Back to the gallery – but Rodin is no blockbuster

As our frenzy of COVID-19 lockdown-easing culture blitz continues, The Other Half and I nipped over to Tate Modern for The Making of Robin exhibition.

A little note: it might feel like a “frenzy”, but while getting out and about a bit, we’re also avoiding the centre of London and venues that would entail using the Tube or crossing central London. Let's all be sensible.

 

Living in east London, Tate Modern is easy for us as it’s a single bus ride and a walk away. I’d deliberately booked for late on the Sunday morning of a bank holiday weekend as that was almost certainly going to be quite quiet. It was. And we also walked most of the way home – but that’s a different story.

 

Now, this is billed as a major exhibition, but while it is interesting, it’s no blockbuster for the uninitiated. That said, we are living through exceptional times, so leeway has to be given as arts organisations try to get back up and running in the face of a deeply anti-arts government in Westminster.

 

The exhibition concentrates on the processes that Auguste Rodin used in creating his iconic sculptures. This means looking primarily at how he created, used and re-used the plaster works that were rarely intended as being finished items.

 

So, for instance, there is an entire display cabinet full of hands that were initially created when he was working on The Gates of Hell. These are really interesting ... but particularly if you’ve seen a finished version of The Gates of Hell. The OH and I are fortunate enough to have visited the Musée Rodin in Paris twice, spending time with castings of many of the works we see represented here in their development phases. Including The Gates of Hell.

 

Personally, I love Rodin’s monumental Balzac ... but can you fully appreciate all the maquettes (both very large and very small – and there are many of them) if you can’t see or haven’t seem one of the final castings?

 

Equally with The Burghers of Calais – although at least visitors to this exhibition can go and view the casting that stands in Victoria Tower Gardens, next to the Houses of Parliament without too much difficulty.

 

For me, the most interesting works shown here in their own right are those representing the Japanese actor and dancer Ohta Hisa, known as Hanako (left). They include works in bronze and glass and are fascinating.

They were unlike any Rodin works we'd seen previously.

It was also good to see a couple of works by Camile Claudel – Rodin's lover and co-worker – yet I find myself wonder whether, by forcing this tiny representation in, the exhibition doesn't do her a disservice rather than a service.

 

Indeed, the OH and I have a long history of finding some curators’ notes impossibly pompous or priggish. Here, this becomes the gallery’s attempt to be ‘woke’ (and I hate myself having to describe it as that).

Further, it actually risks misrepresenting Claudel's life – reducing her problems to her connection with Rodin, rather than noting, for instance, the massive damage done to her by her mother.

 

And seriously, who really needs to be pointed, via QR code, to a chat between two women saying that there was a “gender imbalance” in art in the 19^th century? Not least for an essentially art geeky exhibition ... is Tate really assuming that visitors won’t know that the 19th century was deeply unbalanced in gender terms in general?

 

Equally, do we need a mini lecture on ‘cultural appropriation’? I mean – the examples of Rodin's personal collection of objects from the far east, then turned quite casually into new works are genuinely interesting. But would the gallery also, in such context, mention Ai Weiwei, or is smashing centuries-old Chinese vases and claiming that doing so is a ‘work of art’ okay if you’re Chinese and the centuries-old vases you smash in the name of art are themselves Chinese?

 

Look ... it was great to get back into a gallery. In terms if Tate Modern, the social distancing etc all works well and allows you to feel comfortable, for which I am genuinely grateful, but this exhibition is, in essence, for Rodin geeks. If you haven't seen finished versions of these plaster works, then it's probably not worth visiting.

 

And such things can be done better. See Matisse in the Studio in 2017 at the Royal Academy showed how – my thoughts here.

 

And as for Rodin – some thoughts from the last time the OH and I visited the Paris museum.

Cruella: Flawed, yet arch but subtle fun

Cruella

For those of us of a certain age, Cruella de Vil is one of Disney’s most memorable – and least likeable – villains. Having had the pleasure of playing a classic villain on stage in a Christmas show – and being able to relish the response of the children in the audience (including one who spotted me without make-up while in a shop a short while later) – I enjoy a good villain at least as much as the rest and possibly more.

 

But while, as an adult filmgoer I almost had the hots for Antony Hopkins as Hannibal Lector, killing and skinning dogs to make a coat is simply beyond the pale. Though to add from a personal perspective, it always helps for me if a villain is a little bit arch; I give you 2003’s Underworld, and Bill Nighy as Victor, and Alan Rickman’s Sheriff of Nottingham as further examples.

 

Perhaps it was the trailer that made me want to see this – or partly the lure of being able to, once again, actually be in a cinema – or a bit of both, but after a first post-lockdown cinema visit last week made me feel comfortable in the environment (it was Peter Rabbit 2, in case you’re curious), this was too tempting to miss.

 

An origin story for de Vil, it is set primarily in the 1960s and ’70s, allowing for a ridiculously good soundtrack and some wonderful costumes, and it tells the story of how Estella becomes Cruella and, along the way, invents punk.

 

It looks wonderful, but it’s also a cracking story of being different – of being an outsider who is expected to conform and the soul-shredding struggle of trying to do that.

 

That soundtrack? It includes the Stones, Bowie, Nina Simone, The Clash, Queen, Judy Garland, Nancy Sinatra, Blondie and Ken Dodd, plus a new song from Florence + the Machine, and is a major force for why the film works (by and large).

 

The performances are delightful. Emma Stone as the eponymous Cruella is wonderful: arch – yet far, far more subtle than that might suggest (hint: arch can also be subtle). Emma Thompson as the Baroness, her nemesis, is a wonderful sparring partner, visually channelling Holly Golightly in places, and. ore than visually channelling Meryl Streep as Miranda Priestly/definitely-not Anna Wintour in The Devil Wears Prada in others.

 

Mark Strong is excellent – and also very subtle – as the Baroness’s butler, while Joel Fry and Paul Walter Hauser provide the perfect – and not obviously simplistic – level of support as the Dickensian child crooks who ‘adopt’ Cruella’, only to end up being led by her.

 

Oh ... and the dogs are great too.

 

There is a criticism, though – and that is that is too long by around 15 minutes. Director Craig Gillespie should have knocked 15 minutes off the 134-minute run time – without losing any scenes. There is no bad scene, but it should all have done with just that bit more pace.

 

However, back to the pluses: it looks utterly fabulous and has a pleasing darkness, but with some laughs too. This is Disney channelling DC’s predilection for the dark, but also understanding Marvel’s use of humour – and thereby arguably handing DC a lesson (though trailers for July’s The Suicide Squad suggests that DC might have finally latched on to why Marvel is streets ahead of them in such stakes).

 

It’s dark in a good way – arguably a Joker for a younger audience. And I cannot give it greater praise than that, even with that quite serious pacing fault

Back to the concert hall – at last!

On Wednesday evening, after an all-too-long absence, The Other Half and I finally made it back to the concert hall for a socially-distanced programme at the Barbican.

It had been a long time coming: our last live concert was on 6 December 2019, also at the Barbican, for a recital by Russian pianist Arcadi Volodos, who performed a programme of works by Liszt and Robert Schumann.

 

By the end of that year, we’d been to five concerts/recitals (plus four operas together – one further one for me – and one play). Hopefully, this doesn’t make me sound like a dilletante in the culture vulture stakes.

 

Yet I had realised by late last autumn that while concerts were hardly an everyday experience for us, they were the form of entertainment outside the home that I missed most deeply. Perhaps there’s a sort of spiritual basis for that? Whatever.

 

On Friday 11 December last (my birthday, as it happens) I’d optimistically booked tickets for the Barbican on 10 January, for a recital by the wonderful young British pianist Benjamin Grosvenor. That went the way of all flesh only shortly thereafter, as London was plunged into tier three – and then the whole country into lockdown three.

 

As I said, the return has been a long time coming – and not least for all the musicians and backstage and front of house staff. The UK government, as with all bombastic, flag-shagging, populist regimes, seems determined to play down and denigrate the arts in general, irrespective of what they give to the country as a whole – even in terms of being a major attraction for tourism and, therefore, a big earner for the economy.

 

But hey ... if we had a half-way decent government in Westminster, it’s possible that we wouldn’t be where we are now.

 

Anyway, Wednesday was one of three socially distanced concerts at the Barbican being given by the London Symphony Orchestra, under conductor laureate Michael Tilson Thomas, and featuring Yuja Wang on piano.

 

The programme opened with the five very pleasant minutes of The Last Spring by Grieg, from his Two Elegiac Melodies, opus 34.

 

Then came Ms Wang to the stage for Rachmaninov’s second piano concerto – the Brief Encounter one.

 

After 35 minutes of that, we were served up Beethoven’s fifth symphony – synchronicity allowing that it takes the same time to perform.

 

It was a relatively short concert with no interval, but superbly chosen. Both of the main works are iconic – or at least, have iconic musical moments and phrases that possibly do the full works a disservice.

 

Personally, Rachmaninov’s first piano concerto is my favourite and I have rather dismissed the second because of the over-familiarity of its theme.

 

But here, it became new, the musical quotes back in context and not dominating the whole. Wang’s playing can be both muscular and exquisitely delicate. It was a glorious performance.

 

I teared up so often, but I remain slightly unsure as to whether that was the music itself, the performance and/or simply Being Back. Probably a full house. It had the feeling of a religious experience (and I do actually know what those are like!).

 

The Beethoven was a revelation for similar reasons to the Rachmaninov. Freed from being reduced to that brief, opening quote, the symphony becomes so much more. Not least, it can be viewed as a sort of struggle between the Classical and Romantic eras of western music that Beethoven bridged – and indeed, created the bridge between.

 

The first movement has a sense of the revolutionary – a hint of sturm und drang. The second then seems to leap back to a more courtly approach.

 

Only a week or so before, the OH and I had listened to a classic von Karajan recording of the sixth symphony, The Pastoral, on 180g vinyl. There, it is so easy to comprehend Beethoven, in effect, painting pictures in music. Here, you feel the struggle to reach that – and that is fascinating.

 

This week’s concert also made me consider my relationship with Mozart and why I don’t want to spend much time with his music. It’s as though Beethoven brought the emotion – and Mozart avoided it.

 

That’s a slightly simplistic view, of course – but not that much. My favourite piece of Mozart – and it’s one of my favourite pieces of music per se – is the requiem. But I think that’s because it has real emotional heft rather than simply being a bonbon for a not-very-intelligent emperor. 

 

The playing throughout was wonderful. Ms Wang is a superb pianist – I have ordered several of her recordings on the basis of what we saw and heard.

 

I’ve been shielding for much of that last year – and fortunate enough to have been able to work from home throughout. It’s not all been bad, but it’s not all been great either.

 

And getting back to hear music like this, played like this, was special almost beyond belief.

As lockdown ends, there's another pandemic

Another pandemic

Piled pyramidally on top of the bin

Precarious crates and paper plates

Lord it over the overflow ...

A plastic salad tub or two

And paper masks

Crumpled blue

With broken strings.

There’s no pub near the lone pint pot

That leans rakishly against a birch,

Nursing the afternoon’s dregs and

Staying stock still so as not to lurch.

Bottle tops trodden into London clay

Sprout between tussocks of weary grass,

While a barber-pole straw dallies with daffs

And a pizza box spreads like porn-style ass.

Percussive rain on a discarded can

Refreshes the parts with a pinging tune,

And a neon spoon floats across the pond

As though water has borrowed the moon.

Bedraggled plastic caught in branches,

Remains of bunting tied to trunks

Shiny metal stars, bombed into the air to greet a birthday

Fallen now like blossom

Sparkle on the ground

And vie for space beside the wall

With shreds of a dog-torn rubber ball

And a plastic five that speared the cake.

Lockdown is easing as spring is sprung.

Let’s surge to freedom and

Show nature what it’s missed.

April 2021

Taking flight into a magical world

Wing

Matthew Francis

 

Faber & Faber

 

 

What better way to spend a chilly Saturday in early March, than curled up in a chair with a slender volume of poetry? In Matthew Francis’s Wing, I found the perfect companion for the afternoon, as wan sunshine tried to best the high clouds outside.

 

It was copy bought in Aldeburgh last September, on our brief escape from London before further measures to combat the pandemic were introduced. Neither The Other Half nor I are big on ‘shopping’, but after we’d booked the break, we discovered that the small town included a serious independent bookshop. And we knew instantly that we would pay at least one visit.

 

In the event, during a stay of nine nights, I strayed inside three times. Masks were worn, hands sanitised and then encased inside white cotton gloves that were left in a basket to be laundered on leaving. It is not a vast space, but oh, the bliss of being among shelves of books; of plucking unexpected titles off shelves, knowing that this was a well-deserved holiday-from-the-plague treat.

 

In a selection that was hugely influenced by the nature of the trip, Wing – published earlier in the year – was one of the books that went into my bag.

 

It is a joy.

 

With an overarching theme of examining microscopic life – and particularly the insect form – it also brings other wings into its embrace.

 

After opening the first section, Freefall, with a poem that starts with houseflies buzzing around where Francis is sitting to write, he concludes with a work of the same name – written “in memory of a friend killed in a parachute accident”.

 

Neither mawkish nor sentimental, this stunning verse blends the human with the natural world – even though the very fact of being in a plane and of parachuting is far from ‘natural’. But as the opening stanza has it:

 

Out of the metal shell of the plane, he hatched

Into raucous air,

 

and stretched out, breathless, as he’d done so often,

on the cushion of wind,

 

to crawl, crablike, across the irregularities

of the buffeting element.

 

Tissues of cloud below swathed the greens and yellows

of a chequered world.

 

The subject might seem out of place in a book of nature poetry, but it brings to mind Icarus and, in a collection titled Wing, is a counter – and poignant one at that – to the apparent effortlessness of flight in the non-human world; a reminder too, of the fragility of life.

 

The middle section of this collection is named Micrographia, after the “scientific treatise by Robert Hooke (1665)”, an English scientist who, with a microscope, was the first to visualise a micro-organism.

 

It is a remarkable melding of science and nature, as the microscope increases both understanding and also mystery.

 

The final section, Canticles, is more playful.

 

In Collective, for instance, Francis reinvents collective nouns: instead of a ‘clattering’ or a ‘train’, he posits a delightful “funambulism of jackdaws”. Forget ‘gaggle’, here we have a “chevron of geese” – how much more picturesque and accurate? – and a “double-take of blackbirds”.

 

And the poem finishes with a “shifting mandelbrot of starlings” – a glorious description of a murmuration, bringing science/maths into the impossibility of such miraculous formations.

 

In Sea Canticle, one cand almost hear the haunting tones of Debussy’s La cathédrale engloutie (Sunken Cathedral), as the varied inhabitants of the seafloor float liquidly over and around the remains of a sunken sailing ship.

 

Wing is a glorious collection that, overall, has a quality of meditative awe at the complexity of life, even at its tiniest.

 

Wondrous.

 

New poem: Cold etchings

 

Cold etchings

 

The house faced east across the valley,

Stoic against the Pennine winters of childhood

When bitter winds would blast across the space

to bite at fingers blue and

Clog the arteries between towns

with snow that

Drifted and swirled and blotted out the view.

 

A plug-in Dimplex made bearable

the move from day to night,

Wan warmth radiated out to battle goosebumps

Until safety was reached

under flannelette and honeycomb and eiderdown,

With a piping bottle for frozen feet.

 

By morning, the large bow window would be frosted fast.

Frayed old towels folded on the sill below

Set to mop up when it thawed at last.

But before then

I’d dare to etch my initials on the glass.

 

This year, the cold snapped late.

But it was sharp enough when it arrived

To save some bees from neonics intended to beat a beet pest.

 

Locked down locked in I only saw

the rime through slatted blinds.

No early morning walks to the bus stop

Diverting slightly to surreptitiously

            etch messages on frosted cars

Under cover of decaying dark

As a fox barks in the nearby park.

 

 

8 March 2021

Praising grown-up Germany in the age of Brexit

Why the Germans Do it Better

John Kampfner

 

Atlantic Books

 

If you wanted to create a more provocative title, then it’s hard to see how you could better than that for this volume, which was published late last year.

 

It will inflame hardcore, Brexit-loving exceptionalists (never a bad thing), but it also won't be particularly popular with most Germans.

The latter group does not generally want to view its country in such terms: where the past lies so heavy, nationalistic bragging is out of the question for the majority.

Rather, there is continued reflection and concern – a situation not seen in the UK, where a loud minority feels free to howl some sort of superiority and, as Iain Duncan Smith did in January, at the end of the Brexit transition period, to hail the opportunity for Britain to “dominate” the world once more.

How Christ-like can you be? And I only ask the question, since IDS is supposedly a Christian.

So the history of the UK remains largely unfaced, to be seen only as one long, glorious victory. Raising the issues of statues to slavers is, for the right-wing elements of the press, 'woke’ and, of course 'cancel culture’.

But for author John Kampfner, it has, since the end of WWII, punched above its weight morally and ethically – and therefore, it’s not difficult to see why this is a legitimate suggestion.

 

It’s actually worth stepping back a bit to start with, noting that Kampfner is the son of a Jewish father who escaped eastwards from the Nazis, where he met the author’s English Protestant mother, who was a nurse in Singapore, where he himself was born.

 

Kampfner’s own CV is seriously impressive: he has worked as a journalist for Reuters, The Telegraph (initially in East Berlin), the FT, the BBC, and has been the editor of the New Statesman and current affairs editor of the British Society of Magazine Editors.

 

In other words, we can fairly approach this work without assuming an impinging and overriding personal/political ideology.

 

It is a fascinating book, combining elements of memoir, interview, data, history and lots more.

 

From a personal perspective and as a Germanophile myself, I am probably far better read on German history than the overwhelming majority of my compatriots. Indeed, I was whooping out loud when Kampfner described the lack of German history beyond 1933-1945 being represented in most British bookshops.

 

For a couple of decades now, that has been a way in which I judge a bookshop. I am not alone.

 

However, butting into this, I would take issue with Kampfner’s simplistic comparison of Prussia with Nazism. If you want to read more on that, then I can never recommend Christopher Clark’s superb Iron Kingdom highly enough. To be fair, I'd say read it anyway – it's the best history I've read.

I would suggest that he equally wrong on the green movement in Germany – in terms of timing. As Günter Grass’s 1986 novel The Rat illustrates, Germans were first spurred into action on the environment by realising that their forests were dying because of acid rain. And for Germans, forests are a massively important issue – as Kampfner does point out fleetingly.

He also stresses that, in Germany, free issues are not just the preserve of the political left. The environment has brought many together, including conservatives – hence the electoral success of the German greens. 

However, for all my pickiness, this is a brilliant volume in so many ways. If you sit anywhere to the left of centre – and frankly, I think that many of those on the right of centre would feel the same – this is actually a clarion call for conservatism. Note the small ‘c’. And it's not a bad vision or, in Germany, reality.

 

There are many things I recognised – as well as many that were new to me – and also many that I found myself longing for.

 

Kampfner is very good on the social market and, while it’s briefer in terms of pages, he’s even better on Germany’s verein – the clubs. Apparently, Germany expects all citizens to be part of community organisations. Reading this section, I found myself longing for such a sense of community in the UK.

 

I recall a boat trip around Lübeck on a Sunday morning and seeing all the local boating clubs active. And other individuals out waking and running and running and more.

 

Nothing since has suggested to me that Germans have it, in essence, wrong – and this book provides the facts to back this up.

Kampfner is not simply rosy-tinted about his subject – he see its faults and sets them down clearly. But even while admitting to being “more of a child of Thatcher” than he would have imagined, in his impatience with the German way of doing things economically, he now points to how the country has largely stuck to its beliefs on the social market – even as many other countries now start to make at least noises about the importance of community etc.

It’s clear that Germany is aided in being more ‘grown up’ by having none of the distrust and dislike of intellectual activity that is particularly rife in English life. He describes how Angela Merkel loves to discuss high culture – and contrasts that to David Cameron, who was embarrassed to admit, at a dinner with the Kanzellor, that he just watched telly when off duty.

As Kampfner goes on, it’s a perfect was to illustrate how a liking for high culture is generally disparaged in the UK as elitist etc – where the situation in Germany is quite different (the number of small towns in Germany with opera houses is a succinct illustration of this).

But then again, German conservatism is ‘girly swot’ Merkel and here, it’s Boris Johnson and his rabble of an untalented Cabinet that happily trashes ‘experts’ at the first opportunity.

In the age of Brexit and Johnson, Kampfner’s book is an important read and corrective.