Art

One of the puns that circulated the cultured elite of Italy during the Renaissance compared the potency of an artist’s paintbrush, his pennello, with his penis, il pene. Raphael, who by all accounts liked his women, perhaps embodied that duality best of all. The artist’s fascination with female kind, Antonio Forcellino suggests in his brilliant and lyrical biography of the artist, helped shape his genius. Not long before Raphael died, aged just 37, of a malady popularly believed to have stemmed from excessive sexual activity, he painted La Fornarina — a young, brown-eyed beauty (perhaps his last lover), semi-nude but for a diaphanous veil draped beneath her décolletage. Around this date he also painted a heavily veiled woman, La Velata.

It is a pretty toothy jaw of hell that Philip II of Spain, the Doge of Venice, and the Pope kneel before in prayer in a famous El Greco painting of the late 1570s. Philip and the other rulers of the so-called Holy League might just observe within hell’s mouth the skeletons of those they deemed Infidels — the very Turks, perhaps, their men had recently defeated off the Gulf of Corinth in 1571.  For a struggle so bloody, the Battle of Lepanto that inspired El Greco’s painting makes a relatively cameo appearance in David Abulafia’s masterful human history of the Mediterranean Sea. Even now in paperback, The Great Sea is still a very big book indeed.

What to make of Banksy? Artist or vandal? Tate Modern holds no Banksys and, other than a redundant phone box that he folded in half and pretended to have reconfigured with a pickaxe, Banksy has never destroyed anything. So I ask my 15-year-old son what he knows of him: ‘He’s the guy who did the policeman with the Tesco bag, who does really cool graffiti, not lame stuff, and no one knows who he is.’ Actually, we do know who he is. His identity was discovered some years ago by the Daily Mail, an organ neither beloved nor believed by those who follow Banksy. But because the public loves a mystery I shall follow Will Ellsworth-Jones in his coy refusal to give the name away in this competent, broadly sympathetic and enjoyable book.

It must have been hard to settle on a title for this book; but then this is not the book that Richard Cork originally had in mind.  In his introduction to The Healing Presence of Art he describes how he was approached to write on the contemporary role of art in hospitals, but in beginning the research for this he became aware, as he puts it, ‘of the rich, complex and largely overlooked tradition’ to which modern art and medicine are the heirs.   It is this vast hinterland that forms the theme of Cork’s book. It is neither ‘art in hospitals’, nor ‘art and medicine’ nor ‘art as therapy’ but all these things and more.

The question of what artists actually get up to in their studios has always intrigued the rest of us — that mysterious alchemical process of transforming base materials into gold, or at least into something marketable in the present volatile art world. Today’s studio might as likely be a laptop as laboratory, factory, hangar or garden shed, but is nevertheless an apt prism through which to explore the notion of creativity, and this boldly ambitious volume does just that, interviewing 120 British artists in a freewheeling way about their practice and process, inspiration and ideas.

Prunella Clough was a modest and self-effacing artist who nevertheless produced some of the most consistently original and innovative British art of the second half of the 20th century. She was by no means reclusive, enjoying an extensive social and teaching life, but she deliberately kept a low profile, being famously guarded with biographical details. So much so, that a couple of young artists I knew in the mid-1980s were convinced that Clough was already dead, though she continued to paint and exhibit sporadically until her death in 1999. How refreshing this is in an age of seemingly unbounded artistic egos, when relentless self-obsession has to make up for lack of real creativity.

By a fine coincidence, two legendary icons of British art were being feted in London on the same evening last month, and both are primarily famous, to the public at least, for their depiction of the Queen. At the National Portrait Gallery, the director Sandy Nairne hosted a dinner to celebrate the portrait oeuvre of Lucian Freud, while the Victoria and Albert Museum opened its major exhibition of Cecil Beaton’s lifetime lensing of Elizabeth II. In the 1950s these two artists were the epitome of London society. Beaton, by way of his groomed exquisite taste and laconic manner, was the epicene idol of sophisticated drawing rooms; the nascent Freud, 30-odd, untidy, brooding, supremely sexual, was a magnetic talisman for every smart hostess’s house, and often her bed.

In the first book of his scientific-cum-philosophical poem ‘De rerum Natura’ — or ‘On the Nature of Things’ — Lucretius draws the reader’s attention to the power of invisible forces. The wild wind, he wrote, whips the waves of the sea, capsizes huge ships, and sends the clouds scudding; sometimes it swoops and sweeps across the plains in tearing tornado, strewing them with great trees, and hammers the heights of the mountains with forest-spitting blasts. It was a description I was well placed to appreciate as I read this whimsical, scholarly and original book while staying in a Georgian folly on a country estate in Kent.

Seduced by the hayseed hair and the Yorkshire accent it’s tempting to see the young David Hockney as the Freddie Flintoff of the painting world: lovable, simple, brilliant, undoubtedly a hero, and delightfully free of angst. In this enjoyable book, which sets out to to ‘conjure up the man he is and in doing so to put his paintings and drawings in the context of his extraordinary life’, Christopher Simon Sykes provides us, naturally, with a more complex story. Hockney is a hero if course — not least to homosexuals, for blazing a stylish and courageous trail to emancipation in the 1960s, and more recently to beleaguered smokers in his stand against politically correct bullying.

In 1930 Evelyn Waugh, already at 27 a famous novelist, spent two days in Barcelona. He came upon one of the art nouveau houses designed by Antonio Gaudí, who had died four years earlier. Waugh was captivated by the swooshing ‘whiplash’ lines of the building. He hired a taxi and asked the driver to take him to any other buildings in the same style. So he saw a number of Gaudí’s fantastical creations, including his church (often mistakenly called a cathedral), La Sagrada Familia. It took an extra-ordinary leap of taste for Waugh to admire this flamboyant architecture at the height of the Modern Movement, with its insistence on ‘clean lines’ and ‘form follows function’.

A pleasingly tactile canvas-like cover adorns this heavy book and proclaims its purpose; the boldly brushed illustration is a detail from ‘Mauve Primulas on a Table’ painted in January 1928 when the artist was in his mid-fifties. He wrote of a ‘painting orgy’ and how he suffered ‘tennis-elbow from holding my brush for 8 hours solid’. Patricia Reed’s catalogue note adds, ‘the work is a synthesis of the motifs that interested him at this moment: a tilted picture plane, textured cloth, penumbrated shadows, a cropped bowl and a pair of open scissors’.

Like his contemporary and fellow Yorkshireman, Alan Bennett, whom he slightly resembles physically, David Hockney has been loved and admired throughout his lifetime. He painted one of his greatest works, ‘A Grand Procession of Dignitaries in the Semi-Egyptian Style’ in 1961 while still at the Royal College of Art. He has dazzled, surprised and often upset the world of art ever since. Picasso aside, he is the wittiest modern painter, in the sense not just of being funny, but intelligent; a whole history of Western art is both contained and extended by his originality. For example, it was both funny, and in the 1960s brave, to apply Boucher’s soft pornography to bums as well as bosoms.

These two books make mutually illuminating and surprisingly contrasting companions, given the similarity of their subjects. Both are written by those with hands-on experience in the field of art preservation and security. Sandy Nairne was Director of Programmes at the Tate Gallery in 1994 when two important paintings by J.M.W. Turner were stolen while on loan to an exhibition in Frankfurt, and was a key player in their eventual recovery. When Anthony Amore became Security Director at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston in 2005, he immediately picked up the threads of the investigation into the theft of three Rembrandts and other works which had been stolen from the museum 15 years previously.

At the age of just 21, Samuel Palmer produced one of British art’s greatest self-portraits. At the age of just 21, Samuel Palmer produced one of British art’s greatest self-portraits. Although he is wearing the clothes of the period (1826), the face that surmounts the casually fastened soft high collar is both Romantic and modern, instantly and thrillingly bridging the gap between his century and our own. As Rachel Campbell-Johnston notes in her welcome biography, Palmer’s hair is unbrushed and he seems not to have bothered to shave: ‘It’s hardly the image you would expect from an upcoming artist at that time. He does not strike the pose of the ambitious young professional; make a bid for new clients by parading palette and brush’.