Death and Art

Not news from, but news in, Brugge and the rest of Europe comes the death of Simone Veil who died yesterday, June 30, aged 89.. This Auschwitz survivor lived, when many of her family died, and went on to carve out a magnificent career for herself. She was Minister of Health under Giscard d’Estaing, President of the European Parliament, Honorary President of the Fondation pour la Memoire de la Shoah, Member of the Academie Francaise. Need I go on? Perhaps her most courageous act was to push through legislation for the legalisation of abortion in January 1975. Quite an achievement forty years ago in a country like France with its deeply traditional and Roman Catholic roots.

In the meantime I despair when I hear and read of the state of British politics with the inflexible Theresa and the D.U.P. support package involving real money with apparently no insistence that D.U.P. policy moves to support gay marriage and abortion though the latter, strangely, managed to garner sufficient support for meaningful legislation in Parliament. Brexit continues its downhill path of UK destruction while Corbynmania allows the mirage of a Labour electoral victory in sight when a majority of voters will not support Really Left policies. What’s not to like in the Labour manifesto? Nothing save the impossibility of affording it all.

 The Haymaker by Emile Claus. 1896

But to return to Beloved Brugge or rather, yesterday, to Ghorgeous Ghent. A friend and I returned to the Caermersklooster, in Patershol, to see another marvellous exhibition in this former Carmelite monastery. Entitled, Rooted, it displays Flemish art from 1880-1930. Much of the exhibition is of paintings from private collections and demonstrates a major turning point in Flemish art history against the backdrop of the development of Belgium as a leading industrial nation. The early works were painted by a group of Belgian Impressionists who had left the grime and overcrowding of industrial Ghent for the pastoral paradise of villages along the River Leie. These light and picturesque works by Gustave Van de Woestyne, Emile Claus, George Minne and Valerius De Saedeleer, are the most romantic and beautiful of the entire exhibition and show the nostalgia the artists felt towards the rapidly-departing pastoral idyll of earlier nineteenth century life. All these paintings are done before the First World War and, with the onset of war, the tone and style changes abruptly as artists flee Belgium and
become immersed in the international art scene.

Woman on a Bicycle. Hubert Malfait 1924

The pastoral gives way to the metropolitan; scenes, again based on ordinary lives, now picture images of cafe interiors, fairs, circuses, the music hall and modern pursuits like cycling. The pictures of Gustave de Smet, Frits Van den Berghe, Constant Permeke and Edmund Tytgat are individually striking and contrast dramatically and urgently with the earlier Romanticism on view. Two of my favourite Flemish artists feature; James Ensor in his Oostende studio and Rik Wouters in his domestic Paradise; both are idiosynchratically expressive but somehow a little apart from the general tide of art history.

One visitor enjoying a ride on the carousel

I did enjoy the manner of display in this Rooted exhibition; several small rooms are furnished with items of furniture contemporary to the paintings and one space has an imaginative version of a carousel to echo the circus theme. Delightful and light-hearted as a backdrop to an exhibition of outstanding works from radical and influential Flemish painters of the day. Worth seeing twice!

Zomer by Gustave de Smets 1913



  Open air school in Astridpark

And just as a passing observation; I noticed last week how many school parties there seemed to be roaming the streets and squares of Brugge then the penny dropped! School finished yesterday and pupils and teachers alike were unwinding in thankful preparation. Still three weeks to go in the UK before the longed-for Summer break!

Universal Genius Par Excellence



Horse's Head by Giorgio Vasari.
[in exhibition]

In search of cultural refreshment, I visited the new Leonardo exhibition in Oud Sint Jan on Sunday morning. It is billed as a World Premiere as, after Brugge, it travels Europe-wide. I do vaguely remember a similar idea for a Leonardo exhibition which featured models of some of his sketches, in the Poor Priests’ Hospital in Canterbury as part of the Festival 1985. This current exhibition is mind-blowing in its extraordinary scope and size; there are over a hundred models made from Leonardo’s sketches and demonstrate the quite extraordinary genius of the man. Indeed, Giorgio Vasari in his Lives of the Artists, 1568, describes Leonardo [1452-1519] as: an example of an artist transcending nature when, ‘a single person is marvellously endowed by Heaven with beauty, grace and talent in such abundance that he leaves other men behind.’

 

One can imagine that illegitimacy was despised and ridiculed during the fifteenth century but Leonardo was saved from ignominy in his mother, Caterina's, peasant family because his father, a rich notary living in Vinci near to Firenze, took him into his household and provided a basic school education. Ser Piero da Vinci, eventually recognising his son's extensive talents, persuaded friend, Andrea del Verrocchio, to take the boy into his workshop to shape his creativity. So, good fortune in his early days provided Leonardo with creative training and his matchless curiosity and innate creativity carried him per ardua ad astra.

 Ginevra de' Benci  1474/8

His painting was almost faultless with its wonderful use of sfumato and chiaroscuro though he did acquire a reputation for not always finishing commissions. In spite of Leonardo's mastery of portraits

 Lady with Ermine
Accomplished portrait of
Cecilia Gallerani
1490

and his astonishing anatomical drawings in surviving notebooks, the exhibition is memorable chiefly for the superlative array of wooden weapons and defensive models constructed from his drawings.

There are inventive and enormous catapults and several cannon ball-launching machines; assault cars and any number of ingenious devices involving ladders, projectiles and protective armour for the mediaeval soldier. One cone-shaped assault car is credited with being the inspiration for the modern tank.
Walking round wondering is to be in the skin of a mediaeval general, given the key to a mediaeval gallery of prototypes of weapons and armour designed to make him ecstatically impregnable on the battlefield. Leonardo was an Engineer Extraordinaire and an Inventor of Defence and Weaponry Par Excellence. And this doesn't touch on his genius with hydraulics, aeronautics, architecture, measurement.

One tends, now, to think of Leonardo da Vinci as, primarily, an artist, though he left quite a small body of work behind; 15 or 16 paintings in total though containing wonderfully realised compositions such as the Mona Lisa and the Last Supper but my favourites are Lady with Ermine and Ginevra de’Benci [1474/8] However, contemporaneously, he was admired and sought principally as an engineer and inventor, especially in the realms of warfare. The art of warfare ranked first in the list of arts and clearly Leonardo was entranced by it for most of his life.



Cone-shaped armoured car surmounted
by a small tower. Armoured
wooden exterior defended by  
low perimeter cannons.

Many of da Vinci's sketches were clever dreams, unrealisable at the time because of the weight of the materials available. But, this Renaissance Man's inventions often pre-dated by hundreds of years, the actual appearance of machines imagined by him. His 'aerial screw' drawing has notes ....' If this instrument made with a screw be well made -- that is to say, made of linen of which the pores are stopped up with starch-- be turned swiftly, the said screw will make it spiral in the air and it will rise.'
His idea of compressing air to obtain flight is similar to the principle behind today's  helicopters, the first of which was made in the 1940s.


 Leonardo da Vinci, self portrait, 1512/15

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             

                              

 The matchless beauty of Ginevra de' Benci,
as portrayed by Leonardo in 1474/8

 

Brugge Blog from Britain

 St Augustine's Abbey ruins

Lovely to see Canterbury again; I used to go for coffee and shopping twice a month when I lived in Wye and always enjoyed it. I am more sensitised to city gates since living in Brugge so that I nodded appreciatively to the Westgate, England’s largest city gate still standing, as I passed by. Canterbury has its own UNESCO designation covering the wonderful Cathedral, the atmospheric remains of St Augustine’s Abbey and St Martin’s. The Cathedral with its exceptional early stained glass and memorial

 6th Century St Martin's Church

to Thomas Becket, the Archbishop murdered there in 1170,  boasts Bell Harry Tower which has dominated the city for hundreds of years and is a notable landmark for miles. St Augustine's, founded by St. Augustine in 597 A.D. was a centre of learning and spirituality for almost a thousand years until the unfortunate intervention of Henry V11in 1538 with the Dissolution of the Monasteries, while St Martin's, the first church built in England and in continuous use since the 6th century, stands nearby. A truly exceptional and historical trio in this World Heritage Site.
 



Not entirely beautiful outside, but a great
addition to Canterbury life. 

Memory lane took me to Caffe Nero and for a quick peep at the Marlowe Theatre nearby, scene of many a past theatrical evening out. I happened to pass the Chaucer Bookshop which I love and from where I once bought an old [and expensive!]map of Kent for in a special present plus one or two from the delicious array of second-hand and antiquarian books. It is a real bookshop for book-lovers. I just had a couple of sunny hours in the centre of the city and located the recommended but new-to-me Curzon cinema, tucked away in a side street and now open for two years. It has the flavour of a cinema club with a cafe and it is adventurous and delightful. I really savoured the mid-town atmosphere with more students than I have ever seen there before. Canterbury felt young and thriving and I was inspired to pop into Cath Kidston’s to buy a handbag in the sale. I shall remember that delightful afternoon every time I behold its rich blue, spotted solid shape.

Wye on the following four days was even more beautiful than I had remembered and just as friendly and welcoming as expected. It was a real delight to be back and even my Monday evening talk to the Arts Association went down well in spite of sauna-like temperatures. Almost best of all was the lunch

 Wye, 1934 vintage

for wimmin born in 1934 of whom there were eight of us identified when I lived there. One of us was indisposed but the remaining seven had a most relaxed and amusing time lazing the afternoon away in a lovely garden, with timeless views of the golden village cricket field beyond.

And during that Wye weekend, it was back to the Stour Festival, an annual feast of' Early Music in All Saints Church, Boughton Aluph, about two miles outside the village. Mark Deller, son of the fabled counter tenor Alfred, runs it still though it was launched by his father in 1962. There are five concerts each weekend over the last two weekends in June and the setting is idyllic. Marquees for food and drink , rural Kentish landscape and Baroque music in a beautiful old church; what more could one ask? The Festival is a whole world somehow caught in a social aspic; one sees the same people, in certain fashions; courtesy and bonhomie abound; friendships are renewed; wonderful music is shared and savoured and even if it rains, the sun always shines somehow.

All Saints, Boughton Aluph, before
the annual Baroque Festival.

The first half of my ten away-days took me to Nottinghamshire, to my sister’s farm, and little outings with my sister in her wheelchair; the very best was a visit to the lane where we had grown up, only about seven miles from her present residence of nearly sixty years. The tiny house, number 14, was identified and miraculously the wood adjacent to our house where we had played with our gang at being ‘bombed out’ in WW2, and where we had climbed so many trees over seventy years ago, was unbelievably, still there! It is now part of a small country park and ‘our’ part remains. We wandered in the sun, delighted to be back, with memories re-kindled and brains sharpened. A great idea from my sister’s younger son re-kindled some of the best experiences of our childhoods, accessing a veritable store house of submerged memories.

 My sister, forgetting she has Alzheimer's,
and I on a lovely sunny outing to les temps perdus.