Skip to main content

Paintings at an exhibition, seen briefly!

A fleeting visit yesterday, between meetings, to the National Museum in Stockholm and what do I find but an exhibition of paintings from Russia - from the Tretyakov and St. Petersburg - of those now deeply familiar artists from the late nineteenth century including my favourite Russian painting: The Little Fox by Mikhail Nesterov of a fox tamely emerging from the woods of northern Russia to greet three elderly monks, benignly enjoying each other's company sitting on a log. It is a beautiful painting of contemplative ease in which a glimmer of paradise is restored, now and here, in the renewed compact between nature and human.

There was, also, a parallel exhibition of Swedish painters of the same period and their exploration of the four seasons. Here they explore the natural landscape through a romantic and nationalist lens. The world of emigration and urbanization is abolished, and a simpler life extolled in a purifying nature. In contrast to Nesterov, it is a vision that is fundamentally secular. The dislocation, that is the modern world, is not healed through man's transformation within a created order that is transcendentally graced; but, our wounds are healed by a nature cleansed of our obscuring, problematic presence.

However, in my hurried progress, the painting that most deeply arrested me was a Rembrandt portrait of an old woman, displaying all the weathering of age, gnarled hands to the fore, signalling a life of toil well met, struggled with, surrendered to. It is a painting luminous with reality, illumined with compassion.

There is a moment in Patrick White's The Vivisector where his central artist character, Hurtle Duffield, realises that his life as an artist has been about offering people confrontations with the truth that, frankly, they would rather not accept! You get that feel with Rembrandt, his truthfulness is uncomfortable, and necessary, but you can imagine that the good burghers of the Netherlands found him a deeply ambivalent good.

It is no doubt a futile exercise to grade painters (except by subjective favouritism) yet it is irresistable - like discussing who was the greatest footballer while propped up against a bar - but I would wager my money on Rembrandt. Looking closely, if briefly, at this remarkable portrait, it relativised the gallery in its light. He is extraordinarily compelling.

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

Luminous Spaces - the poetry of Olav H. Hauge

Don't give me the whole truth, don't give me the sea for my thirst, don't give me the sky when I ask for light, but give me a glint, a dewy wisp, a mote as the birds bear water-drops from their bathing and the wind a grain of salt. It began with a poem, this poem, in Mark Oakley's 'The Splash of Words: Believing in Poetry' - a wonderful series of meditations on particular poems, one each chapter. The poet is the Norwegian, Olav H. Hague (1908-1994). I immediately ordered, 'Luminous Spaces: Selected Poems & Journals' and was enjoying dipping until, at the weekend, recovering from a stomach bug, I decided to read them through and fell wholeheartedly for a new friend. Hague was born on a farm. His formal education was brought short by a combination of restricted means, an inability to conquer mathematics: and, a voracious diet of reading ranging beyond the confines of any confining curriculum. He went to a horticultural college instead an...
1 comment
Read more

Richard Hauser and the evils of Marx

Richard was a distinguished Austrian sociologist who had contributed to the Wolfenden report that led to the decriminalisation of homosexuality in England, Wales and Scotland in the late 1960's. I was remembering him on the plane today because I saw a reference to his wife, Hephzibah Menuhin, pianist sister of the violinist Yehudi and human rights activist. I met him after responding to an advertisement in the New Society. He lived in a house in Pimlico, a widower, with a clutch of young people, running an ill-defined (for me) social research/action institute, that I visited several times and to which Richard wanted to recruit me. I was never clear as to what my responsibilities might be and resisted co-option. He was, however, extraordinarily charismatic and as a Jew had fled Austria in 1938 not without receiving permanent damage to his hearing, courtesy of Gestapo interrogation. I vividly remember one story he told me that gives you an idea of his character. He was invit...
17 comments
Read more