Chrome Tome

The Secret Lives of Colour, Kassia St Clair (John Murray 2018)

This book is going to be good, I thought when I picked it up. So good that I felt an urge to write a glowing review of it before I’d read it. After all, it was going to combine two of my favorite things: colors and words. Just by flicking through it I could see that. There were sections with titles like “Amaranth” and “Chrome Yellow” and “Magenta” and “Emerald” and “Vantablack”. And each page of a section had a broad stripe of the relevant color down one edge. Colors and words! I was going to enjoy the book a lot and it would be one of the best I’d ever read.

And I did enjoy the book a lot. OK, it wasn’t as good as I hoped it would be, but it easily passed the test I apply to everything I read. Do I want to read it again? Yes, I do. It’s an instructive and entertaining book. The story of color is also the story of culture and clothing. In recent centuries, it’s the story of chemistry too. I’ve found myself looking at classical art in a new way since finishing the book, because Kassia St Clair writes a lot about painters and their search to find and fix new colors on canvas. But there are no illustrations in this book: just black type on white paper and pure strips or spots of color. Well, at the beginning of each chapter, the names of the colors are printed in the colors themselves. It doesn’t look very good or feel very good in the brain. I like the colors and the words to be separate, like flowers and bees. The words should buzz around the colors, sipping their nectar but never exhausting it.

And sometimes words desert a color and buzz off to another: the shifts in color-vocabulary are interesting. But even more interesting are the expansion in color-vocabulary and the different ways different languages divide the spectrum. Color is one of the joys of life and this book is a joy to read.

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The Wheel Deal

Cyclogeography: Journeys of a London Bicycle Courier, Jon Day (Notting Hill Editions 2015)

I’ve never read George R.R. Martin, but I like this quote by him: “A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one.” That applies to a world of sword and sorcery, but it also applies in this world. Film can show you what a life is like from the outside; books can tell you what a life is like from within. Reading Jon Day’s Homing (2019), you’ll learn what it’s like to be a pigeon-racer; reading his Cyclogeography, you’ll learn what it’s like to be a bicycle-courier:

When I became a bicycle courier I found that I loved cycling for my living. I loved the exhilaration of pedalling quickly through the city, flowing between stationary cars or weaving through lines of moving traffic. I loved the mindlessness of the job, the absolute focus on the body in movement, the absence of office politics and cubicle-induced anxiety. I loved the blissful, annihilating exhaustion at the end of the day, the dead sleep haunted only by memories of the bike. – p. 3

A film could show you some of that, but it couldn’t tell you what it feels like from within. And here’s something that a film can’t show you at all:

You learn the secret smells of the city: summer’s burnt metallic tang; the sweetness of petrol; the earthy comfort of freshly laid tarmac. Some parts of London have their own smells, like olfactory postcodes. The Shisha bars on Edgeware Road haze the area with sweet smoke; the mineral tang of Billingsgate fish-market wafts over the Isle of Dogs. – p. 6

But Day was an aspiring academic as he rode his bike and, just as he does in Homing, he mixes literature, film and art into his tales of life on the road. So Cyclogeography is a map as well as a memoir: it maps the culture and philosophy of cycling, all the way from Flann O’Brien’s strange and disturbing novel The Third Policeman (1967) to Will Self’s short story “Waiting”, which sounds dull even in the description. But there’s more to cycling than cycling, as it were. The bike runs parallel with the car in more ways than one. Both bikes and cars are like blood-cells speeding along the veins and arteries and capillaries of London, partly autonomous, partly constrained by the anatomy of the city. Some cyclists acquire what taxi-drivers call the Knowledge, the intimate familiarity with London’s geography that allows you to navigate swiftly and surely from any point to any other. Frank, one of the controllers at the courier-firm Day worked for, had acquired his Knowledge like this:

He had been expelled from school at fourteen for stealing mopeds, he once told me, and spent his teenage years as a scholar of the city: joyriding cars and motorbikes down its alleyways and cul-de-sacs, learning every back road and aerial walkway, every park and passage and byway and rat-run. He used this mental armoury first to evade the police and later, more legitimately, as a taxi driver. – p. 39

Then Day adds this beautiful little Ballardian touch:

But after a few years on the road, he realised that he preferred his mental map of the city to the real thing, and so he retreated to the office to live in it at one remove, traversing London vicariously in his imagination.

Frank’s controllees still preferred the wheel deal: as Day says, “Most couriers are young, male, and slightly lost.” (p. 28) Or a lot lost, and glad to be so. Some are hiding from the police or not just riding but being ridden by drug-addiction or mental illness. It’s a dangerous and demanding job. Day loved it, then got out and wrote this short book. There’s a lot in it: free-wheeling and free association. Day is an academic now and in a particularly dangerous (but undemanding) field: EngLit. But he doesn’t write like a typical academic and there’s no ugly jargon or pretentious cultural theory, despite the appearance of Debord and Self. Writing should be like riding: smooth, well-balanced, following the contours of thought and reality with grace, efficiency and ease. That’s what Day has achieved in Cyclogeography.

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Previously Pre-Posted on Papyrocentric Performativity…

• Homing in the Gloaming – a review of Jon Day’s Homing: On Pigeons, Dwellings and Why We Return (2019)

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Daysed and Confused

Hawkwind: Days of the Underground: Radical Escapism in the Age of Paranoia, Joe Banks (Strange Attractor 2020)

In terms of core issues around maximal engagement with key notions of cult bands, well, yeah, Hawkwind are the dog’s bollocks. They’ve been blasting eardrums and blowing minds for over fifty years. For flip’s sake.

This book is a detailed look at their first decade-and-a-bit. Too detailed for me, I have to admit, because I’m not a Hawkwind obsessive. And I don’t think drugs and loud music were ever a threat to the Powers That Be. In fact, they might have been a big help. They were certainly very self-indulgent and while loud music was wrecking a lot of ears, drugs were wrecking a lot of lives and a lot of minds. If you are a Hawkwind obsessive, you’ve probably already got this book and learnt that it’s something in which “even the most hardcore of Hawkfans will discover something new.” You’re probably also a Guardianista like Joe Banks, the author. His prose isn’t particularly bad, but it’s not particularly good either and he doesn’t know what a hanging participle is: “Initially hired as a road manager and driver, [Nik Turner]’s rudimentary talent on the saxophone soon sees him inducted into the new band.”

Fortunately, most Hawkwind fans, Guardianista and otherwise, won’t know what a hanging participle is either, so bad writing like that won’t bother them. And even if it did, Banks didn’t write everything in this book. And he didn’t take the photos or draw the art. There are a lot of rare images and a lot of interesting interviews with people who are important in the Hawkwind story, from electronics whiz DikMik to the statuesque Stacia, the nude dancer who was an eye-catching and improvisational part of early Hawkwind gigs.

So for me the book’s biggest failure is its cover. The cover looks flashy for a moment, then reveals its flaws when you look at it more carefully. The stumpy-legged female figure is ill-proportioned and ugly, for example, and the artist hasn’t captured the spirit of Hawkwind there or elsewhere. Looking at those flaws, I thought: “I don’t get it – why didn’t they ask maverick gay artist John Coulthart to do the cover? He did some Hawkwind albums, after all, so he was the obvious choice.” Then I thought: “Funnily enough, the cover looks like someone imitating Coulthart and not doing a very good job of it.” Then I looked at the credits for the book and discovered that the cover was actually by Coulthart.

Counter-cultural cock-up — Coulthart’s cruddy cover for Hawkwind: Days of the Underground

Oy veh! How long did he spend on it? Five, ten, even fifteen minutes? In fact, though, while the cover is slap-dash in one sense, I’m sure Coulthart spent a long time on it. But that will have been part of the problem. I don’t like the term “anally retentive” and I’m worried that applying it to the work of a gay artist like Coulthart will be regarded as homophobic.

But let’s face it: Coulthart’s art is anally retentive, man. And he’s never been good at representing three dimensions. Hawkwind, on the other hand, have always been the opposite of anally retentive. They’re half-hippy, half-biker, and they believe in spontaneity, intuition and improvisation. And their music is about expanding into as many dimensions as possible in as many ways as possible. That cover is rigid, regimented and far too symmetrical and two-dimensional to capture the free-flowing and ever-roaming spirit of Hawkwind. The fonts of the title and sub-titles are uninspired too. And why hasn’t Coulthart done something more interesting with the triangles on the straps hanging from the woman’s arms? Has he never heard of fractals or impossible geometry? Sheesh. Compare his bad and overly symmetrical book-cover with the good and subtly asymmetric album-cover that inspired it:

Hawkwind’s Space Ritual, cover by Barney Bubbles

That album-cover was obviously painted by a straight artist who liked the female body and could express what was appealing about it. And the bare breasts on Space Ritual are important not just because they’re part of what’s appealing about women, but because Hawkwind’s Stacia was famous for dancing in the nude. She was stacked and she stunned the eye. So why has Coulthart covered the breasts of his Stacia-figure? Is it because he’s not interested in female breasts or because the publisher Strange Attractor told him to keep the cover clean? If it’s the first reason, it’s another example of how he was the wrong artist for a book about Hawkwind. If it’s the second, that’s not very transgressive, is it? But perhaps it was better that the breasts were covered. This is what the gay genius Michelangelo came up with when he sculpted some bare female breasts:

Tomb of Giuliano II de’ Medici by Michelangelo, Medici Chapel, Florence

Yuck! To conclude, then: good book, gay cover.

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Le Paon dans les Pyrénées

The Man in the Red Coat, Julian Barnes (Penguin 2019)

When I posted Cornelia Otis Skinner’s witty and well-written “Portrait of a Peacock” at my other blog, I would have been pleased to know that within a few weeks I’d be reading a book in which the Peacock has a leading role. Alas, the anticipation would have proved better than the reality. Comte Robert de Montesquiou, the aristocratic French dandy, aesthete and literary butterfly, flits and flutters everywhere in Julian Barnes’ The Man in the Red Coat. But the book has two big flaws by comparison with Skinner’s essay. And one big flaw of its own.

The two big comparative flaws are that the book isn’t very well-written and isn’t mostly about Montesquiou, but a less interesting figure: the French-Italian surgeon and gynaecologist Samuel Pozzi, who’s the Man in the Red Coat of the title. The big flaw of its own is that it doesn’t have an index. Despite Barnes’ sometimes clumsy and banal prose, the book has many amusing and interesting anecdotes and asides. But if you want to re-read them after finishing the book, you’ll have to find them for yourself. Here’s one about the Peacock, who was on holiday in the Pyrenees when he received a telegram informing him that his favourite house, the luxurious and art-replete Pavilion “at Neuilly, on the edge of the Bois de Boulagne”, had been burgled:

As he travelled north, the Count’s apprehension deepened. He imagined his Whistler slashed to pieces. He remembered Flaubert’s phrase from Salammbô about the mercenaries destroying objects “whose meaning escapes them, and which, because of this, exasperate them.” When he got to Neuilly he found, to his relief and amazement, that his treasures were all intact and the “mercenaries” seemed to have left without any loot. Shortly afterwards, the burglars were arrested. At their trial, one of them was asked why they hadn’t stolen anything. He replied, “Oh, there wasn’t anything for us there.” Montesquiou described these words as “the most flattering of all that have been addressed to me in my entire existence.” – pg. 193-4

Montesquiou posing as the head of John the Baptist, flanked by lines of his own poetry

When the Peacock is on stage, this book is always interesting and entertaining. When he isn’t, it’s often much less so. And although it’s almost entirely about la Belle Époque and Francophones, it doesn’t have much French in it. Barnes is bilingual, so why didn’t he write more about Parisian slang and quote more of his dramatis personae in the original? Perhaps he was concealing the drabness of his translations. But he does describe and analyse art well. He notes, for example, that a turquoise cuff-link echoes the turquoise handle of the cane Montesquiou is wielding in Boldini’s famous portrait. That small but significant detail isn’t obvious in copies of the portrait I’ve seen on the net, so here’s a scan from the book:

Robert de Montesquiou by Boldini (1897) (open in new window for larger version)

And there are many more images where that came from. Many obviously come from Barnes’ own collection, including the free photo-cards of Célébrités Contemporaines included with bars of chocolate manufactured by “the grocers Félix Potin.” Maupassant, Wagner, Marie Curie and Kipling are there, which didn’t surprise me. But so is Montesquiou, which did surprise me. I thought he was a minor figure even at the time. He wasn’t. Indeed, he appeared on two cards in the Célébrités Contemporaines series. Barnes says this:

There is something eternally satisfying about the dandyish count – so superior, so exclusive, so aloof from the middle and lower classes, so removed from the normal materiality of the world – falling out of a chocolate wrapper as a free gift. And the anonymous drudge employed by Félix Potin to supply brief biographical notes sardonically observes that the Count is “the author of numerous verse pieces whose precocity is only increased by the wilful oddity of the titles he chooses to supply them with.” – pg. 92

Montesquiou as “Homme de Lettres” on a chocolate manufacturer’s photo-card

Yes, but I think the Count would have been pleased by the illustriousness of the company he was keeping. Just as I was pleased to see him appear in a book by a famous British writer nearly a century after his death. But I would have been more pleased if this had been a better-written book and had centered on Montesquiou rather than Pozzi. Alas, even if Barnes had written The Man with the Turquoise Cane instead, it wouldn’t have been as good as Cornelia Otis Skinner’s “Portrait of a Peacock”. Le Comte est mort! Vive le Comte!

Montesquiou and his secretary-lover Gabriel Yturri in Oriental costume

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The Bella and the Boltonian

A Forger’s Tale: Confessions of the Bolton Forger, Shaun Greenhalgh (Allen & Unwin 2017)

Was I was one of the many people fooled by the Bolton Forger? I think so, because a few months ago I read a book on Leonardo da Vinci that contained an attractive profile of a young woman. I liked it and even thought of finding it online and putting it on Overlord-of-the-Über-Feral.

I’m pretty sure that the same drawing, entitled La Bella Principessa, opens the photo-section of this fascinating and well-written autobiography. The caption underneath runs:

I saw this drawing in Milan in 2015 and despite all the frenzy in the press, it is my work of 1978. Although it looks to have been gone over or ‘restored’ by a better hand than mine. But, like me, no Leonardo!

In his final chapter, “Postscript”, Shaun Greenhalgh (pronounced Green-alsh or similar) gives more details. He says that he made the drawing in imitation of Leonardo, then sold it “for less than the effort that went into it to a dealer in Harrogate in late 1978 – not as a fake or by ever claiming that it was something it wasn’t.” More than 30 years later, he learned that his drawing had risen higher in the world than he could ever have guessed:

I received [an art book from an anonymous donor and] the picture on the cover was immediately familiar, but better-looking than I remembered it. […] [The] title [of the drawing] was rather grand and pompous – La Bella Principessa – the beautiful princess. Or, as I knew her, ‘Bossy Sally from the Co-Op’. (pg. 354)

From the sublime to the ridiculous! The Co-Op is a supermarket chain in northern England. Greenhalgh continues:

I drew this picture in 1978 when I worked at the Co-Op. The ‘sitter’ was based on a girl called Sally who worked on the check-outs in the retail store bolted onto the front of the warehouse where I also worked. Despite her humble position, she was a bossy little bugger and very self-important. If you believe in reincarnation, she may well once have been a Renaissance princess – she certainly had the attitude and self-belief of such a person.

You see the girl in the drawing differently when her label changes. But the drawing itself hasn’t changed. Now that I think back on my first sight of it, I remember being half-aware that it was remarkably clear and bright by comparison with the other art in the Leonardo book. It definitely stood out, but I didn’t suspect anything. After all, it was in a book by an expert on Leonardo, so I accepted its attribution without question.

And so, without knowing it at the time, I had an important lesson in the way art often works. Our appreciation of it can be affected much more than we might like to think by the labels and reputations that go with it. Greenhalgh says here more than once than we should enjoy art without worrying about whether it’s genuine or not. And what is “genuine” anyway? That’s one of the fascinating questions raised by this book and by the phenomenon of forgery in general. Here’s more of what he says about the drawing:

I’m a bit unsure how to talk about this because the book was written by an eminent Oxford professor and must have been quite an effort. I don’t want to ruffle any feathers or cause problems but I nearly swallowed my tongue on reading of its supposed value – £150 million! It would be crazy for any public body to pay such a sum. So I feel the need to say something about it.

He goes on to describe how he created the drawing and made it look old. It was a good effort but he says there are “umpteen reasons for not thinking this drawing to be by Leonardo.” (pg. 357) One of the most important, for him, is that it isn’t skilful enough: “I couldn’t match how Leonardo would have rendered it [a section of cross-hatching]. But I have a good excuse. He is he and I’m just me.”

Well, Shaun Greenhalgh isn’t impressed by Shaun Greenhalgh, but lots of other people have been. If you read this book, you’ll probably join them. He tells the remarkable story of how an apparently ordinary lad from the Lancashire town of Bolton fooled the art world again and again with work in a great variety of mediums and styles. Sometimes he meant to fool people and sometimes, as with La Bella Principessa, he didn’t. And he says he’s sorry that Bolton Museum, “my favourite childhood place”, was duped by a “15 minute splash of light and colour” he’d done “in the style of Thomas Moran”, an American artist originally born in Bolton.

The watercolour is reproduced in the photo-section, labelled “© Metropolitan Police”, because Scotland Yard – or “the Yardies” as Greenhalgh disdainfully calls them – now have a lot of what he’s created. They raided his home, carried away much of the contents, then slowly got around to prosecuting him. In the end, he got four years and eight months in jail for his artistic endeavours. The art-critic Waldemar Januszczack condemns the length of that sentence in the introduction. Januszczack was someone else fooled by the Bolton forger. In his case it was a Gauguin Faun “[d]one in three parts and authenticated by the Wildenstein Institute of Paris”. Januszczack waxed lyrical about the faun in a Gauguin biography he did for the BBC, but says that “[i]nstead of hating Shaun Greenhalgh for fooling me, I immediately liked him for pushing my button and being a clever rogue.” (Introduction, pg. 4)

Greenhalgh wouldn’t agree that he’s either clever or a rogue, but he’s definitely wrong about the first thing, at least. He’s a self-taught expert on a dazzling range of art from a daunting stretch of centuries. Or millennia, rather, because his forgeries included an attractive “Amarna Princess” in alabaster, supposedly from the reign of the Pharaoh Akhenaten in the 14th Century BC. Like many of his other works, the princess was coveted by an “expert” who thought he could get it for much less than it was apparently worth. After all, the statue was being offered for sale by a family of thick northerners – Greenhalgh and his parents – who had no real idea of what it was. In fact, they had a much better idea than the expert – or the experts, rather, because the “Amarna Princess” was probed and pondered for months. Greenhalgh never expected it to withstand the scrutiny, but: “In late October 2003, we were paid half a million for the Amarna Princess, less taxes. So $440,000.” It ended up in Bolton Museum again and Greenhalgh says again that he wasn’t comfortable about that and didn’t touch most of the money.

And is he still trying to assuage his conscience when he insists the Princess clearly wasn’t pukka?

The first problem with the Amarna figure was that it was not done to a proper proportion, something fundamental in all ancient Egyptian sculpture, even with the radical designs of the court of Akhenaten. […] The left arm, or what’s left of it, was cut ovoid in section, which is again un-Egyptian. Part of the robe extending into the negative space to the figure’s left is also totally wrong. […] One other mistake about it was that I put a ‘contrapposto’ into the torso that was totally out of place. That’s the slightly slouchy pose you first see in Greek art of the classical period, post-fifth century BC. It isn’t found at all in Egyptian sculpture. (pg. 346)

Maybe he’s trying to assuage his conscience or maybe he’s re-living his triumph over the experts. Or maybe he’s doing both. Whatever it was, his next major forgery, a bas-relief of an Assyrian priest, was meant for the British Museum down south. And this was a forgery too far. The experts rumbled him this time and the police came knocking. Then he began a slow legal journey towards conviction and custody. Prison is where he wrote this autobiography, but he doesn’t devote much space to it. Instead, he describes how an apparently ordinary lad from Bolton, born in 1960, acquired such a love for and knowledge of art from all over the world and right through history, whether it’s ancient Egypt, Renaissance Italy or Mayan Mexico. Unlike most of us, though, when Greenhalgh liked the look of something he wanted to make something like it for himself. And he wanted it to be as authentic as possible. That’s why he learned about the chemical composition of Roman metalwork and Chinese porcelain.

Most art experts learn through their eyes, by looking at art and reading about it. Greenhalgh did that, but he stepped into a third dimension because he learnt with his hands too. And he stepped into a fourth dimension, because he learnt about the role of time and patience in artistic creation. By doing all that, he won insights that few others possess. As he says: “I’ve always found it strange that art, unlike most professions and trades, has as its experts and explainers people who can’t do that of which they speak.” (pg. 311) For example, how many Egyptologists know what it’s like to carve a statue for themselves? Very few. But Greenhalgh does and he acquired even greater respect for ancient sculptors by discovering how difficult the stone they worked with was. But that’s the way he wants it: “I like to do things that are difficult. Easy isn’t a challenge, is it?” (pg. 293)

However, he discovered that the effort he put into some forgeries was wasted, because art-dealers often didn’t know what to look for. And often didn’t care. They took what they thought they could sell. At other times, they did care what they were buying – a lot. But they tried hard to conceal their interest, because they thought they had a gullible and ignorant seller to rip off. A lot of Greenhalgh’s work is still out there, sailing proudly under false colours. He’s seen some of it but kept shtum, he says. That’s partly because he doesn’t want to spoil the new owners’ enjoyment and partly for his own protection. He doesn’t want to go back to jail.

But his first and so far only stretch in jail was worth it in one way, because it produced this book. He says that “A good faker, just like a good artist, has to be a close observer.” (pg. 296) And there’s a lot of close observation here about both art and life. Greenhalgh lost his wife-to-be when she died of a brain tumour and says that marriage would have taken him down a different path. He would have stopped forging and never gone to jail. Nor would he have written A Forger’s Tale. That makes you look at the book in a new way. Literature is even more about perspective and labels than art is. A clever writer like Michael Connelly knows that, which is why he wrote a crime novel, Blood Work, with such a clever twist at the end that I re-read it at once, marvelling at the way the text had suddenly changed.

A Forger’s Tale isn’t a novel and I won’t be re-reading it immediately. But I would like to read it again sometime. Greenhalgh isn’t a professional writer but he obviously could have been if his inclinations had lain that way. As it is, the occasional naivety of his prose adds to the appeal. He’s an ordinary lad with some extraordinary talents for what he’d call imitation, not creation. And he has extraordinary knowledge too. There is a lot of information here about art and the brief definitions in the glossary make me think of the Latin phrase Leonem ex ungue – “You can recognize the lion by his claw”. Here’s Greenhalgh’s definition of “Reducing atmosphere”, for example: “An atmospheric condition need to achieve specific ceramic effects, in which oxidation is prevented by the removal of oxygen.”

But any self-respecting ceramics expert could tell you what a “reducing atmosphere” is. Greenhalgh knows more: how to create one. Here’s his top tip:

You can use any combustible material [in the kiln], but most burn with some debris landing on the pot, causing imperfections. Mothballs splutter and vaporise instantly, starving the kiln of oxygen. (pg. 294)

So there’s everything here from mothballs to the Mayans, from lanxes of silver to Lowry of Salford. Crime captures life in all kinds of ways and the forger Shaun Greenhalgh has some very interesting things to write about.

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Faces and Facts

The Self-Portrait: A Cultural History, James Hall (Thames & Hudson 2014)

I enjoy books that have me taking notes and looking for more online. This book certainly had me doing that: it’s erudite and informative, full of fascinating asides and anecdotes. Did you know, for example, that the arrow transfixing the martyr’s neck in Pietro Perugino’s St Sebastian (c. 1493-4) actually consists of a narrow line of text: PETRAUS PERUGINUS PINXIT, meaning “Pietro Perugino Painted (This)” in Latin? I didn’t know that and I’m not sure I’d’ve noticed anything strange about the arrow if I’d looked at the painting for myself. Good art-criticism enriches and informs our experience of art like that. And if you wonder how you missed something that seems so obvious once it’s pointed out to you, well, that’s a reminder that you should look more carefully when you’re on your own.

But I wasn’t so sure that this book was good art-criticism as I worked my way through it. Or at least, I wondered whether it was as good as Laura Cumming’s A Face to the World: On Self-Portraits (2009). I don’t think it is, but Cumming set a high standard. She also followed a well-trodden track that Hall has followed again. Dürer, Rembrandt and Velázquez appear in both books, but it would be perverse to avoid them in a history of the self-portrait. Then again, perversity is one way of making a name for yourself when so many critics have written about a limited amount of art for so long. James and Cumming don’t employ it, but I wish they had in the case of Artemisia Gentileschi’s Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting (c. 1638-9). It would be perverse of an art-critic to call Gentileschi a bad painter and this second-most famous of her works an ugly, awkward and uncouth mess.

But it would also be true. Hall and Cumming aren’t perverse: they treat paintress and painting seriously. Where’s Brian Sewell when you need him? Six foot underground, that’s where. I think he could have written a better book on self-portraits than either James and Cumming have done. It would certainly have been more idiosyncratic and politically incorrect. But would Sewell have been able to draw a parallel between self-portraiture and acting by quoting from Diderot? I don’t think he would. James could and did (but I’ll put the original French first):

Garrick passe sa tête entre les deux battants d’une porte, et, dans l’intervalle de quatre à cinq secondes, son visage passe successivement de la joie folle à la joie modérée, de cette joie à la tranquillité, de la tranquillité à la surprise, de la surprise à l’étonnement, de l’étonnement à la tristesse, de la tristesse à l’abattement, de l’abattement à l’effroi, de l’effroi à l’horreur, de l’horreur au désespoir, et remonte de ce dernier degré à celui d’où il était descendu. – Denis Diderot, Paradoxe Sur le Comédien (1773/1830)

Garrick puts his head between two leaves of a door, and in the space of four or five seconds, his face passed successively from wild joy to moderate joy, from this joy to composure, from composure to surprise, from surprise to astonishment, from astonishment to sadness, from sadness to gloom, from gloom to fright, from fright to horror, from horror to despair, and then back again from this final stage up to the one from which he had started. (ch. 7, “At the Crossroads”, quoting from Diderot’s The Paradox of Acting, written 1773, published 1830)

That was one of the parts of The Self-Portrait that had me taking a note and finding out more online. But erudite and informative as the book was, it was still, like all artistic criticism, trapped inside a web of words. Critics write constantly about geniuses but can’t explain them or analyse their work other than superficially. Dürer, Rembrandt and Velázquez all had special brains. I want to know how those brains evolved not just in a cultural sense but in a biological sense too. And I don’t believe that all races were capable of producing the dazzling art that’s discussed here.

Biological analysis of art will seem perverse and even blasphemous to critics, who mostly belong to the biology-denying Guardianista community, but their prejudices won’t stem the flood of perversity that is on its way. And if art criticism is something will never be the same again, then nor will the human race.

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Riff-Raph

100 Pre-Raphaelite Masterpieces, Gordon Kerr (Flame Tree Publishing 2011)

For me there is a simple test for Pre-Raphaelite art and many of the paintings in this book don’t pass it. The test goes like this: is this art deeply, soul-stirringly ugly and unpleasant on the eye? Are its colours garish and ill-judged, its figures stiff and ungainly, its general air stilted, simpering and sentimental?

If I can say “Yes” to those questions, it’s Pre-Raphaelite art. So Sir John Everett Millais’s Christ in the House of His Parents (1849) is Pre-Raphaelite. And Millais’s Ferdinand Lured by Ariel (1849) is too. And Millais’s Ophelia (1851-2) definitely is. And so are William Holman Hunt’s The Hireling Shepherd (1851), The Awakening Conscience (1852) and The Light of the World (c. 1852). That last, which shows Christ knocking on an overgrown door, is one of the most famous paintings ever created. For me, it’s also one of the ugliest. Pre-Raphaelite painters often turn flesh and other matter into something that looks like plastic. Here it looks like putrescent plastic.

William Holman Hunt’s The Light of the World (c. 1852)

But Holman Hunt’s The Scapegoat (1854) doesn’t pass the “Yuck!” test so successfully, so it’s not very Pre-Raphaelite for me. Nor is his Isabella and the Pot of Basil (1867). And most of the paintings here by Dante Gabriel Rossetti don’t even come close to passing the “Yuck!” test. He wasn’t a particularly good artist, but he could capture the beauty of female hair, skin, lips and clothing, and even set them glowing, so I don’t like to classify him as Pre-Raphaelite. I don’t like to classify Sir Edward Burne-Jones as that either. He too could capture beauty, though less earthily and more ethereally.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Monna Vanna (1866)

But Rossetti and Burne-Jones were Pre-Raphaelite, the best of a generally bad movement. Anthony Frederick Sandys was technically a better artist than either of them, as he proved with Medea (1866-8), but he couldn’t capture beauty so well. William Waterhouse could, but he definitely wasn’t Pre-Raphaelite. He was neo-classical and skilful and if the two of his paintings included here, Ophelia (c. 1894) and Juliet (1898), don’t seem particularly out of place, that’s because they are far from his best. In fact, I would say that the only masterpieces here are by Rossetti. He was an uneven artist who belongs with the Pre-Raphaelites at his worst and transcended them at his best. Millais never transcended anything. But perhaps Pre-Raphaelitism would have been a less interesting movement if it hadn’t failed so often and so uglily.

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Wandering Wonders

Plankton: Wonders of the Drifting World, Christian Sardet (The University of Chicago Press 2015)

Originally published in French as Plancton, aux origines du vivant, this is a big book on a tiny subject. A microscopic subject, in fact. Or mostly so:

It is not easy to collect and study a drifting ecosystem consisting of a vast multitude of organisms ranging in size from less than 1 micron to tens of meters, over 10-million-fold difference. The smallest beings are viruses, and then bacteria and archaea. The largest are threadlike colonial cnidarians (siphonophores such as Praya dubia) that can reach more than 50 meters when extending their fishing filaments. (Introduction, pg. 16)

Nothing unites these organisms except the way they drift on the ocean’s currents: “plankton” is from the same Greek root as “planet”, which is literally a wandering star. And if there is life on another planet or one of its moons, it may be no stranger than some of the organisms here. And may be less so. The faintly dizzying smell of ink that rose from the pages of the copy I looked at went well with the phantasmagoric colours and shapes on those pages. Some are beautiful, some are grotesque, all remind me of a line from Aquinas: Unus philosophus fuit triginta annis in solitudine, ut cognosceret naturam apis – “One philosopher was thirty years in the wilderness that he might know the nature of a bee” (Expositio in Symbolum Apostolorum, 1273).

The philosopher at work here is the French marine biologist and planktonologist Christian Sardet, creator of the Plankton Chronicles project and a worthy heir to Jacques Cousteau, who sailed around the world to capture images of macroscopic life like whales, dolphins and squid. Sardet sails around the world to capture the microscopic.

In this, he’s also a worthy heir to Ernst Haeckel, the German biologist who first popularized the beauty of microscopic marine life in books like Kunstformen der Natur (1904), or “Artforms of Nature”. His books truly were art, because he illustrated rather than photographed his subjects, like the “siliceous skeletons of polycystine radiolarians” on page 85, which are reproduced from Kunstformen.

Something is lost in a photograph, but the door of technology can’t be closed now and some images could only be captured by a photograph, like the instant in which a misleadingly named predator meets its next meal on page 166:

The naked pteropod Clione limacia, or “sea-angel”, is a torpedo-like creature a few centimeters long. Furiously flapping its fins, it speeds through the water hunting its favorite prey, the coil-shelled thecosome pteropod Limacia helicina (lower left corner). On contact, Clione immediately ejects six buccal cones, grabs the prey, then eats it slowly with its raspy tongue. Clione roam the cold polar waters where they can reach high densities comparable to the tiny shrimp that constitute krill. Sea angels are themselves a major food for marine animals.

The photograph, “taken by Alexander Semanov in the White Sea” (off Russia), looks like a Lovecraftian deity descending on a Lovecraftian demon. Velella, a beautiful blue cnidarian that floats on the surface, propelled by the wind, is more like something from Clark Ashton Smith. There’s a photograph of a specimen of Velella about to be eaten, with gourmet-like delicacy, by a giant sun-fish.

Lovecraft and Smith would have enjoyed not just the images in this book, but the language too. The colours and shapes are phantasmagoric and so are the scientific names: from Asterionellopsis to Xystonella, from Phaeodactylum to Meganictyphanes. But the terminology is complex because it has to be and this is actually very clear writing:

These three spumellarian polycystines measure between 50 and 100 microns. To capture microscopic prey, they use membranous and cytoplasmic extensions, a peduncle called an axopode, and shorter extensions called rhizopodes that cover their entire surface. (pg. 79)

Christian Sardet translated this book himself from French with Dana Sardet and I’d like to sample it in the original. But Georgian would be even better: plankton should be written about in a strange language and beautiful alphabet. Of course, French and English are strange from the perspective of Georgian, but I don’t think the Roman alphabet could ever look beautiful to a Georgian. It’s functional and perhaps it’s good to have that contrast with the phantasmagoric.

If it is a contrast. Everything here is functional, no matter how strange or beautiful it seems:

Ctenophores owe their name to the Greek word ctene, referring to the minuscule combs comprised of thousands of fused cilia, arranged in eight rows on the gelatinous surface. The cilia of these comb plates are made of the same microtubular elements as those present in human cells. A simple nervous system controls the pulsating movement of the comb plates that act like tiny prisms, diffracting light in rainbow colors. (pg. 98)

No matter how remote ctenophores, diatoms, cephalopods, nudibranchs, tintinnids, chaetognaths and doliolids seem from humans, we have a common ancestor with them. And vertebrates are part of the plankton: larval fish drift there, so we were once part of it too. We mirror the world and the world mirrors us. But some parts of the mirror are more beautiful to look at than others and the world of plankton is certainly one of them.

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Plants on Paper

Drawing and Painting Plants, Christina Brodie (A & C Black 2006)

A book that combines botany with beauty. Christina Brodie’s beautiful drawings of trees, flowers, leaves, fruit and seeds rely on a botanically trained eye. So it’s a textbook in two ways: artistic and scientific. The colours and shapes of plants please the eye; understanding those colours and shapes challenges the brain.

So does capturing them on paper with pencil, ink and paint. Art is an intelligent activity in more ways than one. Illustration has one big advantage over photography: the eye can be selective and adaptive in a way the lens can’t. When Christina Brodie drew a passion flower for page 31, she reduced it to its essentials to capture its structure: the three-pronged stigma, androgynophore, hinged anther, corona filament, perianth segments, and so on.

Colour and shading weren’t important, so she didn’t depict them. Elsewhere, she does: the autumn leaves on pages 96 and 97, for example. There are also two photographs on page 97 and they underline the advantage of illustration. Brodie’s leaves are isolated on stark white paper; her photographs have backgrounds and inessentials. Photography can’t focus and exclude in the way that illustration does and there’s no clear sense of purpose and mind in photography.

Nor does photography pay proper tribute to the complexity and depth of nature. A camera can record a leaf in the same time and with the same ease as it records a forest. Or record a star with the same easy as a galaxy. If photography is an art, it’s a lazy one. There’s nothing lazy about botanical art and some of the power of this book comes not just from the obvious skill of the artist but also from her implicit patience and perseverance. We see in an instant what sometimes must have taken hours to create.

So art is a ritual that pays proper respect to the deep evolutionary time that is also implicit in this book. From fruits and flowers to ferns and fungi: plants come in a huge variety of forms and have been evolving and diversifying for hundreds of millions of years. Anyone who opens this book will see that for themself, but botanical artists like Christina Brodie appreciate it more deeply. She’s a highly skilled artist and thanks to printing she’s able to share her skill with many others.

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Lewminiferous

Guide to Garden Wildlife, Richard Lewington (British Wildlife Publishing 2008)

Richard Lewington illustrated the excellent Field Guide to the Dragonflies of Britain and Europe (2006). Here he’s both illustrator and author, describing and depicting the many species of mammal, reptile, bird, insect, arachnid and mollusc that can be found in a British garden. But that list isn’t exhaustive: millipedes and centipedes aren’t insects or arachnids:

Luminous Centipede Geophilus carpophagus

Dark and sombrely marked, this centipede is sometimes known as the “glow worm” as it gives off phosphorescent light at night. Found under loose bark and fallen logs, and in damp sheds and buildings. Widespread, it appears to be essentially coastal in northern England and Scotland. (“Chilopoda”, pg. 164)

Centipedes are strange animals. Luminous ones are even stranger. But glowing-in-the-dark isn’t the greatest feat of Geophilus carpophagus. Like all other centipedes, it has to solve complex biomechanical problems with an exigent allocation of neurons. As Lewington notes, centipedes are elusive, fast-moving and predatory. But they have flexible bodies that are never in the same orientation twice. Some very interesting algorithms must be at work in their brains and bodies.

In a more general sense, that’s true of every page in the guide proper, with Lewington’s drawings of beautiful or bizarre animals facing potted summaries of their behaviour and habitats. Evolution is a kind of algorithm and every species in this book, from the sparrowhawk, Accipiter nisus, on page 49 to the horse leech, Haemopis sanguisuga, on page 195, has a common ancestor. So evolution is the greatest artist of all, working with matter and energy to create millions of variations on that common ancestral theme.

But the human brain is also a product of evolution, so this book is actually part of nature. That would be true even if it used photographs, but I prefer illustrations. Photography is literally “writing with light”, but a camera is a mindless mechanism. Richard Lewington understands light and had to struggle as he learnt how to capture it on paper. By drawing nature, you acquire a deeper understanding of the richness and complexity of nature. When you draw as well as Richard Lewington and his brother Ian, who supplied the bird illustrations here, you can initiate the unartistic and bring them at least across the threshold of nature’s temple. There’s something magical and ritualistic in illustration that isn’t found in photography and a book like this is as much as an aesthetic experience as an intellectual one.

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