Steps

December 22, 2015, 2:37 pm

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It is high time I drew attention here to the admirable Longbarrow Press, whose strapline is 'Poetry from the Edgelands'. I recently bought from them Steps by Mark Goodwin, one of the 'radical landscape poets' selected for Harriet Tarlo's 2011 anthology The Ground Aslant. You can read and hear one of its poems at The Journal of Wild Culture, but much of the book is taken up with one long seventy-page walk poem, 'From a St Juliot to Beyond a Beeny.' As the title suggests (those indefinite articles inserted before the places names) this poem is not always an easy stroll in terms of language and an endnote recognises that use of 'an' and 'a' will jar with some readers. But I enjoyed it, partly because it reminded me of our own walks years ago on the Cornish coast (Goodwin is accompanied by 'the woman I love' who has a 'creaturely' connection with the animals they encounter. It brought to mind an incident when we spotted some other walkers down on the rocks and I pompously remarked on their irresponsibility in letting a dog swim among the rough waves, only to be told by my wife that what I was looking at was a seal). The walk from St Juliot has strong cultural associations with Thomas Hardy and his future wife Emma, 'the woman whom I loved so' as he refers to her in 'Beeny Cliff', a poem quoted within Goodwin's. On finishing this poem a strong impression of the landscape remains: its broken black slates and white-watered zawns, its sea-pinks and samphire, steep paths, holloways, gorzy slopes and views out to sea.

Extracts from Goodwin's walk/poem appeared in Longbarrow's anthology of walking poetry, The Footing. With the exception of Goodwin this book features poets based in Sheffield and can be read as an exploration of the city's streets and rivers. On the Longbarrow Press site you'll find sound and video clips of poets reading their work out in this landscape. I've embedded one of them below, in which Matthew Clegg and songwriter Ray Hearne are filmed in the woods and by a canal, accompanied by birdsong, the singing of leaves and a brief bit of laddish chanting from a passing boat (6 minutes in). Harder to appreciate from a website is the high production standard of the Press's books, and also their pamphlets, like Peter Riley’s The Ascent of Kinder Scout. The black and grey fonts in Steps look beautiful on the page and an interview with Longbarrow's Brian Lewis makes clear how much care has been taken over their layout. In 'From a St Juliot to Beyond a Beeny' the text follows the poet's steps along the Cornish coast for seven kilometres, varying the pace, diverted by memories and then returning to attend to such things as the river, dotted with shadows, where water circles and light slides and rolls over 'layered pages of still slate.'

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An image of the sun

December 24, 2015, 1:07 am

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To not look at the sea, but over it.

In winter, not at the tree, but through it.

With art, not to look at or through but with it.

- Roger Ackling (1947-2014)

These lines appear in one of the short essays and appreciations collected together in a new book, Between the Lines: The Work and Teaching of Roger Ackling. They suggest why Ackling rarely discussed his own work: 'not to look at or through but with it'. However, he was persuaded to give a talk as part of a 2002 residency at Morai in Hokkaido, from which the quote above is taken. One of the organisers, Toshio Nakamoro, recalls the beach there having 'all the elements Roger needed - clear and intensive sunlight, water and air' and Ackling told his audience that the melancholy, remote beauty of this place had impressed him greatly. He had become a regular visitor to Japan, where his meditative approach to art has always been appreciated - in 1986 the Acklings chose to celebrate their wedding at the Meiji shrine in Tokyo. The talk ended with him modestly admitting that he still did not necessarily know what he was doing. He described the means by which he had been making sculpture for nearly thirty years: pieces of wood, found by the sea's edge and then burned with a magnifying glass. How long this took would depend on cloud cover, the time of day and year, the altitude and the age of the wood. 'I usually work from left to right and against the grain. Each line is made up of many black dots. Each dot is an image of the sun.'

Between the Lines includes many contributions from Japan, along with reminiscences by his fellow British artists Richard Long, Hamish Fulton and Thomas A. Clark. There is a short piece by Evan Parker, whose album Lines Burnt in Light (2001) refers to Ackling's work. Former Tate curator Judith Collins contributes the transcript of an interview she did for a BBC Radio 3 programme, Artists and the Landscape, in January 1994. For this she travelled to the Norfolk coast, where the Acklings lived in a coastguard cottage on an eroding cliff. 'Ackling worked on the beach in front of his cottage, in the shifting space between land and sea. But his sculptures were actually made in the 93 million miles of space between the sun and the piece of found driftwood he held in his hand.' On winter days like the one on which they met for this interview, it was not possible for Ackling to make his work as the light was too weak. But this enforced break meant he could return to it refreshed each year in April.

Reading Between the Lines in weak winter sunlight

As ever here, I have been focusing on landscape and art, but Ackling did not see himself as a land artist and the later sections of the book on his teaching practice illustrate how open he always was to new ideas. In a catalogue essay from 1997, Sylvia Ackling explained that

'he still identifies strongly with the more abstract elements: ideas of remoteness and isolation, an art that is not necessarily object-based, a lack of respect for a hierarchy of materials fixed by commercial values. However, although his fellow Saint Martin's students Hamish Fulton and Richard Long continue to be important influences, together with Dada and Carl Andre, he also looks to the work of Alan Charlton and Peter Joseph, and to that of the sixteenth-century Japanese sculptor Enku. Increasingly, Roger finds inspiration in Enku's work, the Buddhist monk whose life was a journey as he walked from temple to temple throughout Japan in his quest to carve one hundred thousand buddhas...'

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The Wind in the Willows

January 2, 2016, 2:06 pm

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I have just finished reading aloud to my son The Wind in the Willows. It was an unabridged edition, so we have been enjoying those chapters that are sometimes cut: 'Dulce Domum' on Mole's desire to see his old home, 'The Piper at the Gates of Dawn', where they encounter the god Pan, and 'Wayfarers All', on the conflicting impulse to travel and to stay at home. It was a pleasure to read the story without engaging too critically with the book's nostalgic conservatism, or puzzling over how these talking animals coexist with human car drivers and washer women. I thought I would quote something from it here, but rather than choose a lyrical description of the river or the changing seasons I've picked an intriguing passage that I'd forgotten all about, concerning Badger's large underground home. Here, in Grahame's pastoral dream of England, the idea of the city has been literally buried: civilisations decline but nature endures.

Mole has just recovered from his adventure in the snowy Wild Wood and now, after finishing one of the book's many fine luncheons, he is shown around by Badger...

'Crossing the hall, they passed down one of the principal tunnels, and the wavering light of the lantern gave glimpses on either side of rooms both large and small, some mere cupboards, others nearly as broad and imposing as Toad's dining-hall. A narrow passage at right angles led them into another corridor, and here the same thing was repeated. The Mole was staggered at the size, the extent, the ramifications of it all; at the length of the dim passages, the solid vaultings of the crammed store-chambers, the masonry everywhere, the pillars, the arches, the pavements. "How on earth, Badger," he said at last, "did you ever find time and strength to do all this? It's astonishing!"

"It would be astonishing indeed," said the Badger simply, "if I had done it. But as a matter of fact I did none of it—only cleaned out the passages and chambers, as far as I had need of them. There's lots more of it, all round about. I see you don't understand, and I must explain it to you. Well, very long ago, on the spot where the Wild Wood waves now, before ever it had planted itself and grown up to what it now is, there was a city—a city of people, you know. Here, where we are standing, they lived, and walked, and talked, and slept, and carried on their business. Here they stabled their horses and feasted, from here they rode out to fight or drove out to trade. They were a powerful people, and rich, and great builders. They built to last, for they thought their city would last for ever."

"But what has become of them all?" asked the Mole.

"Who can tell?" said the Badger. "People come—they stay for a while, they flourish, they build—and they go. It is their way. But we remain. There were badgers here, I've been told, long before that same city ever came to be. And now there are badgers here again. We are an enduring lot, and we may move out for a time, but we wait, and are patient, and back we come. And so it will ever be."

"Well, and when they went at last, those people?" said the Mole.

"When they went," continued the Badger, "the strong winds and persistent rains took the matter in hand, patiently, ceaselessly, year after year. Perhaps we badgers too, in our small way, helped a little—who knows? It was all down, down, down, gradually—ruin and levelling and disappearance. Then it was all up, up, up, gradually, as seeds grew to saplings, and saplings to forest trees, and bramble and fern came creeping in to help. Leaf-mould rose and obliterated, streams in their winter freshets brought sand and soil to clog and to cover, and in course of time our home was ready for us again, and we moved in. Up above us, on the surface, the same thing happened. Animals arrived, liked the look of the place, took up their quarters, settled down, spread, and flourished. They didn't bother themselves about the past—they never do; they're too busy. The place was a bit humpy and hillocky, naturally, and full of holes; but that was rather an advantage. And they don't bother about the future, either—the future when perhaps the people will move in again—for a time—as may very well be..."'

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Plum blossom on snow

January 3, 2016, 5:07 am

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A friend in Japan normally posts photographs of deep snow around now, although not this year. Interestingly, heavy snow does not appear in the classical literature of Japan. This partly reflects the fact that the climate of Nara and Kyoto is relatively mild. It was only later, with writers like Issa, who came from Shinano, north of the old capitals, that the experience of severe winters enters poetry. Another reason, as Haruo Shirane explains in his book Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons, was that literature idealised nature, so that the unpleasant extremes of summer and winter were avoided in favour of spring and autumn imagery (it also gives a misleading impression of landscape, since writers of poetry rarely ventured beyond their gardens into farmland or wilderness). The early Man'yōshūi anthology included 785 seasonal poems written in the first half of the eight century but only 67 of these concerned winter. This pattern continued: winter poems are the least numerous of the four seasons' in each of the first six Imperial Waka Anthologies, beginning with the Kokinshū, compiled around 905 by four court poets led by Ki no Tsurayuki.

Section of the earliest extant complete manuscript of the Kokinshū

Source: Wikimedia Commons

The winter book of the Kokinshū begins at the turn of the season with a sight synonymous with autumn: bright leaves at Tatsuta River. There follows a set of snow poems evoking feelings of coldness and loneliness, and then four poems about plum blossom on snow. The sequence ends with the year's end, snow having given way to blossom. Autumn and spring had many more nature topics associated with them: in spring for example, in addition to lingering snow and plum blossoms, there were mist, bush warblers, returning wild geese, green willow, yellow kerria, new herbs, wisteria and, of course, cherry blossoms. But, as Shirane explains, winter became more popular in the late Heian and Kamakura periods, where we find poems on waterfowl like the plover, mallard and mandarin duck, which was 'thought to sleep on water so cold that frost and ice formed on its feathers.' The plover originally became associated with winter when it was mentioned in a poem by Ki no Tsurayuki, crying in the cold river wind as the poet searched for his love. By the time of eighth Imperial Anthology, the Shin Kokinshū (1205), there were almost as many winter poems as spring poems and the light of the winter moon was being celebrated for its cold purity, in contrast with the world below.

Sesshū Tōyō, Landscape of Four Seasons: Winter, 15th century
Source: Wikimedia Commons
Winter topics, Shirane explains, 'constructed a monochrome landscape
that shares much with Muromachi ink painting',
an art form of which Sesshū was the greatest exponent.

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The sound of wind in the pines

January 8, 2016, 12:09 pm

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'The innkeeper had lent him an old Kyoto tea-kettle, skilfully inlaid in silver with flowers and birds, and from it came the sound of wind in the pines. He could make out two pine breezes, as a matter of fact, a near one and a far one. Just beyond the far breeze he heard faintly the tinkling of a bell.'

-Yasunari Kawabata, Snow Country, 1947 (trans. Edward G. Seidensticker)

A quote that links my last two posts on wind in the trees and the snow in Japan. I first read this novel at university and scenes from it have stayed with me ever since, like the opening in which the protagonist travels north to the Snow Country, looking at the reflection of a woman superimposed on a snowy landscape in the mirror of his train compartment. This quote comes towards the end and it is referred to by R. Murray Schafer in an essay on 'Music and the Soundscape' as an exemplification of the music of the Japanese kettle which Okakura describes in this passage from The Book of Tea.

'The host will not enter the room until all the guests have seated themselves and quiet reigns with nothing to break the silence save the note of the boiling water in the iron kettle. The kettle sings well, for pieces of iron are so arranged in the bottom as to produce a peculiar melody in which one may hear the echoes of a cataract muffled by clouds, of a distant sea breaking among the rocks, a rainstorm sweeping through a bamboo forest, or of the soughing of pines on some faraway hill.'

- Kakuzo Okakura, The Book of Tea, 1906

That last sentence suggests a level of expertise on behalf of the tea master in adjusting the inside of a kettle like a prepared piano so as to evoke a particular feeling in nature. No need of music or poetry to suggest these things when the process of making the tea creates its own soundscape. I wonder if any modern sound artists have attempted to manipulate recordings of boiling water, or augmented them with field recordings to recreate these effects, or tried to pursue the original idea of simply using 'pieces of iron'? I would love to know more about the landscape music of Japanese kettles; whilst the whisper of the boiling water is named Matsukaze after the sound of wind in the pines, the idea that different effects - sea, rain, a cataract - could be produced by manipulating the kettle is intriguing. But perhaps there was some poetic licence in Okakura's account, written in English for an eager audience of Boston aesthetes (T. S. Eliot would later picture him in an art gallery, 'bowing among the Titians', as 'Hakagawa' in his poem 'Gerontian').

Sen Sōtan, grandson of the great Sen no Rikyū, wrote that the essence of the tea ceremony, Cha-no-yu, could be described as 'the sound of wind-blown pines in a painting.' In his book Zen Landscapes Allen S. Weiss points out that the kettle-wind sonic trope could be reversed, as it is at the end of an account of Hideyoshi's great Cha-No-Yu at Kitano in 1587. Hideyoshi was Japan's most powerful politician and Sen no Rikyū was among the tea-masters at Kitano (four years later Hideyoshi would order Rikyū to commit ritual suicide for reasons that remain mysterious). The account of the gathering at Kitano is told in A. L. Sadler's Cha-no-yu: The Japanese Tea Ceremony (a copy of which I bought many years ago in the book section of that much-missed emporium near Covent Garden, Neal Street East).

'Toyotomi Hideyoshi, Kwanpaku, was a dilettante who always liked to do things on a large scale. He conceived the idea of assembling all the Tea masters in the country and collecting all the rare tea vessels for a huge Cha-no-yu. ...

And so the meeting was held as arranged, and everywhere in the wide open space under the pines at Ukon-no-baba at Kitano tea-enclosures were made in a setting of plum trees and rocks and pools of water, and all the tea lovers flocked thither and did their utmost to see who could produce the most interesting and recherche effect. The whole extent of the gathering was about a mile square. Fortunately the day was a fine one, and Hideyoshi with all his nobles and retainers set out at daybreak to find some five hundred and fifty tea-masters assembled, while immense crowds of spectators appeared from all over the country, and the number of the fires that were lighted under the kettles seemed greater than that of the stars in the autumn heaven. ...

Very great was the joy and enthusiasm of the people, and the display would have continued for ten days as arranged, but unfortunately a rebellion broke out in Higo, and Hideyoshi had to break up the meeting after one day only, so that all the carefully prepared tea-booths were soon taken down and the glade resumed its wonted quiet. And only the sound of the wind in the pines, which again resumed their sovereignty over the landscape, remained to recall the bubbling of a thousand kettles.'

- A. L. Sadler, Cha-no-yu: The Japanese Tea Ceremony, 1933

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The holy mount for the Festival of the Supreme Being

January 16, 2016, 3:02 am

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Pierre-Antoine Demachy, The Festival of the Supreme Being, 1794

On 8 June 1794 (20 Prairial Year II) an artificial landscape was erected in the centre of Paris. This day had been chosen for the first Celebration of the Supreme Being, a new godhead devised by Robespierre, then at the zenith of power. He had been elected President of the Convention four days earlier; less than two months later he would be guillotined without trial in the Place de la Révolution. The landscape was designed by the great revolutionary artist Jacques-Louis David. A plaster-and cardboard mountain topped with a liberty tree was built on the Champ de Mars. That afternoon, as Simon Schama writes in Citizens, 'deputies of the Convention climbed to the summit and looked down to the twenty-four hundred deployed along the paths, slopes and terraces that had been cut into the mountain. At a crucial moment, when the singing and blaring of martial brass had been silenced, Robespierre descended from the mountain like some Jacobinical Moses, parting the waves of tricolored patriots, and graciously received the burst of orchestrated applause that broke over his head.' Jacques-Alexis Thuriot, a former president of the Convention, was heard saying, "Look at the bugger; it’s not enough for him to be master, he has to be God".

Thomas Naudet, Festival of the Supreme Being at the Champs-de-Mars, 1794

What kind of mountain would be adequate for the Supreme Being? Not, it would seem from contemporary prints, a perfectly shaped one. In his book Political Landscape, in a section that discusses the perennial desire of leaders to carve massive statues and faces into mountains, Martin Warnke remarks on this:

'The mount as a whole appears strangely rugged, as if its irregular shape had been copied from works by Mantegna; what we see is a kind of nature monument that could be construed as an enormous head, but the caverns, paths and platforms also serve to direct the movement of the crowd: the men march on the right, the women on the left; the young people march round the hill, and a special commissaire sees to it that there is no confusion. Only optically does the landscape admit of irregularity and contingency. It belongs to the type of fantastic landscape that once rose towards gold skies in the backgrounds of altarpieces, in the early days of landscape painting. Yet the overall physiognomy of the rock still has some of the impressive force attributed to faces in mountains.'

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Rocks at Mouthier

January 22, 2016, 3:35 am

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Gustave Courbet, The Painter's Studio, 1855

I have been reading the new anthology of John Berger's art writing, Portraits. It is arranged in approximate chronological order from the Chauvet cave paintings to some recent sculptures by a young Palestinian artist. Where Berger has written more than once about an artist, the pieces are spliced together and you have to look to the end of the book to see when the component parts were written. Although there are risks of repetition in this (e.g. reading twice a story about Monet painting his wife on her death bed) it actually works rather well. On Gustave Courbet, for example, there is a 1953 essay defending his critical reputation and concluding that socialism was expressed in his work 'by its quality of uninhibited Fraternity'. This is followed by something written twenty-five years later, by which time a new generation of art historians had written major studies reassessing Courbet's art. I will quote from this secondpiece, 'Courbet and the Jura', below.

Five hundred pages long, Portraits is a rich source of ideas and insights on a wide range of artists, all written in Berger's marvellous, clear prose. One small gripe though: for a book about art, it has surprisingly poor black and white images. I couldn't help comparing them with the beautiful small colour reproductions in Robert Walser's Looking at Pictures, another set of essays published last year (a book I highly recommend). This was a deliberate choice: Berger says in the Preface that 'glossy colour reproductions in the consumerist world of today tend to reduce what they show to items in a luxury brochure for millionaires' (which may be true, but one would have more sympathy with this if Verso weren't charging £25 for the book). In the case of Courbet though, no reproductions in book or web page or smart phone would be able to do justice to a monumental painting like A Burial at Ornans, which is nearly 8m wide and covers a whole wall in the Musée d'Orsay.

Gustave Courbet, A Burial At Ornans, 1849-50

Berger is fascinating on the geographical origins of Courbet's art. In 'Courbet and the Jura' he writes that 'the region in which a painter passes his childhood and adolescence often plays an important part in the constitution of his vision. The Thames developed Turner. The cliffs around Le Havre were formative in the case of Monet. Corbet grew up in – and throughout his life painted and often returned to – the valley of the Loue on the western side of the Jura mountains.' The heavy rainfall in this region sinks into the karst landscape's underground channels and gushes out powerfully as the river Loue. 'On the horizontal strata of limestone there are often marl deposits which allow grass or trees to grow on top of the rock. One sees this formation – a very green landscape, divided near the sky by a horizontal bar of grey rock – in many of Courbet's paintings, including A Burial at Ornans.' But this environment offered more than just background scenery, according to Berger it influenced the forms Courbet's paintings took.

Gustave Courbet, The Stonebreakers, 1849

Darkness - in paintings like The Stonebreakers there is little visible sky. 'Due to its folds, the landscape is tall; the sky is a long way off.' In the shadowy spaces of valleys and forests light is only partial and the painter develops the eye of a hunter. In The Painter's Studio the only light seems to emanate from the woods in the painter's canvas. Sometimes it is as if Courbet's scenes take place underwater, where light plays tricks with perspective.

Water - it frequently occurs in his art (I've written here more than once about Courbet's paintings of the sea) and even when absent, 'the foreground forms are frequently reminiscent of the currents and swirls of running water.' His objects have the brilliance of pebbles seen in a clear river. Rocks at Mouthier, colour glistening on its surface, might be a reflection in a pond. His palette knife was like 'a stream of light passing over the broken surface of leaves, rocks, grass...'

Rocks - they are 'the primary configuration of this landscape. They bestow identity, allow focus.' Rocks do not take on a particular form and in them the painter finds something arbitrary and lawless, but at the same time irreducibly real. Courbet, the great realist painter, painted everything as if it were a rock face, without interiority, but in amazement because 'to see, where there are no laws, is to be constantly surprised'.

Gustave Courbet, Rocks at Mouthier, c. 1855
Images from Wikimedia Commons

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Where the River Goes

January 29, 2016, 2:18 am

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A while back on Caught by the River Rob St John reviewed Allan Burns' anthology Where the River Goes: The Nature Tradition in English Language Haiku (2013). He found that 'the most enjoyable bits of this fascinating but slightly frustrating book are the haiku themselves' and criticised the contrast between the introduction's bleak view of the environment with what is conveyed in the subsequent poems. Nevertheless, Burns' introduction does contain an interesting historical survey of the field, beginning in the sixties when nature-oriented poems were at the heart of the growing American haiku movement. From this early period he includes the work of James W. Hackett, O Mabson Southard and Nick Virgilio, whose highly concise ‘lily’ and ‘bass’ proved particularly influential. In the late sixties and early seventies nature haiku written by poets like John Wills and Robert Spiess became more specific - ‘instead of generalized fish and butterflies, they wrote with field-guide precision of muskellunge and mourning cloaks’.

In the seventies such subject matter became less central within English-language haiku writing, but something of a revival was sparked by the work of Charles B. Dickson, a retired journalist who produced a significant body of work before his death in 1991. Among this newer generation Wally Swist and Bruce Ross (compiler of The Haiku Moment) have been particularly devoted to nature-oriented haiku. Poets of the mid-to late-nineties represent a third generation, often publishing via the internet. Burns highlights the work of Carolyn Hall (editor of a journal that focused on nature poetry, Acorn), John Martone (whose work resembles the minimalist poetry of Creeley and Corman) and the British poet John Barlow, whose Snapshot Press published this book. I am embedding below a science animation produced in 2012 by Rob St. John that includes haiku by John Barlow which suggests how this writing is now being combined in new ways with sounds and images.

In his introduction Burns says that he has included mainly ‘type one’ haiku that refer exclusively to nature; type two haiku relate to both people and nature whilst type three are exclusively human-oriented. This typology was devised by George Swede in 1992 and he estimated that the split between these approaches in English language haiku was about 20:60:20. Burns calculates that by 2013 pure nature haiku had become rarer, so that the split was more like 13:67:20. ‘Undeniably, haiku in recent years has witnessed a kind of anthropocentric creep that mirrors an accelerating alienation of humans from the natural world.’ He contrasts this with classical haiku: apparently about 90% of Fukuda Chiyo-ni's were on nature and many of Basho’s have no direct sign of humanity, although of course they can always be read metaphorically in terms of human thought and emotions. I'd be interested to know how many 'type one' nature haiku suggest a whole landscape, by implying distance (birds on a lake, mountain mist) or uniting near and far (pool, moon). Perhaps they all do and it is just a question of how far we are willing to imagine what is left unsaid.

Utagawa Kuniyoshi, Chiyo-ni standing beside a well, mid 1840s

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A Ruin on the Road

January 31, 2016, 2:58 am

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Francis Towne, A Ruin on the Road to the Ponte Nomentana, 1780

Yesterday I visited the British Museum for Light, time, legacy: Francis Towne’s watercolours of Rome. The exhibition is curated by Richard Stephens, whose Catalogue Raisonné will soon be appearing online. This is based on the PhD. Richard was still completing when he commented on a post I wrote here ten years ago referring to Francis Towne. Back then I was sharing a favourite passage from the diaries of Thomas Jones, another painter rediscovered in the twentieth century. Jones had taken Towne sketching in the countryside near Naples. There they encountered 'three ugly-looking fellows dressed in the fantastic garb of the Sbirri di Campagna, with long knives, cutting up a dead jackAss… Towne started back as if struck by an electric Shock… "I'll go no further" says he, with a most solemn face, adding with a forced smile, that however he might admire Scenes in a Picture - he did not relish them in Nature.'

Francis Towne, Temple of Minerva at Sunset, 1781

While he stayed in Rome, Towne also left the environs of the city to paint the surrounding countryside. However, as Jonathan Jones points out in his review of the exhibition, by 1780 the city itself had become a picturesque landscape.

'Towne’s Rome is not a modern living city: it’s a woodland dotted with half-collapsed temples, a meandering countryside populated by a few peasants, antiquaries and market traders, dwarfed by the melancholy remains of a greater past. While Towne was wandering the seven hills of Rome, the historian Edward Gibbon was six years into writing The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Their visions of Rome are remarkably similar. Gibbon’s masterpiece is an awed attempt to understand how something as vast and powerful as the Roman empire could vanish. Towne’s watercolours ask that same question: what has happened in these sleepy valleys and woods? Temples and palaces that once ruled a huge part of the world are now the decaying picturesque decorations of a pastoral landscape where time seems to have slowed down like the meandering Tiber.'

Paul Oppé's article, 'Francis Towne, Landscape painter'

in The Walpole Society Journal, 1919-20

Francis Towne, Arricia, 1781

Images from the exhibition's downloadable guide

The exhibition refers at several points to the revival of interest in Towne's work following his rediscovery and promotion by the collector Paul Oppé. 'Modernist taste of the 1920s and 1930s embraced the flat planes and spare, angular design of drawings like Arricia and Towne was feted as a pioneer.' It made me wonder how future generations will look back on the more recent excitement over landscape paintings by Balke and Strindberg (which I discussed here). I confess I usually find myself agreeing with modernist taste and for me the high points of this exhibition are the works they found most admirable. Hard too not to envy Oppé, then a young civil servant at the ministry of education, who bought a bunch of uncatalogued watercolours in 1907 for 25 shillings that included several works by Towne, including A Study on the Spot at Tivoli. The closest I'll ever get to owning a sketch of Tivoli is to paint one myself... Having tried this on a couple of holidays, wrestling with the strong light contrasts and struggling to unify details of pine branches, Roman brickwork and distant ruins, I'm in awe at the way Towne achieved his elegant compositions. As Laura Cummings writes in another Guardianreview: 'he puts together a version of the great outdoors of exceptional lucidity – the world contained in limber lines, its colours pearly with light and marked by the ever-shifting atmosphere.'

Sketching on the Spot, Hadrian's Villa, Tivoli, 2014

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Study of Rocks and Trees

February 5, 2016, 8:18 am

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The Regional Book by David Matless was reviewed back in October by Ken Worpole on his New English Landscape blog. He summarises it as 'a gazetteer of 44 Norfolk places, each described in telegraphese, halfway in style between Pevsner and the poet Roy Fuller.' The book's style is indeed unusual, its highly abbreviated sentences reflecting the flatness of the landscape described, its cadences often reminding me of crossword clues. Rather than discuss the book as a whole and risk repeating what Ken says, I want here to mention just one of the entries, on Norwich Castle Museum. It's hardly a representative location but the section begins like others, with a spatial location and succinct description: ‘Ten miles from the Bure, one from the Wensum, on a Norman mound. The region on display in paint and diorama.’ A list of local subjects treated in the museum's paintings it terminates thus: ‘Studies in landscape, Langley’s scrutiny: uninventable.’ The solution to this cryptic reference can be found towards the end of R. F. Langley's wonderful journals (Helen MacDonald's desert island book). Matless is referring to an entry for August 2005, when Langley stopped and studied the Museum's paintings with the kind of long, close attention I've written about here before.

What Langley most admired were the watercolours of John Middleton (1827-56), particularly a Study of Rocks and Trees. 'The left side is ghosted in, a rising track, the right an equally hinted slope falling away with sky open behind it. The foreground is out of focus rocks and clitter, done with the slightest washes and touches. The centre is thus presented as altogether important, with the feeling of air around your head as you look at it, space where you are not looking.’ He describes the knots and gnarls and bulges of the trunks, patches of lichen found by the sun and branches twisting in unpredictable ways. ‘Shadows jink over the individuality of irregularities. The whole is done without any mess, everywhere with flair.’ Langley, writing of Middleton in a way that could easily be a description of his own prose and poems, finds that ‘nobody else has done the looking that was involved like this. A study. Indeed.’ Nothing else in the gallery that day had quite this quality of an actual place found, unique and ‘uninventable’. The tree Middleton painted is a kind of challenge to the way we experience art and landscape. ‘It makes fools of those who pass down the corridor with only a glance, as it does those who stroll down the lanes without being brought to a stop. Seeing it like this must matter.’

The cover of the book is a drawing made by the author in 1962

(I cannot find an image of John Middleton's painting, but this looks to have ths same uninventable quality)

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Tall Mountains and Flowing Waters

February 8, 2016, 12:51 pm

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In an earlier post, 'Clouds over the Xiao and Xiang Rivers', I discussed landscape imagery in Song dynasty music for the qin (Wade-Giles: ch'in). The ch'in, a type of zither but sometimes confusingly referred to as a lute, is the great instrument of Chinese history, played by scholars, emperors and poets. There was T'ao Yüan-ming for example, whose fondness for it, along with books and wine, I once referred to here (T'ao was the founder of 'fields-and-gardens' poetry). Indeed, 'T'ao was ultimately so imbued with ch'in music that he removed the strings from his instrument, writing that "I have understood the deeper meaning of the ch'in, why should I need the sound of the strings?" This may help to explain why certain inaudible effects executed on the ch'in are admired, as both the performer and the educated listener can imagine the sounds even when they cannot hear them. T'ao's statement also provided an excuse for later scholars who owned an instrument but could not play it.'

Uragami Shunkin, A Portrait of Uragami Gyokudō, 1813

This quotation actually comes from a book about a Japanese ch'in player, Uragami Gyokudō (1745-1820). In Tall Mountains and Flowing Waters: The Arts of Uragami Gyokudō, Stephen Addiss covers not just his music, but also Gyokudō's poetry, calligraphy and landscape painting. It was music that came first though, as Minagawa Kien made clear in the preface to a collection of Gyokudō's poems, suggesting that this ability on the ch'in enabled Gyokudō to evoke the 'craggy and vast'. In this he resembled the ancient Chinese ch'in player Po Ya, who could convey in his music the qualities of 'Tall Mountains' and 'Flowing Waters'. Kien was referring here to a story in the Taoist text Lieh-tzu that became proverbial as an example of the understanding between friends. Po Ya's friend Chung Tzu-ch'i was so in tune with his mind and music that he always knew what Po Ya was thinking when he played. When Chung Tzu-ch'i died, Po Ya broke the strings of his ch'in and never played again.

Uragami Gyokudō, Snow Sifted Through Frozen Clouds, c. 1810

Gyokudō epitomised the bunjin ideal: an amateur artist who painted 'without knowledge of the six laws', who loved to play the ch'in but did not 'know the rules', who read for pleasure and detested scholarship. Nevertheless it is easy to imagine that as the years went by his daily work as an official would have been increasingly tiresome. In 1794 political circumstances prompted him to resign and devote himself entirely to the arts. He seems to have had no regrets. In 'Shutting My Gate, I Play the Ch'in' he writes of having left his concerns behind. In another poem he finds that 'fifty years have passed / like a whistle in the wind,' and now 'among the short-tailed deer, / I strum my ch'in.' Elsewhere he describes himself like a figure in a painting: an old man playing his instrument as night deepens, illuminated by a moon above Dragon Mountain. Or he can be found listening to the autumn wind in the forest trees and chanting his poems to the accompaniment of a waterfall.

You ask the plan of my life?
At roof's edge a strip of clouds,
inside the walls a ch'in.

Stephen Addiss performing 'Hito - Man's Nature' by Uragami Gyokudō

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The Coast of Bohemia

February 12, 2016, 2:56 am

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Joseph Wright of Derby, Antigonus in the Storm, 1790-2

On Tuesday we went to see The Winter's Tale at the atmospheric, candlelit Sam Wannamaker Theatre. I am sure I was not alone in looking forward to seeing how the director dealt with Shakespeare's most famous stage direction: 'Exit, pursued by a bear'. When it came, this scene played out in near darkness, rightly leaving a lot to the imagination. This worked well not just because it must be hard to convincingly stage an unexpected bear attack, but because the pursuit takes place on the non-existent desert shoreline of Bohemia. Perhaps we are not meant to try too hard to picture the surrounding landscape. Nevertheless, I love the way Joseph Wright has endeavoured to imagine this scene as it might actually have occurred, depicting the rocky beach where Antigonus was pursued and met his grisly end, 'torn to pieces with a bear.' This painting is in Ontario where it has been shown alongside sound machines traditionally used in 18th century theatre productions, one imitating the wind (canvas passing over wood) and the other rain (beads rotating in a drum.)

Much speculation has gone into Shakespeare's setting for this part of the play. Some historians have thought he cannot have meant Bohemia and was referring to somewhere else - Apulia, perhaps, or Bithynia. Others have pointed to the play's source (Robert Green's pastoral Pandosto) which also refers to Bohemia's coast, or have explained it in terms of the political advantage in siting the action in the country of an ally of James I. But pastoral has never been at all realistic and Shakespeare probably felt as free to imagine 'Bohemia' as his contemporaries would Arcadia. This is not the only point in the play where reality and fantasy fuse: the actual Renaissance artist Giulio Romanois referred to as sculptor of the statue of Hermione that miraculously comes to life (Giulio was a painter, not a sculptor). Shakespeare's Bohemia reminds me of another mythical place that I wrote about here before, Kafka's Amerika. Kafka created a version of that distant continent that was a kind of 'exploded Bohemia'; Shakespeare's coast of Bohemia is similarly a country drawn out of dreams and desires (Kafka on the shore, one might say).

Gelett Burgess, A Map of Bohemia, 1896

In A Time of Gifts the young Patrick Leigh Fermor, walking alone along the Danube near the southern edge of old Bohemia, thinking of The Winter's Tale, dreams up his own theory. 'As I marched downstream, inspiration struck. 'Coast' must originally have meant 'side' or 'edge', not necessarily connected with 'sea' at all! Perhaps this very path was the Coast of Bohemia - at any rate the Coast of the Forest: near enough!' Remembering the plot, he imagines a route for Antigonus: sailing from Sicilia to Trieste, overland to Vienna and then up the Danube. 'The ship, running into terrible storms, probably among the Grein whirlpools, founders. Antigonous, the old courtier, scrambles ashore, - perhaps just under the castle of Werfenstein!' The bear would have emerged from the forest and Act IV's sheep-shearing festivities might have been celebrated in one of the nearby farms. It is a wonderful moment of creative excitement... followed by crushing disappointment when he arrives at Vienna, checks the play text and realises that Shakespeare's didn't actually use the word coast at all:

SCENE III. Bohemia. A desert country near the sea.

Later, unable to give up on his speculations, Leigh Fermor has a second moment of jubilation after an afternoon spent in his host's library searching for connections between England and Bohemia. 'The windows of the flat looked down on the whole of Prague. Towards the end of my search, the pale sun had set among those silver and purplish clouds and at lighting-up time all the lamps of the city had leapt simultaneously to life.' His host suddenly has an idea and takes down a history book. It explains that Bohemia did briefly have a coastline, when its territory extended to Dalmatia. Celebratory drinks are poured in a mood both victorious and valedictory, as the young literary detective is set to leave Prague and head off again on his slow journey to Istanbul. Years later, writing the book, Leigh Fermor looks back on all this with the knowledge that Shakespeare's comedies always have an imaginary topography...

'Woods and parkland on the Warwickshire, Worcestershire and Gloucestershire borders, that is; flocks and fairs and a palace or two, a mixture of Cockayne- and Cloud-Cuckoo- and fairyland with stage mountains rather taller than the Cotswolds and full of torrents and caves, haunted by bears and washed, if need be, by an ocean teeming with foundering ships and mermaids.'

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Rainbow Mid Life’s Willows

February 13, 2016, 9:05 am

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Ian Nairn once described the view from 'decent quiet Duquesne Heights onto the roaring heart of Pittsburgh' as the epitome of terribilità. If he were there today, half a century later, he could look across to the city's cultural district, where the Wood Street Galleries are hosting an exhibition of British landscape art. Pastoral Noir is curated by Justin Hopper who grew up in the city but now lives over here, in Suffolk. He has been responsible for some interesting recent experiments in the fusion of image, sound and text on themes of place and memory. In 2014 he recorded Ley Line, 'a series of poems based on walks in Pittsburgh along a fabricated ley line connecting the central church with a handmade shrine to the Virgin Mary overlooking the river - passing, on the way, the house in which Andy Warhol was built and the one in which Keith Haring lived, as well as many local and personal landmarks.' These pieces were 'bookended by two poems based on Anglo-American folk songs found in both Sussex and Appalachia, read by myself and Shirley Collins' and there was music too by The Belbury Poly and Host Skull.

Justin has now sent me his new album, 'I Made Some Low Inquiries', which again combines words and music and draws connections between the old weird American and English folklore. Its title is a line in an old song that Almeda Riddle recorded under the poetic title 'Rainbow Mid Life’s Willows' for Alan Lomax and Shirley Collins, during their field recording trip through the South in 1959. Justin's texts also draw on stories told to George Ewart Evans, poems by Seán Ó Ríordáin and the writings of French psychogeographer Jacques Réda. You can see in the video clip below how this sounds with musical accompaniment from Jem Finer, Susie Honeyman of the Mekons and others. Justin has a great voice for spoken word performance - from an English perspective his American accent sounds neutrally classless, not immediately identifiable either with those who live and work on the land or those who own, walk over and contemplate it. Folk music always raises awkward questions around our position as listeners, our yearning for authenticity and lost connections with the land. But Justin is prepared to risk romanticising a singer like Almeda Riddle in order to convey some of the emotional intensity, the terribilità, in her songs...

'Throughout Collins’ and Lomax’s recordings one pictures oneself at the scene hearing these men and women sing, an act so normal to them as breathing and yet an act of alien beauty to the visitor. It is, of course, wrong to produce an ‘other’ of one’s subject. But this Ozark songstress is alien – not in place, but in time. Hers is a song of the landscape – an intersection of history and now, of weather and sorrow. It is untranslatable, and yet, here, we attempt to translate it. It is a song worth imbibing – despite its powerful, uncanny taste.'

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Utopia

February 22, 2016, 4:22 am

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Ambrosius Holbein, The Island of Utopia, 1516

2016 marks the five hundredth anniversary of Thomas More's Utopia. The book has little in detail to say about Utopia's topography, although we are told that it was once a peninsula, before a channel was cut through the isthmus connecting it to the mainland, creating a crescent shaped island that is like one great harbour. The land itself is not especially fertile but the Utopians make good use of their natural resources and enjoy their communal gardens. In his introduction to the Penguin translation Paul Turner provides an amusing overview of utopian and dystopian literature, from the vision of paradise in The Epic of Gilgamesh to recent novels by Huxley, Orwell, Evelyn Waugh and Mary McCarthy. More's chief model was Plato's Republic, in which Socrates describes his ideal state. It is in Plato's Critias however, that he imagines an actual location for a utopian society: the island of Atlantis, formed of concentric rings with springs that provide both hot and cold water. Before Plato, Paradise was imagined in the form of Elysium, which Homer located on the western edge of Earth. Turner writes that in The Odyssey'the description of the Elysian Fields stresses chiefly the superb weather-conditions; but Lucian, completing the picture later, represents Elysium as a luxurious holiday-camp, with honey and scent laid on, permanent background music provided by nightingales, and self-filling wine glasses.'

Ambrosius Holbein, The Island of Utopia, 1518

The first edition of Utopia came with a sketch-map of the island by Hans Holbein's elder brother Ambrosius. However a slightly different version appeared in 1518, within a book devoted to the work of More and Erasmus that had engravings by both of the Holbeins. In this new version the ship's position in relation to the island makes it resemble a skull, slightly reminiscent of the famous anamorphic skull in Hans Holbein's The Ambassadors. There is an interesting article on this in the British Dental Journal which suggests that Erasmus may have suggested a memento mori design as a pun on More's name. At first I thought special dental techniques had been used in this research and that there might have been something uniquely interesting about the 'ship of teeth'. However, the article is actually an excursion into art history by a practising dentist whose 'experience in dental radiology' heightened his perception of concealed anatomical structures. It is a striking idea that the particular viewpoint dentists habitually have of our upturned faces may lead them to read landscapes differently (not what Woody Allen had in mind I think when he wrote'If the Impressionists Had Been Dentists'). The Utopians may have had need of dentists, as their meals ended with a great variety of sweets and fruits. Dentists are not mentioned explicitly but Utopia has a plentiful supply of medical equipment, experienced doctors and sympathetic nurses, so that 'practically everyone would rather be ill in hospitals than at home.'

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Wanderings through the Mark Brandenburg

February 29, 2016, 2:34 pm

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Reading the new translations of Walter Benjamin's radio broadcasts, made between 1929 and 1932,you are aware of how quickly the world in which they went out would disappear. The final set of programmes about the catastrophes of history now seems to point towards the disaster that would shortly engulf Germany and eventually Benjamin himself. The broadcaster was, in Benjamin's imagination, a guest in people's homes but, as Peter Conrad wrote in his review of Radio Benjamin, 'when the Nazis took control of Germany’s airwaves, such polite protocols were suspended. A welcome guest no longer dispensed sage advice or told cautionary stories; instead, one man harangued a crowd, shouting tirades at top volume.' How many Berlin Youth Hour listeners, you wonder, would grow up to fight in the Wehrmacht ten years later?

The programme I want to highight here, 'Fontane's Wanderings through the Mark Brandenburg', begins with the idea that the landscape surrounding the city was 'discovered by the youth of Berlin'. This Wandervogel movement would soon be outlawed, along with other groups distinct from the Hitler Youth. However, as its title indicates, the main subject of Benjamin's broadcast was not these young walkers, or the wider groups of Bündische Jugend. What he proceded to talk about was a remarkable topographical project, conceived one day in 1858 on Loch Levan in Scotland, by Theodor Fontane.

'In the middle of the loch lies an island, and on the middle of the island, half hidden behind ash trees and black firs, rises an old Douglas castle, the Loch Levan Castle of song and legend. On returning to land by boat, the oars rapidly engaged, the island became a strip, finally disappearing altogether, and for a while, only as a figure of the mind, the round tower remained before us on the water, until suddenly our imagination receded further into its memories and older images eclipsed the images of this hour. They were memories of our native land, an unforgotten day. It was the image of Rheinsberg Castle that, like a Fata Morgana, hovered over Loch Levan...'

In that moment Fontane realised that the landscape made famous by Walter Scott was really no more beautiful than the sandy terrain of his native Mark Brandenburg. And so he began his wanderings, selecting material to write about like 'a walker picking individual ears of grain'. In 1860 he wrote to his friend Theodor Storm that the result might run to twenty volumes; in the event it was published in five, between 1862 and 1889. The result was, as Benjamin told his listeners, 'far more than tedious descriptions of landscapes and castles, these books are full of stories, anecdotes, old documents, and portraits of fascinating people.' It is not hard to imagine this appealing to Benjamin. It sounds as if it would be enjoyed by English readers too if a modern selection were published, perhaps by an editor/translator looking, like Benjamin, to illuminate our understanding of culture and social change. Although Fontane's novels have appeared in English (Before The Storm is one of my father's favourite books), I've not come across a translation of the Wanderings through the Mark Brandenburg, either in full or abridged form.

Carl Blechen, Rural Landscape in the Mark Brandenburg, c. 1831-8

Benjamin concluded this broadcast with his own description of the broad, expansive landscape of the Mark - quoted below again in the translation by Lecia Rosenthal - and some verse by Fontane that hardly needs to be translated.

'Its sandy, marly soil does not lend itself to strong shapes; however, one is occasionally surprised to come across a steep precipice, or a gorge ripped into the earth. But the plain of the Mark, with its birch forests and cast acres of fields stretching to the horizon like a broad sea of gray and green, is the landscape's most beautiful feature. It is so shy, subtle, and unobtrusive that sometimes, at sundown, on the water amid pillars of pine, you think you're in Japan, and other times, in the limestone hills of Rüdersdorf, you imagine yourself in the desert, until the names of the villages here call you back to reality. Fontane strung some of these names together in a few light and airy lines, which we close with today.

And on this tapestry's flourishing seam
the laughing villages prosper and teem:
Linow, Lindow,
Rhinow, Glindow,
Beetz and Gatow,
Dreetz and Flatow,
Bamme, Damme, Kriele, Krielow,
Petzow, Retzow, Ferch am Schwielow,
Zachow, Wachow and Groß-Behnitz,
Marquardt-Ütz at Wublitz-Schlänitz,
Senzke, Lenzke and Marzahne,
Lietzow, Tietzow and Rekahne,
And lastly a garland of lively haunts:
Ketzin, Ketzür and Vehlefanz.'

Landscape view in the 1986 TV adaptation

Theodor Fontane, Wanderungen durch die Mark Brandenburg

Footnote: Michael Rosen's excellent programme on the Benjamin broadcasts can be heard on the BBC archive. Although he doesn't explore the countryside of the Mark Brandenburg, he visits the Benjamin archive in Berlin and locations described in the original programmes .

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Song of the Forests

March 4, 2016, 4:08 am

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I have often written here about music inspired by landscape, but the Song of the Forests is an oratorio dedicated to the reshaping of landscape. It was by written by Dmitri Shostakovich in the summer of 1949 to celebrate the forestation of the Russian steppes. A year earlier he had been denounced for formalism. Living in fear, he took to waiting on the landing by the lift each night for the anticipated arrest, as Julian Barnes describes in his new novel The Noise of Time. While Shostakovich composed serious work 'for the desk drawer', the Song of the Forests was written to help secure his rehabilitation. It was a setting of what Barnes calls 'an enormous, windy text by Dolmatovsky' that referred to Stalin as The Great Gardener. 'Under Stalin, the oratorio insisted, even apple trees grew more courageously, fighting off the frosts just as the Red Army had fought off the Nazis. The work's thunderous banality had ensured its immediate success.'

This was not the only collaboration between Shostakovich and the poet Yevgeniy Dolmatovsky. In 1951 they wrote 'The Motherland Hears, The Motherland Knows' which Yuri Gagarin whistled on his descent to earth ten years later, making it the first song performed in space. An article on Dolmatovsky in a journal dedicated to Shostakovich mentions more of his work, including songs that were popular during the war. In his memoirs Krushchev said he'd been inspired by 'The Song of the Dnieper'which describes the river filling with the blood of the Fascists (you can hear renditions by the Red Army Choir on Youtube). Shostakovich and Dolmatovsky continued working together and met for the last time just before the death of Shostakovich in 1975. Apparently Shostakovich said to him "You know, The Song of the Forests was really about protecting the environment - a subject the whole world is talking about now. We hit the nail on the head!"' Forty years later we are still talking about it, but as Hannah Ellis-Peterson wrote last year, the contemporary relevance of the Song of the Forests may have more to do with politics than the environment.

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Blind Orion Searching for the Rising Sun

March 11, 2016, 9:59 am

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Nicholas Poussin, Blind Orion Searching for the Rising Sun, 1658

I write this surrounded by piles of books with a couple of pictures propped against them. This would be pleasant except that they've all been brought upstairs to be out of the way of some imminent building work. Sadly there's too much I've got to do here in the house to spend time writing anything very thoughtful about landscape and art. So here instead I will just give you a couple of beautifully written passages from an essay by William Hazlitt, 'On a Landscape of Nicholas Poussin.'

'Orion, the subject of this landscape, was the classical Nimrod; and is called by Homer, 'a hunter of shadows, himself a shade.' [...] Mists rise around him, and veil the sides of the green forests; earth is dank and fresh with dews, the 'gray dawn and the Pleiades before him dance,' and in the distance are seen the blue hills and sullen ocean. Nothing was ever more finely conceived or done. It breathes the spirit of the morning; its moisture, its repose, its obscurity, waiting the miracle of light to kindle it into smiles; the whole is, like the principal figure in it, 'a forerunner of the dawn.' The same atmosphere tinges and imbues every object, the same dull light 'shadowy sets off' the face of nature: one feeling of vastness, of strangeness, and of primeval forms pervades the painter's canvas, and we are thrown back upon the first integrity of things. [...] To give us nature, such as we see it, is well and deserving of praise; to give us nature, such as we have never seen, but have often wished to see it, is better, and deserving of higher praise. He who can show the world in its first naked glory, with the hues of fancy spread over it, or in its high and palmy state, with the gravity of history stamped on the proud monuments of vanished empire,--who, by his 'so potent art,' can recall time past, transport us to distant places, and join the regions of imagination (a new conquest) to those of reality,--who shows us not only what Nature is, but what she has been, and is capable of,--he who does this, and does it with simplicity, with truth, and grandeur, is lord of Nature and her powers; and his mind is universal, and his art the master-art!'

Poussin's Blind Orion Searching for the Rising Sun is now owned by the Met but when Hazlitt saw it, the painting was 'one of a series from the old masters, which have for some years back embrowned the walls of the British Gallery, and enriched the public eye.' His essay praises what were the world's first regular temporary exhibitions of Old Master paintings. Pictures, he concludes, 'are scattered like stray gifts through the world; and while they remain, earth has yet a little gilding left, not quite rubbed off, dishonoured, and defaced.' I don't think Hazlitt would have thought much of the Alexander Calder lithograph I'm about to pack away in an old sheet for a few months. But he would have agreed that to take pleasure from art it is unnecessary to have pictures hanging on the walls around you.

'Pictures are a set of chosen images, a stream of pleasant thoughts passing through the mind. It is a luxury to have the walls of our rooms hung round with them, and no less so to have such a gallery in the mind, to con over the relies of ancient art bound up 'within the book and volume of the brain, unmixed (if it were possible) with baser matter!' A life passed among pictures, in the study and the love of art, is a happy noiseless dream: or rather, it is to dream and to be awake at the same time; for it has all 'the sober certainty of waking bliss,' with the romantic voluptuousness of a visionary and abstracted being.'

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The lake of Como

March 18, 2016, 2:57 pm

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Francesco Gonin, View of Lake Como, 1840

(illustration for chapter 1 of Alessandro Manzoni's I Promessi Sposi)

'That branch of the lake of Como, which extends towards the south, is enclosed by two unbroken chains of mountains, which, as they advance and recede, diversify its shores with numerous bays and inlets. Suddenly the lake contracts itself, and takes the course and form of a river, between a promontory on the right, and a wide open shore on the opposite side. The bridge which there joins the two banks seems to render this transformation more sensible to the eye, and marks the point where the lake ends, and the Adda again begins—soon to resume the name of the lake, where the banks receding afresh, allow the water to extend and spread itself in new gulfs and bays.

The open country, bordering the lake, formed of the alluvial deposits of three great torrents, reclines upon the roots of two contiguous mountains...'

- Alessandro Manzoni, The Betrothed, 1827

Thus Manzoni begins his celebrated novel in the manor of a rather dry geography lesson. According to Umberto Eco, almost all Italians hate the book 'because they were forced to read it at school.' They also wonder why he spends so long describing the features of Lake Como before getting on with the story. 'Manzoni proceed as if he were filming from a helicopter slowly landing (or as if he were reproducing the way God looks down from the heavens to single out a human individual on the Earth's surface).' With the third sentence the description moves from geography to topography. Then, once it has attained a human scale, the landscape begins to be described as it would be experienced by someone walking over it. And from there Manzoni passes from topography to history before finally alighting on an individual, Don Abbondio, who is making his way along a lane on the 7th day of November, 1628.

On this blog I have described something similar before: Joseph Conrad's Nostromo, in which the long scene-setting prepares the reader for a book whose story will encompass more than just the activities of its characters. In The Betrothed, Eco says, 'we are being told not just the story of some poor little human beings but the History of Divine Providence.' That opening in which Manzoni assumes 'the viewpoint of god, the great Geographer' also tells us something about Don Abbondio. This is 'not just an exercise in literary self-indulgence; it's a way of preparing the reader straightaway to a read a book whose main protagonist is someone who looks at the way of the world from on high.' In the portrait I have reproduced here Manzoni is shown in front of Lake Como. He looks neither towards us or over his surroundings but upwards, to a point somewhere above the world.

Giuseppe Molteni, Alessandro Manzoni, 1835

The Umberto Eco quotations above are from Six Walks in the Fictional Woods, the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures he delivered in 1993. This post is prompted in part by the sad news of Eco's death last month, which has been marked by many tributes and obituaries, from The New York Times to BLDGBLOG. The last of his Walks concludes with the story of a visit he had recently made to a planetarium. There the curator arranged the display so that it showed what the stars would have looked like on the night of 5-6 January 1932, the first night of Umberto Eco's life.

'Perhaps others have had a similar experience. But you will forgive me if during those fifteen minutes I had the impression that I was the only man, since the dawn of time, who had ever had the privilege of being reunited with his own beginning. ... Perhaps I had found the story that we all look for in the pages of books and on the screens of movie theaters: it was the story in which the stars and I were protagonists. ... That was a fictional wood I wish I had never had to leave.'

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The Tarn

March 20, 2016, 5:46 am

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Lars Hertervig, Borgøya Island, 1867

Yesterday I watched the first of Andrew Graham-Dixon's new three-part series on Scandinavian art. He has begun it in Norway, crunching through the snow in a parka and discussing some artists I've featured here before: Munch, Dahl, Balke. In one hour he couldn't include everyone (no Kitty Kielland) but I was interested in the story of Lars Hertervig (1830-1902), whose traumatic move from a poor farm on the west coast of Norway to the city of Düsseldorf, where his sponsors sent him to study at the Arts Academy, was likened by Graham-Dixon to the shock of Norway's transition from rural backwater to modern state. One day, Hertervig, who had fallen in love with the beautiful daughter of his landlady in Düsseldorf, was told that a rendezvous had been arranged with her. But when he arrived to meet her he found no one there but a bunch of bullying, mocking students. This practical joke contributed to a depression which led him to return to Norway, where he was placed in the asylum at Gaustad. After eighteen months, 'incurably insane', Hertervig went home to his family. There he began to paint again. Two examples of this new style were discussed in the programme: the first (above) shows a crag emerging from boiling clouds above a mirror of water; the second (below) is stranger still, a vision of what might almost be a prehistoric landscape.

Lars Hertervig, The Tarn, 1865

Here is what Andrew Graham-Dixon had to say in front of The Tarn:

"Looks at these clouds. There's nothing else like this in all of nineteenth century landscape painting. It's almost as if the landscape itself has gone mad, been provoked into these paroxysms of movement and gesture. It's almost as if you are looking into the mirror of a troubled mind. The landscape itself has a tremendously primitive, ancient feel about it. To me it's almost as if Hertervig is attempting to summon up or capture that sense of the landscape that's always been there in the Norwegian soul, whether in the soul of the Vikings or the Christians who followed. And together with that there's a kind of fear present in it all. A fear perhaps that just as this landscape might almost be on the point of reverting back to some primordial waste, that there is no meaning, there is no purpose, there is no pattern to the natural world. The world simply is there."

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Topological loss

March 25, 2016, 12:16 pm

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The building work I mentioned a fortnight ago is well underway, covering everything in layers of dirt from crumbling Victorian bricks so that any neglected surfaces begin to look like Man Ray's Dust Breeding (1920). Meanwhile I have been reading this week about the first study of London's air quality which puts a figure on the number who die prematurely from the long run effects of nitrogen dioxide and dangerous fine particulates. Such airborne pollutants have been used by the Italian artist Luca Vitone for a new kind of plein air landscape art, canvases that capture the grey substance of the city that we all have to breathe. He has also made similar works from the kind of dust I am surrounded by now: Rooms (1914) comprised four watercolours made from dust collected inthe German Federal Court, Bundesbank, Bundestag and Berlin's Pergamonmuseum. You can see an example of a dust piece accompanying an article on Vitone in Frieze from a couple of years ago. In this overview of Vitone's art Barbara Casavecchia discusses other works that deal with a sense of placelessness:

'In 1988, at the age of 24, Luca Vitone began working on ‘Carte Atopiche’ (Atopic Maps), a series of 1:25,000 scaled maps from which he removed all topographic indications. [...] ‘All my works reference a condition to which we are subject, which I call “topological loss”,’ Vitone explained in an interview with the critic Emanuela De Cecco in 1992.² So deep-rooted were his feelings that he had the geographical coordinates of his place of birth, the Galliera hospital in Genoa (Lat. N. 44°24’07’’ Long. E. 8°56’31’’), tattooed on his arm, while his website constantly updates his position with a tracking system. Travelling widely and regularly exhibiting internationally, Vitone (who is now based in Berlin) compensates for his placelessness through constant scrutiny of his relationship to the contemporary Italian landscape, which he transforms into minimalist installations, soundscapes and, more recently, monochromes and videos.'

The article concludes with a description of Vitone's recent work in which visitors to the Venice Biennale were confronted with a scent that the artist had developed 'in collaboration with the master perfumer Maria Candida Gentile by mixing three rhubarb essences.' This was no perfume though, it was designed to evoke the smell of asbestos. For Vitone there was a particular association with asbestos-related deaths in Piedmont. (When we first moved in here we were told by the man who dismantled an old structure in the garden that he thought it contained a small amount of asbestos. In mentioning this I should point out that our garden is pretty small and a significant portion of it constitutes an inconvenient ivy-clad mound that we understand to be a concreted-in World War Two air raid shelter nobody has had the energy or money to have removed. Still, I suspect this visible remnant of the past is something of an antidote to feelings of placelessness and topological loss).

After Venice, Vitone and Gentile created a new olfactory sculpture for an exhibition in Berlin, Imperium (2014), 'composed of different fragrances, which together evoke the “smell of power”' (something I think I may have sniffed before). Olfactory landscape art may well be a growing trend. One of the best known artists working with smell, Sissel Tolaas (who recently featured in The Guardian) is also based in Berlin and made an installation charting the smells of its districts back in 2004. The city is also home to a Smell Lab dedicated to olfactory experiments. The results from one of its field trips are not hugely impressive ('Piece of Textile Left for an Hour Underneath a Rug at a Späti on Kottbusser Damm' - 'Smells like Nothing'), but I guess this kind of smellscape research is still in its infancy. It is not yet possible to embed smell clips into these blog posts so I have added a short video about Luca Vitone above. Now, on a fine evening here in Stoke Newington, I think I can smell the spring at last, overlaid with a whiff of brick dust and a hint of ancient soot from the old kitchen fireplace we have just uncovered.

Fragment of old wallpaper, Stoke Newington, date unknown

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