Category: favourite things

Leonardo da Vinci. A Life in Notebooks

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Study of Fetus in the Womb circa 1511

 

Part artist, part scientist, Da Vinci embodies the Renaissance man par excellence.

Luckily for us, the workings of his inner mind in painting, sculpture, anatomy, military engineering and cartography have all been recorded in the notebooks he kept throughout his life.

One of these notebooks made it into the Queen’s Royal Collection during Charles II’s reign. For hundreds of years following, the 550 drawings were carefully preserved in the Print room at Windsor castle.

To mark the 500th anniversary of da Vinci’s death, 200 of these drawings have travelled up to London for a show entitled Leonardo da Vinci: A Life in Drawing at the Queen’s Gallery, London.

Leonardo began his career as an apprentice artist, a garzone, aged 14, working for the eminent Florentine painter and sculptor Verrocchio. Under his inspirational master’s wing, he was exposed to both theoretical training and a wide range of technical skills, including drafting, chemistry, metal work, plaster casting, leather work, mechanics, woodwork, as well as drawing, painting and modelling. 

To complement their education in the human body, Verrochio’s pupils were sent down to the local hospital to perform dissections. For Da Vinci it was a revelation, setting him along the path of scientific observation.  

At the show the anatomical section is the most fascinating. Da Vinci’s documentation of muscles, nerves and vessels demonstrate the artist’s investigation into the  mechanics of movement. 

The act of procreation also preoccupies the polymath as you would expect. His artistic representation of coitus is both intriguing and poetic. Man’s ‘material’ is seen to enter the female uterus, and in Da Vinci’s drawing, it is the man’s brain which baptises it with an ‘animal element’ or soul. Meanwhile woman, the receptacle of the man’s offering, gives her soul to the child via her spinal cord.

Further on in the show, da Vinci’s dissection of a uterus reveals a mature foetus  (see heading). Beautifully drafted, it is unsettling to think of the circumstances in which Da Vinci captured nature’s best kept secret. Burying its head in its hands, its placenta snaking around its back and thigh, the baby is both immaculate and lifeless.

Other highlights were Da Vinci’s outstanding botany drawings, the map of the Tuscan valley he drew up as a military engineer and cartographer, and finally a sculptural project for the Duke of Milan.

Da Vinci was commissioned to make a bronze equestrian statue to honour one of the Duke’s forebears. Unfortunately only the clay version survived until it was destroyed by French soldiers when they invaded Milan. As for the bronze required for the colossal equine cast totalling 75 tons, it was used instead for the production of cannon balls.

The theme of unfinished works is a reoccurring one with da Vinci. Personal procrastination and  destruction seem to have blighted da Vinci’s existence. It is really poignant to think that though Leonardo was revered in his day as a painter, he was only able to complete 20 paintings.

The exhibition does give us the opportunity to view the preparatory sketches for several of the most famous works, The Last Supper for instance. The relatively unknown (The) Head of Leda was the main attraction at the show however.

Da Vinci’s charming sketches of a beautiful young woman with Renaissance hair, plaited, rolled and trained and seen from all angles, is enchanting. Da Vinci worked on the painting for the last 15 years of his life. It entered the French Royal Collection but had to be destroyed due to its ruinous state.

 

The head of Leda

Head of Leda 1504-1505

 

For me, The Head of Leda’s studies are a precious record of what could have been da Vinci’s greatest painting of all.

All in all, I found this an inspiring show and one which leaves you wanting more.

KH

Leonardo da Vinci: A Life in Drawing runs until October 2019 at the Queen’s Gallery, London.

Dior and the Story of the Perfect Dress

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In his autobiography Christian Dior tells the story of a fortune teller he met at a 1919 charity event for veterans of the Great War. He was an impressionable, imaginative young man. The fortune teller told him that he would suffer poverty earlier on in his life but that his luck would change and that he would make ‘a great deal of money out of women’. Needless to say, he ran home to tell his family. His father, Maurice, an affluent industrialist, laughed the loudest.

His childhood spent in Normandy by the sea with his brothers and sisters was happy. Life was full of parties and friends. Despite being shy and reserved, Christian knew how to make good friends.

In 1931 disaster struck. Christian’s father’s enterprise went bust and Christian lost both his brother and beloved mother, Madeleine. Penniless, Christian wound up the art gallery he had set up with a friend and fell gravely ill with TB. If it hadn’t been for the friends rallying round to raise money for the sanatorium, we would have probably been deprived of one of the greatest dress designers of the twentieth century. Dior recovered and returned to Paris to embark on a career in haute couture.

In 1946, aged forty-one, Maison Christian Dior was born, thanks to the financial backing of an important French industrialist named Marcel Boussac. Nicknamed ‘the cotton king’, Boussac had made money out of two world wars and had become the richest man in France.

At the V and A’s exhibition: Christian Dior: Designer of Dreams. I  joined a traffic jam of people and circumvented the cameras, a television presenter and a small army of photographers, who had parked their tripods in front of the choicest Dior creations and were refusing  to budge!

I imagined Christian Dior peering down at us from his cloud, in his habitual grey suit, looking every bit the plump French priest, shaking his head and floating off into oblivion. He cherished his privacy and was happiest sketching at a café table, well away from the fashion circus.

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I finally slipped into Room 1 of the exhibition, which is devoted to Christian Dior, the man. The display cabinet was full of photographs of his childhood. Dior as a boy in a sailor suit. We have a portrait of Christian as a young man. He has bright, sensitive, kind eyes and he’s sitting on a divan with an open book. Like Proust, he was a great watcher. A watcher of women at the balls and parties his mother and others held in his circle.  When she died so suddenly something must have broken inside of him. He consciously strove to recreate her world, her liking for the eighteenth century furniture and dress.

All these things are implied and shown in the ball gowns in the Historicism room. Christian Dior was drawn to the sinuous lines of the Belle Epoque dress (late 1880s), the sumptuous silks, and the tightly waisted mid-19thcentury fashion. His fashion showroom at 30 Rue Montaigne was made up in the same style – but in muted grey, so that the furniture and soft furnishings wouldn’t detract from the beautiful models circling the drawing room.

A crazy John Galliano gown embroidered with aqua marine flowers dominates the room. In the background stands an 18thcentury folly with formal garden. Galliano was the great-great grandson in the Dior designer dynasty if we are to view it as a family. I overheard someone say: ‘Galliano is not necessarily the best but he is the most interesting after Dior.’ There is no doubt, Galliano’s theatricality and his exuberance and colour brought magic to the show.

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For me, the real highlights were Dior’s impeccably tailored suits of the early nineteen fifties, the cinched waists, soft shoulders, the skirts coming down below the knee moulded to the figure were the height of femininity and sophistication.

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Memories of a Dior-inspired Agnes B suit I had bought in the early nighties surfaced. Charcoal grey, fashioned in flannel with fitted jacket, lots of buttons, and figure-hugging skirt. With it, I had positively sailed into business meetings. My Agnes B suit was my lucky suit. The one that pulled in the big contracts – strict but feminine, professional but comfortable. It lasted me ten years and I am so sorry I didn’t have a copy made of it!

Aside from the tailored suits, tailored dresses, such as Dior’s Tulip Dress from the Spring 1953 collection or the chic H-line dress, sheathed at the chest of Autumn 1954, stopped me in my tracks. They are still so timeless, so beautiful.

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H-line Dress

There are five hundred objects on display in this exhibition but I didn’t feel overwhelmed by them. This is all due to Oriole Cullen’s careful curating and also Nathalie Crinière’s artful exhibition design. The themed rooms, eleven in all, showed off the clothes to their best advantage in their different settings. The labelling meanwhile provided just enough information to retain our interest.

 

Most memorable was The Garden Room,which draws on Dior’s passion for flowers and gardens. There is a touching story about Dior’s youngest sister, Catherine Dior, who joined the resistance during World War II and was interned at Ravensbruck concentration camp. Christian was so relieved when she returned safely that he named his Miss Dior perfume after her. The stunning Baccarat bottles containing the original perfume are on display. He also designed a Miss Dior dress with tiny silk flowers in her honour knowing that she loved gardens as much as him. Maria Grazia Chiuri’s (Dior’s present Creative director) Garden in Bloom dress from the Dior Spring-Summer collection of 2017 is also worth lingering over. The petal-like flowers ornamenting the gown are in fact cut and dyed feathers.

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I finally entered the Ateliers room with great anticipation for I was setting foot into Dior’s inner sanctum, the workroom. It was filled with dummies in glass cases. They were clothed in white cotton toiles, the test garments made up from Christian Dior’s sketches. Admiring them in turn, I began to appreciate the different panels of a jacket, a dress or skirt, the layering, the stitching and sheathing. Here I started to really see how one hundred hours could be spent hand producing one of these garments.

Christian valued his seamstresses or petites mains for good reason for he was no technician. They cried when he died so suddenly, aged fifty-two. During his ten-year tenure he produced seventy collections. He was an inspiration for the artistic directors who followed. I wonder however whether any of his successors came through the tradesmen entrance as he liked to do at 30 rue Montaigne. I somehow doubt it.

 

KH

 

Christian Dior: Designer of Dreams runs from 2 February – 14 July 2019

 

The very readable, Dior by Dior (The Autobiography of Christian Dior) is on sale at the V and A priced £9.99

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Sound of Silence. Cage and Rauschenberg Take On A New Life With MusicArt.

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During the summer of 1952, composer John Cage staged a happening that was going to change the world of music and art forever. At Black Mountain College in North Carolina, in the college dining hall, the audience listened to Cage read from an essay he had written on the relationship between music and Zen Buddhism. He punctuated his talk with long silences. It must have read like an extended poem.

Cage’s preoccupation with silence as musical form lead to his publishing of 4’33’’, his silent work, that same year.

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At that same college event, four white paintings had been suspended in the air above the audience. Robert Rauschenberg’s pristine White Paintings incarnated what Cage had expressed in words and in silence, namely painted space onto which the outside world could be projected. These paintings could change according to where they were hung; daylight, nature, harsh light spots could cast various shadows across the work. The canvas was a receptacle. A living tableau even, which changed from minute to minute – if only we were attentive enough. And that was the point – conceptual art as it came to be known, required us to think and to fine-tune our senses. And senses are at their most acute in stillness and space.

Knowing this, Cage in his 4’33” silent composition, drew our attention to ambient sound. For him there was no difference between sounds and music.

To this day, these ideas seem radical!

 

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Inspired by Cage’s and Rauschenberg’s works and ideas, pianist Annie Yim invited an audience to attend the premier of ‘Conceptual Concert in Three Acts’, at the Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery, London the other evening.

The concert room could barely accommodate the fashionable crowd that gathered for the event. Many had to make do with standing at the back, for along the walls, either side of them, precious Rauschenberg paintings had been hung. They formed part of a wonderful exhibition entitled Spreads 1975-83, the Thaddaeus-Ropac Gallery is putting on at the moment.That there wasn’t a white painting in sight was no bad thing and was consistent with the artistic layering that was about to take place in an evening of music, art and poetry.

At the front, a shiny black piano waited to be played. It was positioned between what seemed to be two huge canvases covered in sheets.

A tape recorder was switched on. ‘Nature is better than Art,’ said a gentle voice from the past belonging to the inimitable John Cage.

Annie Yim, founder of MusicArt which brings different art forms together, walked on stage to perform The Seasons composed by Cage in 1947. Sitting down at the piano she launched into winter: stark chords; spring: frolicking and skittering notes across the keyboard and summer: lyrical melodies, interspersed with mischievous interludes. Nuanced, precise playing of what is still considered to be experimental material is often hard to pull off and Annie Yim did so with gusto! The composition ended abruptly.

Act 11 was given over to new music by distinguished composer, Raymond Yiu which contained jazz elements and a beautiful duet played by Yim and the composer himself.

Meanwhile, Kayo Chingonyi, award-winning poet, read his own compositions. His poem entitled Matrix – Who’s to say, a tribute to Cage’s reverence for everyday (musical) sounds was particularly memorable and pertinent.

The latter part of the Act was devoted to Cage’s wonderful musings on the creative process: ‘I am trying to change my habits of seeing. I am trying to be unfamiliar with what I’m doing’ (what dedication to permanent invention!) and poem To Whom which he read out at opening show of Rauschenberg’s White Paintings at the Stable Gallery in 1953. For me, one of the highlights of the evening was to listen to him speak.

And finally Act 111 unfolded. The sheets were removed to reveal two large mirrors. Pianist Yim sat down at the piano and as instructed by Cage in the 4’33” score, didn’t play a note.

Silence prevailed for 4’33’’. It was an entrancing experience. At first, time really did seem to stand still. As the performers froze, so did the audience. Very soon bemused expressions started to reflect in the mirror, bobbing heads looked this way and that.  Others, worn out by the lead up towards Christmas no doubt, simply closed their eyes and napped. Tiny sounds started to emerge from the stillness: nails clinking a wine glass, creaking chairs, stifled coughs. As if on cue, a rasping motorbike broke into the space. A tiny part of me felt it had been orchestrated but it didn’t matter for the mirrors revealed a room of smiling faces.

Cage had woven his magic as had MusicArt. It had been a bold enterprise by Yim and her team. She risked putting too many eggs into one basket. But overall, the project was cohesive, expertly performed by all and thought provoking, shedding further light on two iconic figures.

 

KH

 

Catch Rauschenberg Spreads and John Cage Ryoanji exhibitions at the Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery, 37 Dover Street, London. On until 26 January 2019.

How To Get Out of the Cage. Engaging documentary featuring John Cage by award-winning film-maker Frank Scheffer on Youtube.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My Favourite Things: A Word in Your Shell-like

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Aporrhais Pespelecani is a marine snail, the thing that lives inside a seashell, a little mollusk that can be found from the Norwegian coast to the shores of the Mediterranean. It has a very pleasing shape, which seems designed to fit into the human hand – a deep bowl, and 3 or 4 spiny ‘fingers’, radiating out like the struts in the webbed foot of – well, a pelican, which is how the snail gained its name.

 

It can also be found in Gallery 156 of the Metropolitan Museum.

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About 500 years BCE, a workshop somewhere in Greece or in its islands began sculpting these shells in marble. We have no idea how many were made, but only a very few have survived (the British Museum has one; so has the Getty), and given how complex and delicate the shape would have been to sculpt, maybe all of them were the work of one single workshop, maybe of one single mind that saw the natural original, washed up on a beach somewhere, and was inspired, and worked at the design, and then worked at it some more, until they had perfected it. They made it bigger than the shell is in life, so this one, if you were to hold it, would project either end of your palm, with the tips of your fingers fitting between the spines.

 

This is far and away the finest of the survivors. The marble it is carved from is snow-white, and has tiny sparkles of quartz in it, like snow again. As you crane your head to see all the way around it, held upright in its  display case, you begin to realize how magically put-together is the shape – the soft round of the bowl, the delicate spines, the tiny whorl at one end (a separate piece, like the stopper to a bottle), the flat lip at the other. The way all these shapes fit together is half the enchantment of the piece. The other half is what it tells us of us, that human impulse to take something from nature, and recreate it, give it new form, give it rebirth as art, and how that defines us and has propelled us forward from all those centuries ago to what we are today.

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Its surface tells of a final chapter in its history. The marble has been eroded by the action of water and sand. This shell that is not a shell was returned to the ocean at some point, which took the bright paint that would once have covered it (there’s a tiny trace left, on the whorl), and gave it its foamy whiteness, and wore at its spines, just as it would have done a real Aporrhais. In other words, it is so beautiful, it fooled even the sea.

Real Pelican’s Foot shells, with that suggestive, hand-friendly shape, were used as libation vessels, and then maybe cast back into the sea. Their carved marble cousins were probably made for the same purpose. Perfected, painted, used – and cast back into the element that inspired it. Everything about this is as perfect and organic a whole as it is possible for a work of art to be.

JCH