The Botticelli Renaissance

Botticelli died and was forgotten. Or so the story goes. Rediscovered in a substantial way by the Pre-Raphaelites, so began a long arc of repetition, quotation and homage, not yet ended. The Gemäldegalerie in Berlin has put together a story of the renaissance of Botticelli, assembling works influenced by the Florentine master. They show the diversity of inspiration found in Botticelli’s brushstrokes, and in particular in the body and beauty of his The Birth of Venus.

I find the long reach of this particular Venus extraordinary. Botticelli’s rendering of Simonetta Vispucci, half floating, half falling out of the half shell, always seemed to me to be an ill-postured, unbalanced, scoliosis affair with a small head. In any case, the Berliners haven’t got their hands on that particular rendition from the Uffizi. They’re making do with a study of the same, isolated against a black ground. I prefer it. Venus, born of nothing, makes much more sense to me than Venus born of a seafood platter. And the version they do have is the highlight of the show, being the only Botticelli actually placed directly into the context of modern works inspired by it.

The fact that some of these works are difficult to look at, and others painfully ridiculous, only draws one back to the original with the thought that genius peaked right off the bat. Rineke Dijkstra’s photographs of beached teenagers, looking for all the world like non-consentingly sexualised bully victims, stand either side of Venus, begging inappropriate questions of pubescent sexuality and nascent womenhood, forcing one to don blinkers and look all the more carefully at Botticelli’s increasingly compelling masterpiece. This is the true stroke of curatorial brilliance. The juxtaposition confronts the eye and demands we reject it, yet the trinity thus presented haunts us with the corruptibility of artistic intention and slaps us with our own corruption.

The rest of the show is anti-climactic, from the pointed photographic dross of David Lachappelle to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood’s own insipid obsession with square jaws and arachnid fingers. The main problem is the striking absence of Botticelli himself, save for the introductory Venus. The modern borrowings suffer for the lack of a narrative. After the striking first impression, this is more of an exercise in artistic genealogy, but with the viewer left to draw the family connections.

Botticelli’s works are, inexplicably, relegated to the rear of the exhibition, lumped together with a number of studio productions of dubious quality. The cursory curatorial narrative slips here, from one of inspiration to apology. Why not spare us half a dozen replications of a single image, each a bit more ropey than the last, in favour of contextualising Botticelli among his adoring followers. By the end, the striking first impression is utterly lost, as are we as we try to find our way to the exit.

Make Something of Something

I’ve been following the energetic creativity and general joie de vivre of Claire the illustrator for a good while. Sometimes young people give you hope – there’s a spark there: a passion, a purpose, a spirit. If you’re looking for an example of resourcefulness, seek her out. I thought she was a real individual who happened to be handy with a pencil, but it turns out she’s also handy with saw and set-square. She wanted for something, and went and made the damn thing. Now that is a kind of problem-solving psychology that is all too rare these days. And there’s a fair example of fatherhood here too. Go look.

Image lifted from http://illustratorclaire.wordpress.com/. Pretty sure she'll be alright with that.

The example set me thinking. Time was that there were three kinds of people: people who made stuff or dug it out of the ground; people who sold the stuff that was made, or else filled in ledgers to record how much was sold; and people who did bugger all. Each had a value set. The first put value in skill; the second put value in money; the third put value in blood, or else in tradition. It seems to me that there is something very honourable in setting store by skill, something noble about blood, and something essential about tradition. And that makes me lament all the more that practically everyone these days is of the second category. Everyone is a salesman or an administrator, and our lives are reducible to an overwhelming concern with the bottom line. I find very little by way of humanity in the mere chasing of green.

Alas, the artisan and the patron are not likely to be resuscitated any time soon. I therefore exhort you to do as our young exemplar does, and make something of something. Find some value in life that does not reduce to dollars and cents. If you have a frivolous hobby, pursue it seriously. Play an instrument? Dedicate yourself to mastering it. If you’re a gardener, don’t satisfy yourself with pulling weeds, but work to enchant it. Write stories? Get published! There is humanity in these things, for the human creature is artful and skilful. Therein lies one source of our cachet.

Every Intellect Needs A Café

There’s something about those little plaques that really saddens me. ‘So-and-so used to come here and behave like a bohemian’, they tend to say. And the hipsters and tourists flock to the cafés where these plaques hang in order osmotically to acquire the genius left embedded in the very tables and chairs. Theirs is a conspicuous consumption of over-priced caffeine, and they will likely be remembered for nothing. The sadness arises because I see the erection of a plaque as a cultural period. If a spot is designated as formerly a hive of intellectual and artistic activity, then it is now nothing more than a relic, and artists and intellectuals will give it a wide berth. Nothing says cultural death quite like a plaque.

The truth is that every artist and every intellectual still needs a café. Give us the quiet of an urbane apartment and we go stir crazy. Give us an office and we recoil at being at work. Put us in a library and we object to all the out-of-place noise and bustle. But give us a café, with wait staff who look and act like waiters and waitresses; with a sense of age and tradition; with a nonchalant superiority in cakes, pastries and savouries; and with a decent wine list for when espresso no longer cuts the mustard – give us this place and we shall relish creation. The noise of this place is not distracting, as it would be in a library, but atmospheric. The public becomes a muse for our endeavours. We acknowledge the faces of those whom we recognise as being similarly engaged, and we think of ourselves as a salon. Occasionally we meet, talk, inspired and aspiring, lose track of time, loosen the grip of society’s sense of the importance of time, and loose our imaginations.

I am an itinerant; I am always in need of a place like this. In Paris I confess I went directly to Les Deux Magots, but Hemingway and Picasso are long-since gone. I wasn’t there long enough to come up with better, but in the sun’s penetration of the smoky terrasses of Saint-Germain-des-Prés I knew I was in the right neck of the woods. The very air suddenly turned me into a photographer:

Oh, if I were there now. Why does my camera only work occasionally?

Other cities have afforded more time. In London, Patisserie Deux Amis, a short walk from the British Library, and Café Mozart on Swains Lane (now closed, so a plaque is no doubt being conceived), have been my bolt holes. Don’t all crowd out the former, or you’ll spoil the place. Anyway, it’s mine.

Photo by Steve Bowbrick

In Cambridge, Simon’s on Mass. Ave between Porter and Harvard Square, if you could ever find a seat.

The eponymous Simon. Photo by Mark Garfinkel, Boston Herald

In Montreal, I’m unimaginatively attached to the ghetto cafés on opposite corners of Milton and Parc, the 24-hour Second Cup and the Presse Café that faces it. These attachments are more productive than romantic, and there’s little actually to recommend them (which is perhaps as it should be). But if my legs are working you’ll find me at the Nocochi Café with its Persian cookies, or at the Première Moisson a bit further along Sherbrooke.

Favourite haunt of McGill undergrads, as well as their profs.

In Berlin I’m spoiled for choice, but my destinations of choice are pretty well set. Leysieffer and Café Einstein offer all the old-world charm a thinking man needs, the former peddling the finest chocolate outside Switzerland, the latter doing fine fare in general and Apfelstrudel in particular. Anna Blume I’ve already covered, but a stone’s throw away one can happily intellectualise oneself into a coma at Weinstein – not really a café, but that’s how I treat it, which is all that counts.

Leysieffer, Friedrichstrasse

Einstein. Just a perfect place. Photo by tip Berlin.

Weinstein. Emphasis on the Wein. Photo by tullintusch, Qype

Where to next? The world hasn’t let me know yet. But just in case, let me know where you all go to create, wherever you happen to be. Maybe I’ll meet you there.

In Praise of the Egg

It is International Women’s Day. And Pancake Day! Rarely is one’s focus so tightly concentrated on the symbol of the ovum. It may seem difficult to celebrate the achievements of half the global population, but I suggest targeting your attention on the wonders of those women around you. I am blessed to be accompanied daily by women of exceptional intelligence and impeccable taste, and I salute them. To she who is most exceptional of all, I made a votive offering of my own famous pancakes. She is ascending to new heights of brilliance of late, and I count myself especially thankful for her, and for the opportunities that have been freely available to her. Onward!

Rembrandt, The Pancake Woman

Barcelona Masculine: Some Observations

The most common image on the door of gentlemen’s bathrooms in bars and restaurants in Barcelona is of Al Pacino as Michael Corleone in Godfather II. We can debate the manliness of this character, but not if he only marks the way to basic biological functions.

The nearest, and most lavish, den of iniquity to my (rather nice) hotel was called ‘Bagdad’, and offered an ‘Arabic porn show’. I deigned not to penetrate its inner sanctum.

The Olympic needle is enveloped by a feminine O, and the crucible of the Olympic flame sits atop a rather flaccid looking upright.

One of the principal city displays is the magic fountain, which gushes on a precise timetable, to the strains of Pavarotti. It’s an illuminated circle of water, fed by a lavish terraced waterfall that descends from an art museum.

At the Picasso Museum, the art is slavishly laid out in chronological order, with no mind to the apparently enormous gaps in the collection that this method reveals. And thus we get the man’s loose sketches of his arty friends alongside his cheap smut. You’ll see some gems here, but the feeling you’ll leave with will be that of Picasso’s women: the man was a stylish cad.

And finally there’s Gaudi, who was pathologically afraid of the straight line so far as I can tell. Barcelona is the best planned city in Europe, all neatly laid out in beautiful tenement blocks. But the chief attractions among these solid piles are Gaudi’s visions, giving the distinct impression that all his bricks melted in the Mediterranean sun. Twelve Euros to enter, no less; more for the premium shack.

All told, a city of the exotic and the feminine, the organic and artistic. What manliness abounds in the visible city is cast in questionable light. But I would aver that these attractions are not where people live, nor work, but are the mere attractions for the touristic gaze. In its stoic planning, the rest of the city conceals its strength in a sober anonymity.

*4th, 5th, 6th, 8th, 9th pics are mine.

Modern Times

The man visited the Neue Nationalgalerie near Potsdamer Platz  in order to look over the Moderne Zeiten exhibition. He could never quite reconcile himself to the abdication of morality among certain modernists. Art that gave itself to mere daubs and splatterings seemed to him an insult to painting. The pursuit of pure form, of messages surreal, abstract or non-existent, seemed to him pompous and puerile. But the man was drawn to new objectivity – to the confrontation of those parts of the human most joyous, most erotic, most grotesque in candid representation. He went expecting a heavy dose of the latter element.

He argued with his companion over the meaning of Lotte Laserstein’s Abend über Potsdam (1930): whether the men bored and ignored their women, or if they fought over them in that faux-relaxed intellectual manner that attempts to prevail without ever coming to violence. In either case, the feast is meagre, the mood depressively alcoholic, the outlook grey with pending gloom. If this was a last supper, it was not a prequel to an apotheosis, but a repast before a fall: sin and daggers cum panis. The man, shocked by this portrayal of masculine shortcomings, walked away trying to shake of his admiration of the portrayal of their clothes, to which he was compulsively drawn. There is more to civilisation than dressing, he considered.

In the next room, a crowd of people stood laughing. The man joined them and began to laugh too. They watched Charlie Chaplin, at his beautiful best, in Modern Times. Across languages and cultures people came together to laugh at the master who has never been approached in comedic cinema. His performance transcends time. And so does his critique. The man ceased to laugh and looked again. So many muscular men; so many hard workers. But the machine enslaves them, and makes men subject to unworthy men, who hold power in capital, but who occupy themselves in effete activities, engaging with reality through jigsaws that cannot be put together. The weakling is put on a par with the strapping chap; the function of biology put in rhythm with the machine. Woman is reconceived as mere nuts and bolts, to be tightened compulsively and without any notion of humanity. Modern Times was emasculation in extremis.




The man moved on, searching for an image of a man to which he could hold. He could not find one.