My son is a man.
Winston turns 18 today and, as luck would have it, received an offer from his college of choice last night. There could be no finer birthday gift.
All you need to know about the college is that it enjoys the same weather as his prep school (snow!) and is in the most perfect setting imaginable.
A fabulous birthday gift.
These biographical pieces generally run annually in time for Hanukkah and Christmas.
Words cannot express this father’s feelings when, last night, my son Winston received the below, just in time for my birthday. There could be no finer birthday gift:
Our many college visits over the past couple of years have focused on the northeast and on Ivy and Little Ivy schools, Union being one of the latter. You can read about those visits here; the index includes two visits to Union College. The little Ivies are typically one tenth of the size of the Big Ivies and focus more intensely on liberal arts studies.
To quote Winston’s illustrious namesake: “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end, but it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”
Well done, Winnie!
And its civilizing forces.
These pieces generally run annually in time for Hanukkah and Christmas.
The images below are in chronological order, illustrating key junctures in the progression of western art and architecture.
No one exposed me to the visual world. My parents had little interest in the visual arts, being more focused on music. Chopin’s piano music was the first thing I recall hearing as a child, emanating from the gramophone, played by Artur Rubinstein, naturally. You can take a Pole out of Poland but you cannot take the Polish out of a Pole. My parents, whose world view stopped at the Russian border on the east and the German one in the west – and they were to experience occupation by both aggressors – saw to it that refugee status would have them end up in England, not the United States. Had they given but one moment of thought to this decision, I would have graduated from the Ivy League not University College, London. My loss. It always does to choose one’s parents well.
No, my exposure to the visual world, by which I mean painting, photography and architecture, was purely the result of serendipity. I chanced on the photography section at the Kensington Public Library at a very early age, still in short trousers, and in retrospect I started at the top, for the first photographs I seriously studied were those of Henri Cartier-Bresson whose greatest work was done in the 1930s. My interest sparked, I went on to explore the wit and whimsy of the fashion photography world, once again lucking out and starting at the top in the guise of Irving Penn, who conquered this and many other genres with aplomb. Not surprisingly during these early years of discovery Paris and the French came to my notice and when I visited Paris in 1973, poor as the proverbial church mouse, it was with two goals. To take street snaps and to visit the Louvre. In the process I fell head over heels in love with France and the French, a nation whose greatness looked askance at the small minded provincialism of the British and their hatred of all things foreign. And that does not even take into account that assault on food which is British cooking. For centuries the French have welcomed free thinkers, revolutionaries and non-conformists, not to mention those who prefer to eat well.
My early interest in French culture saw me devour Proust’s magnum opus “In Search of Time Past” not once but twice while still a teenager. And that second reading, during my last years at prep school, coincided with a transforming experience which greatly broadened my appreciation of the visual world. That event was the BBC’s series “Civilisation” written and narrated by Kenneth Clark and enthusiastically sponsored by the head of the BBC, David Attenborough. Even fifty years later it’s accurate to say that Clark was the premier art historian of the past century.
Suddenly, a world which had been limited to Delacroix, Ingres, Géricault, Degas, Pissarro, Sisley, Manet, Monet, Corot, Daumier, Gauguin, Cézanne, Rodin, Seurat and Van Gogh exploded to include Giotto, Titian, Botticelli, Giorgione, Mantegna, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, Bernini, Brunneleschi, Bramante, Donatello, Caravaggio and Tintoretto – Italians all – and the realization that Florence, Venice and Rome, the cities at the heart of the 15th and 16th century Renaissance, had contributed the bulk of what we know about art and architecture in Western Europe to this day. And all of this against the most frightful background of despotic rulers and corrupt popes who left us with this great legacy which is Civilisation.
Or, as Harry Lime/Orson Welles put it in Carol Reed’s ‘The Third Man’: “You know what the fellow said – in Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”
All of this discovery was ably guided by Lord Clark’s mellifluous prose and, despite his magnificent erudition, not for one moment is there an iota of condescension. Clark was, above all, a great teacher, looking to share his knowledge, not take advantage of it. Stated differently, his patrician roots and superb education at Winchester and Trinity College, Oxford, where history was his major, empowered rather than constrained his communication skills. That he only earned a second class degree is merely a reflection of the fact that his burning interest even at this early age was focused on art, not history. And socially, while he would always be talking down to his audience, as a great humanist he only ever communicated on their level.
St. Peter’s was commissioned by Pope Julius II. Clark writes of the Pope:
…. we see for the first time the splendid head of the young cardinal who, more than any man, was destined to give the High Renaissance its heroic direction, Giuliano della Rovere. What a lion he looks compared to the donkeys of the papal secretariat! And when he became Pope Julius II he was able by magnanimity and strength of will to inspire and bully three men of genius – Bramante, Michelangelo and Raphael. Without him Michelangelo would not have painted the Sistine ceiling, nor Raphael decorated the papal apartments; and so we should have been without two of the greatest visible expressions of spiritual power and humanist philosophy.
And, one might add, St. Peter’s would have come out looking like the local parish hall instead of what it is, the most glorious church in all Christendom.
History suggests that Julius II, the warrior Pope, was a good deal less saintly than Clark would have us believe, but there’s no denying he was the driver behind the rebuilding of St. Peter’s as well as the subject of Raphael’s finest portrait. His was the decision to raze the old basilica, committing to the century long project that is today’s headquarters of the Catholic faith. Even if one condemns all religion as utter bunk, the greatest confidence trick since the origin of the earth and the source of most of the deadly conflicts of the past two millennia, it would be churlish indeed to deny the genius that is St. Peter’s.
The BBC series, the first of its kind in color and filmed on costly 35mm stock at that, was in thirteen parts and I have just watched all the episodes once more. The grainy video shows its age and is not really up to the big, sharp TV screen of today, but Clark’s prose has not aged. Here he is in the last episode, ‘Heroic Materialism’, which speaks to the Industrial Revolution and the rise of the New World:
“On the whole I think that knowledge is preferable to ignorance, and I am sure that human sympathy is more valuable than ideology. I believe that in spite of the recent triumphs of science, men haven’t changed much in the last two thousand years; and in consequence we must still try to learn from history. History is ourselves. I also hold one or two beliefs that are more difficult to put shortly. For example, I believe in courtesy, the ritual by which we avoid hurting other people’s feelings by satisfying our own egos. And I think we should remember that we are part of a great whole, which for convenience we call nature. All living things are our brothers and sisters. Above all, I believe in the God-given genius of certain individuals, and I value a society that makes their existence possible.”
What could be more apposite at a time when the leadership of the free world is up for grabs, having been ceded by a shameful bunch of crooks looking solely for personal enrichment? A cruel gang of mobsters devoid of any interest save the making and display of wealth by any and every illicit means possible. Sadly, there is no Roosevelt, Churchill or De Gaulle in sight. Mercifully the works of the Renaissance and of nineteenth century France will survive these depredations of culture and civility. In a world of anti-civilization, works such as St. Peter’s in Rome along with Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel will always remind us that man is capable of greatness despite his circumstances.
In the world of painting that greatness was never more in evidence than in the works of Caravaggio (1571 – 1610) who burst on the world of art at the very tail of the Renaissance. Everything that had been posited, from Giotto to Raphael, was perfected by this rogue, one who would rather be drinking, fighting and whoring than painting yet, despite appalling personal traits, his sponsors saw to it that he was always in demand. And when you look at The Calling of Saint Matthew, as but one example, you can see why. Or take a look at The Supper at Emmaus (there’s one in London’s National Gallery and another in The Louvre) where the pull-no-punches realism extends to worm infested fruit, common as muck faces and raggedy clothing. The world of realism and captured moments had to wait for Degas, some three hundred years later, to see this slice of life rendering improved upon. Degas, of course, had the benefit of photography. Caravaggio was limited to the images in his brain.
Towards the end of ‘Civilisation’ Clark narrates the following:
“Our other speciality is our urge to destruction. With the help of machines we did our best to destroy ourselves in two wars, and in doing so we released a flood of evil, which intelligent people have tried to justify with praise of violence, ‘theatres of cruelty’ and so forth. Add to this the memory of that shadowy companion who is always with us, like an inverted guardian angel, silent, invisible, almost incredible – and yet unquestionably there and ready to assert itself at the touch of a button; and one must concede that the future of civilisation does not look very bright.
And yet when I look at the world about me in the light of this series, I don’t at all feel that we are entering a new period of barbarism. The things that made the Dark Ages so dark -the isolation, the lack of mobility, the lack of curiosity, the hopelessness – don’t obtain at all. When I have the good fortune to visit one of our new universities, it seems to me that the inheritors of all our catastrophes look cheerful enough – very different from the melancholy late Romans or pathetic Gauls whose likenesses have come down to us. In fact, I should doubt if so many people have ever been as well-fed, as well-read, as bright-minded, as curious and as critical as the young are today.
Of course there has been a little flattening at the top. But one mustn’t overrate the culture of what used to be called ‘top people’ before the wars. They had charming manners, but they were as ignorant as swans. They did know something about literature, and a few had been to the opera. But they knew nothing about painting and less than nothing about philosophy (except for Balfour and Haldane). The members of a music group or an art group at a provincial university would be five times better informed and more alert. Naturally, these bright-minded young people think poorly of existing institutions and want to abolish them. Well, one doesn’t need to be young to dislike institutions. But the dreary fact remains that, even in the darkest ages, it was institutions that made society work, and if civilisation is to survive society must somehow be made to work.
Fifty years ago W. B. Yeats, who was more like a man of genius than anyone I have ever known, wrote a famous prophetic poem.
Things fall apart;
the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed,
and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction,
while the worst are full of passionate intensity.
Well, that was certainly true between the wars, and it nearly destroyed us. Is it true today? Not quite, because good people have convictions, rather too many of them. The trouble is that there is still no centre. The moral and intellectual failure of Marxism has left us with no alternative to heroic materialism, and that isn’t enough. One may be optimistic, but one can’t exactly be joyful at the prospect before us.
Magnificent prose. One wonders if he would be more despairing today, in an age of AI and control by a handful of US tech giants, intent on doing evil? And that intent, focused on depriving the individual of his pride and privacy, reducing all to the level of the gutter, has far more import on civilization than any terrorist attack.
But by opening my breadth of experience and my eyes and mind to the Renaissance and all it gave western culture, I will forever be grateful to Kenneth Clark.
The DVD series of Civilisation is available from Amazon for very little. Fittingly the cover image is an extract of Raphael’s peerless School of Athens. It is unreservedly recommended to all civilized human beings or to those in search of what civilization means. When the series was first broadcast in the late 1960s it was proclaimed a resounding triumph with 5 million British and 10 million Americans tuning in. That’s 10% and 5%, respectively, of these nations’ populations, not a statistic consistent with claims to being civilized.
The master of surrealism.
There is no rule, when it comes to painters and photographers, as to when you do your best work.
One school of thought has it that you peak in your twenties, all sturm und drang, ready to fight the world and its evils. Another has it that you age like fine wine, the greatest work done before the Grim Reaper drops by.
There are no rules. No generalizations.
Take Raphael (dead at 37, too much partying). In that short span he never created anything less than perfect. Or Caravaggio (39 – whoring, boozing, fighting), each of whose handful of canvases was perfection itself. And Modigliani (36, general excess and illness), every work just so.
Then, at the GR end of the spectrum, you have Monet (86) who only every got better as a visit to L’Orangerie in the Tuileries Gardens of Paris confirms, your head spinning, those ephemeral water lilies all around. Or Leonardo (67), his head bursting with ideas and creating great art to the very end. Or Picasso, whose frenetic output ceased on his death at 92.
There are no rules. No generalizations.
Henri Cartier-Bresson was the man who made me a follower of photography, at an age when I could not even afford a camera. This master lived a very long life yet gave up photography in late middle age. As the remainder of this piece shows, there’s an argument to be made that he in fact had said most of what he wanted by 1939, aged just 31.
The Kensington Public Library, not far from my parents’ London home, had a fine collection of photography books – meaning books of pictures, not of gear usage – and the Dewey system being what it is one book in the 770 section was the first to catch my eye. That book contained HC-B’s early work, and by ‘early’ I mean images made before June 1940 when the Germans captured him and locked him up. I must have been about 11 at the time and was reasonably well schooled in the Impressionists with a smattering of the High Renaissance thrown in for classicism’s sake. And I had never seen anything like it before. The work was astonishing and I knew then and there that I wanted to take pictures like that.
HC-B had studied painting under André Lhote and the cubism touted by his teacher immediately translated into surrealism in his photographic work, started in 1929.
HC-B was 21 years old and he emerged fully formed. His images from the next decade redefined photography as we know it.
All images are © Magnum Photos.
Marseille, 1932.
The Quai St. Bernard, Paris, 1932.
Plasterers, Paris, 1932. How on earth do you improve on this?
Behind the Gare St. Lazare, 1932. A symphony in monochrome.
Brussels, 1932. The acme of surrealism.
Hyères, France, 1932. The Decisive Moment defined.
Tuscany, 1933.
Valencia, 1933.
Madrid, 1933. An image of unforgettable power.
Barcelona, 1933. Rare wit in a man seemingly devoid of humor.
Spain, 1933
Trieste, 1933. An image which, for me, always fortells Germany’s concentration camps.
Valencia, 1933. Maybe the greatest cubist/surrealist image ever created on film.
The Shoe Fetishist, Natcho Aguirre, Mexico, 1934. Reportorial and utterly surreal.
Hyde Park, 1937, as the Gathering Storm beckons.
By the Seine, 1938. The image of France that started my photographic odyssey.
The last days of the Kuomintang, Shanghai, 1948. A rare post war image
that recaptures the dynamism of ‘The Plasterers’, above.
While sparks of his austere pre-war vision were to recur through the remainder of his long life – HC-B died in 2004 aged 96, though he gave up photography in 1975 – the fecundity of the pre-war years was never recaptured. The post-war images trend, for the most part, to the purely reportorial, the pre-war surrealism largely forgotten. Some aver it’s because HC-B was wealthy, the heir to the Bresson thread works which had made his parents rich. He did not have to try hard. I do not subscribe to that belief. He worked like a dog all his life, traveling the globe for the big picture magazines, always at the center of the action. The death of Gandhi? Mao Tse Tung’s overthrow of Chiang Kai Shek? The Paris riots? HC-B was there. Maybe the relative ‘prettiness’ of the images demanded by Life and the like diluted his vision? But if you want to see that vision in full flower, look no further than his images of the 1930s.
Perhaps the worst advice HC-B ever got was from fellow Magnum snapper Robert Capa:
I’m not interested in documenting. Documenting is extremely dull and I’m a very bad reporter. When I had an exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in 1946, my friend, Robert Capa, told me, “Henri, be very careful. You must not have a label of a surrealist photographer. If you do, you won’t have an assignment and you’ll be like a hothouse plant. Do whatever you like, but the label should be ‘photojournalist’ “.
He should have stuck to surrealism.
With the grain master.
This journal seems to have hit a bit of a film streak recently, so here’s more of the same.
In the 1970s, the height of the 35mm film era, Ansco made a film named GAF500 which was a color slide film rated at a nominal 500 ASA. Given that most slide snappers were using Kodachrome II (25 ASA) or Kodachrome X (64 ASA) at the time, this was quite a statement.
The film’s fame owes much to the work of French photographer Sarah Moon who jumped on its creative possibilities which perfectly matched her impressionist – nay, pointillist – photography style. Pointillisme was originated by that most special of French painters George Seurat in the 1880s. Dots of color replaced continuous tones and the results were electric. Maybe his finest work is ‘A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte’ from 1884 and you have zero excuses for not seeing it for it resides in all its magnificence in The Art Institute of Chicago.
At this time in my life I had already long decided to abandon dreary, failed England, where I had grown up and graduated in 1973 from University College, London, and had my eyes firmly set on the New World and America, a reality that came to closure in late 1977. But having been an ardent Francophile for the past 15 of my 26 years on earth, a visit to Paris was first called for. I had already devoured Proust’s magnum opus ‘Remembrance of Things Past’ not once but twice, had enjoyed a passionate affair with Impressionist painting, based on my readings of John Rewald’s magnificent books, and had maybe two hundred of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s images committed to memory.
What causes this flashback is not any great love of tea or madeleines (I dislike the first and rarely eat the second) but rather my son’s trip tomorrow to Paris with his school as part of his French studies. He will stay ’embedded’ with a French family – no English allowed! – for two weeks, half in Strasbourg, Alsace on the German border, the other half in Paris. Strasbourg with its overweening Germanic culture leaves me cold, but Paris ….
Returning to the Divine Sarah, I packed one roll of GAF500 on my trip in 1976, much inspired by her work. The rest was all TriX which is about all I used back then. Why mess with perfection? The greatest monochrome emulsion ever made. I doubt I had taken more than a handful of color snaps in my life a that point, but I did find GAF500 in my Leica on the obligatory trip up the Eiffel Tower and one of the snaps made there came out rather nicely, the essence of all that is French, looking into the fine restaurant atop the Tower.
So the next three weeks I will be living vicariously through my boy, Winston, whose namesake WSC was once asked how he managed to tolerate DeGaulle’s endless grandstanding in London during WW2. “He is my cross of Lorraine to bear”, WSC replied. Expounding on his theme, he added that a world without French culture, cuisine, couture and women would be a far worse place. Churchill wisely chose the south of France for his retirement, abandoning drafty, cold, rainy Chartwell to the tourist hordes. Here’s more of the same:
That week I spent in Paris was magical and I do not recall taking one bad image. This trio from the Tuileries Gardens about sums it up:
May Winston have as good a time.
Vive La France!