Why did I write Eileen McHugh, a life remade?

I wanted to explore several strands, the first and most important being the interrelationship between popular and populist, understanding the latter term in its colloquial sense of wanting to achieve popularity, possibly at all costs. I have long found it intriguing why pop music, for instance, is assumed to refer to ‘popular’ music when something over ninety per cent of releases never achieve popularity on any measure. Probably more than ninety per cent of pop is also not from Tajikistan, but we do not call it Tajik music. Thus labelling things by what they are not could be an infinite process! If pop means populist, however, then it makes sense, because this art form seeks, by whatever means, to achieve public notice, sales, profit and the rest, with the stress on the words ‘aspires to achieve’, hence the failure of ninety per cent of the genre. This often leads to an artist compromising an idea to render it saleable. But if an artist does not do that, the work remains unknown, anonymous, unexperienced. How much should an artist in whatever form seek to live within the confines of recognisable genre? And is that possible without compromising what the artist wants to communicate? How far can one go along this road before reproducing cliché?

Eileen McHugh is an artist. She is a sculptor. She seeks no avenues of compromise in her work. Her career was short and unnoticed. Paradoxically, one of her works has achieved viral status on the internet via a photograph posted in the name of Mary Reynolds, who now wants to create a biography of the artist and a discussion of her work so that she can create a museum to display it. She has contacted Eileen’s mother and has the artist’s sketchbooks and notes.

Eileen wanted to tell stories in her work, stories that arose out of the detritus of people’s lives, their bits and pieces of discarded trash. Her work at one stage is described as ‘off the wall’ as well as on it. The form of the book, however, repeatedly illustrates how lives themselves mirror this state. The lives of people who knew the artist become like new works created by Eileen, assemblages of life’s discarded bits and pieces.

Another strand was the obsession that drives artistic expression, if the motivations of populism and profit do not apply. Why exactly did Schubert write over six hundred songs when he never heard a single one of them performed before a paying audience? What motivated the composer Mieczeslaw Wenberg to ‘write for the shelf’? What drove a deaf Beethoven to communicate via sound?

And why is it that we often feel challenged by art? Is it because we have no idea what we like, and prefer to live in the security of liking what we know? Is it because we only trust things with which we have an assumed commercial relationship, so therefore we trust the transactions being offered?

Paradoxically, by the end of Eileen McHugh, the artist herself is perhaps the person we know the least, despite having been the subject of the whole book! If we do not see people as assemblages of their petty likes and dislikes, any of which might change on whim, what is left? Perhaps it remains as anonymous and unknown as ignored work. Our real contribution to humanity, however, artistically or otherwise, is eventually revealed as that which we give to others. Even tragedy can have a positive outcome.

Free on Kindle - A Text-Book on the History of Painting by John Charles Van Dyke

A Text-Book on the History of Painting by John Charles Van Dyke was published a century ago. Today it offers the modern reader not only potted, period critiques of important artists, but also a remarkable insight into how aesthetics change from generation to generation. John Charles Van Dyke’s assessments of some work will surprise today’s reader, especially his attitudes towards some contemporary artists who received rather hostile reactions from some quarters when their work was first exhibited.

The book deals with the European tradition. It makes no excuses for this. At the time, non-European art was perhaps less well known in Western critical circles. Perhaps also, it was regarded as somehow inferior, perhaps also merely because it was not European in origin. But Van Dyke does offer us a working distinction that excludes most non-European art from his survey, that of the difference between observation and expression. Only that which aims at expression, for van Dyke at least, is worthy of the label “art”. Somehow ancient Egyptian art makes it into the oeuvre, probably because it was also represented in museums that were close at hand and accessible.

Two painters in particular illustrate the difference in treatment between van Dyke’s age and our own, El Greco and Alma-Tadema. El Greco is hardly mentioned as a figure in sixteenth century Spain, his achievements apparently being regarded as rather localised on Toledo. Thus a figure now regarded as a unique stylist and visionary hardly figures in this text. Alma-Tadema, whose academicism and detail might today offer summary and epitome of the staid Victorian England that toyed euphemistically with the erotic is also dismissed. And one of the few English painters to be raised to the peerage, Frederick Leighton, also did not impress Professor Van Dyke. Neither, it seems, did Albrecht Durer.

Central to Van Dyke’s aesthetic is a judgment as to whether the painter not only represents, interprets and expresses, but also constructs a painting. Mere reality is never enough, it seems, life requiring the skill of an editor or architect to render its experience communicable. It is interesting to reflect on how much or little we still value this aspect of aesthetics in today’s painting.

Some of Van Dyke’s observations will at least entertain. Franz Hals, we learn, lived a rather careless life. William Blake was hardly a painter at all. A Dutchman is attributed with the faint praise of being a unique painter of poultry. Matthew Maris is criticised for being a recorder of visions and dreams rather than the substantial things of earth, while Turner is dismissed as bizarre and extravagant, qualities that today might enhance rather than diminish his reputation.

But Van Dyke’s book remains an interesting, informative and rewarding read, despite its distance from contemporary thinking. He is especially strong in his summary descriptions of the different Italian schools of the late Gothic and Renaissance eras. It is more than useful to be reminded of how independent these city states were at the time and how little they managed to influence one another. A Text-Book on the History of Painting by John Charles Van Dyke remains, then, an essential read for anyone interested in the history of art. Much has changed, but then there is much that has not.

My own latest book is One One One, a romantic espionage thriller set on an island in the South China Sea

A Text-Book on the History of Painting by John Charles Van Dyke

A Text-Book on the History of Painting by John Charles Van Dyke was published a century ago. Today it offers the modern reader not only potted, period critiques of important artists, but also a remarkable insight into how aesthetics change from generation to generation. John Charles Van Dyke’s assessments of some work will surprise today’s reader, especially his attitudes towards some contemporary artists who received rather hostile reactions from some quarters when their work was first exhibited.

The book deals with the European tradition. It makes no excuses for this. At the time, non-European art was perhaps less well known in Western critical circles. Perhaps also, it was regarded as somehow inferior, perhaps also merely because it was not European in origin. But Van Dyke does offer us a working distinction that excludes most non-European art from his survey, that of the difference between observation and expression. Only that which aims at expression, for van Dyke at least, is worthy of the label “art”. Somehow ancient Egyptian art makes it into the oeuvre, probably because it was also represented in museums that were close at hand and accessible.

Two painters in particular illustrate the difference in treatment between van Dyke’s age and our own, El Greco and Alma-Tadema. El Greco is hardly mentioned as a figure in sixteenth century Spain, his achievements apparently being regarded as rather localised on Toledo. Thus a figure now regarded as a unique stylist and visionary hardly figures in this text. Alma-Tadema, whose academicism and detail might today offer summary and epitome of the staid Victorian England that toyed euphemistically with the erotic is also dismissed. And one of the few English painters to be raised to the peerage, Frederick Leighton, also did not impress Professor Van Dyke. Neither, it seems, did Albrecht Durer.

Central to Van Dyke’s aesthetic is a judgment as to whether the painter not only represents, interprets and expresses, but also constructs a painting. Mere reality is never enough, it seems, life requiring the skill of an editor or architect to render its experience communicable. It is interesting to reflect on how much or little we still value this aspect of aesthetics in today’s painting.

Some of Van Dyke’s observations will at least entertain. Franz Hals, we learn, lived a rather careless life. William Blake was hardly a painter at all. A Dutchman is attributed with the faint praise of being a unique painter of poultry. Matthew Maris is criticised for being a recorder of visions and dreams rather than the substantial things of earth, while Turner is dismissed as bizarre and extravagant, qualities that today might enhance rather than diminish his reputation.

But Van Dyke’s book remains an interesting, informative and rewarding read, despite its distance from contemporary thinking. He is especially strong in his summary descriptions of the different Italian schools of the late Gothic and Renaissance eras. It is more than useful to be reminded of how independent these city states were at the time and how little they managed to influence one another. A Text-Book on the History of Painting by John Charles Van Dyke remains, then, an essential read for anyone interested in the history of art. Much has changed, but then there is much that has not.

Arte Español Para Extranjeros by Ricardo Abrantes, Araceli Fernández, Santiago Manzarbeitia

Arte Español Para Extranjeros by Ricardo Abrantes, Araceli Fernández, Santiago Manzarbeitia is a superb idea, an excellent read and a perfect way of practising the language. The book charts chronologically the eras and styles of Spanish art. It starts with the pre-historical and archaeological, travels via the Iberian period, the Romans and the Visigoths, to the centuries of Islamic art and the Romanesque. By the time we have reached Gothic art, we almost feel we have come up to date. The Renaissance was not as big an issue in Spain as elsewhere in Europe, but the Baroque flowered and led into what the authors call the modern era. Goya is presented quite convincingly almost as a Beethoven of painting, in other words a figure from whose work almost two hundred years of future development can be traced. Picasso, Dali and Miró bring us into the contemporary era and the book’s final pages present abstract expressionism and works of Chillada.

The Spanish text is immediately accessible. The descriptions are succinct and clearly written. Technical terms are included in a useful glossary whose definitions could not be more accessible or better written. Though there are copious illustrations, this is no mere picture book. The examples have been included to illustrate the text and they carry out the task admirably, thus offering quite remarkable clarity to the excellent descriptions of style, technique and content.

What is so intriguing about Spanish art, the fact that separates it from the rest of Europe, is the Islamic period. Artistic and literary achievements in particular during those centuries have continued to influence both Spain’s cultural life and its language. No other European country has this complexity. Too often, however, the Islamic period is presented as something separate, something overcome and wholly in the past. This is not so in Arte Español Para Extranjeros. Not only via references to mozarabe and mudejar, but also by noting how stylistic elements were adopted by Islamic, Christian and Jewish artists and architects, the authors manage to present a portrait of Spanish art that represents a real synthesis. A visit to the National Museum of Catalan Art (MNAC) in Barcelona would point out how the resplendent Gothic period of religious painting in Spain owes much to contact with northern Europe, Flanders in particular, and little to Italian influence.

In Arte Español Para Extranjeros the text presents this relationship with great clarity and also adequately describes the political and trading context that led to these influences prevailing above those from the geographically closer Mediterranean areas. Non-native Spanish speakers who have even the remotest interest in the arts will find this book captivating and useful in two ways. First its very accessibility makes it a perfect vehicle for the language learner to improve reading skills and vocabulary. But on another level, the book’s ambitious project really does deliver clear, interesting and enlightening observations on style and influence. Arte Español Para Extranjeros was a very ambitious project that could so easily have failed to deliver. In the hands of its three authors, however, it has delivered an almost faultless success.

Sculpture by Vicente Pérez Gonsálvez at Klein-Schrueder

In an exhibition in Fundación Klein-Schreuder, sculptor Vicente Pérez Gonsálvez presents a series of works in marble. The materials, white, black and red marble, plus some alabaster, are all sourced from stone quarries in Novelda near the sculptor’s home in Alicante Province, Spain.

These works of Vicente Pérez Gonsálvez bring abstract forms to life. Perhaps it would be better to say that they render the inorganic organic. Smooth, highly finished surfaces invite touch, the glide of a hand, a skim of flat fingers, the gentle curves of their solid forms imitating the sensuous and voluptuous. The concave and convex meet in flowing ridges, clearly delineated but never sharp, junctions that create lines that meander across and through the shapes. These lines create rhythms that add life and even identity to abstraction that never wanders far from a summarised human form.

And between the lines are spaces, voids that run through the sculptures, or sometimes merely cavities whose very hollowness create an inner space that might itself be inhabited, might itself be alive. It is these spaces that create sensation and suggest vitality.

The titles are all simple, clear pointers as to where the viewer should start to interpret. There is Dove, Lesbos, Body. There is no attempt to place confusion or doubt about the artist’s motive here. These are living, organic shapes crystallized in a once living, now inorganic material. They thus become accommodating, inviting objects that invite us to be absorbed into their spaces, just like the organisms that created them.

Close inspection of the red marble of one piece in particular reveals several fossils highlighted within the design, amid the patterns of impurities that give the stone its character and pattern. Snails, ammonites and other animals that once inhabited the lake or sea where the marble formed are thus revealed. The remnants of their crystallized life thus become the surface sheen through which Vicente Pérez Gonsálvez offers his life-affirming forms. The result is both emotionally elegant and intellectually satisfying.

These sculptures by Vicente Pérez Gonsálvez are currently on show in Fundación Klein-Schreuder, Cami del Pinar 23, L’Alfas del Pi, Alicante, Spain. The exhibition is open on Sundays from 10am to 2pm.

Vermeer´s Hat by Timothy Brook

Vermeer’s Hat by Timothy Brook is not really about Vermeer, or hats, or art for that matter. It’s a book about globalization sixteenth century-style. Using elements from a few of the Dutchman’s paintings – plus some others from the period – the author identifies evidence of global trade, of the economic history of a century that saw the opening up of commerce on a scale the world had previously not known. And unlike the more academic studies of Wallerstein or Gunder Frank, Timothy Brook’s book is accessible even to the casual reader.

Its approach is highly original; its style is lucid and clear; its scholarship is nothing less than phenomenal. Early on in the text the author reminds us of the fundamental difference between the passing image and the narrative of art. ‘Paintings are not “taken”, like photographs;’ Timothy Brook writes, ‘they are “made”, carefully and deliberately and not to show an objective reality so much as to present a particular scenario.’ Objects in a painting are there for a reason. They are part of a narrative or comment that the artist chooses to relate, perhaps consciously. Our tasks as observers are partly to interpret as well as respond, as well as merely see. And make no mistake, the process is intellectual, not just aesthetic.

With an admirable eye for detail, Timothy Brook thus analyses seventeenth century paintings for evidence of international trade. But this is only a starting point for a truly global tour. A beaver hat, for instance, leads him to relate the story of how French expeditions into Canada sought pelts to feed demand for high fashion in Europe. It was the beaver’s fortune – or perhaps misfortune – to be born with a fur that, when transformed into felt, remained waterproof, and hence kept its shape in the rain. 

The consequences of this trade – apart from the obvious ones for the beavers – included conflicts with indigenous people, followed by subjugation and, in some cases, annihilation. A Chinese vase, a Turkish carpet and other artefacts around the house lead to the history of trade with the east and thus into how China developed into a manufacturing centre that sucked in Spanish colonial silver from South America to pay for its wares. A discussion of the galleon trade leads to Spain’s annexation of Manila and later the whole of the Philippines. In order to compete the Portuguese establish in Macau and the Dutch colonise the spiced islands.

What impresses the reader of Vermeer’s Hat is Timothy Brook’s skill – an artist’s skill, no less – in assembling potentially disparate scenes into an engaging and ultimately convincing narrative. Economic history thus becomes an engaging story that makes perfect sense. By the end of the century the British were also on the scene, having taken advantage of victories over the competition. We follow the spice trade, the spread of tobacco, trade in silk and ceramics and, of course, the lives of people who pursued and controlled the commerce. We learn how administrators and rulers reaped their own rewards, how illicit goods were smuggled in the same holds as declared cargoes. We see fortunes made and lost, ships sailed and sunk, reputations created and destroyed. And certainly we recognise the world as we know it, a modern world where only the technology is different. Vermeer’s Hat is a must for anyone who thinks that globalization might be a recent phenomenon.

Figurative Expression - The Art of Antoni Miro

It is certainly a considerable privilege to have the opportunity to visit the house and studio of an accomplished artist with an international reputation. When the visit is to Antoni Miró’s finca, in Ibi, near Alicante, Spain, then the experience is substantially more than mere privilege: it is nothing less than enlightening delight. Antoni Miró’s work is extensive and challenging, but it is also direct and immediately communicative. It has a fundamental humanity, its subject matter largely drawn from impressions experienced by the artist and not, primarily and crucially, within him. He may have internalised responses to his subjects, but via his art he wants to share those raw responses with his viewers, not to impose his views on them.

A phrase that he has used in relation to his work is “a chronicle of reality,” and it is the reality of our modern world, with all its complicated social, economic, political and personal relationships that inhabits his art. Antoni Miró was born in Alcoi in 1944. He confesses to an inner drive that demanded he became an artist, a compulsion that saw him reject a role in the family business in favour of a pursuit of his personal goal. His first solo exhibition came as early as 1965, the year when he founded the group Alcoiart, which functioned until 1972.

Throughout his career he has explored what he calls figurative expression as a tool to create visual communication. His art is thus immediate, never quite photo-realistic, since it liberally employs artistic licence of light, shade, focus and colour to highlight the core of a work. But the images are direct, often drawn from everyday experience and they are presented to evoke and provoke reaction in the viewer. Beggars in the street figure regularly, often alongside the portrayed reactions offered by those they confront.

Everyday objects abound – taxis, excavators, ships, bicycles, buildings and industrial scenes. Beside a multitude of passers-by, anonymous people encountered for just seconds in a day’s encounters, there are also portraits of well-known characters, historical figures, politicians, scientists, philosophers and many fellow artists. And there is also the figurative reworking of familiar themes, such as reinterpretations of Velasquez, which appear frequently in his work. A particular theme which recurs many times in Antoni Miró’s work, however, is the process of looking at images. It’s almost a process of self-analysis.

There are many gallery scenes, where onlookers, some interested, some less so, scrutinise, discuss, ignore, glance at or walk by well-known artworks. The Famous Giaconda looks out at us while the assembled unknown onlookers are potentially all identifiable, with names, families and lives of their own. The lady in the picture is immortalised by time, but is anonymous, despite being instantly recognisable. She can’t tell us about herself, whereas all the anonymous onlookers are real individuals destined to remain unknown. There are also responses to issues in Antoni Miró’s work. His burka polyptich is reminiscent of Andy Warhol. But whereas the subjects of Warhol’s coloured variants were iconic and instantly recognisable, the women in the burkas remain hidden from view, eternally unknown by choice.

There is New York City portrayed as a graveyard, the obelisks presenting a necropolis of a culture, perhaps. A trip through the grounds of Antoni’s Ibi finca – perhaps by Land Rover, on a wet afternoon! – reveals an extensive sculpture garden. There are many works in a multiplicity of media. Again much is drawn from everyday life, using everyday materials, objects and images. There is a striking series exploring the erotic. It is, after all, part of life and experience, so it forms an essential part of Antoni Miró’s art. Antoni Miró explains how dictatorship in Spain stifled freedom. It was an era when he fought for the voice of the individual.

The current era, where the market and capital are the new dictators, presents its own issues. In some ways, it was easier to cope with the more obvious contradictions of the past. Today’s oppression is more nebulous, but real all the same. He has thus used his art to campaign on behalf of social justice. He advocates a socialist, anti-capitalist stance where environmental, social and political themes dominate, alongside the essential ingredient for him, which is Catalan identity. His art involves the viewer as it searches for a more fully human world.

Its neo-figurative technique is direct, making its subjects both instantly recognisable and communicable. Its inspiration is the stuff of life, itself, in whatever manifestation that might appear. But in order to recognise, in order to understand, in order to react, any of us has first to be able to see, to observe and to notice. Antoni Miró’s art is primarily about learning to see, to look and then to realise our relation with life, our own lives, and those of others with whom we interact, with whom we share experience, but rarely know.

Beyond the Schoolboy Fringe - Untold Stories by Alan Bennett

Untold Stories by Alan Bennett is something of a pot pourri. It starts with an autobiographical exploration of social and family origins, and then moves on to include occasional pieces on travel, architecture and art, copious diaries from 1996 to 2004, reflections on previous and current work and essays on contemporaries, educational experience and culture. The fact that it all hangs together beautifully is a result of its author’s consummate skills, both linguistic and perceptive.

Untold Stories takes its title from the autobiographical sketch that opens the book. Alan Bennett was the physically late-developing child of a family in the Armley district of Leeds, a northern English industrial city. His father was a butcher who owned two suits, both of which smelled of raw meat. His mother was the supporting pillar of the household, but was also prone to bouts of depression. As a child, Alan Bennett seemed to dream less than most. Perhaps he is still less than able to admit the breadth of his flights of fancy.

“With a writer the life you don’t have is as ample a country as the life you do and is sometimes easier to access.” This sounds remarkably like e e cummings, a character that would not usually be linked with someone as apparently domesticated as Alan Bennett. But reading all of Untold Stories, the reader is repeatedly struck by how much of the eventual content of Alan Bennett’s perceptive, witty and perspicacious writings has its origins within the four walls of the family home. Many of the values, assumptions, attitudes and standpoints, whose apparently unquestioning adoption by his fictional characters lead the listener to question them, arose from a wider family that feverishly tried to be mundane but, like all families, never achieved that goal. The family was, after all, made up of individuals, each of which had his or her own reality alongside unresolved and often shared misgivings. 

Thus, immediately, a writer has several lifetimes of real and imagined material. Alan Bennett, perhaps by virtue of having at least potentially crossed some of the chasms of social class that so profoundly divide British society, seems able to comment, often with no more than an occasional word or phrase, on those tentative but agreed assumptions that make us what we are. “Minor writers often convey a more intense flavour of their times than those whose range is broader and concerns more profound.”

But this, despite the authenticity of his flavours, is no minor writer. Not for a moment would anyone wish this writer’s passing, but there is no doubt that Alan Bennett’s work will live on, probably grow in stature as its ability to comment on the changing Britain of the twentieth century develops a sharper focus.

Essentially Alan Bennett comes across as a conservative type. He dresses and even looks like a 1950s schoolboy, visits churches to describe architectural details of selected tombs in Betjemanesque prose, probably doesn’t indulge in fusion cooking, shuns recognition, inhabits the inner city but is perhaps never quite at home there. But then there’s the anti-establishment side, the satirist, the overt homosexuality and general anti-bigwig mentality. 

And all of this from a First at Oxford. “But taste is no help to a writer. Taste is timorous, conservative and fearful. It is a handicap. Olivier was unhampered by taste and was often vulgar. Dickens similarly. Both could fail, and failure is a sort of vulgarity, but it’s better than a timorous toeing of the line.” Untold Stories is a long read, but one which offers a simple yet sophisticated joy from beginning to end. Alan Bennett revisits topics he has written about in the past. Miss Shepherd, The Lady In The Van is here, as are his early plays and Beyond The Fringe. So are Talking Heads and The History Boys. But throughout he selects and applies language with much wit and humour to offer apparently ephemeral perspectives on everyday life, perspectives that on reflection are anything but shallow. He is a man of taste, as revealed by his regular revulsion with Classic FM, but he is also an enigma because he keeps listening to it.

Of Wit and Tragedy - Sculptures by Hanna Gerlind Glauner in Alfaz del Pi

Sculpture is capable of presenting itself in a highly conceptualised manner. Shapes can be featured purely as themselves, as forms that require us to interpret, associate and eventually explain so that we might make sense or perhaps no sense of them. At the opposite end of the spectrum, sculpture can also be utterly representational, more so than in painting, since an object’s third dimension can be real, rather than realised. Occasionally a sculptor can entangle and combine these extremes and thus play with observers’ intellect as well as their vision. When the process also involved wit and invention, the mix can become compelling. Such is the experience presented by the work of Hanna Gerlind Glauner, on show until October 30 2011 in the Klein-Schreuder Sculpture Garden, Alfaz del Pi.

Hanna presents objets trouvés, bits of metal rescued from scrap yards in Spain and Germany. Dismantled, inverted or reassembled tools form the bulk of these objects, but there are carding combs, scissors, jump-lead clips and stocky marine nails as well. What is remarkable is Hanna’s vision in assembling them to form provocative, funny, tragic, moving images.

Rumpelstiltskin is dancing so hard he is coming apart. Crusaders approaching Jerusalem is close to a cartoon. A young couple out for a walk has the father pushing the pram. There is a bishop with acolytes almost hiding in his robes.

But then there’s boat people, a row of round-head clips counting themselves along the length of piece of iron that would sink. Meanwhile, four dividers stand legs apart and align their adjusters to mimic the raised rifles of Goya´s Third of May 1808.

The inventor of the wheel presents his concept. He is tall and one-legged, and so needs the wheel. A young girl is tall and elegant. Another carries water in Africa.

Thus Hanna Gerlind Glauner´s beautiful objects both amuse and provoke. Her observations possess both beauty and poise in their solidified imagination. Her exhibition in the Klein-Schreuder Sculpture Garden, Alfaz del Pi should not be missed. Full details are at http://www.klein-schreuder.com/index.htm.

Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel An Artist Of The Floating World

Superficially, Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel An Artist Of The Floating World seems to present a gentle observation of manners. There’s a daughter to marry and thus associated contracts to be nurtured and negotiated. There’s a relationship with an eight-year-old grandson who in the late 1940s is growing up with American cartoons and comic book heroes as his cultural icons. And, above all, there’s the artist himself, bound up with concerns of style and expression, keen to re-examine his influences, especially those arising in the floating world.

His teacher had been instrumental in focusing his tutees on this floating world which could be found in the city’s night-time entertainment district. The artist of this world of pleasure, Masuji Ono, learned well from his master and adopted much from his style, technique and philosophy of Japanese painting.

But Ono was not satisfied to portray the floating world’s beauty for its own sake, or mere pleasure to evoke delight or diversion. No, he had other ideas, such as comment, loyalty, justice, pride, amongst others. And it is because of the direction of Masuji Ono’s developing inspiration that provides the book with its sinister, even violent thread.

An Artist Of The Floating World is set in post-war Japan. There is cleaning up and reconstruction to be done. There is much rebuilding, and not a little reconstruction, much of it not merely physical, but also cultural. A victor’s imposed norms are changing Japan’s future, perhaps to the relief of many who cannot live with their own country’s past. Masuji Ono finds himself at the centre of this transformation because of his previous success as an artist. But, as he continues to seek a future husband for his younger daughter, his personal achievements apparently divide his acquaintances, pupils and even friends into distinct camps, those for, even reluctantly, and those definitely against.

The novel seems to inhabit similar territory to Orhan Pamuk’s later book, My Name Is Red. There is a debate about culture, heritage and identity at the heart of an apparently rather narrow discussion of aesthetics and artistic influence. While Pamuk’s characters inhabit the cut-throat world of the Ottoman court, Masuji Ono lives in a country defeated in war and ravaged by it. The desire to break with the past brings as much tension to Ono as the desire to retain it does in Red. But the style employed in An Artist Of The Floating World is deceivingly gentle and belies the deep tension and conflict at its heart. Kazuo Isiguro’s prose is always silky smooth, so much so that An Artist Of The Floating World seems like a short, even simple book. Luckily for the reader it is neither.

Antonio Mari on show at the Sculpture Garden in Alfas del Pi

Sometimes, perhaps rarely, people have a vision. They not only see, they see through or beyond, allowing them to appreciate, often quite suddenly, a bigger space, more powerful than the immediate. Often it’s an artist that prompts such realisation. After all, it’s the artist’s role to help us see and, at the same time, to interpret. But alongside the art it’s sometimes also the setting that helps us to find an experience that lies beyond mere sight. Such a perfect blend of expression and content can be seen at the Jardin Escultorico in Alfas del Pi on Spain’s Costa Blanca, where works by Antonio Mari are on display. 

Toni Mari is a Javea-born artist who sculpts in iron. His work is often highly naturalistic, with bulls, birds, fish and sheep and other farmyard animals featuring. But it is the human form that dominates his work, despite the fact that most of his figures are often more air than substance. His figures often stride like a Bocchioni or dance like a Degas. 

Charging bulls display a life-force. A strangely light iron bird seems ready to take flight. A Good Shepherd strides, superhuman in scale, across his meadow, his joints – characteristically for Mari – twisted tendons of metal. At the hip a lunch satchel swings, no doubt crammed with the cheese of his following sheep, whose delicate fleece is soldered springs. A welded dog eagerly awaits its master’s call. A series of dancers add pure grace, their clothing and costume flowing into ribbons that do no more than punctuate their back-drop of sky. Though welded to their rusted plinths, surely they move, thus claiming their freedom of life. 

But Antonio Mari’s work is also revelatory, an aspect that is only amplified by the setting. This special exhibition sits alongside a permanent sculpture collection, amongst which are other works by the same artist. The whole is set in the beautiful gardens of the Jardin Escultorico in Alfas del Pi, on Spain’s Costa Blanca. 

Established in 1998, the gardens are the vision of Johanna Klein-Schreuder and Johannes Klein. Twelve years ago they bought a plot with some three hundred decrepit orange trees. Their unique vision was to create a sculpture garden, a space to exhibit human and natural creation both to contrast and complement. Now more than a decade into the project, Johanna and Johannes have achieved their goal. 

Their garden is worth a visit in itself. Though formally laid out, its main features are trees, themselves apparently living sculptures presenting a remarkable variety of shape and form, some in flower, some hardly yet in leaf. Interspersed between these natural forms are works of contemporary sculptors, including other works by Toni Mari, including Love Dance and Man On Stilts. In the former, angels dance a round while in the latter a perfectly formed person who has hardly any physical form seems to stride through the garden at tree-top height. 

Ausencia by Jorge Castro Flóres is a reclining figure whose very substance has been torn away. Here the reduction of the human to a kind of essence is as painful as Mari’s use of the same idea is uplifting. Elsie Ringnalda’s On Top Of You features two elongated but anonymous figures. He is lying on his back. She is upright walking towards him along his legs. Thus natural and human creativity mix, the whole producing its own life. The vision of Johanna and Johannes works beautifully with the joint focus of garden and sculpture augmenting and amplifying each other. The Jardin Escultorico is a wonderful place to visit for residents and tourists alike. And it would also repay repeated visits, since the featured exhibitions change regularly and, of course, the trees are never the same, even from one day to the next. You can visit this beautiful place at Cami del Pinar 23, Alfas del Pi. See http://www.klein-schreuder.com for further details and opening times.

The South by Colm Toibin

The South by Colm Toibin is an intense, though fitful chronicle of a woman’s life, a life as yet incomplete. It presents a patchwork of detail amidst vast tracts of unknown, like a painting that has a suggestion of complete outline interspersed with patches of intricate detail. Thus, eventually, we know some amazing things about Katherine Proctor and we have shared much of her life. She remains, paradoxically, largely anonymous, however, as she probably does to herself.

The title carries an agenda for Katherine Proctor’s life, since aspects of the word provide setting and context for phases in her life. We meet her having just left her husband and her ten-year-old son. She was unhappily married to Tom. Richard was her spitting image. We never really get to know why she left, why she so definitively broke with a past that appeared both secure and fulfilled. A part of her motives may have sprung from her status as a Protestant in Enniscorthy, a small town near the sea in the south of Ireland, in the south-east. She thus inherited a status that bore its own history, a history of which she was aware, but minus its detail. But it could only have been part of an explanation, because it was her husband and her life, her private concerns, that she fled.

In the 1950s, she went south to Spain, settling in Barcelona. There she met Miguel, a man with his own history. He had fought with the anarchists in the Civil War. He still had friends, colleagues from the fight. Katherine falls for him. They move to a stone house in the Pyrenees. He paints. She paints. She bears him a child. Katherine meets Michael Graves, an Irishman, doubly coincidentally also from her home town. He is working in Barcelona. He seems to be an ailing, gently cynical character, who is clearly besotted with her. When things with Miguel turn unexpectedly sour, he offers solace and comfort.

This time, however, Katherine had nothing to do with the split, a separation that also took away her young daughter. She painted more, hibernated. And then there grew an urge to trace the son she had left behind many years before. He was still in their family house, the one she had deserted, where he lived with his wife and daughter. There are tensions. They are solved. Michael Graves is also back in Ireland. Katherine rediscovers the south, her homeland, through painting it. Though penniless, she gets by, sometimes appearing to live off her own resources of passion and commitment. Though perhaps not conscious of it herself, she is always striving for a fulfilment she believes she never attains. In fact, she has it all along. Though a victim of circumstance, she is ready to grasp any opportunity and live it. 

“Only a protestant would go into sea so cold,” Michael says to her. She gets wet. He doesn’t. And in the end, though we still hardly know her, we like Katherine proctor, and we respect her. The South alternates its narrative between first and third person in a subtle way tat allows the reader to sculpt its main character. She becomes wholly tangible, but rarely are we told anything about her. She lives. We meet her, and we react. Colm Toibin’s achievement in this, his first novel, is considerable.

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The Way To Paradise by Mario Vargas Llosa

I rarely read novels more than once. There are some I have read several times, but the list might just run to double figures. I have read The Way To Paradise by Mario Vargas Llosa twice, but not for the usual reasons. First time though I was so disappointed with the book that I thought I had to be mistaken. So I waited a few months and read it again. Second time through I enjoyed it much more but, on finishing it, I had many of the same reservations as I did first time round.

The Way To Paradise juxtaposes two stories which, in essence, deal with how people pursue ideals. It identifies the inevitable selfishness associated with a person’s obsession to achieve, how pragmatism and compromise inevitably dictate daily routine, and how fate, unpredictable and unyielding, has the ultimate say on all of our endeavours.

The two stories of The Way To Paradise are related by family. One describes how the French painter, Paul Gaugin, left his job as a mildly successful stockbroker to pursue his dream of becoming an artist. A closet painter while he acted out the humdrum of nine to five to provide for his thoroughly and properly domesticated Danish wife and five children, Paul Gaugin drooled over canvases by impressionist painters such as Manet. The latter’s nude depiction of Olympia played a significant role in crystallising Gaugin’s ambitions. A provocative and highly erotic painting it is, for sure.

What Gaugin did not know, it seems, was that the sitter shared the name of his grandmother’s lesbian lover. It would add poignancy to the story if the painting’s subject was actually the grandmother’s lover, but the decades don’t add up. Flora Tristan, Paul Gaugin’s grandma, was born into potential wealth. But she was illegitimate, her wealthy Peruvian father having sired her via a poor French mother. So she grew up in poverty. She marries. She hates sex, abhorring everything to do with the act, so the marriage to an impatient husband does not last. There is a child, but there is also violence, threats, public scenes and estrangement. Flora takes up the struggle for women’s rights, workers’ rights and socialism. She dresses as a man to research the experience of prostitutes. She travels from town to town giving presentations and speeches to guilds, assemblies of the poor and groups of women. Both Paul Gaugin and Flora Tristan travel.

The artist, of course, as we all know, went to live on various Pacific islands, where he painted most of the works that now make him famous. But at the time, the experience was far from idyllic. Having wanted to escape the constricting conventions and conservatism of France, he found it reincarnated in the officialdom that dealt with him, his poverty, and his illness, syphilis, which rendered him smelly, pussy and unsightly. On can only imagine what his grandmother would have thought of his processing of local women, whom he painted, infected, made pregnant and then deserted, sometimes in that order. The grandson was doing what the grandmother would have despised, derided. But then the women on the receiving end weren’t Europeans, were they? 

 Flora travelled to Peru in an attempt to claim the inheritance of her birthright. In South America, with colonial heritage all around, she brushed shoulders with the rich, with a way of life she could only dream about in Europe. The experience galvanised her, created the resolution to seek change, a resolve that drove her through her remaining years, prompted her to write, to seek self-expression that might widen and convince her audience. And so both grandmother and grandson pursue their own ideals, never consciously attaining them, of course, but the pursuit, like the life that bears it, is the point. The process is the end, the product merely existence. 

 In reviewing The Way To Paradise I find I have taken much more from the book than I thought. I had problems with the style in that its unidentified narrator constantly seemed to address Flora and Paul directly, referred to them as ‘you’, almost implying that they were acquaintances. On reflection, that might be part of the book’s point, in that celebrity renders those who possess it the friends of anyone. Both characters are thus part of our own common history. We already know them as Paul and Flora. In the case of Paul Gaugin, however, we meet a much lauded, selfish, self-obsessed, perhaps, painter whom everyone recognises. In Flora Tristan, Mario Vargas Llosa tells us, we have a member of the same family who ought to be known better than she is. In contrast with her grandson, however, her selflessness, her energy, her purity, paradoxically, identify her as a figure worthy of respect, worthy of history. The Way To Paradise was clearly worth its second read.

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Up and Down in Toledo, the expected and the surprising

I have wanted to visit Toledo for at least forty years and for one particular reason, being the canvases of Domenicos Theotokopoulos, or El Greco as we have learned to call him. Well, now I have been and I found what I sought, plus a truly amazing and unexpected surprise.

Toledo is one of those celebrity tourist destinations that defy categorization. It was a trading centre in Roman times. It was the Visigoth’s capital in what we still call the Dark Ages. It became a splendid, rich, cosmopolitan, multi-faith trading city and artistic centre under Muslim rule. The Christian era saw the construction and decoration of the institutions and monuments that now comprise the city’s current iconic identity. And, after the period of relative decline that affected all of Spain, it is now one of the world’s most visited tourist venues whilst retaining its own, highly dignified life.

Its setting is superb. Almost surrounded by the Rio Tajo, the outcrop towers over the gorge. And it is topped by a mass of buildings, each of which seems to state its own competitive claim to grandeur. Few of them can challenge the sheer scale of either the Alcazar or the cathedral. The former is much reconstructed and rebuilt after being fought over many times, but its vast scale alone impresses, and surely, courtesy of El Greco’s painted cityscapes, is one of the most recognizable buildings one earth. The cathedral, on the other hand, is both monumental and aesthetically pleasing. Its pictures include El Greco portraits of the saints and an amazing, near cubist Madonna by Morales. One chapel has portraits of all the archbishops who have reigned there. The treasury has five hundred years of their robes. And the ambulatory behind the altar has some of their cardinal’s hats hanging from the ceiling. Apparently they are hung over the owner’s tombs and remain there until they rot. The hats, that is.

There’s an interesting point to be made about a visit to one of the town’s smaller buildings, the Synagogue of Santa Maria la Blanca. The period of Muslim rule was marked by great tolerance. Though the different religious communities had their own areas of the city, Christians, Jews and Muslims built their own churches, synagogues and mosques. But after the re-conquest, Christianity asserted its dominant and normative creed and everything except the churches was suppressed. So the synagogue became a church. An altarpiece was erected in front of the holy wall and arches were bricked up so that Christian paintings could be added. And since the Christians actually did not believe that Jews and Muslims had actually converted, a Holy Inquisition was established was established to identify dissenters. It was not long after this turbulent period that el Greco arrived in Toledo.

Domenicos Theotokopoulos left Crete to train as an artist in Venice. By 1577 he had settled in Toledo and there he stayed. His unique style, a blend of high Renaissance, Orthodox Church iconography and emerging Mannerism is both instantly recognizable and supremely expressive. His use of light - or often lack of it, since he often painted in the dark – gives his canvases a strangely ethereal whiteness which so often seems to stress the humanity and therefore vulnerability of his subjects.

El Greco’s work, of course, is represented in major collections throughout the world and, it could be argued, the collection in the Prado far exceeds in importance and sensation what remains in Toledo. But in the city’s San Tomé church, still in the place for which it was conceived, is the painter’s masterpiece, the Burial of Señor Orgaz. It’s so well known that the experience of standing before it might provoke déjà vu or anti-climax but, like all true masterpieces, it transcends even its own reputation by offering much more than its expectation. Painted in 1586, it depicts the interment of a medieval knight, a resident of Toledo, philanthropist and benefactor of the Sane Tomé church. In the foreground, Señor Orgaz’s body is laid to rest. Meanwhile, towards the top, his soul is admitted to heaven. Across the entire width of the picture a line of mourners faces serves to separate the worldly lower half from the heavens above. Each person is a unique individual, each offering a different emotional and perhaps political response to the burial. In the swirling heavens above, human gravity has no place. There, everything glows with a cool white light, perhaps suggesting cascades of water rather than flights of passion. And it’s the row of human heads, with their intellects perhaps combined, that forms the boundary between the material world below and the ethereal heavens above. A true Renaissance message.

There are other El Greco originals and several copies elsewhere in the city, in Santo Domingo Antiguo, the cathedral, Santa Cruz museum and Tavera museum. Perhaps only the artist himself knows why so many of the people in his paintings have pointed noses. But if all Toledo had to offer was the Burial of Señor Orgaz it would still demand a visit.

The other venue with El Greco paintings is the Casa del Greco, but this is closed for restoration. There are a couple of very well known paintings in that collection, notably a view of the city with a map, so they have been re-housed in the nearby Victorio Macho museum.

Given my motivation for visiting Toledo, I doubt whether I would have made the Victorio Macho museum a priority. He’s a twentieth century sculptor, born in Palencia, Spain, and who spent many years in Peru. It was the El Greco paintings, re-housed there, that drew me, but I left having experienced one of those wonderful surprises that renders a particular trip not just memorable but etched in the mind, never to be forgotten. Macho’s work is astoundingly beautiful. There are bronzes, stonework and drawings. His series of self portraits is masterful, the face full of doubt, but its representation a model of expression and confident technique. A female nude from the back entitled The Guitar is memorable, to say the least. But the most stunning piece was the one a fellow visitor described as just like her grandmother. A small old woman dressed entirely in black sits alone with her head ever so slightly bowed. The head and hands are white. Her expression at first seems detached, at least contemplative, perhaps rather aloof and judgmental. But it changes. A hint of a smile appears as you study her face. And then the sculpture seems to suggest the woman’s entire life. She is simultaneously old and young, with the contrast of white flesh and black clothes suggesting youth and age. And it’s all there in that enigmatic face.

So having found in Toledo the experience I sought, an experience of a quality I had expected, the works of Victorio Macho provided the surprise which made the visit utterly memorable.