Bonnard and Ruskin: diamonds and gemstones

From the big picture

to the cabinet of curiosities

I feel enriched by two very different exhibitions. Astonished by so much critical negativity surrounding the huge Pierre Bonnard show at Tate Modern; all artists I know, including my beloved friend Ruth Addinall with whom I went, have nothing but praise for the master. What are the claims? He didn't reflect the upheavals of his times; he couldn't paint animals; it's only about colour. Stuff and nonsense. In the first case, just focus on what he did cover - mostly his various homes and women he knew well - and ask if he succeeded. My answer would be, more than I could have imagined before I visited. To catch the 'thing in itself'ness of people and animals does not require literal forms - these are forms in motion. And it's not just about colour; the ability to see different angles of a scene and to give them depth, even (this surprised me) profundity remains consistent in his work from 1907 up to his death in 1947. I loved all the works on display to varying degrees, with the exception of a few in the last room. And the very first of his Vernon rooms-and-landscapes from 1914 is a stunner, complete with dachshund.

The one so many of us know and love is from 1925, the dining room at Vernon with the dog's snout and brow just peeking above the table.

Maybe Bonnard was a god of small things, but to see into their essence is the task of genius. It helps that all these things I love so much. An airy room with pictures, a dog, a view onto nature. Coffee, too.

His nudes are intimate studies of his beloved Marthe, long-term companion, whose death in 1942 seems to have taken a lot of the elan out of his work. Again, Marthe in the bath is seen from so many different angles and there's a depth to this. Both these paintings are from 1925, but there are others just as fine from 1914 and the early 1940s.

Not a very kind segue, perhaps, to nutty John Ruskin and his horrified reaction to his wife's pubic hair on their wedding night. While Bonnard must have been genial company, Ruskin would probably irritate the hell out of you if you met him, with his ridiculous prejudices against the Renaissance, Die Meistersinger and Palladio, to name but three. But what he did cultivate in art and nature he pursued very beautifully with word and brushstroke, and the selective but rich exhibition at Two Temple Place, sadly now over, was such a joy. As is the building itself, an extraordinary late Victorian mansion commissioned by William Waldorf Astor in high neo-Gothic style which, of course, houses Ruskin rather well.

Downstairs in the exhibition, the looks were more sideways to influences than concentrated on Ruskin himself. But ascending the remarkable staircase - worth a visit in itself; it's all free - you hit two essential rooms. One is a recreation in homage to the museum Ruskin assembled in Walkley north of Sheffield, for the education of 'workers in iron' and other, concentrating on the natural history of the area. Sadly the original museum is no more, but it's been lovingly recreated in Sheffield, I believe, and this room, with the beguiling collection of minerals at its centre, was one big delight of the museum.

Then the pièce de résistance, space-wise. is the Great Hall with its Clayton and Bell windows of Swiss and Italian landscapes.

Here were lodged most of Ruskin's finest natural drawings featured in the exhibition, from the rocks of Chamonix to birds placed among representations by others (Audubon included)

including an exquisite representation of a peacock's breast feather.

So, what's this?

It's an EU-owl - the pun only works in German (EU-le). You might recognise it as the work of Axel 'The Gruffalo' Scheffler. He and other leading illustrators of children's books including Quentin Blake and Judith Kerr have responded, in the words of the blurb for the 12 Star Gallery's exhibition Drawing Europe Together, 'to make illustrated comments on the historical and possible future relationships between the countries of Europe, many of which are extremely touching and heartfelt.' Believe me, they are. And there was such a poignancy about the launch, for this was officially the last show in the 12 Star. Here's the artist speaking (I must get together more about the event, once I get hold of a copy of the book that accompanies it).

BUT. Not only are we not out, but one regional gallery decided the work was 'too political', so it got an extended lease of life. And now another, until 10 May, after Europe Day when we will be celebrating with the annual concert - here's a report of what we thought might be the last in 2018 - in St John's Smith Square (lined up whether we left on 29 March or not).

And meanwhile, here we are. Where exactly, philosophically speaking, is not clear, but still in the EU...

What Would You Take?: a perfect exhibition

It all came together so swiftly and perfectly. Writer Frances Stonor Saunders had the idea of asking 12 people living in Britain today what single object each would take into exile. Some were from families which had included refugees in the past; others had been in just such a situation more recently. Following on from the idea of his Saja Lugu book and exhibition - 100 Estonians, volunteers from all walks of life, each photographed twice to celebrate their country's centenary as an (intermittently) independent state - Kaupo Kikkas (pictured up top with Frances and below; all What Would You Take? images by Jamie Smith) spent time with each of the subjects, made 12 portraits and a dozen complementary photographs of their hands holding or carrying their chosen objects.

I saw the pairs of images in the perfect little book produced to accompany the exhibition before I went along for the launch last Tuesday. So I was especially moved by how Kaupo had placed his 24 photographs within the L-shaped 12 Star Gallery of Europe House: first the hands, and then, round the corner, their owners, caught with such naturalness and dignity that it was clear an artist had been at work.

One special charm of opening night was to be able to meet many of the subjects and have plenty to talk about. I never did quite manage to collar Claudia Roden - delightful and approachable as she undoubtedly seemed - to tell her how grateful I was for finally discovering the recipe for muhammarah - walnuts, roasted red peppers and pomegranate molasses plus - in her Book of Jewish Cookery after reeling from it the first time in an Armenian restaurant in Beirut.

But I did get to talk to a delightful Lebanese lady, writer Hanan al-Shaykh, who reminisced about her friendship with another great photographer, Eve Arnold - here I seem to be doing the holdy-forthy to her and Frances -

and briefly to Ryad Alsous, whose story is perhaps the most poignant. Professor of Agriculture at Damascus University, he left behind his  beehives and factory, which used to produced ten metric tons of honey a years, all destroyed by Isis, and brought with him to the UK his bee-smoker (pictured below with Thomas Heatherwick's choice of his frugal grandmother's silver-plated spoons.

Ryad now produces honey from native black bees in Huddersfield. 'People say that they are aggressive, but I don't agree, and I'm encouraging others to set up hives with them. When I'm with my bees, I listen for their advice on how to make a home'. His honey was there for sampling - I just missed it, having talked for too long to so many people - and his wife serve up delicious hummus (the secret is to soak the chickpeas in warm water).

We also had music from Nigeria-born Maurice Ijahmo (and I bought one of his CDs). There was an eloquent speech from Frances, and a shorter but very beautiful and sincere one from Kaupo, who says he's never felt such warmth at a launch before. If you want to know the other stories, you'll have to hurry along to the 12-Star Gallery any time during the day this week, or after Christmas and the New Year up to 5 January (check opening times). The booklet with the poignant texts will be there, too, if you hurry. Clearly there's a future for this timely compendium to travel, and to be augmented; but as it is, and where it is, it seems as perfect as it can be.

Hopefully there's a future for the 12 Star too. But whatever happens, the new House of European Art (HEART) will be there in virtual or actual form. Its first project was realised in October with the award of the Hubert Butler Essay Prize.

Butler, the Orwell of Ireland, one of the greatest of all essayists - I've written about him here before -  was, Professor Roy Foster (pictured below in the first of two photos by Roger Way) noted in his eloquent introduction at the Irish Embassy, 'unnervingly prescient about questions of religion, national identity and the fractured histories of Central and Eastern Europe, no less than Ireland...Time and again, his questing intelligence probed the question of borders, and what they signified...It seemed to the judges of the first Hubert Butler Essay Prize that the topic of borders within Europe was of pressing relevance, and also carried an appropriately Butlerian resonance. '

Nigel Lewis, the winner out of over 30 entries (picture below on the right with Irish Ambassador Adrian O'Neill, one of the two runners-up, Victoria Mason and grand-daughter of Butler Cordelia Gelly),  is ambivalent about competing ideas about Europe, but he is clear that 'the EU, like the EEC before it, has been defusing Europe like an unexploded bomb left over from World War II'. It is our only hope against that bomb being reassembled. Read the whole text online here. It was also printed in a booklet thanks to the generosity of Juliette Seibold.

Baltic island magic

It's there in this little philosophical gem, on a par with Tove Jansson's The Summer Book

and the singers, dancers and musicians of Estonia's Kihnu island brought it with them, along with smiles, laughs and a general happiness you can't fake, to the 12 Star Gallery of Europe House the other week (photos by Jamie Smith).

More on Mare and friends anon. In the meantime, I'm so glad I came across the American edition of Swedish entomologist Fredrik Sjöberg's The Fly Trap while browsing in Kensington Books (the author pictured below). A specialist in hoverflies, this splendid writer, translated with obvious style by Thomas Teal, has a rondo theme: 'the art and sometimes the bliss of limitation,' living as he does - or did, at the time of writing in 2014 - on Runmarö, a Swedish island of 300 inhabitants, much augmented by summer visitors. Here's the gist of it:

For an entomologist, 15 square kilometres is a whole world, a planet of its own. Not like a fairy tale you read to the kids again and again until they know it by heart. Not like a universe or a microcosm, similes I'm not willing to accept, but like a planet, neither more nor less - but with many white patches. Even if I were to swing my net an entire summer without adding a single species to my collection, the gaps in our knowledge will still be great, if not quite immeasurable. The fact is, they keep growing, keeping pace with our knowledge.

The issue, reduced to Strindberg's dismissive term 'buttonology,' connects with a parallel interest in the geologist's 'feeling for time' and Sjöberg's own attempt to 'grasp...temporal spaces so great they border on eternity' (Chapter 15. 'The Legible Landscape', is a masterpiece of writing about what we can grasp and where we stop).

Yet the perceptions are not random, despite the fluidity of Sjöberg's ruminations, often tinged by wryness; and there's a parallel character study, of the marvellous man who invented the giant fly trap of the title (and pictured above), René Malaise, a Swede (despite his French name) born in Stockholm in 1892. What a life! Malaise might have limited himself to one area of expertise, study of the sawfly, but like Sjöberg he had interests elsewhere, too - there's a fascinating final chapter on his collection of grand masters - and he travelled. A lot. In 1920 he left Sweden with five other adventurous folk, four men and two women in total, to explore the remote Kamchatka peninsula. Sjöberg's news that the collection from a later expedition to Burma was lodged in Gothenburg's Museum of World Culture - here's a specimen -

gave me a special quest when I was there the other week for Santtu-Matias Rouvali's first concert as the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra's principal conductor. The helpful folk on the desk couldn't locate it, but there was a screening downstairs of photos from the Kamchatka adventure, one of three selected Swedish explorations.

A shot of Malaise himself came up on the screen, so I presume the Museum is happy for me to use the original online.

He took some splendid photos, like this one (though it may well be in Japan, which he visited after Kamchatka, and where he experienced a devastating earthquake).

And here's company, though I have no idea why the woman's face is scratched out.

One more in the context of the big room downstairs at the Museum

and a crate for the sort of thing I was actually hoping to see tucked away in the corner.

It's a very splendid building with a cafe on a kind of mezzanine level

which extends on to a terrace.

The exhibitions are there mostly to make schoolchildren think of the world around us. I loved the forthrightness of the display panels (in Swedish and English) in the way they described the plunder of the earth and the quashing of human rights. Like this: 'One could use many grave words to describe how a small percentage of the world's richest population have exploited the world around them in the past hundred years: irresponsibility, arrogance, greed and egoism'. I half expected an added 'so f*** you, 45th!' We could afford to be more direct in our language here. The fourth floor exhibition included a refugee boat whose occupiers had all drowned

and this cabinet of items owned by Mexicans and south Americans trying to cross the border to the north, with information about some miserable fates.

Which leads us back to the colourful woven dresses of the Kihnu islanders, living under happier circumstances and one of the most enlightened governments in the world. I first wrote about them describing our unforgettable day trip from Pärnu last summer, and I've managed to cut down for accommodation here one of the putatively 2000 year old wedding songs still in their repertoire, which they performed for us in a room of the island's museum.

It was so good to see once more Mare Mätas, the Tallinn-trained lawyer who'd returned to her native island to foster its UNESCO-protected culture, and the sweet accordion-playing girl who's won all sorts of awards in music competitions and has grown up quite a bit since then (she must be 11 now). There she is on the left.

This time it wasn't just dancing ladies. The most jovial chap imaginable sang ballads to his accordion in a very splendid and idiomatic style, and his son came along too. They're demonstrating their splendid traditionally-designed and knitted jumpers, two months in the making, for Mare here. I want one (jumper).

This was the other book-end reception of an exhibition of really superb Kihnu-people photos by the Frenchman Jérémie Jung, some of which formed a good backdrop to the performances. Clearly they loved him there, from their genuinely warm words about him, and when it came to joining in the dances, he knew all the steps (not featured here, but there was audience participation later).

I do hope there's funding for a book of the pictures. And still, deep in my soul, there's the wish to spend a whole year on the island to see nature through all its seasons. No reason that shouldn't happen some time, if not for a while yet.

Son-abend

Rather feeble pun, but Liverpool-born artist Paul Sonabend's evening opening at the 12 Star Gallery on Tuesday was, after, all, prelude to an exhibition called 'Moon and Sun'. We came to know his work through the passionate advocacy of another very fine artist, first and foremost a sculptor, Deborah van der Beek, who has become a good friend along with her husband, musician Andrew, ever since she exhibited at the 12 Star when the European Commission was in Storey's Gate. Deborah has been visiting the retiring but delightful Paul at his flat and studio in Bath, bang opposite the Holburne Museum, for years, and as patron was convinced that he needed a major London show, so she organised one. Here she is pictured below in one of the many shots taken at the opening by Jamie Smith.

I love many of Paul's Biblical scenes and live in hope that he might turn to Greek myth and paint an Oedipus series. But you can't force an artist's imagination. Paul and Deborah have in common a fascination with the Ned Kelly story - in the central of the three pictures the van der Beeks have hanging in the dining room of their Lacock home, Ned Kelly meets Sancho Panza. Incidentally, we're the proud owners of one of Deborah's Don Quixote bronzes.

Need to go back and look at the pictures more carefully than one ever does swanning around receptions - as the host's sposo, I knew a lot of people at the launch so there was no time to wander thoughtfully observing.

Here am I with Deborah and another artist of huge panache, our old friend Jonny Brown, who as an ardent Wagnerian has just furnished me with a whole list of unusual alternatives to listen to and watch for my Tristan und Isolde course at the Frontline Club.

This is the lovely and talented performance artist TD (Theodora) van der Beek, whose nose features on the left in the picture behind her. We know one brother, Henry, from Christmas in Lacock but met Bertie, running a pizza shop with a difference in Brighton, and his girlfriend Maria, who makes the sorbets, for the first time.

Andrew vdB pointing out a detail to Corsham neighbour Gog.

And I include this one only to mark my first proper meeting with the Head of the Czech Centre, Tereza Porybná, because she was our hostess-in-absentia in Prague, and a very wonderful time we had there and further east in Czechia thanks to her and her bonhomous father Zdenek Porybno. There's a bit of word/image play here because their surname has a bit of fish (-ryb-) in it. I'm wondering if those two paintings behind us might not make the perfect compliment to Mark Hearld's watercolour pheasant and fox and could hang on the wall opposite in the room which used to house the Steinway Boudoir Grand (on loan from its owner, now gone, alas).

I genuinely love this artist's work, and would splash out if I can find the funds to prove it. Can't decide between Picasso, Joseph in his coat (pictured above on the left; I knew it already, and was trying to pay vague homage with my shirt) and the animal duo.

'Moon and Sun' at the 12 Star Gallery, Europe House, Smith Square, until 12 June