Category: Writing

Posts which have some amount of my own writing included.

Dulwich Picture Gallery, 11 August 2006

A beautiful collection of Old Master paintings housed in a gem-like building designed by the neo-classical architect Sir John Soane (1752–1837).

Moving to London for my course entails the search for accommodation, and so I spent much of the weekend in the New Cross area looking at flats.

Driving home along the South Circular Road (A205) after a day of searching, I passed a sign for the Dulwich Picture Gallery. I’m surprised I’ve never visited before, but it’s in a part of London which has always seemed to be difficult to get to. Starting my course at Goldsmith’s has suddenly made this side of London much more accessible to me.

It’s perhaps worth quoting the website about the Gallery:-

The Soane building is probably the world’s first purpose-built art gallery. This is a case of right first time. The famous sequence of arched spaces in Soane’s interior is a shrine for Gallery designers, inspiring amongst others Louis Kahn in his Kimball Art Museum, Robert Venturi at the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery in London and Richard Meyer at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. It is revered for practical and aesthetic reasons. Its roof-lanterns diffuse natural daylight, creating an even ‘wash’ of light over the walls, ideal for viewing paintings. The simple arches and smooth coved vaults provide interest without fuss. It is an architecture of harmonious lines rather than lavish decoration, and its elegant simplicity has never gone out of fashion.

The Gallery was opened to the public in 1817 to house the collection put together by Sir Francis Bourgeois and Noël Desenfans originally destined to be a “royal collection” for the King of Poland, before the country was partitioned around 1795. The collection is described as “one of the world’s most important collections of European old master paintings of the 1600s and 1700s.”

Some pieces that particularly interested me, mainly from a technical point of view, were:-

  • Arent de Gelder (1645–1727), Jacob’s Dream – large areas of shadow (much darker than the reproduction on the website), offsetting the vision in the top-right corner. The trees where Jacob sleeps have simply been scraped out of the thick dark paint.
  • Meindert Hobbema (1638–1709), Wooded Landscape with Watermill – the label states “the largest tree is drawn with a romantic intensity”.
  • Adam Pynacker (1620–1673), Landscape with Sportsman and Game – the birch tree’s bark seems to have been painted with a different technique than the rest of the picture – the peeling effect is very vigorously rendered – it’s like an area of the canvas that has a different tempo to the rest of the picture.
  • Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684–1721), Les Plaisirs du Bal – I’m always interested by architecture incorporated into paintings (or other works of art), not least because the developments in perspective often used architecture to demonstrate its’ effects. Here the ringed columns are based on those from the Luxembourg Palace (says the website) or Palais des Tuileries (says the label) in Paris, which, coincidentally, is being rebuilt.

A flickr set of the buildings from the visit.

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prep: The Story of Art

So, having read The Story of Art, what now?

To begin with I’ve highlighted various passages that struck me as interesting, so I’ll be going back through these, transcribing the relevant ones and picking out subjects that deserve further notice. As I do this I hope to develop some more in-depth pieces of writing, pulling together and connecting the themes that I initially settled upon.

Being new to this level of analysis, it will probably start by being a bit random and haphazard, but as time goes on I hope the pieces will get more coherent and meaningful.

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The Story of Art – first read over

1 week and 6 days later I’ve completed the first read-through of The Story of Art by Ernst Gombrich. Which is a lot faster than I expected, mainly because the wealth of photography makes it seem like a much longer book at first glance.

Reading the lie of the page

. . . the original principle of keeping the illustrations before the reader’s eye while studying the text . . .1

Gombrich prides himself on illustrating every work of Art within a page or two of it’s mention in the text. Conversely, a full page of text usually indicates extended discussions on the social or theoretical background to the works. As a student of Art History this was quite a useful feature to keep an eye out for.

1. Ernst Gombrich, The Story of Art (London: Phaidon, 1950; 16th edition, 1995; reprinted 2005), p. 12

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Dear Edward . . .

. . . Today I should just like to draw your attention to one of the courses you will be attending, namely the Core Course – Histories of Art, which will introduce you to approaches and concepts in the History of Art and to the newer developments in the field described as Visual Cultures.

In preparation for the Core Course I’d like to ask you to read Ernst Gombrich’s Story of Art. This is a widely available survey of the history of art and has been translated into many languages. . . . Let the book inspire you to look at art works, to go to museums, to read other texts. But read the book from a critical distance. Please keep a kind of notebook or diary while you are reading. . . .

Letter from Astrid Schmetterling, Programme Leader, Postgraduate Diploma in Contemporary Art History, Department of Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths College, University of London, 19 July 2006

It surprises me that I’ve only read one piece by Ernst Gombrich, and none of his books. I’m sure that he must have been on the reading lists for the courses I’ve taken, but something like arrogance has meant I’ve avoided him. I was probably thinking I had surpassed his writings. However, beginning this course has encouraged me to closely study my knowledge with a critical eye and I’ve come to realise it has some rather large holes and Gombrich is one of them.

So now I hold it in my hands and the sheer size of this brick of a book causes me to make certain pessimistic projections about the time it will take to read. I’m quite a slow reader, and I tend to want to read books twice, once skimming and then again with a more intense concentration, marking and annotating as I go. All this takes time. And I feel like time is precious on this course, so I may have to develop new ways of reading to speed things up.

On a related note, the conversational tone of the book makes me impatient. The storytelling conceit in itself slows the pace.

It’s also difficult to get away from the narrative style presenting the information as a seemingly natural progression from the past to the present. It implies a development towards fulfillment or completion, relegating past art to a rôle of support act to the latest works (I’m out of my depth here but would ‘teleology’ describe this accurately? Hegelianism?). Gombrich, in his preface to the first edition of the book guards against many of the criticisms that have been raised against the work, and says this regarding narrative:

. . . the appreciation of this intentional difference [the urge to be different] often opens up the easiest approach to the art of the past. I have tried to make this constant change of aims the key of my narrative, and to show how each work is related by imitation or contradiction to what has gone before. . . . There is one pitfall in this method of presentation which I hope to avoid but which should not go unmentioned. It is the naïve misinterpretation of the constant change in art as a continuous progress. . . . But we must realize that each gain or progress in one direction entails a loss in another, and that this subjective progress, in spite of its importance, does not correspond to an objective increase in artistic value.

Also, the title on the dust-jacket carved in stone – are these meant to be the tablets of Moses? Or is that just popular culture telling me that’s what they should look like?

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