Rubens at King's: the elephant in the chapel?

At the East End of King’s College Chapel stands Rubens’ monumental altarpiece The Adoration of the Magi. Painted c.1634 for the Dames Blanches convent in Louvain, its luminous colours and arresting nocturnal effects are familiar to all fans of A Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols, broadcast on Christmas Eve, a picturesque occasion quintessentially English in spirit.

One would hardly have guessed the controversy that surrounds its installation. While the vacuous display of intellectual self-gratification that is this year’s Turner Prize challenges the viewer only in their ability to stifle a yawn, this seemingly innocent artwork has fomented the ire of many a conservationist and Edwardian enthusiast, many calling for its removal, an opinion gaining ground among the general public. Not that this is sensible: in 1968 the floor of the East End was lowered to specifically accommodate it, demolishing Tudor brick archways (apparently recycled as crazy paving) and exhuming graves dating back to the fifteenth century. The Edwardian panelling that once covered the stonework is in storage, and the altarpiece itself is challenging to manoeuvre, taking ten men two hours to carry it across the college courtyard when it was first acquired; moreover, the terms of Major Alnatt’s bequest preclude the Rubens being displayed anywhere else, the chapel’s oblong shape and altarpiece’s colossal size not allowing for a change in position. The proverbial toothpaste cannot be put back in the tube so easily.

Many of those opposing the altarpiece today apparently hold Rubens' art in some disdain. Graham Chainey cites Joshua Reynolds’ dismissal of it as a ‘slight work’, carelessly banged out in just over a week, as if Reynolds’ aesthetic judgements are somehow infallible (just like his experiments with bitumen). Writing in the Spectator, Simon Blow, grandson of Detmar Blow, who designed the chapel’s Edwardian reredos, laments how ‘the Rubens dominates’ and ‘blank stone walls stare at you’. The acquisition, lament the critics, is the fallout of titanic egos clashing, namely Michael Jaffé, a “Rubens obsessive”. Cambridge’s first lecturer in Fine Arts and later director of the Fitzwilliam Museum, he is accused in the Spectator of bisexual promiscuity and bloody-minded arrogance. Is this deserved?

‘This munificent gift and rare addition to the worship, dignity, and beauty of the Chapel’ was how King’s described the Rubens in 1961. Kenneth Clark urged its acceptance with his watershed BBC series Civilization in production; only Nikolaus Pevsner opposed its installation. Detmar Blow’s romanticised painting from the 1900s, with warm sunlight flooding the East End, fails to capture the dismal gloom of winter months that precipitated its renovation. The ‘brown Windsor soup’ of Blow’s ‘Edwardian mannerist’ panelling, as Jaffé so aptly described it, is no great loss to the Chapel’s glorious Tudor filigree stonework. As handsome as the reconstructed stained glass is, services in the East End required a focal point at eye level.

By today’s standards, the renovation of the East End in the 1960s was certainly a botched job. The naked stone walls are too austere, and the risible reframing of the Rubens as a faux triptych (the original sold to Michael Heseltine) has something of the Ikea aesthetic, to say nothing of the desecration of the chapel's crypt. Vandalised by the IRA in the 1970s, it is kept behind absurdly distant barriers to this day, keeping the hoi-polloi at a football stadium's distance. Nevertheless, the painting as it stands does great justice to the spectacular setting of King’s, and vice-versa. Rubens’ warmly luminous palette gives colour to an otherwise forbidding architectural space, its grandiose proportions comfortably accommodated by the chapel’s soaring vaults. The combination is best appreciated during services, where art, architecture and exquisite choral singing intertwine in what could be called a Gesamtkunstwerk – a total work of art. Although flawed, the special candlelit atmosphere of evensong or Christmas Eve does much to iron out the creases.

'Regeneration': The Resurrection of Ruskin in Contemporary (Post-Postmodern?) Art

Last week, I attended back-to-back evening lectures that, unbeknownst to me, 'resurrected' the ghost of undergraduate-theses-past and, through it, brought a significant issue of current art making, display and study to the forefront of my attention.

Wednesday - Berrick Saul Auditorium and a talk on 'Ecological Aesthetics' by director of MIMA, Alistair Hudson.  Admittedly,  I knew neither what the terms 'Ecological Aesthetics' nor 'MIMA' implied, but, for that very reason, thought I should go.  This is truly one of the wonderful things about our department here at the University of York: the interests of faculty and students alike are so wide-ranging that amazingly diverse discussions await not only in every-day departmental exchanges but also in all the different speakers invited to give special lectures.  As PhD students intently (and intensely) focused on a sliver of research in a certain area, I believe the opportunity to hear something new and fresh and different is one of the great benefits of being at the University of York as a student of History of Art.  

Thursday - St. Chad's College Chapel, University of Durham and a 'college conversation' on 'Holiness, Regeneration and Beauty' featuring guest speaker and businessman, Jonathan Ruffer.  Never had I been to Durham and when fellow blogger and University of Durham alum Claudia  alerted me to the title of this talk, I could not miss the chance to not only see a new and highly acclaimed historic city, but also to hear anything to do with these three words - three words highly important to my study of nineteenth century debates on art and theology.

Durham by day...

Durham in the dark (ie...4pm!!). 

In talks that (a - I didn't know too too much about initially and (b - that at the outset seemed quite different, there was a strange, serendipitous sense of cohesion that ultimately wound itself back to an old 'friend' of mine: nineteenth century art and social theorist, Oxford Slade Lecturer, John Ruskin.

Author of celebrated books like Modern Painters, Stones of Venice, and The Two Paths (just to name a few...), John Ruskin wrote prolifically about the ancient ideals of societies and their art, their respective risings and fallings-out, and argued that they - art and social virtue - were integrally intertwined.  In an age of rapid industrial change,  Ruskin believed his times to be plunged into a darkness devoid of moral and true beauty.  He argued that his contemporaries must look to and resurrect the models of the past to make art usefully beautiful in the sense that it would inspire them to live and work and do good.  Pointing to and defending artists like J.M.W Turner and the emerging young Pre-Raphaelites as current examples of this ideal, he would continue to advocate for an art 'true to nature,' for guilds and learning and scientific enquiry, and a reverence for the craftsman, his love of intricacy, his skill.  As an undergraduate, I was inspired by his poetic love of art - through his (often lengthy, archetypal Victorian) descriptions, he merged language and image in a near seamless aesthetic expression, such that his text on art became a work of art itself.  Meshing media, meshing topics, I studied his equation of an ideal art with an ideal society with an ideal woman - what he would call a 'Queen of her Garden' or a 'Lily.'  His cohesion of purposeful, virtuous Art and purposeful, virtuous Womanhood I contrasted against Aesthetic 'Art for Art's sake' James McNeill Whistler's rather different equation of Art and Femininity - one sliver of their greater disagreement that would eventually, infamously bring them to court over libel.  Their dispute represented this broader contest within Victorian society where people struggled to find meaning for beauty and art, for themselves and their new lives in a mechanised, globally imperial world.

As Alistair Hudson would point out in his Wednesday night talk, many at the time thought Ruskin was mad - and actually, later in life, he went certifiably mad.  However, despite some of the tendencies in his writings that we see today as extraordinarily sexist and backwardly traditional, he was very very progressive - so radical as to be among the first to suggest that global warming and climate change was going to be an issue for our health and the health of nature.   It is with this eye that Hudson looks to and talked about John Ruskin in the discussion of his own museum's purpose in the industrial town of Middlesborough.  In moving art away from its autonomous reign in the museum, he is instead employing the museum, much as Ruskin would have sought to in his lectures on and about education, 'toward a lexicon of user-ship.'  By creating workshops and arranging galleries that stimulate use and interaction and engagement with art that itself is made purposefully to engage with its times and viewers, Hudsom aims to make not a neutral but an 'intersubjective interface' where the 'monolithic voice' of museums past is replaced by and encourages divergent opinion.  This way, he hopes people may not ask what art 'means' but how it is 'used' and through use, creates meaning for them in their lives, as individuals and a collective, involved, and opinionated whole. Hudson's stream of examples surprised me - their newness, freshness and contemporaneity made Ruskin, this figure of the past, a figure of my past even, so pertinent in the use of art today.  It is for this reason I had chosen to study the Victorians in general - I found their issues, their questions, so useful and present for today as we deal with change second-by-second in the digital world.  To see it actually discussed and begun to put into practice by a curator at a major modern art museum, though, struck me, made me return to my readings of Ruskin from years past....

The next night Ruskin reappeared! Like from an episode of Ghost Hunters, I was tempted to call out to the world of the spirits: 'Are you there? Can you give me a sign???'  (Fortunately, I restrained myself...)  In Durham, Jonathan Ruffer, surrounded by a host of St. Chad theologians, discussed his latest project at Bishop Auchland Castle, and the other such pursuits in the Yorkshire area to bring beauty and holiness to often downtrodden, industrial areas through the inspirational art of church heritage.  Ruffer, a very successful businessman, bought the ancient castle and has thus begun his attempt to restore it and bring it to public appreciation.  Humbly 'open to the will of God,' Ruffer desires not to patronisingly do things 'for people' but instead do things 'with people.' (A fascinating discussion on the use of prepositions in Scriptural events ensued...ask me another time...)  Again, Ruskin was mentioned explicitly as they discussed events in and around Bishop Auchland that sought to engage 'with' people, their faith, and their love of beauty and holy goodness in broader society.  I was absolutely stunned.  On the train back home from Durham, I thoughtfully pondered my own work with art.  How can I make my PhD work, however relatively much smaller than these grand projects at the regeneration of art and beauty, useful?  At this point, can it be? For beauty? For goodness? For grand old Victorian words like 'virtue' and 'society'?

Ruffer ended with an inspirational quote (paraphrasing from my notes of course) I think we should all keep in mind, in one form or another, when we are attempting to find meaning in our work, and in ourselves:  'If we bring nothing, God can do nothing.  If we bring even the smallest amount, the tiniest grain of sand, He works wonders.  Mathematically, God does not add.  He multiplies.'

So, with Ruskin, Hudson, and Ruffer in mind, we all should press on - PhD students, businessmen, and curators alike. Doing our best - making meaning through 'use.'  Because by doing nothing, we will achieve nothing; by doing some good, some good will be achieved.  We just might not see it yet!

Turner's Fighting Temeraire - an inspiration to Ruskin, an inspiration to end on here.  

The art historian who came in from the cold

Okay, the Cold War is over, the Berlin Wall has been commodified into tacky souvenir fragments of doubtful authenticity, and Checkpoint Charlie is now a great place for a photograph with your girlfriend. In the current vogue for “Ostalgie” precipitated by the 2003 film Goodbye Lenin!, I take a trip across East and West Berlin, starting wherelse but Alexanderplatz. Once a bleak void of Soviet urban planning, it is now cluttered with equally tasteless new commercial developments. Yet the Weltzeituhr and similarly futuristic Fernsehturm still stand as reminders of the 1960s DDR, as do a seated Marx and Engels by the Spree, installed exactly the same year as Margaret Thatcher’s Big Bang. Lenin, however, has long said goodbye.

My visa expires at midnight, so I head back to Charlottenberg from Friedrichstrasse U-Bahn, past the lines of Red Army guards. I start the next day with West Berlin’s cultural showcase, the Kulturforum near Potsdamer Platz. 

Past the Staatsbibliothek and Philharmonie, both built in the 1960s, to the Gemäldegalerie, a vast fine art collection brought back together in 1998 after Berlin’s reunification. Highlights include Caravaggio’s Amor Vincit Omnia, several Dürers and one of the best Rembrandt collections I have encountered anywhere. Moses with the Tablets of the Law, pictured, was especially admired by Sigmund Freud, who hung a reproduction in his Hampstead house.

Enough culture – now for some Currywurst! This dish was probably invented by occupying British soldiers in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. It combines sausages, a German (and British) staple with a sauce made of ketchup, Worcestershire sauce and curry powder. Order yours “ohne darm”, without skin, with chips or a bread roll. Curry 36 is one of the oldest in Berlin, located in Kreuzberg by Mehringdamm U-Bahn.

Next, a nice jolly down the Unter den Linden, possibly Berlin’s most elegant thoroughfare, towards the Brandenburg Gate and Norman Foster’s Reichstag, Donald Trump protest permitting. 

A day of non-stop walking requires some relaxation, and where better than the Stadtbad Neukölln? Built in 1914, this Roman-style public bathhouse has giant order columns to spare, reminding you of what civic architecture used to mean. Somewhat off the tourist circuit, its generous spa facilities are good value and well worth a visit.

The Neukölln district, the inspiration behind a track on David Bowie’s Heroes album of 1977, has a large Turkish immigrant population. Kreuzberg is said to be the birthplace of the Döner kebab, and any excuse for one is a good excuse!

After a visit to the Schloss Charlottenberg, much of which is under construction, and a lunch of Berliner Eisbein (boiled ham hock with pease pudding, mashed potato and Sauerkraut), I dress for the opera, namely Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots at the Deutsche Oper with star tenor Juan Diego Florez as Raoul. A five-hour extravaganza loosely based on the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, it is often discussed – usually disparagingly – but rarely heard. Compared perhaps to Rossini’s William Tell or Verdi’s Don Carlo it is somewhat banal, yet as spectacular theatre it remains a benchmark. Numerous airs from it stand the test of time, not least “Plus blanche que la blanche Hermine”, “Piff Paff” and “Nobles seigneurs, salut!”.

Before I head back to the airport there is still time to visit the Museuminsel, or what remains that isn’t under construction. The Pergamum Museum with its dazzlingly coloured Ishtar Gate, transported brick by brick from the site of Nebuchadnezzar II’s palace in Babylon, is a must. I then climb the Berliner Dom for the best views of the city.

To quote Boris Johnson on a recent official visit, “Ich bin nicht ein Berliner” (which should have been kein) – to which I add, “bis bald”!

Archival Adventures: Oh, the places you will go...

Archival work is among my favourite parts of research as a graduate student.  After spending long hours labouring over your texts in the library, the proximity of your materials, directly in your hands, will never cease to excite and refresh your research venture.  Along with conference presentations, it is also one of those activities that can take you incredible places in the world. (Read about fellow blogger Adam's recent trip here.)   As I expand my materials in the doctorate, my 'to-go' list is growing as I add more and more cathedrals and galleries to the archival 'haunts' of years past. 

Although I am only in my first term of my long venture, I was eager to return to the drawings, designs and sketchbooks that feature centrally in my thesis.  Train tickets ordered, bags packed and pencils sharpened, I returned to my quest for Burne-Jones material and any adventure that might ensue!    

In my happy place...

Last month I took an extended 'southern tour' through the endless abundance of London and Oxford. The trip to the Victoria&Albert Museum Prints and Drawings Room is always memorable - not only do they possess significant Burne-Jones sketchbooks for my work, but a visit includes a winding (unofficial) 'tour' through all the 'behind-the-scenes' workings of the massive museum since the traditional entry to the prints and drawings room is under construction. I will never cease to peek in the bulging cabinets and shelves in this backstage world where unseen treasures are secreted away for future organisation and use. 

Oxford is always a joy to return to: it's great 'dreaming spires' guard the infinite books and scholarship entrusted to it over the centuries.  I never was able to see all the libraries during my 9-month Masters there, but the old Bodleian, aromatic, ambient and medieval, is a humbling enough experience for any devout lover of the book.  

   

Excited to begin my day of work with books in the beautiful Oxford Radcliffe Camera.

For my archival research, I venture over to the Ashmolean Museum, the oldest public museum in the world.  

Here I spread out and settle in: I find the Ashmolean Print Room to be among the friendliest and most resourceful archives I have been to thus far.  They actually possess the largest collection of Raphael drawings in the world, and most amazingly, are open to the public! (Appointments recommended.) 

Burne-Jones Orpheus designs for the Graham Piano. His delicacy of touch is incredible - something to truly see in person.

 And research is always fun whenever the subject of my study, Burne-Jones, is involved. Despite the 'melancholy' of many of his monumental works, the abundant caricatures in archives across England show his other side and never cease to make me laugh...

And, at the end of the day, a pint is the most appropriate way to celebrate the success of your research 'quest!'

GUEST POST! PhDs and Student Life: A Tricky Prospect

Maddie Boden talks sports teams, societies, colleges and much more...

Staying in York for my entire academic career thus far has been an effective way to develop some pretty deep social bonds. As an undergraduate, I was able to try out different societies and sports teams, learn about the collegiate system firsthand by living within it and get involved with the students’ union (YUSU) who reached out to me as an undergraduate often and effectively. Moving towards postgraduate study, I was well aware of the Graduate Student Association (GSA) and what they did and felt comfortable getting involved from the start. Six years on and I’m starting to feel like a piece of the furniture. However, I know that coming to York for the first time and as a PhD student is a completely different prospect. Not only are you thrown in headfirst to a new academic community, but that community isn’t really geared towards you as a: mature (21+ years plus is really not that old), humanities based (ever notice how *all* the science PhDs have their own office?), and new student at York.

Well I come to you now, seven weeks into term, hoping to offer up some of the wisdom that comes with staying in the same damn place for this long. There are a huge number of ways of being involved as a PhD student in life on campus - societies, teams, events and campaigns. They aren’t often marketed as being particularly postgrad friendly, but I’ve been here long enough to know that they are and they benefit from postgraduates being involved. I also work at the students’ union part-time which helps to keep track of new activities and events that are going on. I’ll proceed in listicle form for ease of reading.

1.       Sports Teams

York Sport has made getting involved as a postgraduate really approachable and easy. Teams now offer ‘taster’ sessions for recreational players with no commitment to joining. According to the York Sport President, Isaac Beevor, here are the teams that currently have the highest number of postgraduate players:

            1. Volleyball

            2. Archery

            3. Ultimate Frisbee

            4. Handball

You can more information about these teams (and the 60+ others York Sport Union offer) and details about their upcoming sessions at http://www.yusu.org/opportunities/sport/clubs-a-z

2. Art Society

While Art History Society tends to err towards night’s out for undergraduates and SHADY offers intermittent activities, the Art Society is offering a unique opportunity to art historians who might also be artists! The Wentworth Art Studios on campus are being refurbished and reopened at the start of next term and Art Society is offering memberships for access to the studios (which includes time in the studio and supplies) The studios have space for painting, drawing, ceramics, and print-making. If you follow this link: http://www.yusu.org/blogs/view/2005/art-studio-keep-me-updated

you can sign up to the Art Studio mailing list where more information will be circulated when the studios reopen next term.

3. Colleges

One of York’s founding principles was being part of a collegiate system, akin to Oxford and Cambridge but with more opportunities for students to have a say in college life. Today, York has 9 colleges (with a further two planned in the next 5 years). Every single student is assigned to a college at York, including PhDs. The default postgraduate college is Wentworth, but there are postgraduates in every single college and you can opt to be in any college you like. Some postgraduates are college welfare tutors, who live and work in a college, providing a friendly face and first point of contact for other students. College tutors also receive subsidised on-campus accommodation. Another way postgraduates can get involved in colleges is through the colleges junior common room committees (JCRC) JCRC are made up of a number of students who work on events, campaigns and improving student life. There are postgraduate and mature student roles on every single college committee that often go unfilled because postgraduates remain outside the college ‘bubble’. A great way to make a start to change this is by getting involved. College JCRC elections have just been and gone, but colleges will be running by-elections to fill empty positions early next term.

4. Give It A Go Trips

Give It A Go is a programme set up by YUSU to engage certain communities of students (postgraduates in particular) in getting more involved in student life. Feedback has shown that postgraduates that try one of the Give It A Go sessions were glad that they did and said they would do it again and recommend it to a friend. One of the most popular Give It A Go programmes are the termly trips they offer.

On Saturday 26 November they are running a trip to the Manchester Christmas Markets. For £12 (much cheaper than a train ticket) there is a coach taking students there for the day to explore the markets. You can buy a ticket for the coach at www.yusu.org/tickets

You can also pick up a Give It A Go booklet at the Student Centre to learn about the other sorts of sessions they offer (societies, sports clubs, volunteering, careers). 

Many thanks to Maddie Boden, our SHADY co-ordinator, for contributing to our blog this week.. Look out for more guest posts in the coming months...

The Aesthetica Short Film Festival: Inside Out, Outside in

This past weekend, a buzz of film fans in yellow badges dashed from place to place around York for the Aesthica Short Film Festival. As a nineteenth century art historian, I have only really examined film and its art in a brief undergraduate course, but as simply a lover of art, I was eager to be visually stimulated and challenged with the some of the 400 short films over the course of four days.  From 'experimental' to 'drama' to 'documentary' and 'family friendly,' there was literally a category for anyone of any age and any interest.  I was not to be disappointed.

Screening at the National Centre for Early Music - right around the corner from me! Never would have known...

In a range of beautiful venues across York - many of which I had yet even to know existed! - back-to-back sessions were screened from morn onto late into the night.  In the flurry of options, I chose sessions largely entitled 'Experimental' and 'Artist's film' or 'Dance,' 'Music,' and 'Fashion.'  These categorisations seemed by no means ultra-restrictive, as I myself questioned what explicitly determined 'Experimental' from 'Artist's film' and saw the heavy reliance of dance upon music and fashion and vice versa.  Their interrelationships, especially in a direct comparison between sessions like this, usefully illuminated for me one of the wonders of films: its extraordinary flexibility that, at times, challenges, subverts and therefore underlines our habitual attempts to structure, organise and (oftentimes) fully understand art itself.

It was this understanding of 'understanding' itself that was repeatedly impressed upon me as viewer. These issues converged in a variety of ways in an amazing set of Artists's Films, that as a collective, stand out in my memory.  On the one hand, many of the videos could prompt the viewer to think about our existence within a multitude, presenting us with the temporality and smallness of our existence within the collective architectures of our society.  In films like Theo Tagholm's Simulacra, the buildings and structures of our very lives were blown-up, fragmented, and examined, picked through what, in some cases, ended up looking like the great rubbish heap of humanity. This feeling was explored in a different was by other films, which explored our subjective interior loneliness, digging sometimes quite literally beneath our relationships, our clothes and skin.  Notions of beauty, gender, and reality itself were slowly, and many times, uncomfortably stripped away to lay bare deep emotional and physical fears.  Text on the screen, the spoken word, and music often underlined visuals that equated eerily open landscapes or unidentified fleshy surfaces with our bodies.  The Toby Tatum Guide to Grottoes and Groves was no traditional 'guide' in the sense of documentation or education; rather, I felt myself asking, what are we learning about ourselves? The music, the angles, the lighting, could all make nature feel both more and less alien to us.  The strings, playing against the gurgling murmur of the waterbed, sometimes gave me a sense of peace, but at other times made me incredibly uneasy.  Do we therefore become anxious outsiders, glimpsing and probing into secret grottoes' shadows, and aware of own 'looking' as potentially sinister and forbidden?  In Aya Ben Ron's short entitled No Body, a deep resonant voice made the viewer feel the fear of loss of your own body -  words like 'itch,' repeated and associated with the 'ants' that were crawling on and inside your skin, your 'stomach', made me squirm in my chair.  Furthermore, by converging reality and fantasy with the opening lines 'based on a true story and a fairy tale,' I altogether began to wonder, are we on the inside or on the outside of the story, the characters, the film, and our very selves?  In these and other instances, I felt that the insides were pushed out, and outsides were pulled in, fluidly breaking boundaries in beautiful and ugly, serene and uncomfortable ways.

My favourite film, if I were to select one, was Maryam Tagakory's Poem and Stone, where 'residual soil and stains aren't mere reconstructions of the past, but an attempt to ritualise the fragments of the absent' (ASFF Official Programme, 87).  Iranian street scenes were played against the bare feet, the bare fingers, that formed a lump of fallen soil into a beautiful circular arrangement of words - poetry, textually and visually.  Colours, music, words were all coordinated into a sublimely sombre aesthetic experience that played shadows of past memory against collages of the present. Even days later, shadows of this film play in my own memory, reenacting and yet inevitably separating me from those ritualised fragmentations of pasts, presents, and absences in Iran.  Thus, even here, I am aware of my bodily distance from and emotional connection to that which was presented on the screen - a paradox that a film like this can make so profoundly apparent to its public.  


In the end, I was taken not only to new places in York (who knew the National Centre for Early Music was less than a minute's walk from my accommodation?!), but new places geographically, ideologically and artistically.  I am already excited for next year's addition, and I highly recommend it to anyone, especially my fellow departmental students here at York.  It is an amazing opportunity to see and think about the ever-present issues, wonders and mysteries in art that is not to be passed up next year!

Am I an Art Historian yet?

A month into the PhD process, I thought it might be a good idea to reflect on how it's gone so far. What have I done? What have I achieved? Well. I've done a lot of reading. And I mean a LOT of reading. I've started my Italian for Art Historians course. I've started to audit undergraduate lecture series and attend departmental research seminars and other  events.  I've met some absolutely astounding people with whom I've had challenging and stimulating interactions. This is all amazing, right? Right?

Except it's also really tough. Coming from a historical background and almost falling into History of Art through a series of extremely happy accidents means that I have a lot of catching up to do. Everyone seems to know exactly what their thesis is because they've spent their academic career working up to this point. I wrote my undergraduate and masters dissertations on early modern English witchcraft and have now made a huge leap of faith into Italian domestic interiors because I loved it so much when I chanced upon an MA module on the subject. They're already going on research trips because they have the necessary language skills and knowledge about their source material. I can barely say 'Buongiorno, mi chiamo Hannah' and I'm expecting to be able to go off and get to grips with Florentine archives. Art historical theory is second nature to them because they have been immersed in it from the beginning of their undergraduate degrees and I'm struggling with working out what an object actually is.

So why am I even bothering? How can I even begin to call myself an art historian given all of the above gaps in my knowledge and skills base? These are questions that I've asked myself on numerous occasions over the last couple of weeks, and it turns out that they are not  particularly helpful ones and neither is comparing myself to those around me. I have, however, come up with some tentative answers.

I am bothering because I love it. I fell in  love with Italian cultural history during my undergraduate degree and then with domestic interiors during my MA. I jumped when this project was offered to me and taking the chance to do this PhD was the best choice I ever made. Yes, I might have to work a little harder than others, I might have to attend undergraduate lectures to get my knowledge  base up to scratch and I might have to wait a little while to go on a real research trip. But you know what? That's fine. A little hard graft never killed anybody and this is really making me appreciate the achievements I am making: the other day I looked at some potential source material in Italian and it didn't completely baffle me. I'll take that. The support that the department is providing to get me up to speed is absolutely wonderful and already it's working wonders. I need to stop seeing my interdisciplinary background as a disadvantage - it has given me so many skills that I'm constantly applying and has brought me to this point in my academic career.

As for whether or not I'm an art historian yet... the answer is a resounding no. But that's fine too. I recall that during our first meeting as a cohort of PhD students Amanda Lille, my supervisor and Chair of Graduate Studies for the department said that she didn't feel like she had found her voice as an Art Historian (with capital letters) until well into her academic career. These words fill me with hope and optimism and I will certainly be making more of an effort to carry them with me in future. So in the meantime, I'm happy to say that I am not an art historian... yet. 

SHADY Film Screenings

'It's funny how the colours of the real world only seem really real when you watch them on a screen.'

Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

Introducing the latest SHADY venture, a bi-weekly film screening in the Berrick Saul Treehouse, founded by yours truly. Kicking off with Derek Jarman's Caravaggio (1986) on November 3 at 6pm, films will be chosen on the basis of cinematographic panache and acting excellence (sadly excluding The Naked Gun 33⅓).

Candidates for future film screenings include:

• Basquiat - starring David Bowie as Andy Warhol. 'War-hol. As in holes'
• Rear Window - Hitchcock's voyeuristic, misanthropic masterpiece
• Manhattan - Woody Allen's neurotic philandering tour de force, of 'marvellous negative capability', co-starring Diane Keaton (well la-di-dah!) and Meryl Streep

We hope to provide wine receptions and the odd introductory lecture by academic staff. So come along next week for a nice relaxed evening of free entertainment and homoerotic stimulation courtesy of Derek Jarman! All welcome, so bring your friends/loved ones/pet fish.

'Flesh': A Challenge

'Flesh'

 (York Art Gallery, running 23 September 2016 – 19 March 2017)
Ranging from aesthetically pleasing, to perfectly mundane, to utterly perturbing, ‘Flesh’ is nothing if not thought-provoking.

 Having heard some very interesting reviews of the exhibition, and given that our very own Dr Jo Applin from the History of Art department is co-curator, I decided to discover ‘Flesh’ for myself. (It was free for me to attend - though I would have gladly paid - because I acquired a York Museums Trust card.) Encompassing 600 years of work, the exhibition begins in 14^th-century Italy with Dead Christ with the Virgin and St John by the Master of the San Lucchese Altarpiece, an exquisite Byzantine-influenced representation of the subject. With this I was more ‘at home’, working in late medieval Italian art myself and being familiar with theological themes such as these saints lamenting over Christ’s corpse. However, what followed was a stimulating journey through centuries and cultures that explored how varying artists from varying cultures respond to this most multifaceted thing to which we, as humans and as animals, are shackled: flesh. The warning on the glass threshold was certainly no empty statement...

'Please not that this exhibition contains nudity and challenging themes' (Photo courtesy of Dr David Burke)

'Challenging' is one way to describe the themes arising; the works themselves, especially in their particular place and circumstance alongside each of the others, challenge one's emotional responses and capacity for objective analysis. Soon after the 14^th-century Dead Christ, one encounters the fascinatingly juxtaposed 2009 work, Youth, by Ron Mueck: The sculpted lad exposes a wound in his side beneath his blood-stained t-shirt and looks upon it with a surprised countenance. Street violence? The almost surprising fragility of the flesh? The identification of Christ in all humanity? I 'challenge' anyone to walk around this exhibition without numerous questions flooding his/her mind.

Master of the San Lucchese Altarpiece, 14th century, Dead Christ with the Virgin and Saint John, tempera on gold ground on wood, 18.4 x 47.6 cm

Ron Mueck, 2009, Youth, mixed media,  65 x 28 x 16 cm

 Combining animal flesh, death, and matters of commodification, is the Circle of Rembrandt's gruesome and brilliant c.1645 The Carcase of an Ox, as well as the enticingly mundane salmon fillets of Chardin's Still Life: The Kitchen Table of around a century later. The mundane manifests itself in humanity too in, for example, Harold Gilman's delightful Nude on a Bed (1911-12), which lifts the spirits as a sort of respite after Gina Pane's shocking, masochistic 1973 Azione Sentimentale, which inspires quite a different reaction. 

Circle of Rembrandt, c.1665, The Carcase of an Ox, oil on panel, 73.3 x 51.7 cm

I must admit that, given my personal sensibilities, there were sections of the exhibition I could scarcely bring myself to look at -- such as the rather gratuitous 2000 Green Tile Work in Live Flesh by Adriana Varejao -- and other works upon seeing which I was close to tears, i.e. the 2001 deer carcass sculpture by Berlinde de Bruyckere. This is not, however, a negative comment, for it was all part of my experience. What is more, I am certain that anyone visiting would have an individual experience while musing over this visual assortment of representations of flesh, with its whole array of connotations. So step on in, I 'challenge' you...

Old Masters, New Exhibits

London, October 2016

The city of London never gets old, especially when it comes to exhibitions.  With every visit, something new is to be seen - the race to 'see everything' never ends in galleries that seem to change their clothes with every passing weekend.  The art-lover can never keep up!  A feast for the eyes, a buffet for the soul, London always excites and never disappoints when it comes to art. 

What other way to spend a Saturday, then, strolling in and between the latest exhibits? My ambitions (and to-do lists) are great, but I usually manage only to get to two in a day.  Last Saturday, I visited Dulwich Picture Gallery for the first time.  I highly recommend, especially on a fine autumnal day such as it was, catching the Overground from Victoria to the captial's little village outpost.  The twelve minute ride sets you off walking down blissfully green tree-lined streets, crossing through wide parks and sports-pitches, to the gallery seemingly nestled away from the world.

 Inside, a fantastic collection of the Dutch master Andriaen van de Velde awaited (sorry, no pictures allowed!).  An impressive series of landscapes opened, and remained the focus, of the show - lovely scenic blue skies, arched billows of cloud and lush greenery set the palette for the rural, frugal abundance that was the main subject of van de Velde's work.  His sense of detail was marvellous.  His devotion to each and every minute figure, a washing woman, a dashing dog, begged for your own devoted viewership.  This became further evidenced by drawings exhibited alongside major works of the master.  As someone whose main primary source is the drawings of the artist, I truly appreciated how they surrounded a major painting with its various stages in pen and ink and chalk. Not only was one continuously impressed with his attention to the most minute figural detail, but also with his concern for the coordination of those figures within the wider compositional harmony of the respective work.  I believe this was a unique aspect of the exhibition that should be repeated in future with other artists.  These final works in paint can then be viewed in light of the creative enterprise behind them, and the drawings, not a stand alone relic for itself, but the intimate manoeuvres of mind and hand as the artist works towards greater and broader concepts.  

After the focused walk through the exhibit, I spent a while wandering the gallery itself.  I loved its size and relative intimacy;  its use of rich, evocative wall colouring and layered hanging arrangement set viewer and artworks in a context where each played off of one another - artwork on artwork, viewer on artwork - in such a way that there was a certain freedom in viewing them as a whole or as a selected favourite.  

There was also a lovely children's art activity event ongoing. As a regular frequenter of such events in my home-schooled days, I really appreciated seeing them all at work on art surrounded by art.  My favourite form of learning - education in situ! 

The best way to finish a full morning at an exhibition - cake at the gallery cafe! The caffeine and sugar is always the best sustenance to help you press on to your next stop. 

Another walk through the Dulwich parks, and a train back to Victoria.  The city was alive, bustling and sunshiney, so a walk to Trafalgar was in order.  I always forget how big the buildings are from below, glassy fronts glinting against the blue sky above (Admittedly, I suddenly felt transported to the city in the new Star Trek movie...wondering if this is where they got their inspiration from...).  

London...in space?

Although the sun was lovely, I was feeling the day slipping away fast so my pace across town was quick.  Fortunately, I managed to slip in to the 4pm viewing slot of the newly-opened Beyond Caravaggio exhibit at the National Gallery that, above all things that, I wanted to see.

The exhibit was, appropriately, full.  In each room, at least one Caravaggio hung, a monument to gasp and gape at among works of contemporaries and followers.  Displayed in such a way (much like the Delacroix exhibit I had seen last year, which I also adored),  his true genius (controversial word - but I am using it!) was something to be worshipped, from his younger to his more mature works.  His Judas Kiss was incredible - the exhausted Christ submitted, enveloped, by the brutal metal arm of the shoulder that crushed into the space of the viewer.  In their beautifully handled tenebrism, the figures illuminated rich black canvases like candles, filling the spaces as they tumbled out of it before you.  My eyes begged to touch the skin of St, John the Baptist in the wilderness, of the grapes and peaches tumbled across tables. He painted as if to tempt, breaking down the third wall of the canvas in a seduction of your senses that was only ever just out of your reach.  Standing before them, I was taken back to the streets and cathedrals of Rome I had wandered and loved years ago; my passion for his altarpieces in situ rekindled and experienced again on the faraway isle of England.   

Unfortunately, the 'temptation' to more fully experience them was heightened by what I felt to be lighting that was too intense, not only on the Caravaggios but on the other darkly beautiful works framing them.  In this instance, the crowds not only had the trouble of negotiating each other, but a spotlight which blurred, distorted and obscured parts of the image, sometimes even the central or focal point.  I found myself slipping to the side or standing to the back of the group (on my tip-toes), trying to look up at the pictures at an angle so view it without that central gold 'splotch' of the spotlight.  I am no gallery or lighting expert, but would not the dimmer lighting, like that of a cathedral, be more suitable for works that themselves were meant to glow forth from the darkness of their canvases, from the shadows of a chapel?  (Please comment...I would be interested in your thoughts on this matter of display...).

Nevertheless, I felt myself more than pleased by National Gallery exhibit - not only did I thoroughly enjoy the Caravaggio's I had seen in Baroque art history books come to life before me, but I loved seeing different work of the period that I had never seen before. The drama of darkness and light, in colour as in the stories of artists and their subjects themselves, will never cease to entice my love of mystery.  It is works like these, though not of my period of specialisation, and the galleries that house them that continue to call me back to London, her exhibits, and my love and study of art.  

Postcards of a few of my favourite now hanging above my desk: (L) Nicolas Regnier, St. Sebastian tended by the Holy Irene and her Servant ; (R) Caravaggio's St. John

An art historian's guide to opera

Could anything sound more poncy than the above title? Am I just peddling the cliche of art history as a posh person's leisure pursuit, sneeringly broadcasted last week by Guardian art critic Jonathan Jones upon the news of art history's decommissioning as an A-Level?

Opera, like art history, is quagmired in misconceptions. Anyone can enjoy it. Why not? Full-length performances are available for free on YouTube. BBC Radio 3 strongly advocates the art form. Supported by Arts Council funding, tickets for almost any performance in the UK can be bought at absolute rock-bottom prices. This summer I stood through four operas at the Proms, at £6 a go, including a magnificent five-hour performance of Rossini's Semiramide, conducted by Sir Mark Elder. The very same is performing Wagner's Das Rheingold in Manchester with the Halle Orchestra, with a £3 student deal for the best seats in the house. Any takers?

Opera is an essentially synthetic art form, combining music with the visual and dramatic arts. Its impact as a Gesamtkunstwerk or "total work of art" as Wagner conceived it (his own operas being the supreme realisation of the art form's potential, if you believe) has drawn legions of ardent opera-lovers among the intelligentsia - Stendhal, Nietzsche, Adorno and Kenneth Clark to name a few. Harnessed to music's irresistible Dionysiac force has been libretti of at best Shakespearean eloquence (though not very often) and a prominent visual component, namely the production.

Operatic productions form an art-historical goldmine whose surface musicologists can only scratch, not least in the twentieth century. Hockney's Die Zauberflote (or Schinkel's, or Chagall's), Dali's Salome, Jarman's Don Giovanni. Filmmakers have also dabbled, with roaring success: John Schlesinger (of Marathon Man fame), Franco Zeffirelli, Luchino Visconti, Patrice Chereau.

Sadly these prodigious forebears are of scant interest to today's generation of Eurotrash nitwits. The bicentennial production of Wagner's Ring at Bayreuth was greeted with a twenty-minute standing boo-vation for its stridently anti-Wagner rhetoric, where Rhine Maidens are prostitutes who hang around gas stations and love duets are accompanied by alligators copulating. Some might say such controversy is what keeps opera alive. Personally I'm staying at home.

My essential point is, give opera a chance. In fact, go the the library now and take out Rigoletto, or Il Barbiere di Siviglia, or Boris Godunov. Because operatic music is among the most exciting and delectable ever written. And what could be better after a full day's Marx, Foucault or Derrida?