The Russian architect Berthold Lubetkin once declared “Nothing is too Good for Ordinary People”* and as a founder of the radical Tecton group he designed municipal housing which combined the creation of healthy spaces, where people could live healthy lives, with the expression of his modernist aesthetic.
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Paintings by Howard Fritz
at the Torriano Meeting House, 99 Torriano Avenue, London, NW5 2RX
from January 12th 2019 More →
An enthralling survey of ancient myths is the central idea of Ovid’s exhibition at Scuderie del Quirinale in Rome. Ovid interpreted and sometimes created the tradition of classical mythology in his most famous poem, Metamorphoses. He was an aristocrat and an intellectual who clashed with emperor Augustus’ moral reforms. For this reason, Augustus exiled him to Tomis, a remote town on the Black Sea, where the poet died ten years later.
Ovid’s free thinking and open criticism to a moral interpretation of myths is clearly pointed out in the exhibition and well explained in the captions. Starting from the first room, the viewer is well aware of the paramount importance of Ovid’s works both in the past and today. From the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, his books were copied by hand then published in printed editions spreading throughout Europe. Ovid’s words are still meaningful today in the installation in coloured neon, ‘Maxima Proposito (Ovid)’ (2017) by the American artist Joseph Kosuth. It is a selection of writings in English and Latin from Metamorphoses testifying the still relevant and inspirational quality of the myths.
Love is central to Ovid’s oeuvre in all its forms: eroticism, seduction, passion as well as how to discipline desire. His libertine vision was in contrast with Augustus and his wife Livia’s reforms that meant to renew pax deorum (divine harmony) and devotion to the gods, aiming to give stability to the Roman empire. Ovid clashes with this view mocking the gods as frivolous, malicious, ruthless in their revenge and insatiable in love.
The examples are numberless and well explained throughout the exhibition with engrossing works of art, mainly sculptures from the Roman period but also pictures by Botticelli, Tintoretto, Domenichino, Saraceni and Poussin, and thought-provoking descriptions. The ambiguous and falsely chaste image of Venus Pudica (modest Venus), covering her private parts, is revealed in the illicit love affair of Venus and Mars. Another example is in the slaughter of the Niobids, a ferocious massacre of young innocents by the hands of Apollo and Diana. The goddess shows her vengefulness and cruelty in the story of Actaeon as well, who sees her naked by chance and is transformed into a stag then devoured by his own hounds. In a similar way, the satyr Marsyas, who dared challenge Apollo in a music contest, loses and is flayed alive as punishment.
The best example of Ovid’s exposure of the gods’ eccentricities and his criticism of Augustus’ policy, is expressed in the way he narrates Jupiter’s affairs, revealing the lack of morality of the lord of heavens and protector of Rome. Ovid’s Jupiter is a seducer, an insatiable lover, using any means in order to fulfil his desires. His victims are defenceless girls, young men and honest married women he conquers using trickeries and disguises. He transforms into a swan to rape Leda, a white bull to abduct Europa, an eagle to kidnap Ganymede, and golden rain to conquer Danaë. The gods worshipped by Augustus are not impeccable examples of morality, on the contrary, they are capricious and subjected by their passions and whims, eventually cruel to the extreme. Ovid’s undermining of the reputation of the gods brought Augustus to exile him.
The exhibition continues on to the second floor focusing on stories of love, rape and abandonment such as the myths of Ariadne, Proserpina and Ganymede. Love is an obsession, so powerful that it cannot be controlled. It triggers action and eventually transforms the victim in a goddess or dooms her forever. Women are usually powerless in the face of the authority of the gods. They are forced to submit both to rape and to transformation or to invoke transformation to avoid rape as in Apollo and Daphne’s story.
The most tragic story is the myth of Narcissus, where Echo, who is desperately in love with him, consumes herself to the point of being reduced to her voice. Narcissus rejects whoever is in love with him and finally loses his head for his own image reflected in water. As Tiresias predicted ‘so long as he never knows himself’ he will live. This is an ambiguous prophesy that implies the dangers of egocentrism. The only character who seems to thrive after his abduction, rape and abandonment is Ganymede. He is not punished or transformed but ‘promoted’ to the role of cup-bearer of the gods.
At the end of Metamorphoses, Ovid envisages his future everlasting fame. His works will be used by great writers such as Francis Bacon, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Joyce, T.S Eliot and Bob Dylan. The poet’s emphasis on change, a constant becoming of all the forms and aspects of the universe, reflects our modern vision of life. This lack of stability, that Ovid took from the philosopher Heraclitus, stresses the proximity of all the forms: humans, gods, animals, plants and minerals. There is a reciprocal influence and a constant tension between the different natures where new shapes keep what is possible of the old ones, which are never completely effaced in the transformation, as Calvino claims in his essay ‘Ovidio e la contiguità universale’ (Ovid and the universal proximity). Eventually, it is not a total change but a process. For the preservation of the species, survival is fundamental: ‘everything changes, nothing dies, the everything flows, and every image is transformed in movement’.
The exhibition shows in an effective, stimulating way how Ovid’s works influenced our culture and storytelling from ancient time until today, thanks to a vision centred on the constant becoming of being human. It entails transformation but also continuity and encompasses all forms present in nature. Interesting descriptions and significant works of art complete the display giving a thorough perspective to the viewer.
Carla Scarano © 2019.
A daring exhibition of Yayoi Kusama’s work at Victoria Miro Art Gallery. The title itself plays on the double meaning of the word ‘moving’ evoking emotions and the movement of her repeated polka-dots that dance in the eyes of the viewer producing unsuspected depths and continuous motion on the apparently flat surfaces.
The exhibition develops in four sections. On the first floor of the gallery the visitors are allowed about a minute entry into the Infinity Mirrored Room. It is a mesmerizing experience of multiplied spherical paper lanterns with polka-dot patterns in a mirrored dark room. The lights shift colours from green to red, yellow, deep blue and bright pink communicating an overwhelming and reassuringly pleasant effect in the infinite repetition of the same motifs in a controlled space. As the title remarks, the artist’s (and the viewer’s) heart can dance, or play, in an illusion of infinity inside an enclosed space wishing to go beyond the limited vision.
At the ground floor of the gallery, Kusama’s pumpkins are displayed in paintings and in the painted bronze sculpture versions. They are in three colours: green, yellow and red, with black dots. Other paintings in the same room reveal a closer attention to the details of the dots, reflecting motion and evolution. As Kusama said, pumpkins speak to her about ‘the joy of living. They are humble and amusing at the same time’, they are ‘humorous’ and have a ‘human-like quality’. However, her pumpkins do not look like ‘real’ pumpkins we find in nature, not only in the colour but also in the shape. They look perfect, an image of a pumpkin, an example that becomes ‘The Pumpkin’ for the viewer.
The polka-dot patterns repeat endlessly in a reassuring rhythm controlling and limiting the space and giving, at the same time, the illusion of infinity revealing a highly crafted painting technique. They give a sense of suspension (dot, dot, dot…), a controlled suspension (but controlled to what extend?), which seems to be her core message.
The abstract entities evoked in the titles of some of her works (e.g., eternal soul, the heart dancing into the universe, I want to go to heaven) reveal unidentified places open to infinity and yet controlled by the artist in the accumulation and repetition of the same shapes. The viewer cannot be but fascinated by the illusion created and mastered by her art, the depth and movement of dots’ paths on her creations.
Among the visitors, there were families with children who were flabbergasted by the ludic quality of Kusama’s work, reminiscent of theme parks and playgrounds. But there is much more in her work for an adult eye, with her constant allusion to the tension between the finite quality of being humans and their infinite aspirations.
Kusama had a traumatic childhood; she studied painting in Kyoto and moved to the US in the late 1950s until the early 1970s, when she moved back to Japan. She is not only a visual artist, she is also a writer and produces performances, happenings and installations. In 1977 she chose to live in a psychiatric hospital and admitted that ‘if it were not for art, I would have killed myself’. She has reported to feel her soul separated from the body and to have hallucinations that she recreated afterwards visually in her paintings in an attempt to decipher and control them. In spite of her old age, eighty-nine, which does not seem to weaken her creativity and skill, she is extremely prolific; in fact, she is one of the world’s number one female artists. Her work has been described as a crossing between surrealism, minimalism, pop art and abstract expressionism. It certainly appeals to the public and has a primordial quality, translating her obsessions, which reflect the viewer’s obsessions, in an accessible language through self-assuring repetitions. She claimed that in her ‘nets’ of repeated patterns she meant to expand beyond herself in a self-obliterating process that allows her to access an imaginary unrestricted reality. What appeals the audience is also the sense of extreme freedom her work communicates, certainly a controlled kind of freedom but still beyond ordinary boundaries. In some way it reflects our free but surveilled society.
The exhibition continues into the beautiful gallery’s waterside garden, with the sculptures of the ‘Flowers that speak all about my heart given to the sky’. Nature and artifice merge in the constructed Arcadian scenery in the shadow of the cement and glass building of the gallery. A perfect match.
The last part of Kusama’s display, ‘My Eternal Soul Paintings’, is in Gallery II, third floor. They have a different philosophical and pictorial approach, large canvases with intriguing titles such as ‘A Corner of the Sky’, Beauty of Death’, ‘I Want to Eat the Sun’, or ‘Beyond the Heaven’. Large portions of bright colours and archetypical figures prevail on repeated patterns. Some of them look like primordial masks (‘Garden of Women in Blooming Youth’, ‘Let’s Stop the War’), others resemble organic elements (‘I spoke all about Peace’, ‘Hymn to Life’). The striking freedom of these works skilfully catches the eye of the viewers involving them in Kusama’s fantastical experience in an illusion of infinity where everything is possible, provided that it is also under control. Her work and her life shift between depersonalization and a solid grip to reality in a man’s world where she is leaving her indelible mark masterfully dottying around.
Carla Scarano © 2018.
Domesday Book, William the Conqueror’s 1085 survey of his recently-won kingdom, merits an exhibition in its own right.
But the British Library’s decision to place the book, on loan from the National Archives, in context as not just the beginning of post-conquest Britain, but the continuation of Anglo-Saxon times is inspired.
It makes us realise the extent to which it is a record of what came before the events of 1066, as well as a snap-shot of the new Norman rule and how much of our national identity, based on the English language, survived a French invasion.
For Brexiteers, that could be cause for celebration, but equally the exhibition’s gathering of the literature and culture that remain from the centuries when our nationhood emerged underlines what they owed to ongoing exchanges between Britain and mainland Europe.
Moreover, our largely Germanic language and gene pool were the result of the 5th-century arrival of Saxons, Angles and Jutes who crossed the North Sea to settle in Britain and threaten the British communities that had survived the withdrawal of Roman rule.
Over the six-centuries covered by this spine-tingling exhibition, boundaries were frequently redrawn.
Linguistically the languages of the Picts, Scots, Britons and Anglo-Saxons stood alongside the Latin of the Church, while kings and archbishops vied for territory and power and Mercia replaced Northumbria as the dominant kingdom.
Uneasy stability broke out with a peace treaty around 880, included in the exhibits, between Guthrum, leader of the Danes, and Alfred, king of the Anglo-Saxons. The Vikings, increasingly tempted by the prosperity that came from relative peace, however continued to raid and, by the mid-11th century, the succession crisis caused by Edward the Confessor’s failure to leave an heir triggered the Norman Conquest.
In the turmoil, much was destroyed, but what the British Library has lovingly assembled of what survived fires the imagination.
It’s an exhibition of firsts. We have, for instance, Codex Amiatinus, the earliest surviving complete Bible in Latin made at the monastery of Wearmouth-Jarrow in England’s northeast and taken to Italy in 716 as a gift for the Pope.
On loan from the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana in Florence, this exhibition marks its first return to England in more than 1,300 years. During that time, the one change is a 19th-century alteration on the dedication page, when the name of Abbot Ceolfrith, who set off to Rome with the Bible and died en route, is replaced with that of “Peter of the Lombards”.
Other firsts are the earliest known legal text, dating from the early 7th-century and establishing a 50 shilling fine for anyone who kills a man, and the earliest letter in English, when Ordlaf, a royal official writing to King Edward the Elder, detailed a property dispute.
These documents are beautifully and painstakingly written, but they pale by comparison with some of the most famous manuscripts, including the British Library’s original text of the Old English epic poem Beowulf and the Library’s Lindisfarne Gospels.
Less well-known today but also wonderfully creative is the Utrecht Psalter on loan from Utrecht University Library. In one of the many instances of cultural cross-fertilisation, it spent the period from around 1000 to 1640 in England when its charming illustrations that leap off the page gave rise to what was known as the “Utrecht style.”
Beyond literature and the Church, other branches of learning are represented.
Bald’s Leechbook takes its name from “laeca”, the old English word for doctor. It was probably compiled in the 9th-century and is at times surprisingly modern. Alongside the remedies for elves and night goblins, it describes plastic surgery for a cleft palate and a salve including garlic to treat eye-sores that hit the headlines in 2015 because tests proved it was effective against a strain of MRSA.
Less enlightened, but conceivably inspiration for Gulliver’s Travels is the 11th-century Marvels of the East, which depicts the men with heads in their chest and 20-foot tall giants with lion’s manes who supposedly lived in the lands beyond Britain.
Such manuscripts are an academic’s delight and you will find many of them peering hungrily at the thousands of ancient words on display, but there is also dazzling bling and other visual treats for those questing easier access thrills.
Among these are a glorious golden belt buckle from the Sutton Hoo hoard, embellished with a web of 13 snakes.
We also have the Alfred Jewel, inscribed Aelfred mec Heht gewyrcan (Alfred ordered me to be made), a stunning example of the craftsmanship devoted to a handle for a pointer stick used for following words when reading a book. What better symbol of the importance a civilised culture gave to reading.
The Anglo-Saxons had also begun to need more precise measurements of time. Visitors can marvel at a portable sundial for the 10th-century monied classes with appointments to keep.
Another visual joy is the Lichfield Angel, displayed for the first time outside Lichfield, once the ecclesiastical power at the heart of Mercia. Assumed to be Gabriel, this beautifully strong and clear limestone carving dated from around 800 AD is thought to come from a shrine chest, possibly that of St Chad.
Spong Man, the earliest Anglo-Saxon three-dimensional human figure ever found also has immediate appeal. The pottery lid for a cremation urn, this ancient, hewn man with his head in his hands resembles primitive African art as much as anything European in yet another challenge to our sense of historic Englishness.
Barbara Lewis© 2018.
In 1933, Hitler became Chancellor of Germany. In the world of fashion, shoulders broadened and the iconic 1930s shape became established.
The juxtaposition of fascism and fashion might seem frivolous, but Night and Day is earnest in that it takes style as the lens through which we can understand anew an era impossible to disassociate from the World War that followed.
It was also preceded by the stock market crash of 1929, meaning that looking good night and day was often a triumph of ingenuity over adversity and only the wealthy few could be effortlessly if guiltily elegant.
Even for them, the gaiety of the 1920s flappers gave way to more sedate and chaste cuts, just as in architecture the extravagance of art nouveau had already been pared back to the geometric flair of Art Deco, named after the international exhibition Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes, held in Paris in 1925.
Another piece of style trivia we learn, or possibly are reminded of, is that the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922, when gold discs were found sewn to the young king’s clothing, led to a vogue for sequins and sparkle that endured into the 1930s.
At the dazzling summit of the social pyramid was Princess Elizabeth, captured by Cecil Beaton in a froth of net and diamante, decorously seated in her palace.
For mere mortals, glamour had to be contrived from domestic skills honed from reading women’s magazines, full of helpful tips. At the same time, department stores were also becoming established, allowing customers to browse unattended through racks of off-the-peg clothes bearing price tags and forcing shop assistants, previously accustomed to the personal service of the tailor-made, into new work practices. Today’s echo is the growth of online shopping, check-out robots and the collapse of the high street.
The shift away from the chic boutique also coincided with the advent of cheaper, patterned fabrics and synthetic materials rather than the embroidered silks and velvets that had gone before.
They provided the attire for the thousands upon thousands living in the new semi-detached suburban housing that shot up in the 1930s, replacing crumbling slums.
At the other end of the social scale, society photographer Cecil Beaton was signing the lease on his country home in Ashcombe, Wiltshire, where he would entertain his leisured guests and host fancy dress parties.
One of his outfits was a “rabbit coat”, worn at his “fête champêtre” in 1937. It has been recreated with egg shells and flamboyant felt flowers and guards the entrance – or is it the exit? – to a selection of 30 of Beaton’s 1930s fashion portraits. The original was made by stage costumier Madame Karinska and had accompanying breeches embroidered with beetles.
Most of the portraits he shot take as their theme the glamorous and make-believe. They include his famous 1936 photograph of Marlene Dietrich, which captures the strength of her jaw-line, echoed by the brim of her hat and continued by the sweeping gesture of her hands.
We also have a triptych “Charwoman to Dowager” on the art of retouching, showing how he slimmed down and rejuvenated his subject.
The two worlds – glamour and desolation – collide in his portrait of Vicomtesse Marie-Laure de Noailles, artist and patron, as she huddles in her fur coat among the ruins of the Paris Exhibition.
Her sorrowful expression may have been genuine, but is also stylised. One rare natural-looking shot is of actress, writer, model Iris Tree and another “bright, young thing” Nicolas Nabokov, who holds her tightly while she looks radiantly happy.
They stand out for their apparent disregard of formality in an exhibition that emphasises the pride of overcoming difficulty and keeping up appearances.
Another selection of portraits by Dorothy Wilding, Madame Yevonde and Paul Tanqueray, leading studio photographers in London, provides further testimony to the golden age of the glamour shot.
Vivien Leigh is luminous in a sapphire blue dress offset by a vase of tiger lilies. Even Washing Day, an advertisement for British Celanese fabrics, is a dreamy haze of soft colours against a summer sky.
Returning to the present, the similarities – and differences – are striking. Today’s women do not accept that their place is in the home. Still, however, they emulate the film stars. The difference now is that they want the brands they wear not makeshift equivalents. A decade after our own financial crisis, we have lost the 1930s willingness to find satisfaction from cutting our coat according to our cloth. The nagging sense left by this socially-aware exhibition – from which the evening gowns, plunging at the back, however elegant cannot divert us – is that the divisions between the have and have-nots, borne out in how they dress, are marked today, as they were in the 1930s, and anger is fermenting.
Barbara Lewis © 2018.
Son of a carpenter, Andrea Mantegna (1431-1506) was a self-made man from Padua. In 1453, he married into the greatest artistic family of nearby Venice and became the brother-in-law of Giovanni Bellini (1430-1516).
Regardless of the emotional success of the marriage, for art historians, the far more important relationship is of two brothers-in-art, who spurred each other on, often treating identical subjects, learning from each other and drifting further apart as their styles matured.
Fifteenth-century art works are fragile and difficult to transport, meaning the National Gallery’s justly lauded assemblage of works from as far away as Brazil is a rare chance to study and marvel at the extraordinary similarities and differences between two of the greatest Italian Renaissance artists.
Mantegna is the more cerebral. Inspired by architecture and antiquity, his trademark is a dramatic use of “scorcio,” or foreshortening, that brings us up close to the agonies suffered by Christ, rather than allowing us the emotional distance of gazing up at a lofty figure.
Bellini’s great strengths create a different kind of immediacy. They include a powerful use of colour, the creation of atmospheric landscapes, steeped with emotion, and the portrayal of faces that seem to live and breathe. A true Venetian, he infused his works with light.
We begin with St Jerome in the desert, in the wilderness and with a lion.
Mantegna’s St Jerome Penitent in the Desert, loaned from the Sao Paulo Museum of Art, cuts a frail, lonely figure, surrounded by symbolic items with a rather doleful lion at his feet as tame as a dog.
Bellini’s St Jerome and the Lion zooms in on the interaction between the lion with a thorn in his paw and an animated St Jerome in an almost pastoral landscape.
The two painters again differ over treatment of Christ’s descent into limbo. On this occasion it’s arguably Mantegna who focuses more narrowly on the dramatic action as Christ disappears into the earth. Bellini’s descent is embellished with Bosch-like half-serpent, half-fish monsters.
Both versions share a similar figure in the foreground with flowing robes, perfected in a surviving studio drawing also shown at the National Gallery.
The technical virtuosity and emotional authenticity of Mantegna and Bellini are all the more vivid when compared with their contemporaries.
Marco Zoppo was inspired by Bellini, but his dead Christ with angels lacks the physicality and depth of human suffering of Bellini’s interpretation, while Mantegna gives us more context and more symbolism: a looming sky, a landscape where life goes on indifferent to the agony and an antique-looking tomb.
Perhaps the most striking example of similarity and difference is the Agony in the Garden. Bellini’s depiction sweeps away Mantegna’s architectural detail, background figures and a vulture of doom in a tree to portray a kneeling Christ dominating a landscape with little to detract from him and the firmament where an angel of hope awaits.
By the time we move on to the later years, for the most part the subject matter on display from the two artists is different.
Mantegna’s fascination with antiquity reaches its acme in his great nine-panel The Triumphs of Caesar painted during his time in the employ of the Gonzaga family in Mantua for their ducal palace and now part of the Royal Collection at Hampton Court Palace after Charles I acquired the work in 1629.
Bellini remained in Republican Venice, where he brought his powers of capturing human character to a portrait of the blue-eyed Doge Leonardo Loredan, all-powerful and inscrutable in exquisitely embroidered silk.
Mantegna’s Cardinal Ludovico Trevisan demonstrates comparable skill in his depiction of the translucent folds of the cardinal’s surplice, but if the doge’s clear stare is modern, the cardinal is stern and classical, like the characters who people Mantegna’s Triumphs of Caesar.
Equally, Mantegna’s Virgin and Child is a perfectly crafted study in quiet, protective tenderness and bonding down to the child’s tiny clenched hands. It is heart-breakingly beautiful and artistically brilliant, but it’s Bellini’s boldly colourful and more fluid Virgin and Child that looks ahead to the great blossoming of Renaissance art that was still to come.
Barbara Lewis © 2018.
The beautiful park and the edifices of Villa Torlonia in via Nomentana in Rome is an unmissable place in the tour of the capital. It is not far from the centre and it is easily reachable by bus from Stazione Termini (the central railway station of Rome).
The Villa belonged to powerful Roman families, first to the Pamphili then to the Colonna and finally to the Torlonia. It has interesting buildings which were designed and restored by the architect Giuseppe Valadier in the nineteen century. He gave them an elegant, classical outline and reorganized the garden with paths and fountains. The most important parts to visit are: Casino dei Principi (House of Princes) with its temporary exhibitions, Casino Nobile (Noble House) with the museum, and Casina delle Civette (House of Owls). There are also Old and New Stables, Jewish catacombs, the Lemon House, the Medieval House and the Red House. In 1925 Mussolini lived there with his family until 1943.
The Casino Nobile is beautifully restored with interesting frescoes and remarkable stuccos, especially on the ground floor. Going upstairs there is an elegant detail: the plaster patterns on the ceilings mirror the patterns of the marble floor. On the first and second floors there is a collection of paintings of Scuola Romana (Roman school), one of the most important artistic movements of Italian art in the period between the two world wars. The painters of the Roman School were different one from the other but had some common characteristics, they all worked in Rome and had profound links with the city, were dedicated to blending great painting skills, believed in the experimentation of new approaches, and opposed Fascism. Among them there are renowned artists, such as Renato Guttuso, Mario Mafai, Giuseppe Capogrossi, Fausto Pirandello, Antonio Donghi, Giulio Turcato and Alberto Burri. Their work is referred as ‘Realismo Magico’ (magical realism); they chose intimate, homely subjects and hidden corners for their pictures in opposition to the rhetoric of the regime. They also expressed the anxiety of the modern world depicting places of the city demolished by Mussolini’s urban project.
Casino dei Principi hosts an exhibition of Duilio Cambellotti, featuring about two hundred works that delineate the artist’s eclectic career which was influenced by the ideas of William Morris and the Scottish design of the School of Glasgow. It is an anthological exhibition that displays examples of the artist’s versatile work as an illustrator of books and magazines, creator of posters for events and advertisements, sculptor, ceramist, furniture, jewellery and carpet designer, textile artist, printmaker and stained glass artist. He also designed scenes for the Greek theatre of Syracuse, and other classical theatres in Italy such as Taormina, Ostia Antica and Paestum, as well as the costumes of the plays. His style is connected to Art Nouveau but he had a strong political and social commitment as well. He resisted the perfect industrial product and believed that the artist was a craftsman close to the art of the people that, for him, in the mainly rural Italian environment of the time, were the peasants of the Roman countryside, the Agro Pontino. His source of inspiration was people’s work, their legends and myths, the buffaloes of the Agro Pontino and the tools the peasants used to labour the land. This is clear in some of the works on display such as ‘Conca dei Bufali’ (1910), a bronze large bowl with buffaloes, or in the sculpture ‘Le vacche aratrici’ (1924-25) where the busts of the cows are the central piece. They are pieces that evoke a mythical agrarian world considered morally important and aesthetically attractive in opposition to the industrialization that was advancing in Italy, though slowly compared to other European countries.
Cambellotti denied the hierarchy of arts, a concept which is clearly showed in the exhibition explaining his tendency to mix and experiment in different techniques, following the Wagnerian idea of ‘total art’ (Gesamtkunstwerk), ranging from paintings to the graphics of posters and advertisements, stained glasses, furniture and even toys. He also took part in an important social project, the ‘Scuola del Popolo’, People’s School, that meant to bring education to the illiterate peasants of the Roman countryside. He designed posters to advertise this project, decorated schools and illustrated the books with the letters of the alphabet making drawings to simplify learning through images. In this way he combined his social commitment with his work for companies, and for public, civil and ecclesiastical patrons. He illustrated the Florets of St. Francis of Assisi, produced stained glasses with religious themes and realized private house furnishing and interior spaces for exhibitions. He worked for the magazine ‘La Casa’, the House, and took part in Monza’s famous International Exhibition dedicated to decorative arts in 1923 and in 1925.
The exhibition illustrates every step of this engrossing, unconventional career in different sections with significative examples of his major works starting from the posters he produced for the theatrical performances he contributed to as set and costume designer as well, to the advertisement for the Fiat Balilla, ‘La Balilla dell’Impero’, the Balilla of the empire (1937), to interior and furnishing designs, stained glasses, also present in the window decorations of Casina delle Civette, ceramics, textiles inspired by Middle East art and projects for monuments. His style looks for a synthesis, a harmony that combines his ethical commitment and the aesthetic message where the role of the artist is in unifying craftsmanship and the themes and symbols of labour linked to the agrarian archetypical Italian heritage.
More works by Cambellotti are in Casina delle Civette, both in stained glass and furniture. This is a unique building which was originally a Swiss cabin, or rustic chalet. The prince Giovanni Torlonia liked to live there so much that he transformed it, adding annexes and altering parts. The final result is complex, multi-faceted, incredibly attractive and mysterious. From outside it looks like a mixture of medieval, rustic, Renaissance and vaguely northern style. Inside it there is a special charm in its narrow corridors, wooden stairs and floors and variably sized rooms, all decorated with superb glass windows. The emblem of the owl is recurrent, probably hinting to Giovanni Torlonia’s passion for esoterism. There are owls on stained glasses realized by Cambellotti, but also on capitols, stuccos and tiles. The place is so intimate, elegant and fascinating that it is said the prince preferred this small house to his rich palaces. On the front door is his motto: Wisdom and Solitude.
It took four years to refurbish the Casina delle Civette after it was completely abandoned for more than forty years, but now it’s worth visiting as well as the rest of Villa Torlonia both for the beauty and peaceful environment, and for the riveting exhibitions displayed in its elegant buildings.
Carla Scarano © 2018.
This is a remarkable exhibition: Jennie Jewitt-Harris’s intricate collages, built in many cases on a foundation of pencil and charcoal drawings of driftwood, are a delight to the eye. The huge range of material – fragments of press cuttings, maps, tickets, illustrations and many more – draw the observer into the works and compel them to find and build stories of their own. In one moment, one may be transported by a piece of map to a remote (or perhaps familiar) spot, and in the next be made to speculate about the lives of characters who have been frozen in time in a complex, alien, environment. Perhaps they are observers, too.
Jennie is a doctor and many of the images are suggestive of anatomical drawings. In ‘Jeopardy of Life’ the image suggests a human figure striding across a landscape, the sinews of the lower limbs taut as it leans forward under a burden of collage including figures that stare out at the viewer, demanding our attention and forcing us to view it ever more closely. ‘Seat of the Soul’ is an image of her husband’s eye, and draws us deep into the body, emphasising the unique role of the organ of sight in internalising our physical environment. In conversation, I learnt that while many people are willing for their internal organs to be used for transplantation after death, far fewer are willing to donate their corneas, the transparent part of the eye through which light passes into the retina, itself an extension of the brain, a topic that Jennie is researching for a PhD.
The quality of Jennie’s work is attested to by her having two of her artworks hanging at this year’s Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. It certainly deserves to be more widely known. As does the C & C Gallery, situated at the back of a bar only a couple of minutes away from Forest Hill rail station, on the London Overground as well being served by as main line trains from London Bridge and Victoria.
William Marshall © 2018.
In Bleak House, the rag and bottle merchant and collector of papers Krook dies from spontaneous combustion. In terms of dramatic appropriateness and poetic justice, it’s apposite, but Dickens’ belief such an event was possible earned him the scorn of those who saw themselves as more scientific.
The English essayist George Henry Lewes accused Dickens of being “completely outside philosophy, science and the higher literature”.
More than a century later, it is Dickens who is the more revered of the two, honoured by a series of museums in some of the many houses in which he lived.
The museum in Doughty Street, London, in a house where Dickens lived in the early years of his marriage, has a temporary exhibition to revisit the established view that Dickens had no truck with science, presenting the discipline not so surprisingly as an extension of his concern with social justice and reform rather than abstract theory.
A precursor to today’s television scientists, Dickens role was as a mass communicator and debunker of some of the more nefarious pseudo-scientists masquerading as the real thing.
He was a popularist with a gift for reaching across society and across age groups. As a well-established stop on the London tourist trail, the Doughty Street museum has the additional challenge of communicating to all nationalities as well as to all generations and the risk is everyone is left slightly unsatisfied: the children and visitors from afar are puzzled and the pedants scoff at interesting snippets that deny us a deeper, more coherent narrative.
We can touch an armchair in which Dickens sat, see a court suit and sword Dickens wore, wonder at the lectern from which he declaimed and at the desk where he wrote so prolifically – and for cult followers that may be ample.
The stand-out exhibit of the science exhibition is Pepper’s Ghost, a display of optical illusions created by chemist John Pepper, which uses angled glass to create ghostly figures, including some from Dickens’ novella “The Haunted Man”.
You can try it out by sitting in a booth and terrifying your friends. Dickens and Pepper had the higher aim of exposing the fraudulent spiritualists who used such equipment at seances.
Scientific or not, no-one could deny that Dickens was dedicated to describing ill-health and helping to combat it, devoting some of his restless energy to a campaign for the world’s first children’s hospital – a few blocks away from his Doughty Street home at Great Ormond Street.
We also learn that, like other writers whose description is based on acute observation, he has led to some retrospective diagnosis. Obesity Hypoventilation Syndrome, a condition related to sleep apnea, was first called Pickwickian Syndrome because the Pickwick Papers – written while Dickens was at Doughty Street – feature a character with classic symptoms: Joe, “a wonderfully fat boy,” is constantly hungry, red in the face and always falling asleep.
Also characteristic of his profession, Dickens was as capable of ruthlessness as of compassion. His work to improve conditions for broader society was matched by cruelty to his wife Catherine Hogarth whom he married when he was 24 and with whom he had 10 children.
The museum’s artefacts include Catherine’s engagement ring and document Dickens’ decision to make a public announcement of his separation from her as he pursued his affair with the young actress Nelly Ternan. For Catherine that was humiliation. In Dickens’ mitigation, the pressure of his fame and public speculation arguably forced his hand to tell the world. The museum doesn’t get into the underlying ethics.
Ternan added to Dickens’ considerable expenses as he set her up as his mistress in a series of houses on the outskirts of London.
Money was a particularly powerful driver for Dickens, spurred by bitter memories of his father’s imprisonment for debt in the Marshalsea.
We’re reminded of how far he rose by a prison grill installed in the attic rooms, which in Dickens’ time were reserved for his servants and a nursery for the three of the 10 children already in the family when he lived in Doughty Street.
The basement might be more prison-like, but there we have a Victorian kitchen – complete with a hedgehog to keep down the insects – and a wine cellar to cater for the elegant dinner parties as Dickens cemented his fame and fortune. We leave with the sense we have barely begun to know the man behind it all.
Barbara Lewis © 2018.
Born in the Normandy port of Honfleur in 1824, son of a mariner and whose dying wish was to return to the coast, Eugene Boudin had an instinctive understanding of the play of light on water and in the sky.
He never attained the position of Peintre de la Marine (Painter of the Fleet), a title awarded by the Minister of Defence in France to artists who have devoted their skills to the sea, but the poet Baudelaire was among those to recognise and encourage a talent regarded now as a precursor to impressionism and he has a museum in his name in the cobbled streets that rise from the port of Honfleur.
The notes in the visitors’ book complain its only fault is it does not contain enough works by Boudin himself.
Until October 15, another Seine estuary artist Paul-Elie Gernez (1888-1948) takes centre stage in a very comprehensive exhibition bringing together his wide-ranging output from wood cuts to designs for embroidery and stylistic experimentation that echoes pointillism and cubism.
The choice for the exhibition flyer is “Baigneuses devant la Jetee” (Bathers at the Pier), a relatively early, accessible work from 1920 only typical of his output in its faithfulness and skill. The bathers are not yet bathing, but fully-clad and well-rounded, more suited to bobbing than swimming. Their bold solidness is of a piece with the rest of the composition that captures the eternal child in all of us, from the priest in black from top to bottom to the rotund madame in pink, on a summer’s day beside the sea.
Years later, life on the beach is still a central theme, but the style has become spontaneous and impressionistic. His atmospheric Deauville beach scene of 1939 is ostensibly similar to his Trouville beach scene in 1946. We have the same characters – a man in bracers seated with his back to us, a woman bather ready for the sea, fellow beach-goers casually arranged around them, absorbed in quiet tasks or just enjoying the day – but the later picture is in pastel, a medium Gernez made his own and that is suited to the texture of the clouds and the haziness of seaside days. The 1939 work is in oil.
If his decorous beach scenes are populated by people overdressed by today’s standards, Gernez also painted nudes in every style and setting – with iris and sea shells, warming themselves by a blazing hearth or abandoned luxuriously on a flowery shawl.
Similarly, he experimented with still life, especially flowers but also the fish, as on sale today at the Honfleur quayside, and depicted in pastel on a crumpled red check cloth by Gernez.
A one-off that catches the eye is the sturdy but diminutive, realistic rather than sentimental “petit ramoneur” (little chimney sweep) of 1915. He’s a child with the bearing of a man, cigarette in hand and no levity in his face.
Gernez a year later painted his own portrait “with moustache”. He is also with a collar and tie and the fixed expression of a prolific, highly respectable hard worker, but it is the comparatively effortless Boudin who inspires the visitors’ book plea for more.
Not only are Boudin’s works generally small-scale, they are few but charming as Boudin’s modest personality and natural understanding shines through.
The two painters are linked not just by Honfleur and the sea: Boudin’s clouds that capture the layered immensity of the sky and his beach scenes – or as he put it modestly “my little ladies on the beaches” – provided inspiration for Gernez.
If there’s too little Boudin, there is even less Dufy, but the two on offer are an unexpected bonus on the museum’s top floor, which also has a view across the rooftops to the port and the Pont de Normandie.
Long before that transformed the land and seascape, we have Dufy’s version of the Normandy resort of Sainte Adresse around 1950 and his vivid Normandy cornfield of 1935: with a flourish he takes you into the tangle of corn ears growing in all directions, in which any conventional sense of perspective is irrelevant.
For those who leave the Musee Eugene Boudin hungry for more, a Honfleur museum pass gives access to four museums for 13 euros.
The other one we managed to squeeze in was the “Maisons Satie”.
Satie (1866-1925), like Boudin, was born in Honfleur and inhabited a surreal, floaty world not far removed from impressionist light-filled clouds.
By his own admission, Satie did not fit any obvious category. He painted and wrote words as well as music, explaining he was not so much a musician as a phonometrician (measurer of sound). His most famous works are Les Gymnopedies and Morceaux en Forme de Poire (Pieces in the Form of a Pear), so it is entirely appropriate that the museum’s first room contains only a giant pear with wings, gently moving up and down, as the representation of Satie’s soul.
Other installations take us through Satie’s living days beginning with morning prayers and his quarrels with religion and ending in the bars of Paris with Cocteau and the other luminaries of the day.
They lead us up to a totally white, dreamy, light-filled attic room where a white pianola plays Satie’s work and then they take us back down to a plush velvet cabaret theatre where we watch a film of Parade and listen to the jeers of the first audiences.
Then they were bewildered by the surreal one-act ballet. Now, especially after an hour spent in Satie’s magical world, we marvel at the coming together of the talents of Jean Cocteau, Pablo Picasso and Erik Satie.
We may well wish we could have lived in such heady days as we hand back the audio-sets and return to the streets of thronging tourists buying seaside kitsch.
Barbara Lewis © 2018.
Balla: Villa Borghese. Review by Carla Scarano.
January 15, 2019 by Carla Scarano • art, drawing, exhibitions, painting, sculpture, year 2019 • Tags: art, Carla Scarano, exhibitions, painting •
Balla: Villa Borghese
Museo Carlo Bilotti
Aranciera (Orangery) di Villa Borghese
Rome
29/11/2018 – 17/02/2019
‘Ho lavorato molto cercando sempre di ritrarre il vero ed attraverso ad esso l’intimo spirito delle cose’
Giacomo Balla
(I have always worked a lot trying to portray the truth and through it the intimate spirit of things)
The Museum Carlo Bilotti is located in the elegant edifice of the Orangery in the park of Villa Borghese. It is one of the many and interesting museums of the Municipality of Rome scattered around the capital, and is free of charge. It is hosting an engrossing exhibition of the first period of Giacomo Balla, a painter and sculptor whose works developed in the first half of 20th century going from realism to abstract art; he was also a major representative of Futurism, an avant-garde movement. Balla lived near the park in 1904 in a large apartment in via Paisiello in the chic district of Parioli. He depicted the trees and landscapes of Villa Borghese from the balcony of his study or immersed in the green just outside his house.
Villa Borghese is in the heart of the city stretching from Pincian Hill facing piazza del Popolo to Parioli for eighty hectares. Besides strolling in the beautiful park, visitors can admire the Lake Garden, various temples and fountains, piazza di Siena, venue of the renowned international horse show, look at the Water Clock and at a reconstruction of the Globe Theatre, as well as visiting the Borghese Museum and Gallery and the Rome zoo (Bioparco). The Orangery is another interesting place to see. The edifice was deeply altered throughout the centuries. Its original structure dates back to the 16th century but was completely refurbished in the late 18th century by Marcantonio IV Borghese in a new project that involved the area of the Lake Garden where the Orangery was a place of leisure. The building was severely damaged during the battles of 1849, when the Roman Republic fell under the pressure of the French army. It was acquired by the Municipality of Rome in 1903 together with the rest of the park.
Museum Carlo Bilotti is an important example of collaboration between public and private enterprises. It is a meeting place of art and culture situated in the centre of Villa Borghese thanks to the donations of Carlo Bilotti, an Italian-American entrepreneur who worked in the field of cosmetics. He was a collector who opened his collection of renowned art works to the public both in Rome and in Cosenza (his home town), donating twenty-two works to the museum. They are paintings, sculptures and drawings mainly by Giorgio de Chirico, but there are also works by Larry Rivers, Andy Warhol, Gino Severini and Giacomo Manzú. Unfortunately, the room dedicated to de Chirico is temporarily closed due to repairing works. The areas dedicated to temporary exhibitions are a large part of the museum both at the ground floor and at the first floor.
In a room by the entrance, a video clip introduces Balla’s art and career from his beginnings as a student at the Royal Albertine Academy in Turin to the time he spent in Paris and his arrival in Rome where his fame soared. At first he became famous for his portraits, where he applied the techniques of light and shadow from photography. Among his students there were Umberto Boccioni and Gino Severini who introduced Balla to Futurism. He signed the Manifesto of Futurism in 1910 moving to an abstract pictorial style that conveyed sensations through colours and geometrical shapes. The study of movement and speed was paramount in this period. Even his daughters’ names, Luce (light), and Elica (propeller), were inspired by this avant-garde movement. Futurism meant to destroy the past and rebuild a new future in a constant change and regeneration. It relied in slogans such as ‘we will free Italy from her innumerable museums which cover her like countless cemeteries’, or ‘a racing motor car is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace’. In politics Balla was a socialist, opposed the establishment and was involved in the literacy campaign together with Duilio Cambellotti. They meant to improve literacy in the countryside around Rome, the Agro Pontino, where there was a high percentage of illiterate peasants and very poor conditions due to the Pontine marshes and the spreading of malaria. At the end of his career, Balla embraced a more realist, figurative style again.
The exhibition displays enthralling pictures, mainly pastels, of views, trees, fountains, alleys and sculptures of Villa Borghese. The artist explored the park over and over again, simplifying the forms and modifying the colours. For Balla, Villa Borghese was like the mount of Sainte-Victoire for Cézanne, a great source of inspiration, that allowed him to investigate reality to the point of an abstract research of purity. The core of his art remained the study of light and movement throughout his career.
A few portraits on display testify his skilful use of chiaroscuro merging the lesson of the masters, such as Caravaggio, and the new techniques of photography he learned in Paris. The influence of Impressionism and Divisionism, characterized by the separation of colours in spots, are also present in some of the works, such as ‘Germogli Primaverili’ (spring buds), ‘Villa Borghese dal Balcone’ (Villa Borghese from the balcony) or the pictures of trees. They emphasise the attentive study of shades that create dynamism and movement. A nocturnal study of ‘Le Torri del Museo Borghese’ (the towers of Borghese museum) reveals a modern interpretation of light and shadow reminiscent of van Gogh’s lesson. A research of simplified forms almost to the abstraction is in ‘Fontana’ (fountain) and ‘Cantano i Tronchi’ (the trunks sing), where the lines evoke the shapes in deep contrasts with the background. Some landscapes depicting the suburbs of Rome are also on display showing how Balla was a complete artist, mastering portraits, landscapes, close up details as well as sculptures. ‘Linea di velocità + forma rumore’ (1913-1914, 1933) is the only futuristic work of the exhibition. It is an installation in chromed brass showing in its sharp angles and convoluted curves the vibrant quality he attained in his investigation of movement and speed.
This is a compelling exhibition that successfully presents some of Balla’s less known yet fascinating pieces centred on the theme of Villa Borghese in the enchanting atmosphere of the Orangery, immersed in one of the most beautiful parks of Rome.
Carla Scarano © 2019.