Skip to main content

Bringing people to light



Sebastian de Mora by Diego Velasquez

Wittgenstein suggested that on any visit to a gallery you should chose only one painting and study it in depth, anything else he suggested was superficial and an exercise not in culture but futility. 

Spending yesterday morning in the Prado in Madrid, I could see what he meant - to me a wholly new collection, never seen in pigment and canvas before, it could simply overwhelm. But we are not all equipped with Ludwig's austerity; and, in any case, I expect people absorb art differently, if they do. For me, I am a speedy looker, whizzing round, then, noticing what arrests, return to specific points to watch closely to what reveals.

Also, being prejudiced, I can eliminate swathes of stuff that, however remarkable, leaves no impression on me whatsoever - Dutch seventeenth century still lives of dead pigeons, pewter and fruit, for example, or eighteenth century portraits of aristocrats by virtually anyone; and, most Baroque religious painting. In the latter to achieve any real contemplative depth - as distinct from wrought emotion - requires disciplined genius and a retrospective borrowing from before Raphael's sentimentality over washed or from starting elsewhere. El Greco is, in this, the exception that proves the rule. 

There were, thus, many works that stepped into the loved and known - Fra Angelico's 'The Annunciation' a large scope work of poised beauty awash with light and grace, Durer's Adam and Eve on the brink of expulsion, a thwarted promise awaiting a thornier journey of grace; and, the reconstruction of a Romanesque chapel - thirteenth century frescos of a quiet humanity, simple narrative and assurance of grace received. 

Beyond the known, there were works studied in books like Goya's Black paintings but now seen for the first time in all their contained, intelligent questioning fury. Here violence is exposed as the dark failure it is with no ennobling light, whatever the justice of the cause, as here with two men simply clubbing each other shorn of mystery, in an abjectness complete. They are paintings that sadly remain as topical as ever.



And there was the new and for me yesterday that was Velasquez, known yes, noticed fleetingly sometimes, but seen no. For me, the most accomplished of his works, apart from the famous depictions of court life, are his portraits of court dwarves as above with Sebastian de Mora and below with Diego de Acedo:


They too, though in a different vein, remain hauntingly topical as paintings of a compassionate inclusion of difference, of that which is apart brought within the viewers' recognition; and, painted whole in their own light, seeing out with their own eyes, gestures, positions. Seeing them together in their own gallery space was deeply moving. A reminder of how uncommon it yet is to allow everyone's beauty to be seen, to break it open from stereotype (and canon) and allow it to sing its own song. 

I was reminded of reading only last week that the one explanation for absence that gains no traction with an employer is that you are suffering from depression. We carry around multiple assumptions of what constitutes 'other' but consciousness and conscience are omnipresent in all, for all who have eyes to see; and, here Velasquez is dismantling one such otherness by allowing us to step towards a population dismissed from view into a disabling category and be seen as particular persons in all their diversity and complexity. For the disability lies in us.



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

Red Shambala

Nicholas Roerich is oft depicted as a spiritual seeker, peace visionary, author of numberless paintings, and a brave explorer of Central Asia. However, Andrei Znamenski in his 'Red Shambala: Magic, Prophecy, and Geopolitics in the Heart of Asia' has him perform another role - that of geopolitical schemer. The scheming did have at its heart a religious vision - of a coalition of Buddhist races in Central Asia that would establish a budding utopia - the Shambala of the title - from which the truths of Buddhism (and co-operative labour) would flow around the globe. This would require the usurpation of the 13th Dalai Lama to be replaced by the Panchen Lama guided by the heroic saviour (Roerich) who appears above dressed for the part. In the achievement of these aims, the Roerichs (including his wife, Helena, who had a visionary connection with 'Mahatmas' whose cryptic messaging guided their steps) were willing to entertain strange bedfellows that at one time include...
Post a Comment
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