Skip to main content
Read page text
page 4
A R T H I S T O R Y art of the time, and which remains one of the graphic masterpieces of the twentieth century. But then there are many works of less assurance, or of the wrong kind of assurance – works which return again and again to the same source of pathos – the old guitarist, the old beggar, the old this, the old that – “Life”, in short, a painting Picasso later deemed particularly awful, but which Richardson thinks a masterpiece. And there are curiosities – those canvases, for instance, inspired by the suicide of his friend Carles Casagemas which remained under wraps for decades, no doubt because they still touched a raw nerve. Or because they, contrariwise, laughed at the wrong moment. “Evocation”, in the current Washington show, Picasso: Painting the Blue Period, the lower part of which depicts the mourners at the burial of Casagemas, turns into a spoof of El Greco. “This art-school facetiousness”, says Richardson, “reminds us of something we are apt to forget: the artist was still [in 1901] only nineteen.” Only nineteen, but already aware that in order to progress as an artist he must stop doing what has already worked for him. I keep thinking of Picasso’s nocturnal view of the lamplit “Le Moulin de la Galette” (in the Guggenheim Museum, New York), peopled with those femmes fatales who can be summoned so easily by his brush. How many artists, on reaching that level of facility, have been content to repeat the winning formula. But Picasso, in Gertrude Stein’s expression, “empties himself, and the moment he has completed emptying himself he must recommence emptying himself, he fills himself up again so quickly”. So it happens that, as we come to the last gallery of the Washington exhibition, we recognize one of these moments of emptying, when Picasso is coming to the end of the Blue and the beginning of the Pink, or Rose Period. Picasso and Fernande Olivier are in Gósol, in a remote village in the Pyrenees, where we learn that Picasso and his lover enjoyed an idyllic summer, in which Fernande was unable to communicate except through sign language (or through Picasso). It seems to have been, for as long as it could be made to last, a good formula – silence and the pure mountain air. One of the things that changes, apart from the palette, is the artist’s evident and excessive design upon our sympathies. A problem for Richardson, as his biography swelled to a scale surely not foreseen, must have been the bet he was making with his mortality. It is striking that we get a very strong feeling of his having met the artist, even though the biography itself never reaches that actual moment. The biography ends in 1943, the great set pieces in the fourth volume being the Spanish Civil War and the Occupation. Cooper and Richardson met in 1949. Richardson, in my guess, took the view that he might never bring the biography up to that moment. But he had a story he wanted to tell – in something of a spirit of self-justification, perhaps. So he took time off from the biography. One may feel a little impatient with him for doing so. But it is understandable. Sacred Monsters, Sacred Masters (2001) is a collection of magazine articles, longish pieces which appeared in The New York Review of Books, Vanity Fair and House and Garden. The form suited Richardson very well. It is here that the devastating portrait of Gala Dalí is to be found. Here too, in “Nina Kandinsky’s Deadly Diamonds”, we encounter the widow of the great abstract artist. As Nina’s fortunes improve with the art market, she treats herself to ever more spectacular jewellery until one day in Gstaad she is robbed and strangled, probably by someone she knew. Richardson had a gift, which I believe to be rare, for hanging a show. I had assumed that this would have been a part of what he learnt from the hanging of Douglas Cooper’s collection in the château they restored together in France. But John Richardson: At home (2019; a coffee-table book about his successive abodes) suggests otherwise. A room displaying a 4 startling ten early works by Léger turns out to be hung in a reassuringly amateurish way. And this reminds us of something Richardson tells us about Cooper – that he was happy to spend lavishly on the acquisition of works of art, but cheap as chips when it came to the furnishing of their home. One tends to assume that a collector will want his collection to live in something roughly resembling a museum. Not all do. Not all care. For some, ownership is where the interest stops. Sally Ganz, whose collection of paintings, when it was finally sold, broke all records, had a chair where she liked to sit in the mornings, drinking coffee and smoking away. Beside the chair was a table with a phone. Over the chair there hung a white Jasper Johns “numbers” painting which gradually, over the years, turned yellow with nicotine. When the stain could no longer be ignored, she would phone Jasper Johns and explain the problem. He would tell her to send the painting over to his place, where he would clean it up for her. It was in the Ganz apartment that I learnt that, in your own home, a masterpiece on the wall did not have to be totally visible to be well hung. Space being limited (and masterpieces numerous) one might settle for a partial view. Richardson over the years, working for Christies and as a gallerist in New York, developed an aesthetic very similar to that of the antique-dealer Christopher Gibbs, born out of a revolt against the Ghastly Good Taste of their parents’ generation. The starting point is a disavowal of what was sometimes known as Buggers’ Regency: The trappings of a lovely home were not only made in England or in France in the 18th century. Buy a chieftain’s throne from Benin and opium bed from 17th century China, hangings and cushions from Morocco, Persia, Turkey and India, vast lacquer coffers and ethereal 16th-century screens from Japan, armoires of strange woods from abandoned colonies … In other words, anything except what your mother thought “good”. Richardson was a decisive interior decorator. His last home in New York he managed to turn into an enfilade of rooms of great splendor. I asked him, on my first visit, what was the name of a particularly intense bluey green with which he had covered a whole wall. He said: “Well, I always think of it as a sort of verdigris. The thing about a colour like that, when you first put it up you think: Oh my god what have I done. But as soon as you start hanging things on it you see how beautifully it responds to the colours in works of art.” He paused for a moment. Then he resumed: “Mind you, that can be true of any colour.” Another pause. Then, crisply: “Except white.” I committed this advice to memory. It is true that one can be appalled or intimidated by a newly painted wall, but that everything changes when one starts hanging things. One is, after all, reducing the area of visible paint. I asked him about a large drawing that appeared to be a design for a stained glass window. He said it was by Burne-Jones, adding that “if a drawing is large you can often get it for nothing. Nothing. People are afraid to buy large things.” This advice I have found to be very far from true, unless by “nothing” you mean “a large sum of money”. Richardson was not at all afraid to mix valuable items (the Picasso prints, the Warhols, the baroque mirrors) with the higher junk (the stone obelisks, the blue-and-white china, the endless lamps). But the obelisks had better be big. When I told Howard Hodgkin I had been to Richardson’s apartment, he asked me to describe it. “Well”, I began, “everything is large. If there’s a vase of flowers, it’s a huge vase of huge flowers. If there’s a plate, it’ll be a huge plate. If ” – Howard cut me off. “I know that style!”, he exclaimed. “I know that st yle. It’s called –” and here he struck his forehead for inspiration. “It’s called Everyone’s a Size-Queen.” n TLS “Wild rumours circulated that strange Squire Waterton rode around his estate on the back of a crocodile Susan Owens is the author of Spirit of Place: Artists, writers and the British landscape, 2020 Rapacious borders Spirits of freedom in a much- loved common pursuit SUSAN OWENS ENGLISH GARDEN ECCENTRICS Three hundred years of extraordinary groves, burrowings, mountains and menageries TODD LONGSTAFFE-GOWAN 400pp. Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. £30. GARDENS ARE BY THEIR NATURE ephemeral and the majority of the remarkable examples discussed in English Garden Eccentrics have long since disappeared. But that, Todd LongstaffeGowan argues, is just as it should be because these places are best understood as extensions of their creators’ selves. Remove the visionary force, and what remains loses its animation. Gardens are front and centre in this book, which, he states, is concerned not so much with “what makes individuals eccentric than with how they have used landscape to map out their own personal biographies”. This comes as a relief: books about eccentrics often have a bewilderingly capacious scope. English Garden Eccentrics succeeds because of its narrower focus on how individuals have channelled their energies into a common pursuit and pitched their imaginations against natural and topographical constraints. There is nothing narrow, however, about the range of planting, pruning, building, tunnelling and menagerie-making the author sets out here. Longstaffe-Gowan has delved deeply into archives, old newspaper reports and contemporary visual material in order to recreate on paper strange and spectacular gardens from a 300-year period, beginning in the seventeenth century with ingenious waterworks around what the antiquary John Aubrey called a “marvellous grotto” animated by artificial thunder and lightning. Some gardens will be familiar: among their creators, perhaps the bestknown is Sir Francis Dashwood, instigator of extensive pleasure-grounds and the notorious Hell-Fire Caves at West Wycombe. But the book’s originality stems from the obscurity of many of the people and gardens Longstaffe-Gowan has unearthed. These include Sir Charles Isham who introduced the gnome to English gardens when, in the 1860s, he built a gigantic rockery at his Northamptonshire estate and peopled it with models of fairy miners – probably an idea he got during his travels in Germany, which brought him into contact with the traditional Gnomen-Figuren or “folklore figures” used by miners as talismans. A militant group are captured on camera taking strike action in Sir Charles’s rockery. Here, too, is Sir Francis Crisp, who constructed an exact model of the Matterhorn in his Alpine Garden (the illusion was only broken when garden birds perched on its summit); and Joshua Brookes, who decorated his garden with, in his words, a “very large and picturesque piece of Rockwork, formed chiefly of considerable masses of the Rock of Gibraltar, adapted to the purpose of a Vivarium, at present inhabited by an Eagle and several smaller rapacious Birds”. Birds of a more decorative nature were a feature of Lady Reade’s Oxfordshire garden in which she built a vast crescent-shaped aviary; when she travelled she would fill her carriages with her beloved parrots, macaws and cockatoos, along with pet monkeys and other creatures – much to the delight of spectators. MAY 6, 2022
page 5
H O R T I C U L T U R E I R E Y O R K S H W E S T , C A S T L E S A N D M U S E U M S I E L D W A K E F © Among the most intriguing of Longstaffe-Gowan’s subjects are those whose gardens either reveal an unsuspected aspect of their nature, or greatly magnify a known one. In the first category is Jonathan Tyers. He was the proprietor of New Spring Gardens – later known as Vauxhall Gardens – on the south bank of the Thames, pleasure grounds offering food and drink alongside a cheerful array of music, theatre and exhibitions. By contrast, the private garden he created at Denbies, a farmhouse he bought in 1734 near Dorking in Surrey, was, writes Longstaffe-Gowan, “among the wittiest dismal demesnes in Georgian England”. This garden – dismantled immediately after Tyers’s death – was called “Il Penseroso” in a nod to Milton’s poem, and clearly intended as a counterpart to Vauxhall’s “L’Allegro”. The attractions of the contemplative life Milton explores in “Il Penseroso”, however, were not pursued; instead Tyers made a penitential experience of the journey through his hillside garden. The visitor would follow a path described in the sole account dating from Tyers’s lifetime as a “labyrinth of walks; some descending, some ascending; in some parts easy, smooth, and level, in others rugged and uneven; a proper emblem of human life!”. At almost every turn one would encounter large flags bearing admonitory messages; one was led to a Temple of Death in which to contemplate mortality, papered with extracts from Edward Young’s Night Thoughts and Robert Blair’s “The Grave”; and when one left the Temple it was through a gate constructed from stone piers in the form of coffins, each topped by a human skull. Longstaffe-Gowan suggests that this “anti-pleasure” garden, bathed in “a strange air of guilty gloom”, worked as a fundamentally literary experience: the visitor would be immersed in an anthology of moralizing verse, realized in three dimensions. In the second category – the magnification of traits – is the eighteenth-century antiquary William Stukeley, who carried out pioneering fieldwork at Stonehenge and Avebury and became convinced that Druids were responsible for these monuments. Stukeley’s increasing personal obsession with druidic culture was expressed in his own successive gardens, the first of which was at his home in Grantham, where, in the 1720s, he created what he called a “temple of the druids”. Here he planted trees and hedges in concentric rings around a central “antient appletree oregrown with sacred mistletoe” to reflect the layout of the sanctuary at Avebury. Later in life, Stukeley settled in Kentish Town in north London, where the druidic elements to his garden became yet more concentrated; again he planted in circles and added a Druid walk and a range of other features including a temple, a grotto, a hermitage and a tumulus. He also built a mausoleum, not as a tomb chamber but as a site devoted to contemplation and retrospection. One can only speculate about the druidic rites Stukeley may have enacted in this carefully staged arena. MAY 6, 2022 Where, though, does caprice shade into eccentricity? Topiary, which has a history in England stretching back to the sixteenth century, is a feature of a number of gardens included in the book and Charles Waterton on the Walton estate by Edward Jones, c.1864 TLS Longstaffe-Gowan is careful to distinguish between the popular use of “small-scale yew topiary for the frivolous decoration of modest London gardens” and what he terms “freakish deviation[s] of the conventional practice”. These deviations included remodelling huge ancient churchyard yews “to resemble relics of antiquity”, among the most famous of which was the Harlington yew in Middlesex, clipped into bold geometrical masses in the early eighteenth century by a local gardener, John “shaver” Saxy. (It is interesting to note how many of the gardeners here seek to connect with the past.) The Countess of Dudley of Witley Court in Worcestershire, the subject of another chapter, was so fond of topiaries that she made regular excursions around the neighbourhood in search of examples to buy for her garden; though whether she can strictly be regarded as an eccentric is a moot point. Few would dispute the credentials of Charles Waterton of Walton Hall near Wakefield, although this proto-conservationist would have seemed stranger to his contemporaries than he appears today. On succeeding to the family estate in 1806, he set about making it into a sanctuary for birds and animals, in particular those he felt were unjustly persecuted. At a time when barn owls were considered vermin, he built a box in which they could nest, and, in his own words, “threatened to strangle the keeper if ever, after this, he molested either the old birds or their young ones”. Weasels, hedgehogs, jays, jackdaws, hawks, kites and ravens were among the other “vermin” he encouraged, and he spent much time and money planting trees and shrubs for cover and wooden structures for their accommodation. He was just as keen that people should enjoy his grounds, frequently inviting “pic-nic parties” of workers from the surrounding mills and patients from the Wakefield Asylum. Even so, wild rumours circulated that strange Squire Waterton rode around his estate on the back of a crocodile – an idea based on a youthful escapade involving a caiman that he recounted in his travel-memoir Wanderings in South America (1825). If they encountered him in his grounds, however, most visitors took this busy, plainly-dressed man for a gardener. Longstaffe-Gowan concludes with perhaps the most eccentric of all the gardens in his selection, though at first glance it appears to be the most conventional. It belonged to Mabel Barltrop who, in the years following the First World War, created a new Garden of Eden close to the site, she believed, of the original: Bedford. Regarding herself as a prophet, she was a leading member of the Panacea Society, which sought to reconfigure the Holy Trinity into a foursquare system in which Barltrop – or Octavia, as she was known to her community – was the Daughter to balance the Son. They believed that, when Jesus Christ returned, His first move would be to pay a visit to Octavia and stroll with her around her garden. The plot at the back of no. 12 Albany Street remained in most respects a typical suburban garden of the period, with a large lawn to facilitate social gatherings from tea parties to the Second Coming. Among a few less conventional features were a chapel, a makeshift altar on which members’ confessions were burned – accompanied by a toy lamb to symbolize Christ – and a large weeping ash called Yggdrasil after the sacred “world tree” in Norse mythology, around which members would dance, thus, LongstaffeGowan explains, “harnessing the power of this pagan symbol”. As well as being a historian, Todd LongstaffeGowan is himself a gardener and practising landscape architect, and English Garden Eccentrics is enriched by the depth of his working knowledge. His experience also gives him an imaginative sympathy with each of his garden-making subjects who as a result spring from the page as real, if highly unconventional, human beings. Indeed, one of his aims, he writes, is to encourage fellow gardeners to defy dull conventionality, “to inspire those who feel a spirit of freedom welling up inside them to dare to be eccentric – to pluck up the moral courage and indulge with impunity”. n 5

Page Text

View plaintext

A R T H I S T O R Y

art of the time, and which remains one of the graphic masterpieces of the twentieth century.

But then there are many works of less assurance, or of the wrong kind of assurance – works which return again and again to the same source of pathos – the old guitarist, the old beggar, the old this, the old that – “Life”, in short, a painting Picasso later deemed particularly awful, but which Richardson thinks a masterpiece. And there are curiosities – those canvases, for instance, inspired by the suicide of his friend Carles Casagemas which remained under wraps for decades, no doubt because they still touched a raw nerve. Or because they, contrariwise, laughed at the wrong moment. “Evocation”, in the current Washington show, Picasso: Painting the Blue Period, the lower part of which depicts the mourners at the burial of Casagemas, turns into a spoof of El Greco. “This art-school facetiousness”, says Richardson, “reminds us of something we are apt to forget: the artist was still [in 1901] only nineteen.”

Only nineteen, but already aware that in order to progress as an artist he must stop doing what has already worked for him. I keep thinking of Picasso’s nocturnal view of the lamplit “Le Moulin de la Galette” (in the Guggenheim Museum, New York), peopled with those femmes fatales who can be summoned so easily by his brush. How many artists, on reaching that level of facility, have been content to repeat the winning formula. But Picasso, in Gertrude Stein’s expression, “empties himself, and the moment he has completed emptying himself he must recommence emptying himself, he fills himself up again so quickly”.

So it happens that, as we come to the last gallery of the Washington exhibition, we recognize one of these moments of emptying, when Picasso is coming to the end of the Blue and the beginning of the Pink, or Rose Period. Picasso and Fernande Olivier are in Gósol, in a remote village in the Pyrenees, where we learn that Picasso and his lover enjoyed an idyllic summer, in which Fernande was unable to communicate except through sign language (or through Picasso). It seems to have been, for as long as it could be made to last, a good formula – silence and the pure mountain air. One of the things that changes, apart from the palette, is the artist’s evident and excessive design upon our sympathies.

A problem for Richardson, as his biography swelled to a scale surely not foreseen, must have been the bet he was making with his mortality. It is striking that we get a very strong feeling of his having met the artist, even though the biography itself never reaches that actual moment. The biography ends in 1943, the great set pieces in the fourth volume being the Spanish Civil War and the Occupation. Cooper and Richardson met in 1949. Richardson, in my guess, took the view that he might never bring the biography up to that moment. But he had a story he wanted to tell – in something of a spirit of self-justification, perhaps. So he took time off from the biography. One may feel a little impatient with him for doing so. But it is understandable.

Sacred Monsters, Sacred Masters (2001) is a collection of magazine articles, longish pieces which appeared in The New York Review of Books, Vanity Fair and House and Garden. The form suited Richardson very well. It is here that the devastating portrait of Gala Dalí is to be found. Here too, in “Nina Kandinsky’s Deadly Diamonds”, we encounter the widow of the great abstract artist. As Nina’s fortunes improve with the art market, she treats herself to ever more spectacular jewellery until one day in Gstaad she is robbed and strangled, probably by someone she knew.

Richardson had a gift, which I believe to be rare, for hanging a show. I had assumed that this would have been a part of what he learnt from the hanging of Douglas Cooper’s collection in the château they restored together in France. But John Richardson: At home (2019; a coffee-table book about his successive abodes) suggests otherwise. A room displaying a

4

startling ten early works by Léger turns out to be hung in a reassuringly amateurish way.

And this reminds us of something Richardson tells us about Cooper – that he was happy to spend lavishly on the acquisition of works of art, but cheap as chips when it came to the furnishing of their home. One tends to assume that a collector will want his collection to live in something roughly resembling a museum. Not all do. Not all care. For some, ownership is where the interest stops.

Sally Ganz, whose collection of paintings, when it was finally sold, broke all records, had a chair where she liked to sit in the mornings, drinking coffee and smoking away. Beside the chair was a table with a phone. Over the chair there hung a white Jasper Johns “numbers” painting which gradually, over the years, turned yellow with nicotine. When the stain could no longer be ignored, she would phone Jasper Johns and explain the problem. He would tell her to send the painting over to his place, where he would clean it up for her. It was in the Ganz apartment that I learnt that, in your own home, a masterpiece on the wall did not have to be totally visible to be well hung. Space being limited (and masterpieces numerous) one might settle for a partial view.

Richardson over the years, working for Christies and as a gallerist in New York, developed an aesthetic very similar to that of the antique-dealer Christopher Gibbs, born out of a revolt against the Ghastly Good Taste of their parents’ generation. The starting point is a disavowal of what was sometimes known as Buggers’ Regency:

The trappings of a lovely home were not only made in England or in France in the 18th century. Buy a chieftain’s throne from Benin and opium bed from 17th century China, hangings and cushions from Morocco, Persia, Turkey and India, vast lacquer coffers and ethereal 16th-century screens from Japan, armoires of strange woods from abandoned colonies … In other words, anything except what your mother thought “good”.

Richardson was a decisive interior decorator. His last home in New York he managed to turn into an enfilade of rooms of great splendor. I asked him, on my first visit, what was the name of a particularly intense bluey green with which he had covered a whole wall. He said: “Well, I always think of it as a sort of verdigris. The thing about a colour like that, when you first put it up you think: Oh my god what have I done. But as soon as you start hanging things on it you see how beautifully it responds to the colours in works of art.” He paused for a moment. Then he resumed: “Mind you, that can be true of any colour.” Another pause. Then, crisply: “Except white.”

I committed this advice to memory. It is true that one can be appalled or intimidated by a newly painted wall, but that everything changes when one starts hanging things. One is, after all, reducing the area of visible paint.

I asked him about a large drawing that appeared to be a design for a stained glass window. He said it was by Burne-Jones, adding that “if a drawing is large you can often get it for nothing. Nothing. People are afraid to buy large things.” This advice I have found to be very far from true, unless by “nothing” you mean “a large sum of money”.

Richardson was not at all afraid to mix valuable items (the Picasso prints, the Warhols, the baroque mirrors) with the higher junk (the stone obelisks, the blue-and-white china, the endless lamps). But the obelisks had better be big. When I told Howard Hodgkin I had been to Richardson’s apartment, he asked me to describe it. “Well”, I began, “everything is large. If there’s a vase of flowers, it’s a huge vase of huge flowers. If there’s a plate, it’ll be a huge plate. If ” – Howard cut me off. “I know that style!”, he exclaimed. “I know that st yle. It’s called –” and here he struck his forehead for inspiration. “It’s called Everyone’s a Size-Queen.” n

TLS

“Wild rumours circulated that strange Squire Waterton rode around his estate on the back of a crocodile

Susan Owens is the author of Spirit of Place: Artists, writers and the British landscape, 2020

Rapacious borders Spirits of freedom in a much-

loved common pursuit

SUSAN OWENS ENGLISH GARDEN ECCENTRICS Three hundred years of extraordinary groves,

burrowings, mountains and menageries

TODD LONGSTAFFE-GOWAN 400pp. Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. £30.

GARDENS ARE BY THEIR NATURE ephemeral and the majority of the remarkable examples discussed in English Garden Eccentrics have long since disappeared. But that, Todd LongstaffeGowan argues, is just as it should be because these places are best understood as extensions of their creators’ selves. Remove the visionary force, and what remains loses its animation. Gardens are front and centre in this book, which, he states, is concerned not so much with “what makes individuals eccentric than with how they have used landscape to map out their own personal biographies”. This comes as a relief: books about eccentrics often have a bewilderingly capacious scope. English Garden Eccentrics succeeds because of its narrower focus on how individuals have channelled their energies into a common pursuit and pitched their imaginations against natural and topographical constraints. There is nothing narrow, however, about the range of planting, pruning, building, tunnelling and menagerie-making the author sets out here.

Longstaffe-Gowan has delved deeply into archives, old newspaper reports and contemporary visual material in order to recreate on paper strange and spectacular gardens from a 300-year period, beginning in the seventeenth century with ingenious waterworks around what the antiquary John Aubrey called a “marvellous grotto” animated by artificial thunder and lightning. Some gardens will be familiar: among their creators, perhaps the bestknown is Sir Francis Dashwood, instigator of extensive pleasure-grounds and the notorious Hell-Fire Caves at West Wycombe. But the book’s originality stems from the obscurity of many of the people and gardens Longstaffe-Gowan has unearthed. These include Sir Charles Isham who introduced the gnome to English gardens when, in the 1860s, he built a gigantic rockery at his Northamptonshire estate and peopled it with models of fairy miners – probably an idea he got during his travels in Germany, which brought him into contact with the traditional Gnomen-Figuren or “folklore figures” used by miners as talismans. A militant group are captured on camera taking strike action in Sir Charles’s rockery.

Here, too, is Sir Francis Crisp, who constructed an exact model of the Matterhorn in his Alpine Garden (the illusion was only broken when garden birds perched on its summit); and Joshua Brookes, who decorated his garden with, in his words, a “very large and picturesque piece of Rockwork, formed chiefly of considerable masses of the Rock of Gibraltar, adapted to the purpose of a Vivarium, at present inhabited by an Eagle and several smaller rapacious Birds”. Birds of a more decorative nature were a feature of Lady Reade’s Oxfordshire garden in which she built a vast crescent-shaped aviary; when she travelled she would fill her carriages with her beloved parrots, macaws and cockatoos, along with pet monkeys and other creatures – much to the delight of spectators.

MAY 6, 2022

read next page

My Bookmarks

Buy this Book
Skip to main content