CLUTTER

As you advance in age, you become more aware of the baggage you carry both physical and psychological. I have recently been reluctantly tackling the mountains of paper records, files and notebooks we have accumulated over the years, reminding me of past follies and unfulfilled dreams. Firmly guided by my practical second son, I have failed to think up plausible answers to his pertinent question: “Why on earth are you keeping this rubbish?” The truth is that these objects are no longer of any practical use and the Athens Recycling Centre has a rich catch to mash up, reconstitute or incinerate and our house can begin to breathe again. I was amazed by how much I could easily toss away.

Creeping Clutter

Yet I can see it is only a start. Despite several past purges, I still have far too many books. I hate dumping books but not all of them are cherished friends. Those others, that I cannot give away, (the market for English books is inevitably tiny here in Athens!) will see their last days in the local rubbish skip. I re-read many books but some are long past their sell-by date and must go. Then there are photographs – I have album upon album – very seldom looked at and a gently pleasant memory only for me and my lovely wife. We will keep some “for auld lang syne” as they say, but they mean nothing to my family, who have their own memories. I need to spend many days with the shredder but once done, walls of shelves will be liberated and musty mementos discarded.

The clutter of too much furniture, too many ornaments and too many accrued gewgaws is a jungle requiring ruthless assault. We get used to our homes having a certain style, but styles date and old favourites may have had their run. We inherit objects from much missed family but retaining Granny’s chair or Father’s desk for eternity is pushing filial reverence too far. As I gaze around me I espy a hideous lamp, a peculiar Greek metal water-jug and elaborate English fire-dogs, pokers and shovels (no open fire now to match) – bric-à-brac for a garage sale or for junk-clearing gypsies. We must have a ton of such stuff. We are not admirers of minimalist decors, we just need fewer possessions, cleaner lines and a more easily kept domain. Hold back the nostalgic tears, we must join the 21^st Century!

Removing physical clutter is a painful process as it inevitably strikes at our memories and at our personalities. Much more difficult is the removal of clutter in man’s mind. Our brains house all manner of notions, opinions and miscellaneous information, some valuable, if a trifle antique, and some outmoded bric-à-brac, ripe for the compost-heap. For example, we no longer subscribe to revealed religion as our forefathers taught us; again, I once admired the dynamic European Economic Community and like many a 1970s Lefty-Liberal supported our membership. I now know all that was a historic mistake. Britain reformed and reinvented itself through its own efforts guided by determined Margaret Thatcher. Many of the lessons were harsh but unavoidable to get the nation under economic control.

The EEC has morphed into the EU and wants to extend its diktat over the whole organisation. My time in Greece has shown me the dire consequences of EU ignorance and pig-headed arrogance, compounded by the incompetence of the local politicians. We need to remove the EU clutter from our lives in Britain – dispense with requiring the agreement of Slovak, Spanish or Austrian politicians to our business – and get off the slippery slope leading to national oblivion before it is too late. We will prosper in our new relationship despite the shameful denigration of his own country by Cameron, the self-serving hand-wringing of big business and the sneers of the Guardian-reading pseudo-intelligentsia.

Olivier as Henry V at Agincourt

I share the British mood of quiet patriotism – perhaps reflected in yesterday’s success by the soldier-conjuror on BGT – ready to turn over a completely fresh Brexit page in our nation’s life. I am not ashamed to cry “God for Harry, England and St George” – not to forget Scotland and St Andrew!

SMD

29.05.16

Text Copyright © Sidney Donald 2016

ACADEMIC PAINTERS - DOMINANCE AND DECLINE

Fashions in Art are as volatile as fashions in Clothes. For at least 2 centuries the Academies in, for example, France and Britain set themselves up as the arbiters of taste and the promulgators of artistic rules.  At times, the Academies held sway and academicians produced highly polished, if not often inspirational, paintings. But the artistic community is not easily biddable, revolt against prescribed rules is inevitable and a huge variety of original images and themes bubble up for our dismay or enchantment. The academicians came to be derided but their solid achievements deserve due praise. My piece will concentrate on Britain, with only tangential reference elsewhere.

Portraits of the Academicians by Johan Zoffany

The Royal Academy was founded in London in 1768, many years behind institutions in Italy and the French Academy established by Louis XIV in 1648.  The ever-disputatious French soon got into a controversy on the merits of the line of Poussin as against the colour of Rubens but London was less dogmatic. The Royal Academy elected urbane Sir Joshua Reynolds as its first President.  Reynolds was an undisputed artistic leader, even though his sometimes slapdash technique earned him the nick-name “Sir Sploshua”, and he was much admired in the higher reaches of society.

Lady Charles Spencer by Reynolds

      

Reynolds decreed that the Academy follow “The Grand Manner”, the renewal of the works of the Old Masters, concentrating on mythological, classical or historical subjects, but including portraits and the naked female form. There were many exhibitions, as much social as artistic occasions.  In Paris there were controversies between the disciples of David, Ingres and Delacroix but easy-going London tolerated the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (Millais indeed morphed into an RA President).

There was a heyday of Academic painting in 19^th century Britain. The great names were Sir Lawrence Alma- Tadema and Frederic, Lord Leighton.

Cimabue's Celebrated Madonna by Frederic, Lord Leighton (1855)

The Roses of Heliogabalus by Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema (1888)

These paintings were accomplished and architecturally accurate with a polished sheen. The Victorian public loved them and the academicians became rich. They were however over-fond of the nude (Her Majesty herself, George Eliot or Florence Nightingale failing to satisfy their gaping erotic appetites!) and later generations accused these artists of “lubricity”.

Cave in the Storm by Sir Edward Poynter

The Birth of Venus by W-A Bouguereau

The Sirens and Ulysses by William Etty

These quasi-erotic themes were exemplified by the kind of paintings above, mirrored by Bouguereau’s French confection, acceptable to Gallic susceptibilities in a way that Manet’s shameless Olympia never could be.

The reputation of these Victorian academicians sharply nose-dived by the 1920s, but bounced back. An Alma-Tadema painting The Finding of Moses, originally sold in 1904 for £5,250. In 1960 it was “bought in” for £252 when it failed to reach its reserve in auction. This same painting was auctioned in 1995 for £1.75m and in 2010 auctioned in New York for a Victorian painting record of $35.9m (sic!). Leighton is also a darling of the sale-room and his splendid Oriental-tiled mansion in Holland Park, Leighton House, is one of the hidden treasures of London.

The Scots painter Sir William Russell Flint (1880-1969), with scant regard for fashion, continued the Academic ethos with his well-draughted evocations of Spanish gypsy girls and females in advanced states of undress. Perhaps he knew that his Scottish public, frozen to the vitals by the desolate North Sea haar, needed to fantasize and dream of warmer pleasures. In truth Flint teeters away from the Academy towards the values of Playboy magazine.

The Silver Mirror by Sir William Russell Flint

The Academies have thus delivered a mixed legacy. They have provided conventional pleasures in an accessible form, surely preferable to the many-papped or three-eyed monstrosities served up by the grotesquely over-praised Modernists.

It may be instructive to evoke another artist, Gustav Klimt (1862-1918) who was at least a half-academician. He received his professional training at the highly conservative Vienna School of Arts and Crafts, the equivalent of an Academy. He worked on conventional murals and ceilings. He fell foul of the authorities, rather in the academician fashion, by decorating the Great Hall of the University of Vienna with ceiling paintings criticised as “pornographic”. Klimt founded the Vienna Secession movement and moved towards Symbolism. Yet Klimt knew his public and his line and vibrant colours were in the Academic tradition. In a so-called Golden Phase, Klimt painted his Portrait of Adele Bloch Bauer in 1907. To global astonishment it was bought for an astounding $135m in 2006 by the Neue Galerie, New York, the highest price ever paid for a painting.

Adele Bloch-Bauer by Gustav Klimt

Those Academicians always had an unerring instinct for the soft-spots of public taste – not for them starving in a garret – and they prospered mightily.

SMD

24.05.16

Text Copyright © Sidney Donald 2016.

FALLIBLE MEMORY

We often think we can remember past events clearly, indeed we may honestly believe our version of mis-remembered moments - just as I thought last week I was re-reading The Great Gatsby (I realised I had never read a word before) or Dirk Bogarde remembered entering Belsen (he was never there) and I once had a deluded boss who claimed personal credit for master-minding a successful transaction (in fact his hand was wholly absent).


 Similarly we entirely forget past pronouncements, - as David Cameron, with convenient amnesia, has forgotten he once advocated Brexit if he did not secure a decent new deal from the EU (he failed to get one) and now says (improbably) that Brexit would increase the likelihood of World War, a prospect to which he had never previously alluded. In their zeal to terrify the electorate, the Remainers (with Osborne and Carney in their front rank) will say almost anything in the way of alarmist claptrap and I fully expect dire predictions soon of a plague of boils, then of locusts before a climax on about 20 June predicting the death of our first-born unless their cause prevails!

Yet memory does play tricks. I now struggle to remember significant people and events in my childhood, but I do remember peculiar and oddball things which I had to memorise by rote. I remember the Australian nursery rhyme we sang at my Aberdeen school (aged about 5):

The famed Kookaburra

Kookaburra sits in the old gum tree

Merry, merry king of the bush is he

Laugh kookaburra! Laugh Kookaburra!

Gay your life must be.

I suppose American influences were at a height of esteem in about 1948 as we also recited The Song of Hiawatha:

By the shores of Gitche Gumme,

By the shining Big-Sea Water

Stood the wigwam of Nokomis

Daughter of the Moon, Nokomis

It was not all jack-asses and Red Indians, as we also had dourly to learn Psalm 46 – The Lord of Hosts is with us, the God of Jacob is our Refuge, followed by uplifting stuff (peaceniks would approve) about snapping spears and burning chariots.

A little later, at prep school, I recall a rather sinister-looking master with a deep voice reading aloud to us narratives on the Labours of Hercules and The Siege of Troy – we were entranced by the adventures of Agamemnon, Hector and Ajax. Finally I remember in about 1955 the Headmaster enlivening one morning assembly with an enthusiastic rendering of The Lake Isle of Innisfree by W B Yeats:

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree, 

And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made; 

Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee, 

And live alone in the bee-loud glade. 

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow, 

Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings; 

There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow, 

And evening full of the linnet’s wings. 

I will arise and go now, for always night and day 

I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore; 

While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey, 

I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

I was impressed then and remain impressed by Yeats’ lyricism, even if the piece is hackneyed and lampooned by some Irish intellectuals. That strait-laced English-born headmaster and WW1 veteran first instilled in me a love of poetry. Thank you, Harry Nock!

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If you are thinking that I am meandering somewhat, you are dead right. I have switched off my brain for the duration of the Eurovision Song Contest, the annual musical orgy, noisily camp, which I have followed avidly since about 1970. I confess this year to having sat through two semi-finals and tonight’s Grand Final, listing meticulously the merits or otherwise of the contestants. Dumb-founded by the elimination of Ireland and the inclusion of Ukraine, mercifully my memory is another casualty and I cannot remember any of the tunes, any of the lyrics or, best of all, any of the bizarre costumes or even most of the artistes (although nobody can forget 2014’s glam bearded tranny Conchita Wurst!).

At the end my favourites were Australia, pretty Dani In belting out her number, Poland, with a guy in a red military jacket and painted fingernails giving us a rousing Euro-anthem; Russia’s Thunder and Lightning was a wow with remarkable special effects, the Spanish girl surprised with her zip while my long-shot was the strong song by the curvaceous girl from Azerbaijan.

Oh no, shock horror! Splendid Australia has just been pipped at the post by the dismal Ukraine song, a dirge set in 1944, which I assumed would not survive the semis. Well, the Eurovision is always unpredictable and maybe I am not the ideal critic. I will studiously resolve to forget everything about tonight!

SMD

14.05.16

Text Copyright © Sidney Donald 2016

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THE MERRY MONTH OF MAY

We can throw away our long combinations, consign our bed-socks to retirement, empty and hide away our trusty hot-water-bottles, for the calendar has gloriously announced the arrival of May, harbinger of summer and days of wine and roses. May has a lot to live up to:

O The month of May, the merry month of May, 
So frolic, so gay, and so green, so green, so green! 
O, and then did I unto my true love say, 
Sweet Peg, thou shalt be my Summer's Queen. 

So sang Thomas Dekker, the Tudor bard in 1599, while the arrival of May once triggered off galumphing dances around the Maypole, an orgy of Morris dancing, the wearing of diaphanous clothing by blonde beauty queens and serious revelry for the lads, booze and bonfires, especially in Northern Europe when they combined May Day with traditional Walpurgis Night. At Oxford 50+ years ago, we loaded up a punt with a few girls, rustled up a picnic, and congregated after a chilly night out on the river, for the May Morning choir trilling from Magdalen Tower. But much of this is for the antiquarian – 21^st century May has different enchantments.

Leicester City fans go bananas

If you are looking for May miracles, what about Leicester City, 5,000-1 outsiders who won the English Premier League title when Spurs failed to beat Chelsea on 2 May? The team cost a fraction of those of the famed leading clubs, but team spirit, some inspirational individual performances and steady, unflashy management from Claudio Ranieri has seen them gloriously through.  The world rejoices at the triumph of the underdog and nobody grudges them their moment of immortality. I confess to the occasional pang of regret that I will never again hop, skip and jump or play rugby or speed about a squash court – but spectator sport suits me fine and saves me from sweaty scrums, broken limbs and freezing hours on the boundary.

In Greece this year May Day clashed with the Orthodox Easter Sunday, a time for kissing strangers and general reconciliation and renewal. This mood is not likely to last as the traditional parties long to get their snouts back in the trough and do their damnest to undermine the SYRIZA-Anel coalition. I suppose Lefties throughout Europe marched grimly on May Day with their red banners and clenched fist salutes (or have they phased them out?) – anyway not much in evidence here in peaceful Tory Folkestone! The 5 May local elections see a Labour Mayor of London, but Labour disasters in Glasgow and elsewhere with some Tory and UKIP joy: the SNP was rampant but not wholly dominant.

A more generally applauded anniversary will be VE Day on 8 May, 71 years since Nazi Germany finally surrendered after causing 6 years of mayhem and suffering. The world could breathe again, although we had to wait until 1990 for the Berlin Wall to fall and communism peacefully to crumble in Europe. Our continent is poorly run and its governance requires a radical overhaul, but it remains a beacon of hope, attracting migrants from all over the world. To be fair, everyone, even Germans themselves, wants to avoid a revival of German hegemony in Europe and instead strive with every good will to support economic progress and mutual cooperation.

I was in classy Highgate, North London for two days and how lovely the gardens are in May, with cherry blossoms galore, magnolias starting to burst and a hundred other blooms dizzying the senses with colour and aroma. Yesterday morning I strolled over to Kenwood to admire again Robert Adam’s wonderful Library and savour the pictures from the Iveagh Bequest, ravishing English portraits from Romney and Gainsborough, frolicsome Bouchers and Dutch masters, like Vermeer and Rembrandt: I most enjoyed the peace and serenity of Cuyp’s View of Dordrecht, with the still water, the motionless boats and the distant townscape.

Albert Cuyp's View of Dordrecht from Kenwood

That peace and serenity is what Europe and the world needs this May.

SMD

6.05.16

Text Copyright © Sidney Donald 2016