Look into the cataract

I've been a bit short of time recently so here is just a brief post to share a clip from YouTube of the beginning of Werner Herzog's Heart of Glass (1976). Embedded clips like this usually disappear after a while so I am also including some still images from the film too. The Rückenfigur looking over the Bavarian Alps is the herdsman Hias, a character based on the legendary Bavarian prophet, Mühlhiasl who had Nostradamus-like visions of the future.  The second one shows clouds flowing over the mountains, a scene Herzog and his crew filmed frame-by-frame.  These mountains formed the landscape of Herzog's childhood, living until the age of twelve in a remote village which his mother had taken their family to after the house next door to theirs in Munich was bombed in an Allied raid.

After these views of the mountain landscape where the film's story is set (just after the end of the clip embedded here), there is a sequence of stranger, more dream-like images of flowing water. These are supposed to put the viewer into a kind of trance, like the villagers in the story who talk and act as if in a waking dream - Herzog got all his actors to perform under hypnosis, with the exception of Josef Bierbichler who plays Hias (for more on this, see the book Werner Herzog and the making of 'Heart of Glass'). Over the waterfall footage you hear a voice in German: "I look into the cataract... I feel an undertow... It draws me, it sucks me down..."  As this is happening, Popul Vuh's music gently plays in the background.  Herzog described the effect of concentrating intensely on this imagery.  It "gives you a lift as if the waterfall was standing still and you start to float upwards. It's a little but like the effect of staring from a bridge into a river and all of a sudden you start to float..."   

Landscapes Drawn towards and away from the Sun

Thomas Kerrich, Diagram of Three Landscapes Drawn towards and away from the Sun, 1796

I just came upon a photograph I took of two remarkable drawings by Thomas Kerrich - I think they were in Patrick Keiller's 2012 exhibition, The Robinson Institute?  I last featured Kerrich here when I highlighted one of his views of the beach at Lowestoft, far more minimal than you would expect from a painting done in 1794.  These sketches come from around the same time: the cloud study is undated, but the three landscape views in circles were drawn around noon on March 18, 1796. Those three circular views could almost be conceptual art and remind me of photographs taken through Nancy Holt's Sun Tunnels. The colour trials might be strange light effects somewhere beyond the stratosphere, although at first glance this image could be taken for fleeting impressions of pennants in a regatta and foam tipped waves.

Thomas Kerrich, Cloudscape with Colour Trials, c.1795 

The Tate has some other nice cloud studies by Kerrich - I have included one below.  The British Museum also has five of his sketches which 'record changes in the light and weather along a stretch of coastline near Lowestoft and Pakefield in Suffolk in August 1794.'  The curators suggest that 

'Their immediacy and freshness are due to the fact that they were done directly from nature, as indicated by the artist's notation; but also because as an amateur, Kerrich was not constrained by conventional landscape formulae and was free to explore weather and cloud effects with a simplicity and directness not equalled until the work of Constable nearly two decades later.'

Thomas Kerrich, Study of Two Clusters of Cumulus Clouds, c.1795

Ten Skies and 13 Lakes

‘The only way one can understand landscape is through time.’ - James Benning

This is a still from TEN SKIES (2004) a film by James Benning that lasts over two hours and consists of ten static shots of the sky over California.  You can currently watch it all on YouTube.  Claudia Slanar has written about this film and its predecessor 13 LAKES (2004) that the attention they demand ‘leads to a fluctuation between impatience, immersion and digression.’ Scott MacDonald has described the experience of seeing them for the first time as like going into a horror film, where the viewer has to decide to ‘endure whatever the film is about to send their way.’ By the third ten minute sequence it will be clear that almost nothing is going to happen. So what exactly do they offer? MacDonald suggests they provide a kind of visual and auditory retraining. ‘Again and again during a viewing of either film, we ‘awake’ to realise that our minds have moved elsewhere, into daydream, memory, worry, planning… and we wrestle our consciousness back to the screen and soundtrack, often to realise that in the interim things have altered more than we might have expected.’

In these films, landscape is transformed directly into art. As Slanar says, they 'represent the concept of nature as a ’ready-made’, as a pre-existing object that is turned into a work of art by means of an artistic signature.’  The fragmentary soundtrack of Ten Skies ‘subtly evokes a sense of place without depending on synchronous sound’. She relates Benning's films to other examples of slow cinema – Peter Hutton's Time and Tide (2000) and At Sea (2007), Sharon Lockhart’s Pine Flat (2006), Abbas Kiorostami’s Five (2003).  Her essay, and that of Scott MacDonald, appear in an excellent compilation dedicated to James Benning published in 2007 by the Austrian Film Museum in Vienna. The book discusses his work's engagement with ideas of place and the rapidly changing American landscape.  As Julie Ault says, the films reveal a persistent iconography – ‘groups of cows, passing trains, emitting smokestacks, farmland being ploughed, billboards, gunshots, oil wells, highways, the Spiral Jetty and the Milwaukee neighbourhood where Benning was born and raised.’

Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty is the subject of Casting a glance (2007): seventy-eight one-minute shots made during sixteen trips to the Jetty between May 15 2005 and January 14 2007.  The title refers to something Smithson said that evokes that idea of landscape as 'ready-made': ‘a great artist can make art by simply casting a glance.’  Benning first saw Spiral Jetty almost twenty years earlier.  In those days it was much harder to find - he tried various roads from Rozel Point before finding one that led to wards the lake, then had to walk three miles to find it, submerged at that point under two feet of water.  I will end here with Benning's evocative description of encountering Spiral Jetty as a site constantly changing, illustrating his view that 'the only way one can understand landscape is through time.'

‘The Jetty is a barometer for both daily and yearly cycles. From morning to night its allusive, shifting appearance (radical or subtle) may be the result of a passing weather system or simply the changing angle of the sun. The yearly seasonal shifts and water level changes alter the growing salt crystals, the amount of algae in the water, and the presence of wildlife. The water may appear blue, red, purple, green, brown, silver, or gold. The sounds may come from a navy jet, wildlife, splashing water, a distant car radio, converging thunderstorms; or be a silence so still you can hear the blood moving through the veins in your ears.'

Apotheosis

It could be argued that John and Yoko made a form of landscape art in Apotheosis (1970), their seventeen minute experimental film of the view from an ascending balloon.  It was shot in December 1969, on a snowy day in Lavenham, Suffolk.  At the beginning you hear the balloon being inflated and see John and Yoko in hooded outfits.  It then becomes clear that the camera is mounted in the balloon, which rises out of the market place until you can see white fields and black trees that could have come from a Bruegel  painting.  This landscape gets progressively whiter and more indistinct until it eventually disappears.  After several minutes, the balloon emerges above the clouds which, in the words of Jonas Mekas, 'opened up like a huge poem, you could see the tops of the clouds, all beautifully enveloped by sun, stretching into infinity.'

Back in 2010, The East Anglian Daily Times published an article about the film and interviewed people who were there that day, such as Roger Deacon, manager of a local building firm, who remembers helping to lift the famous couple out of their balloon.

'John and Yoko didn’t take off on the flight, climbing out of the basket after the photographs to oversee the launch – to shouts of “chicken!” from the gathered crowd – while their collaborator and cameraman, Nic Knowland (himself a Suffolk man, originally from Debenham), ensured the shoot was carried out to their requirements.'

In his essay 'Walking on thin Ice: The Films of Yoko Ono', Daryl Chin compares Apotheosis to the contemporary work of Michael Snow (La Région Centrale, Snow's celebrated three-hour film of an uninhabited mountainous landscape, made with a robotic camera, was shot in September 1970).  However, The East Anglian Daily Times was not impressed by Apotheosis. 

'The best thing you could say about it is that it left the people of Lavenham - and Yoko - with some bizarre and brilliant memories (“We always have a laugh about it,” says Roger Deacon. “Not many people can say they’ve had their hands around Yoko Ono!”)
Other than that, it was a lot of hot air.'

The sun is slowly eclipsed

I wrote here a few weeks ago about two of the Tacita Dean exhibitions in London this year; this post is about the third one, 'Landscapes', at the Royal Academy.  The first thing that will strike any visitor is the venue itself, the new RA extension, and (if you're my age) a feeling of déjà vu as you realise you're entering what was once the Museum of Mankind.  Then, the first room is full of clouds.  They were all created on slate, using spray chalk, gouache and charcoal pencil.  These obviously stand in the long tradition of artist cloud studies - Cozens, Constable, Stieglitz - but are immediately recognisable as the kind of blackboard drawing she became well known for in the nineties (her Turner Prize nomination was twenty years ago).  One cloud triptych is called Bless Our Europe and another Where England?  I found myself thinking about the chalk cliffs I wrote about in Frozen Air and the way clouds float freely over national borders. 

Beside these cloud studies, a whole wall is taken up by one of Dean's large-scale mountain drawings, The Montafon Letter (2017).  Here the brief textual annotations, which are a feature of her work in different media, come from the account of a devastating avalanche that took place in 1689.  A priest tending to the dying was buried by falling snow, but then unburied when another avalanche struck, and survived.  There is a photograph of Tacita Dean working on this, accompanying an interesting Guardian interview prior to the opening of this exhibition.  Another mountain scene dominates the second room: Quarantania (2018).  This shows a forbidding rock wall under a blood red sky - Mt. Quanrantania is the site in the Judean Desert where the devil is said to have tempted Jesus.  The image was constructed by manipulating early photographs and above the desert floor there is a kind of blurred mirage effect.  

In the final room you can watch Antigone, a new hour-long film which Tacita Dean has finally completed after one false start and many years reflecting on its underlying themes.  Landscape footage (which is of most relevance to the subject of this blog) is set alongside various approaches to the story of Antigone and her father, so that, for example, two bubbling volcanic vents remind you of the blind eyes of Oedipus.  In the catalogue she explains that: 

'Antigone has taken form as a result of the inherent blindness of film. Using masking inside the camera's aperture gate, I filmed one part of the film frame before rewinding the camera to film another part. This meant that the film was composed without the possibility of seeing what was already exposed in the frame. So Bodmin Moor under February drizzle sat in blind relationship with the shores of the Mississippi or geysers in Yellowstone with the total eclipse of the Sun. Only when I returned to California in the late Summer of 2017 and processed and printed my rolls of negative, did the film revealed itself to me.'

Sunlight on the catalogue for Landscapes, showing pages related to Antigone 

Adrian Searle, in his Guardian review, said that 'it is impossible to do justice' to this film. 

'We visit the floodplains of the Mississippi in Wyoming, the town of Thebes, Illinois, and the courthouse where Abraham Lincoln first practiced. Here we meet Anne Carson and actor Stephen Dillane.  For much of the film, Dillane is an Oedipus blinded by tinted glasses made for viewing the eclipse, and wearing a huge, straggly beard. He maunders across the world as though without purpose, at one point followed by a pair of curious dogs. As he walks out of frame, the dogs start copulating. Think ZZ Top. Think Saint Jerome. Think Harry Dean Stanton in the film Paris, Texas. A man on a mission, escaping his fate. Eagles circle the sky, their call a distant mewing. There are vultures and a crow stalks the horizon. Every moment of Antigone is a confusion, a complexity and a delight – a rich muddled stew of words and images, places and atmospheres. And through the imaginary day on which everything takes place, the sun is slowly eclipsed.'

I know what he means about ZZ Top, although I was thinking more of Warren Ellis from The Bad Seeds.  Those eclipse glasses were like the distinctive sun goggles in Herzog's Fata Morgana and the split-screen wandering of Oedipus reminded me of Ori Gersht's film about the last walk of Walter Benjamin, Evaders.  The idea of filming in Thebes, Illinois may seem a bit forced, but its old courthouse was a wonderfully atmospheric setting.  The whole film is worth seeing just for the way the early evening light falls on its old books and floorboards, and for the view across the river of the sun glowing and setting behind distant trees.  I would recommend arriving at the start (there's a showing every hour) and trying to get a front seat.  We did, and were engrossed by Antigone from start to finish.

Ideas for Sculpture in a Setting

Paul Nash, Event on the Downs, 1934

The Tacita Dean exhibition Landscape starts today, but before I get to that, I wanted to mention here the Still Life exhibition which is still on for a few more days at the National Gallery.  It is free, unlike Landscape and Portrait, and it also incorporates other artists' work (and so reminded me of An Aside, the excellent exhibition she curated back in 2005 at Camden Arts Centre).  It includes examples of an overlapping genre, 'still life in a landscape', of which Event on the Downs is a famous example.  Long before Surrealism though, Thomas Robert Guest was recording archaeological finds by painting them close to, towering over the places in which they were found.  There is a Tate Paper ('Thomas Guest and Paul Nash in Wiltshire') with more information on the rediscovery of Guest's paintings in the late 1930s.  Such hybrid works, situating the still life in a landscape, differ from the kind of painting I featured here last year, where the two form separate worlds within the same artwork.  John Crome's Study of Flints is another example, similar in composition to Guest's paintings.  In the exhibition it is represented not by the original but by a postcard (Tacita Dean is known for collecting and using postcards in her art).  Crome's painting relates closely to two of Dean's own works, films of flints owned by in Henry Moore, called Ideas for Sculpture in a Setting (Diptych) (2017).

Thomas Robert Guest, Bronze Age Grave Goods from a Bell Barrow

Excavated at Winterslow, Wiltshire, 1814
 

John Crome, Study of Flints, c. 1811

In her introduction to the catalogue, Tacita Dean writes about a Paul Nash painting that manages to combine all three genres: landscape, portraiture and still life.  Cumulus Head is 'said to be a portrait of his wife, Margaret.  She appears in a cumulus cloud landscape with a green, possibly grass, middle ground.'  Furthermore, this portrait 'is painted as a statue head carved in stone and mounted on what appears to be a stepped pedestal.'  There is nothing quite like this in the exhibition^*, although the human form is evoked in Two White Manikins by Albert Reuss (the manikins are propped up among rocks in what looks like a desert).  There is though one small, strange work from the National Gallery's own collection, which from a distance appears to be another close-up view of a flint-like rock.  It includes two figures, plus an angel who is probably part of a scene that was cut from the panel.  St Benedict is in a cave, receiving food lowered down to him by St. Romanus.  But, as Marjorie E. Wieseman writes in the catalogue, 'whether by accident or design, Romanus' grey robed figure seems to rise out of / melt into the rocky forms encroaching Benedict's hermitage, inviting fantasies of a landscape come alive or, alternatively, of a figure turned to stone and subsumed into the land itself.  The stillness come awake; or life, become still.'

Paul Nash, Cumulus Head, c. 1944

Workshop of Lorenzo Monaco, Saint Benedict 

in the Sacro Speco at Subiaco, c. 1415-20

  

^* the Paul Nash painting Cumulus Head is actually included at the RA in the third part of the Tacita Dean exhibition, 'Landscape'. 

The Black World

I did a post here back in 2010 about Trevor Paglen, the artist-geographer who has explored the 'black world' of US military and intelligence agencies.  I focused then on his 'limit telephotography' in which restricted landscapes, cut-off and unseeable with the naked eye, can be glimpsed using high-powered telescopes.  Today I popped into an excellent small exhibition of his work to coincide with the Deutsche Börse prize (like the exhibition of Richard Mosse photographs I described here two years ago).  Three exhibits of particular interest from a landscape perspective:

• They Watch the Moon (2010), which you can see above in the window of the Photographers Gallery, is a beautiful vista of hills completely covered in rich green vegetation.  At their centre, a constellation of artificial lights and the dishes of telescopes arranged in a circle like orbiting moons.  In an essay on Paglen's work, 'Visiting the Planetarium: Images of the Black World', Brian Holmes has written of this photograph that whilst we may see in it something grand, an image of the cosmic relation of earth and sky, in fact 'the radio telescope depicted is devoted to banalities: it picks up stray cell-phone conversations bouncing off the lunar surface from halfway around the globe.'

• Untitled (Reaper Drone) 2010, is just as visually stunning: a late-Turner swirl of yellow light - the desert sky near Las Vegas - and caught in the image the tiny silhouette of military drone.  This series of photographs, the curators explain, are achieved with a large-format camera trained on the sky: 'when the film is developed, small insect-like drones are peppered throughout the images.'  There is another, Untitled (Predators), not in the exhibition, which could be a high cirrus sky over Suffolk - an ominous contemporary version of Constable's cloud studies.

• NSA-Tapped Fiber Optic Cable Landing Site, Marseilles, France (2015) partly comprises another large-scale landscape photograph, juxtaposed with a nautical map onto which various diagrams and images have been pinned like the visual prompts on a crime investigation board.  The view of rocky islands in the bay of Marseilles inevitably brings to mind The Count of Monte Cristo, a novel that features surveillance, secret locations, political plots and, here where the NSA-tapped cable came ashore, the fortress prison where the novel's hero is cut off from all communication with the outside world. 

Paul Cézanne, The Bay of Marseilles from L'Estaque, c. 1885

(a postcard of this painting is one of the items Paglen has attached to the map of Marseilles)

Having written this I see that the Photographers Gallery have just today posted an interview with Paglen on their website.  In this clip, embedded here, he talks in front of the map of Marseille about the way his work aims to make visitors look at the world more closely and more suspiciously.

The Tarn

 

Lars Hertervig, Borgøya Island, 1867

Yesterday I watched the first of Andrew Graham-Dixon's new three-part series on Scandinavian art.  He has begun it in Norway, crunching through the snow in a parka and discussing some artists I've featured here before: Munch, Dahl, Balke.  In one hour he couldn't include everyone (no Kitty Kielland) but I was interested in the story of Lars Hertervig (1830-1902), whose traumatic move from a poor farm on the west coast of Norway to the city of Düsseldorf, where his sponsors sent him to study at the Arts Academy, was likened by Graham-Dixon to the shock of Norway's transition from rural backwater to modern state.  One day, Hertervig, who had fallen in love with the beautiful daughter of his landlady in Düsseldorf, was told that a rendezvous had been arranged with her.  But when he arrived to meet her he found no one there but a bunch of bullying, mocking students.  This practical joke contributed to a depression which led him to return to Norway, where he was placed in the asylum at Gaustad.  After eighteen months, 'incurably insane', Hertervig went home to his family.  There he began to paint again.  Two examples of this new style were discussed in the programme: the first (above) shows a crag emerging from boiling clouds above a mirror of water; the second (below) is stranger still, a vision of what might almost be a prehistoric landscape.

 Lars Hertervig, The Tarn, 1865

Here is what Andrew Graham-Dixon had to say in front of The Tarn:  

"Looks at these clouds.  There's nothing else like this in all of nineteenth century landscape painting. It's almost as if the landscape itself has gone mad, been provoked into these paroxysms of movement and gesture.  It's almost as if you are looking into the mirror of a troubled mind. The landscape itself has a tremendously primitive, ancient feel about it.  To me it's almost as if Hertervig is attempting to summon up or capture that sense of the landscape that's always been there in the Norwegian soul, whether in the soul of the Vikings or the Christians who followed.  And together with that there's a kind of fear present in it all.  A fear perhaps that just as this landscape might almost be on the point of reverting back to some primordial waste, that there is no meaning, there is no purpose, there is no pattern to the natural world.  The world simply is there."

Southern Light Stations

Inspecting a tiny stereoscopic cloud study in 

Noémie Goudal's Southern Light Stations

Here's the Photographers' Gallery summary of the work on display in Noémie Goudal's Southern Light Stations exhibition.

'In Towers, large-scale follies or telescopic structures sit within vast, featureless landscapes, as if suspended between heaven and earth, while Stations depict seemingly free-floating spheres, reminiscent of celestial bodies: the sun, moon and planets. Closer investigation of the images reveals ropes, scaffolding and smoke referencing their construction. The exhibition centrepiece is an observatory-style architectural structure, offering a selection of stereoscopic cloud studies.'

Goudal has been identified as part of a group of younger photographers 'choosing to foreground the formerly ‘repressed’ aspects of the medium', i.e. the physical means and technical processes necessary to create an image. The apparatus required to keep her spheres in place comes over though as more than just a reaction to photoshop and a means of focusing attention on the actions of the artist.  It gives the Stations photographs a mysterious quality, as we wonder what purpose they serve - are they remnants of some installation or performance, or envirographic instruments of the kind imagined by the British Exploratory Land Archive? As she says in the interview embedded below, the work is partly based on early astronomers like Copernicus and the instruments they might have used.  The gallery's central observatory like-structure with its stereoscopic viewers provides a way to imagine studying the form of clouds before the invention of the telescope.

The exhibition includes one Stations photograph that takes up a whole wall.  Watching my son walking up to this it looked as if he was on a stage set, and then as if he might enter the imaginary space.  In a short essay on the artist's work Marta Gili sees her images in terms of an emptying of the landscape. 'As in the theatre of The Absurd it could be said that here nature is represented in order to be vacated, like a stage ultimately intended to be inhabited by other sets, which are in turn nothing other than masks of something that might have been or might have taken place in another time, past or future, or another place, near-at-hand or far off.'  This theatrical element is echoed by Bernard Marcelis who writes of the way Goudal has chosen to situate her constructions in caves and islands, places that are 'imbued with a certain dramaturgy, or at least are propitious to reconstructions or particular mises en scenes'.  In a third essay reprinted on the artist's website, Sebastien Montabonel and Emma Lewis relate her imagined spaces to Foucault's notion of heterotopias. 'Building a stage on which our imaginations can play out, a narrative in which we are protagonists, Goudal’s images brings us, as viewers, back to ourselves.'

Atmosphere

We were in Margate recently and saw the new installation by Edmund de Waal, atmosphere.  As usual in his recent work, the vitrines and their arrangement in space are as important as the small porcelain vessels they contain.  The title comes from Turner's remark to Ruskin, "atmosphere is my style" and the vitrines floating in the gallery correspond to Thomas Forster's poetic cloud classifications (the lists above are part of an accompanying text piece).  One of these vitrines is fully transparent but the pots in the others are only partially visible as shadowy forms behind clouded glass.  "When thinking about the changing landscape of clouds," De Waal writes, "I remember Constable's beautiful letter about lying on his back and doing 'a great deal of skying.'" The gallery provides cushions to encourage you to look up at the vitrines from below and do some indoor skying, although for me this emphasised how unavoidably static these sculptures are compared to the real cloudscape outside. 

The Ruins of Hohenbaden

 

Carl Philipp Fohr, The Ruins of Hohenbaden, (1814-15)

The Morgan Library & Museum

Today was the last day to see A Dialogue with Nature, an excellent little exhibition at The Courtauld which included works from New York's Morgan Library & Museum that I'd not seen before, like Carl Philipp Fohr's 'jewel-like watercolour', The Ruins of Hohenbaden (1814-15).  I was particularly fascinated to see German paintings and drawings like this alongside those by familiar British names (Cozens, Girtin, Turner etc.).  Three more examples: Caspar David Friedrich's The Jakobikirche in Greifswald as a Ruin (c. 1817), the kind of nineteenth century 'anticipatory ruin' highlighted in the Tate's current Ruin Lust exhibition; Theodor Rehbenitz's strange little Fantastic Landscape with Monk Crossing a Bridge (c. 1826-30), a throwback to the style of Dürer's woodcuts; and the composer Felix Mendelssohn's sketchbook for 1837-9 open to show that popular Romantic trope, the view from a window.  Although there were few surprised in these British and German artists' subject matter, the exhibition conveyed a wonderful sense of technical creativity in the means used to engage in 'a dialogue with nature'.  I left with a mental list of ways in which an innovative artist of the period might demonstrate a distinctive landscape vision...

Use stylised strokes...  I have written here before about the vocabulary of marks used by Chinese landscape painters and named after the natural phenomena they resembled, like tan wo ts’un – 'eddies of a whirlpool'. The Courtauld curator drew attention to the foliage in Johann Georg Wagner's Wooded landscape with stream and oxcart on road (1760s), depicted using 'whirls and coils in a lively, almost calligraphic manner', a device which 'imbues this tranquil scene with vitality and movement.'  Wagner didn't have a chance to develop his style, dying at the age of just twenty-two (the same age at which Carl Philipp Fohr was killed, after an accident swimming in the Tiber). 

 

Use a 'stump'...  This was how Thomas Gainsborough, in Wooded Upland Landscape with Cottage, Figures and Cows (c. 1785), created subtle shades of grey on the road leading into the picture, the walls and the trees beyond and the distant hills and clouds in the background.  By rubbing a tightly rolled stump of leather or paper over the surface he left areas of soft shadow that contrast satisfyingly with the grainy texture of the unsmoothed chalk elsewhere in the landscape. 
 

Add gouache and gum arabic...  Mainly self-taught, Samuel Palmer also used distinctive ways of applying ink and paint, like the stippled trees in The Haunted Stream (c. 1826).  But what's really striking about another experiment, Oak Tree and Beech, Lullingstone Park (1828), are the different materials used. The extraordinary fiery evening light in the depths of the trees is 'yellow watercolour over white gouache, to which he applied gum arabic, imparting shine, and occasional dots of red watercolour.'
 

Choose coloured paper... The exhibition included one of Constable's cloud studies in which, it appears, he had insufficient time to record all the gradations of colour.  Nearby is one of the 150 cloud studies made by his German contemporary Johann Georg Dillis, executed with white chalk on blue paper so that he could avoid the issue of colour and concentrate on pure form.  I would love to see a large selection of these all on display together.

Leave a hole...  The moon must present a particular challenge for landscape painters and Turner makes it look easy in the Courtauld's On Lake Lucerne, looking towards Fluelen (1841).  Hung next to this in the exhibition was Friedrich's Moonlit Landscape (1808) in which he made no attempt to paint the moon itself: instead a circular hole was left so that a blank piece of paper behind shines through. In fact this was originally designed to be illuminated by lamplight and viewed to the accompaniment of music.

Like clouds accompanying the rising summer sun

Here's an idea for an art installation.  You pass into a room between the trunks of two pine trees that show signs of having been cut into with a large axe and smaller one.  In front of you is a pond covered with lotus plants, lit so that the veins in their leaves stand out.  Placed on low plinths around the room are a torn net, hemp stalks, frayed rope, oxen fur and a lump of alum.  Vitrines contain horses teeth, thorns, split beans and broken bands.  And on the three walls facing you, video projections show silent footage of an eddying whirlpool, falling rain and roiling clouds. This installation would (as some readers will have recognised) be inspired by the various types of shaping lines (ts'un) used in traditional Chinese landscape painting.  For example, expand the image of Fan Kuan's Travellers among Mountains and Streams below and you can see his use of the 'rain dot stroke', which one source characterises as 'many perpendicular, forceful, short lines executed under a quick brush. Collectively, they look like the marks left by a heavy rain on a mud wall. This type of stroke is suitable for depicting the pocked appearance of the eroded loess plateaus of northern China.'  There are various lists of these brush strokes and the one I've reproduced below is in Fritz van Briessen's The Way of the Brush: Painting Techniques of China and Japan.

 Fan Kuan, Travellers among Mountains and Streams, c.1000

Luan ma ts’un – like tangled hemp stalks
     (also called luan ch’ai ts’un, like tangled bundles of brushwood)
Ho yeh ts’un – like the veins of lotus leaves
Chieh so ts’un – like unravelled hemp rope
P’i ma ts’un – like spread out hemp fibres
Ma p’i ts’un – like a tangled ball of hemp fibres
Luan yün ts’un – like rolling billows of cloud
Niu mao ts’un – like cow hair
P’o wang ts’un - like a torn net
Fan t’ou ts’un – like lumps of alum
Tan wo ts’un – like eddies of a whirlpool
Kuei mien ts’un – like the wrinkles on a demon’s face
Hsiao fu p’i ts’un – like the cuts made by a small axe
Ta fu p’i ts’un – like the cuts made by a big axe
Che-tai-ts’un – like broken bands
Ma ya ts’un – like horses teeth
Tou pan ts’un – like two halves of a bean
Yü tien ts’un – like raindrops
Tz’u li ts’un – like thorns
Mi tien ts’un – like the dots used by Mi Fei

In that imaginary installation I drew upon (rather than drawing with) all of these ts'un, except two which don't correspond directly to things we might encounter out in the landscape - the wrinkles on a demon's face and the brush stroke named after a specific artist, Mi Fei. The others all suggest ways in which the motion of the hand is akin to a natural process and seem to situate the artist in direct connection with animals, plants, rocks or water whilst in the very act of shaping a landscape painting.  I like the fact that these links are indirect and metaphorical - mountains, for example, can be constructed from clouds (with a luan yün ts’un, the brush is 'moved in an orbit, like clouds accompanying the rising summer sun.')  Placed in a gallery all objects prompt metaphorical readings: it would be hard to view a torn net or a pile of thorns as nothing more than signifiers of themselves, or reminders of how particular brush strokes have been termed. So it is with a painting like Travellers among Mountains and Streams, a Taoist vision of nature rather than a strictly topographical one: a symbolic journey through high mountains, their rocky sides mottled like the aftermath of a rain shower. 

The codification of style in painting manuals like The Mustard-seed Garden and the way landscapes could be built up from simple forms has prompted modern computer programmers to simulate the small axe cut, the hemp-fibre stroke and so on.  A paper by Way and Shih, for example, describes work on the synthesis of rock textures in Chinese landscape painting, aiming to provide tools for digital artists and allow the automatic rendering of Chinese-style landscapes.  Their mathematical models have no connection to physical objects or natural processes; but then it is also possible to imagine Fan Kuan dabbing his brush onto the silk scroll oblivious to the rain drops falling outside.  Can this gap between art and the world be closed?  In his New River Watercolours, John Cage took stones from a river and drew round them to create marks not unlike roiling cloud strokes: "with the involvement of the rock, the line is not so much me as it is the rock." And Brice Marden (as I was saying a couple of weeks ago) uses sticks in his calligraphic drawing to produce natural variations in the line.  These objects restrict the artist to a type of gesture whilst releasing the expressive potential of the brush stroke.  Cage said that as he traced the stones, "a slight turning of the brush on my part makes a big difference in the line. So, it's hard to explain, but I'm moving toward a freedom of gesture while at the same time using gesture."

Cold Mountain

I was at Tate Modern on Monday for the inaugural talk in a new American Artist Lecture Series, organised by the US embassy.  The ambassador's wife Marjorie Susman provided one of the four introductions that preceded Brice Marden's talk and Q&A with Sir Nicholas Serota.  Later in the week she was interviewed with Marden on Radio 4's Front Row, at the ambassador's official residence in an ornate state banqueting room: mahogany table, gilt decorations and, thanks to the State Department's ART in the Embassies programme, a large painting from Marden's Cold Mountain series.  This had recently served as the backdrop to a dinner in which the Obamas met the Queen.  Marden acknowledges that financial and political power can negate the effect of an artwork but thinks that this painting is 'in a position where it's allowed to try to do its work'.  I'm always intrigued by the choice of art works in places of power (No. 10 Downing Street for example) and in this case the choice seems at odds with the inspiration for Marden's painting, that mysterious T'ang Dynasty poet-hermit Han-shan ('Cold Mountain'), an inspirational figure for later Zen poets and painters.  In a brief digression on Monday, Nick Serota recalled showing the Queen around Tate Modern: when she got to the Rothko room she asked, to his surprise, whether "this artist was into Zen".  I like to imagine her at that state banquet, sitting under Brice Marden's painting thinking of Han-shan.  'The Cold Mountain trail goes on and on/ ... Who can leap the world's ties / And sit with me among the clouds?'

Gary Snyder's translations of Cold Mountain, 

A Tokyo National Museum postcard showing a scroll painting of Han-shan and Shih-te,

A Serpentine Gallery postcard showing Brice Marden's Cold Mountain 2 (1989-91).

In addition to Cold Mountain, Brice Marden mentioned on Monday his admiration for Chinese calligraphy, the landscape painter Shitao's treatise on painting, and the tradition of scholar's rocks, several examples of which he now owns.  He has also been inspired by Chinese and Japanese gardens, with their capacity to distill "the energy of the landscape".  A recent canvas uses a shade of blue used in 11th century Chinese pottery, the "colour of sky after rain." It is a colour he may well glimpse here in wet and windy London: a bit of a shock after the Greek island of Hydra, where he has been spending time relaxing at his studio, sitting in the sun and reading Cavafy and Seferis.  He described to Serota another of his studios in upstate New York, at Tivoli, not far from Olana, the former home of Frederic Edwin Church.  Marden was unapologetic about his admiration for the Hudson River landscape, despite its familiar place in American art history: "going through Spring up there is so incredible you just have to make paintings of it."  He said "I love going out drawing in nature, although I don't draw trees and stuff".  Instead he uses trees and stuff: sticks dipped in ink which allow accidental marks and natural variations in the line.  Harder ones are best - it is, he said with a twinkle in the eye, a drag when your stick goes soft.

Some wine beside the white clouds

Landscape can be a solace to the exile, but it can be hard to contemplate the beauty of lakes and mountains without thinking of home, or the bitter circumstances and long journey that have led from there.  When the An Lu-shan rebellion broke out in 756, the poet Li Po travelled south to Kiukiang to escape the turmoil and fighting.  There he made an ill-fated decision to join Prince Lin, the Emperor's sixteenth son, whose flotilla was making its way down the Yangtze.  Instead of heading off to fight the rebels, Prince Lin was aiming to set up his own independent regime.  According to Arthur Waley (in The Poetry and Career of Li Po) it seems unlikely that the rather unworldly Li Po knew what the Prince intended - he would later claim to have been virtually kidnapped: "I allowed myself to be deceived by false pretences and was forced by threats to go on board a transport."  At the time though, he wrote poems like 'Watching the dancing-girls at a banquet on board Marshal Wei's transport; written while with the Fleet', indicating that he was thoroughly enjoying himself on this adventure.  This pleasant time came to an end near Yangchow, where Prince Lin's forces were met by government troops and his generals abandoned him - Li Po probably jumped ship as well at this point (the prince was captured and executed).  On his return to Kiukiang, Li Po was arrested as a traitor and imprisoned for several months.  After being set free he made his way to Wu-ch'ang, near Hankow, where he stayed for a while, hoping for a pardon, before continuing again, north, to Yo-chou, near the famous Tung-t'ing (Dong-ting) Lake.  There he met two friends, both exiles like himself.  Chia Chih was a writer (he had actually composed the Emperor's deed of abdication in 756) and former Governor of Ju-chou who had been demoted after being judged to have fled south from the rebels too hastily. Li Yeh was a relative of Li Po's, banished to the south after being charged with perverting the course of justice.  One day, the three friends decided to take an evening boating excursion on the lake...

Hermit Fisherman on Lake Dong-ting, Wu Zhen, 14th century

'The bright moon, the autumn wind / the waters of Lake Dong-ting, / a lone swan, the falling leaves, a tiny skiff.'  Thus Chia Chih conveys the beauty and the underlying sadness of the occasion.  In his Anthology of Chinese Literature Stephen Owen provides translations of the poems that resulted from this outing.  Li Po 'wrote a series of five of his most famous quatrains celebrating the beauty of the moment.'  But Chia Chih's are 'every bit as memorable.  Both poets called to mind echoes of exile and death beyond the edges of the vast lake, places like Chang-sha, where the Han intellectual Jia Yi was banished.' Li Po imagines riding the currents in the water up into the night sky and buying 'some wine / beside the white clouds.'  In the centre of the lake there is a mountain called Jun-shan (the source for one of China's ten famous teas) which Li Po pictures on a 'mirror of jade' - the 'bright lake, swept calm and clear.'  Chia Chih describes more turbulent waters, swollen with autumn floods.  The friends let the waves guide their light boat, 'no care whether near or far.'

So in eight short poems we have a record of an evening in the autumn of 759, a moment of reflection before events, like waves on the lake, swept these men up again.  Climbing Pa-ch'iu Shan that autumn, Li Po glimpsed another fleet mustering and wrote in one of his poems of the rebel forces approaching Lake Tung-t'ing.  It was only near the end of the year that peace was restored to the Yangtze region and the poet was finally able to leave, making for Wu-ch'ang where he again expressed his hopes of one day being given a posting back in the capital.  But by this time Li Po knew that any such post would be his last.  He fell ill while traveling to Nanking and in 762 made his final journey to see the great calligrapher, Li Yang-ping near T'ai-p'ing.  Meanwhile Chia Chih had also made his way back and, a year later, on the accession of Emperor Tai-tsung, regained his former position, going on to serve as Vice Minister of War before his death in 772.  Li Po seems to have died at the home of Li Yang-ping, to whom the poet entrusted what writings he still had after his years of wandering in exile.  According to the well known story, he took another nighttime boat excursion, and this time, drunk on wine, fell into the river and drowned whilst trying to embrace the reflection of the moon.

Note: As always the sources vary in spelling Chinese words and here I've generally stuck to the older Wade-Giles system - for me the poet will always be Li Po rather than Li Bai.  The pinyin version of Chia Chih is Jia Zhi.  As noted above, Lake Tung-t'ing is now generally called Lake Dong-ting.

Iceberg in Mist

Between 1968 and 1970 Gerhard Richter painted a remarkable range of 'damaged landscapes', as they are termed by Mark Godfrey, the curator of Tate Modern's Gerhard Richter: Panorama. These include aerial views of cities in thick grey paint, the colour of ash and rubble, that Richter later likened to images of the destruction of Dresden but which might equally be seen as warnings of some future apocalypse.  One of these, Townscape Paris (1968), is a painting I referred to rather tentatively in one of my very first blog posts here.  At the same time Richter was also painting a very different kind of townscape, reproducing details of architectural models, and these too seem dystopian - windowless blocks showing no sign of life, casting shadows over empty white roads that resemble the patterns on a circuit board.
 

Another monochrome aerial view from 1968, Clouds, provides glimpses of an abstracted version of the German countryside - imagery that Godfrey compares to the opening sequence (above) of Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will (1935). Two years later Richter began a very different series of cloud paintings, this time treating them as isolated objects, white against featureless blue-green skies.  They resemble Alfred Stieglitz's famous cloud photographs, Equivalents (1927), which in turn (as Rosalind Krauss points out in that weighty tome Art Since 1900) could be viewed as Duchampian readymades - uncomposed and detached from their environment.  Alps II (1968) might be a close-up of a storm cloud and is barely recognisable as a landscape painting, certainly a long way from the heroic image of German mountains celebrated in those early Reifenstahl films.

Seascape (Sea-Sea) (1970) is described in the exhibition as a 'collage of two photographs of the sea, one inverted to appear as the sky. The painting creates a momentary illusion of a coherent seascape, until it becomes clear that the ‘clouds’ in the upper half of the painting are waves. It creates a sense of discontinuity and suggests Richter’s acknowledgement of the gulf separating him from the moment of Romanticism.' It made me think of Rothko's grey paintings, with the patterns of waves replacing Rothko's brushtrokes.  Mark Godfrey views them as a cross between Capar David Friedrich and Blinky Palermo: an attempt at the kind of radical abstract statement Palermo was making in his Cloth Paintings using the traditional medium of a seascape.  Another point of comparison is Vija Celmins and, like her, Richter also produced images of black and white fields of stars.

In 1971 an exhibition of Richter's recent work, painted in flat colour rather than black and white, prompted various critics to compare him with Friedrich.  Landscape near Hubbelrath (1969), for example, shows an empty view with a road sign where we expect to see, in Friedrich, a church spire.  Richter said that his art lacked the spiritual underpinnings of Romanticism: 'for us, everything is empty'.  However, Mark Godfrey argues that Richter and Friedrich both aimed to create a sense of unfulfilled desire (readers of this blog may recall an earlier post on the way Friedrich composed 'obstructed views').  This approach may have seemed particularly appropriate to a post-war German artist working at a time when the purpose of painting itself was being called into question.

There is one more interesting example of Richter's engagement with Friedrich later in the exhibition, a painting called Iceberg in Mist (1982).  I have mentioned various artists here before who went north to paint the Arctic seas -  Peder Balke, Lawren Harris, Per Kirkeby - and Richter made his own trip in 1972, looking for a motif as powerful as Friedrich's The Sea of Ice.   Mark Godfrey mentions that on his return Richter made 'an extraordinary and little-known book of black and white photographs of icebergs', printed, like the two halves of Seascape (Sea-Sea), both upside down and right side up.  In this way Richter rejected the single sublime image and arranged the photographs in such a way that 'their overt subject became more or less irrelevant.'  Richter's urge to thwart our desire for spectacular landscapes is also evident in the later painting, where we cannot even glimpse the tip of the iceberg as the whole view is shrouded in mist.

Caspar David Friedrich, The Sea of Ice, 1823-4

Cloud and light

Toshio Hosokawa's new opera Matsukaze, based on a Noh play by Zeami, has received a lot of praise this year.  The New York Times review explains that it begins with some field recordings: 'the tranquil sound of waves washing up on a beach, which he recorded off the coast near Tokyo in January. Two months later, when the cast assembled in Berlin to begin preparing for the opera’s premiere in Brussels, the waves had acquired an entirely different significance. “We heard those water and wind sounds, and we remembered at once the tsunami...”' 

Last month ECM issued a new set of Hosokawa recordings, Landscapes.  Despite the title this only includes one of his early 90s 'Landscape' chamber pieces (some of which are currently viewable on Youtube - see below).  It features a new expanded version of  'Landscape V' for shô and string orchestra; the other tracks are 'Sakura für Otto Tomek', 'Cloud and Light', and 'Ceremonial Dance'.  The Independent's Andy Gill pronounces the album 'exquisite' but The Guardian's Andrew Clements thinks it 'exquisite in a self-conscious way ... for a few minutes the effect is entrancing, but after that it begins to pall'.  In his liner notes Paul Griffiths says 'The interplay of shô and strings, and in particular their mutual imitation, is the driving force – or perhaps one should say ‘drifting force’, given that the music carries itself so lightly ...  its effect is of observing clouds in a largely peaceful sky, clouds that are mostly white but occasionally show shadows and briefly stir into more turbulent action.”

Rome must be like the clouds

A reference to one of Joseph von Eichendorff's poems in that last post reminds me that I've not previously mentioned here one of my favourite Romantic Novellen, his 'Life of a Good-for-Nothing' (1826).  Its guileless hero makes his way to Italy... 'Eventually, when I had covered quite a distance, I gathered that I was only a few miles from Rome. This filled me with joy, for when I was a child at home I had heard many wonderful stories of the splendour of this city. As I lay on the grass outside the mill on Sunday afternoons and everything around was so quiet, I used to think that Rome must be like the clouds moving above me, with wonderful mountains and ravines going down to the blue sea, and golden gates, and tall gleaming towers on which the golden-robed angels were singing. Night had fallen long since, and the moon was shining brightly when I finally came out of the wood onto a hilltop and suddenly saw the city in the distance. The sea was glimmering far off, the immeasurable heavens were twinkling and sparkling with their countless stars, and below them lay the Holy City, of which only a long strip of mist was visible, like a sleeping lion on the quiet earth, while the hills stood round like dark giants watching over it.' (trans. F.G. Nichols)

He walks on over 'a wide, lonely heath' and on to the city where 'the tall palaces and gates and the golden cupolas gleamed in the bright moonlight.'  We have entered a Rome of the northern imagination here, with the same appeal as that dream image of 'Amerika' in Kafka's novel (which I quoted from here in an earlier post). Eichendorff's hero goes 'past a few small houses and then through a magnificent gate into the renowned city of Rome. The moon shone between the palaces and down into the streets as though it were broad daylight, but the streets were all deserted except for the occasional ragged fellow lying in a marble doorway in the warm night and sleeping like the dead. The fountains were plashing in the silent squares, and the gardens along the street were rustling and filling the air with refreshing scents.'  In Rome he encounters a painter and visits his studio in the attic of an old house, where we are given one of those images of the Romantic artist at the window I described yesterday. 'The painter flung the window open, so that the fresh morning air swirled through the whole room. There was a marvellous outlook over the city and towards the mountains, with the early sun shining on the white villas and vineyards. "Here's to our cool green Germany beyond those mountains!" cried the painter, drinking from the bottle he then passed to me. I responded to him politely and in my heart I thought again and again of my beautiful distant home.'

The Morning Glory

If I hadn't been so busy at work I might have tried to get to the Aubin & Wills Literary Salon this evening, where Travis Elborough was talking about his seaside book Wish You Were Here and Gavin Pretor-Pinney was due to discuss The Wavewatchers' Companion. Never mind - I was actually at the seaside watching the waves last week, and although I've not yet got round to either of these books, I did have Gavin Pretor-Pinney's earlier bestseller The Cloudspotter's Guide with me.  You can read various reviews and articles online that tell the story of The Cloud Appreciation Society, which Pretor-Pinney founded in 2004, and the writing and design of The Cloudspotter's Guide, rejected by 28 publishers before becoming a runaway bestseller.  The book is not a cultural history, although there are references to clouds in the work of Mantegna and Correggio, Kalidasa and Thoreau.  Keen not to be seen as too highbrow, the author describes himself wondering through the Tate's American Sublime exhibition with the catalogue upside down (his point being that the skyscapes in Bierstadt and Church are as important as the landscapes).  His sense of humour did grow on me - it is hard to resist the comparison of strato-cumulus, 'always in transition', with 'the pop singer Cher at the height of her costume-changing stage routines'.  One species of this cloud, the Morning Glory, is likened to Cher 'in the brass armour bikini and gold Viking helmet she wore on the sleeve of her 1979 album Take Me Home'.  This is a long way from Hubert Damisch and A Theory of /Cloud/, I thought, as I read this, but then Damisch was interested in the painted signifier, Pretor-Pinney in explaining and celebrating the real thing.

Altocumulus stratiformus translucidus I believe
(but feel free to correct me if I've got it wrong...)

The Cloudspotter's Guide includes a brief description of the Cloud Harp, an instrument designed by Nicolas Reeves that responds to the shape of the clouds above it (see video clip below), and in the chapter on stratus there is an account of the Blur Building, designed by Liz Diller and Ric Scofidio for the 2002 Swiss Expo, which took the form of a cloud floating on the surface of Lake Neuchâtel.  The design for this consisted of a metal skeleton covered with 31,400 high-pressure water jets controlled by computer which took account of temperature, humidity and prevailing winds.  'By responding dynamically to the constant changing atmospheric conditions, the system ensured there was always enough fog to envelop the structure, but not so much as to cause a nuisance downwind.'  Artificial clouds and the manipulation of weather for military ends are the depressing subject of the book's penultimate chapter.  A 1996 report for the US government, Weather as a Force Multiplier: Owning the Weather in 2025, describes a future in which an enemy can be hit with fog, rain, storms and lightning, and where clouds are controlled through nanotechnology and are able to communicate with each other.  After this it is a relief to turn to the final chapter, where Gavin Pretor-Pinney travels to a small town near the Gulf of Carpentaria in search of the Morning Glory (the cloud he likened to Cher in her brass bikini).  There he meets the glider pilots who surf this magnificent roll of cloud as it heads inland, and is taken up himself to see the morning sun cascading 'down the cloud's face, casting long shadows along the ripples of its surface.  The undulations gently rose up with the progress of the wave, before disappearing over the crest.'

The Cloud Harp

The bracing glories of our clouds

I have enjoyed reading Romantic Moderns, which has much to say about the revival of interest in the English landscape before and during the war.  Alexandra Harris acknowledges her debt to Kitty Hauser, whose Shadow Sites: Photography, Archaeology and the British Landscape, 1927-1955 begins with a discussion of the 'topophilia' characteristic of writers and artists in this period.  In 1947 Auden defined this topophilia as having 'little in common with nature love.  Wild or unhumanized nature holds no charms for the average topophil because it is lacking in history' (cf. Sebald vs. Mabey in my recent 'After Nature' post).  What unites 'topophils', Hauser writes, 'is an interest, sometimes amounting to an obsession, with local landscapes marked by time, places where the past is tangible.  For some, such as Betjeman, John Piper and Geoffrey Grigson, this topophilia - as Auden suggests - is eclectic, including medieval churches, Gothic and mock Gothic architecture, Regency terraces and ancient sites.  Some topophils of this generation, such as Paul Nash with his fascination with the genius loci, made atmospheric prehistoric landscapes a particular focus. Others, like painter Graham Sutherland, were attracted to scarred nature and geological vistas.  In the Four Quartets, T. S. Eliot looked for redemption and history in an English village: 'History is now and England'.  And with an eye to continental Surrealism, photographers and film makers including Bill Brandt, Humphrey Jennings, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger found in pockets of the British landscape curious and moody survivals from the past.' 

All of these writers and artists feature in Romantic Moderns, along with others less directly concerned with landscape but whose work looked nostalgically at a fast vanishing world of country houses and village traditions.  The Bright Young Things, for example - Evelyn Waugh, Cecil Beaton, Rex Whistler, the Sitwells -  whose work has never appealed much to me, are discussed alongside Eric Ravilious and Edward Bawden in an interesting chapter on the 1930s Georgian Revival.  Kathryn Hughes in The Guardian, praises the book's 'tactful generosity towards people and places, sights and sounds, that have tended to get written off as embarrassing or just plain wrong. Never has this seemed more important than now, as we work through our own complicated millennial feelings about the romance of the past. Thanks to Harris it no longer seems entirely shaming to admit to a secret Cath Kidston habit. Taking tea in the stable block of a National Trust property becomes a dignified activity, rather than something to pretend to find a chore.'

I'm no stranger to National Trust tea shops but have always been constrained in where I could go by not owning a car.  Motorists of the 1930s were encouraged to discover the landscape of Britian by the posters for Shell-Mex designed by artists like Vanessa Bell, Graham Sutherland and Frank Dobson (whose depiction of the Cerne Abbas giant is reproduced in Romantic Moderns - the giant's most famous feature is obscured by the shadow of a strategically placed cloud).  In 1934 Cyril Connolly titled his review of an exhibition of Shell-Mex commissioned artwork 'The New Medici'.  He observed that it was 'not the awe-inspiring or exceptional which now seems important, but what is most cheerful and genuine in our countryside - England is merry again - farewell romantic caves and peaks, welcome the bracing glories of our clouds, the cirrus and the cumulus, the cold pastoral of the chalk.'  The Shell County Guides that John Betjamen commissioned also looked beyond the obvious - a fact typified by John Piper's Oxon which deliberately excluded the city of Oxford.  As Alexandra Harris says, 'Piper's Oxfordshire is not a land of touristic sensation.  Old England is allowed to be almost a modern lived-in country.  A photograph of clustered advertisements which would have troubled purist preservationists is captioned 'a tree of knowledge', and an oval photograph with faded edges evokes nostalgia only to affront it with a big sign advertising a 'super cinema.''  It almost sounds like a journey through Oxfordshire's edgelands, prompting the thought that we could have a new series of county guides for the psychogeographically inclined pedestrian, written by Iain Sinclair, Rachel Lichtenstein, Patrick Keiller and so on.

Romantic Moderns won the Guardian First Book Award and Alexandra Harris can be seen talking about it on the Guardian website.  Thames and Hudson have now signed her up for two more books - a short biography of Virginia Woolf and another one, The Weather Glass, which I am looking forward to as it will apparently 'explore the British preoccupation with the weather, from Beowulf onwards'.  In Romantic Moderns these interests come together in a chapter called 'The Weather Forecast', where there is a discussion of Woolf's unfinished history of literature, 'Reading at Random'.  She makes this sound fascinating: it was to be a book 'shaped by views from windows and stretches of country ... a passionate exercise in literary geography.'  Harris argues that the twentieth century threatened to alienate people from the weather, as Modernist art looked beyond the incidentals of atmosphere to uncover clear cut shapes and colours.  She contrasts this with the rain-filled lithographs of her book's other main protagonist, John Piper (of whose drawings of Windsor George VI said, "You seem to have very bad luck with your weather, Mr. Piper").  Working outside, Piper 'loved the odd splashes that arrived unexpectedly in his paintings.'  These blots have the effect of confirming 'the allegiance between art and the world beyond the painting.  And, like the sand found in a half-read book, they are the souvenirs of a time and place, nature's signature added next to that of the artist.'

A snowfall on the Esquiline Hill

Masolino, The Foundation of Santa Maria Maggiore, c1427-8

Source: Wikimedia Commons

The snow has been melting here and the passage of days has left Kline-like compositions on the ground mapping the departure of vehicles, the clearing of paths and the making of snowmen.  Looking out of the window now it is not clear why certain patches of snow remain, as if they have some special significance. Masolino's central panel for the Santa Maria Maggiore Polyptich shows Pope Liberius marking out the site of the future church after a miraculous summer snowfall on August 5th 352.  The snow had been predicted in a dream shared by the Pope and a rich Roman couple who wanted to donate their wealth to a worthy cause.  In Masolino's painting, snow floats through the golden sky beneath a fleet of clouds that resemble UFOs.  From the largest of them Christ and Mary look down and snowflakes fall more thickly on the place where the new building will rise, a permanent legacy of this fleeting phenomenon.  Later depictions of the legend by artists like Grünewald and Murillo treat the subject more naturalistically and less interestingly.  Today the miracle of the snow is recreated in Santa Maria Maggiore and other churches every year with a shower of flower petals.