Stopovers in Northern Spain: Santander and Bilbao
Until recently, the north coast of Spain has been, for me, fly-over territory: if the weather is good, glimpses caught of the bay of Santander, far below, almost exactly an hour’s flying time until Malaga.
The Oath-Go-Round at the Coronation
One has to admire the attempt to resurrect Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan for the Coronation. Hobbes, writing in the aftermath of the English civil war and at the time the “modern” British monarchy began to be shaped, believed that the only way out of the primitive natural state of permanent civil discord, “a war of all against all”, wherein life is “nasty, brutish and short” was a “covenant”, whereby all submitted to a “sovereign” ( an abstract concept that could include monarchy, oligarchy or democracy) that would supreme, unfettered power to impose civilised order. The original illustration to Leviathan depicts a handsome, Stuartish Monarch – yet on close inspection the Monarch is composed of all the citizens that have transferred their powers to him, and from whom his sovereignty is derived.
In May 2023, we were enjoined to enter an actual Hobbesian covenant, and pledge allegiance to a modern Leviathan, King Charles..
But the Hobbesian commentator detects two major flaws in this new social contract.
First, after an initial frisson over whether this allegiance is “commanded” from everyone, we are told it is voluntary – a mere invitation to pledge allegiance. This will not do at all. According to Hobbes, the covenant transferring power to Leviathan is universal and irreversible. Only thus does Leviathan get his, her or its supreme authority.
That is one lamentable failure. The other problem is that, in the UK, the identity of Leviathan is elusive. Is it the King, as Head of State? But in the same Coronation Ceremony, the King swears (in an Oath dating back to Hobbesian times) to uphold the laws enacted by Parliament. But, in turn, in Parliament, MPs swear allegiance to the Crown.
We arrive, puzzled, at an Escher-like hierarchy of Leviathans, folding back on one another..
I suppose the Crown may represent the feeble spirit of our Leviathan, and Parliament the crude actuality. So affirming allegiance to the Crown may bathetically translate into obedience to some wretched, passing, crew of politicians.
Hobbes squirms in his shroud.
May 2023
Rock & Roman Ruins- Baelo Claudia
There are plenty of unvisited places that one feels one knows anyway, because they have become cultural, historical or geographic cliches, always present in image and report. Some will inevitably disappoint upon actual acquaintance.
Hispanic Art at the Royal Academy: Goya Portraits
Goya (1746-1828) lived through especially tricky times in Spain – the Enlightenment, then invasion and brutal war, a brief interval of liberalism, followed by reactionary despotism.
Holy Grail and Beekeepers in Valencia
Every amateur student of the Grail (Last Supper Chalice) legends knows that, if one is faced with a choice of potential Grails, never choose the ornate one. The Indiana Jones films instruct us that this would be a lethal error, should one drink from it in pursuit of immortal life. Rather, the true life-giving Grail is a humble earthenware cup, suitable for a last supper in unpretentious circumstances.
A Toddler’s Anecdotes
I have a hypothesis about the visual memories of long ago. Like any hypothesis about the reliability of distant memory, it is ultimately unprovable, but there’s a suggestion of plausibility.
Cezanne at Tate
Cezanne has rolled into town, just as emphatically as his gravity-defying fruits do NOT roll off their tables in his many still life paintings. “With an apple I will astonish Paris”, is the quote taken as the motto for his arrival – in London.
A great collection of Cezanne’s work is exhibited at Tate Modern for over 5 months between October 2022 and March 2023. Go early and go often, to adapt the C19 election voting advice. There is much to be dazzled, or even perplexed, by.
A one-sentence summary of Cezanne’s place in modern art history might say that he took the loose and transient realism of Impressionism to the edge of Cubism and thus initiated the worlds of Abstract Art. He worked with an obsessional attention to colour and form; indeed, to form created by colour, and a gradual abandonment of realist perspective.
Cezanne painted his subjects over and over again, each time trying to express what he saw differently in the same view, and never being satisfied that he captured the essence of the scene or objects before him, or hit on the proper relation of artist to subject.
In the Exhibition, this can be clearly appreciated. Three pictorial themes may stand as examples: Cezanne’s Fruits, his Bathers, and Mont St Victoire. In all these series “realism” gives place over time and compositions to strange geometries and the glories of colour – and in some cases the draining of shapes and contrasts.
Thus, the colours of fruits no longer go to defining the “appleness” or “lemonness” of particular objects but rather blaze an intoxicating coloured pattern out of the frame and across the gallery space.
A landscape of trees, fields, valleys and mountain subtly lends or borrows shapes and colours and, as the series progresses, shape and hue become more detached from the geography of the scene.
What starts as heavy, almost awkward nude studies of bathers gradually assimilate to the forms and colours of surrounding foliage and water.
Play this game with any children you take, or with your friends, or indeed with yourself. Spot the oddities or deviations from “naturalism” in the paintings – for example: those apples should topple; that statue should slide or tip;
Reflect in turn how the compositions are liberated from, but rooted in, the scenes depicted, which are starting points for adventures in vivid perception.
Nov 2022
