art
Cumming takes issue with art historians who, if they mention Fabritius at all, ‘explain him away as some kind of missing link between Rembrandt and Vermeer’. For her he is ‘entirely singular’, each new work ‘an astonishing departure’. Although his life was short and his surviving paintings are few, each is ‘a masterpiece’. A View of Delft, one of the smallest paintings in the National Gallery, is ‘one of the greatest ’. When she was starting her career in London, the shadowy figure in A View of Delft became her ‘strange counterpart ’. The man in the picture is ‘darkly handsome’, posed in thought, two musical instruments beside him on the table and the city of Delft shining brightly beyond. Why is it called A View of Delft when it could be called ‘Man Thinking’ or ‘Man Looking’? Why is the man rarely mentioned in commentaries on the painting? What do titles mean anyway? Titles are ‘an oddly new invention’ and nobody knows what Fabritius himself might have called the work.
The paintings have a value for Cumming that is derived from repeated viewings, from the intensity of thoughts and feelings built up over a lifetime’s relation-
ship. Cumming has looked at A View of Delft more often than Fabritius himself can have done; she knows more about his fate than he could ever possibly have known. Writing about Fabritius takes her deeper into Dutch art – there are absorbing passages here about Rembrandt, Hobbema, Van Goyen, Coorte and others – and evokes thoughts about her family: her father, whose mind is ‘all around me’; her daughters and what they see or don’t see when they look at art.
Joshua Reynolds, no fan of Dutch art, wrote that it was to the eye only that the works of Dutch painters were addressed, not the mind or the heart, and that this was their limitation. The only thing he could find to praise in it was ‘accuracy of illusion’: Reynolds, Cumming writes, ‘notices the white satin in the paintings of Gerard ter Borch because it is so expertly depicted as to appeal to our supposed appetite for resemblance’. Historical and mythological scenes ranked more highly than landscapes or still lifes. These were what Reynolds had seen on his grand tour, along with magnificent portraits. He didn’t see the works of Fabritius or Hobbema, whose The Avenue at Middelharnis stayed where it had been made in 1689 until it suddenly turned up for auction in Edinburgh in the 1820s, eventually being bought by Sir Robert Peel. We had a reproduction of the Hobbema at my school and I remember being thrilled to encounter the original in the National Gallery, so much bigger and brighter than I’d imagined. Going back to look for Fabritius, I looked again at Hobbema and de Hooch, touchstones of a teenage self. Some mixture of me now and me then sat in the cafe, reading what Cumming says about Hobbema, knowing Reynolds was wrong. Eye, mind and heart are not separate.
Cumming’s sole trip abroad as a child was to the Netherlands, where the family went to study art. It was a memorable visit, full of pleasures and some shocks. Her first impressions of the landscape and localities flower again in her impassioned defence of the art in which they are represented. Thunderclap in its very title is a provocation to those who continue to think of Dutch painting as an art of quiet and peace, of timeless stillness. Reading it, we learn to look for the life in still life while remembering that life can end at any moment.
tess little
Weird Sisters Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art
By Lauren Elkin (Chatto & Windus 368pp £25)
When Lauren Elkin’s Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art reaches bookshops, it will, undoubtedly, be placed on a table between Katy Hes- sel’s The Story of Art without Men (which came out last summer) and Claire Deder- er’s Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma (pub- lished in May this year). Hessel’s book does what it says on the tin, providing a feminist response to E H Gombrich’s art history classic The Story of Art. Dederer tackles cultural patriarchy from a differ- ent angle, dwelling on a question she first asked in a viral Paris Review essay, ‘What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men?’ Like Hessel, Elkin chronicles art history from a feminist perspective. Like Dederer’s work, Elkin’s is a personal rumination on the art monster. And yet Art Monsters does not sit between the two books. It ’s both and neither and something else altogether.
The term ‘art monster’ was coined by novelist Jenny Offill (in English, at least: Elkin notes the pre-existing monstre de l ’art). An often-quoted passage from her Dept of Speculation asserts, ‘Women almost never become art monsters because art monsters only concern themselves with art, never mundane things. Nabokov didn’t even fold his umbrella. Véra licked his stamps for him.’
Art Monsters addresses this premise: that only men readily have the permission (in other words, respect) and the resources (wives) to be regarded as incomparable geniuses. Women wishing to become artists face difficulties, sacrifices and condemnation.
But this is just the starting point for Elkin. The barriers women artists face aren’t merely external. As Virginia Woolf noted, the female artist thwarts herself with self-censorship as well. She must overcome a fear of ‘going altogether too far’, a fear of speaking ‘the truth about her body’.
Who, then, is Elkin’s female art monster? She is the artist who stares down this fear. She, her work and her body are excessive, obscene, vulgar, weird. She burns, she destroys, she threatens. Like other monsters, she gleefully dances across dichotomies: human/beast, good/evil, beauty/ ugliness, cleanliness/filth, life/death.
One of the first works of art monstrosity Elkin introduces is Carolee Schneemann’s
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