Pallant House: Conscience and Conflict

Merlyn Evans, Distressed Area (1938)

The Spanish Civil War (1936-39) was an internal conflict; but it was also a crucible in which the world forces of left and right met each other, and thus a battleground for competing international ideologies. In England, we are familiar chiefly with the literary responses - Auden, Laurie Lee, George Orwell. Last year's exhibition Conscience and Conflict showed us the waves sent out through the art world by what now feels like a dry run of WWII.


The closeness of art, society and politics is made clear in a photograph in the vestibule, 'Artists painting a hoarding in Bouverie Street, London, 17 Feb 1939' (John F Stephenson). They are painting the slogan,  'Send Food to Spain'. Bouverie Street was one of the 22 hoardings made available by London County Council. Soon it was defaced by Sir Oswald Moseley's blackshirts.


During the Spanish Civil War, artists found themselves committed to a public cause, and thus to a publicly available artistic language. Art was also stepping in where politicians feared to tread: in 1936, Britain and 24 other countries signed a non-intervention agreement, terrified of the conflict escalating. France and Britain maintained an arms embargo, and the Republicans could only buy weapons from Soviet Russia, while the Fascists were supplied by Fascist Italy and Germany. Many organisations were founded to send aid to Spain, and we get a poignant sense of grass-roots activity in Clive Branson's documentary paintings: Noreen and Rosa (1940), studying a volume from the Left Book Club; Daily Worker (1939) showing a newspaper seller in Battersea and Selling the Daily Worker outside Projectile Engineering Works (1937), the point of the last being the attempt to create a feeling of solidarity among the factory workers for their Spanish comrades. Henry Rayner's drypoint etchings, There is no Peace, There is no Shelter make a more direct appeal to human compassion.


The war coincided with the Surrealist movement, which had an important exhibition in June 1936, on the eve of the conflict. One might have thought that the art of the unconscious would have little to say to, or about, the political. On the contrary, there was an intense and precise engagement. Papier-mâché masks at an anti-Chamberlain protest mark surrealism's presence on the streets. A surrealist pamphlet provides an acute analysis of the situation: 'We know that capital will not respond to socialist democracy with only constitutional means; we know that violence is not only the weapon of the proletariat; Britain's policy is implicitly pro-fascist, it freely allows Portugal to arm fascists'. Perhaps the most iconic picture today to come from this engagement is Miró's 'Aidez Espagne'. This was originally intended as the image for a one-franc postage stamp, but the French government didn't issue it. Surrealism captured, too, the monstrous and desolate, in Edward Burra's Medusa, or the faceless nuns of John Middleton's works, drawing on Jung's female archetype and at the same time pointing the finger at the Catholic Church's complicity in fascist atrocities. This theme is addressed in other works, such as André Masson's La Messe a Pampelune (1937) and John Banting's Absolution: Spanish Civil War (1937). Beyond the surrealist ambit, John Armstrong's tempera paintings of bombed-out buildings in scorched plains are more powerful for being drenched in Mediterranean colours: the light associated in art with gorgeousness and the relish for life here illuminates only a splintered emptiness.


Not all artists were sympathetic to the Republicans: the modernist Francis Rose (1909-79) was strongly pro-Nationalist. His satirical The Reds are Really Not Bad Sorts, or the Tastes of War (1936) bristles with contempt for what he must have seen as a communist menace. For Rose, at least, the right side won, and the exhibition ends with a reminder of the misery of war: Clive Branson's Hut Against Trees, Prison Camp in Spain (1938) has tremendous further impact when we learn from the label that he himself was imprisoned in Spain. Many ghosts hover over the gallery, among them John Cornford, dead at 21, and Julian Bell, volunteer ambulance driver, brother of Quentin, daughter of Vanessa, who suffered a breakdown on hearing the news of his death. Or Felicia Browne (1904-36), artist and communist, the first British volunteer to die in action, whose sketchbooks were brought back from the Front and stand as testament to the high emotions and high ideals recorded in this wonderful and revealing exhibition.

Tate Britain: Barbara Hepworth

When does art become over-familiar, so ingrained that a surprise response becomes impossible? Hepworth's smooth, primal forms, Moore's landscapes morphed into human form; walking around Tate Britain, where I spent many hours many years ago, I found myself nostalgic for the time when the modern pressed itself into my consciousness, when it wasn't familiar or embalmed in reverence.

Tate Britain's Hepworth show was a fruitful re-introduction to this stern yet serene creator, giving us a clear account of stages in Hepworth's artistic career. Room One introduced us to direct carving: while the classical way was for a sculptor to model in clay and then leave it to assistants to cast the work in bronze, in the 1920s a number of sculptors (Jacob Epstein, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska among them) carved directly into stone. This method was not, it seems, all that revolutionary, and was in fact taught in art schools; but it was associated with decorative rather than fine art. This is always a tricky distinction;. Is John Skeaping's charming Fish (1929-30) a mantelpiece item, while his (attributed) torsos, because they are sort of Grecian, 'fine'? Whose values are at work here?  But perhaps, albeit sceptically, one can detect a kind of higher seriousness in the austere figures which look back to archaic and classical forms next to the charming animal sculptures by contemporaries like Alan Durst, Ursula Edgecumbe, Elsie Henderson. Who were they?  We wonder how fame's trail was blazed, exactly. How many artists, like Leon Underwood, were just not that interested in the networking and self-promotion that lead to a place in the galaxy? How meritocratic is the art history we tell ourselves?

Anyway, I found myself fascinated as much by the kinds of stone as by the works themselves: anhydrite, polyphant, white alabaster, Hoptonwood, Bath, Corsehill - each one suggesting something to the artist's mind by its heft, grain and texture. There is always the magic of working against the stony matter, too: hard, cool Parisian marble becomes the warm soft bodies of Hepworth's Doves (1927). There is a strong sense of contiuity with other epochs, in the seated, inwardly asorbed female figures with their ancient geometrical hair (Contempative Figure, 1928). While the block of stone is suited to bust and seated figure, its grain and curve following sometimes a twist in the body, wood tends towards the vertical. But it, too, steps out of its time: Standing Figure (1929-30), with its stylized face and blank eyes recall the kouroi of Egypt. This was a time, we remember, when artists were finding in the so-called 'primitive' a path away from the oppressive canons of academic tradition and the vacuity of modern life.

Room Two, 'Studio',  is about the partnership, artistic and personal, of Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson. A work of art makes us wonder about the process of its making, and one of the best ways of tracing that process is to become, imaginatively, the artist herself. And so, in front of Head (1930-31), I feel the Cumberland alabaster in my hand, my body latched on to its vast geological history and the landscape it comes from, my skin answering to its smoothness, my mind's eye picking up the face pushing outwards from within the stone. Carving is unearthing, dis-covering. Everything leads to a kind of simplicity which resonates, which has presence. Modernity makes its mark room: in the Cubist abstraction of Two Heads (1932), in the formal experiments of the Mother and Child series (1934), or the Freudian moment in the phallic imagery of Two Forms (1933) and Standing Figure (1934). Yet at the essential, mystical level, the view is always in the direction of the primal, the prehistoric, the work which bypasses the rational historic mind and speaks to our instincts, as a cliff-face or a cloud may speak to us.
Room 3, International Modernism, puts Hepworth in the context of abstract artists of the period: Alexander Calder, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Piet Mondrian, Auguste Herbin. There are pages from the magazines through which their work became visible.  And here are the kinds of pieces I auto-associate with the name 'Hepworth': smooth, polished, elemental forms (simply called 'Forms'); smooth and gleaming, like distended eggs, tapering standing figures like megaliths; distillations of sand-dunes, the undulations of landscape, forms in a rock pool. The base becomes part of the work. There is something theatrical going on, a feeling that that stones have a mysterious life and speak to each other across quiet spaces. Serenity, purity of a ritual kind takes over from the roughness and mess of ordinary life. Here, and in the next room, we find the family of wooden carvings, hollowed out, painted, strung like Aeolian harps - expressions of the feelings of a landscape, dream versions of caves, tunnels and subterranean streams.
We move into a room of larger wooden sculptures, from the hard tropical wood guarea. These are inspired by a visit to Greece, soon after the tragic death of the artist's son Paul, aged 23. We are invited to perceive a funereal quality to the sculptures, and perhaps there is one, or is that simply a case of reading what we know into what we see? Before we leave, there is a reconstruction of a pavilion for a 1965 exhibition in the Netherlands, with the bronze works exhibited there - looping and folding concentric bands, petrified ripples.
I didn't mind seeing Hepworth indoors. Of course these works take on another dimension in a landscape setting, but sculpture shouldn't depend on a particular environment, and I thought they kept their charge in the soft-toned spaces of the Tate's downstairs galleries. The main weakness of the exhibition was the rather anxious promotion of Hepworth as an international modernist - which she was, but there isn't enough here about Cornwall and the St Ive's community, as if that would make her seem parochial to London gallery-goers; and the more her modernity was stressed, the more I saw the prehistoric and the turning away from modern life. But that is a paradox within Modernism itself. More importantly, the exhibition let the sculptures do their work, speak to the spirit, and quicken our response to the earth, the land, the undulations of that wave, that hillside.

John Finnemore, Teddy Lester

John Finnemore, author of Teddy Lester Captain of Cricket (London: Chambers, 1916), you have given me a joyous lifelong memory. I discovered this book as a boy in my uncle's house. Its orange boards and thick flaky paper intoxicate me still. Now I have rebound Captain of Cricket, I have one other  title in the series, and I search for more whenever I'm in a second-hand bookshop. Teddy, easily the best cricketer in Slapton School, takes the reputation of the house seriously and comes down hard on bullying. He is firm but fair and does what is right. Frank Sandys, brilliant new boy, bowls with a queer shuffling run. His stock ball is a googly (odd, since that is meant to be a surprise delivery), occasionally mixed up with a straight fast one. Ito the Bat is Japanese and bowls with a bizarre action, hence his soubriquet. Teddy and his chums play cricket, in a strange form of the game where bowlers 'find a spot' and become unplayable. They stroll around Slapton school and save the country. Their teachers barely exist.

Penny for your thoughts, Ito, old man.

Who were you, John Finnemore? Wikipedia says there is nothing left now but census returns, and reconstructs your (childless) life with Emma, teaching in Welsh schools, and eventually making real money from writing. I imagine you in your elementary classroom, speaking Welsh, dreaming up Boy's Own plotlines. Is there really nothing out there? No school archives In Aberystwyth, no letters, no manuscripts? Why did you buy a house with fifteen bedrooms?

John Finnemore, you died aged 52. Your books are rare finds today. You are not listed on goodreads, but you are a good read. When I pass by an empty cricket ground, sometimes, at dusk, I stand quite still. The whole of Slapton watches with hushed breath. Everything depends on this last wicket stand, and Frank Sandys is shuffling in to bowl.

Erika Langmuir, A Closer Look: Still Life

This short book, one of a series produced by the National Gallery, is a very helpful introduction to the genre of still life painting. The author explains its beginnings in the Greek xenia (offerings to guests), now known only from description, and Roman wall paintings, like those preserved at Herculaneum and Pompeii. In the medieval and Renaissance period the naturalistic depiction of flowers and objects was justified by their inclusion in narrative paintings, though there are fascinating instances of stand-alones like Gaddi's painting of a cupboard with eucharistic objects in Santa Croce, Florence. The genre really comes into its own around 1600. In just a few pages we get a clear idea of the essential elements of the Dutch still life and the Spanish bodegón, and the subgenres of flower painting and breakast piece. There is an interesting comparison of still life elements in paintings by Caravaggio and Velazquez, in which the author is not shy of expressing an opinion (avoiding the flat even-handedness that can mar expository writing). Other questions are contemplated: how are we to understand the symbolism of a still life, obvious in the case of a vanitas but in other cases more obscure to the modern viewer? What internal dramas are evoked in these mesmerising compositions? I like the thought that often the still life bypasses thought and speaks directly to our sensuous response to the world. The great Chardin is touched on - I would have liked more on him, remembering the wonderful RA exhibition - and there are close engagements with works by Cezanne and Picasso. Because the book is centred on the NG collection, it does not take us further into the twentieth century or into other media like photography and video. I am reading Charles Sterling's book on Still Life, which is superb but weighty with knowledge and lists of painters I have never heard of. This book provided a useful summary of the key episodes of the story. Erika Langmuir, former Head of Education at the NG, has a gift for clear yet passionate writing, and the series as a whole (rebranded as A Closer Look) is beautifully produced.

Erich Fromm, Fear of Freedom

The basic thesis of Fear of Freedom is this. We want more freedom for ourselves, but at the same time we are afraid of it. As individuals, we grow up and become more independent. But the more independent we are, the more alone, the more isolated we are: the help of our elders is taken away and at the same time we see others as competitors for the same goods – success, attention, comfort. It’s hard to be alone and embattled for too long.  So it becomes natural to seek refuge in a group, in a system which gives us guidance and protection. We say we dislike authority, then, but at the same time we want it. At a deep level, we feel a need to submit to something which makes us feel part of something bigger: membership of a religion, of a class or a political movement can all do this.

All of this is part of Fromm’s attempt to explain the rise of fascism in the twentieth century, the phenomenon of modern society renouncing the freedoms it has won and embracing the most authoritarian of codes. Here are three kinds of authority which Fromm talks about: these we can call external, internal and invisible.

External authority we can cover very quickly. It is simply anyone out there who is in some position to tell you what to do, or stop you doing something. Parents, teachers, policemen, religious leaders, doctors, perhaps writers – depending on the circumstances, people such as this will have some authority over us. That authority might be legitimate or illegitimate, we might be right to obey it or morally obliged to rebel against it, it might be exercised benignly or maliciously, it might have been acquired honestly or by corruption. The only point here is that it is external to us, we can clearly see that it comes from outside us.

The second kind of authority is internal. This is when the rules we gathered from the outside become internalized, become part of the way we regulate ourselves. The whole point of making young people go to bed at certain times, I suppose, is that eventually this becomes second instinct. In the same way, the various codes and values that we pick up in our early lives will get internalized. To a large extent, they become our conscience, the little voice inside us telling us what’s right or wrong. Conscience is actually a massively important element in Western culture. In the Protestant Reformation, a huge weight was placed on the importance of the individual conscience, which took over from the external authority of the Church. Moral philosophers like Kant elaborated on this idea at length. Just possibly we might be living at a time when that idea is weakening. I can only speak anecdotally, but there seem to be many examples of people acting without any reference to internal conscience at all: some MPs bleating that their expenses were within the rules is a case in point. But I suspect that a lot of the anger directed at politicians comes from an uneasy feeling that they in some way reflect our own behaviour. What can I get away with? How can I play the system? We all dislike those who remind us of our own faults.  Is conscience still a strong determining factor in modern daily life? Maybe it is. In today’s paper, the boarding card airport shop story, where retailers have been making millions in VAT savings and not passing them on to cutomers;  on another page, City of London people collectively lifting a car off someone who’s got hurt. Evidence points all ways.

After external and internal, Fromm’s third type of authority is what he calls ‘invisible’. This is when you’re obeying an authority without even realizing it. How does this work? If you’ve ever seen someone being hypnotized, you’ll know how easy it is to plant ideas in another person’s mind. A person can genuinely believe he is lost and feel distressed, for example, simply because those thoughts have been put in his mind by the hypnotist, even though he has no recollection of having these suggested to him. According to Fromm, you and I are for much of the time in a very similar condition. We all have, say, likes and dislikes in music, political opinions, preferences for particular clothes and so on. But how did those ideas arise? Much as we like to think that we figured it all out ourselves, we would also recognise that a lot of opinion forming is going on around us: advertisements, newspapers, and so-called common sense can all provide us with pre-packaged views that we willingly make our own. And, like the hypnotized man, we come to believe they are our own. It’s useful. We don’t have time or energy to think through the whole of politics for ourselves, for example, so we read our preferred newspaper to learn what our opinions are on a range of subjects. Influential figures in the media can help us too. Except, of course, we think those really are our opinions. Here’s a scenario to illustrate the point.  You watch a football match on TV. You listen to the analysis of an authority figure, a pro. You think, yes, that makes sense. And, later, when someone asks you your opinion of the game you more or less repeat what he said. Only, when you’re saying it, you actually think it’s your own analysis. I’ve expressed opinions on books and films and realized later that I’ve really just repeated a review I read. And I’ve heard highly educated people do just the same thing. Partly it’s because we all need to belong to a group – it’s a basic human requirement – and membership depends on sharing the same ideas as others in the group. The group might be a religious community, or a class, or a union, or a group of political activists; or we might yearn to be accepted into a wine-tasting and opera-loving set, or a merry band of computer game fanatics. Any such group will have its required set of beliefs which you need to embrace to get the full benefits of membership.  And pretty soon and pretty painlessly you’ll believe that they really were your own private views and tastes all along.

So, one suggestion in this book is that while we’re considering, and maybe resenting, one external authority we’re very much in the grip of another authority altogether, the current of popular opinion that carries us along.  Does it matter? To some extent, it must be inevitable that we simply pick up certain views from what’s going on around us. It’s impossible to think everything through individually, and there’s no great shame in adopting at least some of the fashions of the time. But if we really want to stand as individuals, we should leave some space to think some things through ourselves. Academic work provides some opportunity for that, though maybe not much. But everyone knows the satisfaction that comes from thinking something through in some area of life. You might really think about the football match and find Alan Hansen thinks the same thing. Fine, your thought is original because it originated in you, not outside you. Man is a pack animal, and we will all to an extent go with the pack. But we also have a capacity to pull away for a moment, and do the incredibly hard work of actually forming thoughts and judgements in our own minds. We can draw on external authority if it helps; we are free to reject external authority, if we have good grounds for doing so and it’s not just disagreement for its own sake. That way we begin to develop our own voice, to be authentic. That is where our real authority as persons begins.

Jeff Wall

Jeff Wall

Jeff Wall, Steve's Farm, Steveston 1991

A grit road passes, undulating, through an unremarkable town. In the middle distance, someone walks unhurriedly towards us along one of the light grey tyre tracks.  We notice two horses, on a patch of  ground behind dilapidated wooden buildings.  Around these gently animated figures the stillness gathers. This is a place waiting for something to happen. The road, the tyre tracks, stand as traces of purpose. Beyond the sheds and the huddled houses we sense infinities of space.

In the stillness, we notice: a loose portico, about to slide to the ground; rusting vehicles; scrubby brown grass on a shallow embankment and field. Behind the crumbling houses there’s a pile of timber for burning (a gutted outbuilding?). Echoing this, fallen tree branches lie opposite. Above, the blue is draining out of a still, even sky. In the background, where the road swerves to the right in the distance and disappears, a row of identical houses leads us to the picture’s edge.  We look again and we notice that the road is more of a track, encroached on by wild grass; the field is becoming a wilderness; indifferent trees sway slightly, under a dying sky. It’s a frontier place, a threshold between human dwelling and ragged nature. It’s also a transparency, over a lighted box, and it’s entrancingly beautiful.

I am in Tate Modern, looking at Jeff Wall’s Steve’s Farm, Steveston (1980).  I’ve seen it before, at a small exhibition in Norwich Castle two years ago, and coming back to it I remember the details: those horses, the holes in the roof, that spindly tree near the corner of the field. I don’t think it’s just chance that those things have stayed in my mind, though chance is always an essential element in what we take away with us from exhibitions. But details - in art, in life - become truly memorable when they belong to a powerful atmosphere. And Steve’s Farm is typical of Wall’s pictures in that it does impress on your mind a really strong, strange feeling. His pictures don’t hit you, sensation-like. Instead, they seep into you as keep looking at them. They are a slow-burn emotional experience. Though they are made in the ‘instant’ medium of photography, the slow kind of looking they induce is anything but instantaneous. You look, you register, you take your time.

What is the atmosphere of Steve’s Farm? I would say it’s melancholy. Not operatic, tragic grief, but the sadness of a ruined farm and of identical houses, each as solitary as a Carthusian cell, surrounded by lone and level straggly land. A sadness of wonky fences and clapped out cars, of living on the edge of nowhere. It’s the melancholy so wound into the fabric of life you don’t even notice it, except when you’re still, except when you stand just outside it for a moment, as we do now. The subjects are neither diminished nor aggrandised by the contrivances of art. They return us to the stuff of life, simply more disposed, for a while, to see it.

The stuff of experience, however terrible the experience, is still just ordinary stuff.  Photography, the recording art, is a wonderful medium for reminding us of this. But ordinary things have one peculiar quality: namely, they don’t exist. Or rather, things are only ordinary when they are on the margins of vision, as this town must have been ordinary to the driver who passed through it, an hour ago, a day ago. Things stop being ordinary when you start looking at them. Take the most everyday, dull thing you can think of and start drawing it, and it becomes the most interesting thing in the world. As we look at it, we feel that it is an important matter to capture its form, its texture, its presence.

And this gazing on the ordinary is what much of Wall’s art is about. His suburban images, based in his home town of Vancouver, become as fascinating as Chardin’s pots and hares. Many of his  photos remark on what usually goes unremarked, they describe the nondescript.  They remind me of David Lynch’s filming technique of shooting scenes from one fixed point, turning a sideways glimpse into a frontal gaze. This attentiveness to things is analogous to the moral act of giving your attention to another, of looking sympathetically beyond yourself, but it is not in itself moral, or morally improving. It is also paradoxical, as the looking itself involves some kind of organisation, as we assimilate the scene before us: the immediate impression turns into a mediated, meaningful vision. Another way of looking at Wall’s photos is to see them as a meditation on the processing we do as we sort the world into ordered images.

Central to the ordered, artful image are genre and composition. We look again at Steve’s Farm, and we notice that it is a certain kind of picture, a landscape. And it does the things that landscapes in the classical tradition tend to do: it disposes its parts into a harmonious, balanced whole. It makes us think of Dutch pastoral, say, or the classical world of Poussin. As in the old masters, the skyline in this picture divides the picture into a ratio which looks close to the Golden Mean. Like any number of seventeenth-century pictures, the road is a device to lead us from foreground to middleground and background. It also balances the strong horizontal of the houses, which is further counterpointed by the orthogonals: the wooden border and the water channel on the left, and the line of grass and fence on the right. While the diagonals lead us towards the vanishing point, the foreground is anchored by the shed, fence and tree on the bottom left. This helps to pull our attention back to inspect this waste ground. Land is connected to sky by the treetops. Most prominently, there is one tree centre left, one central and one on the right, each at a different depth in the pictorial field: they articulate these receding spatial planes, and also divide the landscape into four coherent vertical sections, making it more legible. There is a rough symmetry between the land on either side of the road, made more visually stimulating by having the road off-centre, and by the varied levels of ground. The rhythm of the wooden posts on the left is answered by the pattern of house shapes in the distance.

These devices of geometrical composition work with colour harmony: the image is unified by dominant tones of grey-blue (the road, the fence, the sky, the slate roofs), and green-brown. This is fitfully punctuated by the white and creamy house fronts, illuminated from the right. By such means, every part of the picture leads our eye easily to another. Good composition always draws us back into a picture, creating a satisfyingly regulated world which we instinctively don’t want to leave.

In the classical tradition, the harmonics of composition signify a harmonic, ordered society. The equilibrium of the image is a formal equivalent of the equitable cosmos. The Dutch landscape or interior is characteristically about the prosperity that follows good government, in the well-ordered soul and the well-ordered society. Wall’s images evoke this tradition, so we can see how his subject-matter overturns the usual repertoire of images. Prosperity has turned to shabbiness – uncultivated land, a defunct farm. A thriving society has become a desolate, unsocial world, where life is lived in isolation. This is the end of a story, an anti-pastoral where man’s enterprise is sinking back into stark, unbeautified nature. Thus the composition is not merely a technical device, but a way of making the image an ironic commentary on a whole tradition. At the same time, composition also balances, but does not resolve, the various tensions – between man and nature, between the old (the farm) and the new (the houses in the distance), between movement and stillness. And between the smart, weightless technology of the work and the drab, solid poverty of the thing represented.

To take another example: Milk (1984) is deliberately, one might say ostentatiously, composed: the bush balances the figure of the man, and this left column of the picture adds visual interest to the whole scene:  it creates a further space in the receding banister and staircase, and its verticals answer the tilted horizontal of the pavement. It’s unrelated in terms of narrative to the man, but cover it up with your hand and the picture loses much of its power. The variety of textures creates a visual interest:  glass is placed against brick; there is a syncopation of different rhythms of brickwork; the plant becomes an intriguing remnant of organic life,  enveloped by the mundane and the manmade. Like Steve’s Farm, Milk also alludes to paintings: the man, modelled in strong chiaroscuro, could easily belong in a painting by Caravaggio. He’s the stark obverse of Murillo’s cherubic streetkids.

But what is happening here? What has prompted this man to jolt the carton of milk and send its contents flying? We do not know. The more we look at these pictures, the more questions they raise. They lead us from the seen to the unseen. Techniques of absolute clarity are used to create an awareness of mystery. The work also directs us to think about the medium. Photography is an art based on light. In Wall’s work, light is fundamental in other ways: these images are transparencies, they are in light boxes, each one is a revelation of some kind. Yet what they reveal points to the unrevealed, to what is not transparent – the secret lives in suburban houses, the tragedies that happen on a street corner, and pass in an instant. Illumination is effective because it points us to the shadows.

This sense of mystery is also bound up with a feeling of wonder. Part of the fascination in Jeff Wall’s work is the complexity of the process. Images like Milk might be inspired by something happening on a street, which is then painstakingly recreated using actors, in dozens of separate shots.  Others, like A Sudden Gust of Wind (based on an image by Hokusai) or Dead Troops Talk, are studio fabrications. No such scene ever took place in the world out there: they exist only as art. These last two works cited have been digitally assembled to create an entirely new image. Sometimes this process of meticulous construction can take months. It is a kind of inversion of Gerhard Richter’s paintings of photos, or Ron Mueck’s sculptures. For while those artists use hyper-realist techniques to bring painting and sculpture close to the condition of photography, Jeff Wall takes photography in the direction of the crafting, fabricating process of the painting and sculpture workshop. In each case, we feel intrigued, and the sensation of some marvellous skill, beyond our comprehension, is part of the viewing experience.

Jeff Wall’s photos are utterly clear, easily readable images. And yet they involve us deeply by prompting complex responses. We can read them according to a classical language, and see them as a kind of deconstruction of that language. We can explore their ambience of mystery, imagining the narrative around them, consciously sensing the dislocating, rather eerie feelings that drift through us as they unfold their strangeness. We can relate sympathetically to the pathos of the subject matter, and then interpret them as post-modern explorations of artifice and the impossibility of pinning down the authentic. And we can be rapt by a fascination with the means of their production. Above all, they are such intensely, radiantly beautiful creations that they seem to offer some kind of transcendence, transposing the mass of reality into the ethereal world of the lighted box and the thin film of transparency. These glowing creations suggest stained glass, a juncture between earthly and perfect light. Reverently attentive to the texture of the real, Jeff Wall’s photography is finally a visionary art.

Elements of Abstraction

From the Archives ...

Elements of Abstraction: Space, Line and Interval in Modern British Art

Southampton City Art Gallery, 30 September 2005 – 8 January 2006.

Elements of Abstraction is an exhibition of abstract art in Britain, from about 1914 to the present. The sixty or so works on display take up three rooms of Southampton Art Gallery, an ideally peaceful space in which to soak up a rich variety of paintings, some of them lamentably neglected by art historians.

Before 1920, we find two kinds of British artists testing the borders of figurative art. There were the Bloomsbury group, who adopted the sensuous colours of Gauguin and Matisse to produce images of bourgeois comfort; and then there were the Vorticists, represented here by Edward Wadsworth. Theirs is a very different language, close to Italian futurism. It expresses energy and power through thrusting angles and aggressive compositions. But both Bloomsbury and Vorticism stand as false starts in the light of what happened later.

For in the war years, and the decade following, Britain became remote from continental art: these were the years of Russian Constructivism, of De Stijl and the Bauhaus, but initially these movements had little impact on British art. It was not until the thirties that groups and magazines with stridently modern names appeared: Unit One, Axis, Circle. Political convulsions abroad brought important artists to Britain: Naum Gabo, in particular, had a far-reaching influence. The dominant language was Constructivism – the relation of art to science and engineering, through pure geometric forms. This visual rhetoric expressed a productive, utopian social spirit and represented freedom from oppression.

British artists picked up on these ideas in different ways. In the forties and fifties, two main groups emerged. One was the West Country School, who took the Constructivist vocabulary and, not always consciously, absorbed into it the sights and atmosphere of the Cornish coastline.  Ben Nicholson’s hypnotic squares and circles point to the local scene with their soft greys and browns. Peter Lanyon’s dramatic perspectives, and Terry Frost’s painterly grids, both resonate with the sensations of the Cornish landscape.  Even Roger Hilton, who wanted the picture surface to be an autonomous image, suggests the local scene: his painterly Black on White March 54, could be country roads or hedges on snowy fields, seen from far above. Through such artists, the Constructivist language had lost its revolutionary Russian origins, and become applied to the exploration of the inner life and natural forms.

The second major group using Constructivist ideas was gathered around Victor Pasmore in London after 1945. Their more hard-edged work articulates  post-war optimism. Artists like Kenneth and Mary Martin used geometric art and modern materials to express a defiant modernity, self-consciously international.

This fascinating group – other names are Adrian Heath, Gillian Wise, Anthony Hill – was soon overshadowed in the art world by Abstract Expressionism. Their successors are the Systems Group, who employ mathematical formulae to make visual patterns. They, too, have been overlooked, and it is good to have a chance to see their work here: when described it sounds severe and unemotional, but there is also something exhilarating in these complex, repetitive configurations.

Another strand is that of British colourists – there are fine works here by Heron and Hodgkin, grandiloquent canvases by John Hoyland and an example of Callum Innes’s poured paint technique.  If there is a theme that links all the approaches taken it is a generally positive mood. Whether the work is contemplative in the St Ives mode, or ebullient as in the energetic brushwork and flaming colours of Gillian Ayres, it consistently communicates a passion for making. A well-produced catalogue, with colour plates of some rarely seen works and meticulous scholarly essays by Brandon Taylor and Alan Fowler, adds to the attraction of this intriguing and uplifting show.

 

 

 

Stanley Spencer, Sandham Memorial Chapel, Burghclere

 

Washing Lockers

Sandham Memorial Chapel is an undemonstrative redbrick building by Lionel Pearson, in the Hampshire village of Burghclere. Small and low, with two almshouses as wings, it sits at the end of a lawn, partially screened from the road by trees and fence, quite at home in a landscape of green fields, thick hedgerows and temperate winds. The Chapel is an Oratory of All Souls, and was dedicated in 1927 as a private memorial to Lieutenant Willoughby Sandham, who died in 1919 from an illness contracted in the Macedonian campaign.

 

This unobtrusive place is also one of the most remarkable monuments to have emerged from a war in any country, for its interior walls are painted by Stanley Spencer, with scenes recollected from his own war experience and transfigured into deeply religious images. At one remove from the bustle and publicity of galleries, and detached from the relentless rush of media images of today’s conflicts, the Chapel, and the masterpiece it houses, offers something increasingly rare – an apt space for contemplating serious things. It is a quiet place in which to consider war, and man in war, and the redeeming powers of art.

 

The paintings of Sandham Memorial chapel are rooted in the personal experience of the artist. The bare facts can be briefly told. In 1915 the 24-year-old Stanley Spencer enlisted in the Royal Army Medical Corps and was stationed as a medical orderly at the Beaufort war Hospital in Bristol. In August the next year he volunteered for active service overseas and, after training at Tweseldon Camp near Farnham in Surrey, was stationed in Salonika (in Macedonia) with the 68^th field Ambulances. In October 1917 Spencer retrained as an infantryman with the 7th Battalion of the Royal Berkshire Regiment, and spent some months on the front line. All of these places figure in the Sandham paintings. A bout of malaria brought Spencer home, where, under orders as a commissioned official war artist, he painted the first of his works dealing with war, Travoys with Wounded Soldiers arriving at a Dressing Station at Smol, Macedonia (1919, now in the Imperial War Museum).

 

Travoys is not part of the Sandham scheme, but it anticipates in theme and technique much of what Spencer was to explore in the later work. Its subject is not the destruction of battle, but rather man’s capacity for creative, collaborative work. It is about the making of persons, not the breaking of bodies. In harmonious alliance with the men, a line of mules brings the wounded on stretchers to a dressing station. Mules and men look towards a lighted space beyond them, where medical staff treat a patient. Positioned above and behind the group, like a ghostly spectator, we look in too. The scene is imbued with lineaments of Christian iconography: we are reminded of the shepherds and kings looking on at the glowing stable of the infant Christ. These echoes of the miraculous are resolutely located in the real: the details of uniforms and harness are carefully recorded, and nothing is happening that could not have happened. Yet the scene has a powerful atmosphere of transcendence: the emphasis is not on the characters as individuals but on the way they are bound together by work and mutual help into a compact of fellowship. Drama is evoked by a steep, almost vertical perspective, which makes the pictorial space seem to thrust itself towards us. The scene also anticipates the Sandham pictures with its suggestion of a narrative, taking us from darkness to light, from suffering to salvation. The mules, for which the artist evidently had a special affection, are to return, at the centre of the great Resurrection scene on the East wall of the Chapel.

 

Over the next few years, Spencer produced some of his great explicitly religious paintings, concentrating in particular on scenes from the Passion. But memories of war burned within him: the Macedonian landscape reappears, for example, in Crucifixion, taking the place of his usual setting, his home village of Cookham. In 1923 he was staying with the painter Henry Lamb, according to his host sitting ‘at a table all day evolving acres of Salonica and Bristol war compositions’. By chance the two painters were visited by Mr and Mrs J L Behrend (she was Sandham’s sister) who very soon decided to commission Spencer’s work as the memorial work it is today.

 

Spencer is said to have replied to the commission with the comment ‘What ho, Giotto!’, and Sandham Chapel is influenced in terms of concept and arrangement by Giotto’s Arena Chapel in Padua (though an early experiment in imitating Giotto to the extent of using fresco failed). Spencer was closely involved in the architectural design, framing the sequence of images in arches and predella panels, and exploiting the large spaces of upper wall spaces and the east wall to create complex large-scale compositions.

 

The context of the chapel affects our reading of the paintings, too. They refer to each other in ways which would be impossible in a gallery setting. The rhythm of arches, the disposition of small and large spaces, creates a visual drama which depends on the space and light of this particular architectural setting. Throughout, we feel a powerful religious imagination, whereby minutely observed everyday items and daily routines are invested with symbolic meaning. This is the journey of Everyman from darkness and pain to the homecoming of the Resurrection and the revelation of the sanctity of ordinary experience. It is, in the artist’s words, ‘a mixture of real and spiritual fact’. Like Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, it has at its centre the notion of epiphany, whereby normal things and events reveal great mysteries.

 

This inhabitation of the concrete and material by the spiritual is clear in the very first painting in the first arch on the north wall, Convoy Arriving. A squat, colourful bus bearing wounded soldiers arrives at the Beaufort War Hospital. The gates are swung open to allow its entry. The details are based on remembered experience: a mean-looking warder is apparently based on a real individual; his keys are the Burghclere chapel keys, and the rhododendrons outside the gates are from Burghclere too. Everything represented is taken from the real world. But in being painted it is transposed to a new order of meaning. The opening image of an entry echoes our own entry into the Chapel and signals an interior journey which will match the physical journey of the soldiers’ healing. In the space of the chapel, connotations play on the mind. Gates opening and keys suggest the keys of St Peter at the gates of heaven, but equally, with the power of the bus and the stern warder, the Harrowing of Hell; as the bus leaves the dense flowers for the bare drive, we seem to see, repeated, the story of Adam and Eve’s expulsion from Eden and entry to the hardship of mortal life. As with Travoys, we notice a lack of individualising expression among the patients, and a curious absence of distinct intimate relationships: the people are bound together by situation, by shared action, simply by being together.

 

Spencer’s pictures allude to Christian iconography, and also have relations of tone and meaning with each other. Beneath Convoy Arriving is the first predella picture, Scrubbing the Floor. All the predella pictures stress the floor, the earth, and in them the vertiginous perspective flattens out into a gravity-bound underworld – here marked by dark corridors and the inner darkness of the troubled man obsessively scrubbing the floor. His mental distress, and the awkward movements of the three others who step around him, mark an emotional shift after the expectations of the wounded above. It is through descent into this world, Spencer seems to be hinting, through the discipline of menial work, that we are to be truly reunited and healed. Perhaps, in the man’s body and the proximity of his hands to another man’s feet, we catch an echo of Christ washing the feet of his disciples.

 

Once our mind is open to the play of associations, with no fixed theological or narrative frame to restrict them, then we construe Christian allusions throughout. Ablutions is a baptism, a representation of inner cleansing, with the pattern of raised arms striking a gentle uplifting note. The laid-out mats on which men lie in Kit Inspection are the graves in which the dead wait for judgment, laying out their account of themselves, each in his lonely space. And in the astonishing Dug-Out / Stand-To, the soldiers are again somewhere between life and death, between two worlds as they wait apprehensively for an onslaught, anticipated in the cloud of barbed wire that seems about to descend. The trenches are open graves, but this death is only a prelude to the Resurrection on the Eastern wall, to which some men look in hope.

 

The Resurrection is a composition on a grand scale, yet the individual details avoid the loud rhetoric of grandeur. There are no heroic gestures, no postures or expressions of wonderment. The resurrected shake hands, pile up their crosses and get on with the business of presenting themselves to Christ, a small figure who seems rather overwhelmed by it all. As in Pasolini’s film of St Matthew’s Gospel, the business of salvation is entirely unceremonious. One man cuts another free from barbed wire. Another is greeted by his dog.  Some wind puttees. The soldier on the smashed mule cart sits bemused, while driver and the mules start to turn to Christ. What is moving is the way in which all seem to address this salvation as if it were an absolutely normal activity. Just as the ordinary is transfigured into spiritual symbol in Spencer, so the great providential events become everyday happenings.

 

Iconographic references are equally rich on the southern wall: the soldiers like angels with their floating army macs in Filling Water Bottles; the dormitory feast image of bread and jam below in Tea in the Hospital Ward, where the food might be the feeding of the five thousand, and, taken in conjunction with the water above, a kind of Eucharist. Yet the images survive the solemnity of such interpretation, for each one preserves a real and interesting moment of human experience, of the life of work and survival around the terrible fact of war.

 

In Sandham Memorial Chapel Spencer, who experienced war’s depredations first-hand as a private soldier (he was in the ranks throughout), is committed to finding a path to redemption. And he does this in a tradition of English mysticism, in which a connection is found between simple external detail and deep spiritual sensation, a mode of perception which stems from the simple language of the New Testament itself: we find the same sensibility of the numinous in the local, for example, in the writings of T F Powys.  It is a vision beautifully described by Ivor Gurney:

 

            I believe in the increasing of life: whatever

            Leads to the seeing of small trifles,

            Real, beautiful, is good …

   …nor is anything done

            Wiselier than the moving or breaking to sight

            Of a thing hidden under by custom – revealed,

            Fulfilled, used (sound-fashioned) any way out to delight:

            Trefoil – hedge sparrow – the stars on the edge of night.

            (The Escape)

 

Spencer, who when painting Ablutions spent half an hour trying to remember what a sponge looked like then went home to get his own, would have agreed with this. His art leads to the seeing of small trifles, and in so doing elucidates the space of the soul. Born out of war, and charged with a love of creation, Sandham Memorial Chapel is, in every brushstroke, an increasing of life.  It exists in counterpoint to the powerful and distressing visions of other war artists like Nash and Nevinson. How appropriate that, like Giotto’s Arena Chapel, it was dedicated on 25^th March, the date of the Feast of the Annunciation, a visitation of earth by heaven.

Development of Christian Church Architecture

Outline of a vast subject: The Development of Christian Church Architecture


For more, I recommend this lovely book, well worth tracking down (I came across it in the Deanery second-hand booksale: Principles and Elements of Medieval Church Architecture in Western Europe


Architecture is probably the hardest bit of art history to get into, because seeing a photo of a building and actually moving around in it are categorically different experiences, and there's all the technical vocab to get comfortable with. But I remember worthily crunching through Pevsner at about 16, then going into Winchester Cathedral and actually seeing it - not a mass of fancy stone, but a structure of arcades and transepts and aisles and all the rest of it. The jargon is tedious but it opens things up. Today we have naming of parts. And naming connects to vision. a botanist can see things in a garden that I, in the same sense, can't. Reading about a church building - the plan, the elevation, the whatnots and bits and pieces - can be maddening until, click, your mind has generated a 3-D space and you can actually feel something of it. Also, fear of flying is well known, although the science of jet planes is (I'm told) pretty sound. But I've never heard of anyone afraid of entering a medieval cathedral, standing right underneath hundreds of tons of stone vaulting, put up there by medieval masons who were really just working it out as they went along and hadn't a qualification between them. (Yet pretty darned advanced physics was in the system somewhere. I wonder how they spoke about lateral thrust in the twelfth century, or compression.) Then again, if they've stayed up that long, one might think, coming back to the vaults. After all, they don't look that heavy.  And cathedral smashes are a rare news event (no doubt because the powerful Church Lobby keeps them out of the media). Pevsner does not write about architecture in this way, which is why is famous and must be crunched through.

24 Hour Plays, New Greenham Arts Centre, Newbury 1st August 2015

On Saturday August 1^st five theatre companies performed short original plays in New Greenham Arts Centre. All five companies were made up of performers between the ages of 15 and 21, and all the plays had been written and rehearsed over the last 24 hours.  The venture was the initiative of actor Kristoffer Huball. After a day’s workshop for everyone in a range of theatre skills on Monday, the nominated writers were then given short notice of a theme and turned up at the ominous-sounding 101 on Friday for a night’s work script-writing, inspired by props offered by their actors. After drafting, storyboarding, redrafting, and developing through the night, writers handed over their scripts to actors and directors, who had a single day to turn them into a live performance. The emphasis was on independent thinking by talented young people, with suggestions from professional mentors Nigel Munson, Chris Harrison, Nadia Nadif and James Roselman.

Winchester were first up, with Broken News, written by Samuel Morley (who also did the lighting for the evening) and directed by Henry Fuller. This was the most light-hearted show of the evening, featuring an interplanetary news team ‘scooping’ a non-existent supernova on a distant star. The cast of five put their characters over clearly and there was some delightful mime involving spaceships and space suits. The tone changed abruptly with Kennett School’s Appreciation, a monologue by Maveric Hearn about family tragedy. This was sensitively delivered by Adam Smith, who convincingly played more than one character. The Young Corn Exchange followed with The Rose, a Grimm-like parable by Scarlett Quinton, performed by Becky Lillycrop and Adam Taylor, who made striking use of space and movement and covered a range of emotions. St Bart’s School followed with Abi Smith’s Testament of the Imprisoned 2, a prison drama in which director Parry Bates drew some subtle ensemble acting from his all-female cast. Last on the bill was Trinity School’s The Beak Tail of Two Penguins, written by Luke Stevens and directed by John Creed. Molly Fairchild-Smith and Adam Taylor played eco-conscious space-travelling penguins in a piece which started as high comedy and ended somewhere much darker.

All the teams made maximum use of minimal means – no costumes, few props and some basic furniture were enough to create whole worlds in the audience’s imaginations. They had clearly relished the 24-hour challenge and the end result was strong, focussed theatre which will live in the memory. At the end Kristoffer Huball encouraged all the actors to form companies and keep putting new work out there.  With cuts everywhere, there is much to be worried  about in the performing arts at the moment; but seeing the wealth of talent on show in Newbury, there is clearly a lot to be excited about ,too.