My art week
I cannot really add to Derek Williams’ appreciation of the Tudor Portraits at the Holburne gallery in Bath.
I’m not a huge fan of royal portraiture as it constrains a great court painter like Velazquez, but thankfully not Gustav Klimt who left the court of the Habsburgs in the secessionist movement.
Nonetheless I could only admire the Holbeins.
Henry VIII filled the whole canvas but significantly – though a scholar – did not have in his hand a prayer book whilst Queen Elizabeth I looked obdurate with her pursed lips.
The exhibition was well curated with a wall covering in regal purple and accurate historical notes devoid of any wokeism.
Although not a fan of Waldemar Janusczak, whom I find intrusive and puerile, I am enjoying his series on the Impressionists (The Impressionists: Painting And Revolution) on BBC4 on Monday evenings.
Last episode he covered Gauguin.
A character in a Anthony Trollope novel observed of another:
“He is a master of every art except making money …”
This is so true of Paul Gauguin, who at various times in his life was a worker on the Panama Canal, a stockbroker and a tarpaulin salesman.
He was not only a supreme artists but – as Janusczak showed – a superb sculptor: his facial figurine of his Danish wife Metta was particularly memorable.
On Thursday in our art course we covered early German expressionism with the Die Brucke movement based in Dresden and die Blaue Reiter based in Munich.
In her excellent review of Philip Kerr’s The One and The Other Melanie Gay touched on the complex issue of German nationalism.
Artists like Franz Marc of the Blaue Rieter, whilst labelled as degenerate, saw himself as a patriot and died for his country in World War One.
So modern painters like Anselm Keiffer, born in 1945, see the American post-war occupation as an imposition of foreign values.
To be fair, Bernie Gunther in the Kerr novels would regard Nazism as a corruption of German patriotism too.
It’s a complex subject, not made easier by Germany’a greatest contemporary artist Gerhard Richter being born in Liepzig in East Germany, a country which went through no post-war reconciliation process.
