nineveh_uk

I had a bit of a holiday on Saturday and took myself to Birmingham. By dint of finding myself breakfasted, dressed, and with things in the right handbag by 9:40am I headed off for the train in time to fit in several things before the day's main event of a matinee at the theatre.

First stop was the Hall of Memory on Centenary Square, which I might have been inside once bfore, but couldn't and can't remember, whereas I remember walking past it when closed in the evenings or on Sunday on multiple occasions. Next on the civic pride tour was the new central library, which is every bit as impressive as reported*, and a fantastic and usable space. There were other tourists like me, but it was being very well-used. I also walked past the old library, which was in the process of being knocked down and as wrecking machines will, providing much entertainment to random passers-by. It was a good library, but an awful building on all other fronts.

Thence to the Birmingham City Museum and Art Gallery and for an exhibition on minor pre-Raphaelite, E.R. Hughes. Hughes is definitely a minor figure, but it was a well put-together exhibition and passed a pleasant hour. He was a considerably better draughtsman than some of the major pre-Raphaelites**, and there were some very fine portraits of children, highly individual and sensitive, but unsentimental, but though teenage me actually bought a postcard of Hughes' Midsummer Eve, adult me is unconvinced.

Finally to the main event, New Adventures' Sleeping Beauty at the Hippodrome. I saw this on television a couple of years ago at Christmas when lying on the sofa recuperating from norovirus, so my memory was that it was very good, but a bit vague as to detail. Having failed to get myself to it in London, I picked up a return ticket and headed off for a terrific view from the centre of row 5 of the dress circle, a reminder that a good ticket is really worth it. Subtitled "A Gothic Romance", it is fair to say that the cleverness of the production lies in the conceit, and the choreography is less exciting than Bourne's Swan Lake, at least to this amateur viewer.*** But the conceit of Edwardianish palace to the modern day, happy young love with the gardener's boy, vengeful fairy, and unexpected good(?) vampires is very clever, and the whole thing is a wonderfully entertaining couple of hours. Bourne is an excellent storyteller. The sole downside is that it has a recorded score, nothing unusual in ballet, I know, but I prefer the real thing. I like to hang over the railing at the interval and count the double basses.


*And the government's slashing funding so the council has had to cut services every bit as shameful as reported.

**Rossetti really, really wasn't a good man with a pencil.

***Nor does it have Adam Cooper as the black swan, the man for whom, as Deborah Bull put it in introducing the televised version, the word phwoar was invented.

The afternoons of first and second Saturdays of December were spent at a couple of exhibitions*. They were both very good, but it is fair to say that they were not the same, though both certainly made me think.

(1) Death: a Self-Portrait. This was an exhibition at the Wellcome Collection ("a free destination for the incurably curious") drawn from the private collection of one man, and on the theme of Death. Heavy on the skulls and skeletons, it was justly busy. For me, three pieces stood out, for different reasons.

(i) in 'The Dance of Death' room ("focus on the universal certainty of death, regardless of status in life"), a collection of painted pottery figurines, each depicting Death and a [member of social group/profession], with a little poem in German. They appeared to be collectibles, the early-mid C19 equivalent of the little pottery cottages sold at the back of Radio Times, with the skeletal death having a penchant for appropriately-themed silly hats. Quite a lot of the exhibition was really rather funny, a good portion of that intentional.

(ii) the same room, a giant skull produced by an Argentinian artists' collective, and constructed entirely of plasticine. I'm not entirely sure how Hansel and Gretel are oppressing the rightful Argentine ownership of the Falkland Islands, but at 6' high it's a stunning object, far more 3D than the photograph conveys.

(iii) in 'Violent Death', a series of prints by Otto Dix. I hadn't heard of Dix before; he was a German artist who produced the prints in 1924, drawing on his experience of WWI. Though far from the most grisly pieces in the exhibition, they were, for me, probably the most disturbing. They share the room with two other "horrors of war" print series, one by Goya, one depicting the Thirty Years' War**, and depict the dead, the dying, and the corrupted and horrible landscape of the trenches. They are just awful to look at.

(2) Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde. After a diversion to see John Martin's Last Judgment triptych, my mother and I went to see this exhibtion at the Tate, being unreconstructed enjoyers of the Pre-Raphs. It was fabulous, eight rooms, stuffed full of the famous paintings, the less famous ones that set them in context, and other people's famous paintings also setting them in context, and finally seeing the real thing I at last got the point of the Scapegoat***. They had everything, having apparently stripped the walls of the UK's provincial art galleries****, not to mention private collections: Rossetti's Annunciation, and Girlhood of Mary Virgin (AKA "the one in which she looks like a sourpuss"), and later "stunners". The bed I saw in the spring at Morris's house at Kelmscott. A goodly collection of Burne-Jones, including King Cophetua and some terrific tapestries. Extraordinary examples of art and craft, though I am sorry to say that Lizzie Siddell couldn't draw.


*Not the least pleasing aspect of which was that I was not completely wiped-out on Sunday.

**Another period of history I know almost nothing about except that it was very nasty.

***Apparently Holman Hunt not only went to the Dead Sea, but used a real dying goat.

****Mum and I did a lot of "we've seen that one in Birmingham".

When my mother was a child her mother often took her and her siblings to the Birmingham City Museum and Art Gallery on school holidays, and she in her turn took me and my sisters when we visited relatives in Birmingham. The gallery - which is free - opened in 1885, and is housed in an impressive Victorian building that in any other European country would be called a palace, in the centre of town. As well as the usual mummies and a good cafe, it had a number of things that were particularly worth seeking out: the Pre-Raphaelite collection, Epstein's Lucifer*, and John Martin's Pandemonium. And then the latter was sold by the private owner who had been avoiding paying the insurance on it for years by storing it at the gallery, and disappeared from sight to the considerable irritation of my mother. But now it's back on display, albeit in the Louvre, which picked it up for a snip at £1.6 million.



Pandemonium is by John Martin, Regency and Victorian painter of landscapes and dramatic scenes, despised for much of the C20 as a populist whose works were too colourful both literally and figuratively, the large Tate Britain exhibition on whose work ends (there have been several others in the UK in the last twelve months, it being the anniversary of his breakthrough in 1812) today. Martin's most famous work concentrates on scenes from the Bible and Paradise Lost. Pandemonium illustrates the raising of the infernal city, the standing figure is not Satan, but Mammon (Satan sits looking classically angsty by his feet), and the resemblance to the House of Parliament is surely not co-incidental.

The Tate exhibition, which is well worth the stonking £12.70 entrance fee (no, I did not pay for the audio guide on top of this. I feel that at that price one shouldn't need to), contextualises Martin well in the critical culture of his day, one that wasn't quite able to grasp that Martin wasn't simply popular because of scale and flare and drama and sound-and-light shows accompanying travelling exhibitions, but because he is in fact really, really good. It is easy to pick on aspects of a painting and say "that figure's not very good", something one can do, if so minded, even to Leonardo and Michaelangelo. The paintings are hugely dramatic, but it isn't all surface. They tell stories on both a grand and miniature scale, the black and burning earth of The Great Day of His Wrath from the Last Judgement triptych reins down from above your head on individual people: Martin's unseen and angry God, like Kitchener, wants YOU! There's also rather more political commentary going on than Martin's contemporaries admitted, some of which comes through in his engineering schemes for such then-wacky ideas as not emptying the London sewers straight into the Thames, though it's easier to hide the satire in The Fall of Nineveh if your insane brother's reworking of it as the fall of London isn't on public display.**



If the paintings look familiar, that's because they are. Not, perhaps, in the originals today as when he sold thousands of prints, but in their legacy. One might make an argument for Martin as the original fantasy artist, his is the influence that gives us the misty domed cities rising out of red skies on the covers of science fiction and fantasy novels (apparently Martin took great care to get his constellations right). When my middle school art club went mad for row after row of fantasy mountains and cities with rivers flowing into the plain and tiny figures in front of immense landscapes we were following unknowingly in Martin's footsteps.

And then there's the cinema. DW Griffith, a man who knew a dramatic image when he saw it, based Belshazzar's Feast in his film Intolerance*** directly on Martin's painting. Or, to be precise, paintings and mezzotints, as Martin, not unusually for him, created several variants of the scene. Other acknowledged depts include Olympus in Harryhausen's Clash of the Titans and Cecil B Demille's Samson and Delilah. Through this route come unacknowledged debts in pretty much every sword and sandals film made, not to mention SF and fantasy and Leni Riefenstahl. The court in heaven in A Matter of Life and Death, the Senate chamber on Coruscant in Star Wars: The Phantom Menace: that's Martin's Satan Presiding at the Infernal Council. Even the Mines of Moria get a look in. No disaster volcano film lit by the red fires of lava can avoid recalling The Destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum. With the exception of the Titanic and the trenches, Martin got there first.

As for me, I am now reconciled to the fact that I am unable to hear Handel's But who may abide the day of his coming**** without thinking of the line in the The Lord of the Rings of the King of the Nazgul "Few will stand and abide even the rumor of his coming": after all, if Tolkien ever visited Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery after 1952, the city of his childhood and an hour from Oxford by train, he undoubtedly saw Pandemonium.

*The queue is to see the Staffordshire Hoard. Googling for an image, I found a poem on the subject.

**Best known for his partly successful attempt to burn down York Minster

***Now there's an ironic title.

****Starring Emma Kirkby and some truly terrifying early 80s clothes. Look out for the ruffled shirt.