art - TL:DR (That's Long, DID Read)

a simple question about dead children

It’s forever being explained that this or that war or ‘conflict’ (a fun word to watch out for which generally means that the authorities and media recognise something shameful or unequal in the situation) is complex and difficult. But although the historical backgrounds, causes and contexts of wars are almost always complex, there’s one simple question that can clarify the course of events as they unfold: Is it ever acceptable to kill unarmed civilians who aren’t attacking you? If the answer is anything that essentially means yes, then the argument is ended and an eternal cycle of violence, death, reprisals and resentments is tacitly accepted. But if the answer is no – and to me it definitely is – then there’s a moral imperative not to let it happen.

Jean Colombe – Richard I of England orders the Massacre of the Saracen Prisoners, 1191 (painted 1474-5)

The part of the question that states who aren’t attacking you is crucial because realistically, escalating violence frequently ends in killing, whether or not that’s the original intention. Unless one is a Gandhi-style pacifist who thinks that being attacked is a signal to lie down and take it and that (to cite examples he used) the UK should have let Nazi Germany invade unopposed or that the Jews should have willingly delivered themselves up for extinction, the idea of being attacked and not reacting feels entirely unnatural, a practical impossibility, whatever your personal philosophy is. Not that that is any defence against most of the kind of attacks that happen in modern warfare.

Francisco de Goya – The Third of May 1808 (painted 1814)

Even as someone who believes it’s always wrong to kill unarmed civilians, it’s hard to resist applying that belief hypothetically to historical situations. It’s a pointless exercise though, because while it’s entertaining to imagine ‘sliding doors’ moments in history and extrapolate possible consequences from them, there’s no way of actually knowing how things would have panned out whatever the probabilities seem to have been. Plus, it can’t be changed now anyway. We don’t live in history, yet. ‘What if’ is an irrelevant and frivolous question when applied to history, unless you happen to be writing a novel, making a film or inventing a time machine, but it’s a fundamental question about what is going to happen today.

David Olère – The Massacre of the Innocents (1950s?)

It might seem obvious which war or conflict I have in mind while writing this, but although the most obvious guess is probably the right one, I’m not avoiding naming names out of some kind of misguided sense of neutrality. I’m not trying to downplay sickening atrocities or genocides or to pretend that war crimes only matter when some people commit them but not others. The simplicity and universal applicability of the question is the whole point. Is it ever acceptable to kill unarmed civilians who aren’t currently attacking you? I don’t think so. Everything is irrevocable once it has happened, but nothing is until then, so let’s not act as though some people are just destined to be collateral damage in wars as if it’s a fact of nature rather than the result of human choices and actions.

bathroom blade runners – who polices the toilet police?

The prejudice against transgender people in the UK has, after years of furious lobbying, reached the level of a moral panic, and thanks to the pressure of the lobbyists (and perhaps even more, the money behind them) transphobia is now essentially written into British law. It feels like bad form to quote oneself, but four years ago I wrote “The unstated aim [of a moral panic] is the reiteration of a prevailing – often obsolete – orthodoxy … And coincidentally or not, whatever the panic happens to be about, it’s usually the same orthodoxy that is being reinforced and promoted.” That’s true here. The stated aim of the pressure groups – and now, the legislation – is to protect women, ostensibly from male violence, but not only does the law not do that, it actually reinforces the status quo, where crimes against women are often overlooked and always inadequately policed. It’s a policy that doesn’t try to benefit anybody, not even those who have rabidly pursued it – but, indirectly it benefits the very group it purports to punish; male abusers of women.

Claude Cahun in 1928 – “Neuter is the only gender that always suits me”

At its heart there’s a fundamental irony embedded into the moral panic about trans people. The heart of the issue is that there are people who simply don’t want trans people – primarily but not only, trans women – to exist at all. But in trying to wish trans people out of existence, what the transphobes are really doing is insisting on their presence, heightening it (and simultaneously making trans people a way of defining their own identities too) and of course punishing them for their continued existence. The idea of trans people just being, and being accepted as the people they are, obviously isn’t any kind of threat to society; but then, choosing an invisible ‘enemy within’ has always been the agenda of paranoid reactionaries and is such a familiar trope that there’s really no need to list the atrocities these kinds of policies have led to throughout history. Under normal circumstances, the trans women and trans men vilified by activists and politicians are just women and men; the woman who works in your office, the man at the supermarket checkout, a teacher, a librarian, a lifeguard. But when looked at through the eyes of the paranoid bigot, their very unobtrusiveness becomes sinister; someone ‘posing as’ a lifeguard or ‘infiltrating’ a school to pursue their malevolent agenda.

The worst thing about a law that denies the identity of a group of people is, naturally, the impact it has on those people, but it also does nothing to address the problems it’s disingenuously put forward to solve. Male violence against women, wherever it happens, is a serious problem in British society. And yet at every stage – from early displays of ‘light-hearted’ misogyny and harassment among children and teenagers to actual physical assault – society and the law tend not to take it seriously enough, with the result that crimes are under-reported and under-prosecuted and punishments are often laughably mild. At the same time though, harassment and assault et cetera already are criminal offenses, and they don’t become any more criminal, or any better policed, by persecuting a minority group. In fact, the opposite is true, since the focus on trans women as potential aggressors not only takes the focus away from the people who are overwhelmingly, the perpetrators of violence against women – cisgender men – it’s essentially misogynistic and threatens the very safety of the women it pretends to protect.

the late cis-gender, heterosexual musician Vinnie Chas in 1989 – which toilet should Vinnie have used?

It’s perhaps important to point out that the Supreme Court’s ruling states that the legal definition of a woman is based on biological sex at birth, so that only those born female are recognized as women under the Equality Act – it’s simplistic (human biology isn’t) and it doesn’t mention bathrooms at all. But the toilet is central to the ideology of ‘gender critical’ activists. Policing who uses which bathroom is a bizarre preoccupation of the anti-trans lobby, but it’s indicative of the generally perverse and in one sense unserious nature of their obsession with trans people. That being so, public toilets have ended up being a key part of any debate around trans rights in Britain. How ‘correct’ toilet usage is enforced throws up the immediate problem of who polices it and what the criteria are for using a gender-specific toilet. It’s not enough to say, as the Supreme Court ruling implies, that women’s bathrooms are for those who are biologically female from birth, because in many cases there’s no obvious way, short of an invasive genital inspection, of working that out – and there shouldn’t be. In any kind of free and democratic society, the way someone dresses, or the hairstyle and aesthetic they adopt – in short, their identity – is nobody else’s business unless they explicitly make it so, and setting up some kind of ‘toilet police’ can only increase the harassment of women, both trans and cis. The kind of concern I express there often leads to accusations of hysteria, but this week, the prominent anti-trans campaigner Maya Forstater explicitly said this: “Not being allowed into the mens by rule does not mean you have the right to go into the ladies. That may seem unfair, but these are life choices people make. If you make extreme efforts to look like a man, don’t be surprised if you are denied entrance to the ladies.” It’s hard to know where to start with this venomous nonsense. But for a start, what does “extreme efforts to look like a man” entail? What is ‘looking like a man’ anyway? Which man? These people come across like Mary Whitehouse wringing her hands over Boy George’s appearance on Top of the Pops 40 years ago.

The Beautiful Boy (2003) by genuine TERF Germaine Greer; but is this boy manly enough to use the Gents?

For some women, regardless of their gender at birth or their sexual orientation, just having a short haircut or choosing to wear trousers is enough for some people to accuse them of looking like men, regardless of what their intentions were when choosing a haircut or getting dressed that morning. The idea of ‘not being ‘allowed’ into one or other toilet surely also entails some kind of enforcement. There are so few manned public toilets in the UK that presumably, the current bathroom attendants won’t expected to take on the duty of somehow determining who is an acceptable ‘customer’, but someone will have to, if it’s not just empty rhetoric – which it may well be. But it also creates a genuine possibility of toilet vigilantism, which sounds hilarious, until you really think about it. And what qualifies someone to be a toilet police officer or bathroom blade runner? Is there a test they need to pass? Will there be gender-determining questionnaires or apps, or inspections?

The British cis-gender, female artist ‘Gluck’ (Hannah Gluckstein) a century ago in 1925 – which toilet should she have used?

Presumably there were, until now, no laws dictating who can use which bathroom and yet, men (including trans men) tend to use the mens and women (including trans women) tend to use the womens, without any resulting fuss. Somebody who lurks in any bathroom with the intention of assaulting someone is already breaking, or planning to break the law and nothing about this legislation seems likely to deter the few people determined enough to do such a thing. What seems far more likely is that people innocently needing to use public toilets – and it’s not something most people do except in the direst need – will face some kind of additional unpleasantness, especially if their physique and appearance isn’t one that fits the standard, traditional gender norm.

TERF (trans-exclusionary radical feminist) is a useful shorthand term for people like Forstater and JK Rowling, but it also gives them a validity that they don’t deserve, because difficult to see any kind of feminism, either radical or orthodox, in a policy that requires women to conform to a specific kind of approved appearance to be accepted in female-only spaces. I would like to be able to substitute the term ‘right-wingers’ for TERFs, but in fact this whole issue reinforces my growing feeling that the ‘left’ and ‘right’ binary is no longer useful when looking at political and cultural issues. I am definitely left-wing, but then so, one would hope, is the Communist Party of Britain, which publicly supports the Supreme Court’s ruling. I shouldn’t be surprised though, because the mistake I – and many people, it seems – make is assuming that communism is left-wing. If I really examine what I mean by ‘left-wing’ I find that the correct word would be the much abused and misunderstood one, ‘liberal.’ And, as no less than V.I. Lenin went to great pains to explain in 1920’s charmingly-titled pamphlet “Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder, there’s nothing inherently liberal or democratic about communism. It’s easy to forget that, because left vs. right feels so logical, but history proves the point – if left-wing means what people think it means, and communism is left-wing, then the Hitler-Stalin Pact would have been completely unthinkable. Whereas, looking at Nazi Germany and Stalin’s USSR it seems not only logical but inevitable.

Hitler and Stalin’s ideologies diverged in many, quite fundamental ways, but at heart, both were really about power – who has it, and who is subject to it and can be coerced by it. And as citizens of the kind of society that wants to police who uses its toilets, we might want to consider that.

But even though an attack on the trans community is an attack on the freedom and individuality of us all, and even with all of the serious issues and implications from the corruptibility of British politicians to the possible dystopian outcomes for our society, the most important point by far is to remember that this is happening now, and that the target is a small community that includes some of the UK’s most vulnerable people. It’s evil and it’s indefensible, but it’s not irreversible – so those who object should make their voices heard.

gratuitous text and bloody violence – the commercialisation of 80s horror

This article (like several others) came out of a conversation with my friend Paul, and he writes better than I do about 80s horror (and many other things) at Into the Gyre

The 1980s was, famously, the decade when pop culture became corporate, encapsulated in the omnipresent corporate or corporate-style logo. Obviously both corporations and logos long pre-dated the 80s, but it was in that era that it became an all-encompassing ideal. In the 1960s, the first really modern teenagers* had written the names of their favourite bands on their school books or bags and twenty years later their children were doing much the same thing, only they were painstakingly copying logos from album sleeves or tape inlay cards.

*you could say the 50s teenagers were the first, but they were pioneers; the 60s generation was the first to grow up with the expectation of being teenagers, with all that entailed in terms of pop music and rebellious teenage behaviour

As a young horror fan in the mid-to-late 1980s, one of the things that made the notorious video nasties of the previous generation seem so alluringly grimy and disreputable was their lack of slickness. 1980s horror franchises – in themselves a symptom of the decade of accelerated capitalism – even ones with their roots in the 70s independent cinema boom like Halloween – had logos, they had mascots like Freddy and Jason and Pinhead, they had rock songs on the soundtrack – they were corporate and, to young teenagers at least, they were cool. There was no way to make a grotty, un-theatrical, special effects-free film like I Spit on Your Grave seem cool. There was an attempt to make a franchise out of the Texas Chain Saw Massacre, but Leatherface wasn’t iconic in quite the way that Jason was, let alone an almost cartoon character like Freddy Krueger. Murderous, inbred yokels in rural Texas might well be scary but they weren’t easily assimilated into glossy hair metal videos.

the flamboyant 60s/70s Fellowship of the Ring vs its more businesslike 80s update

The publishing world was no different. In the fantasy realm, the hippyish typefaces and sometimes grotesque psychedelic imagery of the great 60s and 70s paperbacks were replaced with foil letters in block type and tastefully elevated landscapes. Tasteful is of course a relative term and within a decade, that utterly 80s look – a publishing counterpart to magnolia painted walls and a beige Laura Ashley aesthetic which married an almost clinical sense of restraint, as if embarrassed by the childishness of elves, wizards and dragons, but combined it with bold, business card-style, metallic sans-serif lettering – would seem just as trashy in its way as the more florid 70s fashions had at the time.

70s horror classics redesigned for the 80s

But, unlike fantasy fiction, where the biggest name in the 80s remained the late J.R.R. Tolkien, the horror genre had star writers who transcended the genre and became part of the pop cultural zeitgeist, Most of the current ‘big names’ in 80s fantasy, like Terry Brooks and Stephen R Donaldson, were writers whose key works belonged firmly to the post-Tolkien 1970s and never escaped a (very big) fantasy audience. Horror was different. Like the fantasy genre, its biggest names – Stephen King (everywhere) and James Herbert (especially in the UK, though his books sold millions worldwide) – had had their first successes in the first half of the 1970s, but as the 70s evolved into the 80s, both their work itself and the way it was packaged began to align with the spirit of the age. The fanbase for horror broadened until the big horror novels became the big airport novels and big supermarket novels and the basis for successful Hollywood movies. The books became bigger and more cinematic (but I talked about that here so won’t again) and their design more stylish, until they resembled the movie posters of the time; but with one major difference. There were of course iconic directors in the 80s, but even the biggest of them – Steven Spielberg, say, or Martin Scorcese – naturally didn’t dominate the posters for their films the way that Stephen King or James Herbert did on their books. In that respect, the authors were more like the star actors of the day, but where Stallone or Arnold Schwarzenegger were only one element, albeit a dominant one, in their star vehicles, with the books you knew that whatever you got would the real, unadulterated thing, unless you happened to be a fan of Virginia (“VC”) Andrews, but she was a special case back then.

The first, strangely romantic adventure-looking Shining (with Warren Beatty-esque hero) and the classic 80s Stephen King logo edition

The extent to which the star authors, rather than the books themselves, were the selling point, can be seen in their evolving covers. After a decade of disparate designs and variable artwork, often not especially horror-centric, publishers like New English Library, Futura and Star began treating books by horror authors as franchises, each with their own logo and aesthetic. Stephen King and James Herbert, to stick with the big two, demonstrate contrasting, but very 80s horror alternatives. James Herbert – who, with a background in advertising and art direction, took a direct interest in how his novels were packaged – went with the 80s version of classy as epitomised by mid-priced boxes of chocolates; a restrained palette dominated by either black or white, with lettering in gold or silver foil. They were eye-catching, moody and, to a teenager, adult looking.

New English Library offering James Herbert as a box of Black Magic chocolates and Stephen King as a hair metal album

Stephen King’s UK publishers (including Herbert’s publisher N.E.L. – but frustratingly, including several others; keeping one truly consistent image annoyingly out of reach) clearly realised that the selling point – the brand, in the parlance of the times etc – was King himself. To that end, the actual cover illustrations and even the prominence of the titles of the books took up less and less space, while the author’s name was treated to something like the logo of a metal band, and was big enough to be spotted across a crowded newsagent or bookshop. Sometimes the author’s name was in foil, sometimes it was embossed, but for at least a few years the covers of his main series of novels – as with James Herbert’s – had the uniformity of a corporate identity.

Stephen King’s Greatest Hits

Where the genre’s biggest stars and their publishers led, others followed; all of the big names of 80s horror tended to follow either the King or the Herbert approach; after wildly variable and sometimes lamentable 70s editions, Ramsey Campbell’s books took on the sleek, Herbertian image. American blockbuster authors like Dean R Koontznd Peter Straub’s books tended to follow the King blueprint.

80s gore (Richard Laymon & Shaun Hutson) vs 80s slickness (Shaun Hutson & Ramsey Campbell)

Gore authors had a kind of niche of their own. The early books of the UK’s most notorious horror author of the era, Shaun Hutson, played down the author’s name in favour of a gaudy movie poster look with the titles in a distinctive ‘slug trail’ font – and his US counterpart Richard Laymon’s works were very similarly packaged (the covers above both look like they could be the work of Danny Flynn, mentioned here, though I haven’t checked). As the sales of both authors increased during the boom years of the 80s, their packaging became – like their work – relatively more sophisticated. In the UK, Sphere mimicked the classy Herbert look for Hutson’s later 80s novels like Assassin and Victims, with the author’s name (embossed, in foil) becoming more of a focal point, while Laymon’s name became almost as logo-like as Stephen King’s. Laymon was far from alone in this. The brand-like identity of Stephen King, and the sheer volume of his sales, meant that the classic ‘logo’ look of his books was highly influential, to put it mildly. The range of King-influenced cover art ranges from the definitely ‘post-King’ 80s covers of authors like John Farris and Rex Miller, to the frankly imitative NEL covers for Stephen Laws, whose 80s books bring to mind the theoretical “Moron in a hurry” cited in court in cases of trademark infringement; not that said moron would have a bad time if they accidentally bought a Stephen Laws novel – but they would know they weren’t reading Stephen King.

the other Stephen of 80s horror

In almost all respects, Clive Barker was the outsider in the world of 80s horror – most definitely of it, but not defined by it. His debut novel The Damnation Game was initially packaged as typical mid-80s horror stodge but graduated, as his reputation grew, to Stephen King style packaging, even as Sphere Books simultaneously took the bold step of publishing his Books of Blood short story collections with Barker’s own fantastical (and in come cases gory) paintings on the covers, immediately putting the author in a dangerous-looking category of his own. Clive Barker’s books looked both more graphic and more outlandish than the usual blockbuster horror authors. From then until the end of the horror boom his work coexisted in the two camps of mainstream and (for want of a better world) alternative horror. The packaging of the 1989 first edition of his short novel Cabal (filmed as Nightbreed) is pure, commercial 80s design; it looks more like a movie poster than the actual Nightbreed movie poster and is complete with logo-like title and gold foil for the author’s name. But around the same time, his dark fantasy masterpiece Weaveworld featured a more imaginative, sophisticated style, taking its lead from the Books of Blood. Weaveworld had a more formal design sense that was flexible enough to be applied to the rest of Barker’s oeuvre, so that when the horror bubble burst and everything 80s suddenly looked as cringingly tacky and dated as mullets and shoulder pads, Barker’s brand alone among his horror peers easily made the transition into the new decade.

Clive Barker as standard 80s horror author, blockbuster 80s horror author (x 2) weirdo 80s horror author and weird-but-classy fantasy author

From 1990 until at least until the turn of the millennium, Stephen King’s publishers experimented with everything from tasteful minimalism to gaudy dayglo colours, the only constant being the prominence of the author’s name on the covers. That sense of immediate brand recognition dissolved around the time of The Dark Half has never been quite as strong since, and an 80s Stephen King collection still has a satisfyingly coherent look that isn’t matched by later editions. James Herbert mostly stuck with the ‘classy’ look of his late 80s books but with a sense of diminishing returns as the titles and cover images became less confrontational and the whole look less fashionable. In the 90s, much of what had been packaged as full-blooded horror tended to be given more of a fashionable ‘urban thriller’ look, just as in cinema, the Freddy and Jason franchises limped to an ignoble (if temporary) end, Hannibal Lecter emerged as a supposedly less cheesy horror villain and nobody wanted hair metal on their soundtracks anymore. It was a new age.

Slugs (1982) vs Slugs (2016) – eventually even the ultimate 80s trash schlock horror novel would be given the ‘tasteful’ treatment (which to be fair does look kind of cool)

what do you look like?

A few years ago a friend sent me a photograph of the ten-year-old us in our Primary School football team. I was able, without too much thought, to put names to all eleven of the boys, but the biggest surprise was that my initial reaction, for maybe a second but more like two seconds, was not to recognise myself. In my defence, I don’t have any other pictures of me at that age, and even more unusually, in that picture I’m genuinely smiling. Usually I froze when a camera was pointed at me (and still do, if it takes too long), but I must have felt safer than usual in a group shot, because it is a real smile and not the standard grimace that normally happened when I was asked to smile for photographs. I could possibly also be forgiven for my confusion because in contrast with my present self, ten year old me had no eyebrows, a hot-pink-to-puce complexion and unmanageably thick, wavy, fair hair; but even so, that was the face I looked at in the mirror every day for years and, more to the point, that gangly child with comically giant hands actually is me; but what would I know?

My favourite of David Hockney’s self portraits – Self Portrait with Blue Guitar (1977)

In a recent documentary, the artist David Hockney made a remark (paraphrased because I don’t have it to refer to) that resonated with me; your face isn’t for you, it’s for other people. And, as you’d expect of someone who has spent a significant part of his long career scrutinizing people and painting portraits of them, he has a point. Everyone around you has a more accurate idea of what you look like than you do. Even when you see someone ‘in real life’ who you are used to seeing in photographs or films, there’s a moment of mental recalibration; even if they look like their image, the human being before you in three dimensions is a whole different scale from the thing you are used to seeing. I remember reading in some kids’ novel that the young footballer me liked (I’m guessing Willard Price but can’t swear to it) that when being shown photographs of themselves, the indigenous people of (I think) New Guinea, not only weren’t impressed, but didn’t recognise them as anything in particular. Like Hockney, they had a point; if the Victorian people who invented photography hadn’t grown up with a tradition of ‘realistic,’ representational art would they have seen any relationship between themselves as living, breathing, colourful, space-filling three-dimensional organisms and the monochromatic marks on little flat pieces of paper? The response of the fictional New Guinea tribespeople is actually more logical than the response (surprise, wonder, awe) that’s expected of them in the novel.

Hockney went on further to say that portrait painting (if the sitter is present with the artist) gives a better idea of a person than photography does. At first this is a harder argument to buy into in a way, but it has its own logic too. A photograph, as he pointed out, is a two-dimensional record of one second in time, whereas the portrait painter creates their also two-dimensional image from spending time in the company of the sitter and focusing on them, a different, deeper kind of focus, since it engages the brain as well as the senses, than the technical one that happens with a lens, light and film or digital imaging software. A camera doesn’t care what you are like, it just sees how you look, from that angle, for that second. Maybe my big 10-year-old smile really is representative of how I was, but from memory it doesn’t represent that period for me at all.

Egon Schiele in his studio c.1915 (left) vs his 1913 self-portrait (right)

But I might never have written this had I not been reading Frank Whitford’s excellent monograph on the Austrian expressionist painter Egon Schiele (Thames & Hudson, 1981). Schiele is famous for (among other things) his twisted, emaciated and fanatically awkward self-portraits. The man he depicts is scrawny, elongated, intense, sometimes almost feline and utterly modern. Schiele in photographs, on the other hand, is quite a different presence. He sometimes has the expected haunted look and the familiar shock of hair, and he poses almost as awkwardly, but otherwise he looks surprisingly dapper, civilised, diminutive, square faced and elfin. But if we think – and it seems logical that we do – that the photographs show us the ‘real’ Schiele, then the descriptions of those who knew him suggest otherwise. “a slim young man of more than average height… Pale but not sickly, thin in the face, large dark eyes and full longish dark brown hair which stood out in all directions. His manner was a little shy, a little timid and a little self-confident. He did not say much, but when spoken to his face always lit up with the glimmer of a quiet smile.” (Heinrich Benesch, quoted in Whitford, p.66) This description doesn’t exactly clash with the Schiele of the photographs (though he never appears especially tall), but it’s somehow far easier to identify with the dark-eyed, paradoxically shy and confident Schiele of the self portraits. In his own writings, Schiele seems as tortured and intense as in his paintings, but in photographs he appears confident, knowing and slightly arch. His face, as Hockney says, may not have been for him, but he seems to have captured it in his art in ways that his friends and acquaintances recognised, and which the camera apparently didn’t.

Schiele in 1914 by Josef Anton Trčka (left) vs his 1911 self portrait (right)

Which, what, proves Hockney both right (portraiture is superior to photography) and wrong (Schiele knew his own face)? And anyway, what does that have to do with the 10-year old me? Nothing really, except that the camera, objective and disinterested, captured an aspect of me in that second which may or may not have been “true.” Objectivity and disinterestedness are positive qualities for evaluating facts, but when it comes to human beings, facts and truth have a complicated relationship. Photography, through its “realness,” has issues capturing these complexities, unless the photographer is aware of them and – Diane Arbus and Nan Goldin spring to mind – has the ability to imbue their work with more than the obvious surface information that is the camera’s speciality. But manually-created art, with its human heart and brain directing, naturally takes the relationship between truth and facts in its stride.

One final example that proves nothing really, except to my satisfaction. Around the year 1635, the Spanish painter Diego Velázquez was tasked with painting portraits of the assorted fools, jesters dwarfs and buffoons whose lives were spent entertaining the Spanish court. Most of these people suffered from mental or physical disabilities (or both) and were prized (I think a more accurate word than ‘valued’ in this context) for their difference from ‘normal’ people; in the same way as carnival “freaks” into the early 20th century in fact. Although these people were comparatively privileged, compared to what their lives would have been like had they not been adopted by the Royal court, their position in the household was more akin to pets than friends or even servants. Juan de Calabazas (“John of Gourds; a gourd was a traditional jester’s attribute) suffered from unknown mental illnesses and physical tics. In a time and place where formality and manners were rigidly maintained, especially around the monarch – where a misstep in etiquette could have serious or even fatal consequences, buffoons like Juan entertained the court with unfettered, sometimes nonsensical or outrageous speech, impulsive laughter and strange, free behaviour. Whereas in normal society these people would be lucky even to survive, in the Court their behaviour was celebrated and encouraged. Velázquez is rightly famous for the empathy and humanity with which he painted portraits of these marginalised figures, but although, as Wikipedia (why not?) puts it; “Velázquez painted [Juan] in a relatively calm state, further showing Velazquez’s equal show of dignity to all, whether king or jester” that seems an unusual response to the portrait below, It’s not untrue, but for me at least, Velázquez’s process of humanisation is painful too. The knowledge that this man lived his life as a plaything of the rich and powerful, alive only because they found him funny is troubling enough. But that pathos seems to be embodied in the picture and you know, or it feels like you know, that Velázquez didn’t find him funny, or at least not only funny. It’s something like watching David Lynch’s The Elephant Man compared to looking at the Victorian photographs of the real Joseph Merrick. Seeing the photographs is troubling, seeing Lynch’s cinematic portrait is too, but it’s deeply moving too.

Juan de Calabazas (c.1635-9) by Diego Velázquez

All of which may just be a way of saying that a camera is a machine and does what it does – recording the exterior of what it’s pointed at – perfectly, while a human being does, and feels, many things simultaneously, probably not perfectly. Well I’m sure we all knew that anyway. I eventually got eyebrows, by the way.

2024 – welcome to the/a future(s)

Another year – and the actual name of the year itself gets ever stranger and more unlikely and exotically futuristic, if you grew up in the era when the film 2001: A Space Odyssey was still set in the future. And here’s the annual attempt to get something onto this site at the beginning of the year – just made it in the first week this time – and hopefully, to post more often. The goal is a minimum of once a month but I think goals are better than resolutions so that’s as far as I will go.

2023 was the usual mixed bag of things; I didn’t see any of the big movies of the year yet. I have watched half of Saltburn, which so far makes me think of the early books of Martin Amis, especially Dead Babies (1975) and Success (1978) – partly because I read them again after he died last year. They are both still good/nasty/funny, especially Success, but whereas I find that having no likeable characters in a book is one thing, and doesn’t stop the book from being entertaining, watching unlikeable characters in a film is different – more like spending time with actual unlikeable people, perhaps because – especially in a film like Saltburn – you can only guess at their motivations and inner life. So, the second half of Saltburn remains unwatched – but I liked it enough that I will watch it.

Grayson Perry – The Walthamstow Tapestry (detail)

I didn’t see many exhibitions last year but am very glad that I caught Grayson Perry’s Smash Hits in Edinburgh. I didn’t really plan to see it as assumed in advance I wouldn’t like it, but in fact I loved it and ended up having a new respect for GP that only partly evaporates whenever I see him on TV.

I can’t be bothered going in depth about my favourite music of the year because the year is over and I’ve written about most it elsewhere. Old teenage favourites came back strongly: Kristin Hersh’s superb run of albums continued with Clear Pond Road. I hadn’t thought a lot about Slowdive in years but I really liked Everything is Alive and was very pleased to see them get the kind of acclaim that mostly eluded them when I was buying their first album a million years ago. Teenage Fanclub’s Nothing Lasts Forever and Drop Nineteens’ Hard Light were good too, and The Girl is Crying in her Latte by Sparks was probably my favourite of theirs outside of their early 70s classics. There were some excellent black metal (or black metal-related) albums too; much as I don’t like to think of Immortal without Abbath, Demonaz did himself proud with War Against All. Niklas Kvarforth returned to form with the brilliant Shining and Skálmöld’s Ýdalir is as good as anything they’ve recorded. In less guitar-oriented genres, I loved Kid Koala’s Creatures of the Late Afternoon and the latest Czarface record but my favourite album of the year if I had to choose one was the loveably lo-fi and enigmatic compilation Gespensterland.

I read lots of good books in 2023 – I started keeping a list but forgot about it at some point – but the two that stand out in my memory as my favourites are both non-fiction. Lauren Elkin’s Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art is completely engrossing and full of exciting ways of really looking at pictures. I wrote at length about Elena Kostyuchenko’s I Love Russia here. Kostyuchenko introduced me to a country that I only knew via history and stereotypes and her book is an exercise in what good journalism should be – informative, interesting, compassionate and readable. Both of these books cut across a wide range of subjects and examine unfamiliar things but also analyse the familiar from unfamiliar points of view; you should read them, if you haven’t already.

It’s no great surprise to me that my favourite books of the year would be – like much of my favourite art – by women. Though I think the individual voice is crucial in all of the arts, individuals don’t grow in a vacuum and because female (and, more widely, non-male) voices and viewpoints have always been overlooked, excluded, marginalised and/or patronised, women and those outside of the standard, traditional male authority figures more generally, tend to have more interesting and insightful perspectives than the ‘industry standard’ artist or commentator does. The first time that thought really struck me was when I was a student, reading about Berlin Dada and finding that Hannah Höch was obviously a much more interesting and articulate artist than (though I love his work too) her partner Raoul Hausmann, but that Hausmann had always occupied a position of authority and a reputation as an innovator, where she had little-to-none. And the more you look the more you see examples of the same thing. In fact, because women occupied – and in many ways still occupy – more culturally precarious positions than men, that position informs their work – thinking for example of artists like Leonora Carrington, Kay Sage or – a bigger name now – Frida Kahlo – giving it layers of meaning inaccessible to – because unexperienced by – their male peers.

The fact that women know more about themselves but also more about men than men do – because they have always had to – gives their work an emotional and intellectual charge often missing from those who belong comfortably within a tradition. This is a pretty well-worn idea – it’s why outsiders like Van Gogh or dropouts like Gauguin’s work speaks to us more clearly than the academic, tradition-bound art that they grew up with. Anybody on the margins, in whatever sense, of “mainstream society” has to have a working knowledge of that society, just to exist. Society has far less need to understand or even notice those people. – therefore their points of view are likely to not only be more individual, but more acute when it comes to observing the world in which they live. Class, race, gender; all of these things are always fascinatingly central to art and art history and the gradual recognition of that fact is making art history ever more exciting and vibrant. For now at least; we live in a time of conservative backlashes which attempt to restore order to those with a comfortable position within yesterday’s world – there will probably be an art historical backlash at some point, and the reputations of the mainstream stars of art in Van Gogh and Gauguin’s day, like William-Adolphe Bouguereau will find their reputations restored.

If that backlash comes, it will be from the academic equivalent of those figures who, in 2023 continued to dominate the cultural landscape. These are conservative (even if theoretically radical) people who pride themselves on their superior rational, unsentimental and “common sense” outlook, but whose views tend to have a surprising amount in common with some of the more wayward religious cults. Subscribing to shallowly Darwinist ideas, but only insofar as they reinforce one’s own prejudices and somehow never feeling the need to follow them to their logical conclusions is not new, but it’s very now. Underlying ideas like the ‘survival of the fittest’, which then leads to the more malevolent idea of discouraging the “weak” in society by abolishing any kind of social structure that might support them is classic conservatism in an almost 19th century way, but somehow it’s not surprising to see these views gaining traction in the discourse of the apparently futuristic world of technology. In more that one way, these kinds of traditionalist, rigidly binary political and social philosophies work exactly like religious cults, with their apparently arbitrary cut off points for when it was that progress peaked/halted and civilisation turned bad. That point varies; but to believe things were once good but are now bad must always be problematic, because when, by any objective standards, was everything good, or were even most things good? For a certain class of British politician that point seems to have been World War Two, which kind of requires one to ignore actual World War Two. But the whole of history is infected by this kind of thinking – hence strange, disingenuous debates about how bad/how normal Empite, colonialism or slavery were; incidentially, you don’t even need to read the words of abolitionists or slaves themselves (though both would be good to read) to gain a perspective of whether or not slavery was considered ‘normal’ or bad by the standards of the time. Just look at the lyrics to Britain’s most celebratory, triumphalist song of the 18th century, Rule Britannia. James Thomson didn’t write “Britons never, never, never shall be slaves; though there’s nothing inherently wrong with slavery.” They knew it was something shameful, something to be dreaded, even while celebrating it.

But anyways, the kind of avowedly forward-looking people we that are saddled with now, with their apparent concern for the future of the human species – especially the wellbeing of thus far non-existent future humans, as opposed to actual real living humans are, unlike the Amish, okay with progress, in the material sense of cars, computers, aircraft, spacecraft. But that only makes their core concern with traditional values and what is natural/unnatural even more nonsensical. If the defining thing about human beings is nature – men are like this, but not like that, women are like that, but not this; that nature dictates that compassion and medical science ate wasted on the weak and inferior, etc, then why draw the line at controlling gender and reproduction? Why get excited about the use of vaccines, or whether or not people “should” eat meat? If nature/”natural” really is the be all end all of human existence, why wear clothes, drive cars, cook food, use computers, build houses? At what point does nature dictate what we do or can or should do? Isn’t everything humans do inherently natural because we have the capacity to do it and actually do do it?

Again, despite the supposed rationalism that fuels the superiority complexes of so many powerful people in whatever sector, their bullshit traditional ideas are dictated against – and always have been – by the lived experience of almost everyone in the world. If ‘real men’ are strong, rational and above all heterosexual, how come most of us will have met, throughout our lives, emotional, irrational men who can’t cope with pressure, who aren’t in control of themselves or their environment? How come homosexuality has existed since the beginning of recorded time and does not go away no matter how traditional or repressive society becomes or how much generation after generation insists that it is unnatural? If ‘real women’ are weak, gentle, sentimental, maternal, submissive and above all heterosexual, how come (etc, etc, etc, etc) Because of decadent western society? Well Western society is partly founded on the ideas of Ancient Greece, which though pretty misogynistic, famously did not have quite the same views on sexuality. And how come these people equally exist in every other society too? Could it be that traditional ideas of ‘human nature’ have nothing to do with actual nature but have always existed in western patriarchal societies simply to reinforce the status quo in the interests of those at the top of the hierarchical tree? From monarchies to oligarchies to modern democracies and communist states – all of which have their own ruling class, even when it is explicitly labelled otherwise – it’s been in the interest of those in charge to prevent anything which fundamentally changes the way things work.

For similar reasons, people in western society (perhaps elsewhere; I am no expert) who live unremarkable and mediocre lives within essentially complacent, and often apolitical circles are increasingly drawn to right rather than left wing extremism to gain prominence and (importantly) material success. Extremist views across the spectrum are entertainingly “edgy” and titillating to people who like to be entertained by controversy and/or shocked by outrageous behaviour, but right-wing views are far more acceptable within the media – and therefore are far more lucrative and rewarding – because they don’t threaten the financial basis that underpins the media and political structure.

So in short – only joking, this will be a long sentence (deep breath). If comedian or podcaster A) gains millions of followers who are excited about disruptive ideas that undermine the state by questioning the validity of the (sigh) mainstream media, by interrogating ideas of media ownership and the accumulation of wealth and power and so on, that represents a genuine threat to Rupert Murdoch, Viscount Rothermere, Meta and Elon Musk in a way that comedian or podcaster B), gaining millions of followers who lean towards ideas that disrupt society by attacking progressive, egalitarian or (sigh) “woke” culture does not. Regardless of the actual or avowed political beliefs of these media magnates, is comedian/podcaster A or comedian/podcaster B going to be the one they champion in order to tap into the zeitgeist (which media magnates have to do to survive)?

BUT ANYWAY, it would be nice to think that these things would be less central or at least more ignorable in 2024. It would also be nice if people in power could not enable the worst elements in society (where the two things are separable). It would be more than nice if the governments of the world would listen to people and end the butchering of helpless civilians. It’s important to remember that it is in the interests of governments – even relatively benign ones – that people in general feel powerless. But we’re not. If making resolutions works for you then make them, if not then don’t, if you have goals then aim for those and you may achieve something even if not everything you want to achieve. But if something is unacceptable to you, don’t accept it. You may have money, power, time or you may have little more than your own body and/or your own mind, but those are 100% yours and the most important things of all. Happy New Year and good luck!

chocolate eggs & bunnies & pregnancy & blood: happy Easter!

ceramic sculpture of a Moon Goddess and her rabbit or hare partner, Mexico, c.700 AD

Imagine a culture so centred on wealth, property and power that it becomes scared of something as fundamental to human existence as sex, and frets endlessly about what it sees as the misuses of sex. A culture that identifies breeding so closely with with money, wealth and status, and women so closely with breeding and therefore with sex that, when looking to replace the traditional symbols of birth and regeneration it rejects sex and even nature and, in the end makes the embodiment of motherhood a virgin and the embodiment of rebirth a dead man. Unhealthy, you might think; misanthropic even – and yet here we are.

But when that misanthropic culture loses the religious imperative that fuelled it for centuries, what should be waiting but those ancient symbols of fertility; rabbits and eggs. But whereas Christianity in its pure, puritanical form found it hard to assimilate these symbols, preferring instead to just impose its own festival of rebirth on top of the pagan one, capitalism, despite being in so many ways compatible with the Judeo-Christian tradition, is essentially uninterested in spiritual matters. So even though capitalism is mostly pretty okay with Christianity, which creates its own consumer-friendly occasions, it proves to be equally okay with paganism, as long as it can sell us the pagan symbols in a lucrative way.

In Christianity the idea of the life cycle is almost surreally reproduced in the (male) Trinity; God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit – defined by the Lateran Council of 1213 – 15 as “the Father who begets, the Son who is begotten, and the Holy Spirit who proceeds” – there’s no room for anything as earthly or earthy as motherhood. The Virgin Mary is essentially a token female presence, and one with her biological female attributes erased. And yet in every society that has worshipped under the Christian banner, child-bearing has historically only been done by women and child-raising has almost entirely been ‘women’s work’ too. Which makes you think that really, patriarchy is one of the great mysteries of humanity and the fact that it’s seen by many as the natural order of human society is even stranger.

But anyway; Easter. Easter is a mess, even to begin with; its name is pagan (Ēostre or Ôstara, Goddess of the spring) and its Christian traditions, even when embodied in the tragic idea of a man being murdered/sacrificed by being nailed to a cross, were never entrenched enough to suppress the celebratory, even frivolous feeling that spring traditionally brings. Okay, so Christ ascending to heaven is pretty celebratory without being frivolous; but as, in the UK at least, represented by a hot cross bun, with the cross on the top to represent the crucifix and even – to play up the morbid factor that is so central to Christianity – its spices that are supposed allude to the embalming of Christ’s dead body, it’s hardly solemn: it’s a bun.

On the other hand, birth, since the dawn of time and to the present day, is not just a simple cause for rejoicing and in that, the Christian tradition – although it tries to remove the aspects that seem most central to birth to us: women, labour (the word presumably wasn’t chosen accidentally) and procreation – probably tells us more about the seriousness and jeopardy of childbirth than the Easter bunny does.

St Margaret, “reborn” after being eaten by a dragon

Childbirth is the central and most fundamental human experience and, until the 20th century it was one of the most perilous ones, so naturally the church had to address it. And so there’s a ‘patron’ (interesting choice of word) saint of childbirth; clearly the Virgin Mary is too specialist to be identified with (and perhaps it would even be blasphemous to do so?) so instead there’s St Margaret. Not much help; firstly, St Margaret should surely be a ‘matron saint’ but that’s not a thing, and secondly, in herself she has nothing to do with birth, although she was presumably born. Instead she becomes the saint of childbirth through the symbolic act of bursting out of the dragon who ate her – a strange analogy but one that reflects the hazardous nature of childbirth in medieval times, when mortality rates were high, not just for babies but for their mothers. And what mother couldn’t relate to bursting out of a dragon? But Christianity’s real issue with the whole topic of birth has less to do with birth itself than how humans reproduce in the first place. Rabbits and hares may represent – in ancient cultures across the world, from Europe to Mexico and beyond – fecundity, but it’s an animal idea of fertility for its own sake that has nothing to do with the practical or emotional aspects of producing new human beings, or the legal, dynastic and financial ones that the Old Testament and the ancient world generally saw as the purpose of reproduction.

Jan & Hubert Van Eyck’s Eve from the Ghent Altarpiece (completed c 1432)

Pregnancy in Western art was a rarity until fairly recently and the puritanical ideas inherited by Victorian Christianity shaped art historical studies, to the point that people (until quite recently) tended to deny the evidence of their own eyes. Surely to believe that Jan and Hubert van Eyck’s hyper-realistic Eve – the mother of the human race – from Ghent Altarpiece (completed in 1432) just has the preferred medieval figure, rather than being pregnant, is perverse, isn’t it? Or that Mrs Arnolfini (Costanza Trenta) in the Arnolfini Portrait of 1434, who is touching her swollen stomach and who had died, presumably in childbirth – the year before this painting was completed, is just an example of that same fashionable shape, seems ridiculously far-fetched. (My favourite among the many theories about the Arnolfini portrait is Margaret Koster’s – which is explored in Waldemar Januszczak’s excellent short film about the painting.)

To go back to Eve; the idea of the first woman pregnant with the first child makes more sense for the 15th century, which was neither squeamish about or embarrassed by the realities of life in the same way that the 19th and early 20th century gentlemen who codified the canon of Western art history were. It’s not impossible that she is just the medieval/gothic ideal of femininity as seen in illuminated manuscripts and carvings; small shoulders, small breasts, big hips and stomach – given an unusually realistic treatment, but it’s hard to believe that even in the 15th century the first reaction of viewers – especially given the realism of the picture – wouldn’t have been to assume she was pregnant. Culture and society has changed a lot in the intervening centuries, but biology hasn’t.

For subsequent generations, the status of women and the perils of childbirth and childhood gave pregnant women and babies a strange presence in secular art. While there’s no reason to assume that people were less caring or sentimental about their partners or their children, portraits were rarely about sentiments, but status. Portraits of women, with the rare exception of Queens, were generally portraits of wives or potential wives, and pregnancy was of crucial dynastic importance. But in times when childbirth was almost as likely to end in death as life for both mother and child, it was presumably a risky thing to record; there are not very many pregnant portraits. Maybe – I should probably have investigated this before writing it – the time a portrait took from commission to completion was also a factor that made it risky? A portrait wasn’t a particularly inexpensive thing, possibly commissioning a portrait of someone who would quite likely be dead within the next nine months felt like an iffy investment, or (to be less mercenary about it) courting bad luck? In the generations that followed, female artists – such as Elizabeth Vigee-Lebrun – could celebrate motherhood in self-portraits, but for the kind of reasons mentioned above – and because of contemporary ideas of ‘decency’ – they were hardly likely to portray themselves as obviously pregnant.

As time went on and connoiseurship and ‘art history’ became a thing I don’t think it’s too much of an exaggeration to say that the arbiters of high culture in the paternalistic (at best, misogynistic at worst) society of Europe were intimidated by the female power inherent in the creation of the human race. The other side of that coin is the (slightly titillating) sense of the beauty, magic and wonder of pregnancy that the pro-female (philogynist? There must be a word) Austrian Gustav Klimt brought to art with Hope I. Beautiful though that is, Klimt’s vision isn’t really so far from the pure virgin/corrupt whore binary of medieval times, especially when you see his beautiful female figure of hope and renewal glowing against a background of death and peril. It really only when women enter the art world in greater numbers that the symbolic and magical aspects of motherhood are reconciled with the more sombre, earthly spirituality that Christianity preferred to represent in a dying man and that pregnant women can just be pregnant women.

For me, Paula Modersohn-Becker – one of my favourite painters – is the artist of pregnancy and childbirth and a painting like her Reclining Mother and Child II (1907) shows all of the human aspects that were embodied in the contorted Christian images of the Virgin Mary, crucifixion and Christ’s rebirth. In her self-portraits, the magic of Klimt without the titillating overtones, the fragility and peril of the older periods and the prosaic facts of pregnancy and what it does, good and bad, to the body, are all acknowledged. For once, it doesn’t seem ironic, only tragic, that Modersohn-Becker would be one of the many thousands of women of her era to die from complications shortly after giving birth.

Paula Modersohn-Becker – Reclining Mother & Child II (1906)

But once the reality had been captured, where to go from there? Anywhere, essentially; after Paula Modersohn-Becker pregnancy becomes just a subject, if a special one; art as creation representing creation. That’s a lofty way of putting it, but for the generation of German artists that followed, ‘realism’ was the whole point, some of the time at least. If Paula Modersohn-Becker represented pregnancy from the point of view of experience, capturing both its beauty and discomfort, Otto Dix the arch-realist gives us just the discomfort. His pregnant mothers are almost all exhausted working class women, heavy, swollen, weighed down by their burden. It’s a beautifully-observed point of view, and an empathetic one, but possibly a very male one too. Although Dix claimed, possibly sincerely, “I’m not that obsessed with making representations of ugliness. Everything I’ve seen is beautiful.” he nevertheless took a definite pride in shocking viewers with his art. As he also said; “All art is exorcism. I paint dreams and visions too; the dreams and visions of my time. Painting is the effort to produce order; order in yourself. There is much chaos in me, much chaos in our time.” By the time Dix painted these pictures he was a father himself, but although his paintings of his family reveal a more tender, if just as incisive, aspect to his art. When he paints these mothers-to-be, with their hard lives in the terminally unstable Weimar Republic, he paints as a pitiless observer, knowing that his work was challenging and confrontational to the generally conservative audience of his time; a time when, like ours, forces of intolerance and conservatism were closing in on the freedom embodied in art this truthful. It’s notable that, while dealing in the same harsh realities as Dix, but with a socially conscious, rather than clinical eye, the artist Käthe Kollwitz gives her women a more studiedly pitiable, though no less ‘realistic’ aura.

But the fact that Dix’s realism, though ‘objective’ was dramatically heightened is highlighted by a comparison between two paintings, one by Dix and the other by his female student Gussy Hippold-Ahnet, painted in 1931/2 and of – I think – the same model. In Dix’s painting, his most famous painting of a pregnant woman, the mother-to-be’s face is averted, hidden in darkness and it’s her almost painful roundness and heaviness that is the focus of the picture. In Hippold-Ahnet’s painting, far less dramatically, the mother sits more or less neatly, looking big but not unhappy. It’s a less dynamic and less assured piece of work – but is it any less real? In Dix’s realism, reality is generally harsh and pitiless, with no veneer of politeness or sentimentality. But although that represents a kind of underlying truth, especially about nature, people are often savage and cruel are nevertheless just as often also polite and sentimental. Gussy’s painting seems less powerful, but she is not showing us, as Dix seems to be, a faceless being representing the eternal, but rarely-remarked-on hardship involved in the joyous business of continuing the human species. Instead, sh3 shows us a woman who happens to be pregnant; both paintings are realistic, both are objective and, as with the symbolic sacrifice of Christ and the eternally recurring Easter bunny, both display different aspects of the truth.

Otto Dix – Pregnant Woman (1931) & Gussy Hippold-Ahnert – Pregnant Woman (1932)

Since the 1920s, attitudes towards pregnancy and women have fluctuated but female artists are no longer the exception within the art world and so women in art can be women in art and not women as a symbols in art. And although male artists have continued – and why not? – to paint pregnant sitters (Lucian Freud’s Pregnant Girl is a beautiful, not uncomplicated example), not surprisingly women do it better. And while I’m not sure if my favourites – Alice Neel and Paula Rego spring to mind – add anything in terms of content and meaning to Paula Modersohn-Becker’s example, what they do add is more experience, wider experience and therefore bring a truer reflection of the source and the central experience of humanity to the world. Regardless of whether or not one believes in a god, everyone believes in that creation story; which is kind of more important than an old, bearded man, a young, sacrificed man and a bird; but it doesn’t matter, there’s room in art for everything. Anyway, enjoy your chocolate eggs.

Paula Rego – The First Mass in Brazil (1993)

Bonus picture: my favourite bunny in art: detail from Piero di Cosimo’s Venus, Mars & Cupid (1505)

forget my fate: saints and sex workers; the art of violence & martyrdom

In a way, this article concerns religious art, though the person who wrote it has no religious beliefs whatsoever. But when people really, passionately, even if unconsciously, believe – in a religion, a philosophy, an idea – that belief imbues the works they create with the power of human feeling. Art, music, architecture, literature, objects; that power that is retained whether or not the observer accepts or understands the ideas that are living within those things. That’s my opinion anyway; I may not believe in the supernatural, but I do believe the ‘natural’ contains magic of its own.

Adam Elsheimer – The Stoning of St Stephen, 1603 (detail)

So anyway; when, in Purcell’s 1688 opera Dido and Aeneas, the dying Queen of Carthage sings Nahum Tate’s beautiful words, “Remember me, but forget my fate”, she is articulating something that was then becoming, and to some extent remains a kind of ideal as humanity tried, perhaps pointlessly, to distance itself from death. Caught in a pincer movement between the Reformation, which had eliminated much of the rich mythology of religion in its determination to reduce the clutter and distance between human beings and their God, and the dawning of what would become the age of reason, which sought to cast off the shadow of crude medieval brutality and superstition, death, once an unavoidable and largely accepted part of daily life, had become something akin to what it is today. That is, entirely acceptable – even celebrated, in fiction and entertainment, in real life it’s preferably kept out of sight and out of mind as far as is possible. But although the impulse to distance oneself from the more viscerally negative aspects of life is understandable, it’s almost the opposite of the way that people, for a couple of centuries at least, related to saints.

Saints have remained celebrated through the years to some extent, but still, since their medieval heyday they have found themselves playing a gradually diminishing role in Western European society. Interestingly though, while Christianity lost much of its cast of characters and stories through the ages, what it never lost in the Reformation – quite the opposite in fact – is that key idea which saints’ lives so often embodied: misery now, rewards later. And it was this, despite the apparent opposition of the two ideologies, which made Christianity and all of the Abrahamic religions such successful facilitators, or carriers (in the pharmaceutical sense) of capitalism. But, while saints faded from the vital figures of the middle ages into their current, more modest position, they remained venerated, if not worshipped, even in the Protestant faith, and still played a vital role in Catholic countries. That being so, plenty of the somewhat harrowing and graphic art generated in their names in earlier years survives; and rightly so.

Take for example Adam Elseheimer’s 1603 Stoning of St Stephen. As a German artist working in Catholic Rome, Elseheimer’s position may have been anomalous, but no faith of any kind is required to understand and empathise with the young saint’s fate. We may not (or we may) share his implied, rather than shown, exultation at the parting of the clouds and the glimpse of heaven beyond, but we can recognise his pain, fear and loneliness. We’ve seen it many times, not only in cinema and in literature, but even more in news reports and photographs or, if we are unlucky, as eyewitnesses to (or victims of) real events. This painting make me think of the harrowing footage, a few years back, of prisoners being beheaded by Islamic State fighters, but they have echoes too, in those everyday acts of violence in which there are, thankfully, usually no deaths – but rarely any obvious sign of divine intervention either.

detail of St Sebastian being clubbed to death by Master WB (probably Wolfgang Beurer, c.1500)

One of the most strikingly contemporary-feeling examples of the art of martyrdom is the series of Scenes from the life of St Sebastian in the Cathedral Museum, Mainz, painted by Master WB (probably the Middle Rhenish painter and engraver Wolfgang Beurer). St Sebastian is one of the most often-painted of saints, usually shown as a kind of surrogate Jesus, young and beautiful, but pierced by (sometimes a lot of) arrows. But the whole point of that part of his legend, is that the arrows didn’t kill him. Tended by St Irene of Rome (in the baroque era the healing of St Sebastian was painted quite often; there are some very beautiful and moving pictures, like the famous Georges de la Tour painting from 1650, and my favourite, by Hendrick Ter Brugghen, from a little earlier) he recovered, and went about his saintly business.

Unusually though, Beurer’s cycle of paintings takes the story past the Christ-like recovery of Sebastian and through to his eventual death, after he journeyed to see the Emperor Diocletian and scold him about his sinful life. This time, the young saint was clubbed to death and didn’t recover. This is a very different death from the ceremonial, iconic execution by arrows. There’s a sense of solemnity, of procedural, if dubious, legality that affords the victim of a firing squad a kind of Christ-like dignity – in paintings at least. There’s no way to make a clubbing to death look dignified though, and Beurer/Master WB doesn’t try. Instead he shows the by now pitifully uncomposed figure of the saint being beset by three cheerfully brutish soldiers with beautifully painted lead clubs.

Hendrik Ter Brugghen -St Sebastian tended by St Irene, 1625

Sebastiano del Piombo’s Martyrdom of St Agatha 1520 (technically doesn’t feature her martyrdom)

St Agatha, like Sebastian, is unusual in that her actual martyrdom – technically, she died in prison at some unspecified time later, after being healed by St Peter – is never pictured. Instead what is shown, essentially for titillating reasons, as horrendous as that is, is not even her torture, where her body was torn with hooks, but only the specific detail of her breasts being cut or torn off.
But although her death seems rarely to have been depicted, there are paintings of the healing of St Agatha in prison by St Peter. Partly this might be because of the two-saints-for-the-price-of-one nature of the image, but perhaps more importantly it afforded the artist another opportunity to show female nudity without fearing religious censure.

detail of St Agatha healed by St Peter in prison by an unknown Neapolitan painter of the early 17th century

Although these paintings – Heinrich Vogtherr’s Martyrdom of St Erasmus (1516) is another great example – are full of religious feeling, it’s far easier as a secular person (or as this secular person) to respond emotionally to a painting of a martyrdom than it is to the ultimate martyrdom of the crucifixion of Christ. Jesus is of course something more than a human being, and though we are supposed to respond to his suffering in a human way, he’s still god after all; he presumably planned it and he can take it. Saints though, are different. The point may be the same – suffering holy people, relating to Christ as their father, in the same way that Christ related to god/himself as his – but these are just human beings. They may be idealised by artists, as they were in their official hagiographies, but they are supposed to be relatable for ordinary, unsaintly people.

Heinrich Vogtherr – the Martyrdom of St Erasmus, 1516 (detail)

Many artists captured the loneliness of Christ on the cross, but the loneliness of Christ, even alone in the dark, is qualitatively different from that of the martyr saints. In their last moments, the saints are usually closely surrounded by their enemies, who are of course also their fellow, imperfect human beings. The pain of Christ, too, tends, for the most part, to be a remote and rarefied thing; it’s familiar to everyone, in an almost neutralised way, from living the cultural landscape of western society. But the pain of the saints is something we recognise in a more direct way. It’s unlikely, I hope, that many people reading this, have first-hand experience of fatal stonings, mutilations, disembowelings or bludgeonings, but these saints, with their looks of glazed shock and their vividly painted blood, are a figures we have become used to in other, secular contexts.

Francisco de Zurbarán St Agatha, c.1630-33 (detail)

It’s fair to assume that these saints wanted to be remembered. But would they – and there are many, many more of them in addition to the few I’ve shown; from the big names like St Matthew and St John the Baptist (beheaded), to St Peter and St Andrew (crucified) to the more obscure, like Saints Cosmas and Damian (beheaded by pagans) and St Ursula (shot with an arrow by the Huns) to the theatrically horrific, like St Bartholomew (flayed and beheaded) and St Erasmus (intestines pulled out with a spindle) – have wanted to be remembered for the nature of their deaths? Even divorced from these kind of narrative paintings, the saints were rarely depicted without their sometimes bizarre attributes, the strangest ones that spring to mind being the aforementioned Agatha, in a more serene setting, bearing her severed breasts on a plate, or Saint Peter of Verona, normally depicted with the cleaver still embedded in his skull.

After the Age of Enlightenment, these explicit, visceral images more or less disappeared from western art for a couple of centuries, despite the occasional politically-motivated flashback like Jaques-Louis David’s Death of Marat (1793). Unexpectedly, they returned in a slightly altered and ideologically almost opposite, and certainly far more secular form in interwar Germany, made vivid by the horrors of World War One. But although a comparison with the Lustmord (sex murder) paintings of the Weimar Republic seems like, and possibly is, a flippant and/or blasphemous one, it feels valid, especially in relation to the paintings of St Agatha with their uncomfortably conflicting motives and coolly horrific imagery.

Paintings like George Grosz’s John the Sex Murderer (1918) and Otto Dix’s horrific Lustmord (especially the lost 1922 painting that exists only in black and white photos) have parallels with St Agatha, the painting I want to briefly talk about is less blatantly sensationalist and to my eyes at least has something of the heartbreaking empathy of Wolfgang Beurer’s St Stephen. Like Dix’s but less confrontational, Lustmord (1930) by the great Neue Sachlichkeit painter and photographer Karl Hubbuch, shows only the aftermath of the murder, rather than the act itself. But rather than losing force because of its relative restraint, Hubbuch’s image is imbued with all of the loneliness, fear, isolation and fragility seen in the face of Elseheimer’s St Stephen and the pitiful battered corpse of Beurer’s.

In the end, whatever the means or motivation for these pictures, what we are left with is the pictures themselves; and if they should survive beyond their meanings and attributions, people will, perhaps sadly, always be able to see what they represent. This is the opposite of art for art’s sake; but then, to appreciate the form of – for example – Wilfred Owen’s war poetry and study that form and its mechanics without taking into account what that apparatus is for is to miss the point. Likewise, the skill of a painter like Beurer, whose intention was to make the holy real and relatable, or of Elseheimer, or Sebastiano del Piombo, or even Karl Hubbuch, wasn’t there solely in an effort to amaze the viewer with the painter’s skill or advertise their technical ability.

Lorenzo Lotto – St Peter of Verona (1549)

It may be that these sex workers and saints would have preferred, like Purcell and Tate’s Dido of Carthage, to be remembered, but to have their fates forgotten – but instead forget that you know the titles and subjects of these pictures. These people were, as many people still are, tortured, killed and disposed of without sympathy or ceremony. It would be nice if they were all remembered.

the cult of maimed perfection

*firstly, may change this title as it possibly sounds like I’m saying the opposite of what I’m saying*

That western culture¹ has issues with womens’ bodies² is not a new observation. But it feels like the issues are getting stranger. Recently there have been, both on TV (where the time of showing is important) and online (where it isn’t), cancer awareness campaigns where women who have had mastectomies are shown topless (in the daytime). This is definitely progress – but it simultaneously says two different things with very different implications.
On the one hand it’s – I would say obviously – very positive; it is of course normal to have a life-changing (or life saving) operation and the scars that come with it, and it can only be helpful to minimise the fear surrounding what is a daunting and scary prospect for millions of people. Normalising in the media things that are already within the normal experience of people – especially when those things have tended to be burdened with taboos – is generally the right thing to do. These scars, after all are nothing to be ashamed of or that should be glossed over or hidden from view. I hope that not many people would argue with that. But at the same time, isn’t it also saying, ‘yes it’s completely normal and fine for a woman to be seen topless on daytime TV, or on popular social media sites, as long as she’s had her breasts³ cut off?’ That seems less positive to me.

¹ Western culture isn’t alone in this, but ‘write about what you know’ (not always good advice, but still). I’m also aware that this whole article could be seen as a plea for more nudity. I’m not sure that’s what I mean

² might as well say it, this article deals mainly with old fashioned binary distinctions, but misogyny applies equally to trans women and I think what I say about men probably applies equally to trans men.

³ or her nipples, on social media

Raphael – The Three Graces (1505) nudity acceptable due to classical context

Essentially, this positive and enlightened development seems to be inadvertently(?) reinforcing ancient and (surely!) redundant arguments, in a completely confused way. ‘Non-sexual nudity’, whatever that means, has always been okay with the establishment(s) in some circumstances. Now, one could argue from the context (cancer awareness campaign) that the nudity is desexualised, and I think that’s why it is allowed to be aired at any time of day. In fact, the Ofcom (UK TV regulating authority) rules on nudity – which are aimed at ‘protecting the under 18s’ from nudity, a strange a concept, as it always has been*, are pretty simple:

Nudity

1.21: Nudity before the watershed [9 pm in the UK], or when content is likely to be accessed by children […] must be justified by the context.

*Interestingly, Ofcom’s rules about nudity are listed between their rules about ‘Sexual behaviour’ and their rules about ‘Exorcism, the occult and the paranormal’

So presumably, Ofcom (rightly) considers this context to be justified, because the naked body is not being presented in a sexual context. But, at the same time, one thing the cancer awareness film demonstrates – and which I think it’s partly supposed to demonstrate – is that there’s nothing undesirable about the female body post-mastectomy. I mean, possibly that’s just me, projecting the notorious male gaze onto the subject, as if that’s the determining factor in what attractiveness is or isn’t, but let’s ignore that. Of course, the people that devised and created the film are not the same people that determine what can be shown on TV or online and when, but they would surely have been aware of the rules that they are working within.

Even accepting that it’s permitted to show a topless woman on TV during the daytime because it’s ‘de-sexualised nudity’, why is that better? Two opposing sides of that argument, a puritanical, right-wing one and a feminist one might both be (rightly?) skeptical of me, as a heterosexual male writing about this. But if women have to be de-sexualised to be regarded equally, or taken seriously, to not be somehow reduced by the male gaze (or damaging to the child’s gaze, since nudity on TV tends to be fine after children’s standard bedtimes and on the internet is theoretically policed by child locks) then that seems no less problematic – and not even very different – from the traditional, paternalistic Western view which sees the Virgin Mary as the ultimate exemplar of female-kind. And if sex or desire is itself the problem then not allowing specifically female nudity is also, typically, reducing the visibility of women for what is in essence a problem of male behaviour.

Sebastiano del Piombo – The Martyrdom of St Agatha (1520)

It’s worth looking at the fact that nudity is even an issue in the first place, considering that we all privately live with it, or in it, every day of our lives. In many world cultures of course, it isn’t and never has been a problem, unless/until Westerners have interfered with and poisoned those cultures, but it’s widespread enough elsewhere too, to be a human, rather than purely western quirk. It possibly has a little to do with climate, but it definitely has a lot to do with religion.

But the fact is that, in Western culture, even before the era of the Impressionists and their selectively nude women or the (as it now looks, very selectively) permissive society of the 1960s, female nudity has been perfectly acceptable to depict for hundreds of years; as long as the nude female is either mutilated (say, a virtuous martyr like the Roman suicide Lucretia), the victim of alien (non-Christian) assailants (various saints*) or, turning the tables, if she is a heathen herself (various classical figures, plus Biblical villains like Salome; a favourite subject with the same kind of sex & violence frisson as Lucretia)

* I didn’t realise when I posted this article that today (5th February) is the Feast day of St Agatha, the patron saint of – among other things – breast cancer. I’m not a believer in the supernatural or supreme beings, but that’s nice.

Even in Reformation Germany – surely one of the least frisky periods in the history of Western civilisation – in the private chambers of the privileged male viewer, nudity – especially female nudity – was there in abundance, providing it came with various kinds of extenuating nonsense; dressed up (or rather, not dressed up) in the trappings of classical antiquity. Okay, so maybe a woman can’t be flawless like Christ, but she can be nude and beautiful too, as long as she is being murdered, or stabbing herself to preserve her virtue, or is sentenced to everlasting damnation.

Lucas Cranach the Elder – Lucretia (1528)

Men could, in art, and can on TV or anywhere else, be more or less naked (admittedly with a fig-leaf or something similar) at pretty much any time because – I assume – of Jesus. Otherwise how to explain it? The male chest is arguably less aesthetically pleasing than the female one, and certainly less utilitarian in the raising of infants, but in deciding that it is less sexual, our culture makes lots of assumptions and takes directives that come from religious, patriarchal roots.

The dissonance between the ways that female and male nudity are treated in our culture has its roots in Christianity and its iconography and although in the UK we’re technically the children of the Reformation, what’s striking is how little difference there really was between the way nudity was treated in the Catholic renaissance and the Protestant one.

In both Catholic and Protestant cultures, the art that was not solely designed for the private, adult (male) gaze was almost entirely religious. Popes and Puritans both found themselves in the same odd position; Jesus must be perfect and preferably therefore beautiful, whatever that meant at the time – but more than that, it would be blasphemous – literally criminal – not to portray Christ as beautiful.⁴But in addition to being perfect, he must, crucially, be human. Understandably, but ironically, it seemed the obvious way to depict human beauty and perfection was without the burden of clothes. The human aspect is after all how the people of the Renaissance could (and I presume people still can) identify with Christ, in a way that they never do with God in other contexts, where that identification would be as blasphemous as a deliberately ugly Christ.

But how was one supposed to regard the nearly nude, technically beautiful body of Christ? With reverence, of course. But revering and worshipping the naked beautiful body of a perfect human being is not something that a misanthropic (or if that’s too strong, homo-skeptic⁵) religion can do lightly. Helpfully, the part of Christianity that puts the (nearly) naked figure at the centre of our attention is the human sacrifice ritual of the crucifixion and its aftermath. That bloody, pain-filled ritual allows the viewer to look at Jesus with pity and empathy and tempers (one would hope; but people) the quality of desire that the naked beautiful body of a perfect human being might be expected to engender. And to that Renaissance audience, the reason for that desire was another, but far more ambiguous subject for artists; Adam and Eve.

^{4 There are special cases though, see below re Grunewald}

^{5 Doesn’t Alan Partridge call himself homoskeptic at some point? What I mean is – and I’m sure many Christians would take serious issue with this – that Christianity/the Christian God is in theory all-accepting of humans and their frailties, but somehow humans just as they are never seem to be quite good enough to escape negative judgement. Not just for things like murder or adultery that are within their power to not do, but things that are in their nature like envy and greed, and which were placed in their nature by God. And then, making a human being who must be killed for the things that other human beings have done or will by their nature do seems on the one hand, not very different from a horror movie pagan blood sacrifice cult and, on the other, kind of misanthropic}

Hans Baldung Grien’s slightly diabolical looking Adam & Eve (1531)

Adam and Eve were a gift to the Renaissance man seeking pervy thrills from his art collection because they are supposed to be sexy. Here are the first humans, made, like Christ, in God’s image and therefore outwardly perfect; and, to begin with, happily nude. But in (almost immediately) sullying the human body, Adam and Eve are fallible where Christ is not. But how to depict the people that brought us the concept of desire except as desirable? Because they are not only not our saviours, but the actual opposite, their nudity can afford to be alluring, as long as the lurking threat of that attraction is acknowledged.

Alongside the problems of the iconography in art came the practical problems of making it; and I think that one of the reasons that, of the four main ‘Turtles’ of the Italian Renaissance,⁶Raphael was elevated to the status he enjoyed for centuries, is that his nude women suggested that he might actually have seen some nude women. For all their athletic/aesthetic beauty, figures like Michelangelo’s Night (see below) and his Sistine Chapel Sibyls are the product of someone who found that the church’s strictures on female nudity (no nude models) happened to strike a chord with his own ideas of aesthetic perfection. Likewise, Leonardo’s odd hybrid woman, the so-called Monna Vanna (possibly posed for by one of his male assistants) seems to demonstrate an uncharacteristic lack of curiosity on the artist’s part.

6 childish

Michelangelo – Night, Basilica di San Lorenzo in Florence (1526-31) and Leonardo(?) Monna Vanna (c.1500)

One way around the problem of naked human beauty was – as it seems still to be – to mutilate the body. Paintings like Mattias Grünewald’s agonised, diseased-looking Jesus (perhaps the most moving depiction of Christ, designed to give comfort and empathy to sufferers of skin diseases) and, on (mostly) a slightly shallower level, the myriad Italian paintings of the martyrdom of St Sebastian, do much the same as those Lucretias and St Agathas; they show the ideal of the body as god intended it, while punishing its perfection so that we can look at it without guilt.

This feels, for all its beauty, like the art of sickness. What kind of response these St Sebastians are supposed to evoke can only be guessed at; and the guesses are rarely ones the original owners of the paintings would have liked. Empathy with and reverence for the martyred saint, obviously; but while Grunewald’s Christ reflects and gives back this sense of shared humanity with the weight of his tortured body and his human suffering, St Sebastian gives us, what? Hope? Various kinds of spiritual (it’s in the eyes) and earthly (relaxed pose and suggestive loincloth) desire?

Grunewald’s agonised Christ from the Isenheim Altarpiece (1515) and one of Pietro Perugino’s fairly comfortable-with-his-situation St Sebstians (1495)

There are lots of fascinating themes and sub-themes here, but for now, there you have it; Christ may have, spiritually, redeemed all of humankind, but aesthetically speaking, women remain (as they say in Narnia) ‘daughters of Eve’.

Nowadays, tired presumably of the restrictions on their lives, men have liberated themselves enough that we don’t even need St Sebastian’s spiritual gaze, or a hint of damnation, to justify our nudity. In what remains an essentially patriarchal society, just advertising a razor, or underwear, or perfume, or chocolate, or taking part in a swimming event, or even just being outside on a warm day is enough to justify our bodies, as long as they don’t veer too far from that Christlike ideal, and as long as they aren’t visibly excited. But even now, women – who can look like humanity’s mother Eve, but not our reborn father Christ – can be more or less naked too, at any time of day they like (on TV or online at least); just as long as they are mutilated.

inside the doll’s house

Thomas Braithwaite of Ambleside making his will (1607, artist unknown)

The dying man glows with sickness in his mildewy-looking bed, the light seeming to emanate from where he sits, crammed into the airless, box-like room. He signs his will while his friend looks on intently with concern and restrained grief.

The artist who painted Thomas Braithwaite of Ambleside making his will in 1607 may not have been considered important enough as an artist, (still a person of relatively low social status in northern Europe, though this was starting to change with painters like Rubens and his pupil Anthony Van Dyck) to warrant signing the picture or having their name recorded at all, except perhaps in the household accounts – but they were important as a witness, and the painting is itself a kind of legal document, although it’s more than that too. The great enemy of the Elizabethan and Jacobean ages wasn’t death, with which most adults would have been on very familiar terms, but disorder and chaos*; and this, despite its tragic appearance, is a painting devoted to the age’s great virtue; order. Both the dying lord (an inscription records the date of his death (Thomas Braithwaite of gentry stock, died 22 December, 1607, aged 31) and his friend George Preston of Holker are identifiable to those who knew them by their likenesses and to those who didn’t, by their coats-of-arms. Biblical texts tell us that Thomas Braithwaite was a virtuous man, but so does the painting itself; this is a man who, even while he lay dying, took care of his business. His passing is tragic, but, he reassures us, it will cause only grief and not inconvenience.

*see EMW Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture, Pelican Books, 1972, p.24

We talk about religious faith now as a kind of choice as much as a belief system, but for all its paranoia about atheism –and all the subsequent romanticism about that era’s new spirit of humanism – the Tudor and Stewart ages had inherited a world view in which the existence, not only of God and Heaven and Hell, but the essential hierarchy of existence, was more or less taken for granted. We may differentiate arbitrarily now between religion and superstition, but for the people in these cramped and airless paintings there was no real contradiction between, say Christianity and astrology, because in accepting without exception the primacy of god the creator, it all works out in the end – everything that has ever existed and everything that will ever exist, already exists. Perhaps human beings aren’t supposed to divine the future, but God has written it and the signs – comets, unseasonal weather, the movement of the stars and the behaviour of animals – are there to be read and interpreted by anyone with the nerve to do so.

John Souch – Sir Thomas Aston at his Wife’s Deathbed (1635)

In an off-kilter, vertigo-inducing room that seems almost to unfurl outwards from the skull at its centre, an illogical space hung with black velvet, a man and his son, looking outwards, but not at us, stand by the deathbed of their wife and mother, while a glamorous young woman meets our gaze from where she sits, apparently on the floor at the foot of the bed.

There’s virtue in this painting too, but mostly this one really is about death. It’s there at the centre, where the lord’s hand sits on a skull, recalling the kind of drama which was then passing out of fashion, just as this kind of painting was. The skull, like the black-draped cradle (with its inscription that reads He who sows in flesh reaps bones), acts as a vanitas motif, focussing the viewer’s attention on the shortness of life, but also recalls the enthusiastically morbid writing of men like John Webster and Thomas Middleton. Sir Thomas and his wife had grown up in an England where plays like Middleton’s Revenger’s Tragedy often featured soliloquies over the remains of loved ones. Sir Thomas Aston is not being consumed by a desire for revenge, but his hand on the skull can’t help recalling Hamlet, or even more so, anti-heroes like Middleton’s Vindice, who opens The Revenger’s Tragedy contemplating the skull of his fiancée;

My study’s ornament, thou shell of death/once the bright face of my betrothed lady/When life and beauty naturally fill’d out/these ragged imperfections,/when two heaven-pointed diamonds were set/ in those unsightly rings – then t’was a face/so far beyond the artificial shine/of any woman’s bought complexion
The Revenger’s Tragedy, Act1 Sc 1, in Thomas Middleton, Five Plays ed. Bryan Loughrey & Neil Taylor, Penguin Books, 1988 p.73

Sir Thomas, unlike Vindice, displays the correct behaviour for a grieving man with an orphaned young son – not, the deadpan ‘stiff upper lip’ restraint of later generations of British gentlemen – though he is a dignified figure, but the kind of behaviour noted in books of etiquette like the anonymous Bachelor’s Banquet of 1603, which states that if

in the midst of this their mutual love and solace, it chanceth she dies, whereat he grieves so extremely, that he is almost beside himself with sorrow: he mourns, not only in his apparel for a show, but unfeignedly, in his very heart, and that so much, that he shuns all places of pleasure, and all company, lives solitary, and spends the time in daily complaints and moans, and bitterly bewailing the loss of so good a wife, wherein no man can justly blame him, for it is a loss worthy to be lamented.

The Bachelor’s Banquet in The Laurel Masterpieces of World Literature – Elizbethan Age, ed. Harry T. Moore, Dell Books, 1965, p.324)

It is perhaps this behaviour we should read in Sir Thomas’s sideways glance, not the hauteur of the nobleman but the remoteness of the recently bereaved. His black sash is adorned with a death’s head brooch; he and his young son (also Thomas) are to be considered men of the world; to their left a globe sits on a tapestry decorated with elephants. But all their worldly knowledge and faith is no help here; the two Astons grasp a cross staff bearing the inscription, The seas can be defined, the earth can be measured, grief is immeasurable. Given this display of intense, but restrained grief, the smiling girl – the only person who makes eye contact with us – is a strange figure, despite her beautiful mourning clothes, and it may be that she is the lady in the bed, as she looked in happier times, there to show us, and remind father and son, of what they are missing.

David Des Granges – The Saltonstall Family c.1636-7

On what looks like a shallow stage opening onto a bed in a cupboard, a strangely-scaled set of figures pose stiffly, only the older child meeting our eye with a knowing smirk, although the strangely capsule-like baby seems aware of us too.

As in the Souch painting, the father figure dominates, just as they dominated their households; the household being a microcosm of the state, the state itself a microcosm of the universe.* Mr Saltonstall, despite being at the apex of a pyramid of hierarchy that allowed absolute power, does not look devoid of compassion or warmth – indeed, he has had himself depicted holding the hand of his son, who himself mirrors (in, it has to be said, a less benign-looking way) this gesture of casual mastery, holding his little sister’s wrist, demonstrating just how the links in this chain of family work. And the family is inside the kind of house familiar nowadays to the heritage tourist as a mirror of the world that produced it; mansions like overgrown doll’s houses, big on the outside, but strangely cramped and illogical inside, with peculiar little wood-panelled rooms and an ancient smell of damp.

Dorothea Tanning – A Family Portrait (1954)

The nakedness of the power structure here isn’t subtle; and it isn’t supposed to be, because it wasn’t there to be questioned but accepted. Virtue lies in following god’s system of organisation, any suggestion to the contrary would make it an entirely different kind of painting. And indeed when painting – and painters – achieved a higher social standing in the century that followed, the messages become more subtle, only reappearing in something like this blatant form again in western art in the post-Freudian era, with a painting like Dorothea Tanning’s 1954 A Family Portrait. But Tanning’s painting is a knowing representation of a reality she was aware of but which had the force of tradition alone. Its appearance in the mid-17th century reflects the reality of the age; the truth, if not the only truth.

*EMW Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture, p.98-9

Richard Dadd – The Fairy Feller’s Master Stroke (1855-64)

The first impression, looking at these kinds of paintings, is something like looking at fairyland through the distorting lens of Richard Dadd’s insanity centuries later; comical and disturbing, familiar and illogical. These painters of the Elizabethan and Jacobean tradition (their art died out at around the same time as Charles I did in the middle of the seventeeth century) – Souch, Des Granges, William Larkin and their many nameless contemporaries – were at the tail end of a dying tradition that would be replaced by something more spacious, gracious, modern and ‘realistic’; but ‘realistic’ is a loaded word and it’s entirely likely that this older tradition captures their world more accurately. We don’t need a time machine (though it would be nice) – a visit to almost any castle, palace or stately home is enough to confirm that the velvet curtains and classical paraphernalia of a Rubens or Van Dyck portrait does not tell the whole story of their era, even among the tiny demographic who their art served. It is a world that we would probably find dark and claustrophobic; witness the smallness of furniture, the lowness of the doorways and the dark paintings of dead ancestors, and this – regardless of the fact that it is partly due to what would later be seen as incompetence* – is what is preserved in this tradition of painting, as well as in the homes these people left behind.

* it’s a matter of fact that the average artist drawing a superhero comic in the 20th/21st century has a better grasp of mathematical perspective – and the idea of perspective at all – than even the more accomplished Elizabethan or Jacobean portrait painter

William Larkin: a great painter who could have learned something from John Buscema & Stan Lee’s ‘How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way’ (1978)

This is the kind of art that the Renaissance and its aftermath is supposed to have made obsolete – but though the word ‘art’ may owe its origin to its nature as something artificial, it also tells the truth, or a truth, regardless of its creators’ intentions. But if I’m implying that it’s realistic rather than idealistic, what does ‘realistic’ mean? Often when deriding ‘modern art’ (a meaningless term, since the art it usually refers to is often post-dated by art – like Jack Vettriano for instance – that is not considered to be ‘modern’) the assumption is that modern art is kind of aberration, a straying from a realistic norm*. But when looked at as a whole (or as much of a whole as is possible from a particular cultural viewpoint) it becomes quickly apparent that art that is ‘realistic’ in the narrowly photographic sense is a tiny island in the vast ocean of art history – and what is more, relies on ideas – such as the opposition of ‘abstract’ and ‘realistic’, that may have no currency whatsoever outside of the Western tradition.

visions of war: Picasso’s Guernica (1937) and Robert Taylor’s Struggle For Supremacy (2001)

Even within Western cultures, the idea that photographic equates to experiential is debatable; despite the persistence (outside of academia) of the idea that Picasso was primarily an artist who painted noses on the wrong side of heads etc, a painting like his Guernica clearly has more in common with images of war as it was experienced in the 20th century – even vicariously through cinema and TV – than the kind of ‘war art’ that my granddad had on his walls, beautiful paintings in a tradition that lives on through artists like Robert Taylor, visions of war where the fear and panic becomes excitement and drama, an altogether easier thing to be entertained by.

*A classic example of this attitude came from Philip Larkin, who, when writing about modernism in jazz, digressed to cover all of the arts, noting

All that I am saying is that the term ‘modern’ when applied to art, has a more than chronological meaning: it denotes a quality of irresponsibility peculiar to this [ie the 20th] century… the artist has become over-concerned with his material (hence an age of technical experiment) and, in isolation, has busied himself with the two principal themes of modernism, mystification and outrage. Philip Larkin, All What Jazz, Faber & Faber, 1970, p.23

Picasso was trying to capture the feel of his century – but most of the great courtly artists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries – the Renaissance masters who became household names – were trying to capture something loftier, to escape the more earthy, earthly aspects of theirs, not least because they were the first generation to attain something like the status that Picasso would later attain; artists as creators and inventors, not craftsmen and recorders. And therefore that feeling of the life of the times shines through more vividly in the work of artists like John Souch and David Des Granges. The 17th century was a time when the world – even the world inhabited by the aristocracy – was far smaller than it is today in one sense, but the wider world seemed correspondingly bigger and more dangerous, but also perhaps richer or deeper, just as these people – often married by 12 or 14, learned – if they were allowed to learn – by 20, old by 40, were both smaller and bigger than we are.

This kind of painting, part portrait, part narrative, was uniquely suited to the lives it recorded, and in one late example its strengths can be contrasted with those of the baroque style that swept it away. In 1613, Nicholas Lanier was a rising star in the English court, composer of a masque for the marriage of the Earl of Somerset. Around this time he was painted by an unknown artist, in the semi-emblematic tradition of artists like John Souch. There are references – the classical statue, the pen and paper with its mysterious inscription (RE/MI/SOL/LA) that highlight that this man is more than just a lutenist, but at the same time he is most definitely that, and the artist has taken care to render realistically Lanier’s muscles as he holds the instrument; an artist yes, but a workman of sorts too. By 1632, Lanier was the Master of the King’s Music and a trusted envoy of King Charles, who even sent him on picture-buying missions. And it is this gentleman that Van Dyck captures; aloof, authoritative, not someone we can picture sweating over a difficult piece of music.

Nicholas Lanier (1613) by an unknown artist (left) and Nicholas Lanier (1632) by Anthony van Dyck (right)

With the art of Van Dyck, the courts of Britain were to discover an ideal of aristocratic indifference which would partly define the project of British imperialism and which is, unfortunately, still with us today. But the truth of Van Dyck’s age, and those which preceded him was stranger, darker and more human. And it’s there still, in those damp-smelling big-small houses, and in the art that died with King Charles.

sleepwalking through geography – doodling and the automatic muse

a cry for help from the depths of the classroom

There are relatively few times in life when it’s possible to switch off your mind and enter a trance-like state without going out of your way to do so; but sitting in a classroom for a period (or better yet, a double period) of whatever subject it is that engages you least is one of those times. When the conditions are right – a sleepy winter afternoon in an overly warm room maybe, with darkness and heavy rain or snow outside and the classroom lights yellow and warm, the smell of damp coats hung over radiators and a particularly boring teacher – the effect can be very little short of hypnotic. The subject will be a matter of taste, for me the obvious one I detested was Maths, but I think that something like Geography or ‘Modern Studies’ (strangely vague subject name), where I wasn’t concerned so much with not understanding and/or hating it, would be the optimum ‘trance class’.

I think every school jotter i had between the ages of 5 and 18 had this on the back, and it never went un-altered

fragments of the Metallica logo. and ???

There’s nothing like school for making you examine the apparently stable nature of time; if, as logic (and the clock) states, the 60 or so minutes of hearing about ‘scarp-and-vale topography’ really was about the same length of time as our always-too-short lunch hour, or even as was spent running around the rugby pitch, then clearly logic isn’t everything, as far as the perception of human experience is concerned.

But it would not be true to say that I did nothing during these long, barren stretches of unleavened non-learning. Mostly, I doodled on my school books. Sometimes this was a conscious act, like the altering of maps with tippex to create fun new supercontinents, or the inevitable (in fact, almost ritualistic, after 7 years of Primary school) amending of the fire safety rules that were printed on the back of every jotter produced by The Fife Regional Council Education Committee. Often these were just nonsensical, but even so, favourite patterns emerged. I had a soft spot for “ire! ire! ire! anger! anger! anger!” (in the interests of transparency I should probably point out that I was almost certainly unaware at the time that ire means anger), and the more abstract “fir! fir fir! Dang! Dang! Dang!” (see?), but some things like ‘Remember Eire hunts – Eire kills’ were fairly universal. But also, there was the whiling (or willing) away of time by just doodling, in margins, on covers, or if the books didn’t have to be handed in at the end of the class, just anywhere; band logos and Eddies* and cartoon characters. Later, towards the end of my high school career, there’s a particularly detailed and baroque drawing of a train going over a bridge (something I wouldn’t have had much patience for drawing in an actual art class) which immediately summons up the vivid memory of a particularly long Geography class, and even which pen – a fine felt tip I liked but couldn’t write neatly with** – that I drew it with.

possibly not fully engaged with learning – but I do remember that this was a Geography lesson

*Eddie = ‘Eddie the head’, Iron Maiden’s beloved zombie mascot, created – and painted best – by Derek Riggs

**i.e. ‘I wrote even less neatly than usual with’

a scowling Eddie face, a strange man and some kind of tornadoes

If I could recall the things I was supposed to learn in classes this well I would have done much better at school. But the point of doodling is that it’s whatever it is your hand draws when your brain isn’t engaged; or, as André Breton put it, drawings that are ‘dictated by thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.’*
This is in fact from his definition of what surrealism is; ‘psychic automatism in its pure state’ and later, in The Automatic Message (1933) Breton went further, influenced by his reading of Freud, specifically referencing what would later become known as art brut or ‘outsider art’ – drawings by the mentally ill, visionaries, mediums and children – as ‘surrealist automatism’. Although it might seem to – well, it definitely does – give too much dignity and importance to the time-wasting scrawls of teenagers to consider them anything but ephemeral, the strange faces, swords, cubes, eyes, tornadoes and goats that littered my school books aged 12-14 or so do seem to preserve, not just the kind of pantheon almost every child/teenager has – made up of favourite bands, TV shows, cartoon characters etc – but a kind of landscape of enigmatic symbolism that comes from who-knows-where and perhaps represents nothing more than the imagination crying for help from the heart of a particularly stimulus-free desert. But in the end, that’s still something.

*André Breton, Manifesto of Surrealism 1924, published in Manifestoes of Surrealism, Ann Arbor paperbacks, tr. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane, 1972, p.26