The Cult of Beauty at the V&A

PART TWO

The Grosvenor Gallery, 1877

The exhibition moves towards the apogee of the Aesthetic Movements influence (and notoriety) in the 1870s and 80s as we pass into the area signposted with Whistler and the critic Walter Pater’s assertion of Art For Art’s Sake. The opening of the Grosvenor Gallery in 1877 was a major step forward, and a bold declaration of intent. It was to become the focal point for the display of Aesthetic painting and sculpture. The opening itself was a significant event which caused much excitement and signalled the movement’s increasing fashionability. Whistler had decorated the ceiling with a design depicting the moon cycling through its phases across a blue background. The walls were painted in the signature Aesthetic tones of green and gold, and were hung with drapes of green damask. Oscar Wilde was there, resplendent in a coat which had been specially designed for the occasion. Based on a dream he’d had in which a man resembled a cello, it was cut and shaped so that Oscar himself, when viewed from certain angles, became an ambulatory instrument. It was a gesture worthy of later Surrealist exhibitions, and he certainly carried it off with a great deal more élan than Dali’s botched diving suit stunt. His review of the opening was his first published work, although he was as much a part of the exhibition as an observer. It was largely positive, singling out Burne-Jones and GF Watts for particular praise, although Wilde, like others, was at a loss as to what to make of Whistler’s Nocturne In Black And Gold: The Falling Rocket, one of his semi-abstract colour arrangements. He covered his temporary uncertainty (he later came to admire such works) with a quip, remarking ‘it is worth looking at for about as long as one looks at a real rocket, that is, for somewhat less than a quarter of a minute’. The painting was to sustain much more serious and damaging attacks than Wilde’s airily amusing dismissal, which Whistler took in good part.

Whistler - Nocturne in Black and Gold

The Grosvenor was partly set up in opposition to the Royal Academy, and was much concerned with giving paintings adequate space to stand out as individual works, and setting them within a sympathetic environment. Whistler viewed exhibitions as ‘installations’ in which all elements, including the gallery setting and décor, combined to create a singular overall effect. The V&A honours this by bathing the walls of its exhibition in projected green and purple light against which outlined peacock feather and lily designs float. Whistler began to give his own paintings titles which synaesthetically suggested a musical quality. There were Nocturnes, Variations and Symphonies, and these ‘compositions’ were regarded in terms of the expressive qualities of their limited colour palettes as much as their subject matter, which almost became incidental. Paintings such as Symphony in White No.1: The White Girl, on display here, are tonally restrained, using pallid, cool and understated colours – whites, greys and pinks, and few if any primaries. His Nocturne in Black and Gold, mentioned above, was one of number of semi-abstract riverscapes, and prompted the pre-eminent critic John Ruskin to ask, on the occasion of the Grosvenor’s opening in 1877, why Whistler felt free to ask for money ‘for flinging a pot of paint in the face of the public’. There may have been a certain amount of public politicking behind such a remark. Ruskin was still a man of the Royal Academy, and felt obliged to uphold its values particularly in the face of such an arrogantly self-assertive man as Whistler. There was no particular artistic reason why he should have displayed such hostility towards Whistler’s paintings. He had, after all, championed Turner, who produced work which matched Whistler’s Nocturnes in terms of vaporous formlessness. Whistler, who was highly self-critical but unlikely to accept adverse opinion from anyone other than himself, and who, as an immaculate dandy, may have objected to Ruskin’s referring to him as ‘a coxcomb’, sued for libel. As his friend in rivalry Oscar Wilde was to discover in a later decade, bringing grievances and feuds into the establishment arena of the Courts was a grave mistake for someone who went so extravagantly against the grain. He won the case, but was granted a derisory award of a farthing in damages, and was left to pay ruinous fees for the case.

The Arab Hall in Leighton House

Whistler also extended his concern with the composition of the perfect gallery installation to the design of his own house, which he worked out with Edward William Godwin. All aspects of living were to be arranged aesthetically. Appropriately, his near-neighbour in Tite Street, Chelsea, where his White House was built, was Oscar Wilde. They weren’t to enjoy each other’s proximity for long, however, since Whistler’s extravagant spending (a necessary adjunct to his through-composed existence) combined with the financial fall-out from the court case left him bankrupt by 1879, and he had to escape to Europe. Perhaps it was a good thing that Wilde and Whistler became geographically distant. Two such carefully constructed mirror-image personae living so near to each other day in and day out might finally have resulted in some matter/anti-matter explosion, albeit a radiantly beautiful and radiantly witty one. From now on, this was Wilde’s manor, and society London was his to charm into submission. Other artists also took to guiding the design of their homes and the furnishings which filled them. Godwin designed vases, the one included here decorated with the outlines of cranes, and there is also a Japanese-style chair designed by Alma-Tadema on display. But it was Lord Leighton who took the Aesthetic house to new heights of feverish extravagance enabled by the wealth accruing from the immense success of his art and his prominent position as head of the Royal Academy. Leighton House, to the south of Holland Park, is a dream palace to match any of his own classical or oriental fantasias. Its most celebrated room is the Arab Hall, with its central pool and fountain and walls lined not only by his own collection of Arabic tiles, but also with a mosaic frieze by Walter Crane.

Burne-Jones - The Beguiling of Merlin

Burne-Jones came into his own with the opening of the Grosvenor Gallery, achieving huge success and widespread recognition after having retreated from public view for some years, hurt by the criticism associated with the ‘fleshly school’ attack. Huge is certainly the word, as his and other artists’ canvasses seemed to expand exponentially. His The Beguiling of Merlin demonstrates something of Whistler’s concern with creating http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifvariations on a limited and subdued palette, in this instance bluish greys. Nimue pauses in her reading of a book which looks reamed by dampness, as if it has been left out in the forest, and looks down upon the resentfully entranced Merlin. Her hair is constrained within an odd serpentine weave of a headpiece which gives her the look of a medieval Medusa. The twisting interlace of the tangled tree branches echo the strands of her hair and arch over to coil around Merlin’s prone body, trapping him within their blossoming and shooting embrace. The figures have the distanced look of all Burne-Jones’ subjects, male or female; pallid, hollow-eyed, half lost in some opiated reverie. The French decadent writer Octave Mirbeau suggested that the shadows under their eyes were the result of masturbation, which probably reveals more about his own very French preoccupations. A later painting, The Golden Stairs (1880), familiar from the Tate Britain, from which it is on loan, offers a fashion parade of angels, all descending a winding stair, holding a variety of instruments. It looks like a backstage scene after the successful performance of some Heavenly symphony. Burne-Jones tries to vary the expressions of the figures in this group composition, but his attempts to give some of the angels a more animated, vivacious look seem strained. Notably, the angel playing the medieval fiddle who breaks the otherwise unbroken line of figures and faces more directly outwards at the viewer wears the more familiar look of wistful, self-contained sadness.

GF Watts - Love and Death

GF Watts was another painter who came fully into his own at this time, earning his own exhibition at the Grosvenor in 1881 and becoming one of the pre-eminent and well-regarded artists of the age. He, along with Burne-Jones, was also much admired by the French, an interesting observation given the general consensus that anything interesting happening in late nineteenth century art occurred across the Channel. JK Huysman’s character Des Esseintes, the very model of the French decadent aesthete who is the central (indeed, pretty much only) protagonist of that handbook of decadent taste A Rebours (Against Nature), expresses his own admiration for the ‘weirdly coloured pictures by Watts, speckled with gamboges and indigo, and looking as if they had been sketched by an ailing Gustave Moreau, painted in by an anaemic Michelangelo, and retouched by a romantic Raphael…the strange, mysterious amalgam of these three masters was informed by the personality, at once coarse and refined, of a dreamy, scholarly Englishman afflicted with a predilection for hideous hues’. Watts maintained a steady fidelity to classical models and Academy traditions, and was also a notable portraitist. His painting of Algernon Swinburne sets him against a background of Rembrandt-like gloom in his dark jacket, which serves to make his red hair and beard and flushed, warm-toned face stand out all the more. He looks a great deal more sober and respectable here than the wild youth of William Bell Scott’s portrait. The allegorical strand of his work came to the fore at this time, and like Burne-Jones, he tended to paint on a grand scale in terms of the physical size of his pictures. His Love and Death (exhibited at the 1877 Grosvenor opening) depicts a naked youth standing amongst blooming flowers seeking to hold back the robed figure of death, who ascends stone steps with her back to us, treading over cut, withered blossoms towards a dark entrance above. Choosing, an earlier picture from 1864, is like a more chaste version of one of Rossetti’s sensuous, late portraits. Here, a young woman smells a red camellia, a bunch of violets tightly clutched in her other hand. She wears a green dress whose ruffled sleeves blend in with the dark foliage, her red lips the same colour as the flowers, which she seems almost to be kissing as much as smelling (camellias have no scent). Unlike Rossetti’s women, who look straight out at the viewer from the canvas, she is viewed in profile, her eyes half-closed and downcast. The model was the actress Ellen Terry, whom Watts had married in the year of the painting’s composition. She was 16 years old at the time, he 47. Always possessed of a strongly moralising turn of mind, which tended to turn everything into an universal struggle in which the opposing archetypes were clearly demarcated. He believed he was saving her from ‘the temptations and abominations of the stage’. She soon realised that these were what she craved more than anything. The marriage was, unsurprisingly, a brief affair, and they parted in the following year.

Albert Moore - Reading Aloud

More dreamy women are found in the paintings of Albert Moore. His Reading Aloud (1883-4) is an exemplary Aesthetic painting, an artful arrangement of vases, fabrics, carpets, bedside furniture and books – the complete Aesthetic collection. His women have rather more colour in their cheeks than Burne-Jones’, although they are draped around the bed with a similar listless languor. The Art For Art’s Sake galleries focus on the applied arts as much as they do the fine arts, demonstrating the extent to which Aestheticism sought to extend its reach beyond the galleries and into the daily settings and styles of life. There are some gorgeous clothes here. The women’s dresses are notably looser in line than the suffocatingly constricted fashions of the day. This was a move towards the ‘rational’ dress associated (negatively or positively according to your outlook) with the bohemian and artistic life in much the same way as it would be down the years. Some of these fashions seem to hark back to the empire line dresses of the early 19th century, with the material cinched below the bust and flowing freely beneath. For the gents, there’s an elegant silk smoking jacket with tassel and braid ‘frogging’, and accompanying embroidered velvet smoking cap. A small blue silk purse designed and made by Jane Morris in 1870 offers a hint of the real Janey behind the passively posed photographs an cautiously penned letters. The celebrity status which the major Aesthetic artists, writers and designers enjoyed in the 80s and 90s is intriguingly embodied in an autograph fan, on the bamboo spokes of which signatures and brief messages have been written. An ideally Aesthetic object upon which to accumulate such names. It shows the extent to which it was the artists as much as the art who fascinated the public (a fascination fed by the increasing popularity and circulation of newspapers). This idea of the artist as celebrity has a particularly modern ring to it. Another fan included here is painted in dark, night tones and decorated with a moon around which bats flitter. It would be a perfect accessory for the modern day Goth, ideal as a sun shade.

Whistler and Godwin's White House in Tite Street

There are plans and designs for ideal Aesthetic homes, the descendants of Philip Webb’s Red House, which reflected the particular fantasies and personal fancies of the individuals who dreamed them. Whistler worked very closely with Edward William Godwin on the design of his ‘White House’ in Tite Street, neat, watercoloured plans of the front elevation of which are on display here. Its clean and simple elegance of line and proportion and lack of obfuscatory ornamention failed to meet with the favour of the Metropolitan Board of Works, and Godwin was obliged to make its exterior more decorous in order for it to be realised in more than ideal form. Godwin shared Whistler’s desire to create a unified environment in which every element contributed to an overall effect. He collaborated with him on the exhibition stall for the William Watt furnishing company at the Paris Exposition of 1878, an installation (for this was more than a mere sales display) which was given the title Decorative Harmony in Yellow and Gold. Godwin also designed furniture, and was one of the chief progenitors of the Japanese style, which favoured straight lines and rectilinear angles and planes. The wood was generally black, and lacquered or inlaid designs were incorporated around the edges or on the panels. Japanese style was hugely influential, and this influence can be seen reflected in furniture (including screens), book illustration, ceramics and pottery, and clothing (there is kimono included amongst the costumes on display). This preoccupation prompts some strikingly modern designs, as well as some incongruous juxtapositions of Eastern and Western concerns. Lewis Foreman Day’s clock (1879) has intersecting planes of black wood in which is embedded a dark clock face with golden hands. Phases of the moon and hovering classical figures are etched in white against the black background. The whole things looks as if it is intended to complement a similarly designed desk or cabinet. Christopher Dresser’s nickel-plated silver teapot and claret jug from 1879 are designed with utilitarian simplicity, and their angular, flat planes look remarkably modernist. They could almost have been produced at the Bauhaus some 40 years later

Whistler - Harmony in Blue and Gold:Peacock Room

Japanese style certainly influenced the most famous Aesthetic interior, Whistler’s Peacock Room (1876), or as he preferred to call it, Harmony in Blue and Gold. This was designed, in his absence, for the Liverpool ship owner Frederick Leyland, a man of considerable wealth. Whistler covered every available space with peacock designs in blue and gold (using a forest of gold leaf) to create a sumptuously gilded and glittering setting for one of his own paintings, La Princesse du Pays de la Porcelaine (1863-4). This is a work which is itself an exemplar of Japanese influence, with its screens, patterned carpet, blue vase, decorative fans and the female figure draped in a loose kimono-like robe, leaning slightly backwards to create the sinuous curvature of representations of women in Japanese woodblock prints. The whole room was bought, after Leyland’s death, by Charles Lang Freer in 1904, taken to pieces and shipped over to America, where it graced his Detroit Mansion. After Freer’s death in 1919, it was deconstructed once more and put together again in the Freer Gallery in the Smithsonian Museum in Washington DC, where it remains to this day. It is projected here onto the walls of a circular wooden enclosure which has been knocked up for the occasion, and which aims to give a super-cinerama surround screen experience. Unfortunately, the image is far from sharp, and the effect is more akin to looking at a CCTV recording of the room (offering more voyeurism, paralleling the peep show view of Rossetti’s room. The main result of this installation is to place an ugly silo of hardboard in the middle of the gallery; an act of sacrilege in the eyes of an Aesthete. Whistler was also let loose to paint his unrestrained interior designs on the walls and ceilings of the house which Oscar Wilde shared with Constance Lloyd after their marriage in 1884. This time, the peacock feathers were a less opulent white, and were included in the drawing room ceiling décor.

Walter Crane - Solidarity of Labour

Patterned wallpaper and hangings were also an essential component of the Aesthetic home. William Morris is well known as the pre-eminent designer in this area; so much so, indeed, that he put his socialist principles temporarily to one side in order to design the wallpaper for Queen Victoria’s residence in Balmoral. But there is also a lovely wallpaper design on display here by Walter Crane, made for Jeffrey and Co. in 1874. This was intended for a nursery, and features swans, drawn in a heavily outlined style familiar from his fairytale illustrations. The swan, with its white feathers, effortless glide and long sinuous neck is an ideal subject for Aesthetic design. Crane, like Morris, developed strong socialist beliefs towards the end of the century, and created some of the most famous works of art associated with the movement at this period, including his Solidarity of Labour prints. For Crane and Morris, the diversity of media and methods associated with the Aesthetic movement, its refusal to make qualitative distinctions between the ‘fine arts’ of painting and sculpture and the applied or decorative arts was a recognition of the artistry of craftsmanlike labour. Those involved in the manufacturing industries were, in their own way, artists; and artists, conversely, were to an extent artisanal labourers. The vital element of inspiration could be found in the work of the best of both. The rise of mass factory production disrupted this equation, turning labour into a deadening experience devoid of any creativity, which was one reason why Morris, Crane and others associated with the Arts and Crafts movement were so vehemently opposed to it.

Walter Crane - At Home

The Aesthetic portrait was also a fashionable prospect at this time, and many patrons and associates are captured in paint, carefully posed in artfully arranged interiors. Amongst these, we find Crane’s portrait of his wife, standing by the fireplace in front of which their tabby cat sits in tranquil, easeful repose. Many of the elements of the Aesthetic movement are here displayed: The blue and white ceramic tiles bordering the fireplace; the patterned, handwoven carpet; the medieval tapestry; the peacock feather which Crane’s wife absently holds in her hand; and her relaxed, languorous stance. And, for that matter, the cat itself, for cats, rather than dogs, are definitely the Aesthetic pet of choice (Rossetti’s more impractical zoological eccentricities notwithstanding). Crane’s painting has a greater simplicity then the portraits amongst which it hangs. Its interior is light and airy, as opposed to the dark, enclosed interiors within which most of the other important Aesthetic personages and patrons are portrayed. It is less like a shadowed retreat from the world, more like a home which remains open to it.

The Boy From Space

The 1971 BBC LP The Boy From Space has just come into the Exeter Oxfam shop and made its way online. This was part of the Look and Read strand of schools programming, which educated children through storytelling and accompanying reading activities. The LP was part of the 'read' side of the equation, a telling of the story at a slow and steady pace designed to allow its 8-9 year old target audience to follow the words in their reading books. The Look component was realised in the TV series, which was graced with music by John Baker and special sounds by Richard Mills of the Radiophonic Workshop, both of whom are credited on the back sleeve of the LP, although there is very little of their magic to be found within – just the odd raygun sizzle and echoed and phased backward ‘space vocal’ here and there. Dick Mills seems to be largely responsible for the music in the TV serial, presumably using the EMS VCS3 synthesiser which was the Workshop’s first foray into the new technology. They would later graduate to the EMS Synthi 100, a room-filling monster described as being ‘the size of two double wardrobes’ and affectionately christened The Delaware. The theme tune of the Boy From Space TV series is a rather touching two line song crooned by the inimitable Derek Griffiths (a very different style to his funky scatting on the Bod theme, and an indication of his versatility as a performer), with plangent accompaniment from Mills’ synth. ‘Out there in space, shall we find friends?’ he asks, before offering the koan-like poser ‘is there a place where the universe ends?’ I’m not sure whether the series ever fully answered this astro/meta-physical conundrum, but you can find out for yourself here.



The LP was produced by Maddalena Fagandini, herself a veteran of the Radiophonic Workshop, having worked there from 1960-63. She was one of a number of significant female composers and sound engineers to have found a home at the Workshop. Delia Derbyshire and Daphne Oram are the two best known (and I’m very excited about the forthcoming Oram exhibition at the Science Museum, centring around their recent acquisition of the Oramics Machine), but there were also figures like Fagandini, Jenyth Worsley and Elizabeth Parker. Perhaps it says something about the assumptions of the time that both Fagandini and Worsley ended up producing children’s programming; then again, perhaps it says something about our assumptions that we should consider this a less than worthy task. Fagandini was responsible for the percussive cut-up tape piece Time Beat, designed for use as a TV interval signal. This was later produced as a single, released on Parlophone Records, by one ‘Ray Cathode’, better known as George Martin. Fagandini also produced the programme Things That Go Bump In The Night, an archive selection of ‘real’ ghost stories, for which she created suitably eerie sounds which echoed through the shadowy, haunted corridors of the Maida Vale studios. More fantastic Radiophonic sounds were created for a 1960 production of Czech writer Karel Capek’s allegorical beast-fable The Insect Play (1921) and a radio adaptation of Jean Cocteau’s Orphee. For this, she adopted old avant-garde techniques of playing the strings inside the piano, and using Greek modes to produce an evocative and suitably Classical theme for Cocteau’s Princess, the guide to the realm of death beyond the mirror.

The Boy In Space was written by Richard Carpenter, who had already by this time written the two series of Catweazle, which saw the scrofulous old 12th century sorceror thrown through time to negotiate the bewildering brave new world of late 60s/early 70s England. He would go on to write The Ghosts of Motley Hall, a light-hearted manifestation of 70s TV’s preoccupation with the supernatural, and Robin of Sherwood, a particularly Pagan take on the greenwood outlaw mythos. The record is part of the BBC’s ‘Study Series’ of LPs. This title has recently been adopted, along with the graphic design style, by Ghost Box records for its occasional series of 7" singles. These have included a collaboration between Broadcast and The Focus Group entitled Familiar Shapes and Noises. Broadcast themselves were influenced by the old Study Series LPs. The Time and Tune no.2: Adventure Stories in Words and Music LP included La Campanelita, or The Little Bell, which provided the title for the beautiful song sung by Trish Keenan on the 2003 HaHa Sound LP. The cover of the Boy From Space, a fine oscilloscope or spirograph pattern traced against a light blue background, is by Andrew Prewett, who also produced the Poetry Corner (a very similar design) and Play School covers which you can have a look at in this previous post.

Mervyn Peake Centenary

Today is the centenary of the birth of Mervyn Peake (in Kuling in China) and it is marvellous to see the wide recognition that this significant anniversary is receiving. Peake was a man of diverse talents, literary and artistic, and has always been held in the highest esteem by a devoted coterie of admirers. But he has never achieved the centrality of renown within the canon of twentieth century culture which he merits. Perhaps he has been a victim of his own prolific and unbounded energies. How to encompass someone who was both author, illustrator, painter, poet and playwright? He was also a singular figure, not fitting easily into the dominant strains of modernism and realism which define the English art and literature of the last century for the majority of the critical establishment. He was rediscovered in the 60s, due in no small part to the efforts of his wife Maeve Gilmore and supporters like Michael Moorcock and Langdon Jones. His Gormenghast novels provided an alternative to the all-pervasive influence of Lord of the Rings, although many who expected a similar epic fantasy narrative were put off by its dense, pictorial prose and intense interiority (qualities which those who disliked Tolkien saw as positive virtues). Hopefully the wide ranging mixture of exhibitions, talks and publications which are taking place (and which reflect the wide ranging nature of Peake’s art) will bring him to the fore once more, and establish his reputation on a more permanent basis.

Much of this activity is no doubt down to the tireless efforts of Sebastian Peake to promote his father’s work. He is certainly a very busy man at the moment. He will be interviewed this Wednesday (13th July) at 6.25 pm on Radio 4 Extra by Nick Briggs, better known for his expert voicing of the Daleks in the new incarnation of Doctor Who about the new exhibition of Peake’s illustrations at the British Library, The Worlds of Mervyn Peake (the Library now holds the Peake archive of manuscripts and notebooks). He will be talking about the Gormenghast books on Monday at the British Library, alongside China Mieville, John Sessions and Brian Sibley, an event which also marks the launching of Maeve Gilmore’s continuation of her husband’s work, Titus Awakes. He will return on the 26th July for a celebration of his father, along with his brother Fabian, and with further contributions from Sibley, as well as Clare Penate, Hilary Spurling (who wrote an introduction to the 1974 book The Drawings of Mervyn Peake, and so is evidently a long term fan) and a few filmed words from Michael Moorcock. The British Library has also published a new edition of the Peake gallimaufry Peake’s Progress, which contains a mixture of poetry, short stories, poems, plays and illustrations. There is also an accompanying CD, in which Sebastian and Fabian (both of whom have good reading voices) narrate a series of ‘weird tales’ which Peake wrote for Boxing Night, as well as the long narrative poem The Rhyme of the Flying Bomb and some light nonsense verse.

He will be coming down this way (to the South West) on Wednesday (the 13th), were I will hear him speak with Fabian and sister Clare at the Dartington Ways With Words Festival, set in the beautiful environs of Dartington Hall. The three were interviewed recently in the Telegraph in Clare’s book lined flat, which apparently is hung with a personal gallery of her father’s paintings. They talk of the discovery of Maeve’s manuscript for Titus Awakes, which was discovered in an unremarkable box in the attic a couple of years ago, and which has now been published. Enticingly, Sebastian holds out the hope that there may be more manuscripts to be discovered. None of them knew she was writing it, and it appears to have been an intensely personal artistic attempt to reclaim the Mervyn she had loved but who had slipped away from her through slow, mentally degenerative illness. Gilmore had written a deeply felt and vivid memoir of her husband shortly after his death in 1968, which was published in 1970 under the title A World Away (now published in a joint volume with Sebastian's memoir A Child of Bliss). It brings to my mind another autobiography written as an act of cathartic remembrance after profound loss, this time by Peter Cushing after the death of his beloved wife Helen. Maeve was a fine artist in her own right, and her work can be seen alongside Mervyn’s in an exhibition at the Victor Wynd Gallery in Hackney. The photographic prints are lovely. One, of Mervyn holding a forking branch above his head as a fantastic antler forms the basis of a wonderful painting by Maeve which graces the cover to the 1983 paperback edition of A World Away which I have. There is also a fascinating insight into the Peakes bohemian domestic environment, with a picture of their kitchen at Drayton Gardens, every surface covered in colourful paintings and murals (even the cooker). Drayton Gardens was the Peakes’ home in the 60s, so these decorations are probably mostly Maeve’s work, since Mervyn was by this time very ill.

Sebastian was also our guide to the Channel Island of Sark, which was in many ways his father’s true home, in a radio programme broadcast on Radio 4 on 7th July under the title A Hundred Years of Mervyn Peake. He noted that islands were central to his father’s work, and that Sark was a place of inspiration and renewal for him. He is still remembered by the older Sarkese; and how could he not be, with his generously open nature, flamboyantly colourful clothing, ring pierced ear (quite daring at the time) and tendency to sport a voluminous cloak. Sebastian meets several people who knew Mervyn, one of whom reveals two pictures which he painted on the island which he has never seen before. Clare and Fabian also take part in the programme, with Clare (whose own memoir of her father was published recently) warmly recalling him as ‘a man of enormous affection – abnormally affectionate’. There are also some perceptive and insightful comments from the novelist Joanne Harris, who clearly has more than a cursory knowledge of Peake’s work. She makes the comparison between Gormenghast and Kafka’s Castle, remarking that in both works, the castle is the world. The novels certainly share and absurdist sensibility, with a rigid adherence to meaningless ritual, although Peake has a more Romantic sensibility, as opposed to Kafka’s darkly ironic worldview. She also notes that the geography of Gormenghast seems to be constantly shifting, such that it would be impossible to provide a map to its corridors and towers (in the traditional post-Tolkien fantasy novel manner). Harris will spoke further about Peake with Ian MacMillan on the Radio 3 programme the Verb last night, and will also be speaking at the Mervyn Peake and the Fantasy Tradition conference in Chichester on the 15th July, with Sebastian Peake giving a lecture the following day. Chichester also hosts two major Peake exhibitions, one at the Pallant House gallery and the other at the Otter Gallery in Chichester University.

The BBC is also marking the centenary with a major new six part adaptation of the Gormenghast books, which will include Titus Awakes. Brian Sibley is the man responsible for the new version, a natural choice since he knew Maeve and is described by Sebastian in the radio 4 documentary as being ‘a Peake expert’. Indeed, this is not his first adaptation of the books. He wrote a two part abridgement back in 1984, partly under the aegis of Sting, a huge fan of the books (I seem to recall that he named his daughter Fushcia), who played Steerpike. He also wrote the fine 26 part adaptation of The Lord of the Rings in 1981, with Ian Holm playing Frodo. By the time of Peter Jackson’s films, he had aged into the role of Bilbo. The cast for the Gormenghast adaptation this time around includes David Warner, who is identified as ‘artist’. Extracts played in the radio 4 documentary suggest that there is an overarching narrative voice, which happily means that more of Peake’s descriptive prose should remain intact. Carl Prekopp, a relative newcomer plays Steerpike this time around, a difficult role which is the key to the success or failure of any adaptation, since he is the agent of change and revolution within the otherwise ossified castle world, the generating engine of story, and also the embodiment of the novels’ moral ambiguity. The miscasting of Steerpike in the BBC Gormenghast was one of the major causes of its failure to fully capture the spirit of the books. He is not attractive, more a kitchen rat whose charisma is cast by means of an adaptive cunning, offering people what he perceives they desire. Miranda Richardson should make a fine Gertrude simply by fine-tuning the customary Miranda Richardson role. Tamsin Greig plays Irma Prunesquallor, and her brittle comic middle class persona is ideal for the awkward comedy of manners which provides one of the lighter of the several variations in tone and style in the weave of alternating plot strands making up Gormenghast, the second novel. The marvellous Fenella Woolgar plays Clarice, one of the two easily-led, doll-like twins whose strings Steerpike pulls. Mark Benton, a great hangdog presence in Mike Leigh’s Career Girls, the first Ecclestone Doctor Who and a memorable episode of Stephen Volk’s Afterlife, gets to enjoy a role of theatrical meanness as the head cook of the abyssal kitchens, one of Peake’s gleefully exaggerated grotesques.

As mentioned above, Maeve Gilmore’s novel (for it really must be attributed to her more than Peake) Titus Awake has now been published. She wrote it under the title Search Without End, but acceded to the final title, which would link it more recognisably to the Gormenghast sequence. She had little to go on other than what Mervyn might have told her over the years, two or three introductory pages and a few columns of suggestive lists of paired and grouped words, a filament-thin framework upon which to build. The lists included words such as snows, islands, thieves, actors, psychiatrists, lepers, echoes, fires, poverty, monsters, hypocrites, madmen, bankers, affluence, debt, society, pirates (always an obsession), dreamers, decadents, athletes, invalids, colours and scents. As the American Overlook Press edition puts it, ‘what these books might have been’. For Maeve, the quest is clearly for her husband, with Titus as a surrogate searcher. He meets an artist in a psychiatric ward who is no longer able to paint or write, or even adequately communicate, and who is clearly Mervyn. Titus subsequent efforts to find him again eventually leads him to an island. We don’t need to be told where it is. They’ve returned to Sark, the golden isles. Thursday also saw the publication of the Illustrated Gormenghast, a handsome hardback volume with an introduction by China Mieville, who was one of the four writer contributing to a recent Guardian Review lead article on Peake (the others were Moorcock, with a personal reminiscence of his relationship with the Peake’s and their work - his verse accompaniments to Peake's Sark drawings for his children has just been published as The Sunday Books; Hilary Spurling on his illustrations; and AL Kennedy on Sark and its influence on Peake’s art). There are 100 new illustrations, which range from full page portraits to small, swiftly rendered pencil sketches which nestle in amongst the text. This replicates something of the feel of the notebooks in which Peake first wrote the novels. The language and the visual sketches ran side by side in the composition, the one feeding into the other in an instinctive process. You can imagine him scribbling as sentence and then pausing to sketch the outline of a figure at the side of the page and quickly shade it in, thinking to himself ‘yes, that’s what they look like’. So it is fitting that they should now find publication in this form. The writer and artist finally united in one great volume. There’s never been a better time to discover Peake, and feast on the products of his ceaseless imagination. Enter, the gates to the castle are open.

The Cult of Beauty at the V&A

PART ONE

As you walk into the entrance lobby of the dimly-lit galleries in which the Victoria and Albert Museum’s Cult of Beauty exhibition is housed you are immediately faced with an arrangement of objects which serve to conjure the spirit of the Aesthetic Movement of the mid to late 19th century which is its subject. There is a glazed dish with a peacock design made by William de Morgan, an employee of William Morris’ Arts and Crafts firm who had branched out on his own and opened his own ceramics workshops in the 1870s. The peacock’s feathers fan out to fill the left hand of the plate, following the curve of its edge, and seem to glimmer with an almost metallic sheen. There is a lengthwise photograph of a bowl of lilies by Frederick Hollyer, and a pair of andirons for the fire designed by Thomas Jeckyll in the form of sunflowers. All of these had symbolic import for the artists and followers of the Aesthetic Movement, Peacock feathers embodied a self-justificatory glorying in display and the favouring of jewelled colours. They stood for art for art’s sake, as Whistler put it. There was also something of the Byzantine mosaic quality to the feathers, which seemed designed to catch the light of the dying sun, or the decadant fade of empire towards the fin de siecle. If the peacock represented empty splendour, the lily symbolised the eternal soul, its white flowers suggested an unblemished purity, and was, for those who sported it, an indication of heightened sensitivity and attunement to spiritual rather than material values. It was the Aesthetic accessory par excellence, and was carried with a mixture of earnestness, irony and defiance in the face of Victorian convention. Its long, sinuous stem and pallid petals, which seem to droop under their own weight, also served as an analogue of the Aesthete’s ideal figure: tall, willowy and prone to draping itself decorously over the nearest piece of exquisite furniture. It was an absolute gift for the satirists and caricaturists of the day. If the lily suggested moonlight and nighttime, then the sunflower was its opposite. The flower of the summer day, it burned with bright, Apollonian light, the illumination of creation and artistic inspiration. Its yellow became one of the key colours in the Aesthetic palette. Whilst it was incorporated into various designs and paintings and was regularly carried about by Oscar Wilde, it was the lily which became the dominant symbol of Aestheticism. It was cool and distanced and a touch aloof.

There is also a bronze statue in this opening arrangement, The Sluggard by Frederick Leighton. It stands as the perfect representation of the Aesthetic figure – languid, listless and stretched into an artful disposition of limb and torso. Its modesty is minimally preserved by a miniscule fig-leaf, and is a bold indication the Aesthetic Movement looked back to the Classical world in embracing male as well as female beauty. This sometimes manifested itself in the expression of homosexual desire, and such open display of sensuality was to attract strong opprobrium and lead to a disastrous end for several of the movement’s figures, both prominent and lesser known. The intermixing of fine and applied art objects in this introductory display, the prelude to the exhibition proper, with materials ranging from bronze and wood to ceramics and iron, also indicates the wide reach of the Aesthetic Movement. More than merely visual art, it was a lifestyle, an interior design look, a fashion, a literary style and, perhaps above all, an elegantly struck pose.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

The exhibition’s trail through the later decades of the nineteenth century England begins with a series of paintings which depict the search for a new ideal of feminine beauty. Some of the principal figures of the Aesthetic Movement are introduced, divided into separate groups. Dante Gabriel Rossetti and James McNeill Whistler, and Frederick (later Lord) Leighton and George Frederic Watts. Broadly speaking, they can be said to represent the Romantic and Classical divisions of Aestheticism, although such distinctions are largely academic. Watts and Leighton remained firmly ensconced within the Royal Academy establishment, at the heart of the recognised art world (as indicated by Leighton’s ennoblement). Those gathered around Rossetti’s circle, and later launching themselves beyond his orbit, tended on the other hand to stand in opposition to the Academy’s dictates, whether through necessity or design. Leighton and Watts were the leading figures of a group sometimes known as the Olympians, partly due to the colossal scale of their works, which frequently extended to the monumental size of the pictures themselves. Leigton’s Pavonia, a portrait of a dark-haired figure glancing back over her shoulder, her hair haloed with a fan of peacock feathers, has been used for the V&A’s exhibition poster. It’s very effective as such, Pavonia seeming to turn to look directly at the viewer, who finds themselves standing in for some imaginary interlocutor. The name Pavonia is a paradoxical feminine version of the Latin word pavonius, which means peacock. Leighton’s classicism tended to veer towards exotica, as can be seen in his frieze-like painting The Syracusan Bride, in which a parade of female supplicants of varying ethnicity make their way along a path leading to a temple. This wedding party includes women leading tamed lions, tigers and leopards. Such classical fantasies also provided an excuse to expose a good deal of flesh, the temporal and geographical distance and air of literariness lending such displays an air of semi-respectability. Whilst Rosetti and his circle generated a significant amount of moral outrage over their supposed debasement of noble artistic values, the likes of Leighton and Alma-Tadema didn’t raise an eyebrow with their bathing scenes and sleeping beauties.

Frederick Sandys - Gentle Spring

Frederick Sandys’ Gentle Spring typifies the Aesthtic’s presentation of the female subject as symbolic figure. His English variant of Botticelli’s Primavera is a pagan embodiment of the turning season, a verdant Goddess surrounded by blossoming life, a rainbow promise arcing above her head, flowers bursting into colourful life in her footsteps. Female figures are often bordered or laurelled with flowers in Aesthetic paintings, usually with traditional folk or literary import intended. Fruits of similarly symbolic weight also hang pendant, or are clutched or laid on tables, half-eaten. Sandys’ picture of Vivien (complete with fruit, flower and peacock feather array), the sorceress sometimes identified with the Lady of the Lake, also indicates the importance of Arthurian mythology to the movement, and of a dream of medieval life in general. This is particularly apparent in the work of Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris, although Rossetti, who had gone through his medieval period with the Pre-Raphaelites, tended now to look elsewhere for inspiration. Sandys was a follower of Rossetti’s who had produced an amusing satirical representation of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood called A Nightmare in 1857. In this pastiche of John Everett Millais’ Sir Isumbras at the Ford, the armoured Millais rides a rather baleful and ragged mule identified as the critic John Ruskin (a champion of the PRB at a time when others were deriding it), with Rossetti sitting on his knee in a dress, and a tiny William Holman Hunt clinging on to Millais behind. William Michael Rossetti, Dante Gabriel’s brother, describes in his writings about the artistic milieu of the time how Sandys fell out with Rossetti. He felt that Sandys was cleaving rather too closely to his subject matter and style. Such borrowing was literally the case with his picture Medea of 1868 which, like Vivien, used his gypsy lover Keomi Gray as a model, and in which he borrowed the red bead necklace which Rossetti had used in his famous portrait Monna Vanna two years earlier. Sandys understandably took exception to such a view, bordering as it did on accusations of plagiarism.

Rossetti’s Monna Vanna (1866), not included here, is one of his third length portraits of women (or Goddesses) from mythology or Medieval and Classical literature. They are much more solid and physically present than the pale, ethereal and wispily evanescent women of his Pre-Raphaelite years. Those figures were largely modelled on Elizabeth (or Lizzie) Siddall, his partner and latterly his wife, who died in 1862 after years of debilitating illness and opium addiction. She stood in for the tragic, doomed heroine, the favoured female subject (or, more accurately, object) of the Pre-Raphaelites. There was a definite sense of continuity between Pre-Raphaelite painting and the Aesthetics, but there was also a shift in emphasis. Only Rossetti, of the original Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, can really be said to have become a significant (and indeed leading) part of the Aesthetic Movement, and his work distinctly altered in its nature. The Pre-Raphaelites placed great emphasis on realism, both in terms of the representation of the world, in the accuracy of every detail, and in fidelity to historical setting. This is one of the factors which initially attracted such vociferous criticism, particularly when it came to their representation of religious subject matter. They also allowed for a degree of social and moral commentary, particularly when it concerned that abiding Victorian preoccupation, the fallen woman. The Aesthetic Movement tended to turn away from such outward concerns and occupied itself solely with the creation of dreamworlds and sensual surface appearances. The Aesthetic generally favoured interiors, as opposed to the finely observed landscapes of the Pre-Raphaelites, in which every blade of grass was scrupulously reproduced. This retreat indoors was an indication of an increasingly inward-looking nature. There was still an interest in fallen women, but now they were brought back into the studio to pose as models, and not for morally uplifting or instructive tableaux. They often ended up staying.

Bocca Bacciata - Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Rossetti’s Bocca Bacciata (1859), which is included here and painted while Lizzie was still alive, is a portrait of Fanny Cornforth, one of the women whom he picked up off the street. She was what he referred to as a ‘stunner’, a word which he frequently used to describe anyone or anything whose beauty hit him with a dazing blow. Fanny as Bocca is a picture of ruddy health, sturdy and full of face, with the rosy apple by her side echoing the bloom of her cheek. She is bedecked in fine jewellery, the flowers of her necklace reproducing the corona of marigolds arrayed behind her head. The marigolds in this case stand in (in reduced form) for sunflowers. The dark, ivy-coloured green of her bodice jacket and the yellowish tinge to the flesh show two of the signature colours of the Aesthetic Movement, often used in combination. Gilbert and Sullivan would later satirize the preoccupation with these colours in their opera Patience as greenery yallery (also a punning take off of the Grosvenor Gallery, the centre for Aesthetic art exhibitions). Fanny also features in Rossetti’s Fair Rosamund, her cheek now in suggestively full flush. The bottle-glass windows behind her again provide a murky green background. The poet Algernon Swinburne, friend and sometime housemate of Rossetti, remarked of Fanny, in the context of Bocca Bacciata, that she was ‘more stunning than can be decently expressed’. Although, given his reputation for uninhibited speech, it was likely that he felt free to express his feelings in all their ripe indecency. Her free flowing hair in both the portraits betrays another of Rossetti’s obsessions. Elizabeth Gaskell commented that ‘it did not signify what we were talking about or how agreeable I was, if a particular kind of reddish brown, crepe-wavy hair came in, he was away in a moment…He is not mad as a March hare, but hair-mad’. Fanny was given free run of the house, coming and going as she pleased whilst ostensibly holding the position of housekeeper. Many of Rossetti’s friends blamed her for the regular disappearance of household items and money, but he didn’t seem unduly concerned. The muse must, after all, claim her due, the wages of inspiration.

Algernon Swinburne by William Bell Scott

Turning right, we come across objects relating to the early years of the arts and crafts movement, and the close-knit group of Rossetti, William Morris, Jane Burden (who became Jane, or ‘Janey’ Morris), Edward Burne-Jones and Algernon Swinburne. Rossetti, Morris and Burne-Jones had cheerfully collaborated on the ill-starred (because ill-prepared) creation of a mural for the Oxford Union, an endeavour which might have failed artistically but which brought them all closer together. They were joined there by Swinburne, an Oxford undergraduate at the time and already a rebelliously inclined poet who, like Morris, was somewhat in awe of Rossetti (as much as a poet as an artist). A dramatic portrait of Swinburne by William Bell Scott depicts him standing before a Romantic seascape, a small compact figure with a wild mane of red hair, which somehow looks too big for his head, sculpted by the wind. It’s one of the pictures which provides the inspiration for Elizabeth Hand’s novel Mortal Love, which brings one of Rossetti’s ‘Goddesses’ to life, both in the fin de siecle period and in the modern day. The cover features a detail from Rossetti’s La Ghirlandata (The Garlanded), one of his portraits of Alexa Wilding (another woman Rossetti invited in from the streets), who in this case is playing a highly ornate harp watched over by two angels. Swinburne appears as a character, and Hand gives squeaking, high pitched voice to his eloquent profanity. It is a marvellous meditation on the destructive potential of pursuing artistic inspiration, of being consumed by the burning, mesmeric gaze of the muse, and serves as the ideal reflection on the Aesthetic and Decadant period and its subsequent influence (not least on the kind of literary fantasy which Hand writes).

The Red House - Philip Webb

The desire to create objects which combined functionality with beauty and which were produced in a craftsmanlike fashion was a reaction to a perceived ugliness manifested in the mass-produced products of the industrial revolution. The entire Aesthetic Movement, with its emphasis on refinement and highly cultivated taste, can be seen as a recoiling from the influence of industrialised production and the uniformity which it fostered. Its favouring of fey fragility and anti-athleticism countered the brute force and thunderous noise of the factories which powered the industrial revolution. They were retreating from the birth of the modern world into a golden age fantasy of their own dreaming. The extension of the artistic outlook to the decoration of the home is exemplified by The Red House in Bexleyheath, now an oasis amongst barren acres of dull suburbia (I should know, I grew up nearby). It was built for William and Jane Morris by Philip Webb, who also created some of the interior furnishings, alongside Rossetti and Burne-Jones, who painted wooden panels and helped design hangings and stained glass. It became a regular meeting place in what was something of an Edenic period for the group. It is represented here by two of Webb’s bronze candlesticks and a wooden bureau decorated with murals by Rossetti, and there are also examples of Burne-Jones’ stained glass near at hand.

The Aesthetic Movement always tended to be dominated by forceful and charismatic personalities, from Rossetti and Morris to Whistler and Wilde. Rossetti’s brother William Michael was a much more restrained personality, his unostentatious christened names seeming to predestine him for a more prosaic and steady life than the impulsive and temperamental Dante Gabriel. He maintained a 49 year career with the Inland Revenue, reaching distinguished high office, something which allowed him to support the less stable fortunes of his artistic friends and acquaintances when needed. Although he was one of the original seven members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, he never produced any significant artistic work. But he was a sensitive and perceptive editor, critic and biographer, and has left us with some insightful first hand literary portraits of the artists he knew so well, written with a generosity which nevertheless allows for a certain amount of reading between the lines. Of Morris, he notes that ‘he was turbulent, restless, noisy (with a deep and rather gruff voice), brusque in his movements, addicted to stumbling over doorsteps, breaking down solid-looking chairs the moment he took his seat in them, and doing scores of things inconsistent with the nerves of the nervous’. As for Algernon Swinburne, William discreetly observes that ‘no man has a more vigorous command of the powers of invective, to which his ingenuity of mind, and consummate mastery of literary resource, lend a lash of the most cutting and immedicable keenness’. He remarks of Burne-Jones, on the other hand, that ‘his manner was very gentle, and utterly alien from any vaunting self-assertion. He was never in strong health, yet to call him an invalid might be going too far’.

Weeping for a Wombat

William shared a house with his brother for a while, along with Swinburne and the poet George Meredith. The Tudor House on Cheyne Walk in Chelsea, alongside the Thames embankment, was one of a series of exemplary Aesthetic houses, although from all reports it was often in something of a state. William comments on his brother’s notorious habit of accumulating a menagerie of strange and diverse pets which roamed his garden. Amongst those he enumerates are ‘a barn-owl named Jessie…dormice, hedgehogs, two successive wombats, a Canadian marmot or woodchuck, armadillos, kangaroos, wallabies, a deer…a mole…Virginian owls, Chinese horned owls…a raven, chameleons, green lizards and Japanese salamanders’. He passes over the Brahmin bull, which even Rossetti swiftly realised was an impractical proposition. Naturally, he also acquired a peacock or two, which were a particular pest for the neighbours. Apparently, they caused such resentment that a clause was added to future tenancy agreements to the effect that peacocks were not allowed on the premises. Rossetti wasn’t the most attentive pet owner, and most of his creatures were sadly short-lived. He was particularly devastated by the death of his wombats, creatures for which he seems to have had a particular fondness. They appear in many sketches, and on the frontspiece for the edition of his sister Christina’s lengthy poem Goblin Market which he illustrated (an exquisite page of which is on display here). He drew a rather touching ‘Self-Portrait of the Artist weeping at the Wombat’s Tomb’, in which the wee beasty lies on its back, paws curled up on its round belly. A noble classical tomb in the background reads 6th November 1869.

Morris was initially keen to follow in Rossetti’s footsteps, but like any emulating protégé, he soon found his own means of expression, which was directed towards design and writing rather than painting. He was, in fact, best known during his own lifetime as a poet. The shop with ‘The Firm’ of Morris, Marshall and Faulkner and Co. set up in Oxford Street to display their wares – chairs, tiles, cabinets, porcelain, stained-glass and tapestries – did much to inspire the idea of the beautifully decorated home. This was furthered by the opening of Liberty’s home furnishings and costume store in 1883 (unsurprisingly, it is one of the sponsors of the exhibition), which offered relatively affordable style (partly due to the fact that many of its goods were machine-made). The handmade ideal was always destined to be impractical, particularly if Morris’ desire that his goods were to be affordable by the ordinary worker was ever to be realised (it wasn’t). Once his business grew, he too adopted elements of machine production. Some degree of compromise was inevitable if this was to be a lasting proposition, and he could use the machinery of the industrial age on a human scale, and for noble ends.

Veronica Veronese - Dante Gabriel Rossetti

The perfection of interior design was indicative of a general turn inward. Aesthetic painting largely avoided landscape, with portraits, historical, mythological or real, tending to be located inside. When it did venture outside, space was often filled with dense thickets and tangles of branch and vine, which gave the feeling of enclosure. The heavy green draperies of Rossetti’s Veronica Veronese and the dark wood of the furnishings give the room a shadowed, self-enclosed feel, the outside world completely blocked out. Veronica is left to sit idly caressing the strings of the violin on the wall, lost in some inner reverie. Nature, when it appears, is confined to vases or cages, as with the nasturtiums and canary here. As Whistler put it one of the more direct of his carefully sculpted epigrams, ‘nature is usually wrong’. It had to be extracted and re-arranged in order to form the perfect compostion. The yellows of the marigold and canaryoffset the predominantly tones of the curtains and the velvet green dress which Veronica wears. Whilst the model here is Alexa Wilding, the dress belonged to Jane Morris, whom Rossetti would later paint in countless guises, and with whom he would share an intimate and passionate friendship. Rossetti’s own room at Tudor House, Cheyne Walk is partially reproduced here, glimpsed through vertical peep-show slots to lend an authentic sense of voyeurism. Blue china plates are arrayed on shelves above the fireplace. Rossetti and Whistler vied with each other in their obsessive collection of blue china, and the craze spread to become one of the defining and most widely taken up elements of the Aesthetic repertoire. Oscar Wilde, whilst at Oxford, also amassed a fair few examples, and admitted ‘I find it harder and harder every day to live up to my blue china’. An offhand and amusing quip, but also an insightful one. The Aesthete defined him or herself through their objects, until the objects began to control them. There’s a certain irony in the fact that Aesthetes sought to distance themselves from the commercialism of burgeoning mass-production, but accumulated fashionable objects with an enthusiasm which anticipated the consumer age whose seeds were being sown around them.

At home with Rossetti - Cheyne Walk interior. Painting by Henry Treffry Dunton

Rather more ominously, there are a couple of phials secreted amongst the blue china and brass plates, placed within easy reach. These might perhaps have contained the opiate drug chloral, to which Rossetti increasingly became addicted, and which, in combination with the whisky with which he washed it down, helped to wreck his health and lead to his early death. There is a chaise longue or sofa, upholstered in green velvet on one side of the fireplace across which to drape oneself (characters in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray are always flinging themselves onto sofas upon entering a room). On the other side is a rectilinear Chinese chair with a moon design, a lute casually laid against it. It is illustrative of the pervasive influence of the Far East on Aesthetic taste. There are also heavy tapestried drapes to add an additional layer of medieval ambience to the diverse assemblage, and to shut out any external light or sound which might intrude on this artificially created tableau. This is the living space as artistic installation and by extension, life as art.

the Bride, Bridegroom and Sad Love - Simeon Solomon

Rossetti and his circle were dealt a glancing blow by a well-publicized attack published in the Contemporary Review in 1871, pseudonymously penned by the poet Robert Buchanan. He accused Swinburne and Rossetti in particular of perpetrating what he called a ‘fleshly school’ of poetry and art, which displayed ‘morbid deviation from healthy forms of life’ and lacked what he deemed the necessary qualities of virility and tenderness which characterised ennobling art. These were the first signs of the negative and even actively hostile attentions which the Aesthetic Movement would increasingly attract; the accusations that it revelled in deviant, immoral sensuality. Rossetti, Burne-Jones, Morris and Swinburne began to go their own ways. Morris even seemed to be in partial agreement with Buchanan, although for different reasons. He later opined, in an 1888 essay ‘The Revival of Handicraft’, that the Aesthetic Movement had retreated from any social engagement and indulgently lost itself in a passive contemplation of beauty, whether in its art or in the mirror. Another victim of stern Victorian censure was Simeon Solomon, the young Jewish artist shoes franky homoerotic illustrations and paintings aroused the displeasure of the critical and moral establishment, and who was arrested in 1873 and imprisoned for homosexual practises. Shamefully, his friends, including Rossetti and (in particular) Swinburne, who had encouraged him in the free expression of his sexuality, shunned him after his arrest, not wishing to be seen with someone who could damage their own artistic careers with the taint of association. His fate was a precursor of the Wilde’s martyrdom towards the end of the century, which also saw him shunned by many of his ‘friends’, and which effectively brought the Aesthetic Movement to an end. But Solomon didn’t share Wilde’s elegant and relatively swift decline, cushioned in a haze of absinthe and advocaat in the Hotel D’Alsace in Paris. He died alone and broken in the workhouse in 1905 (five years after Wilde’s exquisitely timed passing at the end of the century whose later years he had done so much to define) after years of poverty and alcoholism. His line drawing The Bride, Bridegroom and Sad Love (1885), included here, contains all the tenderness Buchanan might wish for, but not in a form of which he would approve.

Gone With The Wind at the Raven Row Gallery

The rather flippantly titled Gone With The Wind exhibition at the Raven Row Gallery in London showcases the sound art of three veterans of the form: Takehisa Kosugi, Max Eastley and Walter Marchetti. The gallery itself is situated in an 18th century house in a warren of narrow streets near Spitalfields which have yet to fall victim to the shiny promises of redevelopment or to the glacial, eastbound flow of the City’s steel and glass mass. From one of the upstairs rooms you get a truly bizarre rear view of the facade of an 18th century terraced house propped up like a movie flat in front of a modern office development of typically bland functionality. As a token gesture towards preservation, it takes the biscuit. The gallery keeps this house at least from suffering such an inbetween non-life. The three artists essentially get one floor each of its four storeys (and what’s to be found lurking in the attic we shall discover later).

Max Eastley’s graphic scores are exhibited beneath glass in the entrance and exit lobbies, partly in order to preserve the mystery of his first floor installations, which are very much integrated into the period feel of the rooms, and need to be free of extraneous distractions. The scores exemplify the balance which sound art strikes between its visual and musical elements. They are beautiful illustrative works in themselves, water-coloured, stippled or densely inked, and would appear to be abstract in form did they not have the functional purpose of suggesting the organisation of musical pitch and tone-colour. The score’s aesthetic beauty perhaps guides the mood of the performer, who draws ideas from studying them and is encouraged to provide a similarly pleasing palette and outline of sound. A sketch of a butterfly’s wing presented as a score is partly a conceptual work, but also points to the affinity of Eastley’s music with the natural world, and the very hushed quality of the sounds his unobtrusive self-made instruments generally produce. The score invites a musical interpretation of the coloured patterning of the butterfly’s wing, and the shape of its outline, but also the sound of its beating in flight. The butterfly motif is one which Walter Marchetti takes up later on, and butterflies also adorn the picture used to advertise the exhibition. In the adjacent room, which a circulation of the building will tend to bring the visitor to last, you can find sketches of Eastley’s musical automata, the likes of which you will by then have come across. They are tentative plans, half works of art, half engineering plans and cross-sections. Some of these may have been constructed, some may have worked to Eastley’s satisfaction, and some may have remained in ideal form. The sketches allow us to imagine the sounds they might make, to hear the music in our heads.

Kosugi with enhanced violin

The ground floor galleries are taken up with works by Takehisa Kosugi, alongside documentation of his artistic life. In the main room, a doubled row of photographs trails around three walls. Here he is in the late 50s, very neatly and conservatively dressed in sober suit and tie, conducting a cellist in front of a pipe organ which dominates the wall behind like the fireplace in a medieval hall. He is seen performing John Cage’s Concert for Piano and Orchestra during the composer’s influential 1964 visit to Japan. Cage is an invisible presence throughout the exhibition, his multivalent influence felt in the work of all three of the artists. In another photo, Kosugi holds his conventional instrument of choice, the violin, but is surrounded by tape reels, dials and wires, indicating that he intends to play it in a far from conventional manner. This is during a rehearsal for a performance of his landmark minimalist drone piece Catch Wave, which is eulogised in Julian Cope’s survey of Japanese rock and experimental (and experimental rock) music Japrocksampler. He places the 1974 LP recording at number 9 in his top 50 of Japanese albums.

The Taj Mahal Travellers with unusually conventional instrumentation

By the 1970s, the neat conservatoire look has been completely abandoned in favour of the wilder, long-haired freakiness he shared with his younger collaborators in the Taj Mahal Travellers. They were an improvising band who played lengthy pieces which layered microscopic sound elements produced by a wide variety of unusual percussion and string instruments and found objects as well as more familiar (but frequently distorted) tones from the likes of electric guitar, trumpet and harmonica over a droning base provided by Kosugi’s amplified violin, oscillators and short wave receivers. The organic was blended with the electronic. There were also vocal interjections into the general ebb and flow of sound, ranging from meditative chanting to vaguely unhinged babble. The Travellers are caught in performance in concert halls and more unusual settings, and also at various locations along the way during their extensive worldwide wanderings. There they are in a geodesic dome in Sweden with Don Cherry joining them for a group shot (did he also join them on stage, I wonder); they are bathing in the golden glow of the dawn rise (or sunset) during their daylong 1970 performance on Oiso Beach in Japan; walking through a street in Esfahan, Iran; standing by their VW minibus on a rocky plain spreading out towards splintered mountains, the middle of nowhere (or Afghanistan, to be more geographically precise); and finally, fulfilling the self-defining goal given by their name, posing before the Taj Mahal in Agra, India. You can follow some of their travels in the film about them made in 1973 and available over at Ubuweb here.

As we move into the 80s, Kosugi has begun to settle into sober elder statesmanship, the hippie garb discarded, and his equipment, fx boxes, turntables and wire-trailing devices now all confined to one desk. He has crossed the Pacific and is found in the company of the New York and West Coast new music aristocracy. This partly reflects his position at the time as composer in residence for the Merce Cunningham dance company. He is seen alongside Cunningham, and also David Tudor, both of whom were frequent collaborators with John Cage, and interpreters of his music. Such partnerships emphasise the importance of Cage to Kosugi. The composer’s visit to Japan in 1962 had been one of mutual recognition and validation, and proved a lasting inspiration to both Cage and the Japanese musicians whom he met. Japanese music, with its particular philosophical and cultural underpinnings, seemed to be naturally open to Cage’s theories of chance and incorporation of unconventional sound. Indeed, many of his discoveries and innovations were rooted in his fascination for Japanese culture. Different generations of experimental musicians with whom Kosugi has played are represented by David Behrman, who, with his tufts of mad scientist hair and loud paisley-patterned shirt (memorialising his roots in the 60s) seems to conform to Frank Zappa’s ideal of what the modern composer should look like; and Jim O’Rourke, the arch-collaborator and contemporary experimental and left-field rock music’s busiest man. Finally in the photographic section, there are pictures of three installations in which the sound is sourced from differently shaped objects which sprout from various parts of the galleries in which they were placed – a bulb in Spacings (1984), a ‘tree’ in Interspersions (1987), and horizontally hung tubes suspended from the walls in Streams (2001).

A similar work, Interspection (1989) can found on the wall opposite. Oscillators, piezo speakers and a powering battery are corralled within a wooden frame, splayed out like a pressed flower. The whole requires the close, craning attention you might give to a famous oil painting, but in this case in order for the ear to pick out the detail of the faint frog chirp which the circuitry emits. Two graphic scores are also framed on this wall: one in which the stave is drawn as lines of colour , encouraging a synaesthetic translation into the tonal palette and a free, intuitive interpretation of time; the other in which stave lines are punningly scored onto heavy paper, the wavy, uneven results of freeform drawing suggesting the undulant oscillations of held tones. On a table in the centre of the room you can listen to the CD Music of Group Ongaku, containing pieces made in 1960 (a recording of their debut performance in Tokyo), 1961 and 1970. This was the group centred around Kosugi and Yasunao Tone, and the record (number 40 in Cope’s Japrocksampler chart) demonstrates that many of the elements familiar from later improv music were already in place years before - Tooting toy instruments; the clatter of pans and clink of bowls; snatches of radio speech and recorded sound; jabbering and muttering voices; lurking cello pouncing into sudden scrawling motion; squiggles of saxophone skronk; floating piano chords and cat on the keys outbursts; tape manipulations and reverb auras; and the wheezing drone of a vacuum cleaner. The presence of the latter in the similar composition presented by the young composer Hermann in Edgar Reitz’s late-60s set Die Zweite Heimat suggests that the director may have been aware of this work or one of its many descendants. The debut recording, Automatism, is certainly extraordinarily confident, its unusual sounds created with an unhesitating certainty and strident confidence. You can find the album over at Ubuweb, here.

A TV shows videos of previous gallery performances. Wireless (1996) has Kosugi making amplified sound echo round the entry hall of a museum via a contact mic. This as much performance art as music, and betrays the influence of his time with the Merce Cunningham dance company. He drags a cluster of metal balls attached to the end of a belt along the floor, producing a grating, scraping rasp with occasional rhythmic bounce, and at one point twirls around in a noisy dervish dance. He plays his violin, playing on the resonance of the cavernous space and producing Bernard Herrmannesque shrieks of bird attack sound which fly into its furthest corners. He does a Nosferatu creep up the stairs and then suddenly dashes up with nimble steps, echo delayed notes forming an aural wake behind him. It is essentially a dance piece with his own music simultaneously produced as accompaniment. Elsewhere, he produces and antediluvian growl, sends the microphone his of a scouring wind blowing through the halls and corridors, and whispers into a fan, its rotation segmenting the sound and sending its tatters spiralling away.

The room at the back of the ground floor is filled with wavering blue and grey light as the surface of an ocean close to the shore is projected upon the wall. The sandy coloured floor boards on which we walk effectively becomes the sea strand. Visitors wandering in cast sharp shadows onto the shifting projection, becoming Caspar David Friedrich-like figure of Romantic contemplation, gazing out onto the endless blue. In front of his oceanic wall, several small transistor radios are hung adjacent to small transparent boxes of circuitry, each attached to long lengths of thread. They swing gently to and fro, their motion partly caused by people who have picked them up and toyed with them before letting them loose once more. They hang at just the level to tempt you to tamper, and this is presumably the intention. You discover that you can manipulate the sound which they produce by moving radio and circuit board closer together and further apart, causing the bodies to orbit each other in swooping ellipses. The radios are tuned in between stations, and the interference between the signal and the adjacent circuitry stirs up a spectral wind, whose aetheric howl adds to the feeling of Romantic isolation. This eerie sound provides the notional momentum can be thought to set the objects into swaying motion, which in its turn creates the eerie sound, which provides the momentum to set….etc. etc. etc. The pendant radios thus become an odd sort of radiophonic windchime.

The room off to the side of this installation is a sort of back entrance lobby through which the street outside can be seen, natural light entering once more after the projected flicker of the artificial, enclosed seascape. Here, in pieces entitled Pulses, we come across wires rising discretely from the ground, branching out in multi-coloured strands beneath a Perspex frame and producing small, square green circuit board ‘leaves’. These emit low, sputtering, fizzing and buzzing sounds, which become more audible if you zero in on them with an attentive ear. It is an insistent tropical rainforest chatter, a background surround sound of insect stridulation, bird cries and frictional frog rasp. This ambience forms an effective contrast to the previous room, a shift from one element to another, air and water to the canopied green light of the rainforest.

Following an arrow up the staircase to the first floor, we proceed to pass through a series of discreet, enclosed rooms which contain the sonic sculptures of Max Eastley. These appear to stir into self-activated motion, possessed of some animating spirit. Their low, half-heard scratches and sussurations create a hushed, haunted atmosphere in these empty 18th century rooms. In the first room, a loosely rolled tube of copper containing a fan motor periodically whirs into rotation, creating a percussive rattle which sounds like a sudden shower of rain pattering on the rooftop. Two pieces of blank parchment on the wall have tiny, filament-thin lengths of wire attached to a needle, which springs into action as you watch, moving minutely with insectile scrabble, according to some hidden imperative. If you listen very closely, you hear a faint scratching against the paper. It’s as if we are witnessing an act of automatic writing channelled by an invisible hand, producing no visible words. Eastley’s work can be intensely delicate and fragile, often seemingly designed for a short, mayfly lifespan. I got to the Sonic Boom sound art exhibition organised by David Toop in 2000 fairly late on in its run, by which time Eastley’s sculptures had ceased to function, remaining as a series of husks whose animating life had left them.

In the next room, a mirror hangs over a fireplace beneath which a needle hangs horizontally suspended over a small pile of iron filings, turning this way and that. This perhaps gives a hint as to the magnetic force which guides wire and needle in the previous room. This room is filled with the waveform sound of whistling, coiled spring overtones, which have no apparent origin (an example of the Sinister Resonance which David Toop explores in his recent book, perhaps). Two further doors in the room are locked, but pressing an ear against their panels, you can hear something emanating from beyond. There is stertorous breathing, a low moaning wind occasionally rising to a juddering bluster, and agitated windchimes and cowbells. It feels as if something is pacing outside, trying to force its way in. A small, discretely placed plaque towards the bottom of one of the walls reveals the origins of all of these sounds, without dampening the mysterious atmosphere. It indicates that the installation (which I suppose means the room itself) is a ‘mixed media composition with life amplification of Aeolian devices on the roof’. As David Toop, a long time friend and collaborator of Eastley’s, points out in his book Haunted Weather, he has long been fascinated by Aeolian harps, which sound the shifting currents of the wind without the intervention of any human agency. He wrote a brief history of them in 1976 in Music magazine issue 5. His sound sculptures are frequently triggered by the natural elements or by self-generated power and the noises which they produce often blend in symphony with the natural sound environment. This can be heard even without the visual element of watching the sculptures themselves in motion on the 1975 LP he shared with David Toop, New and Rediscovered Instruments (number 4 on Brian Eno’s Obscure label), the back cover of which provided diagrammatic outlines of Eastley’s instruments heard within. You can listen to the hydrophone sounding over the running water which powers it, as well as the metallaphone, the centriphone and the elastic aerophone. It can be found at Ubuweb over here. To see some actually in action, both on a windswept beach and in a studio space, take a look at episode three of Derek Bailey’s series on Improvisation, again on Ubuweb. Eastley appears after about 26 minutes.

The back cover of New and Rediscovered Instruments

Ascending the staircase once more to the second floor, we come to a series of open ended rooms dedicated to the work of Italian artist and composer Walter Marchetti. These rooms were silent (apart from the enthusiastic party of school children who piled through at one juncture). The only sound element to his works displayed here came via a pair of headphones in the first room. These played a piece with the title per la sete dell’orechio (no, haven’t a clue) which seems to be a recording of large objects being heaved into some subterranean lake (or perhaps, more prosaically, an indoor swimming pool). Watery explosions are followed by the ripples of echoing aftershocks. By a happy piece of synchronicity, you can listen to this aqueous bombardment whilst looking down into Artillery Lane below. At a stretch (of the headphone cable) you could also possibly look at the graphic score titled De Musicorum Infelicitate (2001) whilst still listening. This score consists of sheets of paper with a single-track stave running narrowly down the centre. It is almost entirely engulfed in a blizzard of dots until the final sheet, when there is nothing save a single dot (a G). From maximal chaotic complexity to minimal singular simplicity, this almost seems to represent a distracted mind calming itself down and achieving equilibrium.

Glam Piano - Marchetti's Musica da Camera no.182 (photo by Fabrizio Garghetti)

Entering the next room, you are immediately dazzled by the glare of dozens of small light bulbs which twine like a bioluminescent liana around a grand piano, and give off a sultry heat. It immediately brought to mind the extravagant glam showmanship of the likes of Liberace and Elton John, and perhaps also the showy, florid Romanticism of Liszt and Rachmaninov. The piano produces no direct sound, and indeed it couldn’t the lid being entangled in wires. But it gives off a synaesthetic sense, with its intense emanation of light and heat, that it might easily start to sing. Another unplayable piano is to be found in the next room, this one sculpted from a significant quantity of bog rolls (for those not conversant Southern English slang which is redundant anyway, that’s rolls of toilet paper). It shows the influence of the Fluxus movement on Marchetti, who produced his own variants on their happenings and provocations in 60s Spain (the Spain of Franco, in other words) with his ZAJ group. There are several photos and artefacts on display from this era. As which much of the Fluxus group work, it’s difficult to see the point of it beyond the creation of momentary startlement or the prompting of a couple of snorts of laughter. If you care about what it’s presumably making a gesture towards ‘subverting’ then perhaps it makes a greater impact, just as the pranksterish antics of the happenings might have had some shock value for those expecting their dose of high culture. Otherwise, it’s a lot of effort for such a one note joke.

Prepared piano - more keyboard art

On the wall is a rather more diverting work, Le Secche dell Tempo (the dryness of time? Don’t take my word for it). This echoes Max Eastley’s use of butterflies in a graphic score. Here there are many of them hovering incongruously over a map of an Antarctic peninsula, an environment in which they would immediately perish. They are connected by geometrically patterned networks of lines which create a grid spanning the white spaces of the map. The implied music was probably only ever meant to be played out in the head. Randomly fluttering and rigorously ordered, warmly coloured and monotonously cold at the same time, I suppose. Full of the same contradictions as the artist and his work, in other words.

There’s one more flight of stairs to climb, taking us to a small attic room on the top floor. Here chaos reigns, and the confined space throbs with a teeming cacophony. This is a room full of everything all the time at once. It is the Resonance Open, organised by Resonance FM, the experimental radio station which is broadcasting from the exhibition throughout its run. Younger and more established artists all contribute to the mad jumble, creating an attic full of the forgotten flotsam of life which has fused and spliced itself together into strange new forms. An old tape machine has melted in some intense heat, the plastic flowing into an amorphous, fluid form which looks like it belongs in a David Cronenberg film, and invites you to imagine what deformed, gelatinous sounds it might produce. Similarly, a fused cluster of old mobile phones hangs on the opposite wall, a techno-echinoderm hybrid from some nightmarish Lovecraftian rock pool. Johnny Trunk’s LP release The MMs Bar Recordings, made by Sandra Cross, consisting of announcements broadcasting the enticements of the buffet car on the London to Leicester train, revolves soundlessly on an old Dansette style turntable. Filament light tubes tumble out of the fireplace as if they have just wormed their way down the chimney. Another turntable is presided over by a small tutelary statue of the Buddha, who looks on as a blade, replacing the needle, incises a groove into a Perspex disc. The whole sits on an old cabinet, whose panels have been replaced by opaque Perspex onto which coloured patterns are projected from within. It’s a practical combination of DIY jukebox, disco and instant Buddhist prayer wheel.

Back down the stairs, you exit via the soundproofed booth from which Resonance is broadcasting. In the room facing it, three musicians were producing a playful racket from the varied detritus of discarded technology which cluttered their desks, bringing the everything all the time spirit of the Resonance Open attic into a live collision. Grubby Furbies who’d clearly seen it all looked on, heavy lidded eyes occasionally drooping shut with worldweary resignation. One chap felt compelled to climb onto his desk, the better to wrestle with the chunky sampler from which he was attempting to wrangle squeal and thumps of electronic noise. For an exhibition which had offered soundless works of sound art, and other sounds which only revealed themselves at close range, it was a bracing contrast to leave with such a squall of distressed blare ringing in the ears. Further broadcasts from Raven Row can be heard from Wednesday to Saturday on Resonance, between 12-5 in the afternoon. The exhibition runs until 17th July, and is well worth seeing – and hearing.