Skip to main content

St Veronica

Oskar Kokoschka's 'Veronica with veil' is in London presently (from its home in Budapest) at the Royal Academy. It is hauntingly beautiful - the natural woman, earthed and present, holding the supernatural image of Christ, made as she wiped his stained face as he climbs, with the cross, to Calvary. It is a juxtaposition captured in the painting, the more naturalistic woman, the more symbolic face: the first icon of Christ.

Kokoschka called it his favourite religious painting, so the exhibit's title informs us, but that same title suggests there is a more secular explanation. Veronica was an actual woman who was cleaning Kokoschka's apartment at the time of conception. It is a curious use of the term 'secular' - that an actual woman, Veronica, might inspire an association with a known religious story (central to the mythology of Christian art's evolution) is not a 'secular' act! That the cleaner Veronica should be seen in the light of her saintly predecessor is not a 'secular' act either. The titling almost wants us to concede that the subject of the painting is the actual Veronica to which the saintly trappings are incidental - though given that Kokoschka explicitly refers to the painting as religious, grounded in an associative process with an actual Veronica, it is hard to see what this explanation is about, except perhaps a 'knee jerk' refusal of the religious!

It reminds me of a friend, the Irish artist, Patrick Pye, whose own 'arrival' as a recognised artist of distinction was arrested by his insistence on painting sacred themes which the secularised art world of Ireland refused to 'see' until finally the qualities of his art as art (irrespective of theme) wore them down to capitulation!

It caught my attention precisely because the RA's exhibit labelling is usually exceptionally good: the right kind of information, pitched at the right spot, never a false note.


This painting 'The Centaur in the Village Blacksmith's Shop' by Arnold Bocklin was the painting at the RA exhibition (http://www.royalacademy.org.uk/exhibitions/budapest/) that I most enjoyed. It captures (in imagination) a moment of passage, of transition from the mythological to realistic. The onlookers look on surprised at an example of a dying race come into the human realm for the practicalities of help.

It reminded me of Kathleen Rane's lament in her poem 'Wilderness' of the draining away of traditional meanings:

"I came too late to the hills: they were swept bare
Winters before I was born of song and story,
Of spell or speech with power of oracle or invocation,

The great ash long dead by a roofless house, its branches rotten,
The voice of the crows an inarticulate cry,
And from the wells and springs the holy water ebbed away."

and of the end of the Lord of the Rings when the world of men is fully established and other realms, other possibilities have passed to the west. It is a painting evocative of how a sense of displacement (the disenchantment of the world to quote Weber) was ever-present to that transitional world at the turn of the nineteenth, birth of the twentieth century.

It is my lament too - recognising another world (enfolded in this) that is not the perceived orderer of shared meaning.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Buddha meets Christ in embrace

Reading Lama Anagarika Govinda is proving nostalgic on a number of fronts. I recall my first reading of it in my first year at university, bought at Watkins, the famous 'esoteric' bookshop in Cecil Court in London. I sat in my hall of residence room transfixed by a world made familiar; and, it was deepening of a commitment to contemplation (which has been observed fitfully)! I remember returning, at the time, to my school to give a talk to the combined fifth form on Buddhism and using Govinda as the backbone of my delivery (both this book, and his equally wonderful, the Foundations of Tibetan Buddhism). I was voted (I immodestly remember) their best invited speaker of the year. I had even bought a recording of Tibetan music as opener and closer! He reminded me of how important Buddhism was (and is) to my own thinking and comprehension of my experience. The Buddha's First Sermon in the Deer Park was the first religious text I read (of my own volition) at the tender age...
13 comments
Read more

The Jewel in the Crown

I spent six months in Nizhny Novgorod ostensibly as both the chair and the director of a micro-finance fund. I must confess much of that work -apart from the spectacular resignation of my predecessor as director - has faded from view but what I vividly recall is at weekends progressing through Paul Scott's 'The Raj Quartet' and subsequently re-watching its painstaking and triumphant dramatization (by Granada) that I had watched, long before, on the television. It was without doubt my most deeply cherished reading experience to date. This extraordinary narrative of the British in the last, declining days of colonial rule that begins with the doomed relationship of Hari Kumar and Daphne Manners, her rape, and the injustice of Kumar as accused by Ronald Merrick, the Police Superintendent, and one of the most malevolent characters ever created in fiction. He is a magnified alter ego of Scott himself especially the sharply, destructively repressed homosexuality. The narrati...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Beckoning Land that is within

In spite of the fact that all three of Rowena Farre's books were in a certain measure autobiographical, she remains a mystery. The place of her birth, her real name, and ancestry, whether her first book was an autobiography, in fact, or fiction? It is, on reading her last book, a matter on which, beyond a certain notional interest, I find myself wholly and happily agnostic. Whoever she was, she was a person out of sorts with the world she was born into and on, an ever more consciously realized, spiritual quest. In this way, the book leads on from her earlier one about her life with Roma and Traveller communities. There she was following a nomadic impulse that ran in parallel to 'ordinary life' whilst here she is following a nomadic life that enfolds and transforms 'ordinary' life.  https://ncolloff.blogspot.com/2018/07/on-hopes-realities-and-shadows-of-being.html In this her third book, she returns to places associated with her childhood, Hong Kong, Ceylon, a...
Post a Comment
Read more