{misc.} squirrel met een boek

Source: what-floats-my-boat.tumblr.com via skiourophile

{misc.} 'sunday afternoon'

'Sunday Afternoon', by Bruce Bingham

Source: womenandcats.tumblr.com via skiourophile

{wishlist} cecil beaton

Want, want, want...

Cecil Beaton Theatre of War

the book accompanying 

an exhibition at the Imperial War Museum

Wren officers framed by 

Sir Christopher Wren's Colonnade 

at the Royal Naval College, Greenwich, 

London, 1941 (source)

{misc.} spending too much time on pinterest...

Source: dustjacketattic.tumblr.com via skiourophile on Pinterest

More about this house at
 NYTimes and sfgirlbybay (DIY version)

{review} the medici conspiracy

Peter Watson & Cecilia Todeschini The Medici Conspiracy: The Illicit Journey of Looted Antiquities from Italy's Tomb Raiders to the World's Greatest Museums (2007)

I might still be laughing over this book, if the blatant turning of a blind eye by major museums to the provenance of antiquities was not so serious.  It is a cross-over book; sort of popular non-fiction, I suppose. I read it because I read a few blogs about looting (for example, looting matters) and because I am hopeful that we are witnessing a cultural shift in practices. Hopefully.

The core of this book is the story of the attempt to unravel the back-story of the "Euphronios vase". In 1972 the Metropolitan Museum in New York purchased the "Euphronios krater" for a million dollars. This was, at that time, an unparalleled sum for an ancient Greek vase.

The Euphronios Krater, c. 515 BC: 

Sleep and Death carry off the body of 

the dead warrior Sarpedon (source)

From the moment this vase appeared in the Met., a cloud hovered: where did this astonishingly well-preserved (and restored) vase come from? How did it make its way to the Met.? How many pockets were lined along the way? Which country had lost an apparently unrecorded part of its cultural heritage? Was it a fake?

'New' really good quality, previously unknown Greek vases most certainly are either fake or have come from illegal excavations. Most of the best examples of ancient Greek vases do not come from Greece, but were export wares to the Greek vase-loving Etruscans in Italy (just north of Rome). These people were buried in underground tombs carved from the soft stone of the region and they were buried with rich grave offerings including many Greek pots. One question we ask when a vase like this turns us is, what else might have come from a tomb which had contained such a splendid item?

Etruscan tomb at Cerveteri (source)

Etruscan wall-painting at Tarquinia ('Tomb of the Leopards'; source)

If an ancient object is taken from its original context in an illegal excavation, it is likely that all knowledge of this original context will be lost forever. We lose incredibly important information about the ancient culture when we lose the find spot of an object. We lose the ability to get as close to the ancient possessor of the object as we can get without actually being able to speak to them.

There are other couple of consequences: if the Met. is prepared to cough up a record price for an antiquity, the ripples are felt throughout the antiquities trade. A price like this encourages further illegal excavation; it encourages fakes; and it brings in a nice big fat commission to the middle men in their protected warehouses in Switzerland and to the auction houses. As the authors note, a new record for an antiquity with a dubious provenance quickly overcomes any moral impediment to the sale of further items.

From the Met.'s dodgy vase, the scene shifts to the purchasing practices of the John Paul Getty Museum in Malibu. The Italian government's painstaking work in building a case against the Getty curator Marian True is carefully laid out. True and the Getty were placed in an unfortunate position when a warehouse full of antiquities were discovered in the Geneva Free Port in 1995. The warehouse was associated with Giacomo Medici, an antiquities trader who had also been associated with the journey of the Met.'s vase to New York.

In the warehouse, authorities found a hugely detailed record of what had passed through Medici's hands, and this record included 1000s of polaroids showing the same antiquities in various states from fresh from the earth from their illegal excavation to partially restored to - unfortunately for certain museums - in their display cases.

The charges against True have been dropped by the Italian government but not before they had made their point that all future trade in antiquities illegally excavated from Italian soil would be pursued with a vengeance. A number of museums have since decided to return (sometimes as face-saving 'loans') items of dubious provenance, and it is likely that more will follow.

The authors build up a convincing picture of how the trade works and how it is possible to get around things like the 1970 UNESCO agreement (Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property 1970) that should protect new discoveries.

I thought it most interesting to see how auction houses (not necessarily unwittingly) participate in the laundering of antiquities: although bidding on your own lot is forbidden, your own shell company might buy it and the dodgy antiquity will then effectively be laundered - passed back to you with a pile of legitimate paperwork to go with it and thus assist in its sale onwards. Another trick is to provide a fake provenance that ensures that the antiquity was apparently in an obscure private collection somewhere before 1970.

This is all fascinating (could have done with more images of the antiquities though) but this book is completely let down by its stereotyped players. I may be exaggerated a trifle, but almost all of the good guys (those trying to stop the trade or reclaim their country's lost patrimony) are short, jovial, witty, ebullient and dress with the style of Italians (even if they are Greek). They possess "a slightly academic temperament".

All the bad guys (tomb-robbers, middle-men, dealers) have lank hair but are tall, virile, dressed in leather, sweaty (no wonder) and/or closet homosexuals. They don't wear seatbelts. The bad girls use hair dye and fly to their philandering spouses' rescues with briefcases of cash.

The writing style is a form of modern sensationalism that one recognises from The Da Vinci Code. There are a lot of italics, just in case you don't get the point of things. The spelling is variable (Basle/Basel). There are some sentences which really ought to have been edited out, including my favourite: "Not everyone agrees with [X] in his judgments... but his... sheer resoluteness, has a certain magnificence."

I kept waiting for a self-flagellating albino to appear on the scene.

Bad writing and overcooked dramatics aside, this book is important because it offers a popular look at a really important issue - and one that is even more pertinent in the wake of the looting from, e.g., the Cairo Museum during the riots or the situation in Libya at the moment. What will happen to these stolen antiquities? You might think that the items are too well known to ever be passed on the antiquities market. However there are always people willing to acquire items of dubious provenance for their private collections. This book makes it clear, furthermore, that the curators of public collections are not immune to similar corner cutting when the collecting bug strikes.

You'll never look at a Greek vase in a museum in the same way again.

Rating: points for issue-raising; demerits for writing style, um 7/10?

If you liked this… I want to read the Jason Felch & Ralph Frammolino's Chasing Aphrodite. The Hunt for Looted Antiquities at the World’s Richest Museum (2011), a further exposé of the Getty Museum. 

{d.m.} ronald searle

D.M.*
Ronald Searle

{obits: guardian; telegraph} 

A 1975 Searle postcard from flickr

Searle loved books and cats,
which places him very high up in my Pantheon.

 

On my family's bookshelves we have - as well as a handful of St Trinian's and the Molesworth (the latter written by Geoffrey Willans) books - Ronald Searle's Cats (1967; rev. 2005) and the wonderfully crazy Slight Foxed - But Still Desirable (1989), Searle's illustrations of the terminology of antiquarian book catalogues (appropriately, given the context, first editions aren't cheap). There are some images from the book on flickr (and there's an amazon preview).

*Note: "D.M." is a reference to the Manes.

{weekend words}

Knowing the past is as astonishing a performance as knowing the stars. Astronomers look only at old light. There is no other light for them to look at. This old light of dead or distant stars was emitted long ago and it reaches us only in the present… Hence astronomers and historians have this in common: both are concerned with appearances noted in the present but occurring in the past. The analogies between stars and works of art can profitably be pursued. However fragmentary its condition, any work of art is actually a portion of arrested happening, or an emanation of past time. It is a graph of an activity now stilled, but a graph made visible like an astronomical body, by a light that originated with the activity. When an important work of art has utterly disappeared by demolition and dispersal, we can still detect its perturbations upon other bodies in the field of influence.

George Kubler (1962)

The Shape of Time:

Remarks on the History of Things

{wishlist} a joan crawford alphabet

Not a book, but it's about letters. 

And it's part of The Saatchi Collection, 

now on display at Adelaide's

Art Gallery of South Australia.

Donald Urquhart (2007)

'A Joan Crawford Alphabet'

(acrylic on canvas: The Saatchi Gallery)

{poem} frank o'hara

 

I love poetry, but - shamefully - until I had the luck in the 90s to share a house with someone studying post-war American poetry, I rarely read anything later than the 1930s. My lovely housemate happily took me in hand and now I'm a convert. She worked primarily on Frank O'Hara (1926-1966). 

 Jasper Johns 'In Memory of My Feelings - Frank O'Hara',1961 (source)

I cannot read any of his poetry without wanting to get straight on a 'plane to New York, preferably via a time-machine to transport me to the late 1950s. 'The Day Lady Died' (1959; from Lunch Poems, 1964) is one of my favourites. It is about - at least, superficially - the death of the astonishing jazz singer/songwriter Billie Holiday. 

The Day Lady Died
FRANK O’HARA


It is 12:20 in New York a Friday
three days after Bastille day, yes
it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine
because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton
at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner
and I don’t know the people who will feed me


I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun
and have a hamburger and a malted and buy
an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets
in Ghana are doing these days
                                             I go on to the bank
and Miss Stillwagon (first name Linda I once heard)
doesn’t even look up my balance for once in her life
and in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get a little Verlaine
for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do
think of Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore or
Brendan Behan’s new play or Le Balcon or Les Nègres
of Genet, but I don’t, I stick with Verlaine
after practically going to sleep with quandariness


and for Mike I just stroll into the PARK LANE
Liquor Store and ask for a bottle of Strega and
then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue
and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre and
casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton
of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with 
                                                                   her face on it


and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of
leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT
while she whispered a song along the keyboard
to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing

 

 Billie Holiday (source)

{misc.} anzac day

Today is Anzac Day. 

Lest We Forget.

c1943. Artist unknown. Information from the Australian War Memorial archive: "2nd Australian Imperial Force; poster appealing for donations of reading matter (books and magazines) for distribution by the ACF to soldiers, depicts soldiers in jungle reading brown paper, bark and cigarette papers." Credit: Australian War Memorial (public domain)

{review} period piece

Gwen Raverat Period Piece: A Cambridge Childhood (1952)

I've been dipping into Gwen Raverat's Period Piece for some bits and pieces to jazz up an alumnae newsletter. I was reminded what a wonderful book it is (and still in print, thank you Faber).  I highly recommend it if you like a well-written, chatty personal memoir of Victorian childhood, set in an idyllic location, and peopled by the truly eccentric. 

Gwen Raverat (1885-1957) was the granddaughter of Charles Darwin and her family home - now part of Darwin College in Cambridge (UK!) - sits plumb between Silver Street and the River Cam. All of her relatives appear to have been slightly mad, like Uncle William:

Another time, as he was watching the dowdy Newnham students of those days passing our house, he said sadly: 'Why do those young women always wear dung-coloured coats?' For he dearly liked to see a pretty girl well turned out. If he were out walking with me, leaning on my arm, as he usually did, and a pretty girl came by, he would stop dead, turn round, stare, and say loudly: 'Good looking young woman that.'

Raverat was an exceptionally talented wood engraver. She married the painter Jacques Raverat, and both were heavily involved with the Bloomsbury set. Period Piece includes many of Raverat's lovely little drawings. The caption on this one, from the chapter on clothes, reads, The Torturers. The daily dressmaker is on the left; my mother in her most implacable mood kneels on the right.

Another anecdote, very telling of its era:

When Uncle Frank was engaged to Aunt Ellen (his second wife), he was thirty-five, and she was twenty-seven, and a Fellow and lecturer at Newnham; and if any two people could be more respectable I would not like to know them. Yet, when Miss Clough, the principal of Newnham, had been away for a few weeks my grandmother wrote: 'Frank will be glad that Miss Clough has come back, so that he can call on Ellen again.' He had not been able to go there at all while Miss Clough was away! She sat in the parlour with them herself; no one else would do as a chaperon. Of course, there could be no question of his going to Aunt Ellen's own sitting room; nor obviously of her going to see him. One sometimes wonders how anyone was ever able to get engaged at all.

...Mrs. Alfred Marshall tells a story, which she told me herself when she was very old; how she and Miss Marion Kennedy, both of them Newnham lecturers of nearly thirty, took rooms at a London hotel in order to attend the wedding of their friends Professor Henry Sidgwick and Miss Eleanor Balfour; and of how her horrified father, the rector, sent her young brother, a boy of fourteen, posting off in haste, to chaperon them. 'And when he came, we stayed on another night, and even went to a theatre with him!' she told me in triumphant amusement; and ended up: 'But I was in disgrace at home for some time after that.'

Rating: 10/10.

If you liked this... it's interesting to compare how the straitlaced Victorian upbringing of children went completely to hell in the early twentieth century (although boys remained better educated). Hmmm. Perhaps Virginia Nicholson's Among the Bohemians: Experiments in Living 1900-1935.

{review} cynical amber eyes

Edmund de Waal The Hare with Amber Eyes (2010)

I tell Sasha why we’ve come, that I’m writing a book about – I stumble to a halt. I no longer know if this book is about my family, or memory, or myself, or is still a book about small Japanese things.

This is going to spawn a zillion imitators, isn't it? Intimate biographies of objects. The telling of personal stories entwined with objects. In mere months we'll no doubt be overwhelmed with narrative histories of soup ladles and the like. Petit-point door stops. Mirrors (oops, done already). Fish knives. Telegraph poles. There's been a bit of 'object biography' - the life of things - around already, of course (e.g., the excellent Guernica: The Biography of a Twentieth-Century Icon by Gijs van Hensbergen), but the emphasis now shifts to the intimate, the personal. Is this a consequence of the narcissistic nineties? Would The Hare with Amber Eyes (or, indeed, The Bloke Who Played With The Hare With The Amber Eyes) have a made a brilliantly witty series of Facebook status up-dates? Almost certainly.

I read a fair bit of biography, and the trend away from the subsumption of the biographer in his/her subject is becoming increasingly more overt. The first one that really caught my eye was Diana Souhami interspersing Wild Girls: Natalie Barney and Romaine Brooks with verbal images of her own loves and losses. Then I thought that I was finding out too much about Sarah Helm as she investigated Vera Atkins in A Life in Secrets: The Story of Vera Atkins & the Lost Agents of SOE. Do we want to know (or is the questions, 'Do I want to know?') the daily trials faced by the biographer in search of his/her material? Most certainly I think it is important to know what ideologically motivates the biographer. And certainly much (~ all?) biography is covertly autobiographical. But do I want to know the type of car she drove to the archive? That the misty view of Vienna is due to breaking his glasses? I'm not so sure. Is it all too narcissistic? - this focus on the cleverness of the amateur researcher who can read two or three languages and negotiate libraries in foreign countries? Is it because this is a dying skill-set that so much fuss is made of it? Are we becoming incapable of subsuming ourselves when it is not our story? Is biography to be a form of therapy for the self? Is the biographer's broken eyewear just as significant as the fate of 65,459 Viennese Jews?

Nevertheless, hypocritically and despite the slight queasiness engendered by Too Much Information, I really enjoyed The Hare with Amber Eyes. The writing was excellent: rather like the inside of a creamy brie. The objects (I would have liked more images but they are available here) were very sweet. The base-line story was interesting - and shocking - and well-presented. The horror of being Jewish in Anschluss Vienna is communicated most vividly. It's a good read. I'm just way too cynical:

And I have the slightly clammy feeling of biography, the sense of living on the edges of other people’s lives without their permission. Let it go. Let it lie. Stop looking and stop picking things up, the voice says insistently. Just go home and leave these stories be.

Rating: 7/10

If you liked this... I'm not sure I can embrace the genre much further (the mirror one does tempt me a little though). I perhaps need a switch to the first person: reading in The Hare with Amber Eyes that Patrick Leigh Fermor has passed through the family home at Kövesces (recorded in A Time of Gifts) reminds me that I've a few more of his books to read. Perhaps it's A Time to Keep Silence...

{wishlist}

This sounds wonderful. The author was my graduate tutor at university. Sadly she passed away last year (Guardian obituary). She was a very kind person who went out of her way to help her students.

 

 

Carola Hicks (2006)

The Bayeux Tapestry

{weekend words}

Some of the most offensive omissions were dictated by my title. If I had been talking about the history of art, it would not have been possible to leave out Spain; but when one asks what Spain has done to enlarge the human mind and pull mankind a few steps up the hill, the answer is less clear. Don Quixote, the Great Saints, the Jesuits in South America? Otherwise she has simply remained Spain, and since I wanted each programme to be concerned with the new developments of the European mind, I could not change my ground and talk about a single country.

Sir Kenneth Clark: Civilisation: A Personal View (1969) [Foreword].

He sounds so happy about dumping on Spain, doesn't he? Did he have a bad holiday?! Of course, Civilisation is subtitled 'A Personal View'.

{books in pictures}

Cornflower Books suggested posting an image which sums up a book. I'm reading Sulari Gentill's A Few Right Thinking Men (2010) at the moment. It is set in Sydney in the 1930s at the time of the completion of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. So, here's "The Bridge in-curve" (1930) by Grace Cossington Smith (1892-1984) from the National Gallery of Victoria. The bridge was known as the "iron lung" -- its construction provided so many much-needed jobs during the Depression.