Four Sketches
from the England Trip
I am just back
to Minnesota from a quick trip to London… last Friday, Mary
and I were talking about places to go that had space
available so we could use our employee passes… although
there was lots of space to Europe, we could not get to
either JFK or ATL, so had to go from MSP so, the only option
wound up being London… well, London was okay because I love
to go to the art museums there… had been to the National
Gallery a couple years ago but had not been to the Tate for
many years… my interest in the Tate is for their collection
of Victorian painting, especially GF Watts and for the work
of Romantic graphic artist and poet William Blake… which I
had seen there like 40 years ago… they also have a great
collection of the work of William Turner, who is a fine and
interesting painter but not a personal favorite…
So, we found a cheap hotel at Hatton Cross which is one stop
from Heathrow on the subway into the city… in fact, our room
looked out on the old Concorde which is sitting there, I
think in mothballs… the Concorde no longer flies anywhere
does it??? but walking from the tube station to the hotel, a
parade of jets including several huge British Airways 747s
came roaring in about 300 feet above out heads… coming in,
we speculated from the far corners of the old empire, New
Delhi maybe or Hong Kong… looking for all the world like
huge but very loud kites gliding in with the sky showing
through the flaps and slats which are fully extended for
landing… really a cool thing to see for people who like
airplanes…
So, Saturday after we checked into the hotel about noon, we
took the tube into central London… got off at Piccadilly
Circus and walked toward the Thames… toward a column that I
thought was Nelson’s column but which turned out to be
another column about three blocks from Trafalgar Square…
fortunately, while there were plenty of tourists around from
all over the world, it was not nearly as crowded as it has
been in the warmer months when we have visited Central
London… and, as there are maps and guides for the tourists,
it is easy to find one’s way around, so we got to Trafalgar
in due course, after stopping so Mary could have a coffee…
which she enjoyed at a sidewalk café while I sketched the
passers by… the weather was very nice, in the upper 50s and
low 60s during the day and bright and sunny… except for a
bit of rain Monday morning…
So we found the National Gallery and visited all of my old
favorite paintings there… it is not every day we get to see
the work of Leonardo Da Vinci and although much of the
National Gallery Madonna of the Rocks was probably painted
by assistants, it is fun to speculate about what is by
Leonardo’s own hand… I also guess that he used glazes of
noncolorfast pigments for the flesh and for the greenery as
well which I guess would have looked much prettier when the
picture was new… and there is a large drawing there (called
a “cartoon”) by Leonardo which is obviously all by the hand
of the master and is very cool to see, spotlighted in a
darkened room… I have always loved the two paintings
attributed to Michelangelo which are also in the National
Gallery… but, my all time favorite painting, a painting I
have loved ever since I first saw it in a book years ago is
the work called Venus Cupid Folly and Time by Renaissance
Mannerist Bronzino… and of course there are many other rare
and beautiful works including small pieces by Vermeer,
Raphael, Titian… Velasquez’s so called Roceby Venus and
Turner’s best paintings… The Fighting Temeraire Tugged to
Her Last Berth to be Broken Up… a painting that so overcomes
me that I had to walk away from it to keep from breaking
down in a blubbering fit of crying right there in the art
gallery… well, anyway, we had a lovely afternoon in the
National Gallery… had a nice sandwich then took the subway
back to Hatton Cross for the night…
The next morning, Sunday, we set off for the Tate Britton…
and wound up walking around the museum in a great circle
looking for a sandwich or something for breakfast… we
finally found a shop that was open and had sandwiches which
we bought and ate at a small iron fenced park… it was very
nice in the residential area of Milbank, just behind the
Tate, sitting in the sun on a bench eating our sandwiches…
the trees were bare of leaves, but no less beautiful for
that and aside from a few pensioners, the pigeons and an
occasional jogger, we had the park to ourselves… the grass
was green, unlike Minnesota where there is still snow and
ice covering the tan colored grass… Mary helped some
seemingly gay German tourists by taking their picture for
them so they could be together in the photo… for which they
thanked her profusely…
Then it was on to the Tate… I had heard that the Tate’s long
term director Nick Serota, a relentless advocate of
conceptual art, had pretty much destroyed the museum for
those of us not into the stupid art of the Twentieth Century
and that turned out to be true, as only one small engraving
by William Blake was on display and a small handful of
Victorian pieces while most of the Museum was taken up by A
Walk through the Twentieth Century (the art of the Twentieth
Century that is)… a walk I have taken once in real life and
have no interest in taking again… the Victorian pieces that
were out however, were stunning… especially Millais’s
Ophelia and three small paintings by William Holman Hunt…
also, there was a lovely painting of a woman by Rossetti…
the early Pre-Raphaelite paintings by Millais show what an
amazing painter he was in his early years before he turned
his energies toward portraits and soap advertisements…
especially the Ophelia in which a giddy surreal effect is
created by the intensity of the details of growing things
painted with an ultra-photographic technique… and a
symbolist intent… and although there is a large painting of
Ellen Terry, there is no sign of any of the major paintings
by Watts which the Tate owns… there also was a room of
Turner paintings, mostly seascapes… which are very
picturesque and a handful of narrative, High Victorian
paintings such as Derby Day by William Powell Firth which I
love to look at… but most of the museum is now devoted to
pushing academic contemporary art… and not surprisingly,
walking out I saw an advertisement for an upcoming show by
Damien Hirst, champion of the pickled-cow-in-a-jar school of
contemporary art so much beloved of Nick Serota…
Leaving the Tate about 3:30, we walked along the Thames to
the Houses of Parliament and had a talk about the
development of the contemporary art aesthetic… I think that
the art of the 19th Century is best seen as an almost total
reaction to the invention and perfection of photography in
the 19th Century… speaking in broad and very general terms…
pre 19th Century artists had, no matter what school or
movement they belonged to, as a bedrock element of their
aesthetic the two dimensional imitation of what a person
sees… it was said that the mirror was a perfect painting…
and although not all painters believed that, they all
believed that depicting what was seen was what art was based
on…
The invention of the camera put a monkey wrench in that and
very soon the artists realized that here was a machine that
could “fix” the seen on a photo reactive surface and make a
perfect two dimensional record of the seen with the touch of
a button… this rattled the artists... they basically
had three different reactions to it in the three basic art
movements of the 19th Century… the first reaction was the
academic reaction which was to officially ignore the camera…
pretend that it did not exist and that only the artist could
draw a two dimensional representation of the scene… this the
High Victorian masters did and especially the French
Academics such as Bougereau and Gerome… although it is
probably true that both of these artists like many academics
actually used photographs in their paintings to serve the
function that would have been served previous to the camera
by preparatory sketches and drawings… so, this reaction
pretended to ignore the camera but often used the new
technology under the table… there still are some of these
flat earth society type movements such as Richard Lack’s
Classical Realism in Minnesota… in the late 20th Century…
The second reaction to photography was the French reaction
in the latter quarter of the 19th Century in which artists
focused on color, which the camera was still not very good
at and at fleeting impressions of the seen created by
painting in very loose, or seemingly loose fashion what the
artist thinks he or she sees in a brief glance which was
another thing the camera in those days was not very good at…
this style of work lead to a delight in the process of
painting which led directly to one of the two ways of doing
art allowed in the mainstream 20th Century aesthetic… i. e.
abstract expressionism and its devolvement…
The third way of reacting to photography was the
Pre-Raphaelite way in which the artist tried to out detail
the camera… while this way of making art resulted in some
amazing art, it was ultimately mostly doomed as camera
technology was perfected in the 19th Century and became
increasingly good at color into the 20th Century… this
camera reaction lives on in the 20th Century in the various
“hyper realist” schools that persisted through most of the
20th Century… (there is a show up of 20th Century
hyper-realist art at the Walker Art Center in Mpls. as we
speak)…
In the early years of the 20th Century, the arts in Europe
and the US went through an aesthetic revolution in which the
underlying aesthetic philosophy… the philosophy of what is
and is not art… finally changed as a result of the invention
of the camera and the three artistic reactions to that
invention mentioned above… the absolute bedrock of this
aesthetic is that art cannot, must not be based on images of
the seen… because images of the seen are the provenance not
of the artist but of the photographer… so, if the
contemporary artist is going to use images, he or she must
not take the image seriously, must make it clear that the
artist is somehow fooling around with the image rather than
presenting it as an image in itself… so what is done to the
image is more important than the actual image…
This new aesthetic was given its current form when Marcel
Duchamp exhibited a urinal in an art gallery or tried to do
that in 1917… the resultant brouhaha was a delight to the
subversive Duchamp and much to his amusement, laid out a
path of art that had nothing to do with drawing and painting
and which can all broadly be called “conceptual art” … when
I was in art school in the 1960s, this new aesthetic had
solidified and being an aesthetic philosophy which had but
small impact on human beings outside the arts world, became
increasingly insular and academic… and had the broad tenants
that one could do “conceptual art” which consisted of doing
in an art gallery, pretty much anything except hanging a
show of traditional drawings and paintings… and that
activity or object would be called “art” and given serious
intellectual attention and context by imbeciles like Nick
Serota… the other thing the aesthetic does allow is painting
as painting was reintroduced to the world in the 1950s with
abstract expressionism… a painting style from which all
images were excised… in later schools and movements, images
were allowed back into academic art but only if the images
were not taken seriously… as I mentioned earlier in this
essay, what the artist has done to the image in contemporary
art has to be more important than the image itself… for
example pop art would be okay because the images are trivial
and silly so it is the artists having chosen and manipulated
the image that matters not the image itself… or hyperrealism
in which the viewer always says something like “it looks so
real”… rather than responding to the created image as its
own content and context… which is to say the image must not
be involved in the artistic act of making a communication on
some deep subconscious level… from person to person… but is
rather to be encountered in the world as an object…
The contemporary aesthetic requires the viewer to come to
the piece as he or she would come to view non art… without
expecting or receiving communication from the artist but
with the experience being entirely between the viewer and
the object viewed… which of course begs the question which I
have asked elsewhere of why one would need to go into a
gallery to have that experience when the human being is so
surrounded by opportunities to have an interesting or
compelling visual experience outside the gallery… and so
often the experience in the Museum of Modern Art, looking at
the art object is far less interesting than the experience
of looking at the stuff one sees before entering the Museum
and after leaving the Museum… the artist may try to
manipulate this object to make certain impacts on the
viewer, but that is very different from trying to make a
serious image that has a serious communication to make from
person to person and is why so much of contemporary art
tends to be so shallow and to make such stupid and trite
points… when it makes a point at all…
I would like the art of the 20th Century to all just go
away… but, of course, I am a victim of my own time as much
as Rossetti was of his… and like him, I have chosen to
ignore the most recent century and go back to take what I
like from an older aesthetic to build a new aesthetic
philosophy today… in my case, one in which the image is
taken seriously… because people love images and human beings
are natural image makers and communicators… my art is not
like the art of the 20th Century because it does precisely
that, takes the image seriously… that is a philosophical
difference that even the dumb shits in the Museums of
Contemporary Art and the modern art academies pick up on
even though they do not have a clue as to why they don’t
like my art… there is a reason… the art violates the prime
tenant of the Contemporary aesthetic in that it takes the
images seriously….
Well, I was a bit disappointed to have not gotten to see any
of the William Blake works and I would have loved to have
had a look at some of the Victorian art that really
interests me, but my view is the minority one and room after
room of 20th Century crap is what makes the Modern Art
Museum relevant in the highly rarified world of contemporary
art in which Nick Serota is a god…
After these musings, we arrived at Westminster Abby… it was
Sunday so the church was closed to tourists, but there was
an organ recital at 5 pm… since we got there about 4, we
went to St. James Park and watched the birds for an hour and
then went to the organ recital which was very beautiful… the
vast gothic arches and stone work providing an amazing
acoustic environment for the huge pipe organ…
Then we walked on to Trafalgar Square and had dinner for
about ten dollars at a German restaurant that specialized in
spicy sausages in crisp buns… by the time we got back to
Hatton Cross, our feet were as tired as the rest of us and
so we were glad to see a bed… we had planned on taking a
motor coach via ferry to Amsterdam as we have to pay a fee
of $129 to fly out of London but only $55 to fly out of
Amsterdam, but when we got to Victoria Coach Station, we
found that the tickets were about double what they would
have been if we had bought them in advance… so we scrapped
the Amsterdam part of the trip and just flew back out of
London Monday at about two pm…
It was a great flight… I watched two movies, sneaking peeks
out the window every few minutes… but it was very cloudy
until about half way through the eight hour flight when all
of a sudden over southern Greenland, the clouds cleared… I
got to see the amazing snow and ice mountains of southern
Greenland… what a treat to see those jagged rocky peeks
covered except at the very summit with crisp whorls of
blindingly white snow… from almost 40,000 feet, the amazing
desolation of these vast ranges of snow and ice mountains
stretching to the horizon is very moving for me… and a thing
of immense beauty… then on over the broken pack ice of the
North Atlantic, to the hills and snowfields of northern
Newfoundland… to fly over the very southernmost bay of
Hudson Bay… which was covered with broken pack ice… the
chiseled outline of the shore against the blistering white
of the ice… amazing… then south over Duluth and home… lots
of time in the air… lots of time to think about art and this
vast and beautiful planet… lots of time to feel my great
good fortune to be able to see and do the things I see and
do…
a visit to
London
in a few
hours I went
from seascapes
painted at the dawn of the
industrial era,
to seeing the
sea covered with fractured
ice from forty thousand feet…
in these things, perhaps, the intricate touch of
somebody’s god
yet, there was traffic
everywhere
and the buzz of languages
foreign to my
ears… I almost saw
organ notes
bouncing from
the ribs of the
Gothic vault
to the floor
and back again
in dizzy
waves
of
sound…
Four
Sketches from the England Trip
