The gem of the skies in a summer season

Phoenix rising by the sun in the Aberdeen Bestiary
Source: University of Notre Dame

It has been intensely hot again this week and I was listening on the news this morning to reports of fires in the Midlands. It made me think of these lines from 'The Phoenix', a 10th century Old English poem in the Exeter Book which expands upon an older Latin text.

When the gem of the skies
in a summer season, hottest with the sun, shines across the shadows
and performs its destiny, surveying the world,
then the bird’s house becomes heated by the glowing sky. 
The herbs are warmed, the house of desire steams 
with sweet fragrance, then in flames that bird burns
through the grip of the fire amid its nest.

Of course the poem has a hopeful theme, as the fire is not destructive - the phoenix regenerates. In her fascinating book about the Anglo-Saxon year, Winters in the World, Eleanor Parker links this self-immolation and rebirth to the seasonal cycle. The word used to describe the bird's nest is solere, borrowed from the Latin solarium, which in Old English meant 'an upper chamber in a house, a room that gets lots of sun. Not many Anglo-Saxon houses had upper rooms, so the phoenix is special in having this sunny chamber all to himself, up in his tree amid the feafsceade, 'shade of the leaves.'' This sound lovely, although I'm typing this now in the boiling upper room of our house, in the heat island of London, where there is no shade from any trees.

Eleanor Parker describes 'The Phoenix' as 'the most sun-drenched poem in the corpus of Anglo-Saxon literature', with 'some of the loveliest nature writing.' Its poet 'dwells with delight on scenes of blazing sunshine, leafy glades and cooling rivers.' Line 33 includes the word lixeð, which means 'glitters', and 'seems to evoke the flickering play of light in a tree-shaded grove, a dappled sunlight that shifts with the rustling of the leaves.' This quote from her book (p152) illustrates why I liked it so much - she takes fragments of natural description, often just words, and expands them into evocative landscapes. Another example is a few pages earlier, where she is talking about 'The Rhyming Poem'. This is narrated by a king or lord in 'a succession of swiftly changing pictures,' and includes this phrase: 'Ornamented horses / bore me across the meadows on paths of joy, / beautifully hung about with long branches.' She pictures him touching those long branches as he passes through the meadows, wongas, 'open green spaces, far-spreading plains and downs - the kind of landscape where a spirited horse with a fearless rider could really let himself go.'

 

Prehistory from the Air

 

In the late 1930s comparisons were often made between new art and ancient landscapes. In British Art: Ancient Landscapes Sam Smiles cites an essay by John Piper which refers to the work of Ben Nicholson, Henry Moore, who 'has landed us back in the stomach of pre-history' and Paul Nash, who 'leaves us with the bare sea-washed bones of it.' A Barbara Hepworth catalogue compared her work to menhirs and in an article about her work in Circle, the journal that promoted 'constructive art', she included photographs of Stonehenge. One of these images was taken by Carola Giedio-Wecker, who had recently written a study of contemporary sculpture featuring Stonehenge, the Table des Marchands and the stone alignments of Carnac. Perhaps the best frequently cited example of this is 'Prehistory from the Air', the article Piper wrote for the Winter 1937 edition of Axis, edited by Myfanwy Evans (his new wife). This can be read online, so I thought I'd quote from it here, beginning with his thoughts on flight and landscape art: 

Because flying has not created any new consciousness about spaces or vistas or anything else, it has simply served the new consciousness, and has been forced on in its development by it. It has grown up with it in fact, which is the only reasonable way for an invention to work. So the horizon line vanishes, from the air. It has also vanished (nearly) from painting. Instead of being the end-all of landscape, it is now there on sufferance. It is not really strange that air photography began in the '80's, and that about the '80's the horizon in landscapes (with Courbet or Cézanne) was getting much less conscious of itself—no more self-conscious than the foreground, or the background, or the middle distance, ail of which were becoming parts of the same consistent parcel. For contrast, think of Claude's skyline castles in the scenery of his wonderful natural theatre. At its simplest, the change is one from elevations to plan. The picture has tipped over backwards on to the floor, and in being raised again it has brought part of the floor with it. Picasso, Braque, Klee, Matisse have painted elevations of wineglasses, gardens and windows at Nice which have the added richness and meaning of plan-patterns.

Piper's essay is followed by a colour reproduction of a Miró painting and in the composite image above I've juxtaposed it with what he put on the previous page, two images of Silbury Hill - very different but equally interesting. The top one is from William Stukeley 1724 publication Stonehenge and Avebury. 

Stukeley, above all, wanted to record the effort and the feeling for shape of the men who built it. Size and contour are all-important. The story of the size is well told, and as to the shape to jump, run, walk, or struggle up each slope with Stukeley in his drawing is as real and as sharp an experience as to take a journey round a wineglass with Picasso. The air-photograph is flat and subtle. The effect of suddenness that the mound gives in the plain, and the sense of size that the surroundings try to contradict, is as strong as that of ail Stukeley's fold-explorations. Both these representations of Silbury Hill are beautiful—and together they give a very fair idea of this large and curious mound— but so different that it is hard to realise that each gives a reasonable account of the same monument.

Piper doesn't talk about that Miró painting, but the Spanish artist does feature in a later article in this issue of Axis, Anthony West's 'No Revolution.' In talking about abstract art he mentions an early painting done in a vary different style.

Hemingway writes about Miró's picture, The Farm,"It has in it all that you feel about Spain when you are there and ail that you feel when you are away and cannot go there." Perhaps it was possible to give this reading to the picture and to think about happy days in the sun instead of looking at the picture. Perhaps Miró thought so too, for his paintings are no longer like postcards to hold in your hand while you think about the days when you were younger. It is the design in his mind not the memory in yours which he wants to express.  

Joan Miró, The Farm, 1921-22

It is always fascinating to leaf through an old journal or magazine (if I can say 'leaf through' about an online PDF) and here it was impossible not to be drawn to a review by the artist Robert Medley of Hitler's degenerate art show in Munich. Medley found modern paintings by Klee and Kandinsky had been badly hung, without frames, and packed in with second-rate work. Meanwhile, the Approved Art show nearby was full of pictures of Hitler, all hung in a line, along with 'boys and maidens beating drums and waving banners. Gigantic sculptures of nude men striding forward, the artist taking so much care that they should not look pansy that they ceased to be men at all— symbolism had made them inhuman. Pictures telling you what a fine thing war is...' There were also more unassuming paintings, but these were monotonous. 'I had the impression of a number of artists pleased to work quietly, with their minds relieved from having to cope with modem aesthetic or social problems. ... I was pleased to leave.'

Musashi Plain

Utagawa Hiroshige, Musashi Plain, from the series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, 1852 

I have been reading A Tale Unasked, Penguin's new Meredith McKinney translation of Lady Nijō's Towazugatari, a court and travel diary completed around 1307. After her expulsion from the palace she became an itinerant nun, travelling to famous shrines and checking out utamakura on the way. I have discussed utamakura, places important in Japanese poetry, before (see, for example, my 2008 post on Mount Fuji seen from the Beach at Tago). I enjoyed the following passage but then turned to one of the most depressing endnotes I have read recently, which I've added below in brackets. 

The eighth month had begun. A desire to wait until I could see the famous autumn scenery of Musashino had kept me here all this time, and I now decided to return that way. The temple of Asakusa was said to have a miraculous Eleven-Headed Bodhisattva Kannon which I longed to see, and I made my way towards it across a wide plain swathed in a dense growth of Musashino's famous bush clover, together with valerian, silver-grass and mugwort, all of a height that could be judged by the fact that even a man on horseback was invisible in its midst. For three days I pressed on through it all and still there was no end. Little side roads led off to the occasional inn, but the plain stretched on far and wide behind and before me as I went. The Kannon temple was on a low rise in the midst of the treeless plain, and I thought of that poem about Musashino that goes, 'as from the grassy moor / the moon emerges', for indeed this was the night of the full harvest moon. 

[The plain of Musashino, famous in poetry for its bush clover, is where Tokyo now stands]

Edo Period gold leaf folding screen showing Musashino

The transience of famous places and landscapes over the centuries is a melancholy but fascinating topic. I was reminded here of another endnote I wrote about a few years ago, explaining that Altinum, the subject of a Martial epigram, was later sacked and ruined, although its survivors' descendants would eventually found the city of Venice. Musahino doesn't sound is pleasing as Venice - it is described on Wikipedia as 'a city located in the western portion of the Tokyo Metropolis.' When was writing, Tokyo had not yet grown out of Edo, and Edo was still just the home of a samurai clan that had only recently been founded. 

I think the poem Nijō is referring to is in the Eighth Imperial Anthology, the Shinkokinshū, composed by Fujiwara no Yoshitsune. But the most famous literary reference to Musashino is in the Tales of Ise (c. 900), a book I featured here in 2019. In episode 12 a man flees with a girl and hides in a thicket on the plain. Their pursuers are about to set the grass on fire when the girl cries out 'Please don't burn / don't burn, the grasses / of the Musashi Plain. / My beloved hides here, / and I do too'. They are arrested and marched off together - we don't learn their fate. The girl's poem is probably based on a folk song and also appears in the Kokinshū anthology, although there it's set in the Plain of Kasuga, which perhaps shows how arbitrarily stories attach themselves to landscapes. There is a wonderful depiction of this Tales of Ise scene by Kajita Hanko (1870-1917), which I came across on Edward Luper's site. As you can see, a whole landscape is suggested here through one colour, leaving mere glimpses of the lit torches and figures crouching in the grass.

Kajita Hanko, Musashino, 1903

In my last post I mentioned mitate-e parody prints, so I should briefly conclude here by mentioning Musashino (c. 1788-9), a triptych by Kitagawa Utamaro. Here the couple are a young samurai and geisha, while their pursuers are fashionably-dressed ladies carrying paper lanterns. They walk through pampas grass with an exaggeratedly large moon behind them, alluding to that famous moon of poetic tradition that Lady Nijō got to see.   

A Mirror Stand - The Autumn Moon

Utagawa Hiroshige, Views of Ōmi #3: Autumn Moon At Ishiyama Temple, 1834 

Twenty years ago I wrote here about the tradition of 'Eight Views' in Chinese and Japanese art, stemming from the original Eight Views of the Hsiao and Hsiang Rivers. The adoption of this theme in Japan was helped by the fact that only two of the eight actually mention places in China. As Haruo Shirane writes in Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons (2012), this flexibility led 'artist, poet and audience to graft their own favourite domestic and local places onto them' - Edo, Kanazawa and most famously The Eight Views of Ōmi (Ōmi hakkei), which I listed in my earlier blog post. Here I'll be focusing on one of these, the Autumn Moon at Ishiyama, for which Hiroshige designed a lovely print in 1834, where the southern end of Lake Biwa shimmers behind the hillside. 

Views of Ōmi became so well known that by the eighteenth century it was possible to parody them. Suzuki Harunobu's 1766 Zashiki Hakkei, Eight Parlour Views, were domestic versions of the eight landscapes, with the Autumn Moon at Ishiyama transformed into a Mirror Stand. The Art Institute of Chicago has a copy and you can see below how the shape of a crescent moon appears as a result of the way the mirror is held on its stand. Autumn is signified by the miscanthus grass blowing outside this lady's window. Shirane explains that this punning mitate technique 'creates a double vision, superimpopsing the exterior landscape ... onto the interior world of urban commoners in contemporary Edo'. The mirror reflects the beauty of the woman just as Lake Biwa reflects the light of the harvest moon.

Suzuki Harunobu, A Mirror Stand - The Autumn Moon, 1766

This is all very tasteful, but Suzuki Harunobu also produced erotic prints for private consumption... Again there is a version of the Autumn Moon at Ishiyama, in these Fashionable Eight Parlour Views (1769), and again the landscape has been turned into a woman and a mirror, but she is half naked and the figure behind here is a man, grasping and fondling her. The plant outside is now a flowering pink - a nadeshiko, the word for which used to mean "the woman I love" in waka poetry. The mirror no longer resembles a crescent moon; instead it is the woman herself whos body is white as she emerges from her robes like parting clouds. Shirane explains a further pun in text that Harunobu included which refers to the pedestal unit, utena. This word can also mean 'calyx' and thus, metaphorically, female genitals. I don't normally refer readers to Wikipedia but if you are interested in all this it is well worth looking at their lengthy article on the Zashiki Hakkai, analysing each one and quoting Haruo Shirane.

Lower Lake

Hurvin Anderson, Lower Lake, 2005

I've been twice now to the Tate's Hurvin Anderson exhibition - a refreshingly cool, air-conditioned experience on these recent hot days, even though many of his landscape paintings depict tropical vegetation and sunlit Caribbean beaches. In her catalogue essay, 'Home and the World: The Britishness of Hurvin Anderson's Diasporic Landscapes', Gillian Forrester lists British painters whose work Anderson admires: 'Michael Andrews, Francis Bacon, William Coldstream, John Constable, Peter Doig, David Hockney and Euan Uglow, but particularly Andrews. Over time he has absorbed the lessons their methods and preoccupations offer, but his constantly evolving practice is strikingly distinctive and seems unburdened by the freight of both predecessors and contemporaries.' For me the most obvious comparison is with Peter Doig, whose work I've discussed here several times before (including in 2008, when he had a major Tate retrospective). However, as Eddy Frankel points out in his Guardian review, Hurvin Anderson is 'unlike Peter Doig (also a serious painter of memory and the Caribbean)' because his work 'isn’t a purely emotional attempt to deal with the past; it’s a deeply political one, too. The Jamaican hotels Anderson paints were built for white guests, in a country founded on slavery and colonial exploitation.'

Hurvin Anderson, Maracas III, 2004

Gillian Forrester expands on this point in her essay and draws connections to the Romantic period's preoccupation with ruins, evident in the paintings of Constable and Turner. 

The adjective 'ruinate', meaning spoilt or irreparably damaged, was first used in sixteenth-century England, but became obsolete. The term was revived in Jamaica after emancipation, when it took on a new meaning: the process of nature taking over previously cultivated land. In his book Jamaica as it was, as it is, and as it may be (1835) Bernard Martin Senior, a retired military officer and owner of the Glenbirnie estate in Westmoreland, Jamaica, wrote of 'lands termed "ruinate" which means such as have been used till worn out, and then allowed to grow up in bushes and woods.' Senior optimistically argued that Jamaica could be revitalised as an agricultural and mercantile hub, but huge tracts of the country remained ruinate, and do so to this day.

Anderson saw evidence of this in 2017, when he visited Oracabessa: a 'large unfinished hotel complex, partially reclaimed by vegetation, which evoked to him an ancient abandoned palace. The photograph he took was the starting point for an ongoing series of paintings that - to borrow Bernard Martin Senior's formulation - encapsulate Jamaica 'as it was, as it is, and as it may be'. Oracabessa was a banana plantation and then a self-sufficient community for former slaves before it was ruined by hurricanes and floods. In the twentieth century redevelopment began and new properties arrived, including Ian Fleming's bungalow Goldeneye, which is now a luxury resort. Anderson though, 'prefers to look beyond Oracabessa's present reputation as a celebrity haunt, making it a focus for his profound meditations on Jamaica's longer history.'

Deer Jump Lookout

Mrs Fox with her Stormy Landscapes

Here is a landscape painter I have never featured before, Mrs Fox. Her stormy landscapes (painted in miniature by Turlo Girffin) are in the Design Museum's Wes Anderson exhibition, which I visited recently with my son Torin, an art student and Wes aficionado. As you can see below, there were also miniature landscapes on a vending machine from Asteroid City, a film I didn't really enjoy despite all the care lavished on its sets. I particularly liked the idea of a vending machine designed to mix gin martinis with a twist, but this one selling Arid Plains real estate is a neat idea too. The desert landscapes were painted by David Meikle an artist from Salt Lake City whose website says he 'created the images that are seen on the “Welcome to Utah” billboards found at all major entry points to the state'. He looks a bit like a Wes Anderson character. His bio says he was 'inducted into the Highland High Hall of Fame in recognition of his success as an artist' and that he is happily married with six children and 'a crazy cat named Blue'. 

A couple of years ago we stayed a night at the Grand Hotel Pupp in Karlovy Vary (formerly Karlsbad) so that Torin could experience one of the main inspirations for Grand Budapest Hotel. Anderson liked the look of the Pupp but wanted something higher up - the hotel is in the valley, beside the Teplá River. So he combined its look with other buildings like the pink-painted Bristol Palace Hotel, which we also checked out, but didn't stay in. A small funicular in Karlovy Vary takes you up steep wooded slopes to a path from where you can find Deer Jump Lookout. I took a photograph of the statue there, silhouetted against the morning sun. You can see from the exhibition display below how Wes Anderson replicated it (on a grander scale) for the film's painted background scenery. A tourist website explains the history of this landmark. 'According to legend, a deer being hunted by Charles IV's entourage jumped from this rock cliff. The deer fell into a pool of hot water (today's Vřídlo), whose healing properties Charles IV himself tried out. He then ordered that the area around the spring be settled, which it was, and thus, according to legend, the Karlovy Vary spa was founded.'   

Although Wes Anderson visited Karlovy Vary and other useful locations like Budapest and Mariánské Lázně (once Marienbad), what he was really looking for was the atmosphere of old photochrom postcards in the Library of Congress collection. As he explains in an interview with Matt Zoller Seitz, 'in Karlovy Vary. there's a rock with a stag, Stag's Leap, which I first knew about from a 1908 photocrom picture of it. We made our own miniature version of this.' It is easy to find photocrom images online from the turn of the twentieth century that are 'accidentally Wes Anderson'. Some of them look like they have gone through the retro filters Instagram had when it first started. The photocrom process was invented in the 1880s by Hans Jakob Schmid, an employee of the venerable Swiss printing company Orell Gessner Füssli, and was used extensively for early colour postcards. A few years ago I included one of these - a view of Jena - in discussing a Gottfried Benn poem, and I think I should try to write more about them in future posts.      

Photocrom of the Grand Hotel Pupp, Karlsbad 1899

Raw-boned hills

I just finished Richard Langston's superb new oral history of The Clean, In the Dreamlife You Need a Rubber Soul (I had a tear in my eye at the end). I always enjoy shoehorning into this blog stuff I like that really has nothing ostensibly to do with landscape art, and although I can't go off piste and discuss The Clean, I can quote this paragraph, which comes on p242, when they are about to record Modern Rock.

Dunedin is a city in an amphitheater of hills and harbour. It's compact, set close to nature, and a short drive from the city center is the Otago Peninsula, with the Pacific Ocean beating against its cliffs and headlands. There are seals, penguins and an albatross colony on the flanks of Taiaroa Head at the entrance to the harbour. It is a stretch of land that has inspired painters and poets and musicians - it generates a deep sense of nature and the spiritual that lingers like sea spray. One of New Zealand's leading painters of the twentieth century, Colin McCahon, painted its raw-boned hills and conical shapes in the 1940s and made them glow and pulse with an inner light. Robin White painted a portrait of the young poet Sam Hunt in singlet and gumboots, standing hands on hips in sunshine outside the pub at Portobello. It provided the setting for Martin Phillipps to walk through a ghostly grove of trees in the video for his song 'Pink Frost'. If you drive over the hill from Portobello and down onto a shingle road you come to Hoopers Inlet. As you head towards the coast there's a small community hall on your left, and this is where The Clean came to record their next album in the autumn of 1994. Out through the hall windows there's a view of toetoe and flax, bird life on the estuary and the bush-topped volcanic shape of Hereweka/Harbour Cone.

The Chills' 1984 'Pink Frost' video

Reading this I realised I knew nothing about Colin McCahon (1919-87), despite his importance in Aotearoa. I have never seen his work - the only exhibition I know of in London was way back in 1990 at the ICA, and I didn't go to it. More recent exhibitions like the Royal Academy's Oceania have featured Lisa Reihana and other contemporary artists with a focus on Maori culture but I don't imagine there's as much interest here now in McCahon's paintings. You can see some of them at the Dunedin Public Gallery website. One of the most interesting things about his paintings (for those of us keen on geography) is the way they were influenced by textbook illustrations. Learning this made me think of Geoffrey Hutchings, whose diagrams Colin Sackett used for his book The True Line. Here is a quote from an article about McCahon by Paul Stanley Ward:

Starting out as a landscape painter, McCahon’s bold representations sought to capture the majesty and difficult essence of the southern land. His take on the terrain was new; McCahon’s landscapes weren’t romantic, but pared back, primitive, almost abstract, seeking an underlying structure. As a wedding present he had received a copy of geologist G.A. Cotton’s The Geomorphology of New Zealand (3rd ed. 1942), a scientific text examining landscape forms and processes and illustrated with sketches, diagrams and photographs. Cotton’s diagrams ignored built features, trees and objects irrelevant to his scientific themes; he was attempting to strip the landscape to its geological basis. These precise drawings would inform McCahon in his efforts to find the landscape’s spiritual basis. 

The writer Sam Hunt, also mentioned in the quote above, is a poet of the road who refers to landscape as he passes through. He collaborated with The Clean's David Kilgour on an album called Falling Debris in 2009 and I'll end here by embedding one of these tracks, 'River Plateau Song.'