… on the arts and the outdoors
Monday, 29 August 2011 3 Comments
OK, I know that stretching exercises before breakfast are a good thing, but this is a bit extreme. I have no idea who this is, or whether he’s even a cellist, but he’s a welcome tonic after the po-faced players of yesterday. A jolly nude dude, no less.
Sunday, 28 August 2011 Leave a comment
I’ve been pondering whether to offer these pictures separately, but these two near-contemporaneous paintings seem to make a pair. The seriousness of both images – and their lack of animation – does neither sitter any favours. Each comes across as being set in his morose ways – glum old men of their time, perhaps (though one of them is still relatively young).
The one on the left, The Cello Player (1896), is by the American painter Thomas Eakins (1844-1916). That on the right, Cello Player (1893), is by the Danish painter Vilhelm Hammershøi, who was born twenty years after Eakins but died in the same year. While the Philadelphian Eakins was known for his portraiture, Hammershøi was not.
The subject of The Cello Player is the German cellist, Rudolf Henning, who moved from Leipzig and settled in Philadelphia; he is pictured, in isolation, playing one of the five cello concertos by the almost completely forgotten German cellist and composer, Georg Goltermann (1824-98). Henning was just a year younger than Eakins, and when the painting was bought by the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1896 the two men shared the fee, $250 apiece. Over a century later, in 2007, it was sold controversially – and secretly – for an 8-figure sum (reportedly $15-25m) in order to buy another Eakins painting, The Gross Clinic (1875). This ‘upgrading’ (or, to use the jargon, ‘deaccessioning’) caused considerable uproar. The Cello Player is no longer available for public view.
Eakins, who had the magnificent middle name ‘Cowperthwait’, depicted music and musicians on several occasions, and I’ve appended half a dozen at the end of this post. Some are depictions of performers of classical music, like The Oboe Player (1903) – a portrait of Benjamin Sharp, and Music (1904). Some are more ‘downhome’ in subject matter, like The Dancing Lesson (1878) and Home Ranch (1892). The last two portraits – The Zither Player (1876) and Professionals at Rehearsal (1883) – are especially intimate. The earlier one, in particular, has much the same air as Degas’s studies of his father listening to the guitarist and singer Lorenzo Pagans, which he painted in the 1890s. Hammershøi’s art and aesthetic could hardly be more different.
As I mentioned in my first ‘The Cello in Art’ entry, on Carl Holsoe’s paintings (11 August), Hammershøi belonged to a small group of Danish painters who focused on cool interiors in which the human figure, if present, often had her (she’s usually female) back to the viewer. So the Cello Player is a most unusual topic for Hammershøi. It is a portrait of an orchestral cellist, Henry Bramsen, who was the son of Hammershøi’s greatest champion in Denmark, Alfred Bramsen. The painting was therefore a favour bordering on obligation rather than a burning artistic necessity, and that comes across in the generalised approach to most aspects of the picture, with only the instrument itself seeming to have much life or presence about it.
As examples of more characteristic Hammershøi topics, here’s Interior: With Piano and Woman in Black, Strandgade 30 (1901), which makes for an interesting comparison with Holsoe’s use of the domestic keyboard instrument in his paintings, and an exterior, Street in London (1906), a view northwards up Montague St with the British Museum on the left.
If you find these two cello players by Eakins and Hammershøi rather sombre, I’ll put up a much jollier, ‘rude’ one tomorrow, despite it being in black and white!
…..
The Oboe Player (1903)
Music (1904)
The Dancing Lesson (1878)
Home Ranch (1892)
The Zither Player (1876)
Professionals at Rehearsal (1883)
Tuesday, 23 August 2011 Leave a comment
This is probably a less familiar image than the previous one by Augustus John, and there’s less evidence of a cello! In Portrait of a Man with Cello (1923), the Polish painter Jacek Malczewski (1854-1929) depicts the young man strumming the instrument like an upright guitar or a lowered violin. His languorous manner, slicked-back hair and exaggeratedly broad shirt collar, combined with the landscape, suggest nothing less than a weekend in the country along with a spot of music-making, don’t-ya-know. To my untrained eye, the man bears a striking resemblance to a previous portrait that Malczewski had made of his son Rafał (below). (Rafał also made a career as a painter, but he is best remembered as one of Poland’s most distinguished skiers and mountain-climbers. In 1917, he narrowly escaped death in the Polish Tatras. This portrait dates from that year.)
Earlier in his career, Jacek Malczewski had taken up Symbolism with a vengeance, and it is in this period that his most famous paintings were created. He was best known for his forthright portraits, but rare are those without other allegorical ‘presences’ counterpointing, peering over the shoulder of or threatening the subject. The most common ‘onlookers’ are chimeras (in Malczewski’s case, winged females with huge-thighed limbs and a lion’s claws), fauns and muses.
There is a number of portraits with musical themes and several of these reveal their folk origins by the inclusion of the narrow fiddle known as a gęśl. Below are three such paintings: Self-Portrait with Fiddle (c.1908), Music (1908) and Shepherd Boy and Chimera (1905).
Thursday, 18 August 2011 Leave a comment
It was inevitable that Augustus John’s sumptuous portrait (1920-23) of the Portuguese cellist Guilhermina Suggia would crop up early on in this thread. It’s become iconic for several reasons: THAT dress (apparently, his third colour choice), which reminds me of the voluminous red gown that Jacqueline du Pré wore on the one occasion that I saw her play (Haydn’s Concerto in C – one of the few pieces that Suggia also recorded – at London’s Royal Festival Hall); THAT profile, facing away from the cello (the very opposite of pretty much every photograph of du Pré); and THAT posture.
Suggia (1885-1950) was one of the first internationally known female cellists. 
It was only at the end of the nineteenth century, when the endpin (‘spike’ to you and me) gained popularity, that women began to take up the cello seriously. Up until then, it had not been thought seemly for a women to grasp the cello between her knees and lean low to play it. The spike changed all that: the posture could be more upright and – this I didn’t know – enabled a woman to play the cello placed elsewhere than between her legs. Some played it side-saddle and some with the right leg bent low behind the instrument. An outdoor photograph of the slightly younger English cellist Beatrice Harrison (1892-1965) – yes, she of the BBC nightingale broadcasts and recordings – shows her in this latter position, with spike in place. It looks uncomfortable, restrictive and not a little ungainly. I wonder what Scottie was thinking … keeping out of range if his mistress decided to go wanton on the A string?
Suggia, on the other hand, had no qualms about posing in this highly expressive manner, even at a time (1920s) when female cellists were still a rarity and most professional orchestras were male-only domains. After being associated with Pablo Casals as his student and then partner for several years, she moved to England in 1914, quickly becoming known as ‘La Suggia’. Country Life (26 November 1927) published for its society readership a breathless, equine and barely veiled eroticised account of her presence and playing style which is worth bearing in mind when thinking of some more recent cellists:
It was a delight to see her, before each bout, sit up alert, balance and adjust her bow as a fencer balances his foil, then settle herself with huge tortoise between her knees, like jockey sitting down to the ride: erect at first and watchful, till gradually, caught by the stream she created, she swung with it, gently, sleepily, languidly, until the mood shifted, the stream grew a torrent and the group rocked and swayed almost to wreckage. Or again, she would be sitting forward, taking her mount by the head, curbing it, fretting it, with imperious staccato movements, mastering it completely, then letting it free to caracol easily, or once more break into full course, gathering itself in, extending itself, in a wild gallop. She was creating sound till you could see it: the music seemed to flow like running water, up her arms, over her neck; one felt that seated behind her one could see it coursing down her shoulders and her spine, with the whirls and eddies of a mountain river.
Only the face remained apart: in it was something different: the face with its closed eyes belonged to us who were played upon rather than to who played: it was the artist in the artist’s other role, her own audience, listening to herself, experiencing first and more than all other the emotion which her art evoked. That rapt and passive countenance, that swift ordered disciplined activity of every fibre of her body, disciplined till all was instinctive as the motions of a flying bird showed once and for all her double nature, speaker and listener at once, actor and spectator, which must be the artist’s.*
* I’m grateful to Anita Mercier’s fascinating and revealing article on Suggia for the excerpt from Country Life; see <http://www.cello.org/Newsletter/Articles/suggia.htm>. Mercier has also written a full-length study, Guilhermina Suggia: Cellist (Ashgate, 2008).
Suggia had a strong personality, and Augustus John captured a snapshot of the passion and imperiousness of her character. The audio link to Bruch’s Kol Nidrei (below) is to one of the few recordings she left to posterity. It was recorded in the same year as the Country Life review, so makes for an interesting counterbalance to its linguistic extremities and to the fiery temperament implied by John’s portrait. I think it is stunningly beautiful, measured, direct and, yes, expressive but in a restrained way that befits Bruch’s music.
Tuesday, 16 August 2011 Leave a comment
Jonah Bokaer: On Vanishing (2011)
This has to be one of the most stunning photographs of a dancer in recent years. I’m just fascinated by its lines, the merging of the body and reflection into an indivisible sculpture, at once static yet full of energy. The eye can’t help but travel through, across, along. Absolutely wonderful.
“Where’s the cello?”, you might ask. Well, this photo is a publicity still for a performance last month by the American dance and media artist, Jonah Bokaer. On Vanishing was premiered at the Guggenheim Museum in New York on 14 July 2011, with Bokaer (above) and four other dancers, in response to an exhibition of work by Lee Ufan, ‘Marking Infinity’. This 40-minute ‘choreographic dialogue with sculpture’ (Lee Ufan’s steel wall and two rocks) was accompanied by a performance of a late work by John Cage. His One8 for solo cello (1991) was played by Loren Kiyoshi Dempster.
“How does the body erase itself, to prefer matter against presence?” (Bokaer)
Photo © Michael Hart, 2011
To get a taste of Bokaer’s extraordinary choreographic imagination and dynamism as a dancer, here’s a clip he posted of his short solo piece False Start (2007; premiered 2008, New York). A Petrushka for our time, 100 years on.
Monday, 15 August 2011 Leave a comment
Corot: Le Moine au violoncelle (1874)
There is something immeasurably sad about Corot’s Monk with a Violoncello, one of his last works. But then, none of his several portraits of monks shows one in a state of religious ecstasy. They’re totally absorbed in the seriousness of their own contemplation. Somehow all of these paintings seem anachronistic for the mid-to-late 19th century.
Le Moine au violoncelle is also an odd painting because, unlike the others below, the monk is given no context. Why is he playing alone, in an empty room? Is he practising? What is he practising? Would he normally be part of his monastery’s chapelle, accompanying hymns or psalms or other parts of the liturgy? Was his repertoire purely sacred? If he really is a cellist, then he must have some ability, as he’s playing in a high position on the fingerboard. By the looks of him, he’s a Franciscan monk, so maybe he’s playing to the birds from his cell …
Saturday, 13 August 2011 Leave a comment
Whenever I find myself in need of a good dictionary – and this happens all too often – I remember that one of my favourite poets, Edward Thomas (1878-1917), wrote a poem with such a spring in its step that it never fails to remind me that sometimes I should let the right word instead ‘choose me’, as Thomas memorably puts it. So here are the final eight lines of Words (1915), briefer than brief, but more eloquent than many a long verse:
Let me sometimes dance
With you,
Or climb
Or stand perchance
In ecstasy,
Fixed and free
In a rhyme,
Like poets do.
After my current writing project I’m going to sequester myself with two books by and about Thomas that I’ve been really looking forward to reading: Thomas’s account of his journey through the English countryside in The South Country (1909, republished 2009) and Matthew Hollis’s just-released biography of Thomas’s last years, Now All Roads Lead to France. By all accounts, Hollis brings his poet’s insight and a penetrating eye to this extraordinarily raw episode in English literature.
Paul Nash: Ruined Country (1918)
Thursday, 11 August 2011 Leave a comment
I am deep in writing a study of Lutosławski’s Cello Concerto (1969-70), so I sometimes stray into the other arts in search of cello-related items. Two days ago, I came across this haunting painting by an artist new to me (he’s not even listed in Wikipedia!). Carl Vilhelm Holsoe (1863-1935) was a Danish painter and contemporary of the better-known Vilhelm Hammershøi (1864-1916). I really enjoyed an exhibition of Hammershøi’s work at the Royal Academy in London three years ago. They evidently shared a fascination with the spare domestic interior, often including an unidentified human figure – usually female – facing away from the viewer. This gives their pictures an introspective air, reminiscent of 17th-century Dutch masters. Holsoe’s colour palette seems to be richer than Hammershøi’s, whose work is more coolly enigmatic.
I haven’t been able to find out much about Holsoe, but there are at least six paintings which include a cello, though it’s never being played. In one it’s leaning against the same chair as above, as well as against what seems to be a clavichord (another homage to Vermeer, this time to his virginals).
The most touching is the only one with a human figure, a young woman seemingly taking a step towards the instrument, resting her hand on the back of a chair while gazing out of the window. In another interior not included here,she is reading music seated in front of the same keyboard.
Cornish Adrian 