The_Eye_of_the

VISIONS 3

The Fine Arts, Crafts and Design of the Fin-de-siècle

Associate Editors: Anne Anderson, Síghle Bhreathnach-Lynch, Isa Bickmann, Nicola Gauld, Sarah Turner.

IN THE EYE OF THE CRITIC

Views and Reviews

Reviews Editor: Síghle Bhreathnach-Lynch @

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Síghle Bhreathnach-Lynch on Ford Madox Brown in Birmingham
Isa Bickmann on Hans Marees in Wuppertal
Antoine Capet on Orientalism in London
Tricia Cusack on Ford Madox Brown in Birmingham
Margaret de Fonblanque on Viennese Cafés in London

Tricia Cusack

EMMA’S TEETH: REVIEW OF FORD MADOX BROWN: THE UNOFFICIAL PRE-RAPHAELITE

BIRMINGHAM MUSEUMS AND ART GALLERY

24th August–14th December 2008

By far the best man I know – the really good man – is Brown (Dante Gabriel Rossetti).[1]

The present exhibition is part of an AHRC-funded collaborative project between Laura MacCulloch, a Ph.D student in the Department of History of Art, University of Birmingham, and Tessa Sidey, Curator of Prints and Drawings, Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery (BMAG). BMAG holds the largest number of works by Ford Madox Brown in the world.[2] They include some of Brown’s iconic paintings, The Pretty Baa-Lambs (1851-9: cat 27); The Last of England (1852-5: cat 32); An English Autumn Afternoon (1852-5: cat 31) and a version of Work (1852-63: cat 39) and these are displayed here, but the exhibition is designed to focus on the lesser known prints and drawings.[3] BMAG’s collection of 174 works on paper by Brown was purchased from Charles Fairfax Murray, collector and artist, in July 1906. While the Fairfax Murray collection constitutes a very small proportion of BMAG’s total holdings of 27,000 prints, drawings and watercolours, such attention to a specific collection is extremely important in the context of studying the artist, especially an interesting yet relatively neglected one like Brown. Laura MacCulloch has catalogued the works on paper as part of her thesis and the exhibition has been jointly selected and organised by herself and Tessa Sidey.

The BMAG exhibition runs parallel to one with a related theme at Manchester Art Gallery ‘Pre-Raphaelite Works on Paper from the Collection’, but that at BMAG is differentiated by focusing solely on one artist and by the fact that the artist is Ford Madox Brown, whose work has received less attention from art historians and curators than that of those regarded as mainstream Pre-Raphaelites. The exhibition includes 55 items from the collection of works by Brown, spanning a variety of types and topics. There are studies, compositional sketches, finished drawings, and paintings. The range of media includes black chalk; pencil and sepia pen and ink; pastel; watercolour; oil on canvas or panel. Some drawings have literary or historical themes including scenes from Shakespeare (cat 2-4; 24);[4] and studies for Chaucer at the Court of Edward III or Wycliffe reading his Translation of the Bible; there are illustrations for Dalziels’ Bible Gallery; and studies for contemporary topics like emigration. There are fine academic drawings like that of a nude Male with Moustache and Arms folded (1846-9: cat. 11). There are obliquely Hogarthian drawings like Sterne’s ‘Sentimental Journey’: Yorick and Maria Walking (1842: cat. 1); sensitive realist portraits like the Head Study of Daniel Casey (1848: cat 21) or Convalescence: Portrait of Emma Madox Brown (1872: cat 50); or that of Emma for The Last of England (cat 29) or more laboured (in my view) designs for book illustration such as the final drawing The Entombment (1867: cat 45) for a wood-engraving (1868: cat 46). There is a clever and gruesome study of an emaciated corpse for The Prisoner of Chillon (1856: cat 34) reminiscent of Géricault’s earlier studies of corpses for his The Raft of the Medusa. The accumulation of such drawings and projects gives a strong sense of the artist’s labour.[5]

The exhibition occupies two adjacent galleries (nos. 16 and 17). In Gallery 17, the bright green wall against which the paintings have to be hung is a little too brittle in colour and clashes somewhat with the gentler, naturalistic colours of Brown’s An English Autumn Afternoon. The drawings which form the main part of the exhibition needed to be protected from bright light, and to achieve the necessary level of lighting, only occasional spotlights were on among the string of lights in the gallery: these seem a little harsh while the overall effect is a little gloomy: could such lighting be muted without looking harsh and seeming gloomy? I recently attended an exhibition of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s paintings and drawings, including watercolours and pastels, at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (MOMA) where although the same system was used of simply switching off some of the overhead spotlights, the lighting appeared brighter, perhaps because the spotlights were smaller and more numerous, diffusing a more even overall light around the blue-grey walls.

It is obviously quite a difficult task to display largely drawings, mostly studies not intended for public viewing. As such they are often uncoloured, fragmented and on different scales with some drawings and finished illustrations very small. Compositional drawings for illustrations may be larger than the final product as for The Entombment (1867-8; cat. 45, 46), which presents a slight problem of emphasis in display. The drawings have been similarly mounted and framed which helps to unify them, while the wide mounts allow the eyes to rest and to focus easily on the images. The captions to the exhibits are clear, informative and lively, for example, Sterne’s ‘Sentimental Journey’: Yorick and Maria Walking (cat. 1) is accompanied by the comment, ‘The scene actually depicts the reuniting of Maria and Yorick, though this character also shows a physical resemblance to the author himself as he gazes with protective but somewhat lecherous intend at “poor Maria”’. Inevitably the captions sometimes condense a conventional reading of a picture which on closer inspection is a little more ambivalent. Thus the explanatory text accompanying the painting of Pretty Baa Lambs notes that ‘not only the landscape but also the figures are painted together out of doors. The intention was to adhere to the effects of bright sunlight exactly as found in nature’. However, this observation glosses over a more ambivalent representation, since the painting reveals some seasonal confusion with spring lambs, summer sky (alto-cumulus, thunder brewing) late summer fields after hay has been cut and autumn fruit trees.

Themes and Issues

There are particular problems resulting from using a ‘random’ collection of artworks, as opposed to selecting works appropriate to a particular exhibition theme. The stated aim is to highlight the strengths of the BMAG collection[6] and only one item in the Exhibition is not from the Birmingham collection The Dark Blue Vol. II, 1871,[7] a short-lived liberal periodical published by Sampson, Low, Son and Marston and lent by Manchester Public Libraries. However, including items from elsewhere might have helped to highlight the strengths of the Birmingham Collection, for example, more studies for Work: Manchester Art Gallery has some of these. The Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool has a curious study of Emma and Catherine in black and sepia chalk for Pretty Baa Lambs. Does the fact that paintings such as Chaucer at the Court of Edward III (Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney) and Wycliffe reading his Translation of the Bible (Cartwright Hall, Bradford) are not available at the exhibition make the display of preparatory drawings for these paintings less meaningful? The colour reproductions of Chaucer and Wycliffe, the viewer’s reference for the drawings, are also rather too small at about 5”x4” and 4”x5” respectively. Ideally, one would include studies for paintings BMAG has, or obtain the loan of those they haven’t to match the studies.

Given that the aim is to highlight the strengths of the BMAG collection,[8] this raises the question of how to specify and then to represent ‘strengths’. Laura MacCulloch had spent a year familiarising herself with the BMAG collection of Brown’s works on paper and then derived a set of themes for the exhibition:[9]

One of the main strengths is the large number of preparatory drawings for 2 main history pictures, Chaucer at the Court of Edward III (Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney) and Wycliffe reading his Translation of the Bible (Cartwright Hall, Bradford). These suggested two themes – British History and Brown’s working process. Another strength is the large number of works we have connected to Brown’s work as an illustrator and his interest in literature ... We also look at his applied art designs ... as we have a number of stained glass designs by him. With a collection including The Last of England, Work and An English Autumn Afternoon a section on his modern subjects seemed very important especially as it has given us the chance to display less well known drawings related to some of these works. Two other themes we have included are The Nude and Portraits.[10]

The works are thus grouped under seven themes: British History; Brown’s working process; Illustration and literature; Stained glass; Modern subjects’; The Nude; Portraiture.

These themes have been carefully chosen to match the nature of the collection as a whole and they serve the purpose of organising the diverse works in an accessible way. The exhibition succeeds in bringing an order to a very mixed collection and in providing the viewer with a coherent story – or set of stories – about the works chosen. However questions about alternatives may still be asked. It could be contended that categories such as the nude or Brown’s working process are too inclusive. Then the themes have different kinds of focus which introduces some minor problems for the organisation and hanging of the works. For example, ‘Brown’s working process’ as a general rubric clearly applies to all his art, while technical distinctions still needed to be made, for instance in the thematic section for stained glass. The nude relates to a particular figurative genre, whereas ‘modern subjects’ or ‘British History’ refers more to the choice of topic. The ‘Portrait’ category of course brings the problem of portrait studies for particular paintings that perhaps needed to be grouped with those paintings rather than hung separately, as I will argue in the case of the photographic study of Thomas Carlyle for Work and that of the head study of Emma Hill for The Last of England.

An aspect of Brown’s work which I personally find interesting, but which such themes may tend to obscure is Brown’s political engagement, alongside his likely atheism. The exhibition caption for The Entombment (cat 46) has Brown as ‘the most religiously free thinking of the Pre-Raphaelite circle’, but this understates the religious scepticism of a man prepared to describe Catholic doctrine for instance as “stuff and nonsense”.[11] Brown was a prolific reader and interested and educated in the arts including the theatre[12] as well as social issues. Work deliberately uses art to focus on questions of social class, borne out in Brown’s lengthy verbal exegesis of this painting, in which he recalled experiencing ‘a certain socialistic twinge’ whenever he encountered the pastrycook’s tray ‘the symbol of superfluity’ that accompanied the rich.[13] Brown’s great-grandson, Oliver Soskice, has commented that Brown was ‘a real socialist’ in the sense that he had known poverty and had feeling for the Irish navvies in Work.[14]

Brown and the Brotherhood

Brown never joined the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood – he said he disliked societies and was older than the others[15] - but was effectively one of the group, although he lacked Ruskin’s support and indeed suffered his professional obstructiveness as a result of ‘mutual hostility’.[16] Brown adhered to the Pre-Raphaelite principle of ‘authenticity’, whether addressing historical topics or contemporary events. He believed that ‘the first care of the painter ... should be to make himself thoroughly acquainted with the character of the times, and the habit of the people, which he is to represent’.[17] Brown selected particular climatic effects to enhance the themes of his paintings. Work for example was given ‘the effect of hot July sunlight ... peculiarly fitted to display work in all its severity’.[18] Discussing The Last of England (which Brown said he began in 1852 and completed in 1855) in an exhibition catalogue of 1865 Brown explained how ‘to insure the peculiar look of light all round which objects have on a dull day at sea, it was painted for the most part in the open air on dull days, and, when the flesh was being painted, on cold days.’[19] Studies were made outside in the snow ‘to ensure the blue appearance that flesh assumes’ [outdoors in the cold].[20]The importance of weather conditions to the expression and meaning of Brown’s paintings is of course somewhat lost in the monochromatic studies.

The drawings on show indicate Pre-Raphaelite concerns with accuracy of historical detail, for instance the studies of costumes (cat 6) or Young Woman in 18c Costume (cat 23) or Chaucer at the Court of Edward III: Study of Man in Medieval Hood (1847: cat 12: Figure 1). This authenticity was supported by Brown’s library researches. For his Study of a Man in medieval Hood (cat 12) Brown used an illustration of the Count of Flanders from J.R. Planché’s British Costume: A Complete History of the Dress of the Inhabitants of the British Isles (1834, reprinted 1847).[21] In such drawings as this there is careful attention to the detail of the dress and how it sits around the anatomy and posture of the wearer, but the face is hardly delineated. In drawings such as The Last of England: Portrait of Emma Hill (1852: cat. 29) on the other hand, the emphasis is on Emma’s face and her expression, with the costume lightly detailed sufficient to frame it.

Figure 1: Ford Madox Brown, Study of a Man in medieval Hood, 1847: cat 12.1906 p777. © Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery

Emma’s Teeth and The Last of England

The decision to locate The Last of England and Work at one end of gallery 17 and related portraits at the other means that some intriguing comparisons are lost. Thus the photographic study of Thomas Carlyle (c.1859: cat 38: Figure 2) from which Brown composed the painted figure (Figure 3), is grouped with portraits on the opposite wall to Work but needed rather to be beside it, especially as there is a remarkable transformation in Carlyle’s facial expression from seriousness in the photo to a toothy smirk, directed at the viewer, in the painting.

The showing of teeth was meaningful in nineteenth century art; moreover, ‘in Victorian art, characters who show their teeth are remarkable exceptions’.[22] It often connoted ‘lack of self-control’,[23] but the displaying of teeth could be interpreted differently according to context. David Sonstroem has suggested that Brown shows Carlyle with teeth displayed ‘to allude ... to Carlyle’s own humble upbringing and his ... kinship with the navvies’.[24] However, in reworking the serious photographic image, Brown may be slightly mocking Carlyle, as he does on at least two occasions in his diaries.[25] Brown’s ‘script’ for the painting, in which he ‘praises’ Carlyle for having ‘converted a hitherto combative race to obstinate passivity ... centupled the tide of emigration [and] quenched the political passions of both factions’[26] also suggests an element of satire rather than the unalloyed admiration for Carlyle generally assumed by commentators.[27] Gregory Dart has discussed this text in relation to Work and the suggestively cryptic character of both (1999: 75-6) – but it is the comparison between the photograph and the painting which draws out the peculiarity of Carlyle’s smirk.

Figure 2: Ford Madox Brown, Portrait of Thomas Carlyle (Albumen photograph), c.1859: cat 38.1975 p329. © Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery

Figure 3: Ford Madox Brown, Work, 1852-63: cat 39.1927 p349. © Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery

The Last of England and the black chalk drawing Portrait of Emma Hill (1852: cat 29: Figure 4) make a particularly interesting pairing, again with reference to teeth. The Last of England (cat 32) was partly the outcome of Brown’s friend and fellow-artist Thomas Woolner leaving to make his fortune in Australia ‘hoping to amass millions to carry on his art’,[28] but Brown also noted that it treated of ‘the great emigration movement, which attained its culminating point in 1852’.[29] Brown’s painting of a young emigrant couple is separated in the exhibition from the Portrait of Emma (cat 29) which is on the opposite wall grouped with other portraits, although another important drawing, the compositional study for The Last of England is beside the painting. Taken together and in the context of Brown’s own commentaries, the Portrait of Emma Hill (cat 29) and The Last of England illustrate some curious interactions of social class and visual representation as well as contradictions in Brown’s attitudes to class and art.

Figure 4: Ford Madox Brown, Portrait of Emma Hill, 1852: cat 29 1906 p791. © Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery

Brown began designs for The Last of England and Work in 1852.[30] He did the first sketch for The Last of England together with a chalk study for his own head and began the painting.[31] Brown considered paid models unable to represent the feelings the artist would wish to express, which could be achieved better by using oneself or a friend ‘of an artistic or poetic temperament’ as model.[32] Brown used himself and his future wife Emma Hill as the models for The Last of England, but using Emma may have presented Brown with some difficulties.

Brown met Emma Hill in 1848 when she was 15. The daughter of a farmer from Herefordshire, she possessed ‘only a meagre rural education’.[33] Brown’s great-grandson Oliver Soskice said that Emma had been insulted as a ‘farmer’s brat’, and Brown did try to ‘improve’ her, for example by encouraging her to speak properly.[34] It has been suggested that ‘Emma’s youth and her comparative lack of education encouraged Brown to remain silent about his second marriage for some years, until such time as he felt Emma’s “improvement” warranted any publicity about the event.’[35]

Brown wished to depict a middle-class couple in The Last of England. Despite Brown’s socialist leanings, he distinguished between the middle and working classes in terms of their abilities and capacities to form attachments to place and country:

The educated are bound to their country by closer ties than the illiterate, whose chief consideration is food and physical comfort. [In The Last of England] I have ... singled out a couple from the middle classes, high enough, through education and refinement, to appreciate all they are now giving up, and yet dignified enough in means to have to put up with the ... humiliations incident to a vessel ‘all one class’.[36]

It is interesting to see how Brown has transformed Emma as a model for his middle-class female figure.

Julie Codell has noted how ‘the importance of the human face as a signifier of moral character, social status, future behaviour, and intelligence is apparent across Victorian culture’.[37] Brown’s study of Emma’s head for The Last of England in 1852 shows her with unfocused, slightly expressionless eyes, with lips slightly parted showing her teeth. Although Emma shows her teeth in the sketch, they are not shown in the finished painting. As noted, the display of teeth had particular connotations according to context. Thus in the child or ‘the innocent’ ‘openness of mouth symbolizes an unprotective openness to life’,[38] perhaps the case with Brown’s view of Emma. Parted lips were often taken in the nineteenth century as an indication of working class status: ‘the show of teeth may also signify common folk, who may ... lack self-command but who may instead merely be uninstructed in the conventions of the higher classes ... Victorian painters ... sometimes present them with their teeth visible simply to indicate their station’.[39]

The final portrait (Figure 5) has the young wife, as a middle class figure with lips closed, gazing wistfully, but holding the hands of her husband and baby, almost contentedly to one side. The air of sad resignation contrasts with the embittered expression in the face of the husband depicted in the final painting. This differentiation is associated for Brown with his view of the fictive couple’s contrasting responses to leaving England.

Figure 5: Ford Madox Brown, The Last of England, 1852-5: cat 32.1891 p24. © Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery

Brown makes a distinction between the husband’s and the wife’s sentiments: ‘The husband broods bitterly over blighted hopes, and severance from all he has been striving for. The young wife’s grief is ... probably confined to the sorrow of parting with a few friends of early years. The circle of her love moves with her’.[40] Here Brown comes close to Ruskin’s doctrine of the man active in the world while the woman plays the role of the ‘angel in the home’, her husband and baby her sole interests. In the painting with the white cliffs of Dover becoming distant behind the boat, ‘home’ is on her side. Brown, with his hand thrust into his coat adopts the pose of Napoleon, exiled.[41]

The Last of England according to Brown’s grandson Ford M. Hueffer was the first of his pictures to be generally praised.[42] As Codell has pointed out artists, especially the Pre-Raphaelites, did not simply employ the codes but often subverted them, resulting for example in what she sees as the ‘unsettling moral and social ambiguities’ represented by facial expression in such paintings as The Last of England.[43] However, in its depiction of the family unit and the sweet peaceable woman, it was designed to suit the conservative preferences of the Victorian audience. Coventry Patmore, author of The Angel in the House (1854), praised the painting, finding Emma’s face ‘the chief charm of the picture’.[44]

The Portrait of Emma Hill (cat. 29) has been well-chosen to illustrate the cover of the exhibition catalogue (edited by Tessa Sidey) as well as the BMAG publicity leaflet; it also illustrates the cover to Artefacts: The Friends of Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery Magazine Summer 2008. Terry Grimley’s exhibition review in The Birmingham Post is accompanied by another large reproduction of Emma’s face (cat 29).[45] In the exhibition itself, this striking drawing might have been given more prominence, especially by placing it in context beside the painting and by pointing up some of the curious features that arise from the comparison.

In a later portrait of Emma, Convalescent: Portrait of Emma Madox Brown (1872, pastel on paper: cat 50), her lips are again slightly parted, this time to indicate a lassitude resulting from illness following a fever. Here, the portrait strikes a slightly uneasy compromise between a naturalistic depiction and a pose that shows her clear-skinned and beatific, her face framed by a mass of gently flowing hair and her hand clutching a small bouquet.

Perhaps after the exhibition closes, more of these fine drawings and prints might be displayed permanently, especially those that suggest a dialogue with the paintings. Carlyle’s photographic image and its transformation together encourage a rereading of both painting and Brown’s accompanying text. It would be particularly gratifying to see the head of Emma as well as the compositional study near The Last of England, so that the quiet metamorphosis of social class might be observed. Overall, this is a most interesting exhibition, well-researched and lucidly presented. The fact that it has raised new questions about the works displayed is a bonus!

References

Codell, Julie F. 1991. Review of Mary Cowling, The Artist as Anthropologist: The Representation of Type and Character in Victorian Art, The Art Bulletin vol. 73, no. 2: 330-3.

Dart, Gregory. 1999. ‘The Reworking of Work’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 69-96.

Grimley, Terry. ‘Square Peg in a New Tradition’, The Birmingham Post, 2 September 2008: 11.

Hueffer, Ford M. 1896. Ford Madox Brown: A Record of his Life and Work. London: Longmans, Green, and Co.

Newman, Teresa and Watkinson, Ray. 1991. Ford Madox Brown and the Pre-Raphaelite Circle, London: Chatto & Windus.

Rose, Andrea. 1981. Pre-Raphaelite Portraits. Yeovil: Oxford Illustrated Press.

Ross, Robert. 1918. ‘Ford Madox Brown Water Colours Recently Acquired for the Nation’, The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs. vol. 32, no. 178, 3-5.

Sidey, Tessa, ed. 2008. Ford Madox Brown: The Unofficicial Pre-Raphaelite: Works on Paper by Ford Madox Brown from Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery, London: D. Giles Ltd in association with Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery.

Sonstroem, David. 2001. ‘Teeth in Victorian Art’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 351-82.

Surtees, Virginia, ed. 1981. The Diary of Ford Madox Brown, New Haven: Yale University Press.

Thirlwell, Angela. 2008. ‘Vieux Fordy: Death of a Modern Man’ in Ford Madox Brown: The Unofficial Pre-Raphaelite, Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery, 7-15.

· Tricia Cusack teaches at the Centre for European Languages and Cultures, University of Birmingham. Her biography can be consulted in her homepage. The Oscholars would like to thank Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery for permission to reproduce the images in this article.

Síghle Bhreathnach-Lynch

TESSA SIDEY (ED.): FORD MADOX BROWN THE UNOFFICIAL PRE-RAPHAELITE.

Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery 2008

This slim but enlightening catalogue accompanies an exhibition of works on paper by Ford Madox Brown at the Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery (24th August – 14th December). The display includes a number of the artist’s drawings, prints, designs, watercolours and archive material in the museum. These are from a collection largely acquired through public subscription from the collection of Charles Fairfax Murray in 1906. The collection is currently the subject of a series of research collections.

The volume illustrates fifty-five selected drawings and works on paper with forty of them reproduced in colour. Each work is accompanied by an informative entry. Also included in the catalogue is a full listing of the Museum’s 174 works on paper by Madox Brown which will be incorporated into a new online Pre-Raphaelite Resource Site.

Three essays by leading Madox Brown specialists re-evaluate the artist. The first of these by Angela Thirlwell ‘Vieux Fordy: Death of a Modern Man’ sets his artistic development with broad brushstrokes. Thus the reader is given an overall context in which to assess his work. Beginning with an account of his death, Thirlwell returns to his childhood, one which demonstrated his talent for art from the age of four. Two key elements of his future career were already apparent in the boy. He had an unerring sense of beauty and was deeply conscious of ugliness. Secondly he was acutely aware of the expressiveness of the human face. These qualities are clearly visible in the work illustrated in the catalogue. In 1843, at the art museum in Basle, the artist viewed for the first time the almost hyper-realist pictures of Holbein. From then on he would see himself as a modern Holbein and set to transcribing directly from the visible world. His association with the Pre-Raphaelites is covered in the essay as is the importance of women in his life, both personally and professionally. Thirlwell states, ‘Each major relationship of his life answered a separate quest in his multi-faceted personality: his marriages to Elisabeth Bromley and later, Emma Hill, and his two intimate friendships with artist Marie Spartali and poet Mathilde Blind. His first one man exhibition in 1865 at 196 Piccadilly thrust his career into the limelight. At the centre of it was his tour de force, the great canvas, Work, a visual depiction of social life in Victorian England.

The picture is discussed by Tim Barringer in a stimulating essay ‘The Effects of Industry: Ford Madox Brown and Artistic Identities in Victorian Britain’. His opening line ‘We still have no fixed image of Ford Madox Brown’ excites the reader’s curiosity immediately and it is rewarded by Barringer’s analysis of his unorthodox and anti-establishment leanings as well as the feeling that the world was against him. So it is not surprising to learn that during his five decades of artistic production, Brown occupied a range of different positions, shifting his identity and style of painting according to changing times. Throughout the essay are headings under which important aspects of the artist are discussed; the artist as scholar, a painter of history for the modern age, as naturalist, as social critic and as labourer. In Work Brown created a modern history painting in which the role and meaning of labour in modern Victorian society is the topic. Included too is the place of an artist as worker. While the composition is visually intricate, the organisation of social types throughout the picture serves to clearly highlight his theme. The inclusion of Thomas Carlyle who argued that the moral worth of man could be detected in his work, provides definitive proof of Brown’s firmly held notion of the glory of labour.

The final essay by Laura MacCulloch is entitled ‘Forgotten Images: The Illustrations of Ford Madox Brown’. She begins by describing how initially his first attempt was not a success. Asked to produce an illustration for the third volume of The Germ published in March 1850 he used as the basis of his design a scene from King Lear made in 1844 whilst living in Paris. He was extremely disappointed with the final design and worried that it had cost him money. Yet happily the members of the Brotherhood were pleased with it and William Rossetti composed a poem to accompany the illustration. By 1854 Brown was experimenting with different types of graphic techniques. In spite of his earlier lack of confidence in creating designs as an illustrator, his work of the 1850s and 60s such as The Prisoner of Chillon and Joseph’s Coat are leaders in their field along with those of Millais and Rossetti.

This catalogue is a must for all those interested in this fine Victorian artist.

· Síghle Bhreathnach-Lynch is Curator of Irish Art at the National Gallery in Dublin, and an Editor of VISIONS

Antoine Capet

ORIENTALISM REVISITED : ART AND THE POLITICS OF REPRESENTATION

A Symposium at Tate Britain Friday 13th June 2008, 10.00–18.00

Reviewed for H-Museum (h-museum@h-net.msu.edu) by Prof. Dr. Antoine Capet, University of Rouen. This copy has been kindly sent to us by Professor Capet.

As we pointed out in a previous review,(1) it is now de rigueur to organise conferences and study days in connection with major Exhibitions, and the Tate management very competently mounted an international symposium to complement its excellent The Lure of the East: British Orientalist Painting Exhibition, which opened the week before. After a general presentation by Paul Goodwin (Cross Cultural Curator, Tate Britain), the first session, on ‘Orientalism and Art Histories’, was introduced by its Chair, Christine Riding (Curator, 18th and 19th Century British Art, Tate Britain, and co-curator of the Exhibition).

The first speaker was Professor Mary Roberts (John Schaeffer Associate Professor of British Art, University of Sydney), who discussed portraits ‘At the Margins of British Orientalism’. Starting from the example of David Wilkie, Professor Roberts suggested that the genre allowed a range of aesthetic forms, including photographic parodies and ‘Ottoman Orientalism’. If one speaks of an ‘indigenous engagement with Orientalism’, one may suggest the addition of Middle East participants to the logic of European Orientalism. The cross-cultural boundaries are renegotiated by the arts – in this instance portraits – with an interplay between self and other and centre and periphery, pointing to the contingency of boundaries formation. Another example would be that of John Young (1755-1825), with his Series of Portraits of the Emperors of Turkey – the London book of 1815 with his engravings derived from Ottoman miniatures (and paintings commissioned in 1808 by Selim III, with vignettes on ‘my victories’ chosen by the Sultan himself) being dedicated to the Prince Regent.(2) Then there are the two portraits (3) by David Wilkie in 1840 of Sultan Abdul Mejid*. The finished one was commissioned by none less than Queen Victoria for reasons of high politics: British diplomacy was seeking an Anglo-Ottoman alliance against Egyptian expansion. The Sultan took the occasion to remind the British that he was a modernising head of State (he ascended the throne the year before, in 1839) through the ‘Western’ uniform which he is wearing (though the ‘Oriental’ connection is recalled thanks to the fez and scimitar). A dress reform had been introduced by his father in 1828-29, and he clearly makes the point that he intends to continue on the path of ‘Westernisation’. The unfinished portrait (commissioned and oversighted by the Ottoman Sultan) does not fit easily within conventional understandings of British Orientalism, and it seems therefore appropriate that this portrait should not have been included in the Tate Exhibition.(4) In contrast, His Highness Muhammad Ali, Pasha of Egypt ** (also by Wilkie, 1841) is shown in ‘Oriental’ dress – the only concession to modernity on the part of the governor of Egypt from 1805 to 1849 being the fez. All this can be interpreted as showing the Ottoman Empire renegotiating its place in contemporary international politics, notably the three-cornered transactions between Britain, the Ottoman Empire and the Ottoman-Egyptians.

In her paper on ‘The Lure of Orientalism: View from the East’, Professor Zeynep Çelik (Distinguished Professor of Architecture, New Jersey Institute of Technology) confirmed: Orientalism is not an exclusively Western phenomenon, as Ottoman Orientalism surfaced in the mid-19th century. Paying tribute to Edward Said, she insisted that Orientalism cannot be divorced from politics. Ottoman intellectuals like Halid Ziya in his 1908 novel Nesl-i Ahir (The First Generation) were aware of European blindness, and odalisk paintings were criticised notably by the novelist Ahmed Mithad in his Avrupa’da Bir Cevelan (A Tour in Europe, 1889) and by Fatma Aliye Hanim in her Nisvan-i Islam (Women of Islam, 1893). One can also contrast the paintings of Osman Hamdi Bey (1842-1910), characterised by a form of intellectual Islam, with the titillating representations of his master Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824-1904).(5) Likewise, in ‘harem’ scenes, there is a world of difference between the restraint shown by John Frederick Lewis in Harem Life, Constantinople (1857)*, and the overt eroticism of Gérôme’s paintings.(6) Ethnographic research, for instance into costumes, led to such publications as _Costumes populaires de la Turquie (1873).(7) At the same time, a popular form of Ottoman Orientalism was clearly visible on advertisements and packaging for cigarette paper or cough syrup. Ottoman architecture was naturally prominent at the Ottoman Exhibition held in Istanbul in 1863, but Professor Çelik also showed a photograph of the impressive Turkish Pavilion at the Exposition universelle of Paris, 1900, (8) and an undated drawing (probably from the late 1880s) in the Prime Minister’s Archives in Istanbul of the Benghazi Barracks in Libya – obviously built in the ‘Western’ style. The talk concluded with an image taken from a special issue of Servet-i Fünun (nos. 592-593, 1902) on the Hijaz Railroad, showing a train on a modern bridge being welcomed by local people in traditional dress – except the officer standing for the Ottoman administration. All this made it clear that the Ottomans aligned themselves with the ‘civilised world’.

This first session ended with Questions & Answers. Both speakers agreed that Hamdi Bey presented women as a puzzle, as opposed to the ‘Western’ (especially French) eroticism associated with the harem. The vocabulary is also important: although the terminology is fluctuating, speaking of ‘the Emperors of Turkey’ suggests that the country can be managed, unlike ‘the Ottoman Emperors’, which points to the parallel between the Ottoman Empire and the British Empire as entities difficult to manage.

After a pause, Dr Nicholas Tromans (Senior Lecturer in Art History at Kingston University, London, and curator of the Exhibition) treated ‘Orientalism and the Place of the Visual’. He started from Said’s critique of Lane’s _Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians_ (9) - its supposed absence of narrative and the fact that it was ‘bogged down in descriptions’, as Said puts it.(10) – and explained that in the Catalogue (11) he tried to show that this very faltering of narrative suggested by the intervention of the image allowed some painters to believe in the authenticity of their own Oriental projects: for them, the visual legitimately aspired to be that mode of experience which could not be digested by the self-perpetuating processes of Orientalism. These are the projects that form the basis of the exhibition. Said was sceptical of the visual –and he was not alone (12). This tradition was invoked by Timothy Mitchell in his 1988 book Colonising Egypt, in which the act of 'picturing' (of fixing the gaze) is made to do a great deal of the work of Orientalism, and indeed of colonialism – probably, we may now feel, rather too much of the work. Dr Tromans recalled a quotation in the book from an Egyptian educationalist who had visited Paris in the 1820s, and later explained that ‘one of the beliefs of the Europeans is that the gaze has no effect’. Certainly, European tradition long upheld the innocence of the eye and the associated potential of the picture to offer transparent representation. Equally certainly, a Western tradition that Orientals were unable to grasp these principles forms a central plank of the visual culture of Orientalism. This may explain why an uncomprehending William Holman Hunt ‘felt tantalised by the restrictions imposed’ on his looking, as he described his experience in Palestine in 1854: hence perhaps his Self-Portrait in Oriental Costume (after 1875)*, which reflects his frustrations. Later nineteenth-century Orientalist painting has of course long been recognised as a kind of last stand of the Academic tradition: many of its pictorial values are precisely those now looking vulnerable back in London or Paris, and Linda Nochlin did not fail to contrast Gérôme (for instance his Charmeur de serpents / Snake-charmer of c.1883, which Dr Tromans showed as a slide) and Manet. The paper then made a plea in favour of attending more directly to the technologies of visual culture in order to comprehend the power relations around representations. In Interior of a Mosque, Afternoon Prayer (The 'Asr) (before 1857)**, John Frederick Lewis seems to be conscious of these limitations, cultivating repetitive ambiguities: he is himself the ‘sitter’ (as in some others of his paintings), and this leads us to wonder who is drawing the limits: the artist or the pictures? Turning to Lacanian reflections on perspective and vision, Dr Tromans showed a slide of Pyramids Road (1873), a tree-lined avenue connecting Cairo to Giza, by Edward Lear, the peripatetic artist, harried from location to location, ‘manipulated’ in Lacan’s terms by the demands of the perspectival field. The talk concluded on the problem of the authority of beauty as a political end: the twentieth century blamed the Middle East for not living up to the West’s beautiful image of it. This raises the question of the West’s culpability: we in the West can no longer envisage a beautiful Middle East – we visualise it as ugly. It is rather the West that betrayed beauty, perhaps because we no longer have the political hope to allow us to believe in it.

The last paper of the morning, on ‘The Modern and the Anti-Modern: The Lessons from the Orient’, was given by Professor John MacKenzie (Professor Emeritus in Imperial History, Lancaster University), who began by saying that, being himself interested in art – or vision – he initially found Edward Said’s book full of intriguing insights. But this was a brief impression, which soon wore off. When hearing Said talk of Verdi’s Aida at a conference in Brighton, he thought that something did not ring true: Said did not analyse the text, the ideology, speaking of a ‘plot that ends in deadlock and entombment’. On the contrary, Professor MacKenzie argued, Aida is about nationalism and anticlericalism; in it, Verdi celebrated the underdog, and the end is an apotheosis. Said is also wrong in that the victims of internationalism were able to maintain their _cultural_ independence, and all through the 19th century we find a ubiquitous juxtaposition of the modern and anti-modern. A good example is that of the Great Exhibition of 1851. On the surface, it is the archetype of modernity, with its buildings of iron and glass, but the interior was largely anti-modern. Besides the ‘wonders of industry’ one could find a recurring insistence on handicrafted objects, and the same dichotomy between the industrial and the non-industrial was to be found in all other exhibitions. The South Kensington Museum (which became the Victoria & Albert Museum) was the best showcase of this revival of handicrafts. It must be remembered that each British country-house had to have a display of artefacts from Ethiopia, India, the Sudan – notably weaponry: international loot, in fact. One can also mention Leighton’s Arab Hall in Holland Park, all this culminating perhaps with James Millar’s cast-iron ornaments for the ‘Eastern Palace’ built for the 1901 Glasgow International Exhibition, or ‘Baghdad by the Kelvin’ as it was dubbed by sceptics. The general trend was towards a relief from industrially-produced goods, and towards a world lost which they wished to regain, indicating a sort of civilisational disease - and in conclusion Professor MacKenzie drew a parallel between the attitudes of the Victorian middle classes and those of the middle classes of the Middle East today, arguing that they have a good deal in common.

The final Questions & Answers session of the morning, which merged with a panel discussion including all the morning speakers, largely revolved around the authoritativeness or otherwise of Edward Said’s and Linda Nochlin’s writings. While Professor MacKenzie said that we can pick holes in them, Dr Tromans reminded the audience that it was not the authors who were to blame, but the readers who made too much of their theories: one cannot reproach them for the popularity of their writings, even if it sometimes rests on doubtful foundations. Linda Nochlin tried to deal with aesthetics in relation to politics. There must have been among the Orientalist artists a sense of challenge: they were conscious of the difficulties and hostility facing them, but they believed that art could overcome these barriers, and they recorded their troubles in great detail. Beauty can be an oppressive experience. The works in the Exhibition express a fear before the possible disappearance of ‘real’ Africa, of the ‘real’ Middle East, and they betray the Europeans’ anxiety. Professor MacKenzie added that there was a long tradition of absorbing the culture of the Other (e.g. with the Chinese in the 18th century), and that international travellers admired the ‘natives’’ understanding of Nature, while Professor Çelik drew attention to the importance of photography. Very often, these artists started from photographs, which they embellished in their works, choosing rich colours in a bright light. If one considers again Lewis’s self-portrait as a beautiful old man in Interior of a Mosque, Afternoon Prayer (The 'Asr) **, whose beauty is it? Dr Tromans believes that the definition was a shifting one: the beautiful matched with images from other cultures in the 19th century. This led Professor Roberts to wonder what the priorities were in the particular field of research into Orientalist paintings if one was to go beyond the important work already done by Edward Said and Linda Nochlin. Dr Tromans’s priority would go to devoting more attention to the technologies of visual culture. Professor Çelik would choose further questioning of the boundaries and Professor MacKenzie would like to see much more cross-disciplinary analysis, including for instance the history of tourism. Dr Tromans pointed out that it should be the scholar’s duty all the time - Professor Roberts adding in conclusion that rigorous investigation remained the order of the day.

The afternoon’s theme was ‘Orientalism and the Politics of Representation’, Raficq Abdulla, MBE (Visiting Fellow, Faculty of Business and Law, Kingston University) being in the Chair – and the first speaker, Dr Charles Small (Director of the Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Anti-Semitism, Yale University), entered the political field straightaway with his paper on ‘From the Gaze of the Colonial and Post-Colonial: Judeo-phobia, Empire, Islamism’. He began by showing excerpts from a Syrian-produced television series, ‘Al-Shatat’ (the diaspora). This harrowing episode, ‘Jews Murder a Christian Child and Use His Blood for Passover Matzos’,(13) deriving from the notorious forgery, the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, and broadcast on Eid al-Fitr (end of Ramadan) evening, 20 October 2005, on a Jordanian TV network, Al-Mamnou_, was used by Dr Small to make his central point that one must distinguish between Judaeophobia, which has to do with discrimination, and Anti-Semitism, which is genocidal. For him, the Hamas Charter (14) is evidence of the genocidal intentions of radical Islam, and he showed other pictorial examples of Anti-Semitism in the Middle East. The connection with Edward Said is that he was an Arab and that according to Dr Small, he saw Jews as usurpers. In this reading of Said’s work, the author of Orientalism made no distinction between Jews and Christian Europeans – they were perpetrators rather than victims: successionists, in fact. Dr Small sees Said’s impact as leading to the de-Judaeisation of Orientalism: for Said, Orientalism was directed against the Arabs, not the Jews.

Dr Kamran Rastegar (Lecturer in Arabic and Persian Literatures, University of Edinburgh) followed with ‘Curating Diaspora Artists of Muslim-majority Societies in the Metropole: A Third Space, or Neo-Orientalism?’ He remarked that Said’s intention is not the point. His book led to the emergence of a small industry, which is not always good. Art institutions like museums and art galleries canonise art objects and give status to artists, and curators do the same. The museum is a form of cultural tourism, and this is especially true of Exhibitions devoted to the Islamic world, which have no connection with the culture of religious people. In the West, the sacred and the profane are mixed, and the coherence of Islam is lost. He took as an example the 2006 Exhibition at the New York Museum of Modern Art (MoMA),(15) of artists who ‘come from the Islamic world, but do not live there’, in the words of the curator, Fereshteh Daftari. The show avoided political discussion altogether, with artists only being ‘consumed’ within the frame of Islam, and even the one section (out of five) on ‘Identity in Question’ was inadequate. Dr Rastegar commented upon a number of works, notably Mona Hatoum’s Exodus II (2002), an image (the hole left by a car bomb) from Atlas Group’s I_(2000-2003),(16) Anoush Abrar’s Portraits of Iranian Jews in Los Angeles (17) Kamrooz Aram’s The Gleam of the Morning’s First Beam (2005),(18) and Emily Jacir’s Memorial to 418 Palestinian Villages which were Destroyed, Depopulated and Occupied by Israel in 1948 (2001).(19) Discussing Kutlug Ataman’s phallic calligraphy, he saw it as meaningless and wondered about the Islamic dimension in it. He concluded on the West’s misconception of Islamic art as an instrument of cultural control. Is Islamism a universal framework? Like all art, Islamic art is a reflection of and a response to the world in which it is produced.

After Dr Small answered questions on the propriety or otherwise of showing such clips, and no Israeli anti-Arab propaganda, and Dr Rastegar others on whether he had met the MoMA curator and discussed the Without Boundary Exhibition with her (he had not) and why he had not (apparently his request for an interview did not materialise), the Chairman introduced Professor Ziauddin Sardar (Columnist and author [notably of Why Do People Hate America? 2002], Visiting Professor of Postcolonial Studies, City University, London), who spoke on ‘Orientalism: Then and Now’.

‘Where is the East?’, Professor Sardar asked first. Orientalism is about Islam and Muslims. When he sees the pictures of harems in the current Exhibition, he thinks of his wife, his mother, his daughter and of the Westerner’s reaction. Is it only representation? Or does it have other consequences? What is the Westerner’s gaze at Muslim women in Bradford? He does not like that – he is worried, and he is in the Said industry. Orientalism is a discourse, a structure of knowledge, based on ignorance – and it has a long history, which begins with Islamism. The Muslim ‘terrorist’, violent, untrustworthy, has a long history – it is part of Western Orientalism – dating back to the Saracens, the ‘Barbarians’, justifying a pathology of fear: the West is always looking for weapons of mass destruction. This can be internalised by Professor Sardar, or he can start ‘Orientalising’ himself. The paintings shown in the Exhibition freeze the stereotypes, which can be invoked when necessary. The hate is perpetuated by such constructions, though Professor Sardar does not deny that some have beauty. But one must never look at these images out of context, and the constant question must be ‘what is it saying about my neighbour’? Orientalism is an aesthetic of saying, but the time has now come for listening.

The last speaker was Professor Bashir Makhoul (Head of the Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton), on ‘Occupation of an Equal Space’. For the author of Orientalism, he argued, it is a negative term – and we agree with Said. It is seductive, erotic, exotic, and it troubles Professor Makhoul. The Exhibition is a tourists’ exhibition: what we have is not artists with their brushes but tourists with their cameras. Turning to today’s politics, he showed a montage with the colours of the Palestinian flag, commenting that the penalty for showing this in Israel is six months’ imprisonment. He then showed some of his works relating to the conflict, like Points of View, a ‘wallpaper pattern’ which is based on bullet impacts on walls in Beirut,(20) or My Olive Tree, a tree with no roots, with no land, and a moving image, Jerusalem. All these works show that in the Middle East (as everywhere else in the world) art is indissociable from politics.

After a pause, all the speakers joined in a general round table. Professor MacKenzie launched the debate by declaring that he was opposed to State executions and that there were many such executions in Iran – how is he to represent his opposition without falling into the Orientalist trap? Professor Sardar answered that you ‘Orientalise’ people not by criticising, but by stereotypes. A question from the audience raised the issue of demonisation: for instance President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was insulted during his visit to Columbia University on 25 September 2007. Professor Small believes that we cannot be bound by racist Orientalism. But there is a narrative of genocide – which also affects India and Pakistan - coming from Empire and decolonisation, with stories of the poisoning of wells, even of Mohammed poisoned by Jews. The problem is how to stop this genocidal hatred. For Professor Sardar, who wonders how much film there is on Palestine murders by Israel, Professor Small falls into the trap of over-generalisation. He glosses over the immense complexity of the situation, even in Iran – and this weakens his argument. The discussion then turned to the idea that, for Said, Lane was a sexual tourist. Professor Sardar believes that an Orientalist painting is the creation of a certain representation, which continues today in the British media – and this must stop. How can the pattern be broken?, a young artist from the audience asked: she wants to practise a _positive_ Orientalism, and not to be a tourist – which led Professor Makhoul to point out that the context is not the same. The objective today must be to make people more aware. Professor Sardar agreed: it is all a question of intention – Said was right. Christine Riding wonders whether Orientalism is still a useful term and she invited questions on curatorial choices. To launch the discussion, she could for instance say why Lewis's 1850 watercolour _The Hhareem_ was not in the current exhibition: in spite of all efforts (including diplomatic channels) it proved impossible to borrow it. Professor Çelik asked her why the choice was made to stick with paintings, when so much can also be conveyed by photographs, journals and film. Dr Tromans pointed to the practicalities of getting and showing a number of objects – but this was not the main reason: behind the Exhibition, there was a desire to make progress in our knowledge of ‘British’ painting. Of course, the curators were aware that this is only one medium, and of course they were aware of the drawbacks. Professor Roberts posed the problem of expatriates like Henriette Browne*, wondering whether the category ‘Orientalism’ does not introduce unwelcome limitations. Christine Riding recalled that this is the first exhibition of its kind in Britain: naturally, such extensions would be good for future events. The title of the Exhibition was debated for two years, and ‘The Lure of the East’ is not a curatorial, but a marketing decision: half jokingly, one could say that it is a Government demand to counter the lure of football.(21) Professor Sardar sees a Nationalist note in the decision to include only ‘British’ painting: why exclude the French Orientalists? One reason, given by Christine Riding, is that the Tate is in fact the National Gallery of British Art; another, conceded by Dr Tromans, is that Yes, there was a Nationalist agenda: they wanted to show the British way of doing things – one can discern a British ‘regional variety’ of Orientalism, with more precision, more accuracy in some of the paintings. The French way is more ‘erotic’ – the archetype being Gérôme’s For Sale: Slaves at Cairo*. Professor Roberts concluded by saying that it will be interesting to see the reactions to that when the Exhibition moves to Istanbul. Uneasiness was expressed by a member of the audience at labelling the painters as ‘Orientalists’.Was this not a form of political posturing, a way of proclaming ‘I’m the only true voice of the Orient’? Another found ‘the East’ in the title problematic – to which Christine Riding replied that the team had spent five years discussing this. Professor Sardar repeated that he does not like the Exhibition, because these representations are clichés. He does not recognise himself in it, and he does not want to be represented like that. Dr Tromans underlined that this is exceptionalism generated though the medium, i.e. British painting, to which Professor Çelik added that this is historical material – what is one to do with it? Letting the other voices in today would not solve the problem: we must have a historical approach. Professor Small disagreed: the Other is necessary – and Professor Sardar somehow concurred: the ‘East’ is the opposite of the ‘West’, and by using the word ‘lure’, we yield to all constructions. Not unexpectedly, a member of the audience asked whether it was too cynical to see the ‘lure’ as the oil: what about the fact that the Exhibition was due to travel to Istanbul and Sharjah? The panel agreed with a smile on that possible interpretation of the ‘lure’, but Christine Riding explained that no concessions had been made, except on one point, for which the curatorial team entertained grave doubts anyway: the word ‘Arabesque’, which had been suggested at some stage in the preparatory phase, was rejected out of hand in Istanbul. The title The Lure of the East: British Orientalist Painting will be kept in both venues, however.

Notes

An asterisk* denotes that a painting is part of the Exhibition.

Two asterisks** denote that a painting is part of the Exhibition and shown on the Tate’s dedicated site: http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/exhibitions/britishorientalistpainting/explore/

(1) 'Millais, Hunt and Modern Life' Symposium, 30th November 2007. See H-Museum Archive: http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl?trx=vx&list=h-museum&month=0712&week=b&msg=m4aCTXQs00%2bxJCl%2b2adG3g&user=&pw=.
The Exhibition itself was reviewed on 2nd December 2007. See H-Museum Archive: http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl?trx=vx&list=h-museum&month=0712&week=a&msg=GJXuiM2AZ8HQp2nNBqhczw&user=&pw=

(2) A Series of Portraits of the Emperors of Turkey, from the Foundation of the Monarchy to the Year 1815. Engraved from Pictures painted at Constantinople. Commenced under the auspices of Sultan Selim the Third, and completed by command of Sultan Mahmoud the Second. With a biographical Account of each of the Emperors. Recueil des portraits des empereurs ottomans. Suite des portraits des empereurs turcs, depuis la fondation de la monarchie jusqu'à l'an 1815. By John Young, engraver in mezzotinto to His Royal Highness the Prince Regent. London : Printed by W. Bulmer & co., 1815.

(3) This is a complicated story. There were to have been three versions. Only one (shown at the Exhibition, and now in the Royal Collection) was finished. The second version (ordered by Abdulmecid [Abdul Mejid] himself, and now at Topkapi Palace) was left unfinished at Wilkie’s death in 1841. A third one, which had been commissioned by Mehemet [Muhammad] Ali, Pasha of Egypt, when Wilkie went to Alexandria to paint his own portrait, was never started.

(4) The finished one shown in London will not go to Istanbul because it is too fragile to travel.

(5) The Exhibition shows his For Sale: Slaves at Cairo, c.1871.

(6) See for instance: http://pagesperso-orange.fr/verat/Jean_Leon_Gerome.htm

(7) Osman Hamdi Bey et al. Les costumes populaires de la Turquie en 1873 : Ouvrage publié sous le patronage de la Commission impériale ottomane pour l'Exposition universelle de Vienne. Texte par Son Excellence Hamdy bey ... et Marie de Launay ... Phototypie de Sébah. Constantinople : Imprimerie du ‘Levant Times & Shipping Gazette’, 1873.

(8) For a typically Western ‘Orientalist’ picture, see
http://www.bridgemanartondemand.com/art/164823/The_Turkish_Pavilion_at_the_Universal_Exhibition_of_1900_Paris.
See also: http://www.flickr.com/photos/brooklyn_museum/2485984359/in/set-72157604656089762

(9) Lane, Edward William, 1801-1876. An Account of the Manners and Customs of the modern Egyptians. Written in Egypt during the Years 1833, 34, and 35, partly from Notes made during a former Visit to that Country in the Years 1825, 26, 27, and 28. Two volumes. The Library of Entertaining Knowledge. London : Charles Knight & Co, 1836-1837.

(10) Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York : Pantheon Books, 1978 (‘With a New Afterword’. London : Penguin, 1995), p. 162.

(11) Tromans, Nicholas [Editor]. The Lure of the East: British Orientalist Painting. With texts by Rana Kabbani, Fatema Mernissi, Christine Riding and Emily M. Weeks. London : Tate, 2008. Paperback, 224 p. ISBN: 1854377337 ; 9781854377333.

(12) Martin Jay. Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought. Berkeley : University of California Press, 1993.

(13) The clip is visible on the site of the Middle East Media Research Institute: http://www.memritv.org/clip/en/895.htm

(14) The Charter is reprinted on the Yale University site: http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/mideast/hamas.htm

(15) Without Boundary: Seventeen Ways of Looking, February 26–May 22, 2006 http://www.moma.org/exhibitions/2006/15_ways.html

(16) Visible on the Tate site: http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ViewWork?cgroupid=999999961&workid=84100

(17) Visible on: http://www.anoush.ch/images/Iranianjews/iranian-jewish.html

(18) Visible on: http://www.kamroozaram.com/works/12.html

(19) Visible on: http://www.stationmuseum.com/Made_in_Palestine-Emily_Jacir/jacir.html

(20) Visible on: http://www.drumcroon.org.uk/Arch1/Still/Bashir.html

(21) For the benefit of H-Museum subscribers outside Europe, it must be recalled that the opening of the Exhibition almost coincided with the European Football (soccer) Cup, with matches lasting for several weeks and attracting a massive television audience every day.

Tate Britain Millbank London SW1P 4RG E-mail: visiting.britain@tate.org.uk

Recorded information : 020 7887 8008 (international +44 20 7887 8008)

The Lure of the East tickets : £10

The Lure of the East Exhibition Hours: Daily, 10.00-17.40 (last admission 17.00)

www.tate.org.uk

H-MUSEUM H-Net Network for Museums and Museum Studies E-Mail: h-museum@h-net.msu.edu ; http://www.h-museum.net

Isa Bickmann

HANS VON MARÉES (1837-1887)

Retrospective

Von-der-Heydt-Museum, Wuppertal 8th June–14th September 2008

http://www.von-der-heydt-museum.de/

Hans von Marées, who had Huguenot ancestors (‘Demarées’), was born in Wuppertal-Elberfeld in 1837 and lived there for 10 years. This gave the occasion for a retrospective show of his oeuvre in the Von der Heydt-Museum in Wuppertal, which owns together with the Neue Pinakothek in Munich and the Alte Nationalgalerie Berlin most of Hans von Marées’ works. The exhibition in Wuppertal showed 120 works by the artist, a fact which is quite impressive, because his paintings are highly fragile and shipping is of extreme risk. The late works from Munich which are painted in egg-tempera and oil on wood smothered with thick glaze (by the way that too prevents a picture’s being fimed) will not be loaned anymore.

The excellent catalogue gives a lot of new material and information, especially the article by Anette Niethammer on Marées and sculpture, his claim of ‘Illusion des Lebens’ (Illusion of Life) as result of the approach to calmness and movement in the whole figure and the realisation of Marées sketches by the sculptor Artur Volkmann is worth reading.

The reception of Hans von Marées is quite divergent. In the 1930’s his Jewish origins stopped national socialist worship (see cat. Gerd Blum, p. 19), yet working on him in Germany has been a bit of a taboo, because he was one of Hitler’s favourite artists. Apart from his being an outsider of art history Hans von Marées was very influential, especially on sculpture (see: Christa Lichtenstern, Der “Bildhauer” Hans von Marées und seine verborgene Aktualität in der Plastik des 20. Jahrhunderts, in: Exhibition catalogue. Hans von Marées, ed. by Christian Lenz, Munich, Neue Pinakothek 1987, pp. 163-178). His friendship to Adolf von Hildebrand and Konrad Fieldler, art theoretician and Marées’ patron, marked an important step in art history of the late 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. Marcel Duchamp visited Marées’ Retrospective in Paris in 1909 and it seems he referred to Marées’ ideals in ‘Nu descendant un escalier’ (See Cat. Gerd Blum, p. 25). Julius Meier-Graefe’s 1909/10 published monograph is still an important chapter of Marées’ art historical appreciation. But the artist remains less known both in Germany and worldwide.

The exhibition, well worth seeing in Wuppertal, showed 120 works with 22 of his most important paintings and 41 large-sized drawings. First of all a few critical words on the murals: Today it is en vogue to colour exhibition spaces of classical art with strong colours. In the case of von Marées, the museum used pigeon blue for the drawings and wine red for the paintings. Grey is a good choice for works on paper but that red lends the skin tones of figures and portraits greenish and yellowish tinge and disturbs the onlooker.

The presentation was enriched with contemporary photographs of Italian cities and architectures by e.g. Giorgio Sommer (Frankfort, 1832-Naples 1914) showing Italy in an idyllic and pristine way. Furthermore the curator Nicole Hartje-Grave included a few nude photographs by Wilhelm von Gloeden (1856-1931) and his cousin Wilhelm von Plüschow (1852-1930). Yet similarities have been discovered, but there is no evidence that Marées knew Gloeden’s and Plüschow’s pictures (see cat. Ulrich Pohlmann on photography and Marées, p. 222-235, see moreover THE OSCHOLARS, Visions 2, Summer 2008). Also sculptures by his pupils and later assistants were involved.

Being educated in Berlin with the Painter of horses and military-painter Karl Steffeck, Marées begins painting horses and scenes of combats. 1857 he moved to Munich, a better place for a young painter because of the energetic art scene. He works on military subjects and landscapes following the School of Barbizon. Count Adolf von Schack sent him to Rome and Florence to copy works of the Old Masters e.g. Raphael’s Donna Velata (‘Schack-Galler’). Marées worked with Franz von Lenbach, and met Böcklin and Feuerbach.

Hans von Marées, Doubleportrait with Franz von Lenbach, 1863, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen München, Neue Pinakothek [This “Freundschaftsbild” contrasts light (Marées) with blindness (Lenbach’s glasses). Lenbach’s “weapon” is the flap (See Cat., p.74)].

After Marées broke with the copying-job he found in Konrad Fiedler an interlocutor and patron who supplied him with money. In 1869 both went for five months to Spain, Portugal, Morocco, France and the Netherlands. Marées was very impressed by the works of Géricault and Delacroix. That can be seen in “St. Martin” (1870):

Hans von Marées, Der heilige Martin, ca. 1870, Museum Oskar Reinhart am Stadtgarten, Winterthur

In 1873 Marées received an assignment to decorate the hall of the newly founded Zoological Station in Naples (together with Adolf von Hildebrand) – this remained his only public contract! In Berlin he broke with Adolf von Hildebrand, the well-known reason was the ménage à trois with Irene Koppel who, divorced from her first husband, married Hildebrand, and the second reason may be, if we follow Anette Niethammer, artistic controversies (see Cat., p.57).

Hans von Marées, Self portrait with Hildebrand and Charles Grant, 1873, Von der Heydt-Museum Wuppertal

In 1876 he finally went to Rome, where he died in 1887 in increasing isolation.

Marées, German with French and Jewish roots, living in Italy, with preference for homoerotic motifs, but of jingoistic-military attitude is a ‘Musterbeispiel für die vielfältigen kulturellen Ursprünge und für die vielschichtige Identität eines Künstlers der europäischen Moderne’ as Gerd Blum stated in the catalogue (p. 21). He was looking for an ideal idyllic artistic world like Paul Gauguin and many other contemporaries who did not feel comfortable with modernity.

Hans von Marées, Abendliche Waldszene, ca. 1868/70, oil on canvas on cardboard,

64 x 51 cm, Kunsthalle Bremen

At the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin there started on 1st October a second exhibition ‘Hans von Marées – Sehnsucht nach Gemeinschaft’, the first one in Berlin since 1909. 100 paintings can be seen till 11th January 2009. Maybe these shows will develop publicity and research for Hans von Marées’ work.

· Isa Bickmann is a curator and critic, and an Editor of VISIONS.

Margaret de Fonblanque

VIENNA CAFÉ FESTIVAL, LONDON, OCTOBER 2008

Viennese cafés don’t throw you out. They never have, and they probably never will. The longest I ever spent in the Café Central was about six hours, when morning coffee moved seamlessly into lunch, and on to more coffee and cakes. Waiters appeared if summoned vigorously enough, but otherwise left us in peace. Tourists came and went, overawed by the painted arches of the cavernous interior. Habitués read the daily papers, which are fastened on to sticks and very difficult to manipulate. The life-size model of a long dead writer occupied its usual table near the door. Vienna believes in tradition.

The cafés, like Vienna itself, have different personalities in winter and summer. Summer is the time for the little tables and rickety chairs of the small cafés overlooking the Danube high in the Vienna woods, or for the pavement terraces bordered with geraniums in the city. Other cafés come into their own in winter or at night, warm, cosy and welcoming. Everyone has their favourites, and the choice is wide. After five years in Vienna I was still discovering more. The Griensteidl, next door to the Hofburg, was rebuilt in1990, but the globe lights, the red plush banquettes, the coveted window alcoves through which you can watch the horse-drawn fiacres clattering over the cobbles, are all still there. The Schwarzenberg, brash, busy, noisy, has gleaming tables of beaten copper and a lovely terrace, and is well-placed if you are hungry after a concert at the Musikverein. The Sacher, very grand, is where famished Archdukes used to go when meals at the Hofburg had been even more austere than usual. (The Emperor Franz Joseph and the Empress Elizabeth ate very little; and when they stopped eating, everyone stopped). The Landtmann, on the Ring, vast, friendly, warm and welcoming, is where we absconded one cold and damp evening for Wienerschnitzels half way through an open- air production of ‘The Portrait of Dorian Gray’

Warmth, light, comfort, excellent coffee, delicious food, no wonder people adore the Viennese café. But why a festival? Well, in the words of the organisers, the Royal College of Art and Birkbeck College, University of London, ‘The café was far more than just a place to get a cup of coffee; it was the heart of the city’s social and cultural life’. In their view, the atmosphere of ‘frivolity and fun’ encouraged writers and artists to break with tradition and to push new boundaries. And certainly the end of the nineteenth century was a period of intense innovation in Vienna, with Klimt, Schiele, Freud, Schnitzler, Loos, Mahler, Hoffman, Wolf, all in the city – the list is long. The intellectual excitement of Vienna cannot be entirely attributed to the coffee house, but the freedom for artists, writers, musicians, architects and journalists, to meet, haphazardly, when and where they chose, without social constraints, must have helped enormously. You did not have to seek a formal meeting, or hope for an introduction at a dinner party, or try to join the same club. Vienna is a small city – it would be well known when and where you would be likely to run into Freud or Klimt. According to Dr Simon Shaw-Miller, of Birkbeck College, ‘It would be no exaggeration to claim that but for the Viennese coffee house modern life and culture would not be the same for any of us’.

As well as the exhibition, the festival includes a number of concerts, lecture-recitals, talks and films associated with Vienna and Viennese society, ranging from Max Ophuls’ ‘Letter from an Unknown Woman’ and Reed’s ‘The Third Man’ to Ruiz’s ‘Klimt’ and Niel Burger’s ‘The Illusionist’ (brilliant, but very unfair on Crown Prince Rudolph). There is also a two day conference at the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Royal College of Art on ‘The Viennese Café as an Urban Site of Cultural Exchange’, and Birkbeck are organising a one-day seminar at the end of November on ‘The Viennese Coffee House and the Arts of the Fin-de-Siècle’.

The exhibition itself is in the stark white space of the Royal Academy of Art’s semi-basement. Endearingly, Demels have attempted to recreate a Viennese café in this somewhat unpromising setting. Gold drapes over the bare windows, pink lustre vases of flowers, crimson and gilt table lamps, silver sugar bowls on the polished wooden tables, Thonet bentwood chairs, newspapers on sticks….not exactly Vienna, but a gallant attempt. And the coffee and cakes are superb. But after this promising start the exhibition, though very informative, is rather short on atmosphere. Some playing cards and dominoes in a glass case, and a few modern sculptures on café themes, are the full extent of the actual artefacts on display. There are some attractive films from the 1920s: ‘A journey through Vienna’ (apparently filmed from the top of a tram); ‘The Café Jubilaum’ (Its modern kitchens! Its food! Its chef! Its central heating!); and an excerpt from ‘Clothes Make the Man’, a romance set in and around the cafés in summer. Otherwise the exhibition consists of a pictorial record – photographs, illustrations, drawings, cartoons, – of the cafés through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, together with excellent written explanations.

The photographs capture the glamour – the lamps, the glass and marble, the little alcoves, the mirrors, the warm, smoky atmosphere. Each feature has its own section:lighting, kitchens, chefs, textiles, furniture, owners, waiters, music and entertainment, customers. There are some fascinating facts. Electric light was introduced in the early 1900s. 25 per cent of owners at the end of the nineteenth century were women. The cashier, who also acted as the (very respectable) hostess, was usually a woman, but most coffee houses employed only men as waiters. Several cafés employed female orchestras, a useful outlet for women musicians who were not allowed to join the classical professional orchestras. (Female bands in late nineteenth century costume still play at Vienna’s balls). Cafés tended to specialise: music, literature, billiards, cards. Unaccompanied women tended to go to the café –konditoreis, like Demels, who employed waitresses. The 1861 plans of the massive Prasch’s Café and Billiard Hall on Wienstrasse included a concert hall, games room, reading room, and conservatories. Thonet’s bentwood chairs were much favoured; Thonet chair number 14 won a gold medal at the Paris Exhibition of 1867.

The traditional Viennese café was usually historicist in style (equivalent, perhaps, to mid-Victorian). There are some Jugendstil examples, and Loos designed an austere version in the Café Museum. But these are rather an acquired taste. The Aida chain, with the first expresso machines, opened in 1948. The Pruckel was renovated in 1954, and has remained firmly in that period ever since. Other cafés were renovated in the 70s. The Dreschler, opened in 1919 in the Naschmarkt for 24 hours a day, was renovated in 2006 by Conran and Partners, who revealed a mural on the ceiling which had been plastered over.

The modern artefacts included in the exhibition are in a separate room; not very many of them, they range from the quirky to the commercial, and leave you wanting more. Owen Wall’s Murquana coffee cups, designed for Leighton House and based on a scallop shape design, are particularly attractive. Mr Wall is quoted as saying ‘I …felt that were Leighton alive today, he would be a coffee drinking artist’. If only Leighton had lived in Vienna for a while, would the whole course of English art have changed?

Is there a future for the Viennese coffee house? Reports of its death have circulated for fifty years and have been much exaggerated. But Starbucks have moved in to Vienna and are immensely popular. They are the antithesis of the cafés: they are quick. You do not need to go through the elaborate ritual of catching the attention of the waiter, and sometimes life seems too short for that. But there is probably room for both. On a May morning, with the lime trees in bloom, or on a bitter winter’s day, with the snow drifting down round the domes of the Hofburg, there is no better place to be than in a Viennese café with a coffee, a paper, and the possibility of staying on until lunchtime. Or teatime. Or for ever, really.

· Margaret de Fonblanque has a BA in history from the University of Cambridge and an MA in biography from the University of Buckingham. She lived in Vienna for five years between 1998 and 2003.

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