Betrayed in Boston

The idea of this column is to tell the curious in New England a little about Old England’s Mayflower country - the places where some pilgrims came from and where their radical beliefs were formed. There may well have been some dedicated folk who planned a pilgrimage to these historic towns and villages on this 400th anniversary year of the voyage but, sadly, to quote Plymouth’s governor William Bradford, that is ‘an adventure almost desperate.’ 

Interest, though, is undimmed, if the non-stop discussions on the many descendants’ societies I follow are anything to go by, so perhaps we can pick up with the runaways who last month were in Gainsborough. Their destination was Boston, Lincolnshire, a port on the east coast 50 miles away where they planned to sail to freedom in Amsterdam, Holland.

If you have the boots, the knees and the dedication you can walk those miles, just as our band of refugees are reckoned to have done in 1607 or 1608, along the twists and turns of the River Trent to Torksey Lock about 10 miles away, the Fossdyke canal, built by the Romans in AD 120 and on to Lincoln. It’s long - but it is flat.

It’s more than likely the fugitives slunk past the city for fear of arrest but Lincoln is most definitely not a place to bypass. Its old town is a delight of cobbled streets, antique shops, cafes and restaurants, a battle  - scarred castle, and a cathedral which is a fabulous confection of Gothic-flying buttresses, ribbed vaults and pointed arches. Get a flavour of it here; https://tourmkr.com/g/G1BIv2jYQi/377331p,9414m,95.34h,76.46t.

The experts at the Wren Library had planned to display an original copy of “Good News from New England,” an account of life in the settlement, written in 1624 by pilgrim stalwart Edward Winslow. Frankly it is a work of propaganda designed to impress potential investors in England by boasting that ‘the wondrous kindness and providence of God’ had made the place prosper but to see its frayed pages brings a flutter to the heart. You can read them here; https://archive.org/details/goodnewesfromnew00wins/page/n8/mode/2up

Also from the library archive, and every bit as fascinating, is the “Sea Mans Grammar and Dictionary” by the explorer John Smith, a Lincolnshire lad who mapped out much of the east coast of New England in the early 17th century. He lists everything required for a voyage from the names of the anchors, cables and sails, the tactics of ‘giving chase and boarding a man of war,’ to the correct amount to spend on butter - eight shillings, which if my math is correct is $216 today. You can download his advice on http://www.shipbrook.net/jeff/bookshelf/details.html?bookid=27

Another prized possession; the first Bible printed in America by John Eliot in 1663. The Native Americans had no tradition of writing down words so Eliot translated the entire work relying on speech  alone. A staggering achievement.  

You could keep walking to Boston along the banks of the River Witham through empty fenland with only fishermen, butterflies and birds for company but it is 30 miles away - bit of a tall order - so for most latter day pilgrims it is a one hour’s drive.

Guiding your way for many miles away is the looming tower of St Botolph’s church, inelegantly  known as The Stump.

Work on the church began in the 14th century and the 272-feet high tower was completed between 1510 and 1520 as a testimony to the immense wealth of the region’s wool trade which in the 13th century was selling three million fleeces a year to European cities in exchange for timber and luxury goods.

In the 1700s Boston supplied one-third of London’s grain from granaries along the banks of the River Haven but today there is an air of abandonment along the wharves and many of the warehouses have been converted to apartments. It still has a fine square lined with Georgian houses but their days of bourgeois opulence have long faded and instead many have been taken over by charity shops and the equivalent of dollar stores. 

It was on the river four miles out of town that the refugees had arranged to be picked up by a ship but their hopes were cruelly dashed. A memorial marks the place where the fugitives were betrayed by the ship’s captain, arrested, and taken back to the town where the constables made a ‘spectacle of them to the multitude that came flocking.’

Their home for the next month was the prison cells of the ancient Guildhall.

The rich merchants of Boston’s Guild of St Mary had spared no expense in its building in the 1390s by importing wood from the Baltic for timbers and even employing Flemish brick makers but they did not waste their money on the cramped cells or the narrow steps which still lead to the daunting, panelled courtroom.

Again, for the historically minded, a fascinating document is on display at the Guildhall Museum which sheds light on the escape attempt.

I chatted to the Museum’s knowledgable heritage manager Luke Skerritt who recently discovered documents in the county’s archive which revealed that far from a spontaneous bid to escape, the refugees actually settled in Boston for at least three months beforehand.

It appears that Boston had many sympathizers to their anti-establishment Separatist cause who were willing to hide them and help the escape. This nonconformity chimes in with the region’s history of dissent, not least during the angst-ridden Brexit debate. Boston was invariably held up as an example of ‘left behind’ Britain, resentful of East Europeans taking local jobs and disturbed by the number of Polish shops in the market square. Unsurprisingly they voted overwhelmingly to leave the European Union - for them it meant freedom from the stifling bureaucracy of the EU establishment. 

The refugees had no vote in the matter. If they wanted freedom they had to use their wits, break the rules, skulk in the hedgerows to hide from authority. A memorial made of rock quarried from Plymouth, MA, recalls one attempt to flee from the banks of the River Humber near Immingham, Lincolnshire, but once more they were betrayed, once again imprisoned. Still they persevered and by the summer of 1608 Bradford wrote: “In the end notwithstanding the storms of opposition they all got over .... And met together again with no small rejoicing.”

Next month: The refugees in Leiden, ‘a fair and beautiful city.’

For news and updates check; info@mayflower400tours.com. 1-800-303-5534

This month’s 17th century wicked word: drawlatch hoyden. Drawlatch an obsolete word meaning a housebreaker or thief and hoyden, a high-spirited, boisterous, or saucy girl.

Richard Holledge’s book, Voices of the Mayflower is out now.

Chepe and cheerful →

This appeared in the New European on March 26, 2020, though not online. The exhibition was cancelled, of course, but the catalogue can be bought online. It’s a real treat which proves that little has changed by way of concerns - and vanity - over the years.

IN 1477 William Caxton, the man who introduced the printing press to England, fixed a slip of paper to a church porch to advertise the Sarum Pie, or the Ordinale ad usum Sarum, a handbook for priests. 

The advertisement reassured clients that the text of the handbook was “truly correct” and that the buyer ‘shal have them good chepe’ (cheaply) and he appealed: ‘Supplico stet cedula’ - please do not remove this notice.

In a delightful exhibition, The Art of Advertising at the Weston Library, Bodleian Libraries, Oxford, scores of images dating from the dense print of Caxton’s notice to the flashy glamour of a 1930s jazz-age flapper in a shiny Morris car offer a glimpse into the spirit of the times - the inconsequential matters of passionate concern that have obsessed us over the centuries such as health and wealth, what to wear, how to look and how to behave. 

Most of the exhibits are from the John Johnson Collection of Printed Ephemera, accumulated by the late Printer to the University at Oxford, who collected about 1.5 million items - mostly single-sheets, billboards, postcards, flyers and posters. Johnson described his hoard as ‘everything which would ordinarily go into the wastepaper basket after use, everything printed which is not actually a book.’ 

What he rescued from the bin may seem trivial today, but as lead curator, Julie Anne Lambert says: “Their messages are now redundant, their immediacy, sometimes even their meaning, lost. And yet, although they were not conceived for that purpose, advertisements bear witness to their age, often encapsulating its zeitgeist.”

The result is quaint, curious, and with the perspective of 21st century sensibilities, absurd and often, downright dishonest: shaving razors for use while hunting? Cadbury’s cocoa more nutritious than meat, eggs and bread combined? And what about the prospect of immortality offered by Blackham’s Vegetable Tonic which promised to ‘utterly destroy’ The Death Microbe? Take your pick.

The exhibition follows the development of printing from the simple letter press of Caxton’s day, to the wood cuts from the 15th and 16th centuries and on to the 19th century with the invention of  chromolithography, a method for making colour prints using chemicals instead of the raised image of a relief. 

In a kind of symbiosis, as the technologies improved they reflected a society which, for some, became increasingly sophisticated and wealthy and to whom the advertisers targeted their wares accordingly.

Like Caxton’s little poster the earliest adverts were densely displayed and came straight to the point. The Elixir Stomachicum; or, The Great Cordial Elixir published in 1698, claimed to be ‘of a Delicate Flavour, and pleasant (though bitter) Taste to be drank at any time , but especially in a Morning in any Liquor, as Ale, Tea, Canary (a sweet fortified wine) etc.’ It promised to ‘ease scurvey, purifie the Blood, Expell Wind, for all indispositions of the Stomach’ and boasted that it ‘excells any One medicine ever made public.’

By the early 19th century thanks to wood engraving, a refinement of the wood cut, these wordy ads were increasingly replaced by dramatic posters such as Lotteries End for Ever in which the message from a strident bell ringer is picked out in bold red and black lettering which could easily be read by passers by in the street.  

Simple, direct, but with the introduction of chromolithography, the range and versatility of the displays moved up several notches - and none more than with the promotion of Pears soap in 1887. Thomas Barratt, managing director of the soap company bought the copyright to A Child’s World by the Royal Academician John Everett Millais which depicted a boy gazing at bubbles as they floated off into the unknown. Barratt cheekily added a bar of Pears soap, the brand name and a new title, Bubbles. 

Millais was horrified but without a copyright had no choice but to accept the inevitable as his re-worked image became one of the most enduring adverts until the 1920s, appearing on billboards and in books more than three million times.

A soap rival, Sunlight, played a similar game with Charles Burton Barber, a regular exhibitor at the RA transforming A Girl with Dogs into The Family Wash and a painting by Academician William Powell Frith, A New Frock, was transformed by Sunlight into a child holding up her clothing with the slogan So Clean.

Being clean and busying oneself with the housework was a constant theme and the adverts of the 19th century are reminders that this was a world where the affluent had servants who, of course, were happy with their lot and eager to use new products such as Lutticke’s original cold water soap. The ad shows  contrasting images, one with two servants coughing in the steam and weighed down by the misery of washing day, and in the other, dancing for joy once they used the soap which promised ‘no heat, no steam, no chapped hands.’

In For spring cleaning use Calverts, the lady of the house simpers admiringly as her servant cheerily washes down the floor with a damp rag, a bucket and the all-new No.5 carbolic soap.

By the end of the century the world of women is changing. Not only do the advertisers target them as the person in charge of the household budget but also, then as now, a pretty female face makes a more appealing pitch to the household member who actually provides the money. The husband. 

Some themes remain familiar to readers of today’s women’s magazines; the Royal Worcester Adjusto corsets for the ‘generous or fuller figure’ promises ‘luxurious freedom and comfort’ and Figuroids tablets are marketed as ‘the only method by which it is possible to remove fat from the body.’

But the ads also recognise that women were also gaining some independence.  

Vote for Nixey’s Boot Polish combines a reference to the suffragette movement with a, frankly,  deranged-looking woman stepping out confidently in her shiny boots clutching a poster while the right of women to smoke is encouraged by a tobacco maker with the words; ‘It is now fashionable for ladies to smoke dainty little cigarettes and why not?’  

In 1908 a confident young woman, independent and free spirited, strides out as Miss Remington who enthuses over the portable typewriter she is carrying - ‘delightful to operate and so compact.’ Though it does rather confirm her role as secretary - the boardroom is some way off for the Miss Remingtons of this world.  

By now - the end of the Victorian era and the start of the 20th - the advertisers tug at the purse strings by using glamour and celebrity. Mennen’s borated talcum powder claims the endorsement of such stellar names as actresses Mrs Patrick Campbell and Ellen Terry as well as opera singers Adelina Patti and Dame Nellie Melba with the claim,‘The above celebrities all recommend “Mennen.”’  

Ellen Terry was happy to pose for Koko for the Hair, vouchsafing she had used the product for many years and ‘can assure my friends that it stops my hair from falling out... and is the most pleasant dressing imaginable.’

With no control over content - the Advertising Authority launched only in 1962 - the royal family, the ultimate in celebrity, was exploited with scant regard to propriety. 

Matchless metal polish managed to combine the death of the Queen while celebrating her successor, the newly-crowned Edward VII. ‘A “Matchless” Reign and a “Matchless” Metal Polish’ it declared and exhorted consumers to ‘BE LOYAL! DON’T PURCHASE FOREIGN POLISHES’. 

Victoria looks on severely as the public is being encouraged to ‘Ask for Golfer Oats.’ The makers capitalised on her diamond jubilee year (1897) by proclaiming that their porridge was ‘the latest development of jubilee year ... unequalled for Infants and Invalids’ and claiming that their porridge and the Queen together were ‘the two safeguards of the constitution’. 

By the 1920s the advertisements had long substituted laborious accounts of a product’s virtues by concentrating on the brand’s image - often with examples of stylish commercial art.

Aubrey Beardsley drew posters for the literary periodical, The Yellow Book, and Dudley Hardy did as much as anyone to influence the new style with his poster of an effervescent girl dressed in yellow advertising a weekly magazine, To-day.

The Beggarstaffs - a pseudonym for designers William Nicholson and James Pryde - brought strong outlines to Rowntree’s Elect Coffee, and Maurice Greiffenhagen used only three blocks of colour - red, black and off-white - to make an impact with an elegant lady reading the Illustrated Pall Mall Budget. 

Perhaps the most distinctive of the commercial artists was John Hassall who added humour to simple depictions of everyday life. A bald man scratching his head, searching for his Andrews Liver Salt which remains unseen in his back pocket, is a classic. ‘I Must have left it behind’ reads the slogan.

For most of the years covered by the exhibition the impetus for the advertisement came from the printer or the owner of the product or store but by the 1930s, the advertising agency was taking over, offering a complete professional service. One company boasted that it required only ‘details of the story you wish to tell, the client you wish to reach, and the openings you wish to develop’ for it to launch a campaign. 

In consequence the hidden persuaders of the ad world became a multi-million pound industry. Today the United Kingdom ranks fourth among the world’s advertising markets with expenditure estimated at £21.19 billion in 2016 and, as one might expect earnings in the industry are also high with ad giants Saatchi and Saatchi, for example, topping the pay league with income per head at £172,487, according to trade magazine Campaign in November 2018. 

In fact, vast amounts of money have washed around the industry for years. In 1863 one Thomas Holloway, seller of pills and ointment, was at pains to explain the value of advertising because he was not prepared to settle for a ‘limited reputation’ but instead ‘to be content with nothing less than girdling the globe  with Depôts of my remedies.’ 

To achieve that in that one year alone, he invested £40,000. About £5 million in today’s money. 

Even Saatchi and Saatchi would be impressed by that.

Poor social spacing but clean hands. 1890s

If only…

Then as now; policeman on the case

From 1884, bringing joy to washing day

Following the ‘brainsick conspirators’ to Gainsborough

This is hidden behind the Trans_Atlantic paywall of the Plymouth, Massachusetts, newspaper owned by the Wicked Local chain. It’s one of a series relating to the Mayflower anniversary and to the book Voices of the Mayflower.

There’s no denying, the pews in St Wilfrid’s need a spruce up. So does the peeling paint on the walls of this ancient building in Scrooby, Nottinghamshire. Hardly surprising, it dates back to the 15th century.

Of course, for many Mayflower descendants and aficionados, Scrooby is where it all began; where the likes of William Bradford and William Brewster developed their Separatist beliefs and from where they resolved to flee England in the fall of 1607.

This month, we follow the footsteps of these ‘brainsick conspirators’, as the Archbishop of York damned them, as they set off on their way to escape from the port of Boston, 60 miles away.

But, first, back to those peeling walls. Last month, the vicar’s husband, a colorful figure sporting a battered bushwhacker hat and paint-spattered clothes was buffing up the pews with a brush and a can of varnish. Even the benches preserved since the 16th Century on which William Brewster himself might have prayed are in need of TLC.

No one’s fault; many churches in the UK - maybe most - are under-used and under-funded, but it is 2020, it is the 400th anniversary of the great voyage and St Wilfrid’s should be looking its best.

So, just a thought, if there are any descendants of Brewster and Bradford, indeed anyone with Mayflower connections they might want to rally round to cheer up this essential part of the story and contact  the vicar by email - revjackiemckenna@yahoo.co.uk.

(An irrelevant aside; the previous vicar of Scrooby was also a woman and she won fame as one of the critics on the UK version of Gogglebox. She left the parish and starred in Celebrity Master Chef).

Before we leave Scrooby it is worth making a detour of a few miles to Bassetlaw Museum in the attractive market town of Retford, in north Nottinghamshire which has recently opened a small gallery devoted to the Mayflower. It is very informative, and nicely presented with co-curator and enthusiast, Isabelle Richards, in costume ready to explain all.

Back on the fugitives’ trail. From Scrooby the pilgrims set off by foot and boat along the River Ryton, which runs by Brewster’s manor, into the well-named River Idle and to the Trent.

They might have tramped across meadows filled with exotically named plants such as bird’s-foot-trefoil, devil’s-bit scabious and sneezewort wildflowers but most of these meadows are now long gone. Today the way is by car and the horizon is blurred by smoke belching power stations which like much of the old steel and mining industry will be closed to meet the demands of climate change restrictions. 

The runaways made their way to Gainsborough where more fellow travelers were waiting to join them on the perilous adventure 

Despite being 55 miles inland it was one of the busiest ports in the country with wharves bustling with shipping and warehouses full of wool waiting to be exported to Europe.

The town has a rich history. During the occupation of Britain by the Romans a canal was built in about AD 210 which flows, straight as die from the Trent at nearby Torksey to Lincoln - a route the fugitives must surely have followed.

Gainsborough was briefly the capital of England after it had been conquered in 1013 by a Danish king, one Sweyn Forkbeard. A ferocious figure he had spent at least 20 years pillaging and plundering England but he ruled only for five weeks from Christmas Day in 1013 until his death on February 3, 1014> He was succeeded by another figure for England’s past mythology, King Canute (Cnut the Great) who, according to legend, tried to command the waves from coming in with the tide. Some say his feet were soaked by a tidal bore which races upstream in spring and others believe that Gainsborough was the setting for George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss and it was this flood which swept away the hero Tom.

History came clattering up to Gainsborough’s gates again on the July, 28, 1643, during the English Civil War when the Royalists who supported Charles 1 were routed by the Parliamentarians, only for the Royalists to strike and drive off the smaller Parliamentary force.

For Bradford and his apprehensive band Gainsborough was something of a haven, a hotbed of dissenters who shared similar radical views as the Scrooby contingent. One of their leaders was Thomas Helwys who would meet with the sixty or seventy Separatists in secret in Gainsborough Old Hall which was owned by one Sir William Hickman, a sympathizer to the cause.

It was Helwys who helped organize the eventual escape to Amsterdam - as Separatist leader John Robinson wrote, ’If any brought oars, he brought sails’ - but his extreme views landed him in a London Prison and he died in 1616 aged 40. 

It is fair to say, there is tremendous row between local historians over the involvement of Hickman and whether he did indeed support the Separatists but there can be no disagreement over the glories of the Old Hall, where perhaps the escapers huddled, waiting to continue their journey. 

Hickman paid £5,200 in 1596 for the building which is more than 500 years old and one of the finest medieval manor houses in England. (In today’s prices about $ 907,000).

It is a fine sight with its worn brick and black and white timber frame and the main hall with its elaborate vaulted timber roof is redolent of councils of war and grand banquets. Historians suggest that Scrooby Manor, now a shadow of its former self, might well have looked like this - which would explain why Queen Elizabeth 1 coveted it as a royal residence and offered to pay £40 a year for 70 years for the privilege. She was dissuaded by the Archbishop of York who ‘pleaded and prayed with tears, protested and begged,’ for her not to sign the document.

The kitchen is suitably begrimed, as one might expect from one of the most complete medieval kitchens in England with its two open fireplaces, each large enough to roast an ox.

A little different to the fare in the two pubs nearby - the Sweyn Forkbeard and the Canute - though the Canute does compete with a four tier burger. With fries.  

• Best bet for travellers following the pilgrims’ progress check info@mayflower400tours.com. 1-800-303-5534 or contact local guide and historian Adrian Gray; mail@www.pilgrimsandprophets.co.uk

• This month’s 17th century wicked word.

Noddy meacock. Noddy is a crude reference to anyone with a mental problem. Meacock is a cowardly or effeminate man.

Richard Holledge’s book, Voices of the Mayflower is out on February 28. 

Next month; “A large number of them had to take passage from Boston in Lincolnshire ...” William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation.

Old Hall, Gainsborough

Having a Deco at the seaside

British seaside - rainy, fish and soggy chips, deckchairs. That’s the caricature but for a brief flowering in the 1920s and 30s the resorts were glamorous and stylish. Read more in the New European - all seven pages!

https://www.theneweuropean.co.uk/top-stories/british-art-deco-paintings-that-lined-britain-s-seafront-1-6535238

From Austerfield to Boston via Scrooby, Gainsborough and Lincoln; the Mayflower trail

This was hidden behind the Wall Street Journal paywall. Nothing against that; just too mean to cough up. Here’s a piece following the Separatist fugitives on their first attempt to flee persecution in England and find freedom of thought in Holland.

I traced their footsteps when researching my book on the Mayflower - Voices of the Mayflower, the saints, strangers and sly knaves who changed the world. Out now!

March 13, 2020 

KING HENRY VIII of England had no doubts. In 1536, faced with uppity “traitors and rebels,” he dubbed the county of Lincolnshire as one of the “most brute and beestelie [beastly] of the hole realme.” It was a tad unfair but, even today, the county is not an immediate choice as a vacation destination. It’s a part of northern England that drivers speed through, unimpressed by the big skies and widescreen sunsets and unaware of the historic secrets to be discovered in the villages, great halls and solid stone churches.

This year presents a compelling reason to visit: 2020 is the 400th anniversary of the Mayflower voyage to New England, and it was in that ‘beastly’ county and the neighboring districts of Nottinghamshire and Yorkshire where the seeds of religious dissidence were sown, leading eventually to that momentous adventure.

Where to start? The trail begins in the village of Austerfield, some 160 miles due north of London. It ends some 60 miles away near Boston, Lincolnshire, where, in 1607, the dissidents made their first abortive attempt to flee persecution and settle in the tolerant Netherlands. Eventually they succeeded and moved first to Amsterdam and then to the city of Leiden until, disillusioned, they decided to settle in America. After their own ship, the Speedwell, sprang a leak, they were forced to sail on the Mayflower from Plymouth, England.

It was in Austerfield that William Bradford, who was to become the governor of Plymouth, New England, was born in 1590 and where he lived in his grandfather’s house, which today is a modest private home. There’s nothing picture-postcard, thatch-and-timber about the village, but the 11th-century church of St Helena’s is a simple limestone building with a little bell tower and a font in which the boy might have been baptized in the spring of 1590. The church is an oasis of calm with its graveyard of lopsided gravestones, looming conifers and a view across empty countryside that has changed little since young Bradford’s day.

The boy’s beliefs in the radical movement of Separatism were fired by William Brewster, who, as postmaster, lived in Scrooby Manor a little more than 2 miles away. The manor had become a hotbed of dissent, and Bradford would trudge along the cart tracks to join his mentor. The manor was demolished around 1636, though one wing was renovated as a private farmhouse in 1750. The church of St. Wilfrid’s is still standing, where, it’s said, Brewster himself may have prayed on two well-worn pews, preserved from the 16th century. The Scrooby congregation often walked the 7 miles to All Saints’ Church, Babworth, to seek inspiration from one of the movement’s most charismatic speakers, Richard Clyfton.

It’s an atmospheric, shadowy spot with a churchyard covered in snowdrops in late winter and daffodils in spring. Inside—forgive the irreverence—you will find the force is with you; a well-worn stone figure in the knave looks uncannily like Yoda, the seer of Star Wars.

These churches are humble places of worship—some of the pews are in need of varnish, the paint is often peeling on walls, the floors uneven, with memorial stones smoothed down by generations of footsteps. There’s the slight damp smell that pervades ancient buildings. Let the imagination roam; conjure up the voices raised in pietistic passion.

It is possible to follow in Bradford’s footsteps along the 9 miles or so from Austerfield to Babworth, though the cart tracks and byways have been mostly replaced by tarmac. Walk or drive, this might be the moment to pause. Retford, one mile away, has recently opened a Pilgrims Gallery in the Bassetlaw Museum, dedicated to the Mayflower story.

The journey is far from over. It is likely they walked—or sailed—to Gainsborough, where they probably gathered in the Old Hall. Tucked away in back streets, it is one of the best preserved timber-frame manor houses in the U.K., with a spectacular vaulted hall and a vast kitchen and fireplaces big enough to roast an ox.

This is the moment for those with stout boots and hearts to embrace the inner Pilgrim and get hiking. You can follow the River Trent as it snakes its way to Torksey Lock about 5 miles away, where it meets the Fossdyke canal, built by the Romans in AD 120; on to Lincoln, another 10 miles. Boston is 30 miles away along the banks of the River Witham; you can amble through empty marshland with fishermen, butterflies and birds for company. The trail is long, but it is flat.

The fugitives would have slunk past Lincoln for fear of arrest, but this is most definitely not a place to bypass. Lincoln’s old town is a delight of cobbled streets, antique shops and cafes, dominated by the cathedral, a confection of Gothic flying buttresses, ribbed vaults and pointed arches. From Aug. 1 to Sept. 30, its Wren Library will display writings from the Mayflower adventure such as an original copy of “Good News from New England,” an account of life in the settlement, written in 1624 by Pilgrim stalwart Edward Winslow. Seeing its frayed pages brings a flutter to the soul.

Let’s be realistic: Few will walk the walk. Most will rent a car to drive one hour to Boston or join one of the tours organized by Mayflower 400, which is supervising the anniversary events and outings (mayflower400uk.org). In Boston stands the looming 16th-century tower of St. Botolph’s church, better known, rather inelegantly, as the Stump. Stretching 272 feet high, it was a landmark for seafarers and travelers long before the Pilgrims arrived. And on the bleak banks of the River Haven a memorial marks the spot where the fugitives were seized as they boarded the ship they hired to take them to freedom. They were flung into the cramped cells of the town’s 14th-century Guildhall and forced to face the magistrates in the courtroom—all still well preserved.

Nothing could deter them, however. By the summer of 1608 most of them had escaped England, and Bradford declared: “In the end... they all got over... and met together again with no small rejoicing.”

THE LOWDOWN

Getting There and Around

LNER trains run from London Kings Cross to Retford (about 80 minutes one-way) and Lincoln (two hours). Fares vary enormously, so book in advance on Trainline (thetrainline.com). To make the most of this latter-day pilgrimage check out mayflower400tours.com for guided tours, hotels and details of key sights, or contact local guides such as Adrian Gray (pilgrimsandprophets.co.uk), who will explain the history, knows where the best pubs are and, above all, will ensure the churches are open. The local tourist boards, notably Visit Nottinghamshire (visit-nottinghamshire.co.uk) and Visit Lincolnshire (visitlincolnshire.com) can also offer useful guidance.

Staying There

The White Hart hotel, in the heart of Lincoln’s old town, offers decent rooms, a bar and a grill that serves a solid full English breakfast, complete with black pudding and beans. Some bedroom windows look out over the cathedral, while the 11th-century castle is just across the square (from about $162 a night, whitehart-lincoln.co.uk). Boston also has a White Hart hotel (no relation), set on the market square, round the corner from the Guildhall and the Stump. For a not-so-light lunchtime snack at the hotel restaurant, try the locally made Boston sausage with toasted brioche and red onion marmalade (from $106 a night, whitehartboston.com). In Retford— a handy base if you’re planning to visit the villages of Austerfield, Scrooby and Babworth—book Ye Olde Bell Inn, which comes with a spa (from $115 a night, yeoldebell-hotel.co.uk).

A view from over here... ramblings on Mayflower 400

In the first of a regular series of columns from the other side of the Atlantic discussing the people, places and events that led to the Mayflower voyage from an English perspective. The author’s novel Voices of the Mayflower; the saints, strangers and sly knaves who changed the world is out in February.

You might be disappointed. The village of Austerfield is far from ye olde English picture postcard image of timber and thatch one would like it to be.

Without wishing to offend, it is a hum drum now as it was when a young William Bradford sat in the pews of the village church of St Helena’s, clutching his Book of Common Prayer and murmuring his prayers.

On one side of the church a bungalow, on the other ruined farm buildings. Opposite, a maker of gravestones (You know what real estate agents say about location) and almost hidden by a tall hedge, a factory making carbon-based products. The traffic is heavy. 

No, this little settlement in the north of England does not send the pulses racing despite the welcome in the Mayflower Inn with its four bedrooms and a menu offering fish and chips and a chef’s special. 

But the church is a joy, a little oasis of calm with its graveyard of conifers and lopsided gravestones. It dates back to 1080 when it was built by a descendant of one of William the Conqueror’s invading army and boasts a little bell tower and a font in which the boy could have been baptized in the spring of 1590. It was reunited with its the lead liner in the 19th century after years of use watering animals. Bizarrely, graphic carvings of naked women known as sheela na gigs which were used to used to ward off death, evil and demons hover over the portals. 

Stand in the churchyard and imagine the lad, yet to be gripped by the religious fervour which was drive him eventually to become the governor of the Plymouth Plantation, as he gazes out over flat, treeless fields, which still stretch uninterrupted to the Lincolnshire Wolds, low and blue on the horizon. In the fields men and children, some as young as seven, would be tending oxen, sheep and cattle on its common grazing lands; these days the fields are given over to wheat, sugar beet, potatoes and cabbages.

He would have heard nightingales chirruping, the boom of a bittern and the miaow of buzzards. Barn owls would have swooped out of the night sky - all rare sounds today.

Among today’s houses is the remains of the manor owned by his grandfather. Built in the early 1500s and the largest farm in the village, it was saved from demolition over the centuries by history-minded volunteers and is now a private home.  

In Bradford’s day villagers, about 120 of them, lived in mean, smoke-filled houses with a hearth and chimney and perhaps a ladder into an attic. Crowded too, with women giving birth to eight to ten children of which five or six survived.

There was little opportunity to escape their lot. Everyone in Austerfield would have been subject to the immutable class system which dominated 17th century England with the aristocracy at the top and at the bottom the 25 percent who scratched a living in the fields.

The husbandmen, or farmers, working on the land owned by the likes of Bradford’s grandfather would be lucky to earn £15 a year and laborers might pick up one shilling a day.

If this was not grueling enough the population was at constant threat from the plague which helped keep the average life expectancy to about 39 years old.

To get a sense of the Bradford’s small world, walk, drive or meander in his steps to the manor in nearby Scrooby where he studied the scriptures at the feet of William Brewster, one of the Separatist movements most inspiring leaders.This is where the idea to flee persecution - ‘an adventure almost desperate’ - began for him and his fellow believers. 

He would have trudged across the fields or followed the banks of the sluggish River Idle to its juncture with the River Ryton, crossed by the mill - still there, if a little decrepit looking - and knocked at the door of Brewster’s mediaeval manor tucked away at the end of a lane. It was demolished in 1636-7 though one wing was renovated as a farmhouse in 1750. 

The church of St Wilfrid’s is still standing but, as the vicar’s husband, busy varnishing the pews, confessed, it is in need of a lick of paint today. True, but the crowded churchyard, the ancient pen where stray animals were rounded up and the well-worn pews on which Brewster may have prayed again, help tell a little of the Mayflower saga.

Next stop; All Saints' Church in Babworth, seven miles away where the Separatists crowded into the sturdy 15th century nave to listen to the iconoclastic preacher Richard Clyfton railing against the church’s ‘vile ceremonies and vain canons and decrees’.  

The building fell into ruin but was restored in 1830 and again in 1864 and has a tower steeple with three bells and a clock, a nave, chancel and a handsome porch. The inmates of a nearby prison presented the church with a matchstick model of the Mayflower and a painting shows our seekers after truth walking across the fields to prayer. Older members of the congregation reckon they were modelled on the prison staff of the day while others will be intrigued by a damaged figure in the nave which looks just like the Jedi master Yoda in Star Wars. Proof that the force is with them, perhaps.  

The graveyard is shaded by gloomy conifers but last week it was lit up by a carpet of snowdrops. Did Bradford pick his way carefully between them, recalling how Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these? 

Perhaps he was not given to such fancies but the visitor should try to conjure up the sound of prayers and the passion of their beliefs.

You won’t be disappointed. 

Next; on the trail of the great escape

Seventeenth century insult of the month. Slubberdegullion druggles. Slabberdegullion from the Dutch  overslubberen, to wade through mud or the English slabber, to drool. Druggle, task made infinitely more difficult by a state of intoxication. A combination of the words drunk and struggle. Definitely an insult.

That was Life

These photographs from the long-lost (and lamented) Life magazine capture the era of US supremacy in the 20th century. Before someone decided to make the place great again. They also remind us how the role of the photographer has been diminished in contemporary newspapers.

Here’s the piece in the New European;

https://www.theneweuropean.co.uk/top-stories/richard-holledge-on-life-magazine-photo-journalism-1-6433112

Experiment in Leningrad

The Scarlet Flower

In the late 1950s, the Soviet Union had a spring in its collectivised step. Censorship had softened; premier Nikita Krushchev had encouraged a scintilla of freedom by permitting cultural exchanges with the west. In 1961, Yuri Gagarin created a galvanising upsurge in national pride by becoming the first man to reach space.

Into this relatively tractable atmosphere stepped the London gallerist Eric Estorick, an avid collector of modern Italian art, who was hoping to reconnect with the culture his Jewish parents had left behind in 1905 when they emigrated to the US. Visiting Leningrad (now St Petersburg) in 1960, he met the artist Anatoli Kaplan, who introduced him to a group of talented friends known as the Leningrad Experimental Graphics Laboratory (LEGL), the graphics section of the state-run Union of Artists. 

So impressed was Estorick that he bought hundreds of their works — some for as little as nine roubles each — and staged an exhibition in May 1961 of paintings by 27 of them in his new Grosvenor Gallery back home. For the first time since the Russian Revolution, western art lovers were able to see contemporary art from the USSR — and, perhaps more telling, discover works that defied the glum stereotype of Socialist Realism. Instead, the art historian Nikolai Kononikhin has written, “they found an unexpected vitality and humanity free from ideological cliché”. 

Lithography from Leningrad, currently at London’s Estorick Collection, is a small but perfectly focused display of works by 15 of the artists who featured in the original show — the first time they have been exhibited together in the UK since the 1960s. The catalogue gives a wider insight into their work, with many more examples of paintings by the artists who strove together, elbow to elbow, in a scruffy basement cluttered with easels, presses and the stones used for printing. It was, wrote the Leningrad poet Lev Mochalov, “an island of the blessed”. (A comprehensive exhibition of their work will be held in St Petersburg next November.)

Kaplan already had a reputation for designing posters and illustrating books. His work is characterised by his atmospheric black-and-white lithographs of Jewish life. Here, we see “Summer Garden”, a poetic, rather wistful scene of a boy pulling another on a sled beside railings and a foreboding urn-shaped tomb. Estorick snapped Kaplan up for a solo show later in 1961, which was so successful that The Burlington Magazine was moved to declare: “They are so brilliantly good that in comparison Chagall seems like a sloppy amateur.”

If Kaplan was the best known of the collective, Boris Ermolaev was the father figure — “like a holy elder”, declared fellow artist Valentin Kurdov — to whom many turned for help and encouragement. Like Kaplan, Ermolaev stayed true to his roots throughout his career, rarely deviating from charming, stylised scenes of peasant life represented in simple primary colours — images of a stone mason, women doing embroidery or resting from their labours during the harvest. They capture a Russian world that was disappearing even then. 

As the 1960s progressed and the effects of the second world war and the Stalin era diminished, awareness of the outside world within Russia grew — particularly in the arts scene. Books and journals slipped past the censors containing revelations of European movements such as Post-Impressionism and Expressionism, which brought a dose of modernism into the folk art traditions the Laboratory embraced. 

Among the most significant influences were Matisse and his contemporary the French Fauvist-cum-Naturalist Albert Marquet, as the vivacious still lifes of Aleksandr Vedernikov and Mikhail Sculyari testify. In the words of Aleksandra Yakobson, the ferment of creativity in the Leningrad basement amounted to “a hotbed of free thinking”. 

Yakobson herself produced a series of engaging images, such as the child we see in “The Scarlet Flower”, pink-cheeked and artless, about to inhale the perfume of the blossom. She also portrayed cheery family groups, a drunken musician being bundled home and a nude emerging from the bath looking clean and wholesome. 

The work of Vera Matyukh, one of many women who were part of the collective, is altogether bolder both in subject and style. Her images depict women in urban settings and as independent as she was, such as the spirited “Petrol Station Queen” or the magenta-lipped “Mother”. 

Having survived the blockade of Leningrad with a newborn baby in her arms, Matyukh was evacuated to Kazan in south-west Russia before moving back to Leningrad at the end of the war, where she joined the LEGL. “I remember it all with joy,” she wrote. “Besides art, which was the most important, there was a lot of joyfulness, dancing, skiing trips and excursions. All this was part of the life.”

Given state strictures, Soviet artists were required to take inspiration from their own heritage and immediate surroundings. Yet one artist, Gerta Nemenova, was allowed to study art in Paris where she had classes with Fernand Léger and met the pioneering avant-garde artist Natalia Goncharova, who had moved there from Russia before the 1917 Revolution. Nemenova developed a style that was quite different from the others; her sketches of writers and actors, mostly in black and white, are done with expressive and deceptively simple strokes, which captured her subjects with a forceful immediacy.

Only one artist featured here, Grigor Israilevich, rocked the political boat. His sinister image“Owl and Hourglass” is part of a series about time slipping away, but he also painted a fierce monochrome series entitled “Rhinoceros”, inspired by the Romanian-French playwright Eugène Ionesco’s 1959 satire on fascism and mob mentality. 

Israilevich, who died in 1999, was also the only one who ventured into abstract art, with angry, expressionist works attacking the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.The Union of Artists was finally disbanded in 1992, the year after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the LEGL was closed. By then, most of the group had died or moved on. The island of the blessed was no more.

Lithography from Leningrad: Eric Estorick’s Adventure in Soviet Art is at the Estorick Collection, London, until December 22

The curious world of George Stubbs, horse whisperer

Milton Keynes used to be mocked for its concrete cows and empty boulevards. Now it is one of the fastest growing towns in England and boasts an admirable gallery displaying not cows by the glorious horses of George Stubbs. Not be missed.

https://www.theneweuropean.co.uk/top-stories/macabre-story-george-stubbs-under-skin-subjects-1-6352195

Latent Orient

Brilliant headline from the New European to go with this piece about show at the British Museum on oriental art.

Colonial baggage is not the only take away from western depictions of the east

Frederick Bridgman The Prayer

PUBLISHED: 16:26 30 October 2019

Western artistic depictions of the East come freighted with colonial baggage. But they also show a powerful, inquisitive passion for another world as RICHARD HOLLEDGE reports

A group of men are gathered around a coffee shop in the ancient city of Jaffa. They sit, they stand, they gossip. The convivial moment was captured in a watercolour by the artist David Roberts in 1839 and is one of many scenes of everyday - but exotic - life featured in the British Museum's new exhibition: Inspired by the east: how the Islamic world influenced western art.

As the title suggests, the exhibition attempts to redress perceptions of the east as represented by 19th century artists like Roberts by demonstrating how design, ceramics and fashion in Europe were, in fact, influenced by eastern craftsmen over 500 years.

It also provokes discussion about the meaning of Orientalism. In 1812 the poet Byron defined an orientalist as someone who was an expert in the languages, history and philosophy of the east. During the 19th century Orientalism had become an art movement with western artists visiting the Middle East and North Africa in great numbers and producing studies of a strangely foreign culture in engaging, figurative works bursting with colour and energy.

This imagery - or the putative meaning behind it - was challenged by the Palestinian-American academic Edward Said in his 1978 book Orientalism in which he argued that such portrayals were symptomatic of a colonial view of the east, a lazy stereotyping of an inferior people with a culture that was backward and dangerous.

He argued that many western governments felt they had the right to decide what happened in the east - as if the entire population could be "shaken up like peanuts in a jar".

He wrote: "In the process, the uncountable sediments of history, a dizzying variety of peoples, languages, experiences and cultures, are swept aside or ignored, relegated to the sand heap along with the treasures ground into meaningless fragments..."

Of course, that 20th century perspective would have been incomprehensible to Victorians who would indeed have reckoned that not only did Britannia rule the waves and hold sway in the Middle East but had every right to do so.

That attitude of effortless superiority can be summed up with one of the smallest exhibits, that of an 1817 music sheet for a burlesque performance entitled Their Customs are Very Peculiar.

Take the Roberts water colour. The Victorian art lover would have taken the scene on face value, an attractive glimpse of an alien world, but a quote from the text accompanying the work reads: "Wherever there are pipes, coffees and Mussulmans, it is the resort of the idler."

That would have been accepted with complacent acquiescence by 19th century Europeans but today it would be considered a patronising sneer and one that supports Said's argument.

Debunking such stereotypes is at the heart of the exhibition, which is a collaboration with the Kuala Lumpur-based Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia (IAMM).

A map of the Bosphorous Straits which separate Europe from Asia at Istanbul is dated from 1588 and with its references to other states and distant peoples is a reminder that for centuries both the Safavid empire in Iran (1502-1736) and the Ottomans who dominated the region for 600 years until 1922 were at least as powerful as their western counterparts.

Inevitably, examples of sophisticated design and radiant craftsmanship made their way from east to west, such as ceramics from Iznik, in Turkey, which European artisans did their best to emulate. A plate produced in Veneto, Italy, in 1600 pales into lacklustre mediocrity compared with the original from the same period with its a floral pattern ablaze with vivid blues and golds.

The influence of the Ottoman craftsmen was acknowledged by leading French ceramist Théodore Deck who copied a plate from about 1530-40 in ravishing colours and almost matched it for quality. Almost. One can only marvel at the translucent quality of a mosque lamp from the northern Indian Mamluk dynasty with its gilded and enamelled glass, or the deep cerulean of a Safavid vase. No wonder they were in such demand and how eagerly they were imitated.

Wall tiles inspired by Islamic patterns and calligraphy became hugely popular in the Europe and North America of the 19th century. Perhaps the best-known examples of their use can be found in Leighton House, London, where tiles with turquoise flowers and birds etched around with Arabic script line the walls of the Arab Hall. Many were purchased by the House's owner, the artist Sir Frederic Leighton, during his travels in Cairo and Damascus and the rest were faithfully copied by ceramicist William de Morgan to create a house as "beautiful as a poet's dream".

Tiles decorated the smoking rooms and steam baths of the wealthy in Victorian England - later, they were even fitted on the Titanic - and inspired the decor of the Great Exhibition of 1851, which was coloured in primary shades of red, yellow and blue in a nod to the Moorish palette displayed in Granada's Alhambra.

Islamic crafts were all the rage at the Exhibition, with jugs, pots and filigreed jewellery catching the eye and wall hangings which were judged to be in "the gorgeous taste of Persia". Meanwhile across Europe the demand for Iznik faience ware in plates and vases boomed and the well-to-do lusted after silks from Safavid Persia to use in carpets and clothing.

In 18th century France purses made out of 100-year-old silk were turned into elegant embroidered fashion accessories. No high society lady could be without one.

Fascinating costume books from Turkey by European and local artists not only entranced the fashion conscious west but also revealed a society of some sophistication.

They were often used as aids by the artists who only fleetingly visited the east - if at all. Delacroix, who restricted his visits to Algeria, often relied on them for his sketches and the elegant robes worn by Cesare dell'Acqua's soulful harem woman (Oriental Woman Burning incense) were most likely copied in the comfort of his Brussels studio.

Most, however, did make the journey and spent time in Egypt, Tangiers and Morocco in order to understand their subject, and the results are works vibrant with colour and detailed observation which conjure up an idealised world where poverty and hardship rarely spoils the view.

Perhaps best known is John Frederick Lewis, who lived in Cairo and adopted the dress and customs of the Egyptians. His friend, the novelist William Thackeray, declared the artist was enjoying a life of "Arabian Nights glamour ... a dreamy, hazy, lazy, tobaccofied life".

His portraits of Arab chiefs, a stoic market stall owner, and A Mamlook Bey, a portrait of a desert warrior, are among the most striking, not least, for their authentic appearance.

But they are not what they seem. The characters in the Lewis painting are, in fact, self portraits. He is the stall holder, the warrior prince. What is one to make of that? Is it an example of western superiority, does he consider himself better suited to the role than an actual Egyptian or, rather, is he eager to prove he embraced both sides of the cultural divide?

Perhaps, more prosaically, he wanted to save on the cost of models.

What he did share with his fellow Orientalists was quite simply the passion to portray this world of endless fascination with as much verve as they could muster.

The British Museum exhibition has devoted one wall to paintings divided into religious works, street scenes and military figures.

The Hajj by Alfred Dehodencq is a tumultuous scene of pilgrims heading for Mecca with drums beating and cymbals clashing as they stumble along the shores of the Red Sea with their camels and horses and flags held high.

Altogether quieter, In The Madrasa by the Austrian Ludwig Deutsch shows children undergoing their religious education while the Swiss Otto Pilny captures the rawness of the desert with tribesmen on their knees in Evening Prayers in the Desert.

Frederick Bridgman, improbably a native of Alabama, USA, movingly captures a private moment in the mosque in The Prayer. The worshipper, hands apart in supplication, eyes raised beseechingly, stands out from the deep shadows in what is an intense expression of faith, painted with respect and emotion.

Bridgman was a stickler for detail. The man has followed the custom by removing his shoes and, as Bridgman wrote, "the soles of which are put together in order that the profane dust of the street shall not contaminate the sacred precincts".

He disapproved of those who failed to show the same respect. "A French officer in top-boots once showed me a mosque, walking about as if the place belonged to him, and told me to keep on my shoes."

No hint of patronising imperialism here.

Arab Warriors by the German Christian Schreyer has armed horsemen so vigorous they seem about to stampede off the gallery wall in a flurry of heat and dust while The Guard by the Spaniard Antonio Maria Fabrés y Costa is a tremendous character framed by guns and swords. Not a man to cross.

It is the street scenes of ordinary folk, the world of mosques and markets, that bring the Orient of the 19th century alive. The fine detail of The Pottery Seller by Alphons Mielich illuminates the busyness of market day; The Dice Players by Rudolf Weisse is photographic in its minutiae.

Jean-Léon Gérome's bucolic scene of husband and wife in Egypt perched comfortably on their cart as the oxen tramp around threshing the corn is highly idealised with bright yellow corn and just a fleck of cloud to disturb the clear skies. It is an idyllic scene free from drudgery, but here's what a contemporary writer and photographer had to say about scenes like this, quoting an Ottoman official: "The peasant is a bit less than an animal; a bit more than a plant."

Grist to Edward Said's mill; as was the portrayal of the harem, catnip to the artist as an excuse to paint women in various states of undress and boost their earnings by producing languorous soft porn for Victorian gentlemen.

The examples on show are all very decorous. The Hhareem by Lewis depicts a new slave from Ethiopia being presented to the pasha in his luxurious dwelling to see if she is a worthy addition to his collection of concubines, but there is nothing more racy than a bare shoulder.

As a corrective to the representation of women which, harem apart, is non-existent in this collection, works by three contemporary female artists round off the exhibition. Shirin Neshat, an Iranian-American artist addresses oppression in her home country in Women of Allah and a photographic triptych by the Moroccan Lalla Essaydi, The Women of Morocco, challenges 19th century perceptions of women such as a Delacroix sketch of a harem, Women of Algiers in their Apartment.

Boldest of all, Raeda Saadeh, challenges the dystopia of Middle East politics head on in Who Will Make Me Real? by wrapping herself in copies of a Palestinian newspaper which carries stories about the region's endless conflict.

A necessary balance perhaps to answer the perceived institutionalised imperialism of the 19th century artists, but not one that compares like with like, era with era. With hindsight, perhaps the Orientalist painters did stereotype eastern culture but what cannot be taken away from them is not just their virtuosity but their genuine curiosity and passion for a world they captured in all its richness.

Inspired by the east: how the Islamic world influenced western art runs at the British Museum until January 26

https://www.theneweuropean.co.uk/top-stories/europhile-art-western-depictions-of-the-east-1-6340381

The Hajj, Alfred Deohodencq

Ludwig Deutsch's 'In the Madrasa', 1890.

This is really torturing - the pain and shame of Korea's DMZ

One of the oddest tourist attractions - maybe in the world - is the Demilitarised Zone - the DMZ - which separates North and South Korea. Thousand flock from Seoul to peer over across the pleasant hills beyond. They see no sign of peril - but it lurks.

I found the whole experience beyond bizarre when I visited a few years ago - but I didn’t buy a tee shirt.

Read more in this piece in the New European - https://www.theneweuropean.co.uk/top-stories/art-korean-demilitarized-zone-1-6327901

One of Kyungah-Ham’s fabulous chandeliers

Embrace by Joung-Ki Min

Heinkuhn OH, A soldier standing on the water,

Magnificent men

The Brooklands Museum, near Weybridge, Surrey was a runner up in the Art Fund Museum of the Year Award in 2108. And quite right. The place is a delight, quirky, packed to the rafters with gleaming motors and improbable aircraft held together with sticky tape and hope.

This year it celebrates the first non-stop crossing of the Atlantic by Allcock and Brown. They completed the adventure by crashing into a bog near Clifden, Connemara, where I once stayed in pursuit of Peter O’Toole who lived by the ocean nearby. That’s another story.

Brooklands is a joy even for those who would normally be uninterested by anything mechanical like me. It is part of the story of a Britain which ruled the race track and the airwaves.

Read more

Make or rake

Things you find out… an outfit called Muck Rack lists the work of journalists Me included. Goes back four years. If you have the energy google my name and Muck Rack

Art of a state

Tate Modern gets most of its publicity from blockbusters so a relatively unheralded - and free - exhibition on the art of Weimar Germany was a refreshing, and bracing change. One of the great - and relatively unheralded - things about the New European are the art pages which are an exuberant of random but always interesting subjects. Hence this:

https://www.theneweuropean.co.uk/top-stories/tate-modern-weimar-germany-magic-realism-otto-dix-1-5683818

But as they rarely show complete arts stories on their site here it is:

For the poet Stephen Spender 1929 was the last year of that ‘strange Indian Summer - the Weimar Republic.’ He had revelled in the decadence of Berlin, living it up with the likes of writer Christopher Isherwood and the poet W.H. Auden and to them Germany was a paradise where there was no censorship and ‘young Germans enjoyed extraordinary freedom in their lives.’

A new exhibition at Tate Modern entitled “Magic Realism, Art in Weimar Germany 1919-1933” (until July 14, 2019) celebrates that freedom in what, far from a paradise, was a time of tortured creativity, a world disfigured by pain, perversion, rage and disgust.

Look no further than George Grosz and his disquieting work “Suicide” (1916). A man has shot himself and is sprawled on the ground grinning obscenely in his death throes. Dogs roam past, shadowy figures scuttle into the dark, another corpse hangs from a lamp post. But the world goes on its corrupt and heartless way; a harridan of a prostitute, red lips and rouged nipples looks on, indifferent to the death and her own degradation as she waits for custom.

“Suicide” is one of 70 works on display, most owned by Greek shipping magnate George Economou, which were born out of the turmoil of Germany’s Weimar Republic, which lasted from the end of World War One to Hitler’s rise to power as Chancellor in 1933. 

It was a time of upheaval. The Bolsheviks had seized control in Russia, the Austro-Hungary Empire had been dismembered. Germany was hamstrung by punitive reparations imposed by the allies, industry was hit by strikes, unemployment was high and inflation higher. In 1922, a loaf of bread cost 163 marks, one year later it cost two hundred billion. (corr).

Out of this chaos emerged thinkers, artists and provocateurs including German historian, photographer, and art critic Franz Roh, who in 1925 coined the phrase Magic Realism, long before the magical realism of the South American writers. 

He wrote: “To depict realistically is not to portray or to copy but rather to build rigorously to construct objects that exist in the world in their particular primordial shape.

“For the new art it is a question of representing in an intuitive way the fact, the interior figure of the exterior world.”

As definitions go it is pretty impenetrable. A little clearer were the aims of the New Naturalism (Neue Sachlichkeit) which sprung up around the same time and divided into the artists who took actual things from the world of real events and classicists who ‘search for timelessly valid object to realise in art the eternal valid laws of existence.’

Roh was influenced by Freud who had just published “The Uncanny” (Das Unheimliche) in which he examined the experience of perceiving a familiar object or a person in a strange situation with unsettling results.

Unsettling it is. Disturbing and destructive too. As Grosz wrote: “In this faithless and material time one should use paper and slate to show people the devilish mug concealed in their own faces. Let us tear down the storehouse of ready mades and all the manufactured junk and show the ghostly nothing behind them.”

A similar nihilism gripped his contemporary Otto Dix (1891-1969) who like Grosz (1893-1959) served in the trenches. Grosz suffered a breakdown and was admitted to a military mental asylum where doctors declared him unfit for service on grounds of insanity while Dix fought on the Western Front and won the Iron Cross. Utterly disillusioned Dix captured his experiences in a series of etchings entitled “Der Krieg” (The War), a savage denunciation of the conflict with unrelenting depictions of the dead, the dying and the shell-shocked, the shattered landscapes and the graves.

Surprisingly perhaps they were drawn after a 1922 series on the circus which greet the visitor to the exhibition. These are not the happy-go- lucky images one might expect. His circus is peopled by the grim and the bizarre.

The couple in “Scorners of Death” with their jaws clamped in tension are like living skulls, “Lily Queen of the Air” is demonic, in “The Illusion Act” a woman’s head on a spider’s body dances between a skeleton and a circus master. Another entitled “Sketch” has a grotesquely grinning dwarf apparently shooting at a globe while a lanky performer is impaled by an axe and giant screw. 

Everyone is ugly. Who, or what, is about to feel the lash of the whip brandished by the “Tamer” with her hard face, and stunted body? This is a world of the degenerate and the misfit, where the exotic and the permissive is the norm. 

It is a society too which had a gruesome, often misogynistic, fascination for killings with the newspapers dwelling enthusiastically on the latest atrocity. In ‘Dix’s “Lust Murder” the killer laughs  manically as his victim, a woman, lies spreadeagled by her bed, naked and bloody.

It is hard not to think that work like that owes as much to the predilections of the artist as the  pressures of the time. 

There is a definite undertone of fetishism in Rudolf Schlichter’s “The Artist with Two Hanged Women.”. The fact that he puts an artist  - maybe even Schlicter himself - in the frame suggests an unhealthy fascination for degrading women, and indeed for some years the artist earned his living from drawing and selling pornography. 

The Tate thought long and hard about even including the painting in the exhibition but decided to acknowledge that it reflected the artist’s attitude towards women however shocking.

Intriguingly in the next room “Lady with Red Scarf” is a striking portrait of the artist’s wife Evie, hands across her body staring boldly out of the picture. It looks a straight-forward enough image but one has to take a second look when it is revealed that she apparently indulged his various fetishes. Is her gaze bold or is it fearful? Complicit?

What to make of “Conversation about a Paragraph” by Richard Müller? He specialised in exotic nudes, often attended by alien creatures, and here two naked women, one seated wearing only a hat, the other sprawled on a bed with what could be the tattoo of an apple peeping from her nether regions. An angel, painted many years later in the Sixties, flutters by.

Perhaps this meets the Magic Realism label as well as any. It is certainly mystifying but it is also grounded in a political issue of the day. The small symbol for a paragraph hovers in the air between the women. It refers to paragraph 218 in German the constitution which at the time was debating women’s rights to abortion. 

Social issues, politics are all entwined with the hedonistic life immortalised by Christopher Isherwood in his 1939 novel “Goodbye to Berlin” which inspired the film Cabaret many years later in 1972. It captured a breathless dash for pleasure, drink, cocaine, crime and casual sex enjoyed perhaps by the “Girl with Pink Hat” (1925) by Hans Grundig with her smudged make up, heavy mascara and red lips. Judging by her basilisk gaze she doesn’t seem to have enjoyed herself very much  - or maybe she enjoyed herself too much.

Her bleakness is shared by the characters in the works of  Jeanne Mammen, who worked for satirical and fashion magazines. Maybe that’s what helped her portray the emptiness behind the glitter of the cabaret in “At the Shooting Gallery,”and “Boring Dolls,” young women who treat the world with a sardonic mix of nonchalance and boredom. Three prostitutes in “Brüderstrasse (Free Room) stand by a doorway with the sign Zimmer Frei register nothing but indifference and contempt for their potential clients. 

“Come to the cabaret, old chum,” sang Sally Bowles in the film - but she might have added: “Don’t expect to enjoy yourselves.”

From that jaded party it is quite a leap to the intense religious works of Albert Birkle. 

Religion was not seen as being an important part of Roh’s vision but one of Germany’s most sacred paintings Matthias Grünewlad’s “Isenheim Altarpiece” (c 1512-16) had been moved in 1917 from war torn Alsace for safety and had become an object of pilgrimage.

It inspired Birkle, only 21, who also saw active service, to produce a series of tortured images such as the “Crucifixion” and “The Hermit,” both cries of anguish for the lost souls of the war and, perhaps, a means to find a salve for the confusion of the times.

This hurly-burly of creative discord came to an abrupt end with Hitler’s rise to power. Degenerate art was banned, several of the artists fled. Grosz, for example, was charged with making pornographic images and dubbed ‘Cultural Bolshevist Number One’ but even Hitler’s ruthless purge could not destroy all the works.

In his wonderfully original show “Weimar” about the music of the period, which is on at London’s Barbican Centre, Barry Humphries recalls visiting an exhibition of German degenerate art with David Hockney.

“Why had so many pictures survived the Holocaust?” he wondered.

“Because somebody loved them,” replied Hockney.

Actually they are hard to love but it is impossible not to admire their dark audacity. 

Suicide by Grosz

Dix’s circus

Brazil, World War ll and painters

This was one of the more unusual exhibitions of the year. It appeared in the New European 

In November 1944 Brazilian troops joined a US force to attack the Italian redoubt of Monte Castello, 40 miles south west of Bologna.

    The same month, on November 23, an exhibition of Brazilian modernist art defied Hitler’s V2 rockets to open at London’s Royal Academy.

    Two extraordinary events that history has passed by but which are being saluted in an exhibition in London - The Art of Diplomacy: BraziIian Modernism Painted for War.

    Few will be aware that Brazil joined the war, let alone sent almost 26,000 troops and airmen to Europe as well as playing a role in the Battle of the Atlantic where nearly 1,600 died.  

    As for the show it scarcely warrants a footnote in the RA’s records. 

    Now thanks to three years of research by Hayle Gadelha, Brazil’s Cultural Attaché in London, paintings by 20 of the artists have been traced and are being displayed at the embassy. 

    “I heard about the story in my first week in London three half years ago,” says Gadelha. “I started research at the RA but no one had heard of it there. Eventually we found a few short footnotes about the exhibition in the Academy records and an original catalogue.

    “When I saw that the artists who had taken part would today be acclaimed as part of the second generation of Brazilian modernists I realised it was too important to ignore. It was a big story. 

    “I have tried to interpret it as a grand strategy of diplomacy. Very few people knew Brazil had joined the war because it wanted to project an image of a country which was on the side of western democracy not just by sending troops but also with the cultural diplomacy of the exhibition.”

    The main function of the 1944 exhibition was to raise funds for the RAF which was much admired by Brazil society and by the country’s best known artists. 

    Brazil’s Foreign Secretary Osvaldo Aranha said at the time: “It is fair that the artists join with their works of beauty the effort of all good men against evil in this war in which everything is at stake including the freedom of artistic creation.”

    With that noble sentiment 168 works were packed up in seven crates and crossed the Atlantic avoiding lurking German submarines to arrive in a war-torn London. In all, 623 kilos worth of talent, all insured for £2. (£83).

    The enthusiasm of the Brazil and its artists was greeted with churlish indifference, even hostility, by the RA, the art establishment and even the UK government.

    Art critic Sacheverell Sitwell wrote in the preface to the catalogue, a small A5 affair in a cheap blue cover as befitted war time shortages, that: “Foreign blood which had migrated to Brazil was not of first rate. what Brazil needs is not more exiles from Central Europe but the presence of true Chef D’Ecole from Paris  or even London. Should a great painter... transfer himself to the land of energy and opportunity then the results on the Brazilians would be most interesting.” 

    He added: “It would be tragically disappointing if the art of the South American tropics was in no way different from that of the Czechoslovakia or Norway. As much as if the first returning cargoes of oranges and bananas were in the end but pears and apples.”

    To add to the general tenor of racial superiority Sir Alfred Munnings, one of England’s finest painters of horses and recently appointed President of the RA lived up to his reputation as a hater of Picasso and all ‘abstractions and ‘isms by writing that: “No responsibility for its quality would rest on the RA or the Foreign Office.”

    But as Adrian Locke, senior curator of the RA who worked on the current project remarks: “This out dated attitude radiating an air of colonial superiority captures the anachronistic art world of London in the 1940s.”

    Gadelha takes a tolerant view of the reaction.

    “It was war time so the exhibition must have been seen more as a burden than a present,” he says. “The problem was that the work was Modernism and the RA were not exactly prone to like it. The artists were virtually unknown here at the time so it was the most unlikely exhibition at the most unlikely venue.”

    How did he track down the works 70 years after the event? He found a list of buyers in the National Archives and searched through the records of ten cities including Paris, Glasgow and Edinburgh and back home in Rio de Janeiro. Art Uk which puts public art collections online helped find 20 works, he talked to the auction houses Sotheby’s and Christie’s, as well as many of the foundations and institutes of the most famous artists.

    He discovered several were bought by individuals during a nationwide tour of the exhibition but had only the barest details of name and prices. One Tosti Russel paid £51,15d (£21,28 shillings today ) and a Muriel Currant spent £3 3d (£138)). 

    The British Council bought some to boost sales and they were eventually auctioned or sold to several galleries such as Tate, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Manchester Art Gallery, the Ferens in Hull, Bristol, Tullie House, Carlisle, the Mercer Art Gallery in Brighton and Hove and Kirklees.

    Seven have turned up in New Zealand, others in France, Portugal and many in Brazil, the rest are lost. 

    In all, the paintings were sold for £1,200 (£50,000) making a total of £2,000 (£85,00) for the RAF Benevolent Fund thanks to ticket and catalogue sales. 

    Despite the official hostility, 100,000 people attended the exhibition including the Queen Mother, the   Duchess of Kent and the opening night guest list included such art world grandees as T.S. Eliot. H.G. Wells, Paul Nash, Samuel Courtauld and J.M. Keynes,.

    “That was a lot even for the British,” says Gadelha. “For Brazil it was unbelievable. I found 43 articles on the event and they were very positive. Only two or three were negative about the quality of the art.”

    Ah yes, the art. Curator Locke says that the true historic and cultural value of the paintings is finally being recognised and he quotes the Brazilian critic Ruben Navarra who contributed to the original catalogue: “The history of modern painting in Brazil illustrates the conversions of a European influence into an indigenous artistic experience; for the modern movement in Brazilian art has as its basis the rediscovery of a native Brazil hidden behind a curtain of ceremonial and fictitious Brazil.”

    The impetus for modernism was sparked by The Modern Art Week (or Semana de Arte Moderna) in February 1922 during which artists in São Paolo dedicated a week to modern art as part of the celebrations for the 100 years of freedom from Portuguese rule.

    Among the works Gadelha rediscovered are paintings that sprang from that transformative week including some by Brazil’s most renowned figures including Candido Portinari, Emiliano Di Cavalcanti, Lasar Segall, José Pancetti and Roberto Burle Marx.

    They Amuse Themselves by Cardoso Júnior which was bought by the British Council for £2 2d (£92) was described by The Times as having ‘a poetic relation to that of the French ‘Sunday’ painters and it and it became the first of the works to enter the Tate collection. 

    It is possible to detect a difference between the Rio and São Paolo artists - Rio art is more colourful, more folkloric. For example, Emilio Di Cavalcanti’s Women from Bahia, has what critic Navarra described as a ‘magical sensationalism and colour palette that is distinctly Brazilian.’ 

    He wrote: “If regional and folklore spirit found a refuge in Rio, the city of the negro quarters and the noisy laboratory of popular music, Sāo Paolo represents the European element par excellence in our culture.” 

    Oscar Meira’s Sailor shows the influence of Sāo Paulo as an advanced industrial city with work that that is more cubist and cool as do the bold strokes of Manoel Martins’s Suburb. 

    Of the works for sale in 1944 best known perhaps is José Portinari disturbing The Scarecrow (The Half Wit) which was bought by a Brazilian diplomat for £180 (£7,500).

    “It would have £1,000 in the States or Brazil at the time,” reckons Gadelha. “Today it would be worth between $500,000 to £$1million for insurance but in Brazil I would guess $2 million.”

    In the current show the most valuable are by Lasar Segall with his reflective Lucy with Flower at $200,000 but which would fetch maybe four times that in Brazil and Little Girl with Cat by Lucy Citti Ferreira which was considered to be the outstanding work at the time of the original showing. 

    Sitwell compounded his lack of understanding of the art by assuming that the painters were all impoversihed amateurs but rather, says Gadelha: “The artists were mostly about 40, middle class and not at all destitute. They were important names in their own country and making their reputations in the US.

    “The important thing to understand is that they wanted their offer to be appreciated for its moral and symbolical significance rather than for it material value. 

    “I sincerely believe that in associating themselves with this democratic cause it was very much about values. The Brazil press of the day said it was a noble act, a symbolic and moral gesture by the artists.” 

Something eggstra in intoxicating Mexico

I'm too lazy to put this on the main page and anyway the rigours of the FT paywall means there is nothing to see. This is the result of a stimulating whiz around some of the many terrific galleries that are making Mexico City buzz. And what about Guadalajara? Just as creative without the traffic jams.

How better to launch a show than with an egg throwing party? All that yolk streaking down a pristine white wall. Like a Monet, murmured the hostess.

    Add the frolicsome British artist Sarah Lucas, clutching a glass of mezcal and sporting a woolly penis, several men in beards and frocks, and that was the scene last month (April) at the Kurimanzutto Gallery in Mexcio City. Not at all like Monet. 

    Twenty years ago Kurimanzutto was run from a flat with a telephone. Now it is housed in a glamorous space in a placid Mexico City suburb - all flowers and light - and is not just one of the best known galleries in the country but a player in the global market. Hence Sarah Lucas with her show, “Dame Zero” which ends next week (ie May 5). (Star exhibit: a mangled car picked out with her trademark cigarettes). 

    “There has been an increase interest in art from Mexico, South and Latin America over the past decade” says London gallerist Sadie Coles, who represents Lucas and was at the opening. Fundamentally this is because the deep history of modernism in Mexico has engendered the current generation of outstanding contemporary artists. 

    “Serious galleries like Kurimanzutto, OMR,  Proyectos Monclova, House of Gaga and many others have given a platform to these artists that extends beyond their immediate geographical location, through a presence at some of the major international fairs. 

    “The current generation in Mexico are very active internationally, and have aided their careers by not seeing themselves as ‘local’ artists, just as their galleries have never functioned merely as ‘local’ galleries. The endeavour is more sophisticated and ambitious than that - there is commitment and authenticity and a generous desire to educate.”

    As evidence of that in the next few months Mexican artists and galleries will be showing in Buenos Aires, in Dallas, in Saskatoon and Singapore, they will feature at Art Basel and São Paulo but none of the city’s galleries will be gracing Frieze New York.

    As one gallerist put it: “It’s too cramped, too crowded and too much like hard work having to dash around the city to catch up with outside events.”

    Kurimanzutto, for example, is going its own way by setting up a small project space on New York’s East 65th Street with Abraham Cruzvillegas, whose grid of soil-filled wooden triangles won the Hyundai Commission for the Tate’s Turbine Hall in 2015. In New York he will present an installation “Autoconstruccion,” which draws on the random and inventive way people build their homes. 

    “It’s the way we have always done things,” says as Mónica Manzutto, half of an elegant double act with her husband José Kuri who own Kurimanzutto. “The space recreates the spirit we had in the 90s when Mexico was very different from today. There were almost no galleries, almost no museums showing contemporary art and a very small group of collectors, two or three, no more than that.

    “Our gallery was nowhere and everywhere. We would rent a market stall for one day or a cinema where we’d show video programmes. There was no money at stake, we had no children so we were free to travel a lot and bring the work of the artists to curators and collectors.”

    The gallery was born out an ‘incredible synergy’. The couple were in New York studying for their masters when they were approached by an old friend, the artist Gabriel Orozco. Fresh from a successful show at The Armory, he suggested they got together to open a space back home.

    They teamed up with Damián Ortega, José’s brother Gabriel Kuri, Abraham Cruzvillegas and Jerónimo López Ramírez, better known as tattoo artist Dr Lakra.

    They are still together, still a family, maintaining the original spirit of collaboration and careful anarchy but significant names such as Daniel Guzman and the highly political Minerva Cuevas have been added. Oversea recruits include the Vietnamese Danh Vô and Korea’s Haegue Yang, who is currently showing at the Ludwig Museum, Cologne, Germany. And of course, Sarah Lucas. 

    Now they meet in the gallery, an old timber yard acquired nine years ago, which radiates professional élan - there is a bar and even rings for sale in the swirls and curves of Orozco’s Samurai Trees series.

    “There has been a boom since the early 2000s,” says Manzutto. “We continued surfing beyond this wave and we have succeeded in building up our market here and internationally.”

    Some commentators judged sales at the annual art fair Zona Maco this February, as ‘subdued,’ blaming the Mexico’s tricky economic relations with the United States while others point to the shadow of the drug cartels and more than 29,000 murders in 2017, including several journalists. 

    “It is a moment which demands artists to be involved,” admits Kuri. “In the six years of this president (Enrique Nieto) the drugs war has worsened. Our social fabric has been changed. 

    “But that did not affect us at Zona Maco. It was great for us.” He laughs, embarrassed. “I feel bad about it. Guilty.”

    Another major player is Galeria OMR, and they too had “one of the best fairs in our history” says the gallery’s director Kerstin Erdman. 

    “We have to be patient but many collectors and some galleries have been around for maybe only ten years and it takes time to build up a reputation. The collector scene is strong with about 70 per cent international, many from the US, London, Belgium and Paris.”

    She says prices ranged from $15,000 to $50,000. A solo show by Sol Lewitt saw works selling for between $300,000 to $600,000 while one of their roster of talent, James Turrell of the Light and Space Movement, can fetch a million.

    “But,” she admits. “That’s not happening every day.”

    OMR, once a record store and now a space of natural light with a terrace overlooking the busy Roma district, is currently showing the intriguingly engineered sculptures of Jose Dávila. Popular among their roll call of artists, are sculptor and painter Pia Camil, with her bold textiles and sculptures and Julieta Aranda, the first female Mexican artist to appear at the Guggenheim, New York, with “e-flux Video Rental” an archive of artists’ videos.

    Erdman has seen a dramatic change since she arrived from her home in Germany in 2003.

    “There are many more artist-run spaces, five times the galleries and more art fairs, Before Zona Maco we have Material which is an experimental space for young artists with some daring programming.”

    The boom is not contained to the capital. The city of Guadalajara is the home to several galleries, including Travesia Cuatro which is going to Frieze, and many successful artists.

    Alexandra Garcia Waldman relaunched Páramo Gallery in the city five years ago and has recently opened a branch in New York. 

    “I want to recreate the intimacy of Mexico City in the 90s when things were done with no real reason, just because people wanted it to be done, and have the freedom to produce projects that are not solely intended for commercial use.

    “New York is completely different from Mexico City. It is very market driven but the art world in Mexico is based very strongly on relationships. People and the artists love coming to Guadalajara for the pre-Maco fair because of the lunches, the dinners and the museums.” 

    Her next show which will be held in her home on the East Side to coincide with Frieze will feature Naama Tsabar, an Israeli musician, painter and sculptor whose act involves playing eight guitars until each one is broken.

    Perhaps it is the lunches and dinners that make Guadalajara popular with artists such as Jorge Méndez-Blake, fresh from an ambitious project in Hong Kong in which he created a steel pavilion decorated with his characteristic random lettering and set around a centre piece by James Turrell and a contribution by Jose Dávila

    Lesser known perhaps but every bit as talented is another Guadalajara-based artist Gonzalo Lebrija. 

    A cricket admirer - he went to school in England - he is a sculptor, painter and musician. This May in a splendid flight of fancy at the Soluna Festival, Dallas, he will present a 16-strong, all-female Mariachi band performing, improbably, Richard Wagner.

    He also takes striking photographs such as “Brief History of Time,” in which he captured a car at the precise moment before it plunged into a lake - a witty illustration of an upsurge of interest in photography which had slumped since a boom in the 80s and 90s. 

    It was given a boost by the revival of the Zona Maco photo fair in 2015 and by galleries such as Almanaque. In a first for the gallery and for Photo London (From May 17) the gallery will present the work of three generations of Mexican artists including a new documentary-style work by Pablo Ortiz Monasterio entitled “Border's Walls, Tijuana” which captures the precariousness of life in a city where 1,744 were killed last year. In contrasting style, Jesús León, depicts the often dark side of  Mexico sub culture with “Domestic Fine Arts.”

    “Mexico is an intoxicating place for artists,” says Sadie Coles says: “It is clear that Mexico is regarded – both in terms of its modern artistic heritage and dynamic contemporary scene – as one of the epicentres of the Latin American art world.”  

Lebrija's diving car

Gabriel Orozco

Pia Camil

Fight the tyranny of the blockbuster

James Bradburne on the art of running a museum

The head of Milan’s Pinacoteca di Brera is on a mission to get galleries to raise their game

Picture on the front shows James Bradburne before 'St Mark Preaching in Alexandria' at the Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan

 Museum director James Bradburne fears for his profession. He is perturbed by the way some museums treat their visitors. He is dismayed by the “drug” of the blockbuster exhibition.

“We are killing museums,” says Bradburne, head of Milan’s Pinacoteca di Brera. “I really believe that. We are killing the things we love. “We lost our way in the ’80s when directors were forced to use blockbusters to drive a museum’s economy by increasing visitor numbers. Now they have become a drug because without them a museum won’t be able to survive, but that betrays the very nature of our stewardship of the collections.”

A baroque figure sporting round specs and prone to exotic waistcoats — for this interview a teaming of floral patterns, plaid and cord with disparate buttons — Bradburne has been in London to help oversee an exhibition of modernist Italian art at the Estorick Collection in north London. Until recently he was head of the Strozzi Gallery in Florence, where he produced highly acclaimed exhibitions such as Bronzino, Money and Beauty and Pontormo & Rosso Fiorentino.

Now he is revitalising the Brera, as one of the 20 new museum directors appointed in 2016 by Italy’s then prime minister Matteo Renzi as part of a shake-up of the country’s state-owned — and, some considered, moribund — cultural sector.

A British-Canadian, he was one of seven non-Italians to be chosen. “The Strozzi was like driving a Ferrari,” he says. “A state museum is like driving a 1930s Bentley because the machine is not adapted to its function very well. I am taking on the beast, a museum run as a department of a department of a Soviet-style state bureaucracy.” It does have its advantages, however — chiefly an enviable 74 per cent state funding.

The Brera was founded in 1809 by Napoleon as the Louvre of Italy and has 500 works by the likes of Raphael, Mantegna, Bellini, Tintoretto and Veronese, as well as “The Supper at Emmaus” by Caravaggio. Modigliani's 'Head of a Young Lady' (1915) is among the works in the Estorick Collection show There is also a substantial collection of Italian modernist art that was amassed and then donated to the Brera by Emilio and Maria Jesi.

The paintings and sculptures have been “squashed into a corridor”, but they will be found a new home nearby in 2019. It is a selection of those works that make up the Estorick’s show, The Enchanted Room: Modern Works from the Pinacoteca di Brera, opening this week. Artists include Umberto Boccioni, Gino Severini and Mario Sironi, with metaphysical paintings by Carlo Carrà and works by Giorgio de Chirico, Giorgio Morandi and Filippo De Pisis.

“This is one of the great collections of Italian modern art and it’s the first time it will be seen in Britain,” says Bradburne. “The Estorick is a symbol of excellence with arguably the best collection of Italian modern art outside of MoMA — even as good as MoMA.” For him the Estorick and the Brera represent what museums should be about, true to their core identity, eschewing the lure of boosting visitor figures.

Works from the Brera Gallery such as Gino Severini's 'Le nord sud' (1912) make up the Estorick Collection's new exhibition He argues that after the war too many European museums neglected “playing” their collections but instead became fixated on protecting the works.

“Taking care is fundamental but if it is the central aim it means you don’t have to give a damn about who is looking at the stuff. It’s totally self-referential. Yes, you are doing your job as an art historian, as a museum director, but that means you don’t have to worry if young people, old people, teenagers, a handicapped kid or someone with Alzheimer’s can’t get in or if there are no labels.

“In Italy people confuse an excellent collection with an excellent museum. Italy has superlative collections but very bad museums, while Cincinnati, Cleveland and Denver in the USA, for example, have far better museums than any in Italy but they don’t have such good collections. The Getty collection is second-rate — sorry if I offend my friends — but it’s a great museum. They do things with the collection that we are barely imagining.

“It is the difference between having the score of Mozart and playing it. The museum is the performance of the stuff in your collection, not the collection per se.” The average time people look at a painting is 15 seconds. If anyone thinks that is enough I don’t know which profession I am in Bradburne is particularly exercised by what he calls the tyranny of the blockbuster.

These mega-shows, he says, are “cannibalising” the great galleries: “Research demonstrates that if visitor numbers to temporary shows are subtracted, the permanent collections are, in fact, losing business.” It is an argument, however, which ignores the challenges facing museums that have only modest collections — or none at all — and have to rely on one-off shows for revenue, such as the Baltic in Gateshead, the Turner Gallery in Margate, the Royal Academy and even Tate Modern. The Dulwich Picture Gallery, currently showing the works of Moomins creator Tove Jansson, receives no regular public funding at all.

Indeed, the Strozzi itself exists only as a venue for short-term displays, but Bradburne insists: “We turned down a lot of the obvious blockbusters. We didn’t do ‘Sunflowers’, we didn’t do ‘Girl with a Pearl Earring’, we did very interesting, experimental exhibitions of high emotional power which aimed to create new knowledge.” Mario Sironi, 'Urban Landscape with Chimney' (1930) Now, at the Brera, with that cushion of state cash, he has the opportunity to practise what he preaches and prove himself a worthy steward of a great collection — without recourse to anything as tyrannical as a blockbuster.

“I am running a museum where I have the instruments to produce — and the pun works — not ex-hibitions but in-hibitions, bringing in select works and putting them with our permanent exhibits as a way of learning new things about them.” At the Brera, for example, one of the museum’s treasures, Andrea Mantegna’s “Lamentation Over the Dead Christ”, is currently being contrasted with later paintings of the same scene by Annibale Carracci and Orazio Borgianni.

The way they are presented illustrates Bradburne’s enthusiasm for backdrops of strong reds and blues and labels, big readable labels, for which he has commissioned contributions from writers such as Ali Smith, Tim Parks, Orhan Pamuk and Sarah Dunant.

“The painting has all the answers but you need to get people to look at it,” he says. “The average time people look at a painting is 15 seconds. Fifteen seconds! If anyone thinks that is enough I don’t know which profession I am in.”

As we have met in the week when the Art Fund launched its annual quest for the Museum of the Year 2018, conversation turns to what makes a winner worthy of the £100,000 prize. Last year it was won by the Hepworth in Wakefield, which plays to its nucleus of works by Ben Nicholson, L.S. Lowry, Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth, and in 2016 by the Victoria and Albert, which won predominantly on the strength of Savage Beauty, its blockbuster about fashion designer Alexander McQueen.

“The museum worth £100K is the one that works for the greatest, the widest, most diverse series of publics,” he says. “You know what the goal is — to get people to see more, to look longer. “Above all, we need a Copernican revolution in which you put the museum at the heart of the community and visitors at the centre of the museum.” Carlo Carrà, 'The Metaphysical Muse' (1917) He rattles off some of the museums that meet his criteria — the Frick in New York, “a masterpiece in its own right”, the Kröller-Müller Museum in the Netherlands, and for intellectual stimulation the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles.

“The Estorick show is a small gem. Every picture is there for a reason. I bet you the [number of] people who have an emotional experience is far higher here because they will have seen something new and discovered an artist they never heard of.”

He quotes the late cultural commentator Kenneth Hudson, who suggested that the museums that survive the 21st century will have either charm or chairs. “If you want people to look longer and see more, you give them something to sit on because nobody learns standing up,” says Bradburne. “I have just ordered 150 portable stools for the Brera.”

So there you have it: a museum needs charm, chairs and readable labels. A Caravaggio is a bonus. January 24-April 8, estorickcollection.com

A taste of Panama

In the early days of onlinery I wrote a clutch of pieces for The Times about Panama. We went there without any great expectations but absolutely loved the place. Even shared a hotel with a woman who was once accused of romancing Bill Clinton. She had a son with her. Just saying.

Anyway, had one of the great meals at this place:http://panama-mahmad.blogspot.co.uk/2009/05/go-gourmet-in-boquete-panama.html

For the people by the people.

Many of the critics are snotty about the Royal Academy Summer Show but actually it cheers up lots of 'amateur' painters like my local Big Issue seller who tried to enter and raise loadsa for the  RS students.

 Here's piece for the FT.

The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition is easy prey for the critics. As far back as 1794, only 26 years after the first exhibition had opened to display works by ‘all Artists of distinguished merit’ disillusionment had set in. The Morning Post attacked it for descending ‘into a parade of the hackneyed and incompetent amongst the little dirty paltry aristocracy of the Royal Academy.’

    More recently critics reported being filled ‘with a profound melancholy and disgust’ or dismissed it as the ‘largest festival of bad art in Europe.’

    None of this deterred Mereliis Rinne, 32, who walked all the way from Dalston with her canvas or Mary Barnes, 70-plus from Stony Stratford, Buckinghamshire. They joined the hundreds who carried their paintings and sculptures across the cobbles of the Royal Academy courtyard a few week’s ago to offer their work for the show which opens next week/tomorrow (June 13 - August 30). Nor did it daunt a young Eileen Cooper, who as a student in the 70s, had her first work accepted and hung in the main gallery. 

    This year she is the coordinator of the hanging committee, which includes Academicians, Ann Christopher, Fiona Rae and Farshic Moussavi, who is curating the architecture section. “All amazing women,” says Cooper. “Not that we are marketing it as such. It is just unusual for the RA to be so female centred.” Yinka Sonibare alongside RA stalwarts Gus Cumins and Bill Jacklin redress the balance.

    “I believe in the summer show,” she says. “What I really love and value about it is that if your work gets selected you will be on the wall next to a Ken Howard or Anselm Kiefer or a Barbara Rae.

    “The show’s main purpose is to raise money for the RA schools programme which does not receive any government funding so I think it is churlish to be negative about something that supports the next generation.” 

    She admits it is hard to win the plaudits of the critics, but, says, a little tartly in her still-broad Derbyshire tones: “Artists like a challenge so I don’t see why critics won’t take the challenge too.”

    So what can the 200,000-plus visitors to the 2017 exhibition expect? “We couldn’t think of one slogan to sum it up, which is a real drawback,” she admits. “Our aim is to bring something fresh to the show by finding emerging talent and recruiting more artists from countries as disparate as Congo, Peru, Spain and India as well as Turkey and Kurdistan. 

    “We had to spread the word and get the people who might not send in but whose work we have noticed.”

    The result was 12,000 digital entries which were narrowed down by the committee over one ‘surreal’ week in March to between two to 2,500 and then reduced in one eye - watering day to the 1,200 or so which will make up this year’s show.

    It is these amateurs who give the show its singularity and confuse the critics who perhaps are looking for something more ‘professional’ and more structured. 

    “I think the amateur is a difficult term,” protests Cooper, who is a painter and printmaker as well as the first female Keeper of the RA Schools. “There are some who have been Sunday painters since they retired, others might be teachers or academics who will be working at quite a high level and there are a lot of people, maybe a milkman or a bank clerk, for whom art is very precious but who don’t make a living as an artist.

    “Then there are the graduates. It’s harder and harder for them to find a studio and have the opportunities to show their work.”

    She argues that that the exhibition, which is the oldest open-submission show in the world, is a unique opportunity for people to be included who don’t fit into the mainstream, but often narrow, gallery idea of what contemporary art is. 

    “It is very liberating for them and for the possible buyer there is the reassurance that the works have been selected by the artists on the committee which might well be different to those preferred by a dealer,” says Cooper. “Furthermore it is a good place to buy because the commission is lower than most galleries - 30 per cent compared with, often, 50 per cent.”

    Her plan is to mix all the works together. This year, as well as the Academicians who are always encouraged to show - and sell - in support of the schools, there will be three film makers, including a room for a three-screen installation by Isaac Julien, photography by Gilbert and George, recently appointed Academicians and the first duo to appear, as well as a performance by recent RA school graduate Alana Francis. “Very special,” says Cooper. “She opens herself up massively. You’ll find it very moving.”

    Gallery Three - the main space - is the biggest challenge for any curator because the floor is taken over by a bar to quench the thirst of networkers and sponsors and that leaves no room to stage sculpture as a centre piece.

    “It is really hard to hang,” she admits. “The problem is that you have to have lots of different types of work together. Some fit well together, others, well, it can be difficult.

    “We have a very beautiful, very large, Sean Scully and lots of work by Olwyn Bowey one of our academicians whose work is all about keen observation of the house where she lives. They’re wonderful, rugged, fabulously observed, drawings of plants.” 

    One of the co-curators and major contributor is sculpture Yinka Shonibare and he is every bit as enthusiastic as Cooper to highlight emerging artists.

    “The RA does need to find ways of renewing itself,” he says. “It is a very well established institution but it’s not entirely great to rely on past glories and it is always good to refresh the organisation.

    “Institutions are not easy to break into. You have to go through a number of rituals, ceremonies and all sorts of different levels of initiation rites to get anywhere near these places. There are artists who perhaps who don’t have those opportunities - this is their chance to be seen.”

    Shonibare, who is curating two rooms, invited a diverse group to send in their works. One is Abe Odedina, of Nigerian origin,living in Brixton, south London, who paints dashing scenes based on African folk art 

    “I like the Japanese artist Tomoaki Suzuki,” says Shonibare. “He makes carvings of small figures using traditional Japanese methods and style but in a very contemporary way and Hassan Hajjaj, who isMoroccan-British, and who takes pictures of Muslim women on bikes called Henna Bikers. I like the kind of fun of them.

    “These are not the usual works associated with the RA.”

    Shonibare himself is displaying a new example of his razzle-dazzle Wing series in the courtyard while inside one of his Hybrid Angels will stand by a re-imagining of the classical sculpture, Venus de Medici, which he has decorated with a ‘a load of patterns.’

    Like Cooper he admits the vetting procedure is not entirely rational 

    “I go by gut instinct,” he says. “The selection is not a definite science. There are artists who are quite good but unfortunately if the judges can’t agree on that work it doesn’t mean it is necessarily no good, it just means the judges didn’t like it.”

    Cooper, who is also preparing for an exhibition at Wolfson College, Cambridge, with her distinctive depiction of the female form, admits to one or two ‘sparky discussions’ when it came to the show’s style and content. 

    She says: “Big areas of debate will continue through out the hang because there is so much work to accommodate and people get quite invested in their rooms. If you say you’ve got to hang this they might say I don’t want it there, or I’ve just got this room hanging beautifully I can’t add anything else. So I think I will be trouble shooting around the galleries.

    “It’s wonderful to find work you like and hang it well especially when it is by someone you are discovering. Artists need to show their work and it is fantastic for them to do that here and for me too, it is a great opportunity to use art as a means of communication with a new audience.” 

    Sadly, the determined Meriliis Rinne and her painting “The Danger of the Pink Cloud” did not make the cut but Mary Barnes did.

    “I have been painting for 50 years,” says Mrs Barnes, whose successful entry is a sombre black and work entitled “Alas, Poor Aleppo.” She is just the talented ‘amateur’ Cooper has in mind.

    “There is always a huge diversity on show,” says Mrs Barnes, who has sold five paintings over the years. “The fact that anybody can enter is brilliant.”