Lee Miller

Part Two - The War and After

n.b. Lee Miller's photographs are under copyright, but many of those discussed here can be found online at the Lee Miller Archive

After the invasion of Normandy, Withers sent an eager Miller to report for Vogue on the progress of the war on the continent (she had been accredited as an US army war correspondent in 1942). Her war coverage would prove to be an apotheosis for Lee, both professionally and personally. Her photos act both as documentation and as a revealing view of the effect of conflict on the individual. The camera is not a shield, so these images marked her as they passed through the lens and were developed and magnified in the mind’s eye. She also accompanied her photos with her own reportage, writing from the frontline, which combined her sharp eye for detail with a good deal of highly perceptive analysis of what she saw around her. This included a frank account of her own emotional responses, which gave her pieces an intense and personally revealing charge. She began in the field hospitals of Normandy, focussing on the work of nurses and doctors in the medical tents, and the patients whom they were treating. One of the earliest pictures is of a soldier how had suffered extensive burn injuries. He looks strangely and inappropriately jolly, black slits for eyes and nose, and a cartoon smile for a mouth in the round balloon of bandages which inflates his head, and which turns his hands into soft boxing paws. She reported that ‘a bad burns case asked me to take his picture as he wanted to see how funny he looked’. She added ‘it was pretty grim and I didn’t focus too good’. He died shortly thereafter. The blurred focus acts as an expression of her shock, of the sudden sense of dizzy disjuncture felt upon being plunged into a zone of conflict.

Lee then moved on to join the battalion HQ of the 83rd Infantry at St Malo, which had reportedly been liberated. This proved not to be the case. There were still pockets of German soldiers defending the town. She was now reporting from the frontline of a war in progress. With her photograph of billowing masses of smoke enveloping the town across the bay like a volcanic ash cloud, darkly framed through an upstairs window, she had inadvertently captured an image of one of the first ever uses of napalm bombs. In St Malo, she met up with David Scherman, who was there as a photographer for Life Magazine. They would continue to meet and journey together across the chaos of Europe throughout the rest of the war. As they progressed through Rennes, she witnessed the humiliation meted out to those judged to have been collaborators. Her picture and description of the event display a pitiless distance from the young women involved and a ruthless objectivity in pursuit of capturing the image. ‘In Rennes today’, she wrote in a letter to Audrey Withers, ‘I went to a chastisement of French collaborators – the girls had their hair shaved although the interrogation had merely confirmed that there was evidence enough for their trial later on. They were stupid little girls – not intelligent enough to feel ashamed’. Her photo of them shows their faces fixed in blank masks of stoical endurance as the crowds hustle and jeer them along. It’s difficult not to feel some pity for them. Even if Miller, caught up in the heightened (or deadened) emotional responses of wartime, would deny them any compassion, her objective eye offers the possibility of such a response from the viewer, even with the knowledge of their actions.

Lee arrived in Paris to record scenes of wild celebration following its liberation. She looked up old friends to check that they were still alive and well, and took their pictures to testify to their endurance. Jean Cocteau looks dapper and relaxed, leaning against the wall amongst the barred shadows of the Palais Royal Arcade. In another picture, Jean Marais leans out of the window of the apartment he shared with Cocteau, flashing a winning smile at a cluster of young female admirers. Miller visited Colette in a neighbouring apartment in the Palais Royal and wrote a characterful profile to accompany her pictures. She also photographed Maurice Chevalier, elegant and unruffled on the balcony of Louis Aragon’s flat, freshly cleared of all accusations of collaboration. She had an emotional re-union with Picasso, who was portrayed standing amongst his paintings in his studio. Marlene Dietrich is shown seated on the floor, her stylish evening coat pooled in artfully disarrayed folds around her. Miller also took a series of pictures for an article entitled Paris Under Snow. These brought her surrealist eye into focus once more, showing statues given new contours and features by their mantles of snow. Her bawdy sense of humour comes out in her picture of an outdoor lavatory, with offputting public information posters about syphilis posted to its entrance. There’s also a shot of her own balcony outside the room at the Hotel Scribe in which she was based. Champagne bottles and jerry cans are stood in incongruous juxtaposition against the iron grillwork. There is a jerry can shaped declivity in the snow. Lee may have taken command of the one which she kept filled with a try-it-and-see cocktail of whatever alcohol had been ‘liberated’ from cellars along the way. Fuel for the road.

Her impressions and feelings whilst travelling through Luxembourg go towards making up one of her most profoundly insightful Vogue articles on the psychology of war, which was published under the title Patterns of Liberation. In this piece she attempts to describe the difficulties of adjusting to liberty, of starting the shift away from what had become ingrained patterns of thought and behaviour. She wrote to Audrey Withers, describing her assessment of the mental state of those she came across. Her conclusions might indicate that the shock of war was causing her to delve into her own psyche and conjure up some long dormant demons. ‘There were no visible signs or changes in manner’, she wrote, ‘but none the less they are ill – some kind of hidden and devitalizing microbe. The mental malnutrition of the last four years has sapped their strength’. In her article, she makes the point that liberation does not provide an instant solution to ongoing problems, and may indeed resurrect old, or create entirely new ones. ‘The pattern of liberation is not decorative’, she observes. ‘There are the gay squiggles of wine and song. There is the beautiful overall colour of freedom but there is ruin and destruction. There are problems and mistakes, disappointed hopes and broken promises. There is wishful thinking and inefficiency. There is Military Expediency. There is grogginess like after a siesta, a sleeping-beauty lethargy’. She notices the way in which language becomes expedient and adaptable during such inbetween times, hearing one of the American soldiers, upon seeing a medieval ruin, ask ‘well, I wonder who liberated that!’ This leads her to the realisation that ‘the word was bound to degenerate. Now we liberate a church when we wreck it, we liberate a bottle of brandy when we beat down a mercenary publican, we liberate a girl when we detach her from her chaperon. We liberate like we win or swipe a packet of cigarettes, or my field glasses, for instance. I got liberated last night, means I went on a particularly super drunk’.

The photograph Young Evacuee perfectly sums up the stunned confusion following the ending of occupation and the sudden cessation of conflict. A small boy with a satchel on his back sits on a pile of sacks and packing cases, as if he is just another piece of luggage. Temporary signs, quickly knocked up, point in each direction behind him. This makes him look even more lost, stuck at a junction with no idea of which way to go. His face wears an expression of weary anxiety which has a look of habitual fixity. Miller moved on from this area of uneasy liberated stasis awaiting new signs towards a more certain future. She marched with the army through the bleak wintry landscape of Alsace, icy, snow-slushed roads winding through bare woodland and the wreckage of towns. A picture of the bombed out ruins of a church, amongst the rubbled mounds of which ‘a small group of nuns clawed…searching for their padre’, is a particularly powerful depiction of the fresh destruction and accompanying human loss and confusion which she came across.

Lee received clearance to continue into Germany. From here on, her reports began to become increasingly anti-German in tone. As the Life photographer John Phillips, whom she met later in Hungary put it, ‘she hated the fascists – we were all anti-Nazi, but the strength of her hatred was unusual’. There is a barely suppressed fury, a violent rage expressed through visceral loathing (and no doubt voiced at the time with the wider vocabulary of profanity in which she was well versed and with which she could let loose outside the constraints of magazine publishing), which makes her pieces convey a powerful sense of immediacy to this day. She begins her first article from Germany by describing it as ‘a beautiful landscape dotted with jewel-like villages, blotched with ruined cities, and inhabited by schizophrenics’. As she travelled through the ruins of Cologne and Frankfurt, she continued to frame startling images of ruin. The iron grillwork of the Hohenzollern Bridge in Cologne forms a pattern of geometrical order which belies the fact that its central span lies in a collapsed tangle in the river beyond. In the bombed chemical plant of Ludwigshaven, the dislodged storage tanks lie cradled amongst the jagged tangle of pipes and gantries as if they themselves were the missiles which had wrought such destruction.

But it is Miller’s pictures of people from this period which are some of the defining images of the end days of the war. She records the suicides of the family of the Burgomaster of Leipzig, all looking peaceful, as if they had posed themselves for just such a post-mortem photo. These portraits of easeful, almost ecstatic death represent a perversion of German Romanticism. The soul has turned inwards and become infected with a corrupting morbidity, more in love with death than life. Miller’s fascination with the ruins of gothic churches and cathedrals make up a further composite allegorical portrait of the wreckage of the German romantic soul. In her article accompanying this tableau of death, Lee memorably describes the daughter: ‘leaning back on the sofa is a girl with extraordinarily pretty teeth, waxen and dusty. Her nurse’s uniform is sprinkled with plaster from the battle for the city hall which raged outside after their deaths’. It’s disturbingly reminiscent of some of Man Ray’s photographs of Lee herself sleeping. She arrived in Buchenwald some days after it had been liberated. The inmates here had been granted no such decorous and pictorial ends. She photographed an SS guard who had tried to disguise himself as a prisoner. He had been recognised and beaten. He stares directly into Lee’s lense, his face bloody, wide-eyed and blank with animal fear. You almost feel as if she has added a few blows herself. Another guard is shown hanging from a radiator. She remarks that ‘he was taken out on a stretcher, stripped and thrown on a heap of bony cadavers where he looked shockingly big, the well fed bastard’. Such savage feelings, no matter how immediate, honest and well justified, feel like they might also be reaching back into the past, to memories of abuse, and spitting out long accumulated reserves of bile. It’s invidious to think of war in terms of personal therapy, but any extreme experience is liable to shake the elements of an individual’s psyche into new kaleidoscopic configurations.

Miller joined up with David Scherman again as US forces met with the Red Army at Torgau. They travelled together to Dachau, where Miller confronted the full horrors of the camp there, which were more evident than they had been at Buchenwald since it had been liberated only the previous day. She pictured the bodies piled up in the long stationary train stretching towards the camp with an artistic, ordering eye which some have found inappropriate. But these were the first time many people were confronted with these images, and such an imposition of visual order and language made them more readily comprehensible. Her carefully composed shots have nothing of the blurred sense of shock found in her earlier picture of the burns victim. These pictures place soldiers as witnesses to these appalling scenes of amassed dead bodies, standing in for the stunned viewer. Miller realised the importance of creating an indisputable record of scenes which would be scarcely believable back in the USA. The article in the US edition of Vogue in which they appeared featured her subtitle, in bold lettering, Believe It! The UK edition, focussed on victory, didn’t publish these pictures, including only one close-up of skeletal bodies stacked atop one another in Buchenwald, filling the entire frame as if part of a mountainous slope.

Lee and David went on to Munich, where Hitler’s former home was now the command post of a US regiment. It was here that Scherman took an astonishing and genuinely iconic picture which is filled with immense symbolic power, Lee Miller in Hitler’s Bathtub. She sits looking wearily out, to the side rather than directly at the camera, looking lost in thought. A small portrait of Hitler rests on the rim of the tub, and a commonplace nude statuette on the bathside table opposite. Its pose echoes her own in a photo Man Ray had taken of her a decade or so previously. She looks at it as if realising this and contemplating its meaning. She represents the life force set against the death impulse which has infected the German soul. Sitting in the bath in Hitler’s house (and water is traditionally viewed as an archetypally female element), she has occupied the inner sanctum of the country, its hidden core. Here she sits, a female presence at the heart of the masculine endeavour of war. The picture, taken by her sometime lover David Scherman, is a celebration of the body in the face of its desecration and systematic decimation. Lee’s presence, exhausted but unbowed, is a symbolic gesture of defiance in the face of the repression and self-hatred inherent in the urge towards fascism. Such conventional notions of femininity represented by the nude are counterbalanced by the heavy combat boots, in which Lee had trudged across Europe, standing on the bath mat beneath her bare arched back. The mat is filthy, as if she had wiped them thoroughly on it before taking them off. As she put it in a later interview, ‘I even washed the dirt of Dachau off in his tub’. Lee also looked around Eva Braun’s apartment, noting the objects and décor which reflected a life ended in suicide mere days previously. They both went to Berchtesharden, where they witnessed the burning of Hitler’s cabin, set aflame by SS guards who then fled into the surrounding mountains. They both took their pick of memorabilia, the personal effects which she referred to in her article as Hitleriana. Lee took a fancy silver tray etched with the initials AH.

Miller continued to travel through Europe after the war was over, observing the continuing chaos, the course of justice, and the opportunistic profiteering and political manoeuvring which was played out amongst the ruins. She was present for the trial of Marshal Petain, the head of Vichy France, in Paris. Her picture of an emaciated child, a tiny figure amongst the white folds of a Viennese hospital bed, is a heartwrenching image, a depiction of the true effects of war. As she wrote to Audrey Withers, ‘there was nothing to do. In this beautiful children’s hospital with its nursery-rhymed walls and screenless windows, with its clean white beds, its brilliant surgical instruments and empty drug cupboards there was nothing to do but watch him die’. Her photograph of the dying child inspired (if that’s the right word) Graham Greene as he was writing the screenplay for The Third Man. This is the human face of the tiny dots which the blackmarket profiteer Harry Lime points out from the top of the carousel, the face from which he and those whom he represents found it all too easy to distance themselves. Miller’s picture of the soprano Irmgard Seefried posed in dramatic silhouette against the wreckage of the Vienna Opera House as she sings an aria from Madame Butterfly is an image of the human spirit continuing to find a voice. Art offering some hope for renewal.

Miller travelled on through Hungary and Romania, photographing peasants and nobility alike. She took a dramatic picture of the execution of Laszlo Bardossy, the ex-prime minister of Hungary. He stands up straight against a neatly stacked wall of sandbags on a roadside pavement, the rifles of the four man firing squad pointing in at him just a few feet away. To the side, a priest and a small crowd of craning faces bear witness to his death in the early dawn light. She also visited King Michael of Romania, who had acted as the head of the anti-Nazi coalition which had ousted General Antonescu’s fascist government in 1944. She photographed his mother, Helen, leaning on the balcony of the summer palace. With its dark and mysterious spaces, twisting wrough-iron starircases, baroque weaves of balconies and balustrades, and sculpted heads looking on from all directions, this could be the interior of the beast’s castle from Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bete, a timeless world unto itself. It was a huge place, expansive enough for King Michael, no respecter of hallowed tradition, to drive his jeep down the stairs. Naturally, Lee got on with him, and with his resourceful mother too.

In Bucharest, she met once again with Maritza Lataretu, a Gypsy singer whom she had met on previous travels. The gypsies had returned to the cities once more, now that the fascists were no longer in power. Lee availed herself of one of their unique services, a bear massage. As she wrote, ‘the bear knew her business. She walked up and down my back on all fours as gently as if on eggs’. It was a mark of the fearlessness of this bold adventuress that she actively sought out a form of relaxation which involved being sat upon by a bear. The adventures were about to be brought to a halt, however, as she received a letter from Roland Penrose which was couched in the form of an ultimatum. Having given her the freedom to do as she wished within their relationship, he had now decided that enough was enough. He was currently living with a young art restorer by the name of Gigi, and intimated that this might be turning into a permanent arrangement in her continued absence. Needing some sense of underlying stability, she decided to return to England and attempt to patch things up. For a time, this involved living alongside Gigi in the house at Hampstead. Penrose seemed to find this an amenable set up, but Gigi eventually decided that it would be better if she left.

The work for Vogue continued, but Miller no longer felt any real involvement in it. The resumption of fashion and celebrity shots couldn’t seem like anything other than an anti-climax, a retreat into distracting triviality. She continued to produce some fine personal portraits of artistic friends however, such as those of Max Ernst and his wife, the surrealist artist Dorothea Tanning, and Man Ray and his wife, the dancer Juliet Browner, in their new homes in America. In 1947 she became pregnant, and she and Penrose married, Aziz having granted her an instant and unquestioning divorce. Before she went into hospital to have a caesarean birth, she wrote a letter which amounted to summation of her attitude to life, set down in the event of her death. ‘I keep saying to everyone, I didn’t waste a minute, all my life – I had a wonderful time, but I know, myself, now, that if I had it over again I’d be even more free with my ideas, with my body and my affection. Above all, I’d try to find some way of breaking down, through the silence which imposes itself on me in matters of sentiment’. She gave birth to a boy, Antony. It couldn’t be said that she was a natural mother. It wasn’t a role to which she was ideally suited. When she fell pregnant, she had written in no uncertain terms ‘my work room is not going to be a nursery’. Antony would remember his nanny Patsy Murray as a closer presence during his childhood than his mother (or, for that matter, his father).

Roland Penrose, meanwhile, was busy making a steady ascent towards the pinnacle of the art world hierarchy. He established the ICA (the Institute for Contemporary Arts) in Fitzroy Street (it would move to its current premises in The Mall at a later date) in 1948. The following year, he realised another dream, that of becoming a gentleman farmer, moving to a big country house from which he could take on a leading role in the local squirearchy. He chose a place called Farley Farm, near the village of Chiddingly in Sussex, a short drive from Lewes and therefore within easy reach of London. Lee’s attitude to the prospect of a rural lifestyle was pithily summed up in her remark ‘fuck living in the country’. She went along with him, nevertheless. In the years to come, she would appear to many to be little more than an adjunct to his ambitions. A lot of the fight seemed to have gone out of her. Not that she wasn’t capable of raising sheer hell at home.

She found work increasingly difficult and felt aimless and depressed, a state of mind which led to her taking solace in the bottle. Penrose didn’t seem to care. She never told him about her experiences at Buchenwald or Dachau, just as she never told him about her childhood abuse. Perhaps he just never took the trouble to find out. He was frequently more occupied with a series of young lovers. He was a post-war art world Ronnie Wood or Rod Stewart, clinging on to an endlessly prolonged bohemian adolescence, refusing to accept any personal responsibility. A high culture sugar daddy inviting a succession of impressionable young women to come up and see his Picassos. At one point, he fell for a Parisian trapeze artist named Diane Deriaz (you really couldn’t make it up) and tried to get her to marry him, but she was having none of it. Farley Farm was thrown open to all their artistic friends, with Lee expected to play host. Penrose had no patience with her mood swings, and no notion that there might be serious emotional troubles causing such turbulent behaviour. He even wrote to Audrey Withers at Vogue asking her not to offer her any more work. ‘I implore you’, he implored, ‘please do not ask Lee to write again. The suffering it causes her and those around her is unbearable’. He was effectively trying to draw the curtain down on her career. His surreptitious intervention also effectively put an end to a close and long-lasting personal and professional relationship. Withers let Miller know that there would always be an opening for her at the magazine whilst she was in charge, however. Unsurprisingly, Miller was absolutely furious when she discovered what her husband had done. She realised that she was effectively being put in her place. But she no longer had the energy to resist with anything more permanent than a display of foul temper. Her last article for Vogue was published in July 1953. Entitled Working Guests, it showcased photographs she had taken of various renowned artists and prominent figures in the artistic establishment, all of whom had been put to work doing tasks of manual labour around the farm. Lee made no distinction between the visitors to the farm as regarded their social status, treating all as equals, whether they were the local gardeners or the head of some national artistic institution. In the last photo, she herself was shown enjoying a nap inside on the sofa.

Roland Penrose rose steadily in the ranks of the English establishment, as befitted the scion of a rich banking family, dalliance with revolutionary artistic credos notwithstanding. He was awarded a CBE in 1961, and in 1966 became a knight of the realm. Miller therefore became a lady to his sir. She viewed the whole thing with great amusement and refused to take it seriously, insisting that she be known as Lady Lee. In 1960, Penrose curated a Picasso exhibition at the Tate Gallery, for which a fund-raising Picasso Party was held at the ICA. Miller wrote an article for the accompanying brochure entitled Picasso Himself, which drew on personal insights gained from her longstanding friendship with the artist. She sat next to Prince Philip at the party, with whom she apparently got on very well. Blunt speakers both. She wasn’t invited to the Tate opening, however, since it was feared she might say something inappropriate to Her Majesty. A shame, since she could have given her a showing to really remember.

Back at the farm, Penrose filled the house with his art collection and works of his own, with sculptures scattered around the garden. Lee’s pictures and negatives gathered dust in boxes in the attic. Denied artistic outlets, she threw herself into the running of the house, and in particular to the creative environs of the kitchen. Her highly individual dishes sometimes displayed a provocative side which expressed her irrepressible character. She reacted to one guest’s snobbery about everyday American food by whipping up a marsmallow and coca-cola ice-cream, the ingredients of which she revealed to him after he had declared how much he’d enjoyed it (a generous apportionment of rum may have helped). You can find the recipe for it at the back of Carolyn Burke’s biography of Miller. Another dish was known as Muddle Green Green Chicken, which was indeed green, thanks to its heavy concentrations of celery, parsley and leeks. The kitchen became a warm haven for some of the genuinely unconventional guests at Farley Farm, such as the artist John Craxton. He joined her in her culinary explorations, and became a good friend. She still took photographs ofv visitors for personal pleasure. Her picture of the New Yorker cartoonist Saul Steinberg seeming to have just finished sketching the Long Man of Wilmington on the Sussex Downs is especially witty and inventive. She always got her camera out when Picasso was visiting, and her pictures of him form a fine informal record of this most famous of twentieth century artists through the years.

Lee conquered her dependence on alcohol and continued to travel the world in her later years, although she resolutely refused to explore the countryside around the farm, sticking firmly to her initial dictum. She always favoured more exotic climes, and was more a creature of the city. It seems strange that she became stranded in the confines of the Sussex Downs, in damp and chilly England, for the latter part of her life. She died in 1977. Her son, Antony, discovered more about her after her death than he had known during her lifetime. He sorted through her long-unseen photographs and worked towards producing the biographical volume The Live of Lee Miller, enjoying the benefits of a close consultation with David Scherman. Antony Penrose did much to resurrect his mother’s reputation. It could be said that this now eclipses that of her husband, Roland Penrose, much as Gwen John’s reputation posthumously eclipsed that of her brother Augustus John. Penrose now regularly conducts tours of Farley Farm, which now features Miller’s work hanging prominently alongside her husband’s, and holding its own amongst the illustrious company of his collection of twentieth century art. David Scherman wrote the introduction to the volume of war photography and reportage which Antony Penrose edited, Lee Miller’s War. His final sentence provides his own personal and heartfelt summation of a life well-lived: ‘She was the nearest thing I knew to a mid-20th century renaissance woman. In the less grandiose but perhaps more appropriate pop culture patois of her native land, she was a mensch’.

There are a number of good books about Lee Miller which are available in Exeter library, if you happen to live in Devon (and remember, you can always use the inter-library loan system). Or maybe they’re in your own libraries if you live elsewhere.
I’ve got out (but will soon be returning):
The Live of Lee Miller by Antony Penrose
Lee Miller: Portraits From a Life by Richard Calvocoressi
Lee Miller by Carolyn Burke
Lee Miller’s War edited by Antony Penrose with a foreword by David Scherman
The Home of the Surrealists: Lee Miller, Roland Penrose and their Circle at Farley Farm by Antony Penrose

Lee Miller

Part One - Model, Muse and Artist

Blood of a Poet - card playing Fate

I went to see Jean Cocteau’s Blood of a Poet a couple of weeks ago with a live score by Steve Severi. It was great to see the film on the big screen and I was particularly struck by the literally statuesque presence of Lee Miller. She appears as an armless classical statue who goads the poet protagonist into passing through the mirror (one of several characteristic Cocteau images in the film which recur throughout his work) and into the world of the imagination beyond. Scenes are played out behind the doors which stretch along the corridor (which, as with the underworld reached through mirrors in Orphee, seems subject to a weight of gravity and spatial laws all of its own) of the Hotel des Folies Dramatiques. Miller later appears, freed from her plaster carapace and more recognisably herself, as a card playing Fate, her restored arms now holding the hand which will determine whether the artist sitting opposite her at the table will triumph or face ruin. She warns him, with chilling intimacy, ‘without the ace of hearts, my dear, you are lost’. Lacking such a card, her prophecy proves accurate, and his blood is spilt on the snow in the midst of which their wintry al fresco game of death has been played out. Miller is then transfigured back into the statuesque goddess, her arms concealed by long black evening gloves to simulate their previous truncation. She moves slowly offscreen, relying on the inner vision of eyes painted over closed lids. She leads a bull alongside her, its hide a map to some unknown territory, and whose horns metamorphose into the frame of a lyre, the muse’s emblematic instrument. The film has often been categorised as a surrealist work, perhaps because it was made shortly after L’Age D’or (and indeed, funded by the same wealthy and unsuspecting patrons). But its symbolism is highly personal, and it aspires to the status of a poetic dream rather than a surrealist provocation. Besides, the surrealists weren’t at all keen on Cocteau, peevishly accusing him of stealing their ideas. Which seems rather rich, since these had supposedly arisen unbidden from the unconscious and were therefore symbolic archetypes which presumably had a certain common currency.

Blood of a Poet - statuesque muse

Miller talked about how she came to be involved with Blood of a Poet, and the tribulations and privations on set in a 1967 conversation with Francis Steegmuller, included in his 1970 biography of Cocteau. ‘One night Cocteau stopped at the table where I was sitting with Man Ray at the Boeuf sur le Toit’, she begins. ‘Do you know anybody who wants to be tested tomorrow? (Cocteau asked) I did, and told Man so when Cocteau had moved on. Man disliked the idea, but told Cocteau anyway. The tests were marvellous: I fitted Cocteau’s idea of a face. The script was constantly altered. Feral Benga, the black jazz dancer who played the angel, sprained his ankle and had to be a limping angel – Cocteau liked it better that way, but people have read all kinds of things into it. The star on Enrique Rivero’s back was put there by Cocteau to cover a scar – he’d been shot by his mistress’s husband. After nineteen retakes of the card-playing scene Rivero tore up the cards so there wouldn’t be a twentieth – there was a party he wanted to go to. The chandelier was delivered in 3822 pieces, each wrapped in tissue paper, the very day shooting was to begin. The studio was lined with mattresses to keep out sound – the mattresses were full of fleas and bedbugs that kept falling out. My armour – when I was the statue – didn’t fit very well: they plastered the joints with butter and flour that turned rancid and stank. They covered me with Nujol to make the costume cling: it cooked under the lights. The bull (really an ox) was supplied by an abattoir and had only one horn: time and money were running out, so Cocteau made a second horn himself’.

I was vaguely aware of Lee Miller’s name; that she was a photographer and had been associated with Man Ray. The common, reductive summation of her reputation is that she was a ‘surrealist muse’, a description which Angela Carter, oddly enough, repeats in a couple of her essays and reviews (collected in Shaking A Leg). A trip to the library unearthed a few books about her, and I discovered that she was an extraordinary woman for whom such a passive designation is wholly inapt. She was born Elizabeth Miller in 1907, in the (at the time) quiet and gentile city of Poughskeepie, in New York state. At the age of 7, she suffered the horrific trauma of being raped by a family acquaintance into whose care she had been left. The ordeal was made all the more terrible by the fact that it left a legacy of VD which she had to deal with for years afterwards. Shortly thereafter, her father, Theodore, began taking photographs of her which revealed a level of intimacy which seems deeply uncomfortable. She was very close to him throughout his life (and it was a long one) but these pictures suggest a fundamental betrayal of the bond which exists between a father and his daughter. Such unsettling childhood experiences may have contributed to the sense of restlessness, and the resultant wild and impulsive behaviour, which characterised her adult life.

Lee on the cover of Vogue - March 1927

She first travelled to Europe in 1925 to study set design at a school run by the Hungarian artist Ladislas Medgyes, which he had immodestly given the name of L’Ecole Medgyes Pour La Technique du Theatre. A noted Lothario, it’s likely he had an affair with his young student. At any rate, Elizabeth’s parents, possibly alerted to such goings on, travelled to Paris and escorted her back to the States in early 1926. That year, she took dancing lessons and found brief employment in the chorus of George White’s Scandals, a slightly more daring variant on the Ziegfield’s Follies style of Broadway show. One of her predecessors in the chorus line had been Louise Brooks, whose short, bobbed hair and liberated persona was very much akin to Miller’s. Both would go on to embody the spirit of the age. Miller didn’t last long in the Scandals. She moved on once more, this time to study painting at the Art Students League of New York. But she didn’t find her metier here, either. Legend has it (and with Miller, the legend is seldom at great variance with the truth) that she was dreamily wandering out into the street one day, and was pulled back from the path of an oncoming car by a passing stranger. He happened to be Conde Nast, the owner of Vogue magazine, and he was immediately struck by her looks. She had the short haircut and boyish look of ‘moderne’ fashionability, and was stylishly attired in clothes she’s bought in Paris. He asked her back to his office and invited her to model for Vogue. She was soon greatly in demand, and was shot by some of the most famous photographers of the age, principal amongst them being Edward Steichen. He was an artist who was almost as feted as those whom he portrayed, and he had the attendant wealth to prove it. He created an aura of unassailable glamour around his subjects, a look which became part and parcel of the elevated world of celebrity. He essentially created a new pantheon of demi-gods and goddesses. Miller would later credit him with giving her the idea of taking up photography. She was certainly absorbing some of the techniques being employed on the other side of the camera lens, remaining always at a slight remove from the fantasies of which she was the object (a distance which she would maintain later in her career, both as model and photographer). This merely enhanced her mystery, of course. She had always had an interest in technical matters, something which she no doubt inherited from her father, who worked in engineering and was an inveterate tinkerer. The possibilities of photography, which could harness technological means to express an artistic view of the world, seemed like it just might be the medium she had been searching for.

It was while modelling for Vogue that Miller changed her Christian name, Elizabeth becoming Lee. It seemed more suited to the boyish style which she had first gleaned from Anita Loos, and to her modern outlook. It was a self-willed transformation which seemed to indicate a distancing from her path, and attempt at rebirth and the beginning of a completely new life. In a reversal of the general pattern of the early 20th century, she left the new world for the old in order to be reborn. She returned to Paris in 1929, determined to find her way to the other side of the camera, or ‘to enter photography by the back end’, as she later put it with characteristic fruitiness. She looked up Man Ray at his Montparnasse studio. He wasn’t in, so she retired to the neighbouring café, where she bumped into him and announced that she was his new student. She was obviously persuasive, as she was soon much more; his lover, his model, his muse, his studio assistant and eventually (whether acknowledged or not) his collaborator. Madame Man Ray, as she became known. She learnt a lot from him, and really became a serious photographer from this point on. She can lay claim to be the true inventor of his famous solarization technique. Her discovery of it occurred when she accidentally exposed some negatives which she had been developing to light. She went on processing them anyway. The results were striking, surrounding the main subject with a dark outline which separated it sharply from the background, and highlighted black and white contrasts, lending the whole thing a texture of haze and dapple. Further experimentation refined the accidental discovery and subjected the technique to greater control, although a chance element always remained, which lent the process an element of the magical. The best of the solarized portraits by both Man Ray and Miller have a visionary, hyper-real (or surreal, if you wish) air, as if some essence of the subject has been drawn through the lens and filtered onto film.

Man Ray made many photographic portraits of Lee. One, in which she raises her arm and rests her hand on the back of her head, revealing her armpit in a pose of axillary eroticism, was to be echoed in the small plaster-cast piece of faux classical statuary which stands on the bathroom cabinet in the famous wartime photograph of her sitting in Hitler's bath. It's also reminiscent of the pose which Patti Smith strikes in a rather more assertive fashion on the cover of her Easter LP. As was the case with the surrealists in general, Man Ray's pictures often express a violent and misogynistic sexuality. A photograph in which she turns away from the camera and looks upward, exposing her neck, was later slashed, red ink poured onto the gash in murderous anger. He encases her head and arm in wire mesh, crops her naked body so that its head and legs are truncated, crosses her torso with jagged lines of electricity, reduces what is probably her to a ball of back and buttocks (a photograph which he titles The Prayer, as if it’s expressing her desires) and generally divides her body into its component parts. His Object of Destruction, a personalised refinement of the earlier Object To Be Destroyed, attaches a cut out of one of her eyes onto the spike of a metronome, there to be set into blinking motion, adding the instruction that the whole should be smashed with a single hammer blow once the limits of endurance have been reached. He would later paint her lips floating huge and disembodied in a cloud-speckled sky above a mountain-bordered lake.

Her full, sensual mouth obviously exerted a certain fascination. It is the first part of her which appears in Blood of a Poet. The poet wipes it off the canvas on which he is painting a portrait after it starts to move, only for it to appear on the palm of his hand. After kissing it and allowing it to kiss his body, he smears it onto the head of a statue which appears in the corner of his room, Lee in truncated form once more. Cocteau was never part of surrealist movement, which was, paradoxically for a group supposedly valuing the free expression of the unconscious, fiercely prescriptive in its decisions as to who was or was not allowed into its hallowed circles. Neverthleless, he followed in their stead by having the poet smash Lees static form into pieces. He does, however, face retribution for this act of violent desecration. He himself becomes a statue, and centuries later, warring schoolboys denude his body for use in their snowball battle, subjecting it to an instant process of erosion. Miller’s insistence on sharing the libidinous release which the surrealist painters and poets claimed for themselves as an essential adjunct to their art exposed the inherent conservatism which lay underneath their loud declarations of revolutionary intent and expressions of contempt for bourgeois values. This emerged in the sadism which was such a prevalent feature of their art (and was enshrined in their elevation of de Sade to their cultural pantheon), particularly when it came to depicting women. The muse was there to inspire the unbounded and violent expression of their sexual energy (and was even interchangeable amongst their number for that purpose), but she was herself supposed to remain a passive and submissive object. This was a role which Lee Miller was never likely to conform to.

Miller set up her own studios in Paris in 1930, nearby to Man Ray’s. She began to take portrait pictures, some of them for French Vogue (known informally by its crashed name Frogue). She also walked the Paris streets, taking pictures of incongruous details which her eye, versed in surrealism, detected around her; eruptions of the strange onto the surface of the everyday. This seems almost literally the case in her photograph A Strange Encounter, in which the edge of a wave of viscous asphalt seems to be reaching out towards the shiny surfaces of a bystander’s black shoes; The Blob hits 1930s Paris years before lowering its sights to small town USA. Exploding Hand shows the said appendage, draped in an impressively angular sleeve, reaching for a door handle behind a pane of glass and seemingly sparking a sizzling discharge of electrical energy. They are in fact merely scratches on the window, appearing more luminous against the darkness of the trees reflected in the background. But they are transformed by the eye of the imagination which has captured them. Miller returned to New York in 1932, her apprenticeship and affair with Man Ray over. She set up her own studios in Manhattan and became a very successful freelance portrait photographer, shooting some of the most renowned celebrities and artists of the day. These were mostly conventional, professional jobs, expertly executed. She did occasionally experiment which solarization, as with her 1935 portrait of Lilian Harvey. In 1933, she held her first one woman show in the Julien Levy Gallery in New York. She had established herself in her chosen art form and was respected and successful. Which made her decision to marry an Egptian industrialist, Aziz Eloui Bey, in 1934 and go and live with him in Cairo all the more surprising. Perhaps it was the lure of the exotic, the air of mystery which the Near and Middle East held at the time, perhaps the attraction of a wealthy father figure. Anyway, as Carolyn Burke puts it in her biography of Miller, ‘Lee embarked on marriage as if it were a holiday’. It was one which lasted 3 years.

She was utterly unsuited to life in Egypt. Women were expected to remain sequestered from men in their household harem, having no contact with those beyond their immediate family. Bey was a liberal modern Egyptian, and essentially let Lee do whatever she pleased (perhaps recognising that she would do it whether he wished it or not), but she was surrounded by those for whom such liberties were not afforded. She hated the climate, too. She stuck it for as long as she could, making several trips out into the desert. One of her best pictures emerges from these excursions. Portrait of Space from 1937 looks out at the vast empty expanses of the desert through a ragged hole torn through the gauze veil of a tent window. It is a mysterious, almost mystical image, and inspired Magritte, whose 1938 painting The Kiss (Le Baiser) draws directly from it. She stuck it in Egypt for as long as she could, and then headed back for Paris, to the bohemian artistic milieu in which she was more comfortable.

She attended a fancy dress ball with Julien Levy (the gallery owner who had staged her New York show) and there met the English artist Roland Penrose, who had come along with Max Ernst. Penrose had been instrumental in staging the first major exhibition of surrealism in England in the previous year. It had created something of a stir, principally on account of Salvador Dali’s attempts to deliver a speech from within a deep sea diving suit, from which he had to be unscrewed after he began to suffocate. Penrose immediately fell for Miller, and thus began a golden summer and a lifelong relationship. She joined him in Cornwall, where she met up with Man Ray again, there with his new girlfriend Ady Fidelin. Also there were Max Ernst , the artists Leonora Carrington and Eileen Agar, the surrealist poet Paul Eluard and his wife Nusch, and, on a short visit, Henry Moore and his wife Irina. Lee and Roland then went to the continent and called on Rene Magritte and Paul Delvaux in Brussels. They stopped off to have a look around the Palais Ideal, the concrete castle of the imagination built by the postman Cheval in his spare time. It’s a classic work of so-called outsider art, which means the kind of creative endeavours made by people who neither know nor care about art history or art markets. They then joined up with some of the others to spend the rest of the summer with Picasso and Dora Maar, one of his two alternating mistresses and muses. Picasso painted six ‘Portraits of Lee Miller as an Arlesienne’ during this period, the same year in which he had also produced Guenica and The Weeping Woman, two of the most famous pictures of his entire career. Lee later said of him ‘you do not sit for Picasso, he just brought it to me one day having painted it from memory’. Lee Miller’s photographs from this summer sojourn capture the dreamy spirit of their sun-kissed idyll. The best known is Picnic, in which the participants (the Eluards, Man Ray and Ady Fidelin, and Roland Penrose) seem to have their mind on other things than sandwiches and ginger beer.

Miller returned to Egypt and Aziz, whilst remaining in frequent contact with Penrose and agreeing to meet again as soon as possible. She travelled through Egypt and surrounding countries before finally conceding the inevitable and deciding to leave the country, and Aziz, for good. As she wrote to him, she had seen ‘as many changes of scenery and weather here as there are kinds of religions and races of people… (but) all of them (were) vaguely disappointing because of my own state of mind’. She moved in with Penrose in his house at 21 Downshire Hill, Hampstead in 1939. You’ll find a blue plaque on its wall now to identify it. London was bracing itself for German assault, in whatever form it might take. Miller joined the staff of British edition of Vogue (Brogue, naturally) and formed a close relationship with its editor Audrey Withers, a woman in whom she felt she could confide and who encouraged her to develop her work. Withers, a strong-minded socialist, was interested in the changing nature of women’s role in society brought about by war. Miller photographed women at work or in uniform, some of which were published in Vogue, others collected in a book called Wrens In Camera. Many of the shots of working women show them mastering the kinds of mechanical and technical tasks in which Miller herself took an interest. Some are characterised by a poignant absence, such as A Canadian Wren’s Cabin from May 1944. This frames a cluster of personal belongings adjacent to the iron frame of a functional bed frame. A stuffed toy dog leans against the rim of a tin hat, jewellery and family photos and a small stack of books sit on the bedside table and sporting pennants form a descending flight on the wall. These are traces which sketch the barest outline of the person who is the invisible subject of the picture. Effects which are all the more precious given the possibility that this absence may become permanent. In US Army Nurses’ Billet from 1943, the white uniform hanging against the darkness of the interior and the crumpled shapes of underwear outlined against the light, draped in front of the window, seem presentiments of potential hauntings, awaiting the return of bodies which is no longer as assured as once it was. Her shots of ATS searchlight operators offer the perfect opportunity for the contrast of light and darkness, with the profiles of the women clearly etched against the powerful beam.

Miller’s surrealist eye came in to play on her pictures taken in London as it prepared for whatever was to come. Particularly striking is Fire Masks, taken at the entrance to the shelter in the garden in Hampstead. These masks, made to protect those who were on the watch for incendiary bombs, look like a modernist version of the sinister carnivelesque masks worn by figures in Goya’s paintings. They resemble the simplified rendering of the human face in a few bold curves and lines found in the African and Polynesian masks which had so inspired Picasso and the cubists. The grotesque distortion of the human head created by the gas mask is also represented in her photograph of her friend David Scherman, a young photographer from Life magazine who had joined her and Penrose for a time in their Hampstead home. Miller’s shots of the aftermath of raids during the blitz also focus on the surrealist disruptions of the cityscape, the odd inversions of the normal order. Her 1940 picture Nonconformist Chapel shows the solid porticoed door framing a torrent of rubble pouring out onto the street, as if the bricks of the building have themselves become the congregation and are rushing to exit into the open air.

She photographed portraits of many of the artists, musicians and actors in London at the time, as well. Hein Heckroth, the set and costume designer who was to work with Powell and Pressburger on films such as A Matter of Life and Death, Black Narcissus and The Red Shoes, looks nervous and guarded, his face half in shadow, half in the light shining through the window through which he is casting a sideways glance. His downturned mouth is largely concealed by the hand which holds the cigarette he is taking a drag from. This picture was taken shortly after his release in 1942 from his internment as an enemy alien. Humphrey Jennings, the film-maker who produced such landmark wartime films as Listen to Britain, Fires Were Started and A Diary for Timothy, and who had also been a surrealist painter, leans back and looks pensively into the distance to one side of the frame. A cloud of cigarette smoke, illuminated against the inky black background, hangs before him like a comic book thought bubble. It's a picture which is used on the cover of Kevin Jackson's biography of Jennings. Miller shot Henry Moore sketching the huddled bodies sheltering in the London underground at Holborn station during a documentary called Out of Chaos, which focussed on the work of Official War Artists. There’s also a very glamorous shot of Charles Hawtrey in full evening dress drag; he’s almost unrecognisable from the cheerfully weedy characters he would become known for in the Carry On films after the war. Her informal portrait of the journalist Martha Gellhorn pictures her sitting cross-legged on her chair having a fag break, her typewriter awaiting her on the dressing table turned work desk behind, pictures of her husband Ernest Hemingway clipped to the mirror. She looks like she has been captured turning around in a momentary pause from work to which she will soon feverishly return.

As the war moved into its final phases and armies began to do battle in the heart of Europe, Miller was given the opportunity to witness events at first hand. She took it and threw herself into her work with fierce fearlessness and wholly committed dedication. There was something very personal and revealing about her series of war reports for Vogue. The war shook up elements of her psyche which had been held at a distance. It was to be the making of Lee Miller.

n.b. Miller's photographs are under copyright, but you can find many of the pictures discussed here at the Lee Miller Archive

Angels and Demons of the City

I recently read William Heaney’s Memoirs of a Master Forger and David Almond’s Skellig one after the other. They proved, by chance rather than design, to be a perfect pairing, the literary equivalent of a cinematic double bill. Both feature angels and demons in an urban setting; and both invoke William Blake as a tutelary spirit. Almond’s short novel has become something a modern children’s classic since its publication in 1998. It is a story about a young boy called Michael, who has moved with his parents into a dilapidated house which still carries the imprint of the run down life of its previous occupant, a solitary old man. Michael uncovers a seedy, decrepit creature half-buried amongst the hoarded junk in the tumbledown garage at the back of the house’s weed-choked garden. This mysterious, unfriendly yet strangely unthreatening figure is covered in flies and dust and barely alive. It seems to aspire to the condition of a statue, an ossification of mind and body. Or it might be that it just wishes moulder away along with the old man’s accumulated strata of useless detritus. It is a supernatural being that has become a part of the world of decaying matter. It might even be a fallen angel. Michael nurtures his reluctant and moodily taciturn patient back to life with the congealed remains of numbers 27 and 53 from the local Chinese, washed down with brown ale (‘nectar’, as the creature declares it with undisguised relish). If it is an angel, it is one with particularly uncelestial tastes. At the same time that he is preoccupied with this cranky creature, who seems to have inherited the spirit and physical condition of the old man who used to live in the house, his baby sister struggles to hold on to the fragile thread of its newborn life. It is a time of intense uncertainty, which puts a strain on Michael and his parents. This, together with his discovery of the creature in the garage, leads him to confront the fundamental reality of death and life, a keen awareness of presence in the world which generally goes unexamined beneath the surface pleasures and routines of the daily round.

William Blake - The Schoolboy

Michael meets and becomes friendly with Mina, a precocious young girl who lives a few doors away from his new house with her artistic mother, who educates her at home. They are fond of quoting William Blake, and occasionally sing some of his Songs of Innocence and Experience as the poet himself used to. Blake, for them, is an exemplar and champion of imaginative freedom. Mina introduces him to Michael, with a few broad biographical strokes, as a man who ‘painted pictures and wrote poems. Much of the time he wore no clothes. He saw angels in the garden’. She is disparaging about Michael’s more conventional schooling, and to some extent his outlook on life in general. Indeed, when he first meets her, she is literally looking down on him, since she is sitting in a tree. She quotes from Blake’s poem The Schoolboy, which was originally intended to be part of Songs of Innocence, but was eventually moved over to the Songs of Experience. ‘How can a bird that is born for joy,/ Sit in a cage and sing?’ she asks, rhetorically, and later states that ‘to go to school in a summer morn/ O! it drives all joy away’. Blake’s illuminated plate for his poem is framed on the right by a sturdy, intertwining helix of vines up which children climb. Atop its branches is a child reading a book, just as Mina is in her tree when Michael first encounters her. Mina further mocks Michael’s school education and the standardised stages of learning through which he is expected to progress via set tests. When he talks of fitting into a particular reading stream, she quotes Blake’s Tyger, and asks ‘does that need a good reading age’. It is a good analogy for the novel itself, which has become a very popular school reading book. Like Blake’s poems in the Songs of Innocence and Experience, it has a surface simplicity which disguises great and profound depths.

Mina assumes the mantle of Blake’s experience, and exhibits a preciousness about her knowledge which borders on arrogance, and leads her to an assumption of superiority over Michael at times. When she meets Michael’s schoolfriends, there is a mutual lack of understanding, and a failure to connect on any level. Mina is arty and Michael’s friends sporty. They stand on either side of the mind/body divide which Blake sought to disavow. Where Mina expresses herself through Blake’s words, Michael’s friends express themselves through football. When they want to display their friendship, they do so by commenting on a great tackle or a good header. Michael is caught between the two worlds, as he is between his widely divergent friends. He is both embarrassed by his mates’ larking about and teasing over Mina, and annoyed at her lofty dismissal of them. He sees that she thinks herself above their games, and through his association with them, him as well. ‘You might know about William Blake’, he admonishes her, ‘but you know nothing about what ordinary people do’. She doesn’t know Blake as well as she might, otherwise she would be aware that he saw the mind (or soul) and body as being indivisible, the one expressed through the other. As he clearly puts it in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (speaking through ‘the voice of the devil’): ‘Man has no Body distinct from the Soul; for that call’d Body is a portion of Soul discern’d by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age’. As the similarity in their names suggests, Michael and Mina are in some ways the embodiment of the ‘contrary states of the human soul’ which Blake aims to display in the Songs of Innocence and Experience, and indeed in his work as a whole. Both bring their own particular mix of innocence and experience, although they have yet to fall prey to the negative associations with which Blake imbues the latter state. Together they balance one another and create a complementary whole.

William Blake - The Angel

Michael shares his discovery of the sick angel in the garage with Mina, whose acquaintance with Blake makes her the perfect person to understand its nature. It reveals its name to be Skellig, an act of implicit trust in both of them. When the garage is due to be demolished, they move him to an empty and derelict house in nearby Crow Road. This is a real piece of back alley gothic, a detached ruin set in an overgrown wilderness of garden. Owls roost beneath the roof, whose eaves are partly open to the sky. The Crow Road, in Iain Banks’ novel of the same name, is the path to the other side, the world beyond death. Away from the decaying clutter of a life which had become worn and weary, the angel comes back to life. He is fed by the owls, with which he has an evident affinity. His revivification occurs in tandem with Michael’s imaginative awakening, for which it also acts as a metaphor. Mrs Mckee, his art teacher at school, comments on his picture of Skellig that it is ‘the kind of thing William Blake saw. He said we were surrounded by angels and spirits. We must just open our eyes a little wider, look a little harder’. The childrens’ active imaginations allow them to soar. Michael’s mum tells him ‘they say that shoulder blades are where your wings were, when you were an angel’. Beneath the holed roof of the house on Crow Road, Skellig manifests Michael and Mina’s wings once more. They hover in a circle dance which spins them into a brief instant of weightless flight. It is a moment of pure joy. They talk about their experience later, and Mina says that Blake sometimes felt his soul leave his body. She says that he believed ‘it was possible to be overwhelmed by the presence of so much beauty in the world’. It was such a moment of transcendent connection with the essential beauty of the world which Skellig helped them to experience. When they next go to the house, he is gone. They must now learn to fly on their own. Mina sings lines from The Angel, Blake’s poem from Songs of Experience: ‘I dreamt a Dream! What can it mean?/ And that I was a maiden Queen,/ Guarded by and Angel mild:/ Witless woe was ne’er beguil’d!’ The poem goes on to tell how the dreamer ‘hid from him my heart’s delight’ and armed himself against the angel’s return, so that when ‘my Angel came again:/ I was arm’d, he came in vain’. The children have yet to reach such a state of experience, in which they reject the wonder of the world in favour of a strictly delimited set of perceptions and preconceptions. Their state of innocence remains intact. Incidentally, there is a beautiful musical setting of The Angel on The North Sea Radio Orchestra’s LP Birds.

William Blake - Songs of Experience frontspiece

Michael’s baby sister has her crisis night of life or death struggle after a heart operation. His mother has a dream in which a dishevelled angel comes to her and picks up the baby, lifting it above his shoulders where it grows its own tiny pair of wings. It’s a dream image which echoes Blake’s frontspiece for the Songs of Experience, on which a shepherd carries his own infant angel over his head. The baby survives and grows stronger after this dream visitation. Michael joins Mina in singing lines from Blake’s Night, from Songs of Innocence, in what amounts to a prayer of thanksgiving: ‘The sun descending in the west,/ The evening star does shine;/ The birds are silent in their nest,/ And I must seek for mine’. The poem continues, beyond the lines which they sing: ‘the moon like a flower/ In heaven’s high bower,/ With silent delight/ Sits and smiles on the night. / Farewell, green fields and happy groves,/ Where flocks have took delight./ Where lambs have nibbled, silent moves/ the feet of angels bright; / Unseen they pour blessing/ And joy without ceasing,/ On each bud and blossom,/ And each sleeping bosom’. In Blake’s illumination of the poem, angelic figures to the left of the text soar upwards, making for the branches of the tree which sinuously frames the poem from the right before curving above its opening verse. Some are already resting in its branches. It’s a picture which resembles the children climbing the vines in The Schoolboy, and reminds us once more of Mina sitting in her tree. After their shared experience with Skellig, Michael will be able to join her in his awakened state. When it comes to naming the baby which now joins them in their new home, Michael and his parents cannot agree on anything which seems fitting. Whether consciously or not, they draw on Blake again, this time taking from his brief poem Infant Joy, one of the Songs of Innocence. They simply call her Joy.

William Heaney’s Memoirs of a Master Forger is also haunted by the presence of Blake. The protagonist and putative author is a man who claims to be able to see demons. He feels a natural affinity with Blake, with whom he shares a Christian name. As he puts it, ‘I liked William Blake because he saw angels and demons everywhere too’. Although William Heaney tends just to see the demons. His insight into the hidden (or occult) nature of the world is, as it was with Blake, both blessing and curse. It stems from a night in the teacher training college he attended in Derby. He had tried to clear up the mess made by his hallmate and semi-friend Fraser, who had involved himself in amateur occult studies. His blundering attempts at putting these to practical application appears to have a terrifying effect on William’s life and that of his college girlfriends, whose images the seedy and solitary Fraser has used in his invocations. William feels compelled to repeat Fraser’s ritual and make an irrevocable personal sacrifice, making a deal with the demon whom he seems to summon in order (as he perceives it) to save the life of Mandy, the girl with whom he is deeply in love at the time. We learn the details of this personal history in a series of retrospective episodes which intercut the main narrative. In the present, William sees demons everywhere, hovering and waiting for people to attach themselves to. It is apparent that William still carries the demon which he invited in on that night in Derby, and which has affected his outlook on life ever since. He is very clear that the demons he sees are distinct from the biblical variety, and is precise in his taxonomical categorization and enumeration of their manifold nature (there are exactly 1,567 types). He has been a book dealer in the past, and portrays the trade in much the same grubby, fly-by-night light as Iain Sinclair does (drawing on personal experience) in novels such as White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings and Landor’s Tower. William observes that ‘demons do tend to cluster around the yellowing pages and cracked spines of second hand books’. He makes a considerable amount from selling forged books, made with the help of his brilliant but unstable artistic friend Ian. Ian’s reliability ebbs and flows in accordance with the state of his grand romantic passion for a woman who is not prepared to put up with his manifest demons.

William Blake - The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

The money they make goes to the homeless shelter of GoPoint, presumably a variant of the shelter which used to be housed in Centre Point, the modernist monument which towers above the intersection of Charing Cross Road and Oxford Street, and which straddles the hellish entrance to the underworld which is Tottenham Court Road tube station. William’s friend Antonia runs the shelter with unswerving dedication. She is always quoting ‘Billy Blake’ at him. When we first encounter her, she greets him with the line ‘he whose face gives no light shall never become a star’. This is one of the Proverbs of Hell, part of Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, his own piece of provocative demonology. In Blake’s personal mythology, demonic figures such as his semi-divine characters Los and Orc are embodiments of the fire of creativity and the unfettered imagination, which by its nature is not bound by rules or restrictions. These creative energies arise from the body, which is not distinct from the soul in Blake’s view, and ‘energy is Eternal Delight’. In a section of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell entitled The Voice of the Devil, Blake puts forward his contrary view. He outlines the ‘Errors’ of ‘all Bibles or sacred codes’, in particular ‘that Man has two real existing principles: Viz: a Body and a Soul’, and that the one is good (the soul) and the other evil (the body). Blake’s demons are morally neutral and are not imbued with the taint of inherent evil with which they have been infected over the ages by the more Manichean aspects of Christianity. Blake, still in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, notes of Milton, in relation to Paradise Lost, that ‘the reason (he) wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels and God, and at liberty when of Devils and Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devil’s party without knowing it’. William’s demons are also emanations of human energies. As he says of Blake’s angels and demons, ‘some of them were the same ones I was seeing’. His demons of the modern age attach themselves to energies which have turned in on themselves or are misdirected. Thus they are associated with addictions and obsessions, manias and insatiable appetites.

William Heaney’s personal demonology, which has been largely framed by his experiences as a young man at college, casts love as form of possession. An infestation by a particularly virulent and hardy demon which is devilishly difficult to dislodge. He finds himself avoiding it as a result. But there is no doubt that he has a deep love for Antonia. He describes her thus: ‘she stared at me with the eyes of William Blake looking at a seven year old chimney sweep. She is on fire with love. Sometimes I can’t even stand to look at her’. The chimney sweep refers to the two Blake poems called The Chimney Sweeper which appear in contrast to one another in The Songs of Innocence and Experience. In the first, Tom, a benighted child labourer, has a vision of thousands like him who are ‘lock’d up in coffins of black’. He is then visited by ‘an Angel who had a bright key,/ And he open’d the coffins and set them all free’. Antonia is, for William, an angel, a shining beacon of purity and burning integrity in an otherwise grubby world. That he supports her integrity through forgery and deceit is his own skewed way of expiating the evils of the world, along with his own perceived sins. It is an alchemical transformation of sorts. The true demons, in a biblical rather than Blakean sense, are those of greed and power, and the lies and wars which feed them. In a story within the story, we hear the tale of Seamus, a homeless Gulf War veteran who encounters a Middle Eastern dervish in the desert. A local demon. He makes a deal with it to save himself from being blown up by the mine which he has stepped on, and which will kill him if he raises his foot. The demon is permanently with him as a result, and he can never rid himself of its presence. It can manifest itself at any time through any person. He ends up chaining himself to the railings of Buckingham Palace with a home-made bomb, demanding to see the Queen, in whose name he has served his country. All he wants is to make sense of his experience, to be allowed to take his foot off the mine at last; to rid himself of his demon once and for all.

'Los howled in a dismal stupor' - plate 6 of the Book of Urizen

Seamus’ story is part of the strong current of political anger which courses through the novel. At one point, William unleashes a fierce Jeremiad against the corruption and gross inequality of the modern world. He rails against the moral vacuum he sees all around him, the venal behaviour and self-serving ideology of leaders (both temporal and spiritual), media figures, athletes and artists in a passage which burns with disgusted contempt. Government ministers, captains of commerce, religions, football heroes, movie stars and poets are all found woefully wanting. He continues with what reads like a passionate speech, couched in the high rhetorical style of Blake’s prophetic books (such as Milton and Jerusalem), which themselves drew on the language of the Bible. This passage, punctuated with the exclamation of a pulpit thumping preacher, amounts to William’s own Blakean declaration of beliefs. ‘I rage!’ he declares. ‘I do! I rage when I see the lives of ordinary people squandered. The lives of young men and women, weak like me, going under the tidal sludge of drugs spilling across the sink-estates of the nation; the homeless drifting like wraiths; people eating themselves to oblivion and doping themselves with bad television; brave boy soldiers sacrificed in deserts for the ambitions of the insanely rich. I do rage! I weep! To see life held so cheap! And all I have as antidote as I stand lost in the middle of these leaders who are not leaders, these demons hidden in the souls of men and women, are my humanity and my rage’. William eventually discovers that his belief in the veracity of Fraser’s invocation of a demonic force and its terrible effect on those close to him was completely unfounded. He has effectively been living a false existence based on someone else’s story. Similarly, Seamus has been living in a story fabricated by his nation’s governing powers, and simply wishes for it to reach its end. Blake’s exhortation to let loose the creative imagination would have us create our own stories, as well as allowing us to see through those forged by others and sold to us as the truth.

William can’t evade the demon of love forever. It stalks him down in the form of a beautiful young woman who calls herself Yasmin. Antonia has known all along that his view of the world and its demons is a partial one, coloured by his own experience. If the demons which he sees everywhere are aspects of the tormented human soul, then they have their counterparts; angels who perceive that torment and endeavour to alleviate it as best they can. Yasmin had been a resident at the GoPoint shelter, where she had been told of William’s benefactions. Antonia described him to her as their angel. When he had arrived one day, she had said to him ‘you don’t look much like an angel’. Nevertheless, and despite (or perhaps as an unexpected result of) his constant self-excoriation, this is what he is for Antonia, and then for Yasmin too. Blake would probably make no essential distinction between angels and demons. They are emanations of the contrary states of the human soul, and could easily shade from into the other. William has believed himself possessed of a powerful demon, but has acted like an angel (albeit a wayward one who uses demonic means). Antonia had told Yasmin that William ‘sees other people’s suffering. And his own. He sees it as demons. Real demons’. For all her frequent quotations of Blake, she doesn’t share this vision. Perhaps William is mad. If so, it may be a useful madness, an illusory way of seeing the world which nevertheless drives him to do good (some of the milder-mannered atheists might make an analogous apologia for the more beneficent forms of religion).

William Blake - Ancient of Days

Antonia herself is a weary angel, worn down by her tireless work. She becomes very ill, and as she approaches death, she tells Will that she loves him ‘because for you life has never stopped taking your breath away. Because you are generous to all its creatures. You give them a home. But sometimes they don’t want one’. He has never lost the basic state of innocence celebrated by Blake in his Songs. He retains an imaginative openness to the beauty inherent in life, which also serves to power his bitter rage at the forces which would fence it off or pave it over, or poison it with the pretty persuasions of wealth and power. They are the forces which Blake embodies in the form of Urizen, the false demi-god of iron rules which divide and subdivide the unity of creation. He is the Gnostic demiurge, who imprisons us in a deformed subworld forged in his own image. Blake depicts him with the full sweep of Old Testament beard, most famously in the plate Ancient of Days, the frontspiece of his book Europe: A Prophecy. Here, he divides the heavens with his compass, imposing his own rules on this corner of the universe.

William sees demons as parasitical, hovering in wait for a suitable host. Antonia offers a reversed perspective, suggesting that they are actually longing to be allowed to leave the troubled souls who have drawn them in. Angels such as Antonia will help to administer such an exorcism. Yasmin is inspired by William to rebuild her life after she has met him at the shelter. She renames herself to mark her slow rebirth. The near eastern origins of the name she chooses gives a hint of a notional link with the djinn which Seamus had met in the desert. For a while she leads a phantom life, as if watching herself from the outside, acting out another person’s story. She is a ghost of the living, a refutation of Will’s speculation that ‘ghosts are the spirits of the dead…demons, on the other hand, are the spirits of the living’. Yasmin finds meaning and purpose when she meets up with William again. She won’t let him go, no matter how hard he tries to evade her (which is often not all that hard). As she says, ‘you were my angel. Now I’m yours’. And she is a persistent and tenacious angel. Unlike the angel of Blake’s eponymous poem, she is not put of by the ‘ten thousand shields and spears’ with which William ‘arm’d (his) fears’. She keeps returning until finally he lays them to one side and lets her in. Yasmin takes over Antonia’s position at the shelter, with William on hand to support her, financially and emotionally. On Christmas Eve, he sits with the disparate ‘family’ which he has gathered around him and watches the ‘ascent of demons’, a communal letting go which fills the sky with a joyful spiritual firework display which can easily be imagined as a Blake print. Indeed, we can perhaps also imagine a musical accompaniment of the alternative national anthem, which suggests a different vision of national unity than the obeisance to inherited wealth and power and celebration of the established order offered by the official version. Blake’s Jerusalem, from his originally intended introduction to his epic prophetic poem Milton, set to Parry’s stirring music, pledges a personal oath to ceaselessly strive to create an earthly paradise, an utopia which is planned with the boundless energy of the imagination and whose spirit is seeded in the human heart. It is a revolutionary rallying cry for a better world. ‘I will not cease from Mental Fight,/ Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand/ Till we have built Jerusalem/ In England’s green and pleasant land’.

The Windsor Castle

One of the incidental pleasures of the novel is the trawl of its protagonist around some of the more characterful alehouses of the capital. This offers the opportunity for a literary London pub crawl, with each stop having its own accumulation of stories, tall or true. William’s criterion for a good pub is that it should have ‘a shadow’, a sense of a lived past, told through a backlog of tales which layer the locality. Marina Warner wrote an article a while back about the way that inn names used to be markers of hidden local history (you can find it in Iain Sinclair’s anthology London: City of Disappearances). These have been eradicated by the trend towards chain branding, which impose irritating and meaningless quirk of the slug and lettuce variety over the old names which were the key to the genuinely strange and peculiar particularity of place. Michael Moorcock’s Mother London marks the decades of the city through pub name chapter headings. The first pub we follow William into is the Museum Tavern in Bloomsbury. This was apparently frequented by Karl Marx, presumably after a hard day’s work spent craning over books in the British Library which was over the road. We are told that he smashed a mirror on one particularly wild night. The Pineapple in Kentish Town, where William and his fellow losers in love form their ‘Candlelight Club’, ‘attracts an odd mix of trade’, according to the author. It is in fact a grade II listed building, and the Good Beer Guide notes that ‘eccentrics, children and dogs (are) welcome, if kept on a lead’. William doesn’t tell any tales of the Lamb and Flag in Covent Garden, which is strange since, according to the Good Pub Guide, it has a particularly colourful store of them. It was known in Regency times as the Bucket of Blood, on account of the bare knuckle fights which took place inside, and the blood and teeth flew outside too, since it is said (and as a plaque now attests) that Dryden was nearly beaten to death in 1679 by thugs hired by the Earl of Rochester as he walked down the alleyway leading to the pub. The Plumber’s Arms in Lower Belgrave Street, Victoria is supposed to have played host to Lord Lucan just before he vanished from the face of the earth. The Viaduct Tavern is ‘an original gin palace’ of the sort which Hogarth, who depicted beer as the patriotic drink of the Englishman, would have regarded as a palace of sin. William says it was ‘built on the site of the old Newgate hanging prison’ with ‘the cellars…former prison cells for the cut-throats and scum of Victorian London’. The French House in Dean Street, Soho comes with a scabrous story involving Dylan Thomas and a pet monkey, whose dubious provenance stands in for the endemic spread of apocryphal mythmaking associated with the bohemian life of this quarter. The Windsor Castle, in the quiet back roads linking Notting Hill and Kensington High Streets, is said to house the bones of Tom Paine, buried in the cellar. The Good Pub Guide adds that they were sold to the landlord by Paine’s son to pay off drinking debts. An ignoble end for a towering figure in the history of English radicalism. I can vouch for the place’s charm. It’s shadowy interior, oak dividing walls with inserted doors which you have to duck to pass through, and high-backed benches facing one another to provide closed off nooks make for a cosy and secret place, shut off from the world outside, in which to enjoy a beer or two. I had a tasty pint of Timothy Taylor Landlord accompanying a delicious plate of sausages and mash topped with leek and onion gravy.

The Cittie of York

The Crown, near 7 Dials in Monmouth Street was formerly known as The Clock House, a criminal haunt of the 1820s when the area was a notorious rookery. William tells us it was home to ‘the worst kinds of pimps and murderers. Here the king of the pickpockets held court and they divided the spoils of any lunatic stupid enough to enter the district after dusk’. The Dove is a 17th century riverside pub which William notes was frequented by Graham Greene and Ernest Hemingway. The Good Pub Guide confirms Greene’s fondness for the place, and adds that it is supposedly where Rule Britannia was composed. It was also a favourite haunt of Turner, who painted a view of the Thames from its terrace. Members of the Arts and Crafts movement met there in the Victorian era, too, since William Morris’ house was just a short stroll away. William begins to tell the stories attached to the Cittie of York in High Holborn (just opposite Chancery Lane tube station) but cuts himself short, wearying of his pub guide spiel. He does note that it is ‘one of London’s oldest inn sites’, and describes the ‘gloom of the great hall bar and …the back where there are intimate drinking booths’. It’s been here since 1430, although it became a coffee house in 1695 and was reconstructed by the Victorians using 17th century materials. The Coal Hole in the Strand, near Waterloo Bridge, is said to have been the ‘19th century meeting place of the Wolf Club, an actor’s den of drunks, orgies and loose women’. William also claims that Blake used to live in rooms above. This would presumably be the lodgings in Fountain Court, above what used to be the Fountain Tavern, where he and his wife Catherine moved in 1820. Blake liked to take a pot of porter from one of the neighbouring pubs. After Yasmin has revealed herself to be his redeeming angel, she and William go to the Jugged Hare on Victoria Bridge Road. He describes it thus: ‘We sat under one grand painting depicting old-timers slouched in that very alehouse 100 years ago. The pub was in every sense a fine old historical London ale house. Except that it wasn’t; it was a fake old pub, like so many of them. It was a bank that had recently been converted into a pub. The old timers loafing in the pictures were fakers’. It’s a revelation which reflects on the inauthenticity of so much of modern life, which exists alongside a yearning for that very sense of authentic belonging, of being part of an ongoing story in which you are an active participant.

Gordon's Wine Bar

After such a long time living in an inauthentic hell of which he is the author, William has now been offered, and accepted release. In a book full of fakes and fabrications, who knows how many of the above stories are tall and how many true. William has frequented alehouses throughout the story, but only ever drinks wine. Finally, he ends up in a place which is far more suited to his true character: Gordon’s Wine Bar, where the ‘only serve wine’. Here, ‘the light from the candles doesn’t even penetrate to the dark corners and everyone in the place seems to be engaged in either a tryst or a conspiracy. Samuel Pepys lived in the building in the 17th century; Rudyard Kipling wrote The Light That Never Failed in the parlour above the bar’. One should never mix the hop and grape, but it’s seems like a good place to end a London pub crawl, particularly with Charing Cross station or the Embankment tube but a brief stagger away. It’s appropriate that it takes its place as the last drinking establishment in the book, too. It is run by a family with the surname Gordon, but they are entirely unrelated to the Arthur Gordon who set the bar up in 1890. It is one more piece of forgery and misdirection (although not on the owners’ part, I hasten to add). Of course, the greatest fakery contained in the book is the fact that it is not written by William Heaney at all. It’s author is Graham Joyce (who wrote the wonderful novels The Limits of Enchantment and Facts of Life under his own name) hiding behind the persona of the character which he has created. So William is living in someone else’s story after all. But it is a good story, written by someone who understands him, who is able to inhabit his soul. An alter ego, perhaps. Thanks to Neil for recommending both of these fabulous books, and for providing me with a copy of Memoirs of a Master Forger (a nice new one too!) from his bookshop.

The Romantics at Tate Britain

Part One - Outward Vision

The Death of Chatterton by Henry Wallis

The picture which Tate Britain has been using a detail from in their advertising for their exhibition The Romantics is Henry Wallis’ The Death of Chatterton, painted in 1856. It’s an archetypal representation of the romantic poet, burning with a fiercely subjective vision of the world, flying in the face of convention, dying young in a dingy garret and leaving an exquisite and admonitory corpse for those who will later venerate the unrecognised genius which was sacrificed at the altar of convention. The fact that Wallis painted this portrayal of the artist suffering in the name of art in the attic in Grays Inn, London where Chatterton had actually lived and died says something about the idolatry which had grown up around the idea of the individual visionary; the fearless creative spirit engaged in a heroic creative struggle to express the ineffable, to encompass the extremes of human feeling through direct experience. The romantic poets Shelley, Keats and Byron and their contemporaries usually lived up to the expectations which the term raises. There is an 1827 painting in the exhibition by Sir Charles Luck Eastlake which serves to memorialise them. Called Lord Byron’s Dream, it finds the rakish aristocratic adventurer reclining decorously amongst the classical ruins, a fragment of Corinthian pillar for his pillow, with the lakes and mountains of the Near East forming a picturesque backdrop to his reveries. Wallis’ picture is somewhat misleading in representing the visual artists contained within this exhibition, however. For a start, it’s generally considered to be a part of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, a little beyond the particular period in which Romanticism is generally considered to have been dominant. Romanticism is an idea more than a style, though, and has the enduring power which ideas can harness. Its influence can be detected well beyond the accepted bracketing of dates on the art historical time chart.

Turner self portrait (1799) - a respectable Romantic

But the two Romantic painters whose works feature in the greatest number here, Constable and Turner, fail conspicuously to fit the stereotypical view of the wild and passionate bohemian which Wallis’ dramatic tableau so perfectly portrays. Both were essentially conservative men, lacking the social and political radicalism of the romantic poets. Their innovations were achieved almost in spite of their natures, rather than being a direct expression of them. There was tragically youthful death in Constable’s life, but it was that of his wife Maria. He had waited many years until familial approval and social respectability (ie comparability in wealth) dictated that they could marry, and had precious few left with her afterwards. Turner lived for lengthy periods with two widowed mistresses, but kept such relationships discretely hidden, never formalising them in marriage. His personal life was kept strictly apart from his working and public life (and on occasion set up in an entirely separate house). Both artists were members of the Royal Academy. Constable struggled to gain such official recognition but it was always his aim to attain its attendant professional status. Turner taught there and swiftly rose in the ranks to become deputy president in 1845. He was evidently adept at negotiating the politics of such an institution. None of these details, which suggest two men, both from relatively humble backgrounds, who were intent on making a living from their talents, is indicative of what is generally considered a romantic temperament.

It is the work rather than the lifestyle which really counts, though. Again, Constable doesn’t at first seem to fit in with the general conception of the romantic. However, romanticism in art was in part a reaction against the formalised classicism expected of landscape paintings. The very mundanity of the working rural environments which Constable painted marked a definitive break with such elevated subject matter; those much-depicted biblical or mythological scenes or the grand recreations of heroic historical moments. Romanticism also took inspiration from the unpredictable moods of nature, which seemed to belie the ordered rationalism of the Enlightenment and the revival of classical modes of philosophy and art which embodied it. Many sought to represent nature’s constant mutability and potential for sudden, violent change in its most extreme form, with dramatic, large scale paintings of rugged Alpine scenery or tempestuous seas. Constable remained at home and largely concentrated on studying the details of his surroundings in the county of Sussex. The success with which he was able to translate observed reality into an artistic expression of a uniquely individual perception is reflected by the fact the landscape around Dedham and the Stour Valley is now frequently referred to in terms of his paintings. His vision has become so widely known that the real is now held up for comparison with the representation, with a perhaps inevitable resultant sense of disappointment. In modern marketing terms, the artist has put his brand on the landscape, now known as Constable Country ™. He is, in a sense, the most successful of all English romantic artists, if we view romanticism as giving priority to the individual’s subjective view of the world.

Cloud Study

The changeability of nature in Constable’s work is represented by the fleeting effects of light (predating impressionism), by its evocation of seasonal atmosphere, and especially by the detailed massing of the clouds. Constable’s landscapes never unfold beneath the kind of cerulean skies found in the paintings of the 17th century landscape artist Claude Lorrain and his followers. There is the sense of the weight of weather, which more than anything lends them their English particularity. Constable’s direct and detailed study of nature enabled him to depict it in all its living variety, its convoluted patterns and shapes. His techniques, including the white flecks of paint which became known as Constable’s ‘snow’ give this detail form. This set his paintings at a remove from the ideals of classical order and proportion preponderant at the Academy, and from the symbolic role which nature was often supposed to assume. Landscape was considered suitable for use as a backdrop to the subject, a setting for the classical or biblical scene which was the foreground focus of the picture. A theatrical prop, in effect. It could also be included in a proprietorial portrait of the landed gentry, a conversation piece for the parlour in which they survey their own private arcadia. It was not supposed to be the subject itself, particularly not if it was a landscape of farms, mills and parish churches. Such concentration on the local, the refusal to adopt the subject matter deemed acceptable by the art establishment, accounts to a great extent for Constable’s difficulties in gaining entry to the Royal Academy, to which he was only finally admitted late in life, and in the face of continuing opposition. This stubborn adherence to his own artistic vision makes him that paradoxical creature, a conservative radical. A quieter sort of romantic.

Branch Hill Pond, Hampstead Heath

Constable did produce a few pictures which contain some of the more familiar elements of romanticism. The Sketch for Hadleigh Castle features a ruined keep set against a stormy sea and an unsettled sky. His view of Branch Hill Pond, Hampstead Heath (near where he lived for many years – both he and Maria are buried in the graveyard of the Hampstead parish church) features the small figure of a boy, his waistcoat a characteristic splash of red on predominantly subdued, dark tones, looking down onto the water below. The shafts of light slanting across the sky lend the impression of swift movement to the dark clouds, and the sense of a stiff wind blowing across the Heath. It is a modest English version of Casper David Friedrich’s Germanic romanticism, the boy sitting in (literally) for the solitary mountaineer of his The Wanderer Above a Sea of Mist. Constable’s painting of The Chain Pier at Brighton (which Turner also used as a subject), once more appearing beneath troubled skies, is a truncated bridge dipping a tentative toe into the sublime expanse of the ocean. The sea is very much a romantic locale, extending towards a horizon which suggests great distances and unknown lands. Although in this case (and perhaps appropriately, given Constable’s concentration on the local) reason and a large enough map would lend assurance that France was but a comfortably short jaunt across the Channel.

Turner is generally seen as being a more radical innovator than Constable, his work, with its steps towards abstraction, less likely to adorn the lids of biscuit tins. But the more conventionally romantic tenor and varied subject matter of his early and mid-period paintings suggest a man who was more willing to conform to acceptable standards and tastes. He adhered more closely to the Royal Academy’s notions of what constituted the correct from of ennobled (and ennobling) art to which they were prepared to grant their official nod of authentication. As a result, he swiftly rose in their ranks to gain an elevated position of respectability. His extensive body of work surreptitiously introduces a subjective and individual perspective to the theatrical props of epic biblical, classical and historical scenes. Turner did the Grand Tour, the obligatory art tourist route around the sites of classical antiquity and Renaissance revival, and travelled extensively through Europe at various stages of his life (Constable was too poor to undertake such observational travels across the continent). He painted in Venice and Rome but also headed north to the Swiss Alps. His paintings Valley of the Brook of Kidron, The Parting of Hero and Leander, and The Opening of the Walhalla (all of which are included here) exhibit the kind of awe-inspiring spectacle characteristic of the romantic sublime. This is the ideal of a beauty found in immensity, in a depiction of a scale against which the individual is dwarfed and made to feel overwhelmed. It’s a beauty which encompasses emotions such as terror and panic, extreme states which the artist deliberately aimed to induce.

The Goddess of Discord Choosing the Apple of Contention in the Garden of the Hesperides

These pictures feature lowering mountain ranges opening out onto wide open vistas. Towering cityscapes blend in with the natural manifestations of the sublime and match them in scale. In portraying these phantoms of the golden ages of antiquity, Turner evokes a human sublime, a dream of civilisations of an awesome splendour equal to that of nature at its most grandiose. Monumental buildings rise in cascading tiers, receding into the glowing haze of the horizon, until they blur into and are barely distinguishable from the floating accumulations of clouds. Turner’s mythological scene The Goddess of Discord Choosing the Apple of Contention in the Garden of the Hesperides (a title of great precision if not concision) also paints a romantic landscape and inhabits it with fantastic creatures. There is a looming rocky outcrop in the background with a dragon coiled languorously atop the hilly contours of its sloping plateau, almost as if it is part of the topography. These pictures are the precursors of fantasy art, the Tolkienesque creations of imaginary landscape and the soaring (or burrowing) architecture which rises from its plains and abuts its mountains. Walhalla, Kidron and the city behind Hero and Leander could be Minas Tirith or Helm’s Deep.

The Great Day of his Wrath - John Martin

Such comparisons are particularly apt when it comes to the Victorian artist John Martin. His Belshazzar’s Feast (1835), included here, is a relatively modest affair, a black and white mezzotint in which the epic scene is crammed into a small frame. A vast, open-roofed palace rises beneath roiling, lightning-split skies. Panicking hordes rush to and fro inside to escape from the blinding illumination of the burning words of judgement etched in fiery light upon the walls. To gaze upon Martin’s work in fully unrestrained mode (his preferred style) you have to go across the central hallway of the Tate into a gallery where there is a separate display going under the title Art and the Sublime. This forms a kind of adjunct to the Romantics exhibition. Here you will find Martin’s Judgement triptych from 1851-3: The Last Judgement, The Great Day of His Wrath and The Plains of Heaven. They’re difficult to miss, as they occupy almost an entire wall. They are huge in scale, attempting to achieve the effects of the sublime through the sheer overwhelming size of the canvasses. In the paintings of the end of days, taken from the book of Revelation, cities collapse, mountains fold in on themselves, the sky is torn apart by lightning and massed hordes of extras are plunged into the fiery abyss. It’s the apocalypse as directed by Cecil B DeMille or DW Griffiths. It needs a thundering Dies Irae to accompany it. The Plains of Heaven, as is usual with such comparative depictions, is less interesting. But with its blue dream skies and great pacific lakes, and the gentle oceanic swell of hills stretching off into a haze of vast distance, bounded by cloudlike ranges of icy mountains, it could comfortably adorn the cover of any epic fantasy novel.

Science fiction is another 20th century manifestation of the sublime. It has its own cloud cities, and others which float in orbit, shelter under giant domes or retreat into subterraenean caverns. Modernist (or post-modernist) Walhallas and Kidrons can be found in the cinematic futures constructed in Metropolis or Blade Runner. Both of these films feature establishing shots in which we glide in from above towards a prospect of the towering cityscape. These introductions are intended to invoke feelings of awe, and are very much in keeping with notions of the romantic sublime; The city as a range of high-rise mountain peaks and abyssal canyons. The exhibition has its Mordor as well, the industrial sublime of Paul Sandby Munn’s 1803 painting Bedlam Furnace, Madely Dale. The glow of furnaces, turning the sky a baleful red, displays the fascinations of hell, the same kind of sublime terror which might be experienced at the edge of a volcano.

The Temple of Poseidon at Sunium

Turner created more inward vistas, too, in which landscape is blocked from view by iron and stone. His Forum Romanum For Mr Soanes’ Museum is a fantasy collation of Roman architectural forms, an impractical jumble of buildings. It’s the kind of impossible city which Soane might have built in his dreams, incorporating all the chunks of classical masonry which cluttered his remarkable London town house (and which still do to this day in what is now a museum). Turner’s Interior of a Prison is his version of one of Piranesi’s sunless vaults, full of criss-crossing walkways and staircases, great pulleys and chains awaiting the grinding into gear of machineries whose purposes are best left to the imagination. You can almost hear the screams and groans echoing around these dank walls. Turner provides some standard romantic views, as well. His Caernarvon Castle is the consummate romantic ruin, surveyed from the elevated perspective of the approaching traveller. The Temple of Poseidon at Sunium sets stone ruins beside the eroded cliffs of a wild, rocky seashore, doubling the romantic appeal. These crumbling classical columns look like they could be a megalithic circle of standing stones rather than the remnants of ancient Mediterranean civilisations. It’s a particularly British take on a classical subject. In Turner’s later paintings, forms increasingly begin to blur into a haze of light, a glow of sunset reds and golds with which he haloes everything. Norham Castle could be a romantic ruin, or it could still be intact and inhabited. It’s difficult to tell from the blazing mirage of its outline. Sunrise With Sea Monsters is a title later given to a painting in which the vaguely apprehended mouths and eyes of aquatic creatures are all that emerge from the misty blur of morning dazzle. They could be behemoths or they could be cuttlefish. All sense of perspective and scale has been lost in luminous mist. In Sun Setting Over a Lake, even such half-perceived forms have vanished, leaving nothing but an engulfing miasma of light, water and sky, barely distinguishable one from the other. It’s a depiction of an inchoate nature into which human consciousness itself can become disembodied and freely float, losing itself in blissful dissipation. It’s a picture which anticipates the effect of Mark Rothko’s large paintings, with their blurred and hazy edges. A blank, if vivid and suggestively coloured canvas for the imagination.

Sunrise With Sea Monsters