A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things

Last weekend we went to The Garden Cinema to see the new Wilhelmina-Barns Graham film A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things. There was an interview afterwards with director Mark Cousins which has been uploaded to YouTube (I can see myself in the audience!) The documentary turns on an epiphany she had at Grindelwald Glacier, while holidaying in Switzerland in 1949. Tilda Swinton reads the quote about her 'terrifying desire' to roll down the mountain that I included in a post about Barns-Graham I wrote here six years ago. I've always thought of her glacier paintings as a facet of modernist landscape painting but perhaps I shouldn't really be talking about her at all on this blog, because as Cousins points out she wasn't looking up at the Alpine landscape, she was looking down at the ice. Numerous paintings and drawing examine the structure, light and translucent colours of the glacier and a new book edited by Rob Airey has just been published dedicated to these. The variations she found over the years are shown in one of the highlights of the film, a long sequence that just just puts these glacier pictures on screen one after the other in an old fashioned slide show, accompanied by Linda Buckley's music.

A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things won top prize at the Karlovy Vary film festival this year and I would love to have asked Mark Cousins about it, because earlier this year we visited this extraordinary old spa town on holiday. But we were actually there on a Grand Budapest Hotel pilgrimage and I'm sure he would have had no interest in talking about award ceremonies and a place that has nothing to do with Wilhelmina Barns-Graham! Another place he didn't talk much about was St. Ives and the art colony she's always been associated with - as he says in a BFI interview, this is limiting for a painter who saw herself as an independent 'lone wolf'. Cousins thinks there are three particular reasons why 21st century audiences may be interested in her art: climate change (so evident at Grindelwald), the contemporary focus on relatively neglected female figures and her neurodiversity. This last aspect is really his central theme - A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things is a portrait of the artist's 'brain'. It includes some beautifully shot footage of her obsessively compiled notebooks, where she explored the mathematics of colour combinations. All in all I think it's an excellent film that sidesteps the familiar approaches of an arts documentary. Peter Bradshaw gave it a four star review in The Guardian yesterday. His article starts with a photograph of Barns-Graham out sketching in the landscape, so maybe it's not too inappropriate to talk about her again here. 

From the official trailer for A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things

Lost in the sand

I've been on an Irish culture kick over the last month: first the film Kneecap, then Juno and the Paycock with Mark Rylance and then Arán & Im, a performance in which Manchán Magan talked about the origins of Irish words while making sourdough bread (very tasty). Magan is the author of Thirty-Two Words for Field: Lost Words of the Irish Landscape so there was a lot that evening of relevance to this blog. However, I'm going to focus here instead on my fourth Irish cultural event, a trip today to Matt's Gallery to see Remnant, Willie Doherty's new exhibition of black and white photographs and video footage. There were foggy woods (see below), dead leaves and branches, empty streets, blank walls, peeling paint, stains, graffiti, broken bricks and roadside puddles. The videos (shot in Derry, Donegal and by the River Boyne) also showed a moon seen through bare black boughs, a stretch of fast flowing water, rocks slowly dripping and flat waves covering and uncovering a small stretch of sand.  

I've not really kept up closely with Willie Doherty's work since discovering it many years ago when I first got into Hamish Fulton and Richard Long, who were also combining landscape photography with text. The curators note that images like the one I've included above resemble his early work, but instead of having text imprinted on them - words like 'undercover', 'shifting ground' or 'the other side' drawing links to recent political history - Doherty installs them here alongside three videos that contain relatively little movement and words read aloud by Stephen Rea. In the course of this monologue he says things like "fear trapped in the gaps where men and women were displaced" and "the living and the dead side by side" and "all traces lost in the sand, absorbed into the sea". It is all pretty gloomy, but Rea's quiet voice made me want to keep listening.

The gallery has copies of an interview Doherty did with Tim Dixon and I'll end here by quoting something interesting in this about the woods he photographed.

These forests which sprung up all along the border, [are] usually in places where the land is not really of any great agricultural value. These forests were planted, I don't know when they started really, probably sometime in the seventies and eighties. And they're kind of horrendous because they're just very generic pine forests, which are planted in rows and not really maintained or looked after very well, so they become a bit of an eyesore really. But significantly, at least one of the people who was assassinated and then buried by the IRA in the early seventies, one of 'the disappeared', Columba McVeigh, whose body has never been recovered, was buried in a remote border area somewhere between a bog and one of these forests. So it has a significance in that respect, and the first section of one of the strands of dialogue in the work refers to a figure who's dead—a kind of ghost who talks about being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Lagoon city

I enjoyed Martin Gayford's new book Venice: City of Pictures. Reading it felt like returning to a well-loved painting and finding new, interesting details. For example, he cites a book about Tiepolo I've not read, written by Svetlana Alpers and Michael Baxendall, which describes the ceiling of the Gesuati, painted in 1738. The surrounding roofscape reflects and absorbs light and 'Alpers and Baxendall seem to have spent days observing the resulting fluctuations in illumination, such as occasionally visible 'moving ripple of light' bouncing up from the waves of the Canale della Giudecca, the wide expanse of lagoon that lies in front of the church. There is also 'an electrifying occasional five minutes in late afternoon when the sun is low enough in the west both to shine direct through the west windows and to reflect back strongly from the east wall on which it falls.'' Venice has been painted by countless topographical artists but here is an example of the way light and the cityscape transform even the art inside its churches.

Paul Klee, Lagunenstadt, 1932

I could talk here about some of the landscape paintings Gayford discusses by Canaletto, Turner, Ruskin, Whistler or Monet, but instead I'll just features this one by Paul Klee, because I particularly like it. Klee's visit was 'the most fleeting of all the artists chronicled in this book' - just a few days in the autumn of 1932. Lagunenstaft (Lagoon city) 'is in its modest, whimsical way one of the most perceptive of all the vistas of this most painted of places.' The confusing city streets are conveyed by those rectangles at the bottom. Above them 'a few higher and more separated trapezoids' probably represent the structures around the Piazza San Marco that Klee described as 'a unique creation in stone'. And above and beyond these are the water and the sky.

Streams had burst their banks and sallied out

In 1809 Ivan Krylov (1769-1844) published his first collection of twenty-three verse fables - over time the book grew to include 197. Gordon Pirie’s translations of a few of these were praised in reviews of The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry. Ever since Aesop, fables have mainly featured animals - wolves, lions, foxes, tortoises, hares etc. - but Krylov's ‘The Peasants and the River’ concerns landscape features. Local streams are in spate and inundate the peasants’ land (I can picture this now from all the flooded fields I saw on a train to Cambridgeshire yesterday). The peasants believe that the main river, bordered by country estates and flowing through towns to the sea has 'never been guilty of such misdemeanours.' So they go to this river to ask her to bring her tributaries into order, only to see their own possessions, 'precious things they'd lost', carried along in the river like 'discarded lumber'. The moral of the story is this: ‘great men profit from the small man’s crime, / to seek redress is just a waste of time.’ 

Has landscape been used in other fables? Trees and plants occasionally feature, sometimes debating which is the most beautiful, or providing comparisons like the unbending oak and pliant reed, an idea referred to in Troilus and Criseyde but found much earlier in the Tao Te Ching. There is also the plane tree that assures travellers it is not 'useless' because it is providing them with shade, and the trees that object to being cut down by axes made from their own wood. A river is the setting for fables that illustrate the proverb 'still waters run deep' - in La Fontaine a peasant drowns in a smooth flowing river. Elsewhere, a farmer blames the sea for a shipwreck only to be told by the sea that it was the wind who was to blame, not her. In The Seven Wise Masters, a medieval collection, rivers complain to the sea that she spoils their sweet water, only to be told if that's how they feel they should avoid contact with her. Despite these odd examples, I have to acknowledge that in comparison with animals, it is hard to personify human behaviours in whole landscapes. Nevertheless, a mountain is the protagonist in one of Aesop's fables, illustrated below, 'The Mountain and the Mouse'. 

Auguste Delierre's 1883 etching of 'The Mountain in Labour' (Wikimedia)

Summer storms, sea, light, silence

Fyodor Tyutchev (1803-73) is included in The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry but his landscape poems are given rather faint praise: 'the themes of his nature poems are conventional - blazing sunsets, snow mountain peaks, etc. - but he presents these scenes from an unexpected point of view.' His greatest work according to the editors was his love poetry, although their selection is too small to give a good sense of these (and they miss out the one quoted at the end of Stalker, then turned into a song by Björk, 'The Dull Flame of Desire'). Charles Tomlinson, as you might expect, was keener to highlight the side of Tyutchev I'm interested in here. In his Translations (1983) he says 'Tyutchev's poetry, with its evocation of summer storms, sea, light, silence, is true to the quality of the present moment as it reveals itself in the landscape of the mind.'

As usual I won't quote whole poems, but here are some lines that illustrate what Tomlinson says, taken from the translations he made with linguistic help from Henry Gifford.

Summer Storm: 'Bursts out of ravaged clouds / To smear the blue, to charge / Impetuous on the wood'

Sea: 'Winds / Called to one another and the waves / Sang me to deafness'

Light: 'Beneath the sun-gold / Lake currents glint'

Silence: 'Entering autumn, there ensues / (Its beauty is in brevity) / A season of crystalline repose'

Although Tyutchev has been overlooked so far by the publishers of literary classics, you can find an online PDF of translations by John Dewey (not the philosopher). There is a section covering early poems on 'Nature' and another one of late 'Russian Landscapes'. Back in the day, when people still wrote blogs, there was a good one called Poetry in Translation that had a long post about this book, providing a summary of Tyutchev's life and work. Here's a section of it - Ovstug was the poet's family estate. 

Ovstug and the surrounding countryside inspired some of the finest of Tyutchev’s later nature poems, including the following:

There comes with autumn’s first appearance
A brief spell full of wonder and delight:
Whole days of crystalline transparence
And evenings luminously bright…

Where once the sickle strode through wheat-ears tumbling
An air of space and emptiness reigns now;
Only a wisp of cobweb, trembling,
Gleams on the idle furrow’s brow.

The empty skies fall still as birds forsake us,
Yet distant still is winter’s first unruly storm,
And, seeping from above, a blueness pure and warm
Is added to the drowsing acres…

This was another of Leo Tolstoy’s favourites. He particularly admired lines 7 – 8, where a few deft strokes (Tolstoy singles out the evocative use of ‘idle’) are sufficient to create a whole picture of rural tranquillity and repose following the hectic activity of the harvest. ‘The art of writing poetry lies in the ability to find such images, and Tyutchev was a great master of that,’ Tolstoy commented.

Charles Tomlinson translated this poem, written on 22 August 1857, as 'Entering Autumn.' He rendered Tolstoy's favourite lines thus: 'Cobweb on idle furrow / Stretches its gleam of subtle hair.' Another version by Anatoly Liberman makes it into the Penguin anthology, although the word 'idle' doesn't feature in it. You can still visit Tyutchev's estate in Ovstug, although of course I never will. Russia is off limits now, but some English-speaking traveller gave it a five star TripAdvisor review back in 2015 and said it is 'open from early morning (9 a.m.) even off season, pleasant staff, well-kept both house and grounds and you can buy the most poetic leaflet I've ever stumbled across.'

The temple’s firm towering

Years ago when I studied art history I was very taken with a particular passage in Heidegger's essay 'The Origin of the Work of Art'. He deliberately looks at a non-representational work of art: a Greek temple which 'portrays nothing. It simply stands there in the middle of the rock-cleft valley.' But it is through such a temple that 'the unity of those paths and relations in which birth and death, disaster and blessing, victory and disgrace, endurance and decline acquire the shape of destiny for human being.' He goes on to describe how the temple affects the landscape:  

Standing there, the building holds its ground against the storm raging above it and so first makes the storm itself manifest in its violence. The luster and gleam of the stone, though itself apparently glowing only by the grace of the sun, first brings to radiance the light of the day, the breadth of the sky, the darkness of the night. The temple’s firm towering makes visible the invisible space of air. The steadfastness of the work contrasts with the surge of the surf, and its own repose brings out the raging of the sea.  

This passage is quoted in Sarah Bakewell's 2016 history of existentialism and phenomenology, At the Existentialist Cafe: Freedom, Being & Apricot Cocktails - one of the most off-putting titles for a book I have ever come across and one which (I'm sorry to say) stopped me picking it up until recently. Don't judge this book by it's cover - it's very good! She says of Heidegger's temple, 'I'm prepared for the possibility that someone else will find this boring or even odious. But Heidegger's idea that a human architectural construction can make even the air show itself differently has stayed somewhere behind my perceptions of buildings and art ever since I read the essay.'   

Heidegger had never seen a Greek temple when he wrote this but in 1962 he finally decided to go on an Aegean cruise, along with his wife and a centre right politician friend 'who had a past at least as embarrassing as Heidegger's since he'd joined the Nazi Party in 1937.' Cromwell describes Heidegger's disappointment with Olympus, ruined by 'hotels for American tourists', and also with Crete, Rhodes and Athens. Finally though, they encountered some gleaming white ruins on a headland - the Temple of Poseidon on Cape Sounion.

The bare rock of the cape lifted the temple towards the sky. Heidegger noted how 'this single gesture of the land suggests the invisible nearness of the divine', then observed that even though the Greeks were great navigators, they 'knew how to inhabit and demarcate the world against the barbarous'. Even now, surrounded by sea, Heidegger's thoughts naturally turned to imagery of enclosing, bounding and holding in.

Edward Dodwell, Temple of Poseidon, 1821

In her concluding chapter Cromwell acknowledges the continuing interest in Heidegger's writing about technology and ecology but highlights again a claustrophobic quality in his writing - 'his dimly lit world of forest paths and tolling bells'. She prefers Simone de Beauvoir's enduring fascination with the world and quotes (twice) from Force of Circumstance in which de Beauvoir lists some of the experiences that have made up her life. I'll end with these, a sequence of condensed landscapes: 'the dunes of El-Oued, Wabanasia Avenue, the dawns in Provence, Tiryns, Castro talking to five hundred thousand Cubans, a sulphur sky over a sea of clouds, the purple holly, the white nights of Leningrad, the bells of the Liberation, an orange moon over the Piraeus, a red sun rising over the desert...'

Refulgent light in the Sonian Forest

Jan Brueghel the Elder and Peter Paul Rubens, The Vision of Saint Hubert, 1617-20

I have been reading Woodland Imagery in Northern Art c. 1500-1800 by Leopoldine van Hogendorp Prosperetti, published with beautiful illustrations by Lund Humphries two years ago. It is written in a slightly eccentric, charmingly old-fashioned and accessible style with short chapters covering various artists and genres of sylvan imagery, from van Eyck to Rubens. The iconography of trees is linked to an interesting range of sources in Latin vocabulary, religious traditions, pastoral poetry and the wider influences of politics, patrons and print technology. A chapter on Dürer includes sketches made in Nuremberg and a linden tree on the bastion of the castle that I mentioned here last month, I could discuss this or other interesting topics I found interesting, but I'll focus here on a painting by the artist Leopoldine Prosperetti has specialised in, Jan Brueghel the Elder. 

The Vision of Saint Hubert (1617-20), now in the Prado, was one of Brueghel's collaborations with Rubens. It shows one of the two famous saints who had a conversion experience while out hunting - he is not to be confused with Saint Eustace, the Roman general who features in the Canterbury Cathedral wall hanging and Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker. Hubert (c. 656-757) was the 'Apostle of the Ardennes' and the two Flemish artists may have chosen this subject to please their patrons, Archduke Albert and Archduchess Isabella. This quote is from Prosperetti's chapter that focuses on woodland imagery associated with the Sonian Forest on the edge of Brussels. The passage includes two words you don't often come across: reflexy-const and talud.

The finishing touches in these pictorial settings would be passages of light that enhanced the scenery. The term in art theory is reflexy const (the art of reverberated light), which assigns to bounced-off sunlight the function of bringing scenery to life. In classical paintings, these areas of luminosity appeared on the smooth facets of grottoes, rockeries or ruins, to scatter the light to neighboring surfaces. In a sylvan setting, where there would be no resplendent surfaces other than leaves, painters would focus their attention on patches of sand, which, with the right amount of sunlight falling through the gaps in foliage or the opening of a clearing, would create pools of refulgent light. One such opportunity is provided by the talud, the sloping shoulder of a sunken path that is typical of the traveled road in age-old forests. An example of this curious land formation rises above Saint Hubert, bearing a slanted oak barely holding on to the sandy soil. It pairs visually with an illuminated sandy patch below the group of oaks on the other side of the path, which serves as a platform for the stag. 

The deer's antlers and the broken branch on the highlighted patch of ground form another pair: forked forms which Prosperetti finds frequently in Brueghel's paintings and which suggest the forking path of a decision. The cross which Hubert will choose is hovering above the antlers, so small you probably can't see it on your screen... Prosperetti suggests that the hart (cf. heart) at the centre of the forest was like the ducal court at the heart of the Duchy. Isabella's grandfather Charles V, whose hunts in the Sonian Forest are depicted in tapestries that now hang in the Louvre, chose as his motto a verse from the Psalms: 'As the hart panteth after the water brooks, So panteth my soul after thee, O God!'