by Simon Schama
Such alterations exercised the most strenuous minds of early Victorian Britain. Many of them, like the architect A. W. N. Pugin and Thomas Carlyle, eulogised what they imagined to be a lost, devotional, architecturally Perpendicular, Christian Albion and waxed wrathful about the materialist hell of the Age of Machinery, with its philistine utilitarianism and worship of what Ruskin, the sherry merchant’s son, called, contemptuously, ‘the goddess of Getting-On’. In an implausible overreading of The Goddess of Discord Choosing the Apple of Contention in the Garden of the Hesperides, Ruskin recruited Turner as an anti-capitalist, but the truth is that his mills were usually neither dark nor satanic. His sketch of the town of Dudley, made around 1830, when the possibility of an English revolution hung in the air along with bituminous fumes, gives obvious prominence to the emblems of an older world – church and castle barely holding their own amid the chimneys. Consuming fires, Turner seems to have thought, were just the medium through which the country had to pass to come to a new national life.
When the Houses of Parliament caught fire, on the night of 16 October 1834, Turner, along with a throng of fellow Londoners, rushed to see the spectacular inferno. Hiring a boat, he bobbed back and forth, riding the tide, at Westminster Bridge. There had been no foul play, but, since a Parliamentary Reform Act had been passed just two years before, amid loudly voiced fears that, unless it was legislated, the kingdom might, like France in 1830, go down in bloody revolution, the relationship between rulers and ruled was in perilous play. A dominating feature of the two Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons paintings that resulted – one now in Cleveland and one in Philadelphia – is the crowds jamming the embankment and Westminster Bridge, watching, fixedly, the cremation of ‘Old Corruption’.
This is another authentic first – the painting of the People. Turner was putting on canvas Burke’s definition of representative government as a contract between the past and the present. The past is embodied, as if in a Gothic allegory, in the spectacle of the purifying inferno. In the Philadelphia painting, Turner has augmented this feeling of a political altarpiece by turning Westminster Bridge into a structure that seems cut from alabaster rather than limestone, and appears to liquefy into the flame-tinted water at its far end. But the two pictures also look forward to the great issue of the nineteenth century: the test of popular legitimacy. In the Cleveland painting (the two are united in the National Gallery show), Turner broadens the river so that he can give prominence to the rapt masses in the foreground, dramatising their distance from the burning palace of Westminster. One figure, enigmatically, holds up a sign that reads, simply, ‘NO’. This does not make Turner some sort of socialist. It is still Britain, and auspicious unrevolutionary stars are twinkling above the Thames. But the poetics of power did absorb him. And although we often think of Turner as the lyricist of the empty landscape, the truth is that the other Turner, the denizen of the London alleys and pubs, was truly Hogarth’s heir, with an unerring instinct for the crowd as social animal.
Every so often, that public-minded, historically fretful Turner thought that Britain should confront ugly truths. The doomed Slavers was conceived in just such a proselytising spirit and timed for 1840, the year an abolitionist congress was to be convened in London. But Turner’s ambition for a history painting that would achieve, through the medium of marine catastrophe, a moral reckoning had been rehearsed around 1835.
He was, once again, playing with fire, and although that 1835 picture is in a radically incomplete state, it’s the skeleton of a masterpiece. Flecked with gobs of phosphorescent cinders raining down from the sky into a storm-churned sea, the huge composition was traditionally given the title Fire at Sea. For years, it was underrated and underread as a rough sketch. It is in the National Gallery show, where visitors will find it described as Disaster at Sea, which is right, but not right enough. Fifteen years ago the scholar Cecilia Powell recognised that the work depicted an actual calamity, or, rather, a crime: the sinking of the Amphitrite, in September 1833. Powell made one simple, vital connection that hadn’t been noticed before: the frantic figures wrapped about the broken mast and fallen spars of the rapidly sinking wreck are all women and small children. The Amphitrite was a convict ship transporting female prisoners and their infants to the penal settlement in New South Wales. Driven off course by a storm in the Channel, it ran aground near Boulogne and began to break up. It was close enough for appalled French witnesses to offer assistance, but the captain, evidently a stickler for the rulebook, declined, on the ground that he had no authority to land his charges anywhere but their Antipodean prison. He battened down the hatches to prevent just such an escape. In desperation, the women broke through, but to no avail. Though one Frenchman actually swam out to the ship with a line, all of the more than 100 women and children drowned. Three crew survived.
The atrocity was widely reported in the press. Ballads were written and sung about it. Turner could not possibly have missed it, and he responded with a painting of timeless tragic power: the Guernica of nineteenth-century British art. The bodies are a curling ribbon of writhing, pathetic, naked women, arms flung out to the babes who slip from them into the sea for which – in the transparent film of water washing over a spar – the painter deployed all the prodigious gifts of the illusionism he was thought to have abandoned for poetically pretentious freedom. Turner’s bodies are already bobbing flotsam. They are helpless, ugly, manic, and they tear us apart. Our mere witness seems to implicate us in the enormity of the cruelty, the proper effect of all great histories from Caravaggio to Picasso. The pity of the thing is relentless, because of the phenomenal coherence of Turner’s draughtsmanship, the violence of the storm and the desperation of the victims – who should be flying away, centrifugally, but instead are sucked into the whorl of the merciless elements.
We’ll never know why Turner never finished or exhibited the painting. Perhaps he did finish it and this is it. At any rate, the Amphitrite was among the 300 or so oils left in his studio when he died, in 1851, and so it was included in his bequest to the nation. Turner was the first painter in the history of art to give his work to the public, rather than to a church or a patron – and this, too, speaks to the intensity of his devotion to the cultural life of the British people. Ruskin was at least right about that.
In the century and a half since Turner was buried, in St Paul’s Cathedral, the British have loved him with a grateful ardour that has nothing to do with his place in the genealogy of modernism and everything to do with the poetic visualisation of their history. The year before last, BBC Radio 4 asked listeners to vote for the greatest painting – from anywhere in the world, any time. The hot candidate was, unsurprisingly, Constable’s Hay Wain, that carthorse idyll by a plashy stream that seems to preserve the English countryside, in all its cow-parsley, humming-bee, Wind in the Willows summery splendour for ever and ever, amen. But the winner was Turner’s The Fighting Temeraire Tugged to Her Last Berth to Be Broken Up (1838), a painting not about the embalming of the British past, but about its unsentimental coupling with the future.
Although the sky over the Thames is saturated with a nectarine sunset that seems to mourn the passing of the timber veteran of Trafalgar, reduced to a pallid phantom (Turner, as always, taking liberties), its masts and furled sails are restored as it is tugged to Beatson’s breakers’ yard, at Rotherhithe. Thackeray, who adored the painting, assumed that Turner had cast the tugboat as the gnomic villain of the piece, dragging the valetudinarian to its last indignity. But Turner – especially in his own last years – was not at all hostile to the incoming empire of technology. Quite the opposite: he believed that the speeding train or the chugging paddle steamer could be turned into a visual lyric that married time with motion. For that matter, since the two vessels are sailing upstream, and thus westwards, the vermilion sky behind them, in the east, may actually be a sunrise, a fanfare for the future, not a dirge for the past. That’s the wonderful thing about being British: you can never really tell
which is which.
James Ensor at MoMA
Financial Times, 3 July 2009
Oh BELGIUM, man! was Zaphod Beeblebrox’s oath of choice when his two heads were pushed right to the edge. But if The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy meant the curse to suggest rain-soaked tedium relieved by stabs of edgy peculiarity, it got Belgium wrong, the tedium bit anyway. This is the country that gave us Bosch and Magritte and, right in between, the feverish thing that was James Ensor. By turns lurid, lyrical, mysterious, sophomorically satirical, intimate, raucous, cerebral, macabre, tender, narcissistic, suicidal, iconoclastic, reverent, supersaturated and washed out – and that’s just in the first fifteen years of a half-century career – Ensor is the figure no conscientious chronicler of the birth pangs of modernism can afford to overlook, but also the one whom no one has any idea what to do with.
So good for New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) for giving him the first major show in a very long time, even though the curatorial effort to plug him into the genealogy of modern art turns out to be a futile enterprise. He’s catnip for the ism-hunter, since he could do the lot. So the wall-captions and the catalogue assiduously nail this and that picture to the ism du jour – Impressionism, Expressionism, realism, surrealism, slathery tachism and pretentious symbolism. But his sensibility was as twitchy as a bat, swooping out of the air and vacuuming up whatever took his fancy on any particular Tuesday.
His whole career, at least the interesting two decades of it, was one long carnival guffaw at the higher seriousness of modernism. You can almost hear the kitschily raffish self-portrait – Rubens on absinthe, crowned by a Quentin Crisp snapbrim trilby, primroses bursting from the hatband – squeal with giggles from the wall at the solemnity of the installation. Oh Belgium, man!
And not just Belgium, but Ostend: the place you went to for marine calm when Brussels was just too much fun. Which is what Ensor did after a short stint at the École des Beaux-Arts, where he rehearsed a lifetime’s habit of getting on everyone’s nerves.
King Leopold’s Brussels, grown fat on a deadly combination of voracious African imperialism, Liegeois coal and local waffles, was a pincushion for the avant-garde. Its luminaries – the group who called themselves ‘Les Vingt’ and their critic-patriarch Emile Verhaeren – were alert to anything, within and without their borders, that would shred the overstuffed upholstery of bourgeois academicism. It was Verhaeren who wrote the first gushing review of Van Gogh and who wanted Ensor to exhibit with Les Vingt. He became one of their number, but was never a team player. So in 1880, when antsy modernists were hungering for a spell in the South Seas or the boulevards of Paris, Ensor returned to his native town of Ostend, from which he would seldom budge for the seven decades of the rest of his life.
Which is not to say that Ostend was a dull backwater of a middling province of a Lilliputian kingdom. It boasted a small-time bohemia, oompah and pickled herring on the promenades, chalky Pierrots and madcap Punchinellos; it had beer and bathing huts and curio shops, one of which was owned by Madame Ensor, James’s doughty Flemish mother. His father, not so doughty, was an Englishman of means who no longer had them, and had wanted to plant a theatrical sense of himself between the salt marshes and the slate-coloured sea. In their artist son, the two parental tempers – morose and exuberant – bounced off each other, with mood-swinging results.
The twenty-year-old James moved into the loft above the novelty shop and plundered its inventory, especially its grinning or wailing masks, to brilliantly histrionic effect. It wasn’t an especially profound or original insight, the Ensorian perception that the grimacing carnival mask might express the Real Persona while the flesh-and-blood face was merely the mask of social convenience, but only Goya and Daumier had made the masquerade such a penetrating genre of psychological portraiture.
Did the obsession with masks actually produce compelling art? The answers in the MoMA show will surprise anyone who thinks they know the mischievous Monsieur Ensor well. The Scandalized Masks (1883) is a throwback to the seventeenth-century genre painting of Adriaen Brouwer (for all his antic iconoclasm, Ensor was a great archivist of the Netherlandish tradition), with the startling difference that instead of two boers in a tavern, a half-doped snout-nose looks up to see a clogged and bonneted woman, sinister in dark glasses, coming through a door, clasping a wind instrument. Her gesture, also drawn from low-life painting, is unsubtle, the invitation more ominously castrating than seductive.
Much dalliance with intimiste Impressionism follows, with Ensor freckling his light through the tufty woollen gloom of Ostend parlours. But one stunningly weird picture, called, as if to provoke the burghers, Lady in Distress (1882), promises something unsavoury: a Sickert of the dank seaside. She’s not so much In Distress as completely out of it: eyes half-closed, body sunk into the feather-bedding as if awaiting a shroud. One window is draped with a sallow fabric; at another, the curtain is pulled back, its swag hooked to the wall. But the light coming through the exposed pane is painted with a clotted flake-white impasto, while the backlight behind the closed drape is suggested by the thinnest of paint stains, scraped back with palette knife and brush handle. Light is dark and dark is light. Welcome to Ensor’s univers pervers.
Occasionally Ensor takes it easy, and the results are breathtaking. The enormous Rooftops of Ostend (1884) is Turner meets Jacob van Ruisdael, yet somehow translated into an idiom that was all Ensor’s own. The sky, cerulean and pink, creamy and dove-grey, covers seven-eighths of the canvas, and is passionately worked with the palette knife and broad brush, while the crowded roofs below, in their contrapuntal dance of planes, anticipate Cubist townscapes.
But Ensor didn’t give a hoot for where he was supposed to stand in the face-off between tradition and modernity. Another revelation of the show is the enormous, monumental charcoal drawings, with their multiple quotations from Ensor’s art-god, Rembrandt. Ostensibly scenes from the New Testament, they are set by the artist in a Belgian carnival, complete with high-hatted bandsmen. And if the loss of the Son of God amid the seething throng seems a modern caprice, Ensor knew very well that it looked back to swarming pictures by Bosch and Bruegel, in which the indifferent brutality of the crowd engulfs the redemptive presence of the Saviour.
Ensor himself never really felt redeemed, and after a while the jokes in which genre figures, and his own self-portraits, are replaced by skeletons wear even thinner than the rattle of bones. His mind was too frantic, its demonic energy never crystallising around a painterly language in which form and content marry without acts of self-conscious main-force. He means to jangle, but in the end the cacophony enervates rather than illuminates.
Every so often, though, there are treats when he seems to reach back to the boy who must have watched the waves roll in to the beach: a little version of the Battle of Waterloo, with numberless toy-soldier riders hurled against each other, and, at the other extreme, a cartoonish beach scene, complete with smiley-faced Mr Sun, an array of bathing huts, the dip and bounce of beach bums, two men snogging in the foreground – the whole ‘ooh missus’ malarkey of the thing a little cartwheel of pictorial joy. And you think, this may not be vanguard art, but it has the quick of life in it.
Rembrandt’s Ghost
New Yorker, 26 March 2007
In April 1973, the month that Picasso died, he was asked to choose an image to be used as a poster for a show of recent work at the Palace of the Popes, in Avignon. He picked The Young Painter, an oil sketch he’d done a year earlier, at the age of ninety – a vision of his dewy beginnings, not his bitter end. The look is naive and apparently artless, but the hand that draws it is heavy with memories, not just of a Barcelona boyhood, but of the archive of painting. The apple-cheeked youth recalls another young painter at the outset of his career, the twenty-three-year-old Rembrandt, picturing himself and his calling around 1629, in a panel not much bigger than this page. The faces are unmistakably similar: gingerbread-clownish beneath a wide-brimmed hat; snub nose; eyes stylised as og
ling black holes, as if drawn by a child. The captured moment, in both images, is solemn; the young men pause before their work, brushes in hand, as if locked in a creative trance. A raking light, the illumination of an idea, strikes their faces. ‘I don’t paint what I see,’ Picasso was given to saying. ‘I paint what I know.’ Rembrandt, his picture tells us, felt the same way: the mind instructing the hand.
It was an unlikely pairing – the cerebral modernist who had made a point of expelling sentiment from painting going wistful over the master whose every brush mark was loaded with emotion. But the fixation was real. The shelves in Picasso’s studio at Mougins, in the South of France, were packed with Rembrandtiana, including all six volumes of Otto Benesch’s edition of the drawings. And though Picasso could not have seen Rembrandt’s little panel at first hand (it was in Boston), he must have plucked that archetypal image of setting forth from one of his books. Radical remaker of art though he was, Picasso always balanced his iconoclastic instincts with a compulsive historicism. In 1936, he had agreed to become absentee director of the Prado, while Madrid was under fascist siege. Constantly measuring himself for admission to the pantheon, Picasso evidently felt that taking down the masters also meant taking them on, and in his time he had mixed it up with, among others, Grünewald, Poussin, Cranach, Velázquez, Goya and El Greco. At the end, though, it was Rembrandt of whom, according to his friend and biographer Pierre Cabanne, he spoke ‘ceaselessly’. The haunted self-portraits of those final years, all stubble and cavernous eye sockets, were surely prompted by the series of pitilessly truthful mirror images that Rembrandt executed in his last decade: a dispassionate scrutiny of time’s ruin recorded in heavy jowls and pouches. Occasionally, as in the self-portrait as St Paul (in the Rijksmuseum), Rembrandt arched his eyebrows in an expression of quizzical self-recognition, the chastened sinner who might yet imagine redemption. Picasso’s face-making, on the other hand, is showy with self-contempt: so many glaring skulls.