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