In the gallery

 The Eyes have it......

    or.... The sign of a good painting.....

I still revere Peter Cook, even though a quarter century has passed since his fatal gastrointestinal haemorrhage at the age of 57.... And to this day I cannot enter an art gallery without thinking of Pete and Dud eating their sandwiches in front of Cezanne's Les Grandes Baigneuses [Eleven female figures repose in an imaginary landscape bordered by trees.....] The painting was purchased in 1964 with a special grant and the aid of the Max Rayne Foundation.  As Pete tells Dud in their In the Gallery sketch, The Big Bathers (Pete's translation of the painting's title) cost almost as much as Tottenham Hotspur. About fifty thousand pounds a body - you could get the real nude lady for that price.....

Anyway, the art critic in Pete lectures Dud in what makes a good painting.  That's the sign of a good painting - if the eyes follow you round the room, it's a good painting.  If they don't, it isn't.

Dud queries how that works with the Big Bathers, and Pete explains that if they are facing away, then the sign of a good painting is if the bottoms follow you around the room.  And they test the theory.....

In these days of up-lock and anti-social distance, I have been thrilled to revisit some galleries, and to test Peter Cook's perspicacity.  I concentrated on the eyes of certain famous paintings (no, not the bottoms.  I have no place for drifting bits of gauze in my life.....) And I was alarmed to find that not all our treasured masterworks are looking the same way....

Take this group of Four Poor Clares, by Ambrogio Lorenzetti, pictured around 1320-25 from the Chapter House of the Sienese church of San Francesco. They certainly don't seem to be following me.....

And this Virgin and Child, by Ambrogio Bergognone (c.1488-90) appears to be watching something while her boy is distracted by something else.... (and neither seem interested in the Carthusian monks behind  them, building the Charterhouse at Pavia.....)

My curiosity is raised.  Who/what are these icons gazing at?  What attracts their attention?  And why won't their eyes follow me?  Here is Giovanni Bellini's Doge Leonardo Loredan (1501-2) [looking uncannily like Pier Paolo Pasolini by the way].  His dead eyes seem to be deliberately avoiding the artist's attention.  Very cinematic (never look at the camera....)

But Albrecht Dürer's father (1497) would appear to have an eye on his son?  Or is he looking past him?  I hate to say this, but there's a touch of strabismus in the gaze.....

In Jan van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait (1434) it could be that Giovanni Arnolfini, a wealthy Italian merchant resident in Bruges, is contemplating his wife's bump, and that she is dreaming of a happy family.  But she could be looking at her husband's hand and thinking she would rather their guests (in the mirror) hadn't got off the bus.  Either way, they sure ain't looking at us.....

Rembrandt, one of my all time faves (up there with Peter Cook), could play tricks with the light, and his Belshazzar's Feast (c 1636-8) shows us shock and awe as the divine hand writes on the wall (Thou are weighed in the balances, and art found wanting.....  something of a Johnsonian nightmare, perhaps?) These eyes are never going to follow us around the room......

But when he comes to paint himself, as he did many times (he painted himself before the mirror at least forty times, etched himself 31 times and made a handful of drawn self-portraits); he is not shy.  Rembrandt van Rijn will stare us down, daring us to eyeball him back, as in this example from 1637.

His son, Titus, looks a little more abashed when painted in 1658, but he was his father's agent and factotum, and things weren't going well at the time (though they were worse ten years later when Titus died of the plague.)

There's a distinct family likeness visible in this self-portrait at the age of 63 (the year after Titus's death).  But Rembrandt is not finished.  He looks at the viewer with the hint of a smile; there's life in the old dog yet, and these eyes will not only follow you around the room, they will haunt you all the way home.....

I wander the great Galleries of London, almost alone with these darkening faces.  I almost see the paintings reacting to each other in their suspension.  

Edouard Manet's The Execution of Maximilian (1883) not surprisingly upsets the woman in pink sitting with her cat within earshot..... Her expression reminds me of someone on holiday who has just realised the people in the chalet next to her have a child with ADHD.....

And I am interested to see the interaction of others with the windows on the walls. What does this little daughter think about Georges Seurat's Bathers at Asnières (1883 - 4)?  Does she like the little red dog in the foreground?  Or does she wonder why these boys are swimming in a river so close to the smelly chimneys in the background?  Or does she wonder why no one is looking her way?

Meanwhile, other solitary browsers seem to be checking Pete's other thesis.  The Rokeby Venus [The Toilet of Venus, 1647 - 51] (Diego Velasquez's only surviving nude) has the kind of bottom that might just follow you....  (though probably only if you had a Porsche and a flat in Knightsbridge....)

Amidst all this, despite the solemnity of great art, one picture stands out.  The eyes of Frans Hals's Laughing Cavalier (1624) do definitely follow you around.  He's a confident 26 year old and he poses as a man of some vitality.  He is proud to be seen, and will watch every watcher with a view to perhaps meeting up later when the gallery closes.  

As Dud says to Pete: That's the thing about the laughing cavalier - at least he has a giggle......

In risu veritas.....

With thanks to The National Gallery and The Wallace Collection for allowing me to wander freely amongst these treasures and to take photographs (I promise I didn't take any of the pictures....) I didn't use flash and I won't benefit in any way from this blog.....

Wonderful World

Don't know much....

Don't know much about history

Don't know much biology

Don't know much about a science book

Don't know much about the French I took

But I do know that I love you

And I know that if you love me, too

What a wonderful world this would be

I doubt whether the thirty-three year old Sam Cooke’s final thoughts, in December 1964, were that it was a wonderful world – being shot in the chest can’t be a pleasant experience, whatever the circumstances.  But then Bertha Franklin didn’t love him, so things plainly weren’t wonderful…..

Anyway that’s beside the point.  Which is, somewhat tangentially, that I was minding my own business the other day, sipping hand-crafted West Country apple juice in Euston’s Cider Tap, trying to convince myself that, despite an avalanche of unhappy news recently, there is a wonderful world out there.  And then through the apple fumes I heard a voice gently singing Sam Cooke’s signature song. A face, somewhat beardy, a little rosy, certainly bleary, opened its lips and softly stated that art is one way of expressing love for the world, whether it is the art of a singer song-writer, or that of an architect or engineer, or that of a painter, the butcherthebakerthecidermaker…..

And what, I enquired, drawn as one is under such circs into conversation with a stranger, brought on this eye-watering profundity?

And the face, somewhat meekly, responded that this particular epiphany was ignited by a day out in the metropolis, during which it had had a guided tour of the National Gallery and then visited the new extension to the Tate Modern.  Enough "art" in one day to fund a Trident…..

And so, I am intrigued, what might be the connection with Mr Sam Cooke, deceased?

Ah, well, it’s the profession of ignorance, nay innocence, with respect to book-learning while emphasising that love can reveal the wonders of the world.  This touches my simple four-valve heart-pump.  And it is a beautiful song.  Beautifully sung.  And I don’t know much about art (though I knows what I likes)…..

So, wondering where I was going, I asked what it was that he likes….

Angels!  Angels with guitars!  And blue – I love the sheer luxury of lapis lazuli, agate of the Afghans…..

And the landscapes in the backgrounds of Italian renaissance pictures.

I acknowledge that I like Rembrandt (http://www.richardpgibbs.org/2014/12/rembrandt-van-rijn.html), Henry Moore (http://www.richardpgibbs.org/2013/05/feeling-henry-moore-ish.html), Constable (http://www.richardpgibbs.org/2014/11/mr-constable.html),   Brian Bennett (another Old Master, http://www.richardpgibbs.org/2012/10/brian-bennett.html).... Et al….

Et al?  The conversation sputters forward.

Indeed.  I confess that I am quite taken with the arts!  In fact, it takes quite something to dis my pleasure in the visuals.

Give me a furry stance?

I’m not keen on Tiepolo or Rubens…..  Could I  offer you a drink?

Awe?  Thank you, I’ll have a number 12….

The chap who sawed up a cow, and stitched a shark in a tank.  The lady with the bed and tent….

Ah!  Bri Tart?

Scream Tease I call it. 

But did you know that Rain, Steam, and Speed - The Great Western Railway, 1844,  by Big Joe Turner,  there’s a train breasting the Maidenhead Bridge in a fit of storm, and we are meant to feel it all – the gouts of rain, the spiffs of steam and the atrocious speed of it all? Look close and there’s a hare on the tracks; and peoples on the river banks….. And all the manmade madness of it was down to I K Brunel, who built the bridge and the train.

So, what did you make of the new state of the Tate?

Thanks…. Cheeers….  To be Frank

Didn’t catch your name? Gelett Burgess, was it?

James, James Bradburne….. And yours?

James James, eh?  I waved a little finger over my new glass of apple soup.  The Tate?

Have you seen it?

A tad brick on the outside, concrete inside for me.  Too much of the ziggurat....

Sam Cooke wouldn’t really like it.

‘Nuff said.  State of the mind....

Though it is a wonderful world

Apple juice helps.

It's all done with mirrors.  

Going far?

Maybe.  Depends.  You?

Milan.  

Eventually.  

But I’ll get you one before…..

I don’t know…..  

I can't de-cider....

(Joke!)

Well.  One for the virgin......

OK. Don't mind if I was.  

Here's to Big Joe Turner, Isambard Kingdom Come and the Thames at Maidenhead!  

And here's to the lies that make us realise the truth!

 

I knows what I likes.....

La ta ta ta ta ta ta (History)

Hmm-mm-mm (Biology)

La ta ta ta ta ta ta (Science book)

Hmm-mm-mm (French I took)

Yeah, but I do know that I love you

And I know that if you love me, too

What a wonderful world this would be

Desert Island Discs

Variations on a theme by Roy Plomley

Perchance to dream…..

The concept of being cast away on a deserted island plucks plangently at the heartstrings.  Humans are social beings, and being in company informs the structure of society, from tribal cave times to the Islamic State, from Downton Abbey to Scott’s Expedition to the South Pole.  With few exceptions, David Blaine perhaps being a rare one, St Simon Stylites another, we yearn for company, at least part of the time.  So the idea of being cast ashore on a remote piece of land, with no one to talk to, strikes deep into our reservoir of fears.

On the back of books and films about such isolation, Roy Plomley invited his guests to consider such a fate, and to take with them eight samples of music that might console them in their exile, completing the dream-game with a book and a luxury.

Such was the success of this as broadcast entertainment that the show still goes on, half a century after its inception and many years after the deviser’s demise.  Now the radio archives are available on line, and it is possible, should one so wish, to sift the choices of the famous and to generate a list of the most-requested desert island discs…..

The formula is so simple and so successful that it has become, I believe, an after dinner parlour game, one that causes merriment galore in the withdrawing rooms of the cultured, most especially when one is on holiday with friends…..

With this in mind, and finding myself marooned on Coquet Island, a scrap of Northumberland that lies low in the North Sea (more about this very soon), I thought I would play…..

The first thing that came to mind was the enormity of the task.  The choice is (almost) infinite.  So I invented a rule, which was that the discs had to be from my own collection (it would have been even easier had I restricted it to my ipod).

The second realisation was that anyone’s selection could depend on time, mood, day of the week, etc, and so there had to be a time limit, a rule of some spontaneity. If you committed yourself to trying to change the world by your pick of eight records, you would never make it.

So, Roy, here I am.  Alone, with my gramophone, the seagulls crying over the waves, and my eight discs.  Which to start?  Well, Roy, since you ask, I would like to hear Maria Callas, singing Casta Diva, from Bellini’s Norma.  Do not be fooled into thinking I chose this because I am an opera buff, and my fondest moments have been spent in boxes at Covent Garden, but it’s not like that (the closest I have been to a box in Covent Garden was when the market was still there).  I have never seen Norma, never saw Callas, and still don’t know what the song is about.  It’s just the thrill of that voice, that music, the rise and fall of strings and vocal chords that stirs something in me.  I think it is beautiful and sad. It conjures the glittering world of make believe that is the theatre, and within that artifice, that house of candles and gold paint, lies a key to the human soul.  Large numbers of diverse people can be brought together to forget the outside, to be together in a fairy tale, and to then turn to each other and say, Wasn’t that fantastic?

Louis Armstrong’s personal history shows that with perseverance it is possible to realise potential.  The odds in 1900 were not in his favour, but he worked at his music and mastered it, and shone as one of the brightest stars in the music business.  OK there was some schmaltz (and a lot of sweet smoke) toward the end, and I wouldn’t want to have What a Wonderful World on the Muzak of my island (though I really love it….) but the breezy optimism, gently chilled delivery, and superb musicianship of On the Sunny Side of the Street take a lot of beating.

And thank you, Roy, my next choice is from Beatles for Sale.  Again, as with Callas and Armstrong, I never saw the Beatles live, but when I was growing up their music was all around, and both on the radio and on TV we caught glimpses of them as they grew into their fame.  I sat through A Hard Day’s Night twice in succession in Watford (a dare devil thing to do, believe me) and played the album over and over with friends at school in our lunch breaks. I’ve chosen Rock and Roll Music, from the subsequent album however, because, although it may not be as brilliantly light and cool as Chuck Berry’s original, it possibly conveys best what the group was really like in the clubs of Hamburg, or the Cavern in Liverpool.  It is difficult now to explain the excitement they generated, but this number, and its enduring endorsement of rock and roll, sums up a change of attitude in young people that, at least in Europe and America, will never come round again.

My elder brother and I fell under the spell of Bob Dylan very early on.  I bought Freewheelin' on its release and Tim Binding, a friend at school, lent me Another Side of Bob Dylan, which immediately enthralled me with its raw directness.  Years later some friends met in Leicester Square to see Pat Garret and Billy the Kid and, possibly due to an excess of pink gins, ended up in Leighton Buzzard…..  The combination, whatsomever, of Peckinpah and Coburn, Dylan and Texas, burnt a hole in my mind that still glows round the edges.  Billy, they don't like you to be so free…..  Of course, as my friend Ben Timmis has reminded me, the Nobel-deserving Dylan's canon is so vast that this seemingly simple sample does not really do the poetry justice, but I maintain that the lauding of a freedom-seeking anti-hero in such plaintive and haunting tones, together with the calling out of murderous, and faceless, authority, coupled with Peckinpah's striking use of location and Coburn's mesmerising performance (we'll gloss over Kristofferson at this point) all come together for something that would do a lot for me on my deserted island.  [For my funeral, either Blind Willie McTell  or Every Grain of Sand - but that's another matter.....]

And your next choice?  I bought Joe Cocker’s I’m so glad I’m standing here today, when I lived in Italy and at the time I was experimenting with Super 8 film and working with a group of students.  This song seemed perfect for a sort of pop video (I had just featured in one that was directed by Charlie Borromel in a Villa on the Via Appia Antica, which apparently was very popular on TV, though I never saw it myself).  To illustrate the Cocker song Jessica Giuffre, daughter of two well-known Italian actors, wandered about St George’s English School catching the morning sun, blinds being drawn, etc.  It was clichéd, but as a dramatic coincidence of fate Jessica’s mother was killed in a car accident just before we were due to start, so I expected we would cancel the project.  Jessica did not bow out, however, and despite her grief, turned up punctually for our shoots, and we eventually put the song onto a soundtrack and it went on show to great effect.  Brave girl.

And your sixth choice?  This is Bob Marley and the Wailers, Three Little Birds.  And there are three reasons why I would dance to this on my island:  one, it’s a great tune, frothy and funky at the same time; two, I love birds; three, I met Bob and the Wailers on their first tour of the UK.  I was helping a friend’s band as a kind of volunteer roadie and they were the support act.  After the show we spent some time in the dressing room, listening to Catch a Fire….   And that, sadly, is about all I remember.  My one brush with stardom!  Enough said.

Carrickfergus?  It is a wonderful song, and this performance by the finest musicians Ireland has produced since O’Caralan is sublime.  Although my claim to Celtic ancestry (my mother’s father was ‘Irish’ and I have cousins in Mayo) is hardly pureblood, I cherish that part of me, and Irish music and Literature run through my nerves.  I’m drunk today, and I’m rarely sober…..  What an honest (if completely deplorable) line to sing?  Oh but I am sick now, and my days are numbered, come all ye young men, and lay me down…..  Bold to face the truth, and right in calling out youth to take on responsibility.

And your final choice?  Chopin.  Almost any nocturne would do, but F sharp’s as good a key as any!  It’s the perfect music at the end of a busy day, the romance sparkling out of the upper register while underneath there is the brooding of the dying artist looking out of the window at the sea and the rain, the Mediterranean at its most hostile beating on the shores of Mallorca…..  As with Callas, etc, I never saw Chopin, but I can just imagine his long fingers a blur across the ebonies…..

Now you will get the Bible and Shakespeare, but you can choose one other book.  This is easy.  I can imagine that long hours on the island might eventually cause some sort of depression, thinking of the worst, etc.  There is one book that can cure that, with its anarchic simplicity but enduring optimism.  Nothing can better the power of Svejk to survive the most desperate situations, and on my island I fear I may need his help.

And one luxury?  I was going to ask for a supply of yeast, so I could make ginger beer – or something stronger perhaps – but I changed my mind.  Could I have a piano?  And would it be too much to ask for Bach’s Well Tempered Clavier to go with it?  That will keep me busy…..

Paul McMullin, it is yours…..

Thank you, Roy, it's been fun.....

1 - Maria Callas - Casta Diva - from Bellini's Norma
2 - Louis Armstrong - The Sunny side of the street
3 - The Beatles - Rock and Roll Music from Beatles for Sale 
4 - Bob Dylan - Billy 1, from the soundtrack album: Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid  [Of course Main Title Theme (Billy) would be a nice alternative as a Karaoke version.....]
5 - The Crusaders and Joe Cocker - I'm so glad I'm standing here today
6 - Bob Marley and the Wailers - Three Little Birds
7 - Carrickfergus - Van Morrison & The Chieftains
8 - Chopin - Nocturne in F-Sharp, Op. 15, No 2