The Rock of Montmajour with Pine Trees

We recently went to the beautiful Van Gogh exhibition at the National Gallery. I thought it very well done and tastefully presented, focusing on the art (even if the NG website does offer opportunities for an 'ochre afternoon tea' with Sunflower Chocolate Pot, a 'healing plants of Provence' creative workshop and a 5-minute meditation session based on Van Gogh's Wheatfield, with Cypresses). As Rachel Cooke says in her review, 'on the walls you’ll find only titles and dates (to know more, you must look up each painting in a booklet): a minimalism designed to allow one’s thoughts and feelings to flow freely, unimpeded by talk of bloody ears and gunshot wounds.' 

Jonathan Jones enthused about the show and observed that 

In a conventional telling, Van Gogh’s life in Provence was brutally split, as his first ecstatic months ended in self-harm and hospitalisation. Here, the translation to Saint-Rémy is not a tragedy at all. You see how his style got ever more free there. A later room is filled with landscapes he painted around Saint-Rémy that teeter on total abstraction: in The Olive Trees, the earth erupts in waves like the sea, trees dance, and a cartoon cloud is so free from rules it could be by Picasso.

The 1889 drawing of olive trees above that I photographed in the exhibition shows just how abstract and decorative his work was becoming. 

There is a whole room dedicated to one landscape series: drawings made in the vicinity of the ruined 12th-century Montmajour Abbey. The curators note that its 'terrain put the artist strongly in mind of the abandoned garden 'Le Paradou' (a Provençal word for 'Paradise'), which featured in Emile Zola's novel The Sin of Abbé Mouret (1875).' The sketch below is The Rock of Montmajour with Pine Trees (1888) and it 'includes an obscured glimpse of Arles on the far left. In Zola's novel, the Abbé, who has forgotten his vows of chastity due to amnesia, occupies the wild paradise of Le Paradou with his lover, distanced from the realities of everyday life.' After reading this I thought I would make an effort to read the novel and then do some more in depth comments here, but online reviews of it are not encouraging. A film adaptation by Georges Franju doesn't sound that enticing either. If I ever do get round to either of these I may add a postscript to this blog post. 

Ash Dome

Here is a photo I took this morning of the David Nash: 45 Years of Drawing exhibition at London's Annely Juda gallery. This room is dedicated to Ash Dome, the living tree sculpture he planted in 1977. Over the years he has returned to tend the trees and make drawings, using charcoal, raw pigment and earth from the ground they circle. The drawing below shows how the trees were fletched over and grafted. In the catalogue he explains: 

I planted 22 ash saplings in a circle with the intention of forming a dome like space for the 21st century, a 30-year project. In 1981 I grafted on branches to take up the lead growth when the tree was fetched and 1983 I started fetching in an anti-clockwise direction around the circle. Over the years each tree has formed its own individual shape, all spiralling towards the centre. (This is achieved by pruning).

The exhibition has film footage showing Nash as a young man planting the saplings and as an older man seeing how they have evolved. In a 2016 post on this blog I described a BBC documentary about British land artists that included Ash Dome: 'David Nash tells James Fox that clips of him working on it over the years show the sculpture gradually growing while he just gets older (Fox tells us he wasn't even born when Nash planted the saplings in 1977).' Sadly this hasn't happened: Ash Dome was not destined to keep on growing.

In a 2019 interview with Martin Gayford, Nash mentions the arrival of ash dieback disease, although the sculpture was still being referred to as Ash Dome (1977–ongoing). Now it is called Ash Dome (1977-2019). The first drawing above is Ash Dome with ash dieback, the second Ash Dome with oaks. After some deliberation Nash decided to plant a new dome of 22 oak trees surrounding the dying ash trees, this time to be fetched in a clockwise direction. So there is hope here for a new 22nd century dome that will outlast us all. But it is a sad moment in the film (see below) when, earlier this year, Nash returns to his sculpture and picks up one of the original trees which lay broken on the ground. 

Drunkard's Rock

Bill Porter (who uses the pen name Red Pine) wrote a wonderful account of his travels in search of places associated with ancient Chinese poetry, Finding Them Gone: Visiting China’s Poets of the Past (2016). Arriving now at these historic sites could involve encountering coachloads of people at a vast newly-built tourist site or finding nothing at all, just assurances from elderly locals or descendants that an old poet had indeed once lived in the vicinity. To take just one day and four Tang Dynasty poets as an example: leaving Xi’an to visit Wang Wei’s famous estate, Red Pine discovered it is now being used to make nuclear warheads. He then asked his taxi driver to make for the village where Liu Zongyuan had lived, but was met there with shrugs. A shrine to Du Fu was easy to find but Du Mu’s grave in a nearby village was removed by officials in the seventies and is now a pit full of trash.

Given the dense literary history of Mount Lu (which I briefly covered in a 2010 post here) you might think Red Pine would have had no difficulty seeing everything associated with its famous poets. And in Chaisang (Mulberry-Bramble) he did find a grandiose memorial and museum devoted to Tao Yuanming (T'ao Yüan-ming, 365-427), founder of the fields-and-gardens tradition. But when he attempted to see the poet’s grave he was told it was off limits, located now inside a military base, and the soldiers on guard would not let him in. 

Tao Yuanming was born at Chaisang and returned to the area ‘to dwell in gardens and fields’, as his famous poem of retreat put it. However, as Burton Watson wrote in The Columbia Book of Chinese Poetry, Tao’s poetry is ambiguous – ‘exclamations upon the beauties of nature and the freedom and peace of rustic life sit uneasily alongside confessions of loneliness, frustration, and fear, particularly of death. He sought solace in his zither, his books, and above all in wine, about half of his poems mentioning his fondness for “the thing in the cup,” though in one of the poems he wrote depicting his own funeral, he declares that he was never able to get enough of it.'

Tao Yuanming in a painting by Chen Hongshou (1598-1652)

Leaving Chaisang, Red Pine's taxi drove south past the giant Donglin Buddha, heading for Wenchuan village at the foot of Lushan. On a previous visit back in 1991 he discovered Tao Yuanming’s last lineal male descendant had still been living here until his death just a few weeks before Red Pine’s arrival. Returning now, twenty-five years later, he found the village had been bulldozed and replaced with hot spring hotels. But fortunately it was still possible to see Drunkard’s Rock, where Tao met his friends and was inspired to write his wonderful account of the Peach Blossom Spring. The great eighteenth century poet Yuan Mei (1716-97) came here in 1784 and reflected on the fact that a mere ‘scrubby piece of stone / has been cherished and admired for more than a thousand years.’ Red Pine showed his taxi driver the rock and the faded signature carved into it by Confucian scholar (Chu Hsi, 1130-1200). His taxi driver, amazed, wondered why it wasn't in a museum but Red Pine was glad it wasn't and 'given its size, I didn't think it was going anywhere anytime soon.'

The Willows

When I reached the point of sand jutting out among the waves, the spell of the place descended upon me with a positive shock. No mere “scenery” could have produced such an effect. There was something more here, something to alarm.

I gazed across the waste of wild waters; I watched the whispering willows; I heard the ceaseless beating of the tireless wind; and, one and all, each in its own way, stirred in me this sensation of a strange distress. But the willows especially; for ever they went on chattering and talking among themselves, laughing a little, shrilly crying out, sometimes sighing—but what it was they made so much to-do about belonged to the secret life of the great plain they inhabited. And it was utterly alien to the world I knew, or to that of the wild yet kindly elements. They made me think of a host of beings from another plane of life, another evolution altogether, perhaps, all discussing a mystery known only to themselves. I watched them moving busily together, oddly shaking their big bushy heads, twirling their myriad leaves even when there was no wind. They moved of their own will as though alive, and they touched, by some incalculable method, my own keen sense of the horrible. 

This is from Algernon Blackwood's 'The Willows' (1907), 'foremost of all' his tales according to H. P. Lovecraft. In it, 'the nameless presences on a desolate Danube are horribly felt and recognised by a pair of idle voyagers. Here art and restraint in narrative reach their very highest development, and an impression of lasting poignancy is produced without a single strained passage or a single false note.' Blackwood was a great explorer of the outdoors and 'The Willows' was based on his own experiences camping 'on one of the countless lonely islands below Pressburg.' This area on the modern border of Slovakia and Hungary looks like it would be pleasant to visit these days - there is an attractive-looking nature reserve at Dunajské luhy which I am sure is a lot less menacing than Blackwood's 'waste of wild waters'.

Another Blackwood story that deals directly with landscape is 'The Face of the Earth', in which a German professor obsessed with the idea that the Earth is a living Being discerns the semblance of a face in the Dorsetshire Hills. He tries to entice a young student to sacrifice himself in a mouth-like chalk pit ("Come quick. It is the feeding-time.") This and 'The Willows' can be found in a new OUP anthology of Blackwood stories The Wendigo and Other Stories. Editor Aaron Worth points to Blackwood's continuing relevance in 'his pioneering exploration of such topics as plant consciousness and agency, ecological catastrophe ... and monstrous entanglements within natural systems.' A story beginning to attract renewed critical attention for its relevance to colonialism and environmentalism is 'The Man Whom the Trees Loved' (1912). This is set on the edge of the New Forest and concerns a former employee of the Imperial Forest Service in India whose love for the forest outside his English home takes over his life and estranges him from his wife. The way these trees form a single communicating entity anticipates recent debates about the wood wide web.  

'The Man Whom the Trees Loved' may be interesting material for ecocritics but as a story it is, I'm afraid to say, pretty tedious and long-winded. 'The Willows', by contrast, is perfectly paced and compelling. Initially the two canoeists feel menaced by the landscape, but what begins with disquiet at the way the trees move becomes something much bigger, the kind of cosmic horror Lovecraft would specialise in. 

The eeriness of this lonely island, set among a million willows, swept by a hurricane, and surrounded by hurrying deep waters, touched us both, I fancy. Untrodden by man, almost unknown to man, it lay there beneath the moon, remote from human influence, on the frontier of another world, an alien world, a world tenanted by willows only and the souls of willows. 

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.