Ford Madox Brown

I've had a busy week - I also went to the opening of Ford Madox Brown: The Unofficial Pre-Raphaelite at the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. I only had time for a quick look around the exhibition, but it looks fascinating and I'm looking forward to returning when I have more time. It's been a labour of love for Laura MacCulloch, who has been re-assessing the place of FMB in Pre-Raphaelitism through her Ph.D. at the University of Birmingham.
Brown was not one of the founding members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, but as mentor and teacher to them he deserves a place in their history. This exhibition, which focusses on his drawings, looks at Brown in a wider persepctive than is usual. As BMAG's website says,
"Recent research has revealed the breath of Madox Brown’s achievements as a modernist and a realist in a career spanning some sixty years until his death in 1893."

Life is a Cabaret...

On Friday I went to the opening night of Cabaret at the Birmingham Rep. Being me, I didn't realise until I opened the programme that this was the professional debut of Samantha Barks, who was a runner-up in I'd Do Anything (personally I'd say Sally Bowles in Cabaret is a more taxing role than Nancy in Oliver!, but what do I know?!) And it had Wayne Sleep in it. Consequently, I think it's the first time I've seen "Full House" signs outside the theatre; and it was packed. And deservedly so. The set was amazing - flexible and quickly transformed; impressive. Wayne Sleep is both amusing and chilling as Emcee, a role he seems perfect for; and he plays it with a delightful postmoden self-consciousness, asking the audience if they think he's too old to dance, etc. Samantha Barks is good; she's not great, yet, but she's very young, and this was the first night of her first show. She seemed a bit tentative once or twice, but she carried the big numbers of the show very well on the whole, and she does have an amazing voice.

And, of course, Cabaret is a cult classic, as it should be. Aesthetically reminiscent of Chicago, Kander & Ebb's later work, it works in the shadows, blurring lines of morality, sexuality, politics etc until the viewer is bedazzled but sympathetic. The shadow of fascism grows throughout the show to a shocking, brilliant climax, and the world of Berlin in the 1930s is evoked in all its tawdry glory. Some musicals make me cross, but this is a feast for the eyes and the mind; it does make you think, so it stays with you.

http://www.birmingham-rep.co.uk/event/cabaret

Klimt

On Thursday I went up to Liverpool for the day to see the Klimt exhibition before it closes (which it now has done). - Incidentally, I was very taken with the Walker Gallery - hadn't been there before; lots of 19th century paintings including DG Rossetti's Dante's Dream, lovely. Anyway, I didn't know much about Klimt, and am not sure how much more I know now, but I'm glad I made the effort to go. If you don't know much about Klimt either, here is a good place to start. I did know a little about his involvement with the Wiener Werkstatte and the Viennese Secession, and this exhibition shows Klimt in context, including interiors and designs as well as paintings and drawings.
Amazingly, I'd never even seen a reproduction of the Beethoven Frieze before, but it was one of my favourite exhibits here. What caught me by surprise, though, is how much some of it looks like a kind of stylized, Art-Deco-esque Pre-Raphaelitism (feel free to argue) but look at those women on the left here - they even have red hair! Similarly, Girls with Oleanders has a wonderful medievalism that both looks back and forward, and Fable seems to me to reference Cranach's Adam and Eve - or so I wrote in my notes at the time, though looking at it again now I'm not so sure; but it does seem to refer to the Old Masters rather than contemporary painting.
I was taken with Klimt's landscape painting. I notice the brochure says that his landscapes are "now a highly admired aspect of his oeuvre", but to the layman (me) landscapes are not what I associate with his work. However, I loved them - busy patchworks of nature, yet the images are representative rather than natural - no Pre-Raphaelitism here! Garden Landscape with Hilltop, for example (section of it is on the right) seems almost medieval in its profusion, yet is reminiscent of Van Gogh. (As you may have noticed, I'm quite interested in aspects of influence in art as well as writing, and how an artist recreates earlier artistic ideals to his or her own ends.)
What I haven't got to grips with yet is Klimt's depiction of women - some are challenging, looking directly at the viewer and exuding an independent life of their own, such as the femme fatale depicted in Judith II (Salome) while others seem passive, overwhelmed by circumstance and the (male) gaze of the viewer. Of course, as the exhibition notes point out, this was a time when "Sigmund Freud's theories positing sexuality as a liberating force were highly influential, contributing to an overarching atmosphere of eroticism". True, but liberating for whom? Not many of these women look very liberated; it's the male artist who can paint them who seems to benefit here! And Ria Munk on her deathbed strikes me as a prime example of the nineteenth-century aestheticised dead woman - beautiful, but unable to talk back. Of course, it also channels Ophelia in her many guises - mad, dead, and surveyed best when silenced, apparently.

Neo-Victorians

Last weekend I went to "Adapting the Nineteenth Century" at the University of Lampeter, and had a wonderful time! There were so many neo-Victorianists there I felt a bit of a fraud, since I've read and enjoyed Sarah Waters (it was nearly a Waters conference...) but that's about it. I heard lots of papers which looked at how contemporary authors have appropriated aspects of the nineteenth century novel, and have a much longer to-read list now than before (Top of the list: The Crimson Petal and the White and The End of Mr Y). It's fascinating, though, to see how we're still so fascinated with the past (this has set me on the track of thinking about nostalgia as an aspect of memory) and how we are writing and re-writing histories in entirely different ways.
I was particularly fascinated to hear about the Brotherhood of Ruralists, who were a neo-Pre-Raphaelite group formed in the Seventies and appropriated many of the artistic and also literary ideals of the PRB, and I'm looking forward to going to see their exhibition in Falmouth later this year.
I have no time to go into details, but it was a most enjoyable conference - made more so by red wine and feminism on Friday night. More weekends should be like that!

The Ladies of Grace Adieu

The Ladies of Grace Adieu by Susanna Clarke is a gem. Not just in the contents, but also in the book itself - I won't go on about the materiality of the text, etc, but it's a beautifully designed book, lovely cover and wonderful, ethereal illustrations by the peerless Charles Vess. Actually, the book as a whole rather reminded me of a book of short stories by Walter de la Mare that I had as a child (the name escapes me) with illustrations in a similar style, and stories of similar jewel-like perfection.
Of course Clarke is best known for Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, which I haven't read but have just ordered from Amazon. I can't comment on that well-received work, therefore, but I hope it will be as enchanting as this book. And enchanting is just the right word; it's all about enchantment - Clarke reworks fairytales, or develops her own characters from her earlier novel, creating a world which is entirely seductive. Here, the world of faery mingles with the world we know, bewildering but captivating. Clarke cleverly presents the book as an edited collection by the fictional "Professor James Sutherland, Director of Sidhe studies, University of Aberdeen" (the Sidhe are an ancient race of Celtic fairies - you can read more about them here). This professor introduces the stories as curiosities, relics of another time, collected and edited with footnotes by him. We are therefore invited to read these stories as anecdotes by people who, from the sixteenth century onwards, have actually seen and interacted with fairies. What makes it so intriguing is that the tales are thus placed within an entirely fictional context of a canon of studies which doesn't exist, playing with the boundaries of the academic, the fictional, and genuine research into folk-tales.
I don't think I'm doing it justice here; there is a marvellous wistful quality to Clarke's writing which makes the rhythm of the tales hypnotic; furthermore, she has an excellent ear for the cadences of writing in a certain period; her 18th century prose would do justice to Austen while her Elizabethans are almost (modernised) Spenserian. I don't know anything about Clarke, but I bet she knows her Eng Lit. It's an absolute delight; do read it.

Love is all around...?

The National Gallery's Love exhibition seems to have been reviewed everywhere recently, and I'm always a sucker for a freebie anyway, so thought I'd have a quick look. I'm glad I did. It's not often you get to see such an eclectic mix - Emin alongside Rossetti, Cranach near Claude, etc. Generally I'm a bit wary of "themes" - allows generalised and rather trite philosophising, as well as making often rather tenuous connections, and the NG blurb didn't inspire me much:

Arguably love has been the inspiration for more great art than any other human emotion. Nevertheless it presents a challenge to the visual artist. How do you depict love? How do you convey its complexity and intensity?

The wide range of types of love made it difficult to focus, but it was managed quite well, covering divine and human love, siblings, parental, and the usual romantic love. I thought Sandys' Medea was an interesting inclusion - what can go wrong in love (for those who didn't do Classics A-level, Medea killed her children to pay back her husband for infidelity. Lovely.) And I was surprisingly taken with Grayson Perry's God Please Keep My Children Safe (above), a fragile-looking ceramic rabbit with prayers for one's children inscribed on it. Directly opposite that, DG Rossetti's Astarte Syriaca - now that's a twisted kind of love, difficult to disentangle the painter's personal feelings (his adulterous adoration of the model, Jane Morris) from the classical connotations of the subject.

Actually, two of the paintings I liked best were ones I hadn't seen before: Jan Molenaer's A Young Man and Woman making music (1630-2) - domestic and artistic harmony (though he looks a lot happier than she does) and painted so comfortably; and Chagall's Bouquet with Flying Lovers (1934-47), left, which seems a tribute to a happy marriage, though it was painted after her death, and contains shadows and colours of mourning as well as a blissful-looking couple. I guess that's one of the good things about "themed" exhibitions, though - not only does it throw paintings one knows and loves into a different context, it also provides new joys.

Wyndham Lewis Portraits

In between getting Russian visas yesterday, I popped into the National Portrait Gallery to have a look at the Wyndham Lewis portraits exhibition. I know more about Lewis's writing than about his painting, due to a friend whose MA thesis was on Blast, but since he demonstrated Vorticism through his art as well as his writing, I thought it would be an interesting experience, and so it was. Firstly, the unnerving thing about it is when you realise you're standing in a room full of portraits, and none of them are smiling. Many also avoid your gaze. I feel - though I may be wrong - that Lewis may have liked painting people, but he didn't actually have much time for humanity in general. The second unnerving thing was how many of the male portraits looked like my head of department, but fortunately that shouldn't affect too many other people....
Lewis's most famous portrait, of TS Eliot (1938), above, is of a "man haunted by a vision" - or that's what Lewis said of his later portrait of Eliot, but it seems truer of this one. Like Eliot, Lewis felt he had suffered for his art, perhaps sacrificing too much of his personal life to his creative vision. Actually, in the portraits of Froanna, his wife, one wonders if it was her that was sacrificed, too. The portraits are beautiful, often in warm colours (Lewis liked monochromatic painting), domestic, and seem tenderly done, but she looks infinitely sad.
I was interested by Portrait of the Artist as the Painter Raphael, particularly because post-war artists were urged to return to a classical style, which Lewis does ironically, only with the title, while the image itself is modelled on one of Shakespeare. His skill seems so unique, though - there is nothing realist about these figures, yet one feels like reaching out and touching them. Cubist influences are evident throughout, particularly in the chiselled noses and foreheads, as though Lewis's role was not so much to paint them as to carve them out of stone. It's suggested that Cubism is a "radical simplification" of what we see, but in some ways it seems infinitely more complicated, as though these shapes out of which people and things are created are endless, going on forever into a background we can't focus on.
Perhaps one of my favourite portraits here was that of Edith Sitwell (left). She is elegant, lean, poised - and almost dehumanised (and Lewis left out her hands, which she saw as her only redeeming feature.) She, too, seems sad, lonely even, in this surprisingly detailed background (for Lewis). But it's also the essence of what we expect of a 1920s writer (I think) - it plays to the image of celebrated writers, alone, sombre, brooding. I think Lewis liked to play with celebrity; he certainly played with his own image enough, with his obsessive hat-wearing and portraying himself as the "Enemy".
Perhaps his most sympathetic portrait is that of Mary Webb, the novelist, whose physical defects he gently disguises, while the tangled profusion of her hair seems to reflect her interest in the natural world in her novels. One of the least sympathetic, however, seems to be of Virginia Woolf (though no-one is sure that this is who it is). Lewis despised the Bloomsbury Group, and described A Room of One's Own as a "feminist fairytale" - and Woolf, if it is she, seems to be a spectre haunting that fairyland, if his portrait is anything to go by! But then, he was a man of strong opinions, and not afraid to show it, which might not have made him pleasant, but it does make him interesting.

Twilight is not good for maidens...

This is the abstract of the paper I'm currently writing. Don't think I've ever had so much fun with a conference paper! This is for Adapting the Nineteenth Century at the University of Lampeter, August 22-24 2008.

"Twilight is not good for maidens": The Twilight World of ‘Goblin Market’
‘Goblin Market’ remains Rossetti’s most-studied poem, yet has presented problems for critics since its publication. An early reviewer asked, "Is it a fable - or a mere fairy story - or an allegory against the pleasures of sinful love - or what is it?" In this paper, I shall discuss how a poem which was arguably constructed from elements of multifarious sources created its own world which drew readers in and opened up to a wide variety of interpretations. In the late twentieth century, it was the aesthetics of faery, of landscape and primarily of Gothic, which prevailed in interpretations of the work. While serious critics comment on the religious, moral and typological aspects of the poem, it is the alternative aspects of this constructed world, such as fairytale and vampirism which have elicited the most creative responses. My paper will consider two of these responses, and examine the elements of ‘Goblin Market’ which have made such diverse interpretations possible. The illustrative work of the Japanese artist Kinuko Craft has tapped into a dark vein in the work. Appearing in Playboy in 1973 as part of their "Ribald Classics", ‘Goblin Market’ was presented as "a nursery classic" and a "pornographic classic". By juxtaposing the visual and the verbal, the poem appears as indicative of repressed Victorian sexuality. This is perhaps explained best by Deborah Cherry and Griselda Pollock:

In these decades [the 1960s and 1970s], the Victorian era became a site for the
renegotiation of definitions of sexuality. It was characterized as a period of
public virtue and private vice, of sexual hypocrisy, an age of prudery and
respectability with a hidden underside of perversion, pornography and
prostitution.

The illustrations are loosely based on those by Arthur Rackham, but draw on the sexually charged language Rossetti uses in her poem. I propose to examine how Craft draws this out in nuanced illustrations which gesture towards Victorian art, whilst appearing in Playboy.
Recent literary criticism is beginning to attempt reconstruction of the original world Rossetti created, but an alternative space has opened up between critical and creative responses. My paper will explore the aspects of Rossetti’s poem which have attracted an interpretative response, and demonstrate the differing aspect of these two interpretations of ‘Goblin Market’.

Affluenza

I like books that make me rant. Books that have really fulfilled this in the past include Naomi Klein's No Logo and The Beauty Myth, various other feminist texts, The Undercover Economist, and so on. This book covers some of my favourite things to rant about - materialism, advertising, what's wrong with society, Americanisation of society, etc.
James is convincing (probably even more so if you read the companion volume which contains all the citations and science bit) - he suggests that "selfish capitalist" society in the English-speaking world has given us phoney values which mean that we are forever striving for more, keeping up with the Jones's etc. He examines this through work, education, relationships, childcare etc, looking at how affluenza strikes across the world and the extent of the harm it does in causing "emotional distress" or depression, mental health problems, insecurity, etc. Basically he's saying, if we did things for "intrinsic reasons" - because we love to - and if we concentrate on our needs rather than wants (ie we need food; we want a new DVD player) we'd be much happier. He's right, I think; but there are areas I struggle with, such as identifying oneself with one's work, which I know I absolutely do, but not for money (who'd be an academic for the money?!) I certainly put my work above most other things in my life, and I still maintain that's not always a bad thing. Also I think he can be a little sexist, and am concerned by his blaming feminism for some social ills such as women's desire to work rather than look after children in Danish society.
James discusses what he calls the "marketing character" - someone else who sees him or herself as a commodity, and permits society to see them as such; someone whose self is constantly marketed, through the cult of "personality", cultivating characteristics which make them appear to be the person they have been persuaded they would like to be, and so on.
This book seems to be somewhere between social criticism, anthropology, psychology and self-help. He uses "case studies" - anecdotes about people he has interviewed - to make his points, which works in a kind of pop-psychology way, but makes me a little wary of his style and also his purpose. After each chapter outlining society's problems, he suggests "vaccines" against the "Affluenza virus", which is where it begins to seem like self-help, though as a general idea rather than to fix what you perceive to be wrong in your own life, it does stand up to scrutiny, just about. Towards the end he becomes increasingly political, ranting against New Labour (which I'm happy to agree with...) and suggesting how an alternative society might operate - very Utopian. Interesting book, though - made me think and caused me to rant again!

That beautiful pale face is my fate

Last week I read this article in the Times about Newstead Abbey, Byron's home, and an exhibition being held there concerning the relation between Byron and contemporary culture. As I was in the area over the weekend, I decided to have a look...

I've been working on how contemporary culture adapts and interacts with the past, as I'm writing a paper for this conference about adapting the 19th century, so I was looking forward to seeing this exhibition, That beautiful pale face is my fate (said by Lady Caroline Lamb of Byron) but while I was there, it didn't quite do it for me - perhaps I'm not observant enough, but sometimes I couldn't tell which exhibits were part of the art exhibition and which were part of the standing display. Still, having read the brochure (after I got home) actually it seems much more interesting and relevant than I thought at the time, annoyingly. The Gothic side of it appeals to me, of course, and exhibits like Goshka Macuga's image of Byron etched onto a mirror suggest Byron's interest in his own image, as well as the modern preoccupation with public image and celebrity. I also quite like the idea that there are modern inheritors of the Byronic persona, although I'm not sure I would have picked the same people as Marcia Farquhar. Read the Times article - it'll give a much better indication of it than I can.

The abbey itself is wonderfully Gothic, though - Byron used to sit up at night with his friends, dressed as monks and drinking from a goblet made of a human skull (Thomas Love Peacock's Nightmare Abbey was based on his circle) and despite later alterations made to the building and its decor by its later owners, you can still sense what appealed to Byron. Anyway, it's inspired me to re-read Don Juan.

But words are things, and a small drop of ink,
Falling like dew, upon a thought, produces
That which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think;
'Tis strange, the shortest letter which man uses
Instead of speech, may form a lasting link
Of ages; to what straits old Time reduces
Frail man, when paper - even a rag like this - ,
Survives himself, his tomb, and all that's his.

Next Poet Laureate?

Tee hee (from the Times Books section last week)

The current laureate is Andrew Motion, but as it's now a decade-long post rather than a life-time position, we're nearly due another one. There have been calls for the first female laureate, detailed here, but many of the women have said they wouldn't be interested (see here). Of course, the first female laureate should have been Christina Rossetti, on the death of Tennyson, but Queen Victoria wouldn't countenance a woman laureate (and probably Rossetti would have declined it anyway) so instead they appointed the truly unmemorable Alfred Austin.

Laura Knight at the Theatre

Since my knowledge of Dame Laura Knight's painting has been limited to her self-portrait at the NPG and some reproductions in a biography of her which I recently read, I've been really looking forward to the exhibition at Nottingham Castle on her theatre paintings, and it didn't disappoint. There are two fairly large rooms of her work, mostly of her ballet paintings but also some theatre and one or two theatrical portraits. Clearly she liked to paint people - interesting people, or people doing interesting things, and her sense of the dramatic comes across in all her work. She had an enormous output, painting circus people at work, being official artist for the Nuremburg trials and commissions by the government during the Second World War, among other things, but her paintings are all very much of their time - her career pretty much spanned her life (1877-1960, I think) and she manifestly moved with the times, remaining contemporary and vital, never stale or boring. I can't remember when I last enjoyed something visually so much as this.
The ballet paintings are bound to appeal to me, since I have a passing interest in ballet, but I am somewhat sceptical of the prettified 1950s paintings of the ballet; a few here were reminiscent of them, but in the 1930s, before it became a cliche, and they're beautiful. Moreover, she knows dancers, and dancing - she paints them not just performing, but in class, in the dressing room, in the wings, and she gets the angles of their bodies exactly right - legend has it that when she painted dancers in class the teacher would use her sketches to show the dancers what they had done wrong!

The exhibition is a mixture of sketches and oil paintings, and both are a delight, but in very different ways. The technical skill, the colours and vitality of the oils appealed to me, but her ability to catch a dancer's poise and movement in a few lines in her sketches is amazing. Her love of the theatrical life shines through her work. To get an idea of the breadth of her work, there are some examples of her work here. Interestingly, she is often described as an Impressionist painter, but I'm inclined to disagree with this, since her work changes medium and styles, with some of the oils - for example, the painting of Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies as Juliet - seeming almost Pre-Raphaelite in style. However, such labels aren't helpful; her subjects, not her style, was clearly her own preoccupation.

A critic of one of her exhibitions during the 1960s suggested that she painted what she saw, not what she felt - that her work wasn't cerebral enough, perhaps. For the viewer, I think it's difficult to disentangle seeing and feeling anyway, and these paintings are a visual delight; I found myself smiling as I looked at them. There isn't one painting there I wouldn't have liked to take home with me, and her joy in the visual, in the nature of spectacle, is enough for me; I don't really want to analyse it, just enjoy it (which is unlike me!)

An exhibition which will include some of Knight's work is coming to one of my favourite small galleries, Penlee House, later this year, and I shall definitely be going to see it.