God Save the Queen

Highs and lows: Edinburgh

The production of Antigone by Sophocles by the Stamford (Connecticut) High School at Church Hill Theatre was the highlight of the week. With the modesty of youth, they did not seek to impose anything on the text, but allowed its genius – Sophocles’ vision – to shine through. They realised what too many companies have forgotten: that they are the servants, not the masters. I found myself thinking the ultimate heresy: Sophocles might actually be better than Shakespeare. Did I really just say that?
There was nothing wrong with the adaptation, by the director, Michael Limone. There was nothing wrong with the set or lighting. The music was possibly a tad too loud at some moments. But the young people interpreting their roles were exactly right. It would be hard to say who was the best. Morgan Miller as Antigone herself was perfect. Together with Meredith Hackman as Ismene, she brought tears to my eyes in their second dialogue. The tears overflowed. Michael Miller as Haemon was also just right for the role, a passionate youth torn by the cruellest of conflicts. Miccah Kosstrin-Greenberg effortlessly dominated his only scene as Tiresias by letting the inherent drama of his words and terrible aspect of his blind face speak for themselves. But perhaps the finest of all was Robert Rosado, completely convincing as Creon in all the stages of his soul’s tragic journey: arrogant, repentant and, at last, ruined. An honourable mention also goes to both choruses, both the women of Thebes and the senators, who all showed a dignity and maturity remarkable for their years.
As we came out we said: ‘they do not know how good they are’. Is it wrong of me to hope that they remain in ignorance of how good they are? For to realise the quality of their talent would be to risk that all-important modesty in the face of the text. Hopefully they might get the best of both worlds – realise their talents while remaining humble. The programme notes that Robert Rosado hopes to reprise the play next year. He’s not the only one hoping so.
(A version of this review is on the Edinburgh fringe website.)

Low point: the talk on imprisoned writers on Thursday evening. The theme was Burma, Aung San Suu Kyi and the writer U Win Tin. Libby Purves was there, but she left after saying her piece. She therefore didn’t see Mourid Barghouti turning the occasion into – you’ve guessed it – yet another anti-Israel fest. He had about eight minutes, five of which (I wasn’t counting but it was at least half his time) he dedicated to slagging off Israel and drawing an equivalence between it and Burma. He mentioned the Palestinian prisoners’ hunger strike, describing them as political detainees. Considering the usual Palestinian methods of political activism it seems an abuse of language to equate them with NLD prisoners in Burma. In Burma, you can get locked up for joking about Ne Win: but in Israel you don't go to prison merely for making a joke about Ariel Sharon. You have to be a bit more active than that. In any case, it was an abuse of his position. I would have been rather more sympathetic to the Palestinian cause if he had stuck to the subject in hand. So he was not only in the wrong morally but acted foolishly: it was mere preaching to the converted.
No-one walked out or protested. The other writers were just the usual second-string types except for Malise Ruthven, who didn’t protest either. I should have done but wanted to see if he might make a partial redemption by attacking Arafat and Hamas and all their works, but he did not. Instead he went on to the obligatory mention of Abu Ghraib and apartheid before making a perfunctory mention of political prisoners everywhere in the world (so brief that it could easily have been missed) to cover himself.
It was the moderator’s job to correct him, but if she’d done so she would have opened herself to the charge of being pro-Israel. Don’t you care?!? You can imagine the insinuations. I was still angry the next morning. That was an over-reaction for sure, but I’d never seen anything quite like it before.

Two exhibitions

Overcoming my hostility to any art with the word 'modern' in its description, yesterday I went to the Edward Hopper exhibition.
Hopper did not really believe other people existed. His human figures aren't, with the exception, revealingly, of his two self-portraits.
A quote of his: "I think I’m not very human." Poor fellow.

But the exhibition is redeemed by one painting, a painting which takes pride of place at the end of Brian O’Doherty’s film – Sun in an Empty Room. Hopper really came alive with this painting which eschews any pretence of being about anything. Anything, that is, but light. There was a long tradition of painters transfixed by light, from Turner, that Impressionist avant la lettre, through the Impressionists themselves (who still lived and worked in Hopper's early years), to EH himself. Having come to this conclusion it was immensely gratifying to the ego to read a quote in the catalogue. Hopper, 1962: "I think I’m still an Impressionist."

Later, to the National Gallery to see the exhibition of Russian landscape artists of the late nineteenth century. I had often wondered what Russian painters were up to in the age that produced writers like Tolstoy, Chekhov and Dostoevsky, the age that produced composers like Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Mussorgsky and Rachmaninov. The answer, of course, is that they were painting Russia. Ivan Shishkin's paintings do the country justice. They are painted with the meticulous attention to detail that reveals a true mature love of place. The other boys in the exhibition aren't bad either, especially Levitan and Savrasov, but Shishkin deservedly has the central hall.

I would not want to visit Hopper’s America. I’d much prefer to visit Shishkin’s Russia .

Back to beauty

Definitely been overdoing the poliblogging lately. So let us praise beauty once more, and in particular the humane beauties of domestic interior decoration, old style.

Frans Hals’ portrait The Laughing Cavalier is much better seen for real than in reproductions. It’s a picture of a young man in rude health and enjoying life: the facial expression is wonderfully subtle. The lustre of the skin is reminiscent of some of Raphael’s portraits. Young Hans is hidden away in a back gallery at the Wallace Collection, round the back of Selfridge’s – one of London’s better kept secrets. It also has a nice line in Canaletto paintings, which always evoke the urge to drop everything and head for Venice.

The great advantage of these small galleries is their human scale. The National Gallery was built as a gallery and it tends to overwhelm. Is it possible to spend more than half an hour there before getting a headache? The Wallace Collection, on the other hand, is in a building that was originally a private house. One can walk round it and see pretty much all of it in an hour, and it’s less overrun by tourists than the NG. Similarly Sir John Soane’s Museum on Lincoln’s Inn Fields is on a human scale – again, a nineteenth century dwelling – and contains two minor classics, Hogarth’s painting-series ‘The Rake’s Progress’ and ‘The Election’. Anyone who thinks those prudish Victorians invented moralising stories about personal destruction through folly should see the former. Anyone who thinks that dodgy electoral processes are a recent phenomenon should see the latter.
Further afield, the Frick gallery in New York is a gem. There’s a particularly striking pairing of portraits in one room, Thomas Cromwell, with the face of a real villain, looking angrily at Thomas More, unaware that the two would be united in the manner of their endings – put to death by a royal bully – even as they had been enemies in life.
The Frick too was a private dwelling first, which leads me to think this is a general rule: art was made to be lived with, not fossilised, so it’s best seen in surroundings that are fundamentally domestic. The galleries in Rome, for instance the Doria Pamphili, are quite similar – though no-one could ever accuse them of being small. They are, however, domestic in the sense that they were places designed to be lived in by cultured men of taste. It might be cruel to say so, but a purpose-built grandiose gallery like the NG is a tomb for paintings.
Here’s another modest proposal: replace the National Lottery with an art lottery by which the lucky winner gets to take one of the NG’s paintings for display in their own homes. Good for the paintings, good for the people, and good for the general level of cultural debate. It might even be good for the NG: they’re supposed to spread the word about art, and this would be outreach of the boldest kind.

Settling the dispute

It's about time to settle the question of whether the Madonna of the Pinks, recently acquired by the National Gallery, is really by Raphael. Well, here's the gen: it isn't. Brian Sewell's right on this one.
The test is simple. All of Raphael's many Madonnas show a young woman, beautiful certainly, modest, serene. Her expression - whether her gaze is directed at us or at her child - always indicates that Raphael had gone deeply into the mystery of who she represents and into the mystery of her knowledge of the divine choice which had fallen upon her. In short, she radiates intelligence - not the sort of intelligence we think of today, a purely intellectual cleverness, but intelligence with a capital I, of the sort a medieval theologian might have meant, a faculty which (to adopt our theologian's persona) will say nothing to us without our understanding that it is of divine origin. The divine spark.
She is not gormless. Look at the Madonna of the Meadows (in Vienna), the Madonna della Sedia (Florence) or the Alba Madonna (in Washington). None of them are gormless: none of them show anything other than an Intelligent young woman. The Madonna of the Pinks, I am sad to say, looks pretty thick, and I conclude from this that:
a) it was painted by a pupil trying unsuccessfully to imitate Raphael's style; and
b) the National Gallery (and by extension the taxpayers) have shelled out millions for a dud.

Ah well. Pop along there and bung them a few quid, if you can. The real Raphaels will be at the exhibition this autumn, and I wouldn't miss it for the world.

Sweetness and light

The National Gallery lured me in today: I resisted the urge to buy more prints than I could ever fit on my walls and stuck to three postcard-sized pictures that embodied my taste.
I was strongly tempted by Axel Gall's painting Lake Keitele, but couldn't find a print of the right size. It's a brilliant painting, which first caught my eye as I wandered past in search of Raphaels. It shows a Scandinavian lake criss-crossed with silver streaks: an abstract way of depicting the track of the boat of the hero Vainamoinen (apologies to any Finnish readers if I've got that name wrong). The concept is abstract but it fits perfectly.
But anyway, in the end I went for Raphael, Murillo and Leonardo, all depicting scenes notable for their sweetness of character. It is maybe not as shocking as an unmade bed: but one does not have to shock in order to challenge. When our contemporary artists relearn that, they may get less mockery.

Medieval beauty

Enough of this knocking copy. Tower Records in Piccadilly is if anything a more perilous place than Charing Cross Road. Serendipity struck there a few weeks ago when I ventured in and heard some music of such bittersweet beauty that I had to have it. I enquired and discovered that only one copy was left – the one that was playing. The CD was ‘O Lusitano’, a collection of late medieval Portuguese vilancetes and songs. I think the one that captivated me was the song ‘Dos estrellas le siguen Machado’, which looks to me as though it’s about two stars following someone called Machado, whatever that means. Who cares about lyrics anyway? Anglophone pop songs have devotees among folk who only know the words ‘hello’ and ‘Beckham’.
Maybe I had a previous life in medieval Iberia. Another song collection that grabbed me unexpectedly was ‘Cantigas de Santa Maria’, a collection of songs in praise of the Virgin from the court of that brilliant Renaissance man born two centuries early, Alfonso XIII of Castile. The alternation between ecstasy and comedy, between slow, heartfelt gentleness and robust tub-thumping tunes, is common to both collections, and seems to me characteristically medieval.
Late medieval Europe – roughly speaking, in the period from 1200 to 1500 – brought a great deal of beauty into the world. It was a world we would find unbearable, but they made things and did things in a way we would scarcely dare. That beauty expressed itself in many ways: in the cathedrals, flinging their stones across sacred space as though they were no more substantial than balsawood; in the ecstatic mysticism of St. Francis or Julian of Norwich; in the Book of Hours created by the Limbourg brothers for the Duke of Berry, in Queen Mary’s Psalter, in Giotto, in Dante (not finished the Paradiso yet, but trying), and in music, creating exquisite mood-paintings with the simplest of resources.
Anyone who visits late Medieval Europe once with eyes open and ears to hear will want to visit again.

The tremble factor

National Gallery, room 5: Flemish painters of the high Renaissance. One of them is David (not to be confused with the French revolutionary painter of the same name). Standing before his painting of the mystic marriage of St. Catherine, I found several thoughts competing for my mind:

- they were certainly heavily into symbolism, those Renaissance bods;

- and they were more interested in patrons than saints;

- most of all, the sheer virtuosity with which David - not one of the first rank of painters by any means - captured the folds in St. Catherine's red gown. It's just paint on canvas, for heaven's sake: but it's also the fold in the sleeves of the martyr's gown. A tremble moment.

Civilisation

Civilisation is a truly great book. So far I'm only up to the 1520s but it's already taught me things that I will never forget. The book is about thirty years old now but as fresh as ever because Kenneth Clark deals with themes that are timeless. He puts into words things that I could never do - why the great cathedrals are such noble monuments; why we find Raphael so eternally fresh; why such things as the Cluniac reform movement and the Renaissance matter. Along with another great book that I've read in the last twelvemonth - The Story of Art by Ernst Gombrich - it has opened up the subject.
Just one example: until I read Gombrich's discussion of cathedral architecture I had not realised just what the stones of Westminster Abbey, for instance, were trying to say. Now I can see that the builders were doing with stone what today we would do with metal and brick. The glorious arches and columns of a medieval cathedral never meant much to me before: they were just there. It was impressive in an intellectual way to think how they'd shifted all that limestone with such primitive equipment, but they meant nothing more than that. Now - thanks to those two great men - I can look at the Abbey and see the stones expressing a vision of which those old masons and workers were the bearers: a vision of using matter to express spiritual pefection. It could not be more awe-inspiring.
In our time we are swamped by images, so it takes a real effort to put oneself in the shoes of folk who lived in a time when an image was a rare and precious thing. But it's worth doing.