Art and Poetry Come Together in Fredericksburg, Texas

It’s one of the many places settled by German immigrants in pre-Civil War America. Fredericksburg, Texas, is some 75 miles west of Austin in the Texas hill country. And, yes, everything they say and sing about bluebonnets in the spring is true. Years ago, when I lived in Houston, I drove my wife to Austin for a series of medical procedures. And the bluebonnets dazzled. 

A number of other things dazzle in Fredericksburg. The birthplace of Chester Nimitz, the admiral who commanded the U.S. Navy in the Pacific in World War II (the town has an impressive museum devoted to the War in the Pacific). The nearby Lyndon Baines Johnson Ranch, a historical park operated by the National Park Service. The Pioneer Memorial Library and Pioneer Museum. The Texas Rangers Heritage Center at Fort Martin Scott. Don’t forget the beer and food at Oktoberfest. And close by is Luckenbach, Texas, made famous in songs by Waylon Jennings, Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, and Kristofferson. 

 

Fredericksburg has another boast. Actually two: art, and poetry. And they’ve come together in a poetry and art exhibition at the Fredericksburg Art Guild through the month of April. Featured are artist Nan Henke and poet Megan Willome.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Photograph: the eastern end of downtown Federicksburg by Chris Litherland via Wikimedia.

Dancing Prince: The Exhibition at the Tate Modern

An exhibition at the Tate Modern plays a critical role in the story of Dancing Prince. 

Jason Kent-Hughes, whom readers first met in Dancing Priest as Jason Bannon. Jason, then 16, was one of the “warehouse children” living near St. Anselm’s Church in San Francisco. He’s drawn to Michael’s outreach program, a coffeehouse with live music. In A Light Shining, Jason is taken in by Michael and Sarah Kent-Hughes and eventually adopted. Almost accidentally, Michael and Sarah discover the boy has a gift for painting. 

By the time of Dancing Prince, Jason is in his early 30s, married and with two sons of his own. He’s an assistant curator at the Tate Modern. As Sarah recognizes in the story, their San Francisco street child has become an artist with a gift for art administration. As part of a regular staff activity, he gives a talk on the two paintings by Sarah owned by the museum. The interest is so great that the museum has to move the venue from a lecture room to Power Hall, the large interior space that helps define the Tate Modern’s architecture.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.

Photograph by Dil via Unsplash. Used with permission.

“Victoria & Albert: Our Lives in Watercolour” by Carly Collier

Queen Victoria and Prince Albert are associated with a long, long list of historical and cultural events and eras. She gave her name to most of the 19^th century. Albert was associated with promoting industrial expositions, rail transportation, science, and a host of other things. They were also a great love story, detailed most recently in the ITV and PBS television program Victoria.

They were also great patrons of the arts, visiting and hosting exhibitions and promoting artistic genres like watercolor painting. Victoria herself painted in watercolor. And the royal couple commissioned numerous watercolor paintings of their family, homes, and special events. Those watercolors have been featured in a current exhibition in Britain and are the subject of the exhibition catalog, Victoria & Albert: Our Lives in Watercolour, curated and written by Carly Collins.

Collins does far more than assemble a group of watercolors and describe the story behind them. She tells a story, the story of the watercolors collectively, a story that covers the marriage of Victoria and Albert from their marriage in 1840 to Albert’s untimely death in 1861.

The paintings and the narrative text are organized in four groups – home and family; traveling the kingdom; France and Germany; and public spectacle in peace and war. Depicted and described are the people, family events, and major public events that occurred during the 21 years. You see everything from a children’s ball at Buckingham Palace to the opening of the Great Exhibition in 1851 and troops being sent off to the Crimean War.

Victoria and Albert commissioned paintings from a considerable number of artists, including Franz Xaver Winterhalter, Caleb Robert Stanley, Joseph Nash, Louis Haghe, William Leighton Leitch, James Robert, Carl Haag, Mary Herbert, Sir John Tennant, and many others. Many of these watercolors, especially those involving the family, were placed in albums that the royal couple would take with them whenever they traveled.

Collier is the assistant curator of Prints and Drawings for the Royal Collection Trust. She also served as curator for the “Victoria & Albert: Our Lives in Watercolour” exhibition, which has been on view at various locations in the U.S. and is currently at the Poole Museum.

Victoria & Albert: Our Lives in Watercolour is not only an exhibition catalog. It is also a record of what Victoria and Albert believed to be important during their years of marriage and how they viewed the world.

Top illustration: Prince Arthur, watercolor by Queen Victoria (1853). 

“Queen Victoria’s Buckingham Palace” by Amanda Foreman and Lucy Peter

Two weeks after becoming queen, the 18-year-old Victoria moved the household from Kensington Palace to Buckingham Palace. The new home was still a work in progress; it had been a country estate until William IV convinced Parliament to fund an expansion. The money ran out before it was finished and then William died.

It would be Victoria and her soon-to-be husband Albert of Saxe-Coburg to complete the palace to the point where it would be recognizable today. But as Queen Victoria’s Buckingham Palace makes clear, they did more than finish a building. Victoria and Albert turned the palace into an icon of the royal family and Britain in general. 

Written by Amanda Foreman and Lucy Peter, the book serves as the catalog and introduction to the “Queen Victoria’s Palace” exhibition which concluded yesterday. The exhibition was staged in honor of the 200^th anniversary of Victoria’s birth. The book, however, is more than an exhibition souvenir; it stands on its own as a succinct account of how Victoria and Albert transformed Buckingham Palace. 

The transformation was profound. What had been a “country townhouse” for Queen Charlotte, wife of George III, would become a family home, a venue for grand state occasions, and a symbol of the British monarchy. The vision for the palace would outlast Victoria’s self-imposed exile at Balmoral Castle in Scotland after Albert’s death from what was likely typhoid in 1861. Even after she returned more than a decade later, she generally refused to host any event similar to what she and Albert had done together. It was Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli who suggested she host something that was entirely different – and it became one of the best known events associated with the palace and the royal family: the summer garden party.

The book makes generous use of the photographs, paintings, and artifacts maintained by the Royal Collections Trust. And it includes far more than Victoria’s dresses. We can see paintings and drawings of the royal children, the fancy costume balls, the prime ministers, the state events, how the palace structure grew, and what many of the state and private rooms looked like.

Amanda Foreman

Foreman is a historian, columnist, and Honorary Senior Research Fellow in the History Department at the university of Liverpool. She is the author of the prize-winning best sellers Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire and A World on Fire: A Epic History of Two Nations Divided; Georgiana’s World; and the forthcoming The World Made by Women: A History of Women from the Apple to the Pill. She lives in New York. Lucy Peter is assistant curator of Paintings for the Royal Collection Trust and co-author of Portrait of the Artist and Royal Childhood. She lives in London. 

Queen Victoria’s Buckingham Palace is a well-written and well-researched account of how a building became what is likely the most recognizable symbol of Great Britain.

Top photograph: Lucy Peter with one of the dresses include in the Queen Victoria exhibition at the palace.

"Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms: Art, Word, War"

I have a thing for exhibition catalogs. It drives my wife crazy, especially if the exhibition is in another country or city and we’re flying back home. All those books to pack! But I’ll usually buy the book that accompanies an exhibition, especially if it’s something I’ve really enjoyed. Or, I’ll buy the book for an exhibition I haven’t seen but would really like to see, like the current Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms exhibitionat the British Library in London.

The book for the exhibition, Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms: Art, Word, War, is a big one. It’s edited by Claire Breay, head of Ancient, Medieval and Early Modern Manuscripts at the British Library, and Joanna Story, professor of Early Medieval History at the University of Leicester. It includes an introduction and five essays, followed by almost 300 catalog pages tracking the 11 sections of the exhibition.

The essays cover the relationships between Anglo-Saxon England the continent; language, learning, and literature; interactions with Ireland; the emergence of a kingdom of England; and conquests and continuities. The essay authors are all experts in their fields and provide an overall summary of the Anglo-Saxon period.

The catalog section includes origins, or where the Anglo-Saxons came from; the kingdoms that were established and how Christianity gained a position among them; the kingdom of Mercia and its neighbors; the rise of the West Saxons; the emergence of England; language and literature; natural science; reforming the kingdom and the church; music; art; and the conquests of the 11^thcentury (the Norman Conquest of 1066 was only the last of several). 

Authors of the period provided some of the best-known works of literature in what eventually developed as the English language. The Venerable Bede finished his Ecclesiastical History of the English People in 731 A.D., and an unknown author created the epic poem Beowulf about a century later. The exhibition manuscripts are few; some 90 percent of the surviving Old English poetry are included (some six documents). But its writings and poetry like these that drove the development of Old English well into the time of Chaucer and influenced Shakespeare and the King James Version of the Bible. 

At least two themes of special note emerge from the essays and catalog descriptions. 

First, while some still refer to this period as the “Dark Ages,” they were anything but that. There were repeated warfare and invasions, and the Vikings helped keep things upended for the last 200 years of Anglo-Saxon history (William the Conqueror and his Normans were themselves descended from Vikings). But a rich literary life was maintained at various palace courts and especially the monasteries; this was the great period of illustrated manuscripts.

Second, the influence of religion was enormous, and likely because it provided some stability in an unstable time. The Roman Catholic Church was the church universal in Anglo-Saxon England, and while kingdoms emerged and disappeared, and Danes and Norsemen and others were always available for sacking and conquest, the church not only lasted but thrived.

Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms is a big, beautiful book, rather lavishly illustrated, displaying important artifacts and manuscripts from a formative period for British history and the English language.

Related: 

Mercia: The Rise and Fall of a Kingdom by Annie Whitehead.

1066: What Fates Impose – a novel by G.K. Holloway.

Glass Island – a novel by Gareth Griffith.

Top illustration: A feasting scene from the Bayeux Tapestry. Bottom illustration: the Domesday Book, the earliest surviving public record in Britain.

A New Exhibition: Tolkien and the Making of Middle-earth

I first read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy by J.R.R. Tolkien in college. The editions were likely the pirated ones controversially published by Ballantine; almost overnight it seemed everyone on campus was carrying their paperback copies. By the time I graduated, an authorized version of the books had been published in the United States, and I bought the hardbacks, which are well read and still on my bookshelf.

J.R.R. Tolkien in the 1920s

And the Peter Jackson movies from 2001 to 2003? My youngest son and I saw them three times each in the theaters, watched them again when the movies were available on CD, and watched them yet again when the extended version / director’s cut CDs went on sale. 

I’m a fan, but I’m not a fanatical fan. I wore street clothes to the movie theater. I did not dress up as a hobbit, a wizard, an orc, Stridor, an ent, an elf, a dwarf, a balrag, or Shelob the giant spider.

The biggest Tolkien event since the movies is now underway in Oxford. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

The Museum of London’s “Sherlock Holmes”

For five months in 2014-2015, the Museum of London hosted an exhibition about that most famous of all fictional detectives, Sherlock Holmes. Since the first Sherlock Holmes story appeared in the Strand Magazine in the early 1890s, the literary creation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle has been imitated, replicated, adored, borrowed wholesale by other authors, and filmed and recorded countless times in movies, radio, and television.

And his popularity endures. Consider Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock, or the television series Elementary. The Museum of London’s exhibition, Sherlock Holmes under the Microscope, was an extraordinarily popular event.

For the exhibition, the Museum published a companion book, Sherlock Holmes: The Man Who Never Lived and Will Never Die, a collection of essays edited and compiled by Alex Werner, head of the museum’s History Collections. The museum wisely did not tie the book to the exhibition, and instead brought together six essays (and a considerable number of illustrations) that will stand the test of time and add to the literature about the famous detective.

The introductory essay, “A Case of [Mistaken?] Identity,” is by Sir David Cannadine, Dodge Professor of History at Princeton University. It is a fine contextual setting piece, placing Holmes in his historical context of late Victorian London and drawing a detailed picture of what London was like socially, politically, and culturally at the time, and how it influenced both Doyle and his detective.

John Stokes, Emeritus Professor of Modern British Literature at Kings College London, delves into “The ‘Bohemian Habits’ of Sherlock Holmes.” In 1980s London, “Bohemia” was both a specific place – embracing Covent Garden, the Strand, and Fleet Street – and a way of life.

In “Sherlock Holmes, Sidney Paget and the Strand Magazine,” the museum’s Werner introduces us to Sidney Paget, the illustrator who has as much to do with our picture of Sherlock Holmes as Doyle himself. It was Paget who gave Holmes many of his distinguishing features, including the famous deerstalker cap (which Doyle had never included). Werner also describes the Strand Magazine and the role it played, and how it achieved the popularity it did. (The book includes a complete reprint of an article published by the Strand in 1892, “A Day with Arthur Conan Doyle.”)

Pat Hardy, Curator of Paintings, Prints and Drawings at the Museum of London and the Sherlock Holmes exhibition’s curator, examines “The Art of Sherlock Holmes,” the art, photographs, drawings and prints of the period. He provides ample detail of those which included London’s famous fog (and includes some beautiful examples of photographs).

The Museum of London

Clare Pettet, Professor of Nineteenth Century Literature and Culture at Kings College London, looks at “Throwaway Holmes,” a discussion of communication methods in the 1890s and how new developments were fundamentally changing daily life (and how they were used in the Holmes stories).

The final essay, “Silent Sherlocks: Holmes and Early Cinema” by Nathalie Morris, Senior Curator of the British Film Institute’s National Archives Special Collections, consider the early forerunners to Benedict Cumberbatch (my words, not hers). American actor William Gillette essentially set the image of Holmes on screen for his own and future generations, and John Barrymore also played the detective in an early film.

The subtitle of the book, “The Man Who Never Lived and Will Never Die,” is a concise summary of the world’s fascination with Sherlock Holmes. It’s difficult to think of a fictional character who has had more of a pull on our imaginations than Sherlock Holmes. The Museum of London’s Sherlock Holmes goes a long way to explaining the “why” of that influence.

Note: The Sherlock Holmes exhibition ended in April of 2015, but the Museum of London is well worth a visit. Located in the Barbican Centre about three blocks north of St Paul’s Cathedral, the Museum has outstanding exhibits on pre-Roman and Roman London (including a view of a piece of the original Roman Wall still standing), Victorian London, and the Lord Mayor’s gilded coach, among many other exhibits.

Illustration: Dr. Watson and Sherlock Holmes in “Silver Blaze,” Strand Magazine, December 1892. Drawing by Sidney Paget.

Images of War, War of Images

Yesterday, I described our visit to the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum at Washington University in St. Louis, to see the exhibition of “The Paintings of Sir Winston Churchill.” Directly across the hall from the Churchill paintings is another exhibit, this one on World War I: “Images of War, War of Images.”

Two wonderful exhibits at one time in the same museum – and they’re both free.

Last year in London, we visited the World War I Galleries at the Imperial War Museum, a brilliant display of the history of the war. (I reviewed the book describing the galleries this past July.) The museum also had an exhibit of the art of World War I, which we missed for lack of time, but you can get a taste of the exhibit by reading Art from the First World War by Richard Slocombe.

What the exhibition in London included but did not go into great depth on was the role of images, art and propaganda in World War I.  That is the focus of the show at the Kemper Museum.

Art wasn’t the only creative activity that went to war. Magazines, newspapers, recruiting posters, war bond drive information and much else played significant roles. When the United States entered the war in 1917, President Woodrow Wilson appointed George Creel to lead the Committee on Public Information, often referred to as the Creel Committee, to keep up morale at home and helping people understand the task ahead. Today we would call it a committee for propaganda.

The United States was a Johnny-come-lately to the war propaganda effort; Britain, France, Germany, Russia and Italy had already been long involved in efforts to depict their opponents as fools at best and monsters at worst. The Germans didn’t help themselves with the unprovoked invasion of neutral Belgium and the death and destruction that followed, including the famed medieval library at Louvain.

Yet it wasn’t all propaganda. People went into the war with an understanding of their world, that life was getting better and better, the idea of progress as a major principle in economic, social and cultural life, and that cavalry still had an important role to play in warfare. They confronted the technology-based slaughter of both the western and the eastern fronts, and warfare involving civilians in a massively new way. Louvain was destroyed, but even London experienced bombing by German dirigibles. People, and especially soldiers, came out of the war profoundly changed. And that included the artists who went to war.

This is what the Kemper exhibition is about, and it is filled with paintings, posters, drawings, diaries, magazines and newspapers, short films made after the war, and even artifacts like soldiers’ self-decorated helmets. An accompanying book, Nothing But the Clouds Unchanged: Artists in World War I, edited by Gordon Hughes and Philipp Blom, provides insight into what the exhibition includes. The book is published by Getty Publications, and The Getty Museum has provided a considerable number of the works included in the exhibition.

The Kemper has done itself proud with these two exhibitions. The only issue we had was parking – it’s easier on weekends on the famously overcrowded Washington University campus but we did manage to find a metered spot adjacent to the museum.

But if you have the opportunity, see them both (and they’re free).

Illustration: “I Have You, My Captain. You Won’t Fall,” color lithograph by Paul Iribe, 1917; Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles.

The Abstract Art of Agnes Martin

It may be the space – a refurbished power plant with a spectacular open interior several stories high. It may be the shop for art and related books. And it may be that I’m understanding modern art better than I did. But since 2012, when we started making annual pilgrimages to London for vacation, the Tate Modern is one of my favorite art museums in the city.

In 2012, our hotel was on the South Bank, near Westminster Bridge. The Tate Modern was around the bend in the Thames, across from St. Paul’s Cathedral. I could “walk the hypotenuse” from our hotel and considerably shorten the distance. I went three times that year, once to see it, a second time to see the Edvard Munch exhibit, and a third time to see the museum again.

This year, my growing understanding of modern and contemporary art was to be tested at the Tate, with an exhibition of the paintings of American Agnes Martin. It’s officially abstract art, but I won’t argue with anyone who wants to call it minimalist. Pastel minimalist, in fact.

The Islands, 1961

Martin (1912-2004) was born in Canada but eventually landed in Washington State, where she finished high school. She trained as a teacher, but went on to Columbia University in New York to study fine art and art education. After study at the University of New Mexico and a return to Columbia, she became interested in East Asian thought. After receiving her masters in 1952, she went to Taos, New Mexico, doing teaching and other work to support her art.

The exhibition covered her work from the early 1950s to her death in 2004. I paid the fee (about US $18) and walked through rooms initially containing small paintings, gradually giving way to larger and larger works. There was a calm, a serenity about these paintings. They were about light color, in mostly pastel shades, and minimalism is a suitable description for many of them. (As it turned out, my favorite work in the exhibition was entitled “The Book,” a smallish painting that was the least abstract work of all of them.)

Agnes Martin in 1954

These paintings are not about passion; if anything, they suggest the absence of passion. The almost-faded colors of many of them, the similarities they exhibited, and the presence of lines and geometric shapes suggested a detachment, a separation from the world. I wasn’t left cold but I was left feeling distant, a very different response from the exhibition of Martin’s British contemporary, Barbara Hepworth, at the Tate Modern’s sister museum, the Tate Britain.

I enjoyed the exhibition, but I can’t say I became a fan of Martin’s work. Perhaps it was too detached, too zen. I kept straining to hear the winds of New Mexico but instead heard only a rather marked silence.

Resources on Agnes Martin and her work

Agnes Martin: Paintings, Writings, Remembrances by Arne Glimcher.

Agnes Martin: Her Life and Art by Nancy Princenthal.

Agnes Martin by Briony Fer.

Agnes Martin by Lynne Cooke, Editor.

The Agnes Martin page at Artsy.net.

Painting, top: Happy Holiday, oil on canvas by Agnes Martin, 1999.