does all the ladies with nothing on except for a tiny little wisp of gauze always lands on the appropriate place, always the wind blows a little bit of gauze over you know where.
Dud : Pete, you know it must be a million to one chance that the gauze lands in the right place at the right time when he's painting. I bet there's thousands of paintings that we're not allowed to see where the gauze hadn't landed in the right place, on their nose or something.
Pete : Course, you don't get gauze floating around in the air these days, not like you did in Renaissance times.
2) NUDE WOMEN
So, I am here to talk about nude women.. My question is confined to Western art, and to the pictorial representation of nude women, because western art has in a 99% kind of way been run by men for men. Even with this limited focus, the question is interesting. The uneasiness of the female nude in art is because its depiction fuses beauty and sexuality in an explosive combination. You can try to present just the beauty, but you really can't - the sex is always there too. And I would argue the opposite is also true.
Here is a typical Victorian nude:
'DIADUMENED'-1884 by Edward Poynter
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And here is a typical nude model from the internet….. no, perhaps not! I'll let you make your own investigations there. What would be the difference? You could find any number of non-explicit poses by internet models very similar to Sir Edward Poynter's painting. What makes one okay and the other undoubtedly objectionable to some, and certainly to be avoided on Goodreads? Is it intention? We know that the internet model likely won't remain in this modest pose for very long, and that the photographer's intention is pornographic. We read that art, as practised by the president of the Royal Academy, which Poynter was, is not pornographic. Au contraire, it is beautiful. Or so they say. So - it seems - the same thing which made nudes in art acceptable in 1850 and nudes anywhere else unacceptable is the same thing that makes them okay or not okay in 2012.
(By the way, one thing which made any depiction of a nude woman absolutely pornographic and was absolutely verboten in 1850 was pubic hair. The tangled tale of pubic hair is a whole other story and I don't want to get into it here.)
Anyway, what you did in 1850 is you got your models and you renamed them - they became Circe, Psyche, Aphrodite, Calliope, Mnemosyne, and so forth. Nowadays you get your models and you rename them Alison Angel, Phoenix Marie, Real Peaches, and so forth. But I think Calliope would be still okay.
3) WILLIAM ETTY
William Etty, Victorian painter :
Finding God's most glorious work to be woman, I resolved to dedicate myself to painting, not the draper's or milliner's model, but God's more glorious work, more finely than had ever been done before.
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William Thackeray, novelist :
Look for a while at Mr Etty's pictures, and away you rush, your eyes on fire drunken with the lucious colours that are poured out for you on the liberal canvas, and warm with the sight of the beautiful sirens that appear on it.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, author:
The most disagreeable of English painters is Etty, who had a diseased appetite for women's flesh, and spent his whole life, apparently, in painting them with enormously developed busts. I do not mind nudity in a modest and natural way; but Etty's women really thrust their nudity upon you with malice aforethought.
4) GIRLS IN BONDAGE
Gradually, Alma-Tadema began to incorporate more and more nude women into his pictures, often using the Roman bath as a setting. When the subject did not seem to encourage the inclusion of naked Roman women, he incorporated naked slave girls. Slave-girls had a peculiar appeal to the nineteenth century, as they could be depicted bound and handcuffed…. Ernest Normand found that white naked girls amongst Arabs was a profitable career
Undoubtedly the high art panjandrums of the 19th century could be just as lubriciously prurient as any trembly far-flung-website mouseclicker of today. They had the dosh and the barefacedness to brazen it out in public and bleat on about Greek myths though. Did they like a little bit of BDSM? Ha ha, some things never change. In my humble opinion,
THIS IS CREEPY
St Elizabeth of Hungary' Great Act of Renunciation by Philip Calderon (1891)
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5) QUEEN VICTORIA WAS NO VICTORIAN
The Royal Academy, which was the Head Office of British painting, has this giant reputation of stuffiness and rigidity; and yet throughout the period, there was one law for the paintings displayed by the Academy's various galleries, and another applying anywhere else. Inside the Academy you could be bold, honest, you could be startling with your nudes. Check out this one - The Cave of the Storm Nymphs (1903) by Poynter
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Outside, you might get busted. ("The most innocuous of prints, if they depicted a naked woman, could result in the print-seller being hauled off to prison.") The middleclass moralisers and the Curch continually huffed about nudes in art, and the Academy continually ignored them.
The Observer magazine, 1835 :
The Lord Mayor himself at once deserves to be sent to the treadmill for imprisoning a little Italian boy for hawking about the streets a naked Cupid, if such lascivious scenes are to be allowed at the Royal Academy with impunity.
Florinda by Winterhalter was bought in 1852 by Queen Victoria as a present for her husband.
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Wow - QV and hubby also bought nude photos.
6) CHISELLED FEATURES (A DIGRESSION)
In 1854 13 "eminent people" wrote to the director general of the Crystal Palace where the Great Exhibition was being held. They were complaining about the statues of male nudes. Their anatomic accuracy would "in exhibition to promiscuous crowds of men and women prove very destructive to that natural modesty which is one of the outworks of virtue" – in other words, says Pearsall, representations of "men with penises and testicles were a perpetual threat to the stability of the nation. The Directors of the Crystal palace yielded to the pressure, and ordered emasculation by hammer and chisel."
7) HOW MUCH?
Another digression on the rise and fall in the value of paintings : in 1874 Leighton's "Sargonsian Bride" fetched £2677 (= £240,000). In 1960 it was auctioned and sold for £200 (=£3800).
8) CONCLUSION
Well, there isn't one - this is, after quite a few thousand years of the human race, still a hot topic. When is it good to portray that most common thing, that which we all have, in one shape or another, the human body? Is the human body not glorious? Is it not beautiful? Are some more beautiful than others? Is beauty a curse? When is its representation exploitative? Is it always exploitative? Is all this just another expresion of misogynism under the insidious and seducing guise of admiration? If so, do we (we meaning men and women) have to deny ourselves this crashing crushing awesome beauty? Do we create unacceptable hierarchies each time we elevate one form over another? Is this subject too entangled to discuss, that is, too entangled with the whole history of the oppression of women which as every newspaper and news bulletin attests is as alive and well as it has ever been? Is the Western tradition of fine art oil painting just a gruesome parade of rich men's baubles advertising all the lovely things they now possess? Does political awareness undermine and even destroy aethetics? How come even now the depiction of the human body can cause controversy? There is no end in sight here. When we move into later decades of art we get Balthus, Sorayama, Perlstein, Warhol, Helnwein and Mapplethorpe, all busy making us just as uncomfortable with representations of human bodies as we are when we see Victorian grandees carefully painting little slave girls in bondage in ancient Egypt.
9) READING LIST
Desperate Romantics by Franny Moyle Victorian Painting by Lionel Lambourne Live Nude Girl : My Life as an Object by Kathleen Rooney Candy Girl by Diablo Cody...more
I found this little book in my loft, didn't realise I had it. Remarkable what I find there sometimes. Perhaps books spontaneously generate up there. II found this little book in my loft, didn't realise I had it. Remarkable what I find there sometimes. Perhaps books spontaneously generate up there. It is a mysterious space. For me there are three English artists who were without a doubt graced or cursed by some kind of mysticism, there was William Blake, everyone knows him, there was Stanley Spencer, with his visions of the Resurrection in Cookham, Surrey (various frumpy middle aged types clambering out of their graves and tut tutting about it), and there was Samuel palmer who I think is the least known
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He did scenes of rural England in which sheep feature quite often and which seem to me to be very like the Eden we were all thrown out of by an angry Landlord some time ago.
According to this excellent book, PRB often stood for Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, but also stood for Please Ring Bell and occasionally Penis Rather BeAccording to this excellent book, PRB often stood for Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, but also stood for Please Ring Bell and occasionally Penis Rather Better.
But it could have stood for Painters Really Bonkers.
In the beginning there was a young art critic who had the ear of the cognoscenti called John Ruskin. Half of this book is about him. He was The Art Don. All the PRB thought he was like OMG I just saw John Ruskin walk by, I'm going to kiss the pavement whereupon he trod. But he was off the scale creepy. The Ruskin family were friends with the Grays and the Grays had a daughter. By the time she was 13 John was 22 and was writing fairy stories for her and thinking that she might be The One. She grew up to be a real drop-dead stunner. Her name was Euphemia and they called her Effie. I would have too. 90% of the interesting history of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood followed from the curious fact that when 28 year old John Ruskin got to marry the 19 year old Effie in 1848 he declined to have sex with her. For six years*. Until she got so freaked out by this that she divorced him. Which was huge. In those days you actually had to get a separate Act of Parliament passed in the House of Commons to finalise your divorce. That would make you think twice.
A great number of the people in this book spent a large amount of the short time they were allotted on this Planet Earth thinking about what did not go on between John Ruskin's John Thomas and Effie Ruskin's lady bits, and how the wind blew and the tumbleweed rolled between those most public of private parts. It was the talk of the town. For six years.
Meanwhile, the actual PRB were gathering together. Actually, there were two brotherhoods. The line-up for the first one was
John Millais, bass William Holman Hunt, drums Dante Gabriel Rossetti, lead guitar, vocals Ford Madox Brown, rhythm (left after first album)
After Millais and Hunt went solo Rossetti reformed the band
William Morris, bass Edward Burne-Jones, drums Dante Gabriel Rossetti, lead guitar, keyboard, vocals
At first, PRB 1 was laughed at by the critics. But then Ruskin noticed them and decreed that they were brilliant. And so they were. And he became their great friend and supporter.
I liked this - John Millais was a boy genius and got on some people's nerves:
Once after winning a prestigious silver medal from the Society of Arts fellow pupils hung Millais head downwards out of a window and left him there, suspended over the pavement below, held only by the scarves and pieces of string that his peers had selected to attach him to the iron window guards until his precarious situation was noticed by passers-by
How to analyse a Millais painting
The subject is "Lorenzo and Isabella" (painted when Millais was 19)
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The brother in the foreground is holding up a nutcracker in his right hand. While the cracking of a nut could well indicate his desire to emasculate poor Lorenzo, the shadow he himself casts is of a brooding sexuality directed at his own sister. The shadow of his forearm on the table looks like an erect penis, a mound of white ejaculate indicated by salt spilt on the cloth. The brother's foot points at his sister's lap.
The PRB were the first English bohemians. They broke various social taboos, they just couldn't care. The main thing they did was locate stunners on the London streets. They would go out as a group deliberately trawling for stunners (their word), and they would inveigle the girls to become models. The girls were shop assistants or prostitutes, because being an artist's model was the same as prostitution to the Victorians, no difference at all. Then the boys would get these working-class or even underclass girls to live with them, and – the ultimate shockingness – they occasionally married these girls, sometimes after paying for them to get trained up in the middle-class niceties of fashion and manners first. Then they would have affairs with each others' models and/or wives. And it was a whirligig ride for the girls. (For those interested, it turned out that Annie Miller was the Yoko Ono.)
Sometimes it turned out well – Millais got off with Effie – and sometimes it ended badly – Rossetti got off with Lizzie Siddall, shop assistant turned IT girl; he became besotted; promised to marry her; ten years later was still promising; by which time she was a junkie (laudanum) with mental health problems; then finally he did marry her, then he copped off with another woman; then she committed suicide, aged 29. Oh yes, and in his extravagant grief, as a grand gesture Rossetti cast a manuscript book of his own poetry into the coffin , and some months later regretted this rashness and got a special license to get the coffin exhumed to retrieve his bloody poetry, which he now wished to publish and dedicate to his new girlfriend, which, you know, was in poor taste, because she was another man's wife. And you have to laugh because there was a wormhole through his favourite poem. Literally. A hole made by a worm.
As for Ruskin, he survived the wagging tongues and in a truly gothic E A Poe-ish way he started to repeat the same Effie story again with another young girl, this one being ten when he met her aged 39. That wretched car crash takes up most of the last quarter of this book.
The PRB was a living museum of psychosexual morbidity which they then laid bare in their beautiful art. All that yearning, all that death, all that prettiness. All those flowers and fabrics and little mice and foliage and eyes like saucers and undraped flesh and knights and goats and doom.
And finally
Rossetti liked to keep inappropriately exotic pets in his garden. They all died of neglect. His favourite was a wombat.
The wombat did not last long in the Rossetti household. Anecdotally, its demise was as a result of eating a box of cigars.
* One theory about JR was that he had been so conditioned by his immersion in classical art that he was struck with repulsed horror at the sight of his new wife's pubic hair. (Could this happen to a young man of today, I wonder? I think it might, but it wouldn't have been classical art he had been immersed in.)
Revived review for all you Conceptual Art fans, all three of you! Performance Art was Conceptual Art's dangerous unpredictable, frankly quite unstableRevived review for all you Conceptual Art fans, all three of you! Performance Art was Conceptual Art's dangerous unpredictable, frankly quite unstable younger brother.
***
(Warning : this review is not for the squeamish. I know you're probably not that squeamish. But just so you know, there will be pierced flesh and... other things.)
*
The performance artists are the real lunatics of modern art and I love them all. Here are some of my favourites :
VITO ACCONCI
1971 : "Seedbed" (January 15–29, 1971). In Seedbed the artist lay hidden underneath a gallery-wide ramp installed at the Sonnabend Gallery, masturbating while vocalizing into a loudspeaker his fantasies about the visitors walking above him on the ramp.
1971 : "Telling Secrets". In a dark abandoned shed by the Hudson River between 1 and 2 AM on a cold winter night the artist whispers secrets to a small audience. Go Vito!
CHRIS BURDON - THE IGGY POP OF PERFORMANCE ART
In 1971 (the early 70s were very big years for performance art & this book is dated 1979) he performed "Shooting Piece" in which he had a friend shoot him in the arm as an "enquiry into what it feels to be shot. Two or three thousand people get shot every night on tv and it has always been something to be avoided. So i took the flipside and asked what if you faced this head on." Or arm on, as it happened.
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Chris Burdon has also been crucified on the back of a Volkswagen, briefly taken the hostess of a tv chat show hostage and spent five days jammed into a two feet by two feet by three feet locker at UCLA. In 1974 he sat on an upright chair on a sculpture pedestal for 48 hours until he fell off from exhaustion (piece entitled "Sculpture in Three Parts"). Goldberg says that few people have ever actually witnessed any of Budon's performances "but the extraordinary iconic photos and stark factual captions have given these events a permanent reverberating existence in both the mind and the media". In 1973 he performed "Through the Night Softly" in which he crawled semi-naked across broken glass with his hands tied behind his back. Go Chris!
TEHCHING HSIEH
One Year Performance 1978–1979 (Cage Piece)
In this performance, which lasted from September 29, 1978 through September 30, 1979, the artist locked himself in a 11′6″ × 9′ × 8' wooden cage, furnished only with a wash basin, lights, a pail, and a single bed. During the year, he was not allowed to talk, to read, to write, or to listen to radio and TV. A lawyer, Robert Projansky, notarized the entire process and made sure the artist never left the cage during that one year. A friend came daily to deliver food, remove the artist's waste, and take a single photograph to document the project. In addition, this performance was open to be viewed once or twice a month from 11am to 5pm
One Year Performance 1980–1981 (Time Clock Piece)
For one year, from April 11, 1980 through April 11, 1981, Hsieh punched a time clock every hour on the hour. Each time he punched the clock, he took a single picture of himself, which together yield a 6 minute movie. He shaved his head before the piece, so his growing hair reflects the passage of time. Documentation of this piece was exhibited at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 2009, using film, punch cards and photographs.
One Year Performance 1981–1982 (Outdoor Piece)
In his third one year performance piece, from September 26, 1981 through September 26, 1982, Hsieh spent one year outside, not entering buildings or shelter of any sort, including cars, trains, airplanes, boats, or tents. He moved around New York City with a backpack and a sleeping bag. Go Tehching!
SOME OTHER GUYS
Cypriot-Australian artist Stelarc has performed several suspension pieces in which he reproduces the ascetic exercises of some Indian sects by having himself hung from the ceiling by means of (look away now) large fishhooks embedded in his flesh. As you can readily appreciate, there is a great convergence in this type of art with shamanism, where in order to perform some kind of spiritual healing the shaman undertakes transforming or scapegoatlike self-punishing roles on behalf of the tribe or community. So performance art in some aspects is sympathetic magic. Herman Nitsch's Orgies Mysteries Theatre is another version of shamanism - he invents his own rites using all manner of gruesome stuff - dead animals are disembowelled, there is a lot of blood, etc. "Oh, Herman Nitsch is on in town tonight, would you like to go?" is not something you should be suggesting for a first date. Unsurprisingly he had an uneasy relationship with the police.
This takes us to the work of the Vienna Actionists and Rudolf Schwartzkogler (1940-1969). But I really really shouldn't describe those. (Shudders, looks sick, turns away.)
The most famous performance artist in the world is Yoko Ono. She did all kind of avant stuff and one of her well known pieces was where she would sit on stage & members of the audience would take turns to cut her clothing off with a pair of scissors.
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The John and Yoko bed-ins for peace and the bagism, all that was performance art.
A lot of this stuff is using violent imagery to protest against the violence condoned by society (against women, against civilian populations of countries the west invades, etc). And some of it is just gentle and funny. Yves Klein was the man for that - he releases 1001 blue ballons, he paints his models gold, he exhibits empty rooms. Let's not forget Piero Manzoni either, I love him. He signed the bodies of people and declared that thus they become works of art. He sold chrome cylinders containing his own poo for their weight in gold.
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There are so many brilliantly witty pieces of performance art that i could spend all morning happily typing them up in a list. There are worse things I could be doing. But you get the ideas. This is not so much a great book as it is stuffed full of great things - 5 stars for all the mad performance artists!
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(note - the TEHCHING HSIEH info is from Wiki but he is in this book - why isn't this guy famous?)...more
What was it the artist still known as Prince nearly said? There's joy in definitions. They prevent us from having to be party to any more inane converWhat was it the artist still known as Prince nearly said? There's joy in definitions. They prevent us from having to be party to any more inane conversations e.g.
- Hey, what's Tracy Emin's latest stuff like?
- Well, it is what it is.
- Yeah.
- She's still keeping it real.
- For sure.
So, let's define 120 years of art, starting with bad boy Baudelaire. Les Fleurs du Mal, 1857
– "the strictest rule-bound sonnets and the grossest subject matter".
Sounds like Lou Reed.
PG says that the essential elements of modernism are the lure of heresy and the cultivation of subjectivity... a commitment to a principled self-scrutiny…
And these modernists were
aesthetic radicals rebelling against the beloved and oppressive past
Yeah right. Blah blah. Did modernism add up to anything more than a parade of lionised tortured white male artist ritually offending their tribal elders with their rulebreaking tuneless howls of pain about the meaninglessness and futility of boohoo human life?
Art serves no one but itself – not mammon, not God, not country, not bourgeois self-gratification, certainly not moral progress.
Nothing is truly beautiful but what can never be of use to anything. Everything that is useful is ugly, for it is the expression of some need, and human needs are ignoble and disgusting. The most useful place in a home is the latrine.
– Theophile Gautier, a foppish French writer.
Really.
What a load of pompous shit – is a musical instrument ugly? Well, of course, tubas are fairly unlovely, I grant you, but all the rest of them are very beautiful to look at, and they are useful too because they produce music. Human beings appear to need music so that's one need which isn't ignoble. Gautier room, Gautier! And stay there!
Walter Pater : All art constantly aspires to the condition of music.
This is more like it – music can be abstract and very beautiful at the same time. What am I saying - music IS abstract. So in other words it doesn't represent anything, it just is. Oh, excellent, now I sound like a Van Morrison lyric. (Music can also be very useful, like jolly military bands firing up young men with the desire to slaughter other young men they haven't met yet, or like say disco music which inspires persons of all sexes to camp it up and become better acquainted. )
All these aphorisms have more holes in them than a Walmart that only sells colanders.
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PAINTING
It's clear what modernist painting is. Impressionism, cubism, you know the whole grinning growling gurning besplotched ploopy carousel. Poor Vincent! Starry night, ah! No 1 in the charts and you never knew. Tragic.
Monet's prices rose spectacularly, year after year. In 1879 he was earning the same as a top lawyer. By the early 1880s he tripled that. In 1995 he was the Bill Gates of blurry painting. Blurry blurry waterlilies! Oh Claude!
The painters rejected convention, conformity, the academy, they wanted to be proud and alone and unique, so they instantly banded together and called themselves Fauves or Cubists or Neo-plasiticists or The Shangri-Las or whatnot. They were a whole bunch of loners, loning together.
Kandinsky, Malevich and Mondrian – the three imaginary boys.
Paintings of white squares and then black squares by 1913! Now that's progress.
What they did share was a powerful sense of opposition to the world as it was, and a hunger for spirituality – PG
Yeah well, Mr Gay, that's not so special. I too have a powerful sense of opposition to the world as it is, don't you? Doesn't everybody?
Art historians who in recent years have announced the death of art usually give Duchamp the credit or blame for killing it – PG
You got to love Marcel, the only French artist to inspire a doowop group to name themselves in his honour.
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Readymades - Bicycle Wheel, 1913 – art by fiat – I am the artist and if I say this thing is art it is and I'll bite you if you say any different so yah. Yeah? Yeah? Bicycle wheel! Urinal! Suck it up, creeps!
LITERATURE
It's also clear what modernist literature is.
James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Marcel Proust were in a noisy pub one evening.
'Will you lend me £10?' shouted Joyce.
'You'll have to speak up a bit,' said Virginia, 'I can't hear a word you're saying with all the noise in here.'
'Will you lend me £10?' screamed Joyce at the top of his voice.
'It's no use,' said Virginia, 'I still cannot hear a word you're saying.'
'Now now, Virginia,' said Marcel Proust, 'I can hear him quite clearly.'
'In that case,' said Virginia, "you lend him the £10.'
What's more extreme than Finnegans Wake? No book is.
Samuel Beckett : Pinter said about him : The farther he goes the more good it does me. I don't want philosophies, tracts, dogmas, way outs, truths, answers, nothing from the bargain basement. The more he grinds my nose in the shit the more I am grateful to him.
They gave Beckett the Nobel Prize, that's how avant his garde was.
MUSIC
Among all the domains of modernism, music was the most esoteric. Unlike avant-garde painting, or the novel, or architecture, which all entered the mainstream of taste after a time of trials, much avant-garde music is still avant-garde music. PG
Well, when Mr Gay says music what he is referring to is that strange thing called "modern classical music" or "atonal bollocks".
Composers resigned themselves to their fate as emotionally available only to a narrow elite.
- poorly attended concerts before an audience consisting in the main of fellow professionals – pg
Ha ha, serves em right. Take it, take another little piece of my art, baby.
Okay, I get this. Modernism introduced the concept of ugliness as not only acceptable but as something to earnestly strive for. So in music, atonality; in painting, horrible hideousness like Les Demoiselles d'Avignon; in architecture, all that nasty steel & glass; in novels, abandonment of plots i.e. no fun
(Note : modernism is the same as the avant-garde as far as Peter Gay is concerned. Same thing.)
Anyway, jazz does not merit a mention here. But that was modernist pop music.
PG loses me when he describes what a modernist composer like Debussy was trying to do – using such phrases as "such descents into the self" and "the inner life and its felicitous portrayal" – I quite see that that is what Debussy was trying to achieve (and did) but can't see why the same vague phrases couldn't be applied to pre-modernists like Beethoven.
Grand poetasting goulash like :
Mahler was principally concerned to establish the sovereignty of the sounds he invented and constructed, to let them blossom in his own and his listeners' minds (p243) – pg
Why can't this be said about any composer? Or then again – why spin this fatuous twaddle anyway? Why not do something useful instead?
Hold the front page. It says here that Modernists could be and often were right wing, racist and misogynist. No…
TS Eliot, Charles Ives, Strindberg, Hamsun.
The Wrap Up, at Long last
So according to PG Modernism began in the mid 1850s, got up to high speed in 1890 to 1920 and then crashed into a big fat thing called Pop Art in 1960 and died. Don't go breaking my art!!
I was cruisin' in my Stingray late one night When Andy Warhol pulled up on the right He rolled down the window of his shiny new Jag And challenged me then and there to a drag I said, "you're on, buddy, my mill's runnin' fine Let's come off the line, now, at Sunset and Vine But I'll go you one better if you've got the nerve Let's race all the way To Pop Art Curve Pop Art Curve Pop Art Curve
(Abstract Expressionists : You won't come back from Pop Art Curve)
I don't get it. Peter Gay appears to despair at Pop Art and consider it a bad thing because – this is just a guess – although the artists were still white males, they weren't anguished, and they loved low culture (and spent their time eagerly ripping it off). They possessed "hardworking cheerfulness". Maybe that's what was wrong with them. They loved selling out! They wanted to be rich. (As rich as Monet!) After traversing so much interesting material PG suddenly seems to give up. He spends a few pages hunting high and low for signs of Modernism after Pop Art. In Literature he gives a crazy number of pages to Gabriel Garcia Marquez who he appears to think is the very model of a modern major Modernist. He laments the absence of any other great-but-difficult cutting edge authors. He appears not to have noticed Williams Gass and Gaddis, Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace, John Barth, Marguerite Young or Alexander Theroux. Throughout the book Modernism is identified with the avant garde – well, last time I looked, we still have one of those. We have Carl Andre's minimal bricks, Andres Serrano's Piss Christ, Tracy Emin's bed, Damien Hirst's sharks – we have regular outbursts of outrage from the bourgeoisie! What's not to love? Maybe he thinks of all this stuff as "post-modern" and in some way therefore not modernist. But we wouldn't know, because he never discusses post-modernism. Huh.
I was going to grudgingly give this book 3 stars but you know what? it's just a bit crap really. Two stars, and sue me....more
Now I have a reason to enter the Euromillions lottery and win a cool 100 million smackers. Because I now want to commission a book just like this wildNow I have a reason to enter the Euromillions lottery and win a cool 100 million smackers. Because I now want to commission a book just like this wild, obsessive compulsive disorder of a book only for James Joyce's Ulysses. What I will do (when I win) is hire 782 artists, one for every page of Ulysses, and their contract will stipulate that they all sit down on Bloomsday (16th June) and made a lovely picture inspired by a specific given page of JJ's insane novel. So, copying Matt Kish's idea, but doing it slightly differently. It woould be magnificent. It would win prizes. I would establish a prize myself, and award it to it.
As for Moby Dick in Pictures, well, Moby is one of my four favourite dicks, the others being Phillip K, Nixon, and Philip Marlowe, who was a private one, and if ever a book deserved some lunatic to sit down EVERY DAY for a year and a half and NO TIME OFF and do a picture based on a random quote for each and every page, then it's bold Moby.
Ahab said to Starbuck When that whale is caught and canned Would you make me a double-tall-decaf-skinny In your little old latte stand
Moby Dick was a great white whale And a low down dirty rat You ate up all my shipmates And my John B. Stetson hat
I remember it all – and the processions –and the trombones – and the ancient singing – more beautiful than anything I had ever heard and I think I havI remember it all – and the processions –and the trombones – and the ancient singing – more beautiful than anything I had ever heard and I think I have never heard the like since. And the great organ that made the air tremble – and the greater organ that pealed out suddenly, and I thought the Day of Judgement had come – and the roof, and the long lights that are the most graceful things man has ever made. What a day it was, and how alive I was, and how young – and a blue dragonfly stood still in the air so long that I could have painted him.
That's Edward Burne-Jones writing about his visit to Beauvais Cathedral in France in 1855. In those days if you wanted to see French or Italian art you had to go there. No youtube documentaries, not even any colour reproductions, nothing.
Burne-Jones, like a lot of young Victorians, lost his Christian faith quite young, and invented a substitute faith, which in his case was an extremely sensuous and sentimental re-imagining of the legend of King Arthur, along with a generalised adoration of anything medieval and gothick. His art was sumptuous and morbid, chilly and erotic, almost always erotic. Quite a lot of it looks it was born to be on a box of 15th century chocolates. He was a very sweet-natured man with a genius for fusing colour and prettiness with gorgeously atmospheric morbidly mythological medieval maundering involving swoony moony maidens and shiny metallic knights, middlesexy angels and lashings of yellowy-greenery. He would summon up visions of an Arthurian England which never existed but he would get the briars on the briar rose botanically perfect.
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Burne-Jones came from a working class family and was so remarkably upwardly mobile that in his 60s he nobbed around with prime ministers and was knighted and was buried in West bloody minster Abbey. He did this through being recognised by several people who got him work and patrons and for being a total whizz at designing stained glass windows which aren't much called for these days but were the business in the High Victorian period. A good stained glass window was like cocaine for them. Or maybe acid. Hey, I dunno, I'm just theorizing.
The important people for the young EBJ were William Morris, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and John Ruskin. This biography is like a river starting from a twinkly spring in the unnoticed hills and turning into a whitewater stream and eventually into a languorous mighty river on which many famous names can be seen skiffing about. By the end we have spent time with George Eliot, Swinburne, Oscar Wilde, Henry James, Beardsley and many other movers and shakers. EBJ became so famous he was satirised by Gilbert and Sullivan.
He married into a very remarkable family – they were likewise of modest means, the father was a minister, but look at this – one daughter married EBJ who became the most famous late-Victorian painter and died rich; another daughter married a guy and had a son who became prime minister (Stanley Baldwin) and a third sister married a guy and had a son whose name was Rudyard Kipling of whom you may have heard. That's not bad for one family.
EBJ was engaged to Georgiana MacDonald when she was 15 and he was 20. Is that creepy? The engagement lasted four years, his prospects were too dubious to marry before that. But Fiona MacCarthy does not think he joined his fellow student roister-doisters in their carnal explorations of the Victorian sexual underworld. He remained throughout his life a man who loved to be besotted with a whole parade of women and young girls, but intensely enjoyed the besottedness and the intense tete-a-tetes, and that was all. His wife had to put up with that. Many of his entanglements lasted years. She just had to look the other way when he swanned about in Europe with the wife of this guy or the widow of that guy.
However - what about the very young girls. They were called "pets" and this was a thing a few of EBJ's friends also did – they would have intense crushes on their friends' or acquaintances' female children. They would take them out for trips, and have unchaperoned visits, they would paint them, they would write a lot of letters to them, these girls of, say, 6 to 15. And that would be okay. No problem. Fiona says :
What are we to make of Burne-Jones' adoration of little girls? The first thing to be said is that conventions in adult behaviour towards children were very different in the middle of the 19th century from the wariness to which we have been accustomed today. The worship of the young girl, the innocent, had become almost a given in Pre-Raphaelite circles, the depiction of pre-pubescent beauty made more poignant by the sense that this was by its nature a temporary stage.
Extract from the diary of Constance Hilliard, aged 14 – dated 12 July 1865
Drive into London to see Mr Jones. A nice petting and grave talks. Sweet run in the garden, tea and talks, and another nice petting before I went to bed.
Fiona says :
What did she mean by "petting"? Caresses? Sweet-talking? A degree of innuendo? …These things are mysterious to later generations.
I think these relationships were of the same type that Lewis Carroll had with Alice and the rest. They have paedophilic aspects to them, undoubtedly, but we have to struggle against our hair-trigger cynicism and accept that yes, the past is a different country and yes, they do things differently there. When two of the girls he had crushes on got engaged, he was miserable, and painted them into a picture where they are to be seen "posed together at the base of a frozen fountain". (!)
People have loved and sneered at and disregarded and rediscovered and venerated and loathed Burne-Jones' stuff. In 1898 one painting was bought for £5775 (= approx £2 million). The same painting fetched £21 in auction in 1941 (= £2500). When the impressionists came along he didn't like them and they didn't like him. By the end of his life he knew he'd been a fad and that he was passe. Although this book doesn't have too many moments of pure comedy in it, one came unexpectedly for me when Fiona was discussing EBJ's recent rehabilitation – she mentions two prominent collectors – Andrew Lloyd Webber and – can it be – Jimmy Page. Kerrang! I was not expecting the groupie-munching axeman to be making an entrance into these pages. For a moment I was dazed and confused.
For anyone who loves the Pre-Raffs or Victorian painters or Victorian people in general or just a long leisurely biography this is a bit of a treat....more
It’s the Worm! What sharp illusions! How strange are the fancies of the mind. Am I the only man in the world who sees them as they really are? Melt – It’s the Worm! What sharp illusions! How strange are the fancies of the mind. Am I the only man in the world who sees them as they really are? Melt – melt! It’s Tom’s leg! My footsteps sound like drumbeats in this vacuum of an avenue. Yes, we’ll drain this dame dry. She struck down her victims in a frenzy of wanton greed. Was it vexed by a twisted and passionate love? Here is the quart of blood you ordered! Using this tablet as our master cipher, we can read any inscription in the crypt. Ted!! Joyce!! I live with corpses! Pain, and more pain, and finally death, Franklin. It splits into tiny particles, but the red NUCLEUS is still there! I’d even be handsome without these thick glasses. Kiss me, Mary. Mary? Mary? No one will find us here! Wait… Harry’s come back from the dead! Hail the United World Zombies! Our power is secure. All non-zombie traitors are in custody! You weak fool! I made you love what you hated! Oh Jim – I’ll be right with you. I’ve got something to tell you, something frightful. HE DIDN’T WANT TO SHOW WHAT WAS BEHIND HIS LIPS! HE DIDN’T WANT TO SHOW WHAT WAS BEHIND HIS LIPS! HE DIDN’T WANT TO SHOW WHAT WAS BEHIND HIS LIPS! What’s the matter, sweetheart? Why does your voice sound so strange? Cannibals never boil more than one human at a time! The dank smell of the waterfront stings the girl’s nostrils as she follows her bridegroom’s hurrying steps up the creaking gangplank towards the gloomy hulk. The beads of perspiration on his dark skin twinkle like distant stars. The awful prognostications of doom. His head, grown to the size of a WATERMELON! Lorna – don’t open that – Lorna! Lorna!! AIEEE! ...more
This is an extremely pretty book which seduced me in Waterstones recently. I had to have it. And now I have read it. The gorgeous illuminations and seThis is an extremely pretty book which seduced me in Waterstones recently. I had to have it. And now I have read it. The gorgeous illuminations and settings for the text are the principal pleasures here, so take my tip & flick through it when next you visit a big bookshop. It will be on the design shelf, I think, all gold and sparkly. Inside it looks like this
As to what is ensconced within such industrial-strength gorgeousness, what we have is several rather fey and frankly somewhat watery essays, ruminations, blog entries by MB who is a great designer but perhaps not an essayist to rank alongside Dryden, Swift, Addison, Steele, Johnson, Hume, Lamb, Hazlitt, de Quincey, Carlyle, Macauley, Newman, Mill, Trollope, Huxley, Bagehot, Belloc, Russell, Beerbohm, Chesterton, Forster, Strachey, Woolf, Lawrence, Haldane, Huxley, Thurber, Priestley, Orwell, Waugh, Greene, Betjeman, Berlin, Trevor-Roper, Vidal, Naipaul or, indeed, Updike. But there was one about family photographs which was really worth reading & thinking about. Along the lines of - your treasured family photos will one day end up in a bric-a-brac shop and bought by someone who thinks they are quaint. ...more
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