Hey peeps. Here’s a quick midweek one – I’ve got to read Vanity Fair (and have yet to finish Copperfield, but am triaging for now) and it’s time to start preparing for the next essay(s), so I really shouldn’t be writing this but it occurred to me that I haven’t really talked much about our academic trips, and as today was my first time at the Tate Britain, I figured I’d fill you in while it’s still fresh.
We’ve had – how many? – um, four, I think, visits to London museums. They take the place of art history lectures with discolored slides, so they’re most welcome, and helpful. I went to the National Gallery on my own – did I mention that? Really, the only way to go to a museum, especially an art museum, is on your own – what, are you going to follow your friends around the gallery and spend the exact amount of time as them looking at the things they want to look at? See, I would, because I’m not assertive. But going as a class has its benefits as well, you hear from the experts in detail on a handful of works, and you can hang around afterward and get a better look at the paintings that interest you particularly. It was what I did after our visit to the National Portrait Gallery, when they took us through Reynolds but not the Tudors – all those iconic portraits of Queen Elizabeth, that one that they always show of Anne Boleyn, the Holbein Henry! Also got to see a new acquisition – purportedly a portrait of Lady Jane Grey, that I’d read an article about in the New Yorker. There are currently two portraits that might possibly be her, this one in London and then a miniature at YALE (yay, Yale, I love Yale), and there’s a degree of controversy in the whole thing. The thought is that this one at the Portrait Gallery is a copy of a slightly earlier painting (lots of things in the Tudor gallery are copies of paintings done earlier in the century) done from life. It says “Jane” on it (but like zillions of people were called Jane then), and apparently the Tudor costume suggests a person of very high rank, and is surprisingly accurate to the era (suggesting, again, that though it was painted after her death, it was copied carefully from a painting done during the subject’s lifetime.) The jewelry, which is frequently a giveaway as to the sitter’s identity, especially royal sitters, because there are catalogues of all the brooches and necklaces they owned – hasn’t been identified. There’s scoring across the mouth and eyes, like someone tried to deface it, which would be expected given Jane’s controversial history. The problem is – the reason there aren’t many known images of this woman – that her reign was so short, of course, so there was a fairly limited window during which a portrait might have been commissioned. Apparently this painting itself is controversial, not just because of the disputed identity but because some people think the Gallery shouldn’t have spent so much money acquiring it – it’s just a not-so-great painting. (I don’t know how they decide these things. Personally I’m not impressed with the portraits of Elizabeth, from an artistic standpoint, and it baffles me because people were producing much more lifelike portraits at the time; why does the queen look so flat? Although today at the Tate I read that Elizabeth wanted her paintings to be wholly without shadow – I don’t know why, just how she liked to be shown – so she chose an artist whose technique was particularly line-oriented, no shading.) I also saw the portrait of Mary Queen of Scots that was on the cover of the book my grandparents brought me back from Scotland, and the one painting of Shakespeare thought to have been done from life, and Catherine of Aragon and Catherine Parr and Catherine Howard – all good stuff. (But God, did early modern English only have like five given names? Catherine-Mary-Elizabeth-Jane if you’re a girl, and Thomas or Henry if you’re a boy – maybe Henry VIII didn’t even notice he was changing wives.) The interesting thing about the National Portrait Gallery, as my teacher explained, is that it doesn’t necessarily look for art of high quality – its primary function is as a repository for images of notable people. There are, naturally, disputes about taking in well-executed renderings of lesser-knowns. I don’t mind looking at crappy art. I mean, it’s interesting to compare – if there are several images of one person, maybe one good and two or three not so good – what are the salient features that all the artists, skilled and not, include?
Okay, I’ve rattled on about that – other things we’ve done? We went to the Foundling Museum, wherein orphans and children given up by their mothers were kept. Even in its day it was a sort of museum, because people used to come by on Sundays and look at the orphans, as a sort of excursion. Contrary to what you might expect, though, the orphans were by all accounts quite well-cared-for and well-brought-up and well-educated, so they started having to turn away some foundlings, and getting your kid into the Foundling Hospital, if you were an unwilling parent, became rather difficult. Like prep school, except with abandoning children. It was also like a museum – and continues to be – because it was governed, in part, by the 18th-century artist William Hogarth, who invited all his artist friends to be on the board of governors, provided they produced and donated a work to the hospital. So it’s full of paintings by Hogarth, Richard Wilson, sculpture by Rubiliac – all that stuff. We walked around, we saw exhibits about the children – many were given Hogarth’s last name – Hogarth himself never had any children – so there are a lot of people surnamed Hogarth now who go around thinking they’re related to Hogarth when they’re not. There was a list of orphans’ names – “Francis Drake” was particularly popular, an homage to the Elizabethan pirate, it would seem. One of them was called Catherine Speedwell. I think that’s a cool one. I’m saving that for a novel.
We also went, a few weeks ago, to the Soane Museum, an eclectic collection in what used to be the private home of a rather eccentric collector of the eighteenth century. It’s crammed with things, frame-to-frame across the wall; we even saw a room where what appears to be the wall can be pulled out in two parts, opening like a cupboard to reveal another wall of paintings and sketches, which in turn opens out to reveal an open two-level gallery – one can look down into a garden of statues. There’s a lot of Hogarth, tons of fragments of Greco-Roman pottery and sculpture, much fake among the real, I suspect. In the basement, among creepy shackles on the walls and unidentified vases, we found what was labeled as Seti’s sarcophagus, an immense limestone case covered in hieroglyphics. Next to it, on the floor, was the carved wooden inner sarcophagus. Just out. Carved by Nile-dwellers thousands of years ago, and out, in the open air, where someone could mistake it for a bench. What the heck? “This should be in a museum somewhere,” said one of my friends. “I mean, a real museum.”
Anyway! Today was the Tate. As usual, I was up and ran and did my little stomach-crunches and I was totally ready to go at 9:15, but of course the people I was going with weren’t quite together until 9:30ish, and then we had to walk to the Tube station – we’d been told it was a 30-minute Tube ride. It’s okay, we said to each other, maybe we’ll be five minutes late, it’ll be okay. But I thought we could make it. I believed in us. Paddle with a purpose, as they used to say to us in the Appalachian Mountain Club when we were out in the water and the sky was darkening. No need to panic, just paddle with a purpose. (Which some of us had to do all the time anyway, because some of us had a stupid lily-dipping canoe partner. Excuse me, would you like to use a spoon instead?) We actually had to let the first train go by in the Tube station because it was packed so full – we Houdini-ed our way onto the second one and changed for the Victoria line a handful of stop later – ran to the train, got on, pulled into the Tate stop at five to ten. It was, according to my guidebook, a five-minute walk to the museum. We got out, we followed the pointing signs. Made it. Beat the professors there.
Robin Simon – an art historian who’s written a number of books and is a friend of Martin Postle, our professor – took us in. He has actually conducted most of the field trips we’ve been on. We went through the lobby and into a long and beautiful gallery. Professor Simon seemed to be checking for something before he led us in there. “How often do they come?” he asked one of the guards. When he beckoned us in, he gestured to us to keep to the side. “Watch for runners,” he said.
He went on to tell us that he liked this gallery, its architecture was a good example of pared-down classicism, and so on – it’s great for display, though unfortunately it has to be empty now -
At that moment a lean and muscled man in spandex shorts and a T-shirt came sprinting through the entrance at the far end of the gallery. He ran past us, to the end of the gallery, and then left through that door.
“There’s one,” said Simon.
“What is this? What are they doing?” asked one of the more outspoken members of our class.
“It’s a work of art, dear,” said the teacher.
Another man came sprinting up – great form – reached the end of the gallery, and exited. We walked back into the atrium.
“This was done by a clown who won the Turner a few years ago,” said Simon. “He won it for a light bulb that he hung in a room. You would walk into the room, and occasionally the bulb would go on and off.”
“He’s a clown?” I asked.
“Well, I think he’s a clown,” said Simon.
“Oh,” I said. “I thought you meant a real clown.” I’m a quick one. The real-clown explanation would have been more satisfying, because it would have suggested that the artist was actually kind of mocking the art community. Whatevs.
The coolest part of the day – after some more Hogarth and Wilson – was seeing the conservators’ secret chambers. Not secret, actually, probably not called chambers, but that’s what I want to call them. We went around to another entrance of the museum and, with Professor Postle, met a young woman who works restoring and preserving the paintings. We walked down a bare hallway – “Watch out for runners,” said the woman, and indeed it appeared that we’d found the backstage area, a number of sweaty people with water bottles waiting to go on – and took an industrial elevator – a lift! – up to her studio, where she had two paintings mounted on either side of an easel, portraits by Reynolds. She explained the work – cleaning the yellowed varnish that earlier restorers had used to preserve the work, even wiping out additions made by misguided earlier preservers. It’s controversial and difficult to decide, of course – when is a work finished, what does it mean to restore it to its original state? If edits were made twenty years later, should they be taken out? She showed us X-rays and microscope enlargements of samples from the paintings. On another canvas, an unfinished Zoffany, she had completely erased the badly-done face that a later artist had put on one of the figures. Aiya – imagine the pressure! You have to be absolutely sure that what you’re doing is moving the painting toward its original condition. To actually wipe stuff out – well, it’s a lot of power and responsibility. Like Spiderman.
Anyway, that’s that for today. Hopefully that wasn’t too boring. I’m probably going to go to visit Oxford this weekend for the fourth of July, yay. And I will dress in red, white, and blue. Next week is the Bath trip. We’re getting around.
And here’s another plug. I don’t think they’re translating properly as links so just copy and paste it into the url bar.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=xxwOZl8ZMOA
