The Couch Potato Goes Deco

Art Deco Icons.

The complete series [DVD] 

presented by David Heathcote.

Art Deco is synonymous with glamour: Fred and Ginger, Busby Berkeley, Tamara de Lempicka, cocktails and long cigarette holders on ocean liners.  Settle down on the couch for a look at the 1930s through neon-tinted spectacles as David Heathcote guides us round four of Britain's Art Deco icons.

First we spend a night at Claridge’s Hotel in London’s Mayfair. I hope the BBC picked up the check! The art deco suite is glamorous yet comfortable; we are allotted our own butler/valet, who starts by unpacking and putting everything away. Sinking chin-deep into a bubble bath, we notice two bell-pulls beside the tub: one for the butler and one for the maid. The mind boggles.

We explore the hotel's Art Deco makeover of the 1930s, which transformed it from a staid Victorian establishment into a fashionable, up-to-the-minute destination for the rich and famous. The sign above the smoking room door says Fumoir, and the room positively exudes sophistication. You expect to see Paul Heinreid lighting two cigarettes and giving one to Bette Davis. Smoking was sexy and glamorous in the Thirties!

Next stop is the 10-storey London Trans-port HQ. When it was built in the 1930s, it was the highest skyscraper in London. It was an ambitious and controversial design that incorporates a lot of Deco features, but I didn't think it was really a typical example of an art deco building. 

What I liked much more, was the tour of several art deco tube stations from the era, the magnificent collection of London Transport posters, and the old kiosks and signs in the museum. Is anybody else old enough to remember those enamelled WAY OUT signs, with the pointing hand emerging from a perfectly starched cuff?  

Next we visited Casa Del Rio - a remark-able Art Deco house hidden away in rural Devon. I had never heard of it before. It was built in the 1930s by Walter Price, who visited California and fell under the spell of Hollywood. He decided to recreate Pickfair, the glamorous mansion of Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, on a hillside in Devon, facing the sea. Very beautiful, seen from below.

Casa del Rio is a transplanted Hollywood Spanish hacienda, its Deco interior complete with black-and-white marble floors, marble staircase whose treads look like piano keys and lots of chrome, black glass, and mirrors. 

I liked the electrical gadgets that were the hallmark of stylishness in the era when anything American was considered modern and cutting-edge. The not-quite-automatic toaster, the Bakelite radio, the futuristic (now retro!) cocktail shaker … very glamorous but seen through modern eyes a bit lame. Quite endearingly so!

For our final adventure, we board the Orient Express at Victoria Station in London and head off for Venice. (It is interesting to compare this episode to the Orient Express documentary with David Suchet, also a BBC production.)

Fellow-passengers are James and Shirley Sherwood. James bought fifteen much-neglected Orient Express carriages in the Seventies, including the two in which Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express was filmed. James and Shirley talk engagingly about the challenge of restoring the original Art Deco luxury of the romantic train.

I liked the luxurious, yet practical fittings of the sleeping compartment and the elegant, beautifully appointed bar and dining compartments. The Alpine scenery is also spectacular. 

I'm sure the passengers enjoyed their three days' opulence on wheels, but they would have to be relieved to disembark in Venice, because for all its luxury, the train has no air conditioning and the washing facilities are a bit basic: no shower!

The Couch Potato Does Spring Cleaning

Petworth House in Sussex is one of those Stately Homes of England of which Noel Coward sang so eloquently. The oldest parts of the fortified manor house founded by Henry de Percy in the 13^th century, still survive, but the mansion was extensively rebuilt in 1688 by Charles Seymour, 6th Duke of Somerset. For the past 250 years the estate has belonged to the Wyndham family: the current head of the family is Lord Egremont. The house and deer park were handed over to the nation in 1947 and are now managed by the National Trust. Lord Egremont's family live in the south wing, allowing the remainder to be open to the public.

Interior

The house contains an important collection of furniture, paintings and sculptures, including works by J. M. W. Turner and Van Dyck, exquisite, fragile wood carvings by Grinling Gibbons, and unique classical sculptures. There is also a 1592 terrestrial globe, believed to be the only one in the world still in its original state.

"Petworth House: The Big Spring Clean", is a fascinating BBC series of six episodes, narrated by the genial and erudite Andrew Graham-Dixon.

Every autumn, the Trust puts its 300 houses 'to bed', They close to visitors for the winter, and the professional conservationists move in to clean the artworks and the house itself. This work requires not just hard labour, but delicate hands and an in-depth knowledge of conservation science.

They work in almost freezing conditions and behind closed shutters. Heat and sunlight are bad! Paintings and furnishings fade, bugs breed, mould grows! Andrew dons his winter woolies, warm beanie and boots, and pitches in to help. The magic that happens in these winter months is a miracle to behold, as we get a close look at wonderful art treasures and the very fabric of the house.  

It is not a matter of dusters and vacuum cleaners – many of the art works are too delicate to touch even with a feather, and have to be cleaned by that thing the dentist uses to puff a bit of cold air on your tooth. They puff the dust away and suck it from the air with a funnel. The carpets have to be rolled back to expose the insect eggs that were laid during the summer, scaffolding is erected to clean the mouldings and ceiling paintings. The clocks and the curtains, the paintings, furniture and the kitchen utensils are all cleaned and tended by specialists, the acres of parquet floors are rubbed with beeswax by hand, on bended knee.

Having watched this series, I will be wearing a hazmat suit next time I visit a Stately Home, because  now I know how much grime I am shedding and how much damage my mere presence is creating!

I borrowed the series from the Eastern Regional Libraries. 

 

 

The Escher Museum

Visiting the world's great art museums, we sometimes overlook the many small museums which house wonderful things to see, in interesting and historical buildings.

Metamorphosis: Birds into Fishes

One such is the Escher Museum in The Hague. It is housed in what the Dutch call merely Het Paleis (The Palace), as if it were the only palace in town. (It isn't.) It sits at the top, or posh, end of a long, leafy boulevard lined with ambassadorial residences. You will know which is the American one because there is a tank parked outside it, lowering the tone.

Het Paleis used to be the residence of Queen Emma, the great-great-granny of the present  king. She acted as regent after her husband King Willem III popped his clogs, while her daughter, Crown Princess Wilhelmina, was under age.

The former Princess Emma of Waldeck and Pyrmont was 20 when she married the 62-year old king, once described as "the greatest debauchee of the age." He had previously been rejected by Emma's sister Pauline and a few other assorted princesses.

King Willem-Alexander and Queen Maxima of the Netherlands,
with Princesses Amalia, Alexia and Ariane 

My Dutch friend Arno filled me in on all the royal goss: The Oranges are nearly as soap-operatic as the Windsors! Richer and better looking than the Windsors,though, if plumpish. Who can blame them if they put on a few kilos, with all that tempting Dutch cheese. On the upside, they have endless rows of shining white teeth from all the calcium.

Anyway, there it is, Emma’s palace, more of a big posh house than a palace really, but very rococo and they were not shy with the gold paint. There is a very grand staircase, which only Queen Emma and her two favourite ladies-in-waiting were allowed to use. It was the backstairs for everyone else. Luckily there are lifts for the museum visitors today. The grand staircase is still roped off!

I’m surprised Queen Emma didn’t break a leg, because every doorway has an inch-high lintel for the unwary to stumble over. A stripe of that gold paint on the floor to draw attention to the hazard would have been a good idea, but sadly I saw no suggestion box. I don’t suppose Queen Emma took kindly to suggestions … I saw pictures of her and she was a stocky little doorstop of a woman who didn’t look as if she brooked backchat.

About the collection I don’t need to tell you … all the Eschers you have ever seen on posters and coasters, are there. The really good bit is on the top floor, where they have all these optical illusions and trompe l’oeil stuff.

You can look through peepholes into cabinets where the picture is in 3D and the birds and animals move, and you can don virtual reality goggles and step right into some of the pictures – those ones like the Belvedere, where the stairs go nowhere, and the one where down is up, and the one with the chequered floor and the ladders that reach impossible places. It is a lot of fun. You can watch the birds metamorphosing into fishes; thank goodness we are dealing here with Maurice Escher and not with Franz Kafka!

I spent the whole afternoon there and my brain was fizzing all the way home.

The Grand Budapest McGuffin

As long as there have been stories, there have been McGuffins, but it took that fat, sleazy old genius Alfred Hitchcock to give them a name. (People who are both a genius and a really, really nice person are very rare. Try to name three.)

 In 1935 Hitchcock filmed John Buchan's thriller, The 39 Steps. The story revolved round the hero's attempts to stop a spy organisation from  stealing a Top Secret document. It doesn't matter what the document is. It might just as well have been a diamond necklace or a distressed damsel that he was trying to keep out of their evil clutches. Hitchcock came up with "McGuffin" for the item that drives the plot.

The McGuffin needn't even be anything tangible. In North by Northwest, Cary Grant spends the entire film falling into one scrape after another as he is pursued by both villains and the CIA, all due to a case of mistaken identity. Who he is mistaken for and what the pursuers want from him when they catch him, is incidental. It's just the McGuffin that leads the story from one suspenseful sequence to the next.

Now that The Grand Budapest Hotel is in all the cinemas and racking up the favourable reviews, it is a safe bet that our members will be queueing up for tickets and choc-tops at the local  multiplex. I thought this would be a good time to take a look at the film's McGuffin, a priceless Renaissance masterpiece called Boy With Apple, by the artist Johannes Van Hoytl the Younger.

You will search your art encyclopedia in vain for Van Hoytl – the picture was painted for the movie by artist Michael Taylor, who had his tongue firmly in his cheek. He has laden it with enough symbolism for a dozen Art History lectures and several doctoral dissertations.

We have the mysterious note pinned to the curtain, the boy's direct gaze, his extravagantly detailed codpiece and the way he holds his long, slender fingers in a gesture which is a conventional mannerist device expressing a sensual tone. Add the apple in his hand, in close proximity to the prominent codpiece. The apple itself is symbolic on many levels, both biblical and classical. Eve's apple of temptation, the golden apple with which Paris chose the goddess Venus ... and just for a bit of added ambiguity, the apple has a few Caravaggio-like blotches on its surface: it is already beginning to decay.

Is the young man looking to choose a wife or a lover? Is the blemished apple symbolic of a doomed love affair?  Or is it a portent of mortality – does he have a dread disease of which he is yet unaware?

What fun Michael Taylor must have had, painting that portrait. And what fun for us, the audience, when we get the Art History in-joke: the villain is so enraged when he sees Boy With Apple is missing, that he smashes the picture that has been hung up in its place. The replacement is immediately recognisable to us as a real-life Egon Schiele, a priceless teasure he’s obliterated in his fury at losing a fictional  McGuffin.

 

 

Epistolatory Fiction

As a teenager, I was given Jean Webster’s delightful romance Daddy Long Legs and its sequel, Dear Enemy. It was my first encounter with a novel written entirely as a series of letters and it is a format I have liked ever since. 

The first epistolatory novel, which I don’t suggest anybody try and read, was Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1745). It was the runaway three-volume bestseller of its day, but much too ponderous for the modern reader, even though its soap-opera plot will not be unfamiliar.

Pamela is of interest to me only because the NGV holds four of the twelve illustrations that Joseph Highmore did in 1762 for the second edition of the novel. They are very elegant engravings, depicting the costume of the time in great detail. Have a look at them next time you visit the NGV – they hang right near Highmore’s self-portrait.

We Need To Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver consists of letters from Eva, Kevin’s mother, to her husband Franklin. The reason they have to talk about Kevin is that he is in prison, having just shot and killed a number of classmates and teachers at his high school, a scenario that evokes the Columbine killings. This is a chilling novel that grips the reader’s attention right until the startling end.

Ladies of Letters by Carole Hayman gives us the entertaining correspondence between Irene and Vera: they are fiercely competitive and we learn all about their long-suffering families as they strive to outdo each other with their recipes, grandchildren and small-town dramas.

D.E. Stevenson’s four books about Mrs Tim of the Regiment are real Golden Oldies. Set during World War II, they consist of the long letters Hester writes to her husband Tim while he is off fighting the war. Large and small events in the life of her family and the other Regimental wives give a fascinating insight into life on the Home front in the war years.

I'll Be Seeing You by Suzanne Hayes is

another WW2 story, but this time through American eyes. It is 1943 when Rita Vincenzo and Glory Whitehall start to correspond. They seem to have nothing in common except that both of their desperately missed husbands are fighting in a war half a world away from home. Rita is a professor's wife, middle-aged and sensible, Glory a rich, young and impulsive society butterfly. Their developing friendship and how their unwavering support of each other changes their lives, makes this a fascinating book.

WW2 is a rich vein to mine for epistolatory fiction – Joyce Dennys’ Henrietta’s War and its sequel are both charming and funny. Henrietta is a village doctor’s wife and writes regularly to her childhood friend Robert, who is Somewhere in France. As she chronicles the dramas and squabbles of village life, we meet a captivating set of characters and learn how they coped with wartime conditions.

The Guernsey Literary And Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer consists of letters written soon after WW2 by different members of the eponymous literary society. They are addressed to Juliet Ashton, a London writer, and gradually an intriguing tale unfolds of life under the recent German occupation of Guernsey, seen through the eyes of Juliet’s various correspondents.

Another Golden Oldie well worth re-reading

is 84 Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff: the letters she wrote over twenty years to Frank Doel, chief buyer of Marks & Co, antiquarian booksellers in London. The book is interesting not only for the insight it gives into wartime conditions in New York and London, but also for the variety of books that Helene orders from the bookshop, and her potted reviews of the ones she read and enjoyed. I was introduced to many enjoyable books through Helene!

Reaching even further into the past than

WW2, I have discovered a delightful epistolatory novel (complete with sequel) by Jane Dawkins. In Letters From Pemberley, Ms Dawkins gives us a glimpse into the married life of Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy, picking up the story where Jane Austen ended it. Elizabeth writes to her favourite sister Jane, now happily married to Mr Bingley and settled down at Netherfield Park. Jane Austen fans will devour these slim volumes at a sitting and wanting more, like Oliver!

Finally, a very slim volume indeed, but one that always makes me laugh out loud during the whole ten minutes it takes to read: The Twelve Days of Christmas by John Julius Norwich, marvellously illustrated by Quentin Blake.  It consists of twelve thank-you letters written by a young woman to her fiancé who is sending her a series of romantic Christmas gifts. From the first enthusiastic thank you for the “charming, romantic little partridge in the lovely pear tree”, to the final solicitor’s letter threatening an injuction if the full percussion section of the London Philharmonic Orchestra is not removed from his client’s lawn forthwith, these letters are hilarious in their escalating indignation.

 

Marcus Curtius Saves The Day

“Marcus Curtius” 

Benjamin Robert HAYDON
oil on canvas , 76.5 x 63.5 cm
NGV, purchased 1897

 The modern tourist in Rome will hardly notice a small paved basin in the Forum, next to a modest marble plaque showing a fully-accoutred Roman soldier on horseback. This is all that remains of the mighty chasm that, according to legend, opened on that spot in 360BC, three centuries before all the unpleasantness with the Christians and their new god.

This yawning pit was down to the old gods, who announced, (no doubt through an oracle or spokespriest), their requirement for closing it again: Rome’s most precious possession should be thrown in. The good citizens of Rome panicked, especially those who actually had precious posessions.

 

The Lacus Curtius in the Roman Forum today

Luckily, before any official requisitioning of gold or jewels could take place, Marcus Curtius claimed his fifteen minutes of fame, neatly anticipating  Andy Warhol’s famous pronouncement by two millennia. Announcing that nothing was more precious than a brave Roman, Curtius leaped into the chasm, together with his unfortunate horse, who had no say in the matter but doesn’t look best pleased.

Plaque at the Lacus Curtius

Hero or bloody idiot, take your pick, but either way, the chasm closed as promised. The wealthy citizens of Rome heaved a sigh of relief, named the lake, which appeared on the spot, Lacus Curtius, and resumed business as usual.  Over the centuries, the Forum was drained and paved, leaving only the small basin, which is still called the Lacus Curtius.

The Leap of Marcus Curtius by Veronese

The spectacular feat of Marcus Curtius has been the subject of many pictures, including this circular one by Veronese. It was also a favourite subject depicted on plates and bowls. Indeed, one such very attractive majolica dish, purchased through the Felton Bequest in 1940, can be seen in the NGV’s collection of decorative arts.

Majolica dish in the NGV collection

In 1842 Haydon began a huge painting of Marcus Curtius, over three metres in height, which is now at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum, Exeter. The painting was indifferently received. Haydon made several smaller copies, which sold to friends. The one in the NGV is one such version. It was bought by Haydon’s patron Richard Twentyman, who, shortly after purchasing it, emigrated to Australia. It was then bought by Robert Allan and sold at auction to the NGV in 1897.

Benjamin Robert Haydon

The painter, Benjamin Robert Haydon, is a bit of a sad case. He yearned to paint grand historical pictures, but he was not successful at selling them. He was determined to force his idea of Heroic Art on a public that had moved on from that style of painting. They must be forced, scolded and lectured to admire it. He was too arrogant to adapt himself to the trend of public taste.

Benjamin Robert Haydon

Haydon was inclined to give the heroes in his pictures his own features, and Curtius is one such self-portrait. When the picture was first exhibited in 1843, it was poorly reviewed and even ridiculed by some. Haydon was indignant. He wrote in his journal: “I had a grey mare, which I kept leaping for two hours, – I sketched as he descended in the leap ...two men held up his legs & corn was put on the ground … I sketched his neck during the eating. After all this careful thought, comes a boyish critic with his black ribbon round his neck, ... and abuses the picture accordingly.”

He was always in financial strife, and on more than one occasion found himself in debtor’s prison. He was reluctantly forced to paint portraits to make ends meet. He was full of scorn and loathing for portraiture, feeling it was unworthy of him and his high ideals.

Marcus Curtius by Eustache de Sueur

He was extremely tactless, if not downright rude, in his dealings with patrons, which did not help his cause at all.  The Royal Academy did not give his work the accolades he thought it deserved. He did himself no favours by his vitriolic criticism of this august body, when a judicious bit of sucking up might have garnered his work a more sympathetic reception.

He was bitterly disillusioned when his proposed murals for the new Houses of Parliament were rejected in 1843. However, he tried to rise above the disappointment.  He would hold an exhibition of the rejected works, together with a few of his huge historical canvases. His masterpieces  would be seen and acclaimed by an appreciative public. He hired a room in the Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly, in which to exhibit them.

General Tom Thumb

Meanwhile, General Tom Thumb, the three-foot tall celebrity midget and circus performer, was holding public “levéés” in another room of the Egyptian Hall. While large numbers of spectators crowded in to see this spectacle, very few looked in on Haydon’s exhibition.

The painter’s vanity was severely wounded. He wrote bitterly in his diary:  "21 April. Tom Thumb had 12,000 people last week. B. R. Haydon 133½ (the ½ a little girl). Exquisite taste of the English people!" To make matters worse, he attracted ridicule by abusing the public in the national press, contrasting his own superior merits with the vulgar crudeness of the people at large. (He would have called them a bunch of bogans had he known the word.)

The burden of his debts and his mortified vanity finally drove him to suicide.  Sadly, he got that wrong as well: after a botched attempt at shooting himself, he had to finish the job by cutting his throat. 

Marcus Curtius by Simon de Vos