Eliza's One a Week: The Cultural Exploration of E: 2012-02-26

Hello all apologies, once again, for my long time absence from blog land – my excuse is that I am shortly starting a new (and hilariously blog-related) job and have been busy busy busy back and forth around the country handing things over and getting increasingly scared. Also I am of course monumentally lazy. So anyway, this will be a quick round up of the last few weeks of cultural pursuits.

I went back to the parental home a couple of weeks ago to celebrate, belatedly, my darling mamas birthday. We had an excellent time nosing around the charity shops – although I seem to have a talent for only picking supremely boring books at present – and of course greatly enjoyed the murder hunt!! Yes my home town was the place where that vicar got stabbed, as my mother put it; the most exciting thing to happen in Thornbury since the Norman Conquest. Obviously a horrendous thing to happen but still mucho’s amount of fun to be on the national news!! I wasn’t allowed to smoke outside after nightfall and got to stick my head out of the bathroom window instead – thus proving that every (stabbing) cloud has a silver lining. Anyway, on the Sunday we drove over to Westonbirt Arboretum which is the National Arboretum apparently (you’d think it would be Kew wouldn’t you??). This fabulous beacon of all things Victoriana is obviously well up my street. Started in 1829 – i.e. the heyday of the 19th century mania for exotic plant collection and categorisation (2 of the 3 ‘C’s of the 19th century – the 3rd obviously being colonialism) it has flourished ever since. Obviously not being particularly green of finger I don’t have a huge amount to say about the specimens viewed, also all the information kept telling us was that ‘this species is under threat’ – seriously, all the bloody species seem to be under threat, it was a tad depressing. But one thing that did stick out was the Wollemi Pine which dates back over 200 million years. They thought it was extinct long ago and only knew about it from fossils but then some guy was wandering around some valley in Australia and found it! It’s the most hardy thing ever and actually survived a Nuclear Holocaust – there are trees which survived Hiroshima apparently. Anyway it reminded me of this painting by Francis Danby called The Upas, or Poison-Tree, in the Island of Java, one of my favourite in the V&A:

I have been using up leftover leave days before I move departments so I took a Monday off and decided that would be the perfect time to see the Picasso show at the Tate – clearly it will be unbearably packed on any weekend day. Unfortunatly I also decided on the way that a Monday would also be the perfect day to stop in on Primark Marble Arch and after that I could no longer afford to see a £14 exhibition at the Tate. Frankly though my new cardie which was of equal price was WAY more value for money. Instead I wandered over to the Wallace Collection which is free and therefore excellent value for money. Ahh, the lovely Wallace - place of my art historical youth etc. They’ve actually re-hung quite significantly since I was last there, which was probably a few years ago now I think about it. Every time you go you spot some new treasure. My favourite part of the whole place is obviously the tiling which once covered an entire room but now can only be glimpsed in one small corner – cant believe they would rip this out, sometime in the 30s or 40s I think – I guess we should be glad the building remains in general as most of the old London mansions seem to have been bulldozed around this time.

This Reynolds picture is, in my humble opinion, one of his all time finest portraits.

My very very favourite piece in the collection has to be this fabulously erotic painting by Ary Scheffer which depicts The Ghosts of Paolo and Francesca Appear to Dante and Virgil – these were two fornicators condemned to one of the many circles of hell for adultery. Bloody hell though if you looked like that wouldn’t you adult? LOVE this pic.

They also have some really juicy Vernet’s which are always good for a laugh and I also always enjoy these two Van Dykes.

Following my Monday off I took the Friday of that week as annual leave as well and skipped along to the Freud show at the National Portrait Gallery with the mama, who was in London this time. I went to see the big Freud retrospective they had a few years ago with my dad and it was many of the same pieces. It’s his early stuff I really like and this was a new piece to me, a simply stunning self portrait:

It’s when you see images like this, the beloved straggly pot plant that you realise despite being a portraitist Freud clearly had pretty much zero interest in people. Instead everything is treated uniformly; the leaves on this plant are of equal importance to the people sitting in front of it in other portraits in which it featured:

There’s something slightly off balance about the way the studio space features throughout the work of Freud. You always know where you are, you always get the sense that this is Freud’s studio, his space, which is both artificial but also pointedly domestic, almost confrontational in a way. It places all his figures very much as models, not people, in his environment and not their own. They are treated as subjects only, and the naming of most of his works in generic ‘portrait of a women’ type ways heightens this sense of the impersonal and disconnected. It also, if we are going to engage in a bit of dated Clarkist discourse, places them very much in the role of the naked rather than nude. These are real people, but we know nothing about them, and it’s uncomfortable in a way you don’t feel when standing in front of an idealised nude, we are made to see them almost as figures in the life of Freud, not people in their own right.

One other thing that struck me about his work was how unbelievably backwards and dated he must have seen in the 60s. Everyone else is changing the world, changing art, changing the way we viewed ourselves – and he is producing painterly swirls on canvas. What must Warhol have thought???