A stupefying work of painstaking bad taste and technical skill

In his second volume of autobiography, A Dubious Codicil, Michael Wharton describes the Shaftesbury Avenue studio of cartoonist Michael ffolkes, as “a strange room of narrow triangular shape crammed with an astounding assortment of treasures” and draws particular attention to:

...A huge photograph of a painting by the nineteenth-century French Salon painter Bouguereau was pasted on one wall, showing a crowd of naked nymphs, all identical, perfectly shaped, white-skinned, and of ideal nubility. This stupefying work of painstaking bad taste and technical skill amused Michael greatly; but it would be hypocritical to say that he – or any other man – did not enjoy looking at it.

Wharton does not specify which of Bouguereau’s ‘stupefying’ works adorned ffolkes’s wall, but it seems a reasonable guess that it was Les Oreades, which fits the description perfectly.

Unsettled

I've seen two things in the last couple of weeks that have unsettled me. Not disturbed, just unsettled. One was the Cow Leg Trouser from our marvellous Retroprogressive feature. The other was this story about artisanal pencil sharpening:

"With an electric pencil sharpener, a pencil is meat," Rees said. "It's this thoughtless, Brutalist aesthetic. For me, it's almost a point of pride that I would be slower than an electric pencil sharpener."

This is how Rees' artisanal pencil sharpening works: You might send him your favorite pencil, but Rees more often selects and sharpens a classic No. 2 pencil for his clients, he promises, "carefully and lovingly." He slides the finished pencil's very sharp tip into a specially-sized segment of plastic tubing, then puts the whole pencil in a larger, firmer tube that looks like it belongs in a science experiment. Throw it at a wall, he says, and it won't break. The cost? $15.

[...]

So far, Rees is the leader in the field. "Nobody else is doing what I do," he said. "I guarantee an authentic interaction with your pencil. What mechanical pencil sharpener can say that? The X-ACTO XLR 1818? The Royal 16959T? Don't make me laugh."

"I'm going to have this nice, authentic, considered reaction with your pencil," Rees said. "I just want to treat it with respect..."

Both of these things - the Cow Leg Trouser and the artisanal pencil sharpening - may have been embarked upon in a mood of high seriousness or they may be elaborate jokes, but whatever the intention I like the note they hit: internally plausible but externally absurd. The closest analogous thing I can think of is Duchamp's Fountain. In which case perhaps they're both art? If so, they must be very good - contemporary art is always threatening to unsettle but, for me at least, it doesn't usually do half as good a job as these.

'Like a bomb at a tea-party' - P H Emerson versus Peach Robinson

Emerson - Gathering Waterlillies, East Anglia 1886 - Getty Museum

Dr. Peter Henry Emerson (1856-1936) was a Cuban-born, American-raised British surgeon, naturalist, meteorologist, bird-watcher, champion billiard player and, for which he is remembered, influential photographer.

At a time when photographers were going to enormous lengths to recreate paintings – staging very artificial scenes (see Henry Peach Robinson’s Fading Away for the archetype) – Emerson insisted that the camera should capture “people as they really are - do not dress them up.” Many of his works feature the rural labourers of the Norfolk Broads going about their arcane business, gathering water-lillies or harvesting reeds.

Though defending photography’s right to be classed as a proper art form, Emerson argued for a naturalistic approach: "The photographic technique is perfect and needs no… bungling”. He called the then-popular business of retouching “the process by which a good, bad, or indifferent photograph is converted into a bad drawing or painting", so one wonders what he would have made of Photoshop (which the Yard has described as Satan’s Snap Fixer).

Another radical Emerson argument was the notion that pictures should be slightly out-of-focus, to replicate the reality of human vision: "Nothing in nature has a hard outline, but everything is seen against something else, and its outlines fade gently into something else, often so subtly that you cannot quite distinguish where one ends and the other begins. In this mingled decision and indecision, this lost and found, lies all the charm and mystery of nature.”

These arguments were laid out in an 1889 book called Naturalistic Photography for Students of Art, the effect of which one reviewer described as “"like dropping a bomb at a tea-party.” Certainly Peach Robinson objected, declaring: “Healthy human eyes never saw any part of a scene out of focus”.

Emerson’s retort? “I have yet to learn that any one statement of photography of Mr. Robinson has ever had the slightest effect on me except as a warning of what not to do…”

During the Reed Harvest, 1886 - Gordon Fraser Gallery Limited

Snipe Shooting, 1886 - Joseph Bellows gallery

Siren City

I popped into the elegantly bijou Estorick Collection the other day to see their latest exhibition: Siren City, photographs of Naples taken by Johnnie Shand Kydd.

It played, quite beautifully, to just about every preconception you might have about the city. Use of black-and-white film and an old camera (a Rolleiflex - I made a note as I now know how interested some are in this sort of thing) has given the images a timeless quality; subjects looked as if they'd stepped out of a film by Visconti or Norman Lewis's classic Naples '44 or even a Caravaggio.

The city itself looked strikingly unimproved, its people living in a present that seemed very like the past. And it's not just a case of artful photography. Old buildings - even sacred buildings: goal posts painted onto church gates, for instance - didn't look as if they'd been taken out of circulation in order to be conserved and revered; rather, they gave the appearance of being carelessly consumed.

It seemed very different to a city such as Paris, where one is too often conscious of looking at places that might be under glass; on display for the tourist and antiquarian rather than there for the unselfconscious use of the descendants of those who built them and first inhabited them.

Under-investment as a product of poverty and corruption is, I think, the main reason one receives this impression of Naples. Money applied rigorously and rationally brings a tidying up and a sorting out - of people as well as buildings - but it can tend to degrade a lived environment into empty heritage. Paris's Marais and Les Halles districts testify to the dangers of this approach - places once full of messy life that are now sterile and rather boring.

Mind you, the old-time poverty of a community often looks a lot less romantic from the other side of the lens. An improvement of the built environment is something poor Neapolitans - struggling with inadequate accommodation, unreliable services and other, sometimes dangerous, aspects of the area's poverty and corruption - would undoubtedly welcome. The trick is to put the money in without losing the people or, what we might sentimentally call, the spirit of a place. This seems to be a difficult one to pull off. Not that in Naples' case there seems any prospect of things changing for better or worse.

The images are exotically compelling and my reservations added to their interest: well worth a visit (as is the courtyard café!). The exhibition closes on September 12th.

Karl Weschke - “murky, viscous and ominously placid”

The blockbuster Banksy vs Bristol exhibition (the opening day of which I reviewed here), was largely the business of walking round Bristol Museum going “Yes, heh heh, very smart, but is it art, dammit, is it art?” It was striking therefore to find a Banksy-vandalised Damien Hirst (about whom the Is It Art? question is also often asked) on display next to Karl Weschke’s painting Leda and The Swan.




Queasy and inexplicably menacing; Ah, now this is art, then. Why is the myth inverted, with Leda the predator and the swan seemingly trapped in a prison-like environment? Bansky’s gags can be explained in a sentence. Weschke’s bleak paintings defy words. We can give it a go, however. An obituary in The Times describes his style thus:

Weschke’s skies can look like stainless steel, his rocks like iron, and his seas can seem murky, viscous, and ominously placid. Bathers, their backs against the rocks, appear isolated, hemmed in, and vulnerable. Corpses float face down in the dark waters or lie rigid on deserted beaches, and dogs, teeth bared, defend bloody carrion.

Karl Weschke’s biography is as interesting and unsettling as his art. Born in 1925 in Gera, Germany, he was abandoned by his mother at the age of two, sent to a home and then reclaimed by her five years later. He was just one of her three illegitimate children, all by different fathers.

Weschke found the security he craved in the shape of the Hitler Youth. He joined the Luftwaffe in 1942 and was brought to England as a prisoner-of-war in 1945. So convinced a Nazi was Weschke that for some weeks after the end of WWII he refused to believe that Germany had surrendered. His ‘re-education’ resulted in a nervous breakdown and when released in 1948 he had found painting but lost all desire to return to his homeland. He later discovered that his father, a political anarchist whom he had met only briefly at the age of 11, had been murdered at Auschwitz.

Moving to Cornwall in 1955, Weschke exhibited and flogged a few paintings here and there but was largely ignored until the1990s, when the Tate bought some of his pictures and documentaries about him were screened on British and German telly. Thus he gained a reputation late in life, and was given the freedom of Gera in 2001, just four years before his death.

Weschke bore an uncanny physical resemblance to Picasso and had no trouble attracting the ladies. He married three times and fathered five children, happy to raise them alone when relationships broke down. Supplementing his income by teaching and diving for lobsters, he devoted his day to his offspring and painted by night, having no patience for the bleeding heart argument that it was impossible to bring up children and be an artist.

Indeed, although he lived in close proximity to the St Ives School (and counted writers John le Carre and WS Graham amongst his friends), he was cynical about artistic circles, often criticising their snobbery and preciousness. Asked once whether he chose to live in Cornwall because of the beautiful light, he answered, "Cornish light? I've got a 60-watt light-bulb and I keep the curtains closed."

The Cobham Cuckoos

If you visit Longleat and safely negotiate the lions and herpes-infested monkeys, you can enter the vast Elizabethan mansion and – via a circuitous route taking in such stately home essentials as the Saloon, the Red Library and the Dress Corridor – finally arrive at the Grand Staircase, at the top of which you will find the multiple eyes of this portrait staring at you.



Painted in 1567 by the suspicious-sounding Master of the Countess of Warwick, it depicts William Brooke, the 10th Baron Cobham, his second wife Frances Newton (standing) and their offspring. The lady sitting is Frances’ sister Johanna. She’s holding Henry. The other children are Maximilian, William, twins Frances and Elizabeth, and Margaret.

They all, you will note, have the same face. Ageless, like Midwich Cuckoos the children gaze at the nothingness beyond the limits of our perception. Margaret on the right is clearly the leader, her dark artistry fathomless, the evil palpable in her smirk – it is no coincidence that her pet, or dæmon, is a black cat.* The twins are soulless automatons, their actions controlled by infant hound-master Maximilian (left).

Their mother, Frances Newton, is an empty husk, all colour drained from her features. The Baron himself prays ceaselessly and furiously for redemption. Only Johanna, the aunt, knows the true nature of the Cuckoos; they revealed themselves to her one black night and now command her wholly.


*Or possibly marmoset, which is just as sinister if you ask me.