Belshazzar & Berlioz

Rembrandt, Belshazzar's Feast. 1636-8, Oil on canvas, 167.6 x 209.2 cm. National Gallery, London.

Singing in the University Choir: Belshazzar's Feast and Grande symphonie funèbre et triomphale

On the 14th June I had the pleasure of singing with the University Choir alongside the University Symphony Orchestra in this term's concert in York Minster. It was a marvellous and really rather grand occasion, directed by the brilliant Peter Seymour and fervent conductor John Stringer. The first half was Berlioz's stereotypically French Grande symphonie funèbre et triomphale, performed mainly by the orchestra, with the choir bursting in at the end the final movement with 'Gloire! Gloire et triomphe!' The second was all Walton - the grandiose Crown Imperial followed by the iconic Belshazzar's Feast: מנא מנא תקל ופרסין‎ 

Belshazzar also featured the incredible visiting baritone, whom I had the delight to get to know after the concert, Benedict Nelson. I sang with the comparatively small tenor section of the choir, having joined this section to charitably try to boost it, since there are only about ten of them, compared to about sixty sopranos etc. It really was good fun, a fantastic culmination of the term's rehearsals and I believe the crowd thoroughly enjoyed it -- certainly a couple of friends of mine did! The mighty brass section may have at times drowned out the choir, but these things happen...

Look out for more termly Uni Choir concerts! I intend to remain with the choir - 'tis a fun hobby on a Monday evening!

Guest Post: Barbara Hepworth and Single Form (Antiphon)

Guest writer Susan Cohn writes an article on Barbara Hepworth, the focus of her Master's dissertation, and the artist's sculpture on exhibition in the local Yorkshire area...

Exhibition: Disobedient Bodies, The Hepworth Wakefield  Until June 18th, 2017

Dame Barbara Hepworth

Single Form (Antiphon), 1969

Bronze, 223.5 x 61 x 61 cm 

Barbara Hepworth initially carved this elegant, elongated vertical form Single Form, Antiphon in a natural boxwood in 1953 then had it cast in bronze in 1969 to reproduce the edition now at The Hepworth Wakefield in the dynamic exhibition Disobedient Bodies. The work has recently been restored and is on loan from the University of York’s art collection where it was originally placed within the natural landscape on the campus grounds outside the Jack Lyons Concert Hall. In the current exhibition Disobedient Bodies, Hepworth’s Single Form, Antiphon has moved from a dialogue with the outdoor landscape to multiple dialogues with brilliant fashion designs of the most current trends in the fashion industry and alongside sculptures of many of Hepworth’s former contemporaries such as Alberto Giacometti, Jean Arp, Henry Moore and Naum Gabo. Barbara Hepworth poetically articulates her inspiration for this sculpted form in her writing,

The forms which have had special meaning for me since 
childhood have been the standing form …. the inspiration 
always comes either from the artist in the landscape, 
feeling it, becoming it, or the spectator observing the 
figure in the landscape.  

Hepworth’s approach to sculpture was a technique of direct carving and her derivative of the ancient craft, one she learned early in her career from a master carver in Italy. She experimented with this method and adapted the process to capture her expression of a natural landscape in a sculptural form. Hepworth indicated in her writings that many of her works were locally inspired by the landscapes of Cornwall she experienced throughout her adult years in combination with forms of landscapes she fondly recalls from her childhood experiences in the Yorkshire West Riding area and the city of Wakefield. Her sensitive articulation in words of her sculptural expression by hand offers many poetic insights to a clearer understanding of her artistic sensibilities. In terms of her connection with nature and expression in material forms, she states:

All my early memories are of forms and shapes and textures. 
Moving through and over the West Riding landscape with my 
father in his car, the hills were sculptures; the roads defined the 
form. Above all, there was the sensation of moving physically 
over the contours of fulnesses and concavities, through hollows 
and over peaks – feeling, touching, seeing, through mind and 
hand and eye. This sensation has never left me. I, the sculptor, 
am the landscape. I am the form and I am the hollow, the thrust 
and the contour. 

If you walk along the path today from Whitby to Robin Hood’s Bay where Hepworth summered as a child with her family, you will see the rolling hills as they rise and fall alongside the cliffs embracing the waves along the shoreline of the coast. You can almost follow her feel the curves and lines of the forms as she carved them patiently and carefully out of the natural wood. The spiralling lines moving upward along the figure of Single Form, Antiphon seem to grow up from the base or the land if it were one of the ancient stones Hepworth observed and studied that still stand tall in mysterious formations in the Cornwall area. The subtle piercing holes of her sculpture are carved to allow a binocular view of the surrounding landscape, now the gallery conversations, previously in view of the outdoor ponds, greenery and flowers, birds and animals, of the campus landscape.

The original wood sculpture, it is on view at the Oxford University Ashmolean Gallery

Dame Barbara Hepworth

Single Form (Antiphon), 1953

Boxwood, 223.5 x 61 x 61 cm

Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

In its natural setting, it was located near the Jack Lyons Concert Hall at the University of York  

This was the view of Single Form, Antiphon in dynamic dialogue with fashion designs in Disobedient Bodies

While visiting The Hepworth Wakefield, for those interested in further information on the making of bronze sculpture from original and plaster sculptures, there is the brilliant permanent collection in the next gallery of the plasters Hepworth donated to the museum. This includes informative videos, tools, illustrations, and gallery labels with explanations of the process of casting bronze from plasters and original materials. Many of Hepworth’s feature marble, wood, paintings, textiles and bronze works from the collection along with her personal library also now on display in The Barbara Hepworth Exhibition.  

Susan Cohn is currently a Masters student at the University of York, from Winnipeg, Canada. 

Living Letters, Winding Roads, and Glowing Windows

The lesson I have learned again and again during the course of academic study: Research can take you anywhere.  This becomes a deeper and greater truth as one moves from an undergraduate interest, fevered Masters work, to the long-sustained journey of a doctorate.

Arriving at the British Library this past week for the first time, I thought my time there would have been the adventure in itself. The gaping brick archway, the interior plaza, the clatter of locker doors and feet dashing up and down successive stairways as Academia's labourers, young and old, marched in and out of darkened reading rooms like bees in a hive. It was like a train station for any and all kind of querying researcher - the glassy, mirrored elevators even announced the 'stops' at each floor, rattling off: 'Social Sciences Reading Room, Music Room, Manuscript Library....'

And as a great heap of albums was plunked before me in the Manuscripts room, I thought for sure I would never leave! Windowless and chilled by air conditioning, the room enclosed researchers who seemed motionlessly absorbed in their own work.  As I began to comb through Burne-Jones's accounts of the weather, of complete and incomplete commissions, of dinner parties joyful and tedious, I felt that I too would be bound up in my albums - much like the other researchers, much like the letters themselves!

However, the reading of the letters brings you on an imaginative, investigative journey through the realms of another person's world, other people's times - the places and things they loved, hated, or just thought about on a regular basis.  It is a mystery, piecing together the hints and fragments of their lives through the scribbled notations of a quickly-moving, rapidly-thinking artist's hand.  And this time, the mystery led me beyond my imagination, out of the library and to the heart of the experiences many of the letters recounted. 

Later in life, Burne-Jones spent much time by the seaside, supplementing his health with the fresh salty air and designing quietly in his studio.  Writing to his young friend Mrs. Haskell, he recounts the joys and struggles of  his work, of missing grown children, of a nagging wife...of his both hopeful and sorrowful relationship with God and heaven.   He specifically addresses these topics when recounting the characters he sees regularly at his church - obsessed with the high-booted, 'very very old' Vicar who is fond of hunting - and the windows that Burne-Jones not only designed but paid for himself, dedicating them to his daughter there.  When they were put up in 1893, Burne-Jones made a point of explaining the event and describing the pieces to Haskell:

The window is up and looks bummy [can anyone tell me what that might mean in this context? haha] and glows - the grave-digger says it's the splendidest thing in Sussex.

There are 3 lights – and on the left hand is Gabriel and under him a little panel of the Annunciation and he says – but of course in Latin which is his native tongue “I am Gabriel the Archangel, the messenger of great joy."  

And in the middle light is Michael – and under him a panel of his fight with the dragon – and he says I am Michael the Archangel, captain of the hosts of heaven."  

And then comes Raphael (not the painter) and he has a little picture under his of a guardian Angel leading Angela [Thirkel - his granddaughter] through the streets of London and he says – “I am Raphael, keeper of the Lord’s little ones."

And I daren’t ask how much it will cost to make – it’s the only way if you want anything, not to ask how much – and there it is – it’s a thankful offering for Margaret and it said in Latin in a very narrow band.

And it glows and glows the window does.

I was exuberant!  This was very exciting to find for my research, as often Burne-Jones's involvement in church and religious life is questioned - this sustained conversation about religious life and its significance for his personal and artistic goings-on go far to deepen our understanding of the role of his faith in his life and art (complex as his faith - or any one else's for that matter - is).  

A 'double-check' on the letters' addresses and letter-headings revealed he was writing from Rottingdean, where he had his home at the 'North End House' across the street from the church of St. Margaret of Antioch.  This required a bit more digging - an investigation not to be undertaken in the cool shadowed spaces of the British Library but out onto the roads, into the sunshine and to the (never-before-seen) English seaside! 

So as they say in the movies: "ROAD TRIP!!!!!!!!!" 

A two hour drive to the swelling hillsides of Sussex brought me not only to the windows, but the very town Burne-Jones talked of walking through - the seaside air he breathed - the house he lived in and wrote from -  the church with the 'very' old vicar and the windows he took such pains and care and love to dedicate to his daughter.  They were just as the gravedigger described, just as he himself said: 'the splendidest thing in Sussex'; all 'bummy' and glowing!  That day, the letters came to life! 

St. Margaret of Antioch's

The glowing 'bummy' windows

Burne-Jones's home right across the town square.

And just down the street - the beach!

Some shots of the beautiful blue-sky town. 

The memorial to Edward Burne-Jones and wife Georgiana at the church. 

Sous le ciel de Paris

It's the beginning of June and I'm in Europe for two months of bibliographically-induced merriment. The city of Antwerp boasts perhaps the world's only research institute dedicated to one artist, the Centrum Rubenianum. Tucked away behind the Rubens House off the Meir, its extensive library and archives harbour everything you always wanted to know about Dutch and Flemish art (but were afraid to ask). A lively scholarly community is active there, from museum curators to numerous North American PhD fellows from Princeton, Brown and Bryn Mawr.

I will peruse several city archives, not least in my church, and indulge in frites with plenty of mayonnaise, hopefully without precipitating a cardiac arrest.

This weekend however, I am off to Paris to visit the Musée du Louvre's Département des Arts Graphiques, which holds Rubens' portrait sketch of his confessor (probably). Ophovius' tomb monument graces my church.

After wining and dining on the boulevards of gay Paris, and attending an opera performance at Versailles, naturellement, I will return to the banks of the Scheldt to give a presentation at the Rubenianum.

Then, off to Amsterdam to visit their offsite depot in Lelystad. Oh, the glamour!

A busy couple of weeks in the life of a History of Art PhD student…

It’s been a bit of a mad couple of weeks for me, as I’ve been attending conferences and workshops left, right and centre and getting my submissions sorted for approaching deadlines.

As the summer term draws to a close, us first-year PhD students have some pretty major deadlines to meet. We’re all in the midst of our final Thesis Advisory Panel meetings for the year and generating our material to submit for progression to the second year. On top of this, I’ve been putting together funding applications for another research trip to Florence. With all this going on, it would be so easy to get bogged down in paperwork and panic…. But thankfully, there is plenty going on to help us through this potentially stressful time.

Perhaps one of the best things about being a PhD student is being able to get to conferences and workshops and network with like-minded scholars. I’ve been privileged over the last two weeks to attend several such events that were not only useful and fascinating in their own right but have also helped me to clarify some of my approaches to my own research.

The first of these was a lecture by Justin Underhill from Berkeley about on ‘What Turns Pictures On.’ This was part of a wider departmental event, the York Summer Theory Institute that, by all accounts, was a great success. Underhill uses technology in amazing and innovative ways to recreate the settings within which works of art were experienced in the past, and is even branching out into the creation of soundscapes. With my research centring on trying to access the world of the early modern Italian domestic interior, this was hugely thought provoking and really brought home the potential for extending such a project beyond the scope of my thesis.

The end of last week featured a WRoCAH –sponsored conference in Sheffield on ‘Habitual Behaviour in the Early Modern World.’ Wonderfully organised by three PhD students from the Universities of Leeds, Sheffield and York, the conference spanned two days and featured a whole host of brilliant papers, including keynotes from Sasha Handley (The University of Manchester) and Steven Shapin (Harvard University), all of which were frankly inspiring. Even those far outside my remit, including papers on gambling in seventeenth-century Dutch comedy and the tobacco market in early modern England, were really entertaining.

Finally, on Monday of this week I attended a workshop here at the University of York on architectural drawings and models. It was great to get the chance to have a think about the implications of the planning process on the eventual outcome buildings and to hear a paper on my very own Palazzo Strozzi from the wonderful Amanda Lillie (The University of York). This was followed by a research seminar led by Mauro Mussolin (Metropolitan Museum of Art) on ‘Michelangelo and Paper as Palimpsest,’ where he explored the potential for exploring use and re-use of paper in the work of this most famous of artists, digging through layers of drawing and writing and piecing together paper fragments in an almost archaeological way. Fantastic!

I think it’s safe to say that I am currently feeling well and truly edified. My mind is full of interesting and exciting new ideas that I can’t wait to start bringing to my research and I’m looking forward to continuing conversation with all the amazing people I’ve met over the course of this whirlwind couple of weeks. Maybe things will calm down a bit now….. Oh no wait…. York Festival of Ideas starts this week….