Scribble, Scribble, Scribble

by Simon Schama

  We tend to think of Turner (another of Virtue’s heroes), or at least Turner the Brentford boy and happy waterman, as the antidote to all this Italianate picturesque contrivance. But of course Turner was as drunk on visions of Italy, and Venice in particular, as any of the piccoli canaletti, and was quite capable of turning out editions of the Thames which washed the scummy old stream in a bath of sublimity. And he was never above pleasing patrons, either. The direct ancestor of his 1826 Mortlake Terrace, now in the Frick Collection, painted for the nouveau-riche William Moffatt, with its peachy light and strolling gentlefolk is, indeed, Canaletto, and beyond him, the Dutch city painters of the seventeenth century. Related concoctions like Turner’s 1819 Richmond Hill on the Prince of Wales’s Birthday, or the 1825 watercolour of him sketching the serpentine curve of the river and the city about it from the summit of Greenwich Park, are best understood (and forgiven) as patriotic-civic allegories; omnia gathera of the memories, sentiments and loyalties called forth by the London prospect; but this time more in the nature of an implied historical pageant, insular and cocky rather than hybridised and Italianate. And, here, too, the debt is more to the Dutch celebrations of the genius loci – Esaias van de Velde’s wonderful View of Zierikzee, and of course Vermeer’s Delft – than to a mechanical reiteration of Roman glories, both departed and resurrected.

  At least Turner was struggling to marry up authentic Cockney Pride, an experience of place, with a reimagined painterly aesthetic, rather than simply make the city a creature of swoon-inducing beautification; something which the punky smut of London will always, thank God, resist. It was not the American-ness of Whistler which led him to treat the river as aesthetic trance, but perhaps his permanent and increasingly desperate yearning to be in Paris, yet condemned to languish amidst the likes of William Frith and Augustus Egg as The American in London. The only way to survive was to flaunt it, and this Whistler did by becoming a painterly revolutionary in spite of himself, effectively annihilating his subject for a mood-effect. The rockets fall in gorgeous nocturnal obscurity somewhere, who cares, in the vicinity of Cremorne Gardens. The Gardens were a London pleasure haunt and a particular bête noire of John Ruskin as, of course, was Whistler himself and this painting in particular, for which the word effrontery seemed to the self-appointed guardian of visual truth to have been coined. But to make a Cremornian painting, to present art as epicurean delectability, a luscious dish for the senses, was precisely Whistler’s point, one which, again, Paris might have taken as a compliment, but which London found somehow (it couldn’t say exactly how) indecent.

  A great gap opened up in modernism, then, between London as the site of aesthetic cosmetic and London as the site of raw document; in the nineteenth century between the butterfly effects of Whistler and the reports from the underworld of Gustave Doré; in the twentieth between the visual histrionics of Oscar Kokoschka and in the 1950s the startling photographic streetscapes of the mind-blowingly gifted Nigel Henderson. Leon Kossoff and Frank Auerbach did wonders in regrounding vernacular visions of the city in the worked density of paint, but even they were not quite ready to take on the totemic sights and memories of the war-ravaged city in the way Virtue, born two years after the doodlebugs had done their worst, could. (In fact, the spirit of painterly liberty in the 1950s had its own strong reasons to go nowhere near anything that could be thought of as paying lip service to a Festival of Britain-like cavalcade.)

  But that fastidiousness sealed off modernist painting of the city from the broader public whose need was, and may always be, celebratory, not darkly suspicious, or furtively pathological in the Sickert way. And it’s the muscular innocence of John Virtue’s picturing (along with the bravura of his paint-handling); his instinctive relish of the ant-heap swirl of London; his shockingly brave determination to make work which the untrained eye can immediately engage with, which has helped him achieve something no other painter of or in London has ever managed, a truly populist expressionism. That an entire ensemble of his huge, as well as his merely impressively large, paintings should be hung together in the National Gallery as if in the Hall of Honour in the palace of some prince of Baroque, so that they are experienced as a cumulatively intoxicating rush of spectacle, only makes their deeply democratic quality the more miraculous.

  But then Virtue has not been holed up like Monet in the Savoy Hotel, nor taking the morning air like Canaletto with the Duke of Richmond these past few years. Instead, he has been swinging from a gantry, or perched precariously on the roof of Somerset House, London’s mean drizzle on his head; its cinders flying in his face; taking the measure of the city very like his cynosure Turner, in his non-Mortlake moments, right between the eyes. The fine frenzy that pushes Virtue along is wonderfully documented in his sketchbooks, but the challenge for him has always been somehow to transform those immediate responses in the studio into something that both registers and transcends its subject matter. In this most difficult of painterly goals he has, I believe, triumphantly succeeded, allowing us to read the great white daub at the heart of so many of his paintings as intrinsically related to its figural source in the Thames. At such moments of recognition, the pulse of the Londoners among us, especially, will race a little faster. But the reason to be most grateful for these epic masterworks is precisely for their resistance to visual cliché, even to cockney sentimentality; for their faithfulness to a London eye that actually sees beyond London. So we must also read the white daub as a white daub; the most thrillingly satisfying white daub conceivable, ditto the great racing black strokes; the gale-force whirl of the brush. Back and forth we go, then, through the picturing and the painting; the two in perfect step, doing the Lambeth Walk, oi! It comes as no surprise, then, to learn that that just happens to be where John Virtue lives.

  Avedon: Power

  Guardian, 27 September 2008

  Was there ever such a pretty wart? There it sits beside the noble nose, the solitary imperfection in Richard Avedon’s impossibly beautiful portrait head of Barack Obama, taken in 2004 when Obama was the wunderkind of the struggling Democrats. You look at the clever, artless, eager child preserved in the star orator, civic gravity and American ardour overlaid on the same face, the open collar an advertisement of moral transparency, and two equally wistful thoughts come to mind. How long ago that seems; and how sad it is that the greatest of America’s portraitists in any medium isn’t around right now to fulfil his project of shooting ‘Democracy’ in action. But Avedon died, aged eighty-one, in mid-shoot, not long after photographing Obama. He was excited about the work (there was not much about life that didn’t excite him); and he talked about ‘Democracy’ capturing politics as it played out in the lives of regular Americans, rather than a gallery of Players. But on the evidence of some of the pictures, he became drawn to an emblematic freak show; a polemic of the peculiar, easy pickings for an artist with Avedon’s sardonic eye. So, predictably, we have the Republican Conventioneer costumed as Lincoln, but emitting the icy glare of an executioner; or the bovine high-school blonde who seems constituted entirely from dairy matter, the satin spikes of her diadem crumpling on her brow, a lazy eye turning her impersonation of the Statue of Liberty into farce. Only in the portrait of ‘Specialist John H. Copeland’, photographed at Fort Hood, does monstrosity get complicated by pathos. The image of the young soldier separates at the neck. Below is the American empire; the line-backer frame in camouflage fatigues, impossibly bulked up and weighed down by flak jacket; massive gun; a mesh kitbag; above the collar-line, a fresh-faced kid in a buzz cut, doing his best to perfect a roadblock glower, but triggering only an urge to make him a quick cup of cocoa.

  Avedon never made any pretence to objectivity; the notion of the dispassionate lens he wrote off as delusion. His work, he frankly confessed, was at least as much about him as his subjects: a vast collective self-portrait of the compulsions he projected on to America’s faces and figures. In person Avedon was a merrily humane optimist, warm-blooded and gregarious; to know him was to l
ove him. But he was no sentimentalist and there was a Daumier streak in him: coolly contemptuous of the political masquerade even while he was enthralled by its performances. Like Daumier, he thought that lies and cruelty settled like a crust on the physiognomy: passive cosmetic surgery gone wrong. All he had to do was to supply a lit exposure of the particular features in which moral intelligence or its absence had been inscribed.

  As hip as he mostly was, Avedon was, at root, an old-style Jewish moralist whose texts were written in freckles and furrows, pits and pocks. Sometimes those marks and blemishes, which stood out so sharply against the indeterminate white sheet against which his faces posed, were lit as poetic expressions of the persona. So the much mottled but kindly moon-face of John Glenn, astronaut turned Ohio Senator, becomes itself a benign planetary surface. Avedon took delight in tweaking – or annihilating – the expected icon. Ronald Reagan, whose beaming smile warmed millions with its avuncular easiness, he trapped in lower-facial corrugation, as if the firming of power had been withdrawn in retirement along with the presidential motorcade. ‘Looking good,’ Nancy is said to have murmured as Reagan stood on the chalk lines he had asked Avedon to supply, looking anything but. The gaze off yonder Avedon may have wanted to suggest rueful reflection, but our retrospective knowledge of Reagan’s mental fade into Alzheimer’s gives the image an altogether different charge. Confronted by his famously affable beam turned into a mask of porky smugness as if fattened at the trough of self-satisfaction, Karl Rove got all steamed up, accusing Avedon of setting him up to look ‘stupid’; the arch-amBusher ambushed.

  To which, I think, Avedon would have replied with his most roguishly winning grin that all his portraits were collaborations; and that nothing about the meeting of photographer and subject was calculated in advance: not the clothes, not the hair, not the body language. People came as they were. But the truth is a little more complicated than that profession of guilelessness. Avedon did in fact have certain idées fixes about the essential whomever; and then, through some astonishing act of photographic magic against that white paper, could make clothes, expression, collude in imprinting the essential them. Accompanied merely by the innocent act of sticking his left hand in his pocket, the trademark glasses a smidgin off kilter, Henry Kissinger’s expression assumes the defensiveness of no-penetration concrete berms erected around an American embassy. For all we know, there may have been moments when Kissinger (who can be voluble) let his guard down and surrendered to the Avedon charm offensive. But the caught image is of someone guarding state secrets deep in his trousers. Equally, it’s hard not to let what we now know of Donald Rumsfeld’s years of catastrophic military bungling cloud our take on Avedon’s young myrmidon of the Ford administration. But the insignia of the Organisation Man, whose openings are strictly limited – the slightly superior amusement registered in the narrowing eyes, the dangerous haircut and the barely unzipped attaché case – are already there. Could it be my imagination, or are Rumsfeld’s swept-wing lapels converging at the one-buttoned jacket, a cunningly coded sartorial blueprint of the Stealth bomber to come? . . . Nah . . .

  Avedon’s was a literary and dramatic sensibility more than an aesthetic. Every face, every body came with a potential narrative to tease out. Sometimes, in his own mind, sitters were twinned in some deep and weighty history even when they faced the camera alone. The Carter-Ford election was fought all over again in his studio; Carter, at ease in his loosely fitting Christian simplicity, Ford (slightly unfairly) made to scowl as if a different and nicer man were struggling to break through the stony carapace. Deeper still is the duet of Adlai Stevenson and Dwight Eisenhower, a chapter to itself, in Avedon’s visualisation, of post-war American history. The curriculum vitae tells us that Stevenson, the last heavyweight intellectual in Democratic politics before the Arkansas Kid, was twice loser; Ike the winner; which immediately sets up expectations of Avedonian role reversal. And so it seems. Stevenson, photographed when he was Kennedy’s ambassador to the United Nations, at the acme of his rhetorical force (especially deployed against the Castro-Khrushchev missiles), looks to his right, but his face is alive with confident wit; the unembarrassed pleasure of a life vindicated. The old boy is blessed with the benison of Camelot. By contrast the post-presidential Ike seems flaky pastry: the eyes unfocused. Stevenson’s glance is sideways and down, a man on top of his form; Ike’s is distant and upwards, lost in meditation. But it was, in fact, Eisenhower who in his old age had the more important things to say: his farewell presidential address the famous warning against the coming of the self-perpetuating ‘military-industrial complex’, the beast that would consume American liberty. So Avedon bestows on him the dreamy saintliness of some ancient buddha already mourning his vindication.

  The studio was Avedon’s theatre, with sitters encouraged to perform and the maestro as the genial director. The only time I went there myself for a group photo of New Yorker writers paying homage to their departing editor, the atmosphere was festive, beckoning drinks on a side-table. Avedon orchestrated the afternoon unwinding, encouraging us into showtime exuberance (in our case not a challenge). When the right moment came, he stood beside, not behind, the large-format camera, never taking his eyes off us, a party to the party, and caught the family jubilation just so. It was, I think, his Shakespearean sense of life as play that made him Olympian and intimate at the same time. His strongest pictures tease out the inner, optimised image we all carry around within ourselves, hoping that it might have some relationship to the way others see us: strong, wise, finely featured. But then Avedon puts that naively glamorised version in a dialogue with what he sees himself; the result being, in the subjects with which he had most sympathy, a marvellous dialogue between inner and outward countenance: the anima and its vital casing.

  The effect, when successful, is to evoke presence more distinctively than any other photographer who has ever turned their hand to portraiture; more powerfully than Matthew Brady, Julia Margaret Cameron, August Sander or Alfred Stieglitz. For like Rembrandt, Avedon caught the shorthand signature of an entire life and the pose became a print of individual spirit. There is Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, his face lit with Erasmian amusement at the incorrigible human comedy, the dunderheaded obtuseness of political clods incapable of seeing the finesse of politics as he did, or of taking on the obligation to thought that came with the acquisition of power. Well, well, he would say, nursing his shot glass, marvelling at the mess of it all, bow tie askew, arms akimbo, the Irish-American lilt on the edge of a chuckle, would you believe it? And you look at Avedon’s picture, the Senator to the life, and yes, you do.

  Cooking and Eating

  Cool as Ice

  Vogue, August 2007

  Summer 1956. Anthony Eden is dreaming dangerous Egyptian dreams which, in the following autumn, will send what little remains of the British Empire right up the creek (aka the Suez Canal). But we don’t know about that and, if we did, we wouldn’t care. It’s the last day of school. We’ve seen off the eleven-plus, and out there in pebbledash London, beyond the gritty little playground of our primary school, beyond the black spiked railings hung with tendrils of bindweed, there’s a siren chiming. Bing-bong, bingety bongety bong. Mr Whippy is calling and we, short-trousered, snake-belted, grimy-kneed, snot-nosed, want what he’s got. We want a Ninety-Nine; God, how we want it: that shaggy-bark chocolate stick plunged into a mound of air-pumped chalky glop, which would be called vanilla were it not to defame the dark bean. But then we weren’t too organic, not in 1956. So we charge out through the rusting green gates and break into our version of ‘La donna è mobile’:

  My name’s Anton-i-o

  I sell ice cream-i-o

  Down your back-alley-o

  Tuppence a lick-i-o.

  The delirium of ice cream is inseparable from juvenile glee; the uninhibited indulgence of the mouth. To get your tongue round a dollop is to become instantaneously childlike again, whatever your age; to cop a mouthful of lusciousness that magically marries
opposites: fruit and dairy, the tart and the voluptuous; a shot of excitement meets a scoop of all’s well. Yes, yes, doctor, we know the taking of the cone-heaped mound in our greedy gobs makes us blissed-out babies again, tripping down mammary lane: slurp, lick, suck, even, on occasions, drool and slobber. But it’s more complicated than milky regression.