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Charles II: His Life and Times by Antonia Fraser (revised 1993 edition)

Lady Antonia Fraser published her life of Charles II in 1979. 14 years later she published this big hardback version, which is basically a large-format coffee-table book, with the text drastically cut back in order to make room for hundreds of beautiful and fascinating full-colour illustrations.

As I have detailed the political events leading up to the civil wars in other blog posts, this review will focus on snippets and insights into Charles’s private life, seeing the events of this turbulent time from his personal perspective.

Birth Charles was born on 29 May 1630, one year into his father’s Personal Rule i.e. Charles I’s determination to rule without troublesome parliaments.

Heredity Charles had a swarthy complexion. He was nicknamed the Black Boy and this is the origin of hundreds of pubs of the same name across England. Through his father, Charles I, Charles was one quarter Scots, one quarter Danish (his grandfather James I was married to Anne of Denmark); through his mother, Henrietta Maria, he was one quarter French, one quarter Italian. Hence the ‘foreign’ look which many commentators pointed out.

Charles I’s wife, Queen Henrietta Maria, bore nine children, six of whom survived infancy. It was in the marriage contract between Henrietta Maria and Charles I that all their children should be suckled only by Protestant wet-nurses.

Trial of Strafford Charles’s idyllic early childhood was overshadowed by clouds of approaching war. As Prince of Wales, aged just ten, he sat through the entire seven-week trial of Charles I’s adviser, Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, who’d acquired the nickname of ‘Black Tom Tyrant’. When Parliament passed an Act of Attainder declaring Strafford a traitor sentenced to death, 10-year-old Charles was sent to Parliament with a petition for mercy, which was rejected.

Orange In 1642 Charles’s sister, Mary, aged just nine, was married off to Prince William of Orange, aged 12. Their marriage produced a son who was to become William III of Britain 46 years later.

Wedding portrait of William II, Prince of Orange, and Mary Stuart, daughter of Charles I, future parents of King William III, by Anthony van Dyck

Nottingham As the political crisis deepened Charles I kept his sons, Charles and James, by his side, leaving his other children in London when he fled the capital in 1642. They were with him when Charles raised his standard of war at Nottingham Castle on 22 August 1642.

Edgehill Charles was nearly captured by a troop of Roundheads at the Battle of Edgehill, 23 October 1642. In a much-repeated anecdote, the 12-year-old drew his sword and prepared to fight, before Royalist soldiers came to the rescue. Charles accompanied his father to Oxford where a Royalist Parliament was set up. His youngest siblings, Elizabeth and Henry, had remained in royal nurseries in London, where they were seized by Parliamentarians and given Roundhead governesses.

Hyde Aged 14, early in 1645, Charles was given nominal leadership of the Royalist Western Association and departed Oxford. He was never to see his father again. He was to be supervised by Sir Edward Hyde, a lawyer who had initially attacked Charles’s policies in Parliament, but came round to being an advocate for a new type of constitutional Royalism, became firm friends with Charles I, and then the trusted guardian and mentor of his son for the next 20 years.

Flight The battle of Naseby, 14 June 1645, was the decisive military engagement of the first civil war in which the Royalist army was soundly beaten, followed by further Royalist defeats in the West. Young Charles had moved between Bristol and Bridgewater. Now he clearly needed to flee. His party were pushed by advancing Roundheads down into Cornwall and then took ship to the Scilly Isles. Charles was thrilled by the sea journey and at one point took the tiller himself, whetting an appetite for sea sports which was to resurface after the Restoration.

In Bristol, in Bridgewater, in Cornwall and in the Scillies, argument had raged about where Charles should ultimately flee. Hyde was insistent he remain on British soil, for its symbolic importance. But eventually Charles gave in to the wishes of his mother, Henrietta Maria, who had fled back to her native France in July 1645.

Puritan iconoclasm To give a sense of Roundhead iconoclastic zeal, when Henrietta had fled London, Parliament voted to destroy her private chapel at Somerset House and to arrest the Capuchin friars who maintained it. In March, Henry Marten and John Clotworthy forced their way into the chapel with troops and destroyed the altarpiece by Rubens, smashed many of the statues and made a bonfire of the Queen’s religious canvases, books and vestments.

Charles in Paris King Louis XIV of France was Charles’s cousin (the son of his mother, Henrietta Maria’s, brother) and eight years younger i.e. 8 when the 16-year-old Charles arrived in Paris. Henrietta Maria received a small pension from the French court, but Charles received nothing at all – for political reasons on both sides – and had to ask his mother for maintenance, a situation which led to increasing discord. He was reunited with his boyhood friend, the Duke of Buckingham and they both acquired reputations for laziness and ‘gallantry’.

Holland The next two years were spent among the bickering little court of Royalist exiles around Henrietta Maria. In 1648 a Scottish army invaded England. Charles was invited to put himself at the head of it but was fatally deterred by his advisers and instead sent to Holland where part of the British fleet had mutinied. Here he was reunited with his younger brother James. They sailed in the fleet to Yarmouth, optimistic that the Royalist uprising would soon result in the liberation of Charles I who was in prison on the Isle of Wight.

Preston But young Charles and the invading Scots engaged in the same old argument about whether Presbyterianism would be imposed on England, and during these squabbles Cromwell led an army north and destroyed the Scots forces at the Battle of Preston, 17 August 1648.

Birth of Monmouth So Charles’s little fleet sailed sadly back to Holland where he became dependent on the personal charity of the Prince of Orange, living in the Hague. He took a mistress, Lucy Walter, who on 9 April 1649 bore him a son, James, the future Duke of Monmouth, who was to lead a rebellion against Charles’s brother, his uncle James, in 1685.

Execution of Charles I While the Royalists squabbled amongst themselves, the pace of events in England speeded up. It took a while for news to come through that King Charles was to be put on trial, and even then it took some days for young Charles to realise his father might actually be killed. Henrietta Maria sent a letter to Parliament begging to be with her husband but this was ignored, and lay unsealed and unread for decades. Charles sent an envoy to plead with the Dutch Estates General to send official envoys to intercede, but by the time they arrived in London it was too late.

Legend has it that Charles signed a blank piece of paper to be given to the Roundhead court, indicating that he would agree to any terms at all, so long as his father was spared.

Tearful farewells This is a very personal history and so Fraser dwells on the last meeting between the doomed Charles I and his two youngest children who had been kept in Parliamentarian care since the outbreak of war, 13-year-old Princess Elizabeth and 8-year-old Henry Duke of Gloucester, who both broke down in tears. Accounts of this meeting, plus Charles’s last loving letters to his wife, helped to shape the image of Charles the gentle, saintly martyr, which became so powerful in subsequent royalist propaganda.

The Covenanters In September Charles and advisers sailed back to Jersey, with a view to preparing to raise a Royalist rebellion in Ireland. But while they waited, fretted and argued, Cromwell crushed Irish resistance. The royalist party sailed back to the Netherlands. Scotland remained the only hope. An embassy of Covenanters visited Charles in April 1650, insisting that he agree to impose Presbyterianism on all three kingdoms. Charles set off for Scotland and very reluctantly signed the Covenant, the grand document of the Scottish rebels. However, the army of Scots Covenanters which invaded England was crushed by Cromwell at the Battle of Dunbar on 3 September 1650. In any case, Charles had grown to hate the Covenanters and their narrow, bickering worldview.

King of Scotland Defeated in battle, the Scots Covenanters now realised they had to ally with the Royalist Scots if they were to mount a successful invasion of England. To this end, it was arranged for Charles to be crowned King of Scotland on 1 January 1651. He went on a tour of north and east Scotland to raise support. He turned 21 on 29 May 1651. Divisions continued among the Scots, some of whom refused to join the army being raised to invade England. Again.

Worcester The Scots were defeated at the Battle of Worcester on 3 September 1653. Charles fought bravely, escaped and went on the run. His experience of being hidden in the homes and priest holes of recusant Catholic families was to influence his thinking about this loyal but persecuted minority when he was restored. Maybe as a result of being locked up in various tiny hidey-holes, Charles in later life developed claustrophobia.

At one point Charles was disguised as a servant to Jane Lane, accompanying her on a visit to Bristol. He cut south to Lyme, expecting to rendezvous with a ship but when this didn’t appear, was forced back inland. Fraser tells the story with breathless excitement but then, it was a genuinely exciting adventure.

European travels Eventually Charles took ship from Brighton back to the Continent. His sojourn in Paris is brought to an end when the French decide they want to ally with Cromwell’s England and Charles was given ten days to pack his bags. He went to Spa in Belgium, then Cologne, then Dusseldorf. He conceived the plan of an alliance with Spain so went to the Spanish Netherlands, settling in Bruges.

The Restoration I have given a detailed account of the negotiations leading up to the Restoration in another blog post. The procession from Dover, wine flowing in the streets, garlands of flowers. The actual coronation the next year, on 23 April 1661. In the same month, the first awards of the Order of the Garter for a generation.

Catherine of Braganza His people and traditionalists expected magnificence but this came at a cost and Charles was soon spending more than the million or so pounds he was awarded by Parliament. Hence betrothal to Catherine of Braganza. The poor woman was 23, had been raised in a convent, and was sold to Charles along with a dowry of two million crowns or £360,000. But almost all this money was mortgaged before she even arrived in the country. She brought Dunkirk as part of her dowry but in 1662 Charles was forced to sell it to the French (at the admittedly impressive price of £400,000).

Infertility When she was introduced to Charles’s mistress, Barbara Villiers, Catherine had a fit, burst out crying and collapsed on the floor. Over time she learned to manage herself and her feelings in the alien court with its alien religion, surrounded by scheming courtiers, and her husband’s open dalliances with various mistresses. And then it turned out she was ‘barren’ (as we used to say), infertile, incapable of having children. She couldn’t get pregnant. She visited Bath and other spas to take the healing waters. No effect. It must have been incredibly hard.

Frances Stuart The traditional image of Britannia is based on the beautiful but maddeningly virtuous Frances Stuart, who Charles became infatuated with.

The cabal I found it interesting that Fraser thinks, or thought, that every schoolchild ought to know that the word cabal is an acronym for the five statesman who administered Charles’s affairs after he had dismissed the unpopular Earl of Clarendon, who was made to take the blame for the unpopular and humiliating Dutch war – namely Clifford, Arlington, Buckingham, Ashley and Lauderdale (p.156). Does every schoolchild know that? Ought they to?

Painting of Charles II in his coronation robes

King Charles II in his coronation robes by John Michael Wright

Sporty Charles was physically restless and interested in all forms of activity. He was notorious for his fast walking pace which wore out younger companions. He played ‘real’ tennis almost every day. He liked swimming in the Thames. He liked fishing. All of these activities might see him rising at 5am to indulge. He was definitely not a lazy slugabed.

Horse racing Charles loved hunting game in the royal forests e.g. the New Forest and Sherwood Forest, which he had restocked. Charles was an excellent horseman, he loved horse-racing, instituted the Epsom Derby, was no mean jockey himself, and regularly visited the racing at Newmarket. A famous stallion of the day which was used to breed a vast progeny was named Old Rowley and some people nicknamed the king Old Rowley for Charles’s similar tendencies.

St James Park Charles threw open St James’s Park to the public and had the lake built, which he liked to swim in. When it froze over Pepys wrote about the new Dutch fashion for skating or ‘sliding’ as it was called. Birdcage Walk is named after Charles’s interest in rare birds and the aviary he had constructed.

Science Charles loved clocks. He had at least seven in his personal rooms, which all kept different time and struck the hour at random, driving his servants crazy. It was part of his general love of gadgets which fed into serious interests in mathematics and the new sciences – the so-called Scientific Revolution which had seen him found the Royal Society in 1662.

Final illness Fraser’s description of Charles’s death is harrowing. He woke in the night, was feverish, struggled through to morning, let out a great shriek while being shaved, and was thereafter subjected to the monstrous interventions of half a dozen doctors, which included letting a staggering amount of blood, administering cantharides, red hot pokers to his shaved skull (!), cups, blistering and so on. The historian Macauley commented 150 years ago, that Charles was killed by his doctors.

Deathbed conversion to Catholicism Even more dramatic is the story of his deathbed conversion to Catholicism, laden with pathos since the priest who received him into the Catholic church was none other than the Father Huddleston who had helped hide Charles in the homes of local Catholics after the crushing defeat at Worcester all those years ago. He was procured and brought in secret to Charles’s bed-chamber by his brother, James. Fraser’s description of the catechism Huddleston administered and Charles’s conversion are very moving. After 45 minutes Huddleston left. Only his brother James and two other hand-picked gentlemen witnessed it. The great throng of nobles and all the Anglican bishops who had assembled, had been pushed out into ante-chambers and had no inkling of what was taking place.

An exemplary death But Charles didn’t die at once, he lingered. In fact, with characteristic politeness, he apologised to the gentlemen surrounding his bed for being so long a-dying. He called his wife and his two final mistresses in to see him. His many children were brought in and he blessed them one by one. It was an exemplary death from a man who had, throughout his life, striven to be noble and decent. A final example of his loyalty to those who helped him, and his confident way with the people who he so easily mixed with, in St James’s Park or Newmarket, sailing or racing, which endeared him to ‘the people’.

Parliaments Fraser’s account leaves you feeling that Charles wanted to be, and had the abilities to be, genuinely the father of his people. It was his Parliaments, the early ones determined on vicious revenge against Puritans and dissenters, the later ones obsessed by the Catholic threat, which poisoned the politics of his reign, especially the last seven or eight years.

If only Henry Duke of Gloucester, Charles I’s youngest son and widely admired as a young man, had not died in 1660, aged just 20, maybe Charles would have accepted the Whig attempts to exclude James II from the succession in favour of Protestant Henry, and all the disruption which followed would have been avoided.

If only Catherine of Braganza had borne him at least one child who would have been raised a Protestant and ensured the Stuart succession.

But Henry died and Catherine could not get pregnant, and so James Duke of York was left as the most legitimate successor to Charles, and so on 6 February 1685 his doomed reign began.

Restoration art

British Baroque: Power and Illusion @ Tate Britain (2020)

Restoration comedies

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by Simon on September 2, 2020 • Permalink

Posted in History

Tagged 17th century history, Anne of Denmark, Anthony van Dyck, Arlington, Ashley, Barbara Villiers, Battle of Dunbar, Battle of Edgehill, Battle of Naseby, Battle of Preston, Battle of Worcester, Biography, Birdcage Walk, Black Boy, Black Tom Tyrant', Buckingham, Cabal, Catherine of Braganza, Catholicism, Charles I, Charles II, Civil Wars, Clifford, Covenanters, Cromwell, Duke of Buckingham, Duke of Monmouth, Dunkirk, Earl of Strafford, early modern Britain, Edward Hyde, England, Epsom, Father Huddleston, fishing, France, Frances Stuart, Henrietta Maria, Henry Duke of Gloucester, Henry Marten, history, horse racing, Isle of Wight, James II, Jane Lane, John Clotworthy, Lady Antonia Fraser, Lauderdale, Louis XIV, Lucy Walter, Macauley, Newmarket, Old Rowley, Parliament, presbyterianism, Protestantism, Puritanism, restoration, Roman Catholicism, Roundehads, Royal Society, Royalism, Rubens, Scientific Revolution, Scotland, Somerset House, St James's Park, Thomas Wentworth, Wars of Three Kingdoms, William of Orange

Posted by Simon on September 2, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/09/02/charles-ii-life-and-times-antonia-fraser/

Mushrooms: The art, design and future of fungi @ Somerset House

Without fungi all ecosystems would fail.

If you enter Somerset House from the terrace facing the River Thames, then immediately on your right is a set of three long consecutive rooms which Somerset House uses to house left-field and intriguing exhibitions. In the past I’ve come to see exhibitions about Tintin, Beards, and Mary Sibald here.

Continuing this tradition is the current exhibition, three long rooms packed with Victorian, 20th century, and contemporary art works all on the theme of mushrooms and fungi.

The show brings together the work of over 40 leading artists, designers and musicians to present an overview of fungi’s colourful cultural legacy, as well as some optimistic ideas about our fungus future.

Mindful Mushroom by Seana Gavin

Fungus facts

Printed around the walls are some of the fungus facts which we all need to know:

It was fungi that allowed plants to colonise the earth by mining rocks for mineral nourishment, slowly turning them into what would become soil
90% of living plant species depend on fungi to provide basic nutrients through their roots
the largest organism on earth is Armillaria ostoyae which covers 2,385 acres and is at least 2,400 years old
mushrooms have hundreds of ‘sexes’ and reproduce by fusing together

Victorians and fungus

Lewis Carroll was partly reflecting the Victorian growth in interest in the natural world, with decades of collectors having amassed mountains of information about the natural world, here in the British Isles and all around the Empire. In Alice In Wonderland Carroll has Alice encounter a caterpillar sitting smoking an elaborate waterpipe on a fly agaric mushroom. He tells her that eating one side of it will make her grow, while eating the other side will make her shrink. And so the exhibition contains a display case showing volumes of Alice open at this scene and illustrated by different illustrators including the original by Sir John Tenniel and a slender Edwardian Alice by Arthur Rackham.

Alice and the caterpillar by Arthur Rackham (1907)

When his intrepid explorers landed in the moon, H.G. Wells had them discover that it was covered in fast-growing fungi. A whole wall is devoted to a dozen or so watercolours of fungi made by children’s author Beatrix Potter, who painted more than 300 watercolours of fungi between 1888 and 1897.

Hygrophorus puniceus by Beatrix Potter (1894)

Twentieth century fungus

The twentieth century is represented by a wall of collages by American artist Cy Twombly – to be precise, No.I – No.X 91974), combining images from the human world with mushroom images, random crayon marks, bits of print and so on. I’ve never liked Cy Twombly.

In a display case is a record of John Cage’s mushroom music and a rare copy of the limited edition Mushroom Book made by the avant-garde composer, John Cage, who was also a dedicated and serious mycologist. The label tells us that Cage helped found the New York Mycological Society with artist Lois Long, and made a living partly by selling luxury mushrooms which he foraged in upstate New York to the city’s top restaurants.

Cochlea Brick Tuft by Hamish Pearch

A dominant theme of this, the second room, is DRUGS, namely the hallucinogenic effects of the chemical psilocybin, a naturally occurring psychedelic prodrug produced by more than 200 species of mushrooms, collectively known as psilocybin mushrooms.

There’s a display case of various literary and counter-culture books and magazines which register the growing interest in mind-altering drugs through the 1950s and into the psychedelic 60s, sparked off by Aldous Huxley’s Doors of Perception, through Timothy Leary, and on into other pop culture references.

As well as these pop culture references, the exhibition tells us that:

psilocybin evolved in mushrooms 10 to 20 million years ago, apparently as a way to dampen insect appetites – it is a defence mechanism

Contemporary mushroom art

This is the core of the exhibition, a large number of artworks by over 20 contemporary artists on the subject of fungi, which include paintings, collage, assemblies, installations, video, films, clothes and household ornaments about, with or made from fungi.

Take the jokey film, Fly Amanita by David Fenster, in which he dresses up as a mushroom and shares the thoughts of an Amanita muscaria (also known as Fly Agaric or Fly Amanita) mushroom on his species’ relationship with humans.

British artist Simon Popper has been collecting postage stamps from around the world which depict mushrooms. The result is a large collection of sheets of paper to which the stamps are pinned and titled Mycology Philately.

There’s a video by Egyptian video artist Adham Faramawy showing him and two others doing contemporary dance in a room coloured green with superimposed graphic mushrooms appearing in various corners symbolising, apparently, a break through cultural boundaries’.

There’s a Mushroom Suitcase by Carsten Höller, who trained as a scientist before becoming an artist and plays with the intersection of games, mind tricks, scientific experiments, and scientific research.

Pilzkoffer (Mushroom Suitcase) 2008 by Carsten Holler. Photo by Mark Blower

There are some wall cases containing amazingly realistic, life-sized sculptures of various fungi, done with utter scientific accuracy even down to the trailing roots at the bottom, actually made of silk but designed to look as if each one has been freshly pulled from the soil.

Mushroom sculptures by Amanda Cobbett

Artist Alex Morrison combines arts and crafts patterning with colours and layouts inspired by graffiti found in his native Vancouver. The result is a mildly subversive trippy wallpaper.

Mushroom motif, black and ochre by Alex Morrison (2017)

I liked the work of Laurence Owen who:

draws parallels between humanly-constructed grid systems and modes of connectivity within fungal network systems… [exploring] the innate need within both human and fungal organisms to co-exist and thrive.

In practice this amounted to three large-ish (two foot across) ceramic works hung on the wall which looked like fungus–inspired futuristic cities.

Network by Laurence Owen. Photo © Laurence Owen

And they are hung to quite a few other exhibits by many more contemporary artists, including:

Hannah Collins
Cody Hudson
Jae Rhim Lee
Graham Little
Mae-ling Lokko
Perks and Mini
Haroon Mirza
Takashi Murakami
Hamish Pearch
Annie Ratti

Fungi futures

As to the fungi futures, it is estimated that there may be as many as five million fungi species in the world of which we have identified as little as 1%. Considering that penicillin was an accidental discovery made from fungi and has gone on to save more human lives than any other discovery in history, it’s reasonable to wonder how many other wonder-drugs and super-substances may be out there in the Mycological Kingdom.

Some fungi are already used to combat pollution and waste, in rehabilitating oil spills and recolonising the sites of radioactive accidents. And so the third and final room of the exhibition displays examples of the ways fungus material may be turned into more sustainable products that metal and oil-based artefacts. Thus:

Sebastian Cox and Ninela Ivanova have produced a series of lamp shades made of mycelium (“Mycelium is the vegetative part of a fungus or fungus-like bacterial colony, consisting of a mass of branching, thread-like hyphae.”)
Mae-Ling Lokko works on the upcycling of agro-waste and biopolymer materials into building materials, including blocks built from mycelium
there’s a life size ‘burial suit’ by Korean-American artist Jae Rhim Lee, made of biomaterials including mushroom, and designed to prevent the more toxic chemicals from human bodies leeching into the soil
another film, this one by Australian director Jason Evans, documenting foragers of the Pacific North-West collecting matsutake mushrooms which only grow in human-disturbed forest.

And clothes. There’s a display case containing a t-shirt, a handbag and what looks like a bra made out of fungus material, the obvious idea being these are more sustainable and less polluting materials than most traditional fabrics let alone plastics.

And some works by Belgian footwear designer Kristel Peters who now focuses on sustainable shoe design. Her focus is on the use of mycelium as a material with little or no environmental impact, so that the samples of her ‘mycoshoes’ on display here demonstrate experiments at the intersection of bio-technology and fashion.

Mycoshoen by Kristel Peters

Curator

The exhibition was curated by writer and curator of contemporary art Francesca Gavin.

Francesca Gavin interview

This may explain why, after the Alice and Beatrix Potterdisplays, the show cruises briskly through the twentieth century (Cage and Twombly) before arriving very firmly in the absolute present: most of the artworks on display here are bang up to date, with a number of the pieces dating from as recently as 2019.

With the result that, by the end, you realise that this isn’t an exhibition about mushrooms or fungi: an exhibition like that would have to include vastly more botany and science in it, explaining how fungi have evolved, grow, spore, reproduce, exactly how they break down organic waste, and are vital in helping almost all plants and trees to survive.

As an example, there were several references in the wall labels to fungi’s ability to create vast fibrous underground networks and to communicate along them somehow, along with speculation that these networks could be developed in the future to a) transmit electricity b) to form some kind of artificial intelligence network. But then there was no further explanation of any of these mind-blowing notions. I wanted more.

No, this is an exhibition of contemporary art – an impressive selection of videos, installations, clothes and household goods, ceramics, collages and paintings – which just happens to be on the subject of fungi. You learn a few factoids about fungi (some of which the average interested person might well already have known), but what is undeniably new and distinctive is the cross-section of little-known contemporary artists which Gavin has assembled.

Taken as an exhibition about fungi, this show is disappointing. Taken as a wide-ranging exhibition of contemporary art which just happens to have chosen fungi as a subject, this show is a fascinating insight into the contemporary art scene.

More Somerset House reviews

More Somerset House reviews

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by Simon on February 16, 2020 • Permalink

Posted in Art, Exhibition

Posted by Simon on February 16, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/02/16/mushrooms-art-design-fungi-somerset-house/

Mary Sibande @ Somerset House

Mary Sibande (b.1982) is one of South Africa’s most notable contemporary artists, which makes it all the more surprising that this is her first solo exhibition in the UK.

Sibande calls herself a sculptor but she is also a very good photographer. In fact she mainly works with fabric, sewing her own fabric-based sculpture, and the friend I visited the exhibition with described her as a fabulous seamstress – hence, presumably, the show’s title, I Came Apart at the Seams.

For Sibande hit upon an idea early on in her career and has been producing variations on it for over a decade. The idea was to create life-size mannequins of herself, except

imagined as an alter-ego or avatar, who she named Sophie
to pose these sculptures in striking postures and activities
and to dress them in elaborate, sometimes fantastical, almost science-fiction garments

Over the years she’s used this simple-sounding idea to produce some quite simply staggering works of art. I’m amazed she’s not better known and hasn’t been snapped up by one of the major galleries. This is a FREE exhibition at Somerset House so if you’re passing along the Embankment or through Covent Garden it’s well worth making a detour to visit.

Blue

Long Live The Dead Queen (2008 to 2013) was the series in which we first met Sibande’s avatar, Sophie, conceived as a domestic servant – as Sibande’s mother and grandmother were before her. In various iterations Sophie is seen either as a sculpture or in enormous crystal-clear digital photos, transforming her servant costume (in one iteration she is embroidering the Superman logo onto it) in a series of dreams of escaping her lowly status and gender.

I Put A Spell On Me by Mary Sibande (2009)

Purple

Sibande’s next series was titled The Purple Shall Govern (2013 to 2017). In these Sophie is embodied as ‘The Purple Figure’.

The title is a play on words, making two references, mashing up the opening principle of the 1955 Freedom Charter of the African National Congress stated that ‘The People Shall Govern!’ – with the 1989 anti-apartheid Purple Rain protests.

During these, thousands of anti-apartheid protesters marched on the parliament building in Cape Town and the police sprayed the protesters with water cannon marked with purple dye so that they could be identified and arrested later. However, some of the marchers got their hands on the water cannon and turned it back onto the police and authorities, spraying them and thus symbolically equalising everyone.

Anyway, in Sibande’s hands the colour purple is the inspiration for a series of absolutely wild photos and fabric-sculptures, in which the Sophie figure is transfigured into a force of nature out of whose body and clothes and hair, wild dreadlocks or roots or tendrils cascade and explode in a twirling confusion.

A Terrible Beauty is Born (Long Live The Dead Queen series) by Mary Sibande (2013) Copyright the artist

The above is an enormous digital print which is a) of wonderful clarity and precision b) printed onto fabric not paper and hung across one whole wall and c) is totally wild.

The po-faced seriousness of the political commentary on her works – the references to apartheid and this or that protest – in no way prepares you for the wild, crazed, science fiction pullulation of her imaginings.

It is extravagant, operatic – dreams, nightmares or visions on an epic scale and all the more weird and compelling for having been made, created, carefully and time-consumingly sewn out of fabric.

One entire room in the show consists of an absolutely amazing piece of sculpture – the black woman Sophie wrapped in purple fabric, while her hair appears to be exploding backwards into a huge tangled skein which is itself intertwining to form something like the roots of a tree. It is as if the human being is metamorphosing into an awesome, phantasmagorical force of nature.

It’s one of the weirdest and most powerful works of art I’ve ever seen.

A Reversed Retrogress Scene 2 by Mary Sibande (2013)

Red

Sibande’s latest series is titled In The Midst of Chaos There Is Also Opportunity (2017-ongoing). In these Sophie has transformed into ‘The Red Figure’ – red to express the collective disillusionment and anger of many South Africans at the enduring poverty in post-apartheid South Africa.

So blood-red is for anger, but also the power to heal and restore – there’s something of the priestess and healer in the Red Figure. She is sad, she is angry – but she is also empowered by the legacy and memory of all those who gave their lives to overthrow apartheid.

Come, you spirits of the land and the skies by Mary Sibande (2019)

As I say, the commentators, the curators, and Sibande herself, are happy to describe her art in terms of South Africa’s apartheid and post-apartheid history, the struggle for liberation and the long disappointment that came afterwards, and so on.

Maybe that’s where her art starts. But in my opinion where it goes to is somewhere altogether different, somewhere weird, strange and entrancing, to a zone which is disturbing, upsetting, amazing and supremely memorable.

Look closely and you’ll see that Sophie’s eyes, in all her reincarnations, are always closed: she is dreaming, according to the curators, dreaming of freedom and equality etc.

But the way I read it, Sophie is having dreams far bigger than paltry ones about politics and justice – dreams which are far more disruptive and uncontrolled and weird and enthralling, about human nature itself.

A Terrible Beauty and A Reversed Retrogress show humanity morphing into something much bigger and more cosmic than petty concerns about this or that cause or country – in them the purple and red figures are becoming cosmic, entwining with the natural world, seizing power and going beyond the human into an extraordinary new realm of the imagination.

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by Simon on December 12, 2019 • Permalink

Posted in Africa, Art, Exhibition, Sculpture

Posted by Simon on December 12, 2019

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/12/12/mary-sibande-somerset-house/

Print! Tearing It Up @ Somerset House

This is a funky, fascinating and sometimes very funny exhibition celebrating the longstanding tradition of independent British magazine publishing over the past fifty years or so. And it is FREE!

Past

There’s a nod to older, historical magazines at the start of the show, where the curators display a couple of copies of Wyndham Lewis’s Vorticist magazine, Blast!, from 1915 – a quite extraordinary typographical and editorial irruption into the sedate world of Edwardian gentlemen’s magazines – and a copy of Peace News from the 1930s v but overall this isn’t a historical exhibition, its focus is very much on the modern (post-1960s) tradition of alternative and right-on magazines, with a special interest in the reflowering of indie magazines in the last decade or so.

Things really get going in the late 1960s with the birth of the ‘counter-culture’ and the founding of critical magazines like Spare Rib (1972 to 1993), Black Dwarf (1968 to 1972), Oz (1967 to 1973) and Private Eye (1961 and still going). The exhibition then traces the evolution of small, independent, counter-cultural, as well as fashion and music and art and architecture magazines, from then to the present day.

Spare Rib 1972 © Angela Phillips

Several gallery walls are covered with a massive wire grille on which have been hung scores and scores of magazines, with a dazzling variety of photographic, typographical and design styles, to admire and enjoy, with titles like international times, Beaver, Mole, Frendz, Shrew (‘the suppressed power of female sexuality’), Pink, Gay Left, Squatters and so on. The funniest title was Prada Meinhof (bright green, at the right of the photo below) which bears the text ‘Only way to change things – is to shoot the men who arrange things’. Right on, sister.

Installation view of Print! Tearing it Up at Somerset House, photo by Doug Peters

Alongside these wall displays are a number of glass cases focusing on the stories of particular magazines or themes.

For example, one case tells the story of Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood’s shop Sex in the King’s Road which received coverage around 1976 in sex-related mags like Forum and Gallery International as well as the giveaway magazine West One, edited by a young Janet Street-Porter.

Another case focuses on Gandalf’s Garden, the official publication for a collectively-run ‘head shop’ for hippies, also in the King’s Road, which issued six copies from 1968 to 1969.

Contemporary art and graphics have been publicised in a tradition of small art magazines like Apollo, Art Line in Newcastle, Modern Painters, Frieze, Arty, Garageland and Pavement Licker.

Satirical artworld writing could more recently be found in titles like Sleazenation (1996 to 2004), Vice, and the attractively titled Shoreditch Twat.

In one case the show draws links between the 1935 art magazine Axis launched by writer Myfanwy Jones, and the art and politics magazine Mute, founded in 1994 and still going strong.

Private Eye Issue 815, 12 March 1993 © Private Eye

In 1977 Peter York wrote a defining article for Harpers magazine about the independent magazines of the day, mentioning such obscure productions as Emma Tennant’s literary quarterly Bananas, lifestyle mag The New Style and Nick Kimberley’s reggae pamphlet, Pressure Drop.

And a whole display case is devoted to the worldwide publishing and digital success which is Time Out, launched in 1968 and overseen for most of the time since then by publisher Tony Elliott.

Alternative music mags have included Freakbeat, Zigzag, Echoes, Rough Trade, Flexipop!, SFX with more modern publications emerging from grime and dub-step like Woofah, Push and Trench.

The mindmap

Confused? You should be – the last fifty years have witnessed wave after wave of new, small, independent, radical magazines catering to an ever-expanding list of issues and constituencies.

One entire wall of the exhibition is devoted to a vast mind-map which shows the links and interconnections between all these independent magazines. If you buy the exhibition booklet (£4.50) you get a free fold-out version of it (though not quite this big!).

Mind map of British magazines

… and present

Only a little way into the show does its origin and motivation become a bit clearer, specifically the motivation of exhibition curator Paul Gorman.

In 2011 Gorman finished writing a history of The Face, the cultural magazine published from 1980 to 2004. In doing so, in comparing the Face to its current equivalents and looking for its lasting legacy, Gorman became aware of the raft of indie mags which had emerged from the wreckage of the economic crash of 2008.

In an interview with The Drum (see the second video, below) Gorman says:

Around 2011, 2012 I noticed these magazines emerging – like The Gentlewoman and Mushpit – and I was quite encouraged by the fact they were being published mainly by young women. They were anti-corporate, and they had all those values that appealed to me.

It inspired Gorman to take stock of the magazine culture of our times and he realised that, although some high-profile magazines had recently gone to the wall (Glamour, Look), sparking an outbreak of gloom among high-end publishers, we are actually living amid a resurgence of cheaply produced, anti-establishment, freethinking publications.

A little like the revival of vinyl records and just as counter-intuitively, print magazines are going from strength to strength in the digital era.

Garageland Issue 19 2015 SELF © Paul Gorman Archive/ Photography: Milly Spooner

Garageland Issue 19 2015 SELF © Paul Gorman Archive/ Photo by Milly Spooner

So mixed in among the older examples from the 60s, 70s and 80s in the exhibition, is a rich selection of mags from just the past decade or so, which address 21st century issues.

As I walked round, admiring all this visual energy and creativity, I reflected that although Gorman and the other curators might find it inspiring and exciting that there are so many mags celebrating ‘alternative views’ on lifestyle, leisure and architecture or addressing topical issues including diversity, gender, sexuality and media manipulation… us older visitors might instead notice the surprising continuities between the concerns of 1968 and those of 2018 and draw different conclusions.

My take would be that, although gender, sex and race continue to be as reliable money-spinners as ever they were – expressing black anger, women’s anger, the newer range of LGBT+ anger, Asian anger and so on – and are enthusiastically snapped up by guilty young white students – meanwhile the ideas which seemed dominant in my youth – socialism, communism, Marxism, and working class politics – seem to have largely disappeared.

The white working class communities that I thought I was helping when I joined the Young Socialists in 1977 have been redefined into union jack-waving, Tommy Robinson-supporting, Brexit-voting chavs, recategorised as patriarchal racists. Now all the liberal press tells us we should be supporting female BBC presenters, Hollywood actresses and illegal immigrants everywhere.

And the working class lads who empty my bins every week? No one writes about them or gives a damn about their lives. I suppose they just don’t live at the intersection of style, fashion, gender and race.

Thiiird Issue 1 COMMUNITY © Thiiird/Photography: Turkina Faso

Thiiird Issue 1 COMMUNITY © Thiiird / Photo by Turkina Faso

To quote the exhibition text:

The debate surrounding gender and sexuality has been reflected in the success of hugely popular magazines launched in the past decade, from The Gentlewoman, which can chart its evolution from Spare Rib, the seminal feminist magazine founded in the 1970s, to Ladybeard, Ablaze! and D.I.Y zines created by teenage feminist collectives in 1990s to 2000s, among many more showcased.

Similarly, the exhibition celebrates the rise in titles dedicated to ethnic minority communities and concerns, with examples including gal-dem, Thiiird and Burnt Roti, which showcases South Asian creativity.

Positive News Issue 90 Third Quarter 2017 NEW MASCULINITY © Positive News Magazine/ Paul Gorman Archive/Photography: Theo Jemison

Positive News Issue 90 Third Quarter 2017 NEW MASCULINITY © Positive News Magazine / Paul Gorman Archive / Photo by Theo Jemison

If it ain’t black, queer or about women it doesn’t seem to have any purchase, any traction, any validity.

That said, it’s not all identity politics. There are plenty of other contemporary magazines which are not directly political, all manner of magazines out there which I’d never heard of, such as Real Review and Eyesore which promote new writing on architecture and the urban environment, Little White Lies focusing on film, and The Gourmand on food.

Read, listen, watch

The last room in the exhibition is devoted to a very pink, pop-up newstand bearing a variety of bang up-to-date mags which you are invited to pick up and browse through.

The pink pop-up newstand at Print! Tearing it Up at Somerset House. Photo by Doug Peters

This space could have done with some chairs or a couple of sofas to really kick back in.

Podcasts

The pop-up newstand is next to a row of equally pink booths each with a set of headphones for you to slip on and listen to podcasts i.e. brief interviews or monologues by key figures from the recent history of independent magazines.

Print! Tearing It Up podcasts

It would have been interesting to find out more about the impact of digital technology on magazine and news culture:

How much has digital supplanted print magazines? Are there particular reasons why some magazines have gone out of print and out of business, while others are successfully making the move to an online-only existence? Is it luck, or something to do with the subject matter, or the audiences?

And what does it take to succeed in setting up an alternative mag in the current climate? A good business plan? A clear proposition for your advertising department to promote? To what extent does the need to sell adverts undermine or negate any claim to ‘radical’ thought?

The exhibition prompted all these thoughts and more, but didn’t really address any of them. Where should I go to understand a) the current state of play among radical mags b) the direction of travel?

Activities

The exhibition is accompanied by a rash of activities including all-female activist lines-ups, explorations of self-education, acknowledgment of architectural anarchy, plus a PROCESS! Festival co-curated by Somerset House Studios artists OOMK (One of My Kind).

The PROCESS! Festival will run from Saturday 21 to Sunday 22 July and will celebrate independent media and making, bringing together established and emerging designers, artists, activists and publishers to explore, interrogate and share approaches to creative and collaborative processes.

Videos

There is, of course, a promotional video.

And this useful video report on the show by The Drum.

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by Simon on June 15, 2018 • Permalink

Posted in Art, Exhibition

Posted by Simon on June 15, 2018

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World Illustration Awards 2018 @ Somerset House

The Association of Illustrators (AOI) holds an annual competition open to illustrators from any country in the world. This year they received a record 3,300 entries from 75 countries, which the judges whittled down to the 250 or so pictures, paintings, videos and installations on display in this exhibition. There was a lot more to it than I expected.

Installation view of World Illustration Awards 2018. Photo by the author

Probably the main thing I learned was that there is a much wider range of types of illustration than I’d previously suspected.

Books are what spring to mind, children’s books and some adult books containing illustrations. But of course all kinds of information and instruction manuals and pamphlets require illustrating. Newspapers and magazines are packed with cartoons and diagrams. Advertising, when you think about it, is a whole world of illustration. And there can also, I learned, be site-specific installations of big blown-up cutouts or props or models of illustrations of people or objects.

So that’s why entrants were asked to assign their submissions to one of eight categories, and each category had a separate judging panel and awards.

Eight categories of illustration

Site-specific illustration

Murals, wall art, shop windows can all be types of illustration, from shop-sized installations to tiny tiles. Ester Goh’s site-specific work for Singapore airport consists of nine coin-operated animated exhibit windows that ‘draw parallels between the free-spirited nature of birds and travellers with a passion for exploration’.

Esther Goh : A Feathery Trail of Adventures

Design

This includes branding, packaging, album covers, product wrapping, magazine design and typography. Increasingly, digital design is producing sleek, new, finished looks to design.

Yifan Wu : 26 Dangerous Things

Editorial

As news continues to be transmitted via a bewildering variety of online channels, illustration becomes ever-more important in grabbing attention, and conveying information, and brightening up text, with everything from factual graphics to lampoons of global figures.

Lianne Dias : Fake News

Advertising

Posters, billboards, in magazines and newspapers and splattered across millions of web pages, illustrative advertising has to fight harder and harder to grab our attention. Advertising illustrations can be literal pictures of the product, decorative, or conceptual, showing any number of scenarios related to the sell. Advertising doesn’t just sell products but, taken together, amounts to a social history of the culture, a summation of what we buy and need or fantasise about.

La Boca : TFL Safety Posters

Books

Commentators thought the internet would kill off books. Well, the opposite has happened, with more books than ever being sold. The last thirty years have seen the rise of illustrated books for adults, with graphic novels at the most complete wing of that spectrum.

Xiao Lei : Owls of the World

Children’s books

For many people these are where their love affair with illustrations began. From my own childhood I have fond memories of the illustrations of E.H. Shepherd, the wonderfully clear, detailed illustrations for Professor Branestawm by William Heath Robinson, and the fuzzily nostalgic pictures of Edward Ardizzone. When I had children of my own I spent hours soaking up the diverse but always high quality illustrations in almost anything published by Walker Books.

Giordano Poloni : C’est toi mon papa?

Research

At its simplest, illustration explains information, so it is used in every area of human knowledge, from medicine and science, through architecture into the humanities. Importantly, illustration can not only neutrally convey information, it can help shape and mould it. In a given textbook maybe you will remember one particular illustration of a set of facts, rather than the plain text.

Ying-Hsiu Chen: Infographic of Port of Kaohsiung

Experimental illustration

This includes experimenting in new media (mostly video), the creative use of digital techniques, subverting classics with new subject matter or styles, as well as imaginative new variants such as using craft techniques such as ceramics and papercuts. The exhibition includes a virtual-reality setup created by Malaysian artist, Book of Lai, which is ‘a 360-degree interactive illustration, allowing users to explore the virtual space with fun and curiosity’.

Anthony Zinonos: bigSWELL

The pleasure of browsing

250 is too many images to study. I sauntered and strolled several times around the rooms, each time letting different images attract and amuse me, more or less at random.

At the end of the main gallery is a room devoted just to children’s illustrations, with a table in the middle covered in a pile of tempting tomes.

Children’s book room at the World Illustration 2018 exhibition. Photo by the author

All it needed was a bunch of beanbags and I could have settled down here and read comfortably for the rest of the morning. I particularly wanted to find out more about Victor the Mischievous Taxi Driver (although it was written in German).

Elsa Klever: Victor the mischievous taxi driver

The full short list

View the full shortlist of World Illustration Award 2018

Be warned that the AOI website is slow to load and the page showing all the entrants kept freezing, when I last viewed it. However, at the top of the page there’s a set of filters. I suggest you filter by category and look at each category one at a time. A page with just 26 illustrations is far more responsive and easy to scan than one with over 200 pictures, plus a bunch of slow-loading animations.

Location

The exhibition is being held in Somerset House’s Embankment Galleries, a big bright shiny new exhibition space which requires you to go down in a lift if you’ve come in the entrance on the Strand, but which can also be accessed directly from the Victoria Embankment.

Google maps location of Somerset House

It’s only on for another week before it goes in tour round the UK, so get your skates on!

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by Simon on June 14, 2018 • Permalink

Posted in Art, Exhibition, Illustration

Tagged advertising, Books, children's books, illustrations, Somerset House, World Illustration Awards 2018

Posted by Simon on June 14, 2018

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Charles I: King and Collector @ the Royal Academy

King Charles I is most famous for getting his head chopped off in 1649, at the climax of the civil war he had triggered against his Puritan, ’roundhead’ opponents in Parliament.

(I am aware that there’s controversy about all aspects of the wars, from their very name [should it be called the Great Rebellion, the British Civil Wars, the Wars of Three Kingdoms, etc] through to the dates, because the civil wars across all four of his realms actually started with the rebellion of the Scots at having an English prayer book imposed on them in 1637 – which triggered Charles’s hapless manoeuvrings with his Parliament to get them to fund an army to repel the Scots invasion of 1638 – although it wasn’t until rebellion broke out in Ireland in 1641 that the final breach between Charles and his Puritan opponents in Parliament became irreconcilable. It’s a much more complicated story than usually depicted.)

Anyway, before he mismanaged his kingdoms so badly that he triggered war in all three of them (Wales was not a kingdom but a principality) Charles had been one of the most sophisticated royal patrons and collectors of art anywhere in Europe. This big exhibition at the Royal Academy brings together an impressive number of the sculptures, paintings, tapestries and so on that Charles either directly commissioned or purchased through his roving agents from the leading artists of the day. it is a magnificent display of some 150 works of art, ranging from classical sculptures to Baroque paintings, and from exquisite miniatures to monumental tapestries.

Equestrian painting of Charles I with M. de St Antoine by Anthony van Dyck (1633)

Scattered and reunited

A simple but important point about the exhibition – and a demonstration of the vanity of human wishes – is that, having spent a lifetime collecting all these riches, soon after Charles’s execution the new Puritan regime sold them off to pay their soldiers and all these masterpieces were scattered across Europe.

Some were tracked down and rebought by his son, Charles II after his restoration to the throne in 1660, especially the ones which had gone to British purchasers who were no keen to ingratiate themselves with the new king. Most remained abroad and, indeed, made very nice additions to the royal collections of the Louvre and the Prado. But what was returned, along with the works which Charles’s queen, Henrietta Maria, had taken to France and brought back in 1660, went on to form the core of the future Royal Collection.

Charles the collector

In 1623, two years before he became king, Prince Charles visited Madrid. The purpose of the visit was to sound out the possibility of marriage to Maria Anna of Spain, daughter of King Philip III of Spain. Negotiations broke down when the new king, Philip IV, demanded that Charles convert to the Catholic Church and live in Spain for a year as pre-conditions.

But although the diplomatic aim of the visit failed, one thing made a deep impact on the future king of England, namely the huge and dazzling art collection of the Philip IV. This, thought Charles, was the magnificence and grandeur befitting a divinely appointed monarch! Charles went shopping and returned to England with a number of works, including paintings by Titian and Veronese, while agents were sent to France and Italy to snap up anything which came on the market. Thus Charles was able to snap up the famous Gonzaga collection which had been accumulated by successive dukes of Mantua, through the work of Nicolas Lanier, his Master of Music and agent.

It was this collection which included Andrea Mantegna’s monumental series, The Triumph of Caesar, (1484 to 1492) which is given a whole room to itself in the exhibition.

Triumph of Caesar: The Vase Bearers by Andrea Mantegna (1484 to 1492)

But it wasn’t just a matter of liking fine art. A king’s collection bespoke his power, both to the few subjects who saw it, but, more importantly, to visiting ambassadors and princes. According to historian Jenny Uglow, ‘ceremonies were delayed and dinners cooled as he showed visiting dignitaries proudly round’ his collection, including the so-called Bear Gallery containing works like Titian’s portrait of Charles V with a Dog (1533) and Rubens’s Daniel in the Lions’ Den (1616), to the Privy Lodging Rooms which housed works by Titian, Correggio, Giorgione and others; and then, the core of the collection, the Cabinet Room, which held 80 paintings, 36 statues and statuettes, as well as bas-reliefs, miniatures, books, engravings, drawings, medals and precious objects.

Charles V with a Dog by Titian (1533) Museo Nacional del Prado

Moreover portraits, such as those by van Dyck, then had multiple copies made of them which could be sent to foreign monarchs as testaments to Charles’s majesty and glory.

By 1649, Charles’s collection comprised around 1,500 paintings and 500 sculptures. An inventory compiled by Abraham van der Doort (c.1580 to 1640), first Surveyor of The King’s Pictures, recorded the contents of the collection, providing a detailed account of the artistic tastes and high level of connoisseurship within the king’s circle.

Changing British taste

One of the aims of the exhibition is to demonstrate how Charles was the first British monarch to really grasp the artistic culture of the Continent. The Protestant Tudor monarchs (Henry VIII, Edward VI, Elizabeth I), with the brief exception of the Catholic Queen Mary (1553 to 1558), had been wary of Catholic Europe and its culture.

But Charles’s father, James I, changed this policy. During the long reign of Queen Elizabeth Catholic Spain had been the enemy, justifiably so since its king, Philip II, had launched an armed invasion of England, which, if it had succeeded, would have resulted in the forced conversion of the church and people back to strict Roman Catholicism, with untold numbers of arrests, tortures and public burners of recusants.

James came from a different family and tradition and so was able to break with Elizabeth’s policy and seek a rapprochement with Catholic Spain. During his reign the treaties with Spain were moderate but still sparked murmurs of dissent from the Protestant aristocracy. (Anti-Spanish murmurings became louder when the Protestant hero, Sir Walter Raleigh, was beheaded in 1618, largely at the behest of the Spanish ambassador, and as a result of a last, ill-fated expedition to South America in 1617.)

The apotheosis of James I, commissioned by Charles I from Peter Paul Rubens to form the centrepiece of the newly refurbished Banqueting House, completed in 1636

James’s eldest son, Henry, surrounded himself with scholars, artists and musicians and acquired ‘Catholic’ paintings from Holland and from Florence. On Henry’s death in 1612 his collection passed to his mother, Anne of Denmark, who herself became a keen patron of painters, dramatists and architects as well as court masques, and filled her rooms at Somerset House and Oatlands Palace with religious pictures, still-lifes, landscapes and allegorical scenes.

So this was the family atmosphere Charles grew up in, far more relaxed about Catholic culture than his Protestant forebears of the previous century. The Puritans in Parliament disliked this cultural shift, as they had disliked Charles’s trip to Spain (still Europe’s most Catholic power) and then really disliked Charles’s marriage to the Catholic Henrietta Maria, youngest daughter of Henry IV of France, who – to the Puritans’ outrage – was allowed to attend Catholic masses in the Royal Palaces.

But Charles wasn’t alone in his taste for Continental art. Other super-rich aristocrats vied with him to create superb collections, including Thomas Howard (1586 to 1646), Earl of Arundel, and George Villiers (1592 to 1628), Duke of Buckingham. At the height of his success, Buckingham’s palace in the Strand contained over 300 paintings by artists including Rubens, Titian, Tintoretto and Bassano. It became a fashion and a competition.

Titian was the main man. Titian (1490 to 1576) had loyally served Habsburg monarchs, sending them paintings on a wide range of subject from his base in Venice. Titian’s portraits, especially those of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, proved him the supreme painter of kingly, military and diplomatic power, and Charles wanted some.

The Allocution of Alfonso d’Avalos to His Troops by Titian (1540 to 1541) Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid

Charles and Van Dyck

The artist most associated with Charles is Sir Anthony van Dyck (1599 to 1641). Charles persuaded the great Flemish painter to come to London in 1632, where he was appointed ‘principalle Paynter in Ordenarie to their Majesties’.

Triple Portrait of Charles I by Sir Anthony van Dyck (1636)

Van Dyck’s achievement was immense. His fluency and sense of composition, his extraordinary ability to capture not just the likeness but the mood and character of his sitters, was unparalleled. The exhibition includes some of his most spectacular works, including:

Charles I and Henrietta Maria with Prince Charles and Princess Mary (1632)
his two magnificent equestrian portraits, Charles I on Horseback with M. de St. Antoine (1633) and Charles I on Horseback (1638)
‘Le Roi à la chasse’ (1635)

Many portraits were done in several versions, to be sent as diplomatic gifts or given to supporters of the increasingly embattled king. Altogether van Dyck has been estimated to have painted forty portraits of Charles himself, as well as about thirty of the Queen.

Such was the impact and range of his works that van Dyck became the dominant influence on English portrait-painting for the next 150 years. Charles awarded him a knighthood and a £200 annual pension. When van Dyck died young, in 1641, he was buried in (the old) St Paul’s Cathedral.

The Mortlake tapestries

But it wasn’t just van Dyck. Charles I commissioned some of the most important artists of his day. Beside the ceiling of the Banqueting House (above) Charles commissioned from Peter Paul Rubens paintings such as ‘Minerva Protects Pax from Mars’ (1630) and his ‘Landscape with Saint George and the Dragon’ (1630 to 1635).

Another major highlight of the exhibition is the Mortlake tapestries of Raphael’s Acts of the Apostles. These have a complicated history. In 1513 Pope Leo X commissioned Raphael to design a set of tapestries of the Acts of the Apostles to be hung in the Sistine Chapel. Detailed versions of the works were painted in gouache on sheets of paper which were glued together to achieve the scale required, and these preparatory studies are referred to as ‘cartoons’. These cartoons were the send to Brussels, at that time the premiere centre of tapestry making in Europe. The final tapestries took some time to create but were complete and delivered to Rome by the time of the Pope Leo’s death in 1521.

The cartoons were kept on at the workshops in Brussels for some years, and more versions of the tapestries created from them. But a hundred years later many had found their way back to Italy, to the city of Genoa to be precise. And it was here that one of Charles’s agents ascertained that they were available for sale and so young Prince Charles hurriedly bought them.

His aim was to bring the cartoons to England, where they could be used as models for the tapestry factory established in 1619 by his father, James I, at Mortlake in south-west London, and several partial sets of the Acts of the Apostles were indeed woven here over the next two decades. After passing through the hands of various monarchs, the reassembled cartoons were eventually gifted to the Victoria and Albert Museum. And it’s these huge and awesome works that the visitor can see in a room devoted to them.

The Miraculous Draft of Fishes by Raphael (1515 to 1516)

Summary

To visit the exhibition is to bask, for a while, in the reflected glory and magnificence of royalty, strolling past the masterpieces mentioned above as well as stunning works by other Renaissance artists such as Correggio, Agnolo Bronzino, Jacopo Bassano, Tintoretto and Paolo Veronese as well as Albrecht Dürer, Jan Gossaert, Hans Holbein the Younger and Pieter Bruegel the Elder. What a banquet of Baroque art, a visual feast fit for a king.

The promotional video

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by Simon on February 17, 2018 • Permalink

Posted in Art, Exhibition, History

Tagged Abraham van der Doort, Agnolo Bronzino, Albrecht Dürer, Andrea Mantegna, Anne of Denmark, Anthony van Dyck, apotheosis of James I, art, Banqueting Hall, Baroque art, Baroque painting, Bassano, Bishops War, British Civil Wars, Brussels, Catholic church, Catholic Europe, Charles I, Charles I on Horseback, Charles I with M. de St Antoine, Charles I: King and Collector, Charles V, Charles V with a Dog, Civil Wars, Correggio, Daniel in the Lions’ Den, Duke of Buckingham, duke of Mantua, Earl of Arundel, Edward VI, Elizabeth I, exhibition, George Villiers, Giorgione, Great Rebellion, Hans Holbein the Younger, Henrietta Maria, Henry IV, Henry VIII, Holy Roman Emperor, Ireland, Irish Rebellion, Jacopo Bassano, James I, Jan Gossaert, Jenny Uglow, King Charles I, King James I, King Philip III of Spain, Maria Anna of Spain, Nicolas Lanier, Painting, Paolo Veronese, Parliament, Peter Paul Rubens, Philip II, Philip IV, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Pope Leo X, portrait painting, Prado Museum, Prince Charles, Prince Henry, Protestantism, Puritans, Queen Mary, Raphael, Raphael’s Acts of the Apostles, Renaissance art, Royal Academy, royal collection, royal patrons, Rubens, Sir Anthony van Dyck, Sir Walter Raleigh, Somerset House, Spain, St Paul's cathedral, Surveyor of The King’s Pictures, tapestries, the Gonzaga collection, The Mortlake tapestries, the Restoration, the Royal Collections Trust, the Sistine Chapel, The Triumph of Caesar, Thomas Howard, Tintoretto, Titian, Triple Portrait of Charles I, Tudor monarchs, Van Dyck, Venice, Veronese, Victoria and Albert Museum

Posted by Simon on February 17, 2018

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Malick Sidibé @ Somerset House

‘For me photography is all about youth.’
Malick Sidibé

Somerset House is a rabbit warren of attractions with at least two cafes, several art shops, and a number of exhibition spaces. In the terrace rooms in the South Wing (i.e. overlooking the Thames, next to Waterloo Bridge) are three rooms currently devoted to African photographer Malick Sidibé (1936 to 2016).

Sidibé was born in Mali. During the 1950s, using a lightweight Kodak camera, he cycled the countryside around the capital Bamako taking photos of weddings and other family occasions, establishing himself as the country’s only travelling photographer.

As the country was winning its independence from France in 1960, Sidibé set up a studio in Bamako and began making scores of studies of Malians, which capture the youthful enthusiasm, creativity and cool of the young nation. The exhibition brings together 45 high quality prints into three rooms arranged by theme:

Tiep à Bamako / Nightlife in Bamako

Contrast of the formal 1960s black and white suits with the exuberance of party.

Au Fleuve Niger / Beside the Niger River

Le Studio / The Studio

Why do they work?

Black and white is always better than colour. It makes the images crisp and well-defined. All the photos are clear and well lit, he’s not interested in shadows, grey or mystery. Everything stands out in clarity.

They’re all of people, there are no landscapes or objects. And young people. Young, vibrant, energetic people, dancing or goofing by the river or pulling poses in the studio. This spirit of youth and energy comes over infectiously. They’re happy pictures.

There are several levels of the ‘exotic’, or of distance, going on in the photos:

The 1960s photos capture that faraway decade when people jived and twisted while wearing narrow-lapelled black and white suits.
They’re all African i.e. black, in both respects a remote culture from the 100% white visitors to the gallery.
Style. The 60s dancers could be white, the lads and lassies by the river could at a pinch be white – but the studio shots could only be African, in the super-confident brashness of their clothes and poses, the clashing styles and big shades and surreal accessories, the stripes and checks and leopard skin patterns of the wild pants and jackets. Much emphasised when he used a strong striped background, to give the sitters even more visual energy.

These explosions and clashes of geometric designs have something in common with the Op Art of the 1960s, for example the work of Bridget Riley. Except that it is real, walking, talking, singing, dancing art, created by the incredible disparate taste and confidence of Sidibé’s sitters and captured again and again in these wonderful photos.

African tracks

Playing on a loop are 31 tracks by African artists selected by DJ Rita Ray, including Miriam Makebe, Boubacar Traoré, Youssou N’Dour, Ali Farka Touré. It isn’t in the show, but my favourite Boubacar track is Adieu Pierrette.

This is a video prepared for a different exhibition, but which is very informative.

And here’s a full-length documentary about Sidibé by Cosima Spender.

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by Simon on January 8, 2017 • Permalink

Posted in Africa, Exhibition, Photography

Tagged Africa, Mali, Malick Sidibe, photography, Somerset House

Posted by Simon on January 8, 2017

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2017/01/08/malick-sidibe-somerset-house/

Maggi Hambling: War Requiem and Aftermath @ Somerset House

The Inigo Rooms at Somerset House are hosting an exhibition of recent work by one of Britain’s most established artists, Maggi Hambling CBE. (The Inigo Rooms are reached through a doorway in the East Wing of the main quad of Somerset House – which is itself accessed either via a grand archway from the Strand or via the river terrace, linked directly to Waterloo Bridge by a sloping ramp.)

Aftermath

To see the exhibition you have to climb down an atmospheric old winding staircase to a long, narrow, darkened corridor with five rooms off it. Each room is sealed by a heavy wooden door giving an eerie Alice in Wonderland effect. But on pedestals the length of the corridor you can immediately see some of the 30 or so Aftermath works, all about human head-size, sitting on four-foot-high pedestals, spotlit in the darkness.

Hambling was born and raised in East Anglia and the sea is a big presence in her work. Probably her most famous – and controversial – piece is the four-metre-high steel sculpture of a seashell, Scallop, unveiled at the north end of Aldeburgh beach in 2003.

Aftermath is the name she’s given to a series of relatively small sculptures, begun in 2013. She’s taken driftwood from the shore, carved and reformed the pieces, coated them in plaster to soften the outlines and to create a dripping, molten look – and then cast them in bronze, and painted and repainted them with thick gloopy layers of paint. They’ve been subject, in other words, to quite radical transformations.

Installation view of the Aftermath sculptures

What is art if not an act of attention – the creation of an object or sounds or series of words – which themselves command attention? Quite how much attention is entirely up to the strolling viewer.

Walking down the corridor past ten or so of these strange, melted gargoyle shapes painted purple or blue-white or yellow – and then into a room full of twenty or so more – their sheer abundance liberates the viewer to window-shop and alight on this or that object as whims of light, angles or curves, catch your fancy.

Because one hanging on the wall at the start is shaped like a pig’s head, and the next one is a bright yellow glutinous object with tubes protruding which could be a heart, I wondered if they were going to be visions from an abattoir, and that that would be the link with the overall war theme of the exhibition.

But as I explored further I realised that they are far more diverse than that, in shape and colour and intention. I liked:

Aftermath: Pig
Aftermath: Heart
Aftermath: Mother
Aftermath: Polar bear drowning
Aftermath: Amy Winehouse – the black and purple colouring do eerily evoke Winehouse’s big black hair, full eyeliner, tattoos and vivid dresses

War Requiem II

The sign on the heavy wooden door advises that only one visitor at a time should enter the War Requiem II room, so I turned the handle and entered with trepidation.

It is a small room made smaller by four wall-sized panels of rough hardboard, on which are hanging about 20 abstract oil paintings all using the same thick swirls of Indian yellow and jet black oil paint to create tortured gashes. Maybe – I thought – they are the fires burning up out of the oil deliberately released by Saddam Hussein during the First Gulf War. In fact they have titles like Victim XXX and Battlefield XVIII, from which I realise they are intended to be much more figurative than at first appeared.

Battlefield XVIII by Maggi Hambling

From loudspeakers overhead comes the haunting, swooning sound of the soprano singing the Lacrymosa from Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem.

The room contains an old wooden chair to sit on and also two mirrors, all three objects lightly flecked with the same colours as the paintings.

Maybe as we walk round the small space we are meant to catch our reflection in the mirrors and think these victims of atrocity could be us.

You are the sea

At the end of the long dark Alice in Wonderland-style corridor is another heavy door with a minatory sign on it warning entrants to be prepared.

Inside another small room is a two-metre-wide concrete drainage pipe, placed on its side to form a circular seat. The mouth of the pipe is covered with a metal grille and the whole thing is a recreation of a vent from one of the many drainage systems which cover Hambling’s native East Anglia. Apparently, this one is a replica of part of the sluice at Thorpeness, built to prevent the sea flooding the river Hundred and, more metaphorically, from rushing in to overwhelm the land.

There’s a loudspeaker in the pipe and from it comes a recording of the seasounds, the remote booming and breaking of waters far below, which you can hear in the real vent. And mixed into the swashing, crashing sounds are fragments of speech, phonemes torn from Hambling’s 2009 poem You Are The Sea.

Dominating the wall is one of her very large Wall of water paintings – as so often she’s painted a series on the same theme – thick garottes of oil paint depicting the unruly element which threatens to wash us away.

Figurative

Those were the highlights. In other rooms are more obviously representational works. A vivid charcoal copy of a detail of Manet’s The Execution of Maximilian stands as their mascot, reopening the possibility of an immediately understandable figurative art. They include:

A large striking painting of a line of women in black burqas holding rocket launchers – Gulf women prepare for war – taken from a photograph, a snapshot of the absurdity and incongruity of a war which is still raging.
Cuddling skulls evocative depiction of a timeless theme for moralists.

In the 1990s Hambling created a series of bronze sculptures titled War coffin – consisting of small frames with fragments of metal dangling down – and the figurative room contains a TV on a pedestal showing a video which features the sound of the metal pieces knocking each other like wind chimes – an eerie tinkling which echoes down the darkened corridor.

Thoughts

For me the Requiem room didn’t really work, much though I liked the individual paintings: they felt too samey hung together, their similitude drained them of impact.

By contrast the walls of water paintings seemed to me to successfully vary a theme or subject and a style, ensuring visual consistency by the use of the same palette of whites and greys, but producing lots of new and fresh images.

They were helped by their scale. Whereas the victim paintings are all small and close to each other in the viewer’s field of vision, and so have a similar affect, the big walls of water had more space in which to express the variety of the canvases. You had to physically turn to address each one individually, which involved a slight but important mental adjustment as well.

But in my opinion it is worth visiting the show just to see the Aftermath pieces, to wander among these strange combinations of accident and artifice, and let the shapes and colours and configurations sink in, striking chords in your mind, opening visual and tactile possibilities. God, I wish artists let you touch their sculptures!

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by Simon on April 8, 2015 • Permalink

Posted in Art, Exhibition, Sculpture, War

Posted by Simon on April 8, 2015

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2015/04/08/maggi-hambling-war-requiem-aftermath-kings-college-london/

Beard @ Somerset House

Beard
A pogonophile photography exhibition by Mr Elbank

Brock Elbank is an award-winning photographer who began his career shooting women’s fashion working for, among others, the Sunday Times Style, developing a distinctively super-colourised approach to male styling and portraiture, for clients like Nike, Coca Cola, San Pellegrino, Toyota, Dove and Snickers.

For nearly a decade he lived in Sydney where his work became more art-based. While there he shot a mens’ concept editorial for Kiwi magazine Black on Beards – one of the first to recognise the rise of the bearded look which is now a fashion marker around the developed world.

On the back of the commission Elbank had begun to make a series of portraits of men with beards when he met campaigner Jimmy Niggles. Niggles had set up a charity publicising skin cancer after the death of a close friend. He named it Beard Season and the idea was to grow a beard as a conversation starter in order to spread the word about this preventable disease, share his friend’s story and encourage people to go and get tested.

To support Niggles’ cause, Elbank started up #Project60, in which he would photograph 60 people with beards and raise awareness of the charity by posting them on social networking sites. He received over 1,200 applications from around the world and selected sitters to come to his Warwickshire home to be photographed.

This exhibition displays large colour prints of the 60 portraits of beards, as well as 20 other works on the same theme commissioned for Somerset House.

The show includes the famous facial hairs of actor John Hurt and models Ricki Hall and Billy Huxley, but also other interesting characters such as tattooist Miles Better and British woman Harnaam Kaur, who has been growing a beard since the age of 16 after being diagnosed with polycystic ovary syndrome, a condition which causes excess hair growth.

There are also two sweet and funny pics of Elbank’s little daughter, Elkie, sporting an impressive ‘full set’.

Three short thoughts

Men

What a pleasure to see an exhibition of visual art dedicated to modern men, a welcome relief from the diet of scantily clad or naked women, in photos or art, which dominate so many media and exhibitions.

Tattoos

Lots of the subjects are ‘bohemians’ or ‘hipsters’, which means lots of them have tattoos. In fact the tattoos are often more impressive than the beards.

Billy Huxley by Mr Elbank

Eyes

All the images look as if they have had their colour enriched, but something has been done to make the eyes particularly piercing. Bright blue or warm brown, after you’ve got over the beard and the tatts, it’s often the eyes which emerge as the strongest part of the image. Surely John Hurt is wearing brown contacts?

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by Simon on March 28, 2015 • Permalink

Posted in Art, Exhibition, Photography

Tagged Beard, beards, Brock Elbank, Jimmy Niggles, John Hurt, Mr Elbank, Somerset House

Posted by Simon on March 28, 2015

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2015/03/28/beard-somerset-house/

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