The Rise of the Individual

In an essay of 1924, Virginia Woolf declared that ‘on or about December 1910, human character changed.’ Writing from the vantage point of the ‘twenties, Woolf rewinds past the so-called ‘Great War,’ marking instead the date that the first Post- Impressionist Art exhibition was displayed in London. Is this Bloomsbury aesthete just being facetious? Or is there more to this comment?

In the last ten years or so, we’ve happily got over our fixation with Woolf’s snobbishness and psychological instability and have instead realised her as a pioneering feminist; author; and critic of her time. Given these revisions of Woolf’s authority, it’s worth investigating why she chose this ostensibly random date as the pivotal point for humanity, and not one more obviously related to the first world war.

The first Post-Impressionist exhibition – engineered by Roger Fry – showed to Londoners for the first time the revolution in visual representation that had been happening in Paris. The introduction, written by the British artist Desmond MacCarthy, reads more like a disclaimer than a fanfare: ‘there is no denying that the work of the Post-Impressionists is sufficiently disconcerting. It may even appear ridiculous to those who do not recall the fact that a good rocking-horse has often more of the true horse about it than an instantaneous photograph of a Derby winner.’ The apologetic air of MacCarthy’s introduction doesn’t come close to anticipating the reality of the reaction. Woolf describes how ‘the public in 1910 was thrown into paroxysms of rage and laughter. They went from Cézanne to Gauguin and from Gauguin to Van Gogh, they went from Picasso to Signac, and from Derain to Friesz, and they were infuriated.’ According to MacCarthy, one gentleman laughed so hysterically at Cézanne’s portrait of his wife that he had to be helped from the gallery, and walked up and down in the fresh air to compose him. Critics were, likewise, dubious. One feared that the simplification and abstraction of form and colour ‘throws away all that the long-developed skill of past artists had acquired and perpetuated. It begins all over again – and stops where a child would stop.’ Parents echoed this sentiment, sending in childish scribbles to MacCarthy with the claim that they were superior to the works of.

Self-Portrait, Roger Fry, 1928, Courtauld Gallery

But this abstract art for Woolf, for Fry, for the artists, was not regressive, it was definitively progressive. Around 1910, the age of the individual was only just dawning, and the Post-Impressionists’ roguish departure from the norms of representation – the traditions of art that chose to copy reality – was a way of expressing and celebrating that new individuality. Woolf’s selection of December 1910 was not to say that Post- Impressionism prompted the change in character but, rather, it spoke of the rise of individualism and the break from the collective. It is perhaps this simultaneous empowerment and disenfranchisement that established a fundamental conflict, laying the foundation for the first world war.

The Value of Celebrity

A famous name can have an extraordinary impact upon the value of something. With celebrity comes a superpower: the Midas touch. The right name can sell just about anything, and at a vastly inflated price. Kanye West – stellar musician – put his name to a clothing line. The most basic item, a plain white t-shirt, retails for $120. Celebrity memorabilia is the mundane made expensive. In recent auction, a coat once owned by John Lennon sold for £7,000. Elsewhere, a plain, greyish t-shirt worn by Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator II sold for £900. Taken as they are, these items boast no especial worth. Threadbare, worn, basic – but minted by association. Is this not a little insane? Or do these vicariously valuable items boast some significance of their own?

During his lifetime, Francis Bacon was crowned most expensive living artist. In 2007, his Triptych, 1976 was bought by the Russian billionaire, Roman Abramovich, for €55.465 million: a new high for the artist and the highest price ever paid for a post-war work of art at auction. Evidently, we “value” Francis Bacon. This value extends, however, beyond appreciation of artistic merit. At an auction due to take place later this month, Christie’s expects a set of his paintbrushes to fetch £25,000. Perhaps more curious, though, are the values ascribed to the many paintings he (almost) destroyed. In fits of dissatisfaction, Bacon regularly hacked the main subject(s) of his paintings from the canvas, leaving only roughly adumbrated backgrounds, murky and featureless. Many of these have somehow found their way onto the market. Ewbank’s – prominent Surrey auction house – provided modest estimations for the various “destroyed canvases” up for sale, valuing them at around £1,500. The prices they sold at are astonishing. One – a 14” by 12” portrait with the face hacked out, only a shirt collar and pink dusky background remaining – was bought for £40,000. Others, even less distinct, within the £30,000 bracket. Do the pieces command the tens of thousands price tag, or do we suspect rather, a mania for the artist? As ever, a little intellectualisation can muster a not-too-unreasonable defence. Though any obvious significance has been cut-out from the composition-less paintings, one could claim that the absence itself speaks volumes. A space to be filled by the viewer; an articulation of the artist’s frustration; a void, telling us of something missing…But with each of these, we feel the air of pretension encroach a little more. The niggling doubt remains: “but is it worth that?”

The rotten tooth of John Lennon was bought by a Canadian dentist at auction for 30,000. From the DNA implicit in the tooth, the purchaser – Dr Michael Zuk – hopes to create a clone of Lennon. “Most people would say I was crazy,” Zuk says of the staggering price paid for the rock relic, but “if I could play a small part in bringing back one of rock’s greatest stars, it would be mindblowing.” In the absence of beauty, might value be in the eye of the beholder?

The Death of the Book

‘Out with the old, in with the new.’ Innovation might be exciting, but it also makes us nervous. The Industrial Revolution replaced man with the machine; the Digital Age has not been short on victims either. Last year the digital revolution took a firm hold of the book world. Sales in eBook fiction sky-rocketed by 149% in 2012. Is the book being pushed into the past? 

Digital sales killed the CD. As this year opened, music shops closed. HMV went into administration. Buskers are probably the highest earning musicians on the high-street now. The digital book saves money, saves space, saves paper. It suits our ‘on-demand’ lifestyles; it is so very “now”. We can see where this is going. The book is doomed…Or is it? Sales figures might trumpet the success of digitalisation, but not at the necessary cost to material books. Despite last year’s eBook revolution, sales in their paper predecessors only fell by 1%, and some areas, like children’s books, saw an increase. CEO of the Publisher’s Association, Richard Mollett, is optimistic: ‘I don’t think we’re looking at a world where physical books disappear. We’re probably heading to a world where it’s more like 50/50; that sort of ratio between the physical and the electronic.’

How is it, then, that the book might succeed where others have fallen? Publishers now speak of their paper publications as ‘physical books;’ herein lies a clue to their unique selling point. Our history with the book has been as much a courtship with the object itself as it has been with the words.  ‘I like the way it feels,’ say the defenders of the physical book. Our relationship with the book isn’t purely intellectual, it’s sensual too. Buying a CD in a shop was always a mute, abstract experience. Being able to see the CDs was little substitute for actually hearing them. But buying online – where you can “try before you buy” makes much more sense. Most logically, we seem to have exchanged the CD for the actual music. But the digitalisation of the book doesn’t give, it takes away. Gone are the pages to leaf through, the covers to entice, the smell of new glue, the mustiness of foxing. Bookshelves will be barren; libraries, lost; bookshops, bust. The pleasure of giving, sharing, borrowing a book will disappear too; you can’t wrap-up and pass around something that doesn’t materially exist. To read is not just to experience the words, it is to experience the material object itself. It’s hard to imagine a world of literature without books, but I think, perhaps, we won’t have to.

The Art of Facsimile

If imitation is the highest form of flattery, then art has been sycophantically adored. Since their unveiling, the works of the great masters have been earnestly copied by apprentice artists and – whether paint or print, marble or plaster – have populated many a home. These knock-offs are affordable, sometimes quality, but somehow always an apology...they’ll never be “the real thing”. But is the value of imitation only vicarious? Today, innovators in the art of facsimile are proving otherwise.

Facsimile of Veronese's Wedding at Cana, San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice

Veronese’s ‘Wedding at Cana’ was certainly not intended to sit across the room from the Mona Lisa. The French have Napoleon to thank for that breathtaking “acquisition”. Doubtful, though, that the monks (and nowadays, the visitors) of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice were thankful for the void left by Napoleon’s untimely hacking and jacking of the canvas. But Venetians no longer endure that white space as, a few years ago, the artist and restorer Adam Lowe and his team at Factum Arte installed a facsimile of the painting in its original home. Their mimicry is unquestionably accurate. Through digital and technical mastery, they rendered their print with the same texture and depth of paint. The copyist commission was met with the usual skepsticism. But when the curtain dropped and the facsimile unveiled, doubts were overwhelmed; overwhelmed to the point of weeping in the case of some distinguished Venetian guests. This sophisticated illusion assuredly impresses, and though we can’t call it an original work of art, its technical artistry certainly effects something of the sublime experience generated by the master painting.

But while a facsimile can – like art – elevate, Factum Arte’s most recent project proves that it can achieve even more. This spring, a three-dimensional, life-size facsimile of Tutankhamun’s tomb was opened to the public in Luxor. Ideally, of course, we would all have the opportunity to experience the original tomb. But time and tourism have taken their toll on these ancient burial chambers, and – now ravaged – the majority of them have had to be closed. Though Tut’s tomb remains (for now) open, as Adam Lowe points out, ‘the experience of seeing the real thing has been compromised.’ Glass screens partition the viewer from the fragile site; you are segregated, not immersed. At the replica, though, you are allowed a ‘more personal interaction’ (as one visitor reports). The replica also boasts an antechamber containing a series of panels narrating the significance of the original; in further homage to Tut’s tomb, then, the replica speaks on its behalf: allowing access where the other does not, and saying what it cannot say. ‘This is not about taking things away,’ asserts Lowe, ‘it is about bringing things back.’ National Geographic has hailed the first (of many) tomb facsimiles as paving ‘the way to sustainable tourism.’ If imitation equals preservation, then the art of facsimile is surely invaluable. 

The Creation of Sherlock Holmes

Sherlock is coming back. Given that filming doesn’t begin until January 2015, though, for this Sherlock, at least, it’s going to be a while. But whilst Benedict Cumberbatch’s embodiment is frustratingly few and far between, we’ve hardly had to go without other Sherlock incarnations. Last year, CBS aired Elementary – a sexed-up, drugged-up, twenty-first century rendering of the Victorian stories - and Russia premiered a sixteen episode series of (some) previously unadapted stories in November. Conan Doyle’s creation has, from its nascence, been appropriated, recreated, embellished, reinvented. Every generation since could cite various adaptations, manifest in various mediums. As well as those already mentioned, in the last decade or so cinema screens were assaulted by an especially pugilistic Holmes in Guy Ritchie’s film; the Conan Doyle Estate granted Anthony Horowitz the right to continue the literary legend of Holmes in his publication The House of Silk; and in the US series House, we saw the mystery solving prowess of the Victorian polymath reimagined as a modern day maverick medical diagnostician. No doubt there are many more examples one could list. Sherlock Holmes is a pretty familiar face in the British popular imagination, but, with his ever-burgeoning lineage, is it Conan Doyle’s Sherlock that we recognise?

Baker street celebrates its most famous inhabitant in a variety of ways, none of which is especially true to the original depiction of the character. At the tube station, both the statue outside of, and the decorated tiled walls within, depict Sherlock in his most familiar form, complete with deer stalker and pipe. But Conan Doyle never gave him a deer stalker, nor a pipe. The deer stalker was first placed on Holmes’ head by Sidney Paget, who illustrated the stories in the Strand Magazine. Conan Doyle thought Paget’s detective much handsomer than the one portrayed in his stories. And it was the actor, William Gillette (who assumed the role more than 1,300 times on stage), who first introduced and then institutionalised the pipe with the figure. Holmes’ much repeated catchphrase – ‘elementary, my dear Watson’ – was never in the books. That was first attributed to the character in the 1929 film. And 221b Baker street – Holmes’ home – never existed in Conan Doyle’s time. Since then, however, the street was extended and, today, 221b not only stands, it is marketed as the actual house of an albeit fictional figure.

Sherlock Holmes is the product of collaboration. Conan Doyle created him, and the collective cultural imagination continues to create him. In the case of this ever-evolving figure, perhaps we have an illuminating study of how stories become tradition, and how exceptional characters gain cultural immortality. 

Representing the Royals

‘Paul Emsley’s Duchess of Cambridge portrait is catastrophic,’ said Michael Glover in the Independent.  The cheeks are ‘hamsterish,’ the face, ‘saggy’ and ‘a touch dropsical.’  Glover blames Emsley’s photoreal method of painting.  It seems to him as though the painter is envious of the ‘truth-telling powers of photography,’ so has resolved to attempt the same effect in the hope that the achievement of the skilled ‘hand’ proves the more impressive than that of mere ‘machine.’  Unfortunately the clamour of critics pronouncing Emsley’s likeness to be not like-enough has virtually drowned out any positive response, including that of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge themselves.

A week after the unveiling of the first official portrait of Kate a hitherto “banned” painting of the Queen finally went on display in Liverpool’s St George’s Hall.  This 1952 portrait of Elizabeth by John Napper has been hidden from the public gaze for sixty years because it ‘looked nothing like her.’  Even Napper described the painting as ‘a beautiful painting of a queen, but not this Queen.’  The painting veers dangerously towards the comic, as she has been given an extraordinarily long neck.  Napper defended the unusual proportions of the portrait arguing that it was intended to be hung high; from this angle the neck would appear ‘normal.’  The council that had commissioned it, however, failed to “see” it that way, and the painting was confined to the depths of the municipal vaults, until now.

If a portrait fails to be a ‘likeness,’ then, it is a failure as a portrait?  Albrecht Durer declared that ‘the more accurately one approaches nature by way of imitation, the better and more artistic’ one’s work becomes.  Pre-nineteenth century, art that “copied” the visible world was the best kind of art.  But then came the Impressionists, followed by the Cubists, and the Abstract art movement – not to mention a whole host of other “-ists” in between – and painting became less about depicting what was seen, and more about what was experienced or felt.  This, of course, is an inexcusably glib summary of the history of artistic representation, but, suffice to say, imitation is no longer the only appreciable mark of a “good” painting. 

Adrian Searle – art critic for The Guardian – described the Kate portrait as being ‘as soundless and smooth as an undertaker's makeover.’  In its strain toward perfect accuracy, the photoreal effort loses all vital essence.  This is the opposite of what Searle had to say about Lucian Freud’s controversial 2001 portrait of the Queen.  This, he hailed as the best royal portrait for 150 years: ‘Freud has got beneath the powder, and that itself is no mean feat.’  Whilst the painting of Kate might be “more true” as a detailed rendering of the subject’s features, for Searle, it fails to connect to the animating force behind the façade: to the person.  The course, brutal even, brush strokes of the Freud; the heavy paint and the heavy brow; its ugly fleshiness, render it as intimate, penetrating, not to mention confrontational.  It certainly doesn’t flatter.  It is a ‘painting of experience.’

 For many, however, Freud’s shirking of imitation in favour of impression was perceived as unsuitably irreverent.  The editor of the British Art Journal, Robert Simon, complained that Freud had made her ‘look like one of the royal corgis who has suffered a stroke.’  Another tabloid commented that ‘Freud could have saved the Queen the trouble of sitting for him by copying her Spitting Image puppet.’

 Today, then, there is no critical or artistic consensus on what type of representation renders a portrait “true.”  Royal portraiture seems especially fraught with this debate.  The tension between reverence and revelation, flattery and honest record has ever dogged the royally commissioned artist.  Factoring the modern debate between abstract and photoreal representation into that equation, one begins to sympathise with the myriad of aesthetic, not to mention diplomatic challenges that face the painter of royalty.  ‘It’s impossible to please everyone,’ as the popular aphorism goes.