artyculate

Madrid. The first thing that comes to mind is unforgivingly hot sun, siesta and passionate Spaniards. This clichéd image melts away when you see a luscious green Madrid bustling with people throughout the day – tourists and locals, who rarely smile.  However, Madrid did live up to its reputation when it came to art.

Here, in London, we think we have it all when it comes to art: Tate Britain and Modern, the National Gallery and the National Portrait Gallery can make you feel spoiled for choice. A trip to the Prado, however, quickly reveals an unparalleled universe of masterpieces.

The Prado is every art lover’s dream: not only do you have the best of Western European art here but the particular architecture of the museum does all these great works justice. The long, high-ceilinged corridors and spacious rooms allow you to compare, study and fully enjoy each work without feeling bombarded with visual stimuli.  Although there  are many visitors the space never feels cramped – unlike like the Uffizi for example.

When you go to the National Gallery and enter through the Main Entrance, you turn left and there is Leonardo. You can see his work before even entering through the doors. That can be hugely disappointing for anyone who likes to feel on a ‘masterpiece hunt’ in a museum. At the Prado – the excellent hanging and architecture strike a balance between looking and finding. Individual rooms are easy to locate yet the works are sufficiently concealed to feed into your imagination and increase the ultimate pleasure when you find them!

One of the best things about the Prado is how well everything comes together. Their website is one of the best gallery websites I have ever visited, with suggested itineraries depending on how much time the visitor has. Such sifting through works can be questionable considering that the museum already shows only a fraction of its collection (the Prado owns over 21 600 paintings, sculptures and drawings and out of these only about 1000 works are on display while 3100 are on temporary loan). Given the reality of a gallery visit, however, having clear suggested itineraries dependant on time is a great way to facilitate visitors and contribute to their enjoyable stay.

If you are planning a visit to the Prado – you can save some money and gain some knowledge by listening to the audio guides for each painting of your itinerary online. Otherwise, you will have to pay to use them in the gallery.

A constant presence in these is, of course, Las Meninas by Velázquez.  If you are not familiar with the extensive critical debate which surrounds it, you can still enjoy the painting. However, if you have a bit of spare time – reading Foucault’s take on Las Meninas – in the first chapter in his book The Order of Things – can turn even the most oblivious viewer into an acutely perceptive observer.

Other than Velázquez, there are also remarkable works by Rembrandt, Rubens, Goya, Dürer, Tintoretto and many others. If you allow yourself sufficient time to explore the Prado, you will start noticing links, connections. Consider for example Rubens’ Saturn Devouring His Son against Goya’s take on the same subject.

The only unexpected flaw in the Museum was the labelling and the tendency to use a Spanish version of the artists’ names even when the artists in question were not Spanish. Albrecht Dürer, for example, was Alberto Durero and Peter Paul Rubens was Pedro Pablo Rubens. ‘School of’, ‘previously attributed to’, were also only in Spanish.

Don’t let my pedantry deter you. If you are planning a visit to Madrid – the Prado is certainly worth your time.

© MUSEO NACIONAL DEL PRADO

For information on opening hours and ticket prices, please click here

Dear Subscribers,

I hope you have all been enjoying great summer holidays and feel well rested and refreshed.

I have been absent from artyculate.com for a good reason – I focused my efforts on getting published in a daily newspaper in Bulgaria.

I am happy to report that my efforts have paid off and I am getting published tomorrow in the second best-selling newspaper in Bulgaria, the respected 24 chasa (24 hours). The topic is an exhibition of traditional Balkan dress and jewellery in the British Museum which you can see until 18 September, free of charge in Room 2 of the British Museum.

With this brief note I wanted to thank you for finding time to read the reviews on my website and for commenting on them – in person and online. Your feedback has been the best thing about writing. Artyculate has given me the opportunity to talk about what I love best and also helped me get published in print. Thank you for being a part of it.

Thank you for subscribing and expect more new articles in the coming weeks!

Petya

I could not have been feeling any less glamorous when I went to see the National Portrait Gallery’s Glamour of the Gods: Hollywood Portraits exhibition. My hair was flattened and soaking wet and my clothes were dripping from the downpour I found myself in, umbrella-less.

And then there they were: the impossibly glamorous, flawless gods and goddesses of Hollywood. Flaunting their beauty, setting an impossible standard, here were all the screen names you might or might not have watched but whose image you are bound to recognise: Elizabeth Taylor, Marilyn Monroe, Rita Hayward, Bette Davis, and my favourite – Ava Gardner.

It was a shame the NPG had included only two photographs of her: one where she is on a photo shoot and another which shows her photograph undergoing the retouching process carried out on the Hollywood elite.

In some ways this was unfair – I thought, compared to other Hollywood leading ladies, she was the most flawless. But perhaps this was the point – to show even someone as beautiful as her needed some extra help to look her best.

In many ways this photo and 3 others showing Joan Crawford before and after the re-touching process, were what was so good about the exhibition. It was a good reminder how much Hollywood glamour relies on outside help: then as well as now.

Luckily, thanks to their interactive tool you can see yourself glammed up at best or looking even drabber in black and white, at worst.

Check it out here http://www.npg.org.uk/glamour/inter.htm

A young man is lying on a couch. His full red lips are slightly parted, his cheeks are flushed and his gaze is directed towards the source of his excitement. All we can see of this person is an outstretched arm, lovingly embracing the young man.

This powerful image is full of suggestion and ambiguity and this is where its power lies. The titled of the drawing – ‘Untitled’ – offers no confirmation or rejection of what you or I might have thought. We are left guessing and that is as alluring as the sight of the beautiful young man.

What this image does – leaving us to explore our own stories and coming up with meaning – could not have been more fitting for the museum which currently houses it: The Freud Museum in London.

The first time I went to visit it was with a friend of mine who knows more about psychoanalysis that she would care to admit and her knowledge and passion were a welcome break from the popular adage I had been hearing lately: ‘There’s two things you need to know about Freud: he is dead and he is wrong’. Writing off a man with such extensive oeuvre and influence on contemporary academic and popular thought surely should not be so easy.

Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams was the first academic book I read. That, and my age at the time, might account for the profound impression it made on me.

At its core his theory is that regardless of their content in all dreams, even nightmares, there is an element which serves to fulfil a certain wish or desire (not necessarily a sexual one). One of the best examples he gives is a dream one of his patients had. The woman, who was unmarried and had no children, was very close to her sister and her children one of whom had died recently. In her dream she is at the funeral of her other nephew. This dream obviously brings a lot of pain to her and it’s only in her discussion of it with Freud that she is able to uncover a deeper meaning. At the actual funeral of her nephew she met a young man she was very interested in but had not met since. By having a dream in which her other nephew dies, what she is really dreaming about is an encounter with that man. Of course I am simplifying the story but even in its bare outline you can see the strength of Freud’s theories.

The way Freud builds his theories continues to be impressive even when it turns out the theory was wrong. An excellent example of that is his Leonardo Da Vinci: A memory of his childhood. Here Freud takes his cue from a story Leonardo tells in his notebooks. As I lay in my cradle, writes Leonardo, a vulture came to me and opened my mouth with its tail and struck many times with its tail inside my mouth’. Freud sees in this episode an expression of passive homosexuality that the adult Leonardo had attributed to his infant years. But even more important for Freud is the vulture. Using philology, folklore and archaeology he uncovers a second layer of meaning. In Egyptian writing the hieroglyph for ‘mother’ is a vulture. Even more impressively that vulture is sometimes represented with a phallus. The vulture was identified with the mother in Leonardo’s fantasy not only because Egyptian ideas were available and known to the Italians of the Renaissance but also because of the belief held by Egyptians, Greeks and Romans that vultures exist only in the female sex. The vulture was believed to have been conceived by the wind and was cited by the Church fathers as a natural prototype of the Virgin birth. This idea was still in circulation in Leonardo’s time.

That Leonardo – an illegitimate child who was adopted and therefore had two mothers – should have later painted an image such as The Virgin and Child with St. Anne where the two women who are supposed to be mother and daughter in fact look of a similar age and have directed their loving attention to the baby – is no surprise for Freud.

What did come as a surprise was an unexpected confirmation of his theory: shortly after Freud’s book was published Oskar Pfister discerned in the painting in the Louvre the outline of a vulture in the blue robe of Mary, enveloping her waist and the lower part of her body.

Freud was understandably disappointed when it emerged that in the German translation of the text he was using the word ‘nibbio’ had incorrectly been translated as ‘vulture’ when it should have been ‘kite’. With this his beautifully stacked theory collapsed but what remains is the impressive way in which he had brought together different strands of thought to elucidate a previously overlooked piece of information.

While I continued to be interested in Freud’s work, the one thing I was never interested in was his personal life. This has been a good thing as it allowed me to read Freud without attempting to reflect any biographical data back onto his work. As it turned out, however, sometimes personal issues affect one’s work as was the case with Freud who had to leave Austria to escape the Nazis. If fleeing the Nazis was not bad enough, he was also fighting oral cancer at the time.

Walking around his home in Hampstead you’d never guess he only lived here for a year – his personal possessions which are on display (coat, wedding ring, address book, glasses) together with the many artefacts he collected and his famous couch, all make the place look very lived-in. One of most valuable things you will come across in the museum is the short film playing in one of the rooms on the second floor. The various photographs we have all seen of Freud always depict a man who is serious, concentrated. This is why seeing him sitting on a chair accepting guests, laughing, pinching the cheeks of the girl who brought him flowers, talking to one of his best friends and discussing fish with his grandson Lucien Freud, is so novel, so mundanely reassuring and dare I say – heart-warming?

Even if you were never interested in Freud’s theories the museum has a lot more than that to offer. If you are in London and have some free time, go see it!

Immerse yourself in the atmosphere of the Venice Biennale with my short video! Click here to watch it.

When I think dancing I think lack of inhibition, a fair share of agility and a positive body image. A fairly bland association, I know. The current exhibition at the Courtauld, however, changed all that.

Toulouse-Lautrec and Jane Avril: Beyond the Moulin Rouge is the first time the pictorial and personal relationship between one of Moulin Rouge’s most famous dancers and the artist has been explored. A series of preparatory drawings, posters, photographs, medical records and other items divided into two rooms all aim to throw light on this unlikely pairing. It’s not just that Avril came from a poor background while Toulouse-Lautrec – from an affluent one. If that wasn’t enough one suffered a debilitating series of accidents that led to deformity while the other earned a living flaunting her agile legs.

Very soon I felt for Jane Avril. It wasn’t because she had an alcoholic mother who used to beat her or because after she ran away from home and was hospitalised. It was because of how little there was of her.

‘Jane Avril’ was Jeanne Beaudon’s stage name, adopted after a suggestion by her British lover. Although the exhibition organisers wanted to draw on the private/public dichotomy, I never felt I was looking at Jane Avril independent of the Moulin Rouge. There was a reference in one of the texts to her memoires but these were not physically included here. Instead, one famous man’s pictorial representation of Jane Avril dominated the landscape together with another man’s written account of her.

The latter was Arsène Alexandre whose newspaper article was the first source of contemporary information in this exhibition. Quotes from it were translated and reproduced on the wall. The historian in me is always a bit mistrustful of translations (especially partial) and I wanted to see how much of my high school French I could remember. When I read Alexandre’s description of Jane Avril who ‘walks pensively along the streets, meditating on the age-old stupidy of men’ I immediately knew something didn’t sound right. To credit a can-can dancer (but above all a female) with such strong philosophical  abilities would have been extremely untypical in French nineteenth-century writing unless followed by a qualification, obliterating the previous statement. Sure enough, when I read the whole phrase in French in turned out that the pensive Jane also likes to meditate on ‘the beautiful arrangement of a new outfit’ which in French, somehow, manages to sound even more condescending. In some ways, I wasn’t surprised the curator had decided to omit that. However, cherry picking of quotes to create a certain impression is always a dangerous activity and here it was carried out on more than one occasion.

Another piece of information was not explored in its full potential – namely, the fact that while in hospital, Avril was diagnosed with a nervous disorder known as St Vitus’s dance (this is associated with uncontrollable leg movements and was also linked to female hysteria). This episode was cunningly used by Avril herself to add to the mystery surrounding her image and she succeeded in making herself even more interesting to a nineteenth-century crowd. Looking at the medical records, I wished this exhibition were organised by the Wellcome Collection who would have had the knowledge and resources to build an exhibition around it instead of leaving it hanging in the air. At the Courtauld, much like in nineteenth-century Paris – this fact was used to add to the enigma rather than to de-mystify. Shame, given how great the Courtauld normally are at helping to bring new information to light.

Saying anything bad about the Courtauld is almost sacrilege to me and although I must be excommunicated by now, I must say I expected more. Lured by the promise of the exhibition taking me ‘Beyond the Moulin Rouge’ I was somewhat disappointed when the tour ended a block away from the nightclub.

The only thing that salvaged the exhibition was an image I felt had almost slipped in by accident. Tucked in the corner of room 2 was a theatre programme designed by none other than Edward Munch. With a single image, the mood was transformed and the meaning of everything I had seen before shifted. Go see it!

Edvard Munch (1863-1944) Peer Gynt 1896 Lithograph 25.2 x 31.8 cm Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris

For full information on tickets and opening times, go to http://www.courtauld.ac.uk/gallery/exhibitions/2011/Lautrec.shtml