Pearson Abroad
ALAN PEARSON
I left this country on June 1, 1976, and arrived in Los Angeles on June 2.1 found the atmosphere of Los Angeles quite a revelation . . . the man-made physical largeness, the variation in colour, reflected in the populace. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art would for sheer size make an Ancient Greek's eyes boggle.
A first look at the expressionism of Picasso, Pechstein, and Kirchner with his Lady of the Red Hair. The use of black and prussian blue paralleled Beckmann's colours: similarly the forcing of the background through large frontal areas, with the intensity of life and death in the pigment. The strength of Picasso shows in his portraits - in his Weeping Woman with its exquisite knowledge of the duality of the female psyche, and the brilliant breaking down from classical features to a pathos of abstraction, in a lineal cry of green and black existence.
Then came the surprise of Jean Millet and Henri Fantin-Latour. The nineteenth century sensuality of the flesh-pink, the demure Arcadian figures residing on the Venusberg, made you wonder at the human translucency, the gluteous continuity, resting a while on a journey of selectivity. I was indeed seduced: and awaited Europe with relish at the thought of Watteau, Boucher, Rubens and Cranach. I made a mental note to cancel any future subscription to Playboy magazine, and to wear a white collar in Amsterdam.
A last memory is of Gustave Moreau and his compositions: light, again from the background, infiltrating the interiors of the temples of antiquity. He is a master in the use of light and its playing on ancient objects evoking a mood of Time - not unlike Altdorfer's interiors, although more impressionistic, utilizing an object as the key figure for the reflection of light into colour.
Little time was left, other than for a brief look at Hollywood, and to lock my doors in the motel with its seven latches and ringing bell. Clean sheets and a double bed; singular thoughts in my head and seven stations on the tellie. I flew out of Los Angeles on a Howard Hughes plane, driven nearly insane by the flower decoration in the 707 belly. From the air, New York made me think of a staging-post in European expansion, like a virus engrained.
I landed in London on June 4 and for a moment thought it was Cairo, with the heat, and women in purdah. I stayed for a week with Peter Beavan, the English architect, in Kensington. (I realised I would have to make enemies out of my friends, from economic necessity attributable to the high price of food, transport and accommodation.)
Off to the Tate and the National Gallery also the National Portrait Gallery ( interesting for genealogy, lacking in paint). Contemporary English art seemed to lack purpose and subject-matter, and catered for limited abilities. The literal aspect of it was profane pretending to be clever. Dickens still lurked in the contemporaries of the Royal Academy and the with-it Royal College. Carel Weight, from the prominence of the establishment, painted the memories of outside toilets and the wailing of women (past tense) for the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. Whilst, down the road, Bridget Riley painted exquisite tonal coloured, undulating soft, curvaceous, ethereal mattresses. Inviting? Yes! Well worth the price, if you can get it!
Cosmic sounds. . .gurgling water seeping down from an unseen tank (infinite) into an aluminium font . . . the environment and its cosmic affiliations . . . something was taking place at the Tate Gallery.
A philosophical treatise endeavoured to explain why the construction was erected in the first place. It was for people to consider aspects other than the everyday, to conceive more of the variety of infinite nature. I felt that a three-dimensional Emmett steam-engine would have done just as well for most people. Conceptual art in this sense defines the human condition in a larger environmental way: but does not offer any reasons other than literal ones . . . it is purely a physical explanation of the human conditions in space: a dead end, a collective premise. I would think that Luna Park in Sydney has caused more fear and metaphysical speculation than this conceptual window-display with slide rule.
It was with relief that I boarded the boat train from Victoria Station, my eyes set for Parisian visual delights, holding fast in my hand a Eurail pass which served its purpose amiably in the three months of travel.
Finding that the French did not want to speak English, I proceeded to study the arts at the Louvre and the Musée d'Art Moderne. It was a relief to be inside out of the heat, and out of the desert-like atmosphere of dust storms in the Jardinière Toulouse.
The trudge through all facets of Western painting from gallery to gallery left a lasting impression of historical periods . . . an emotional panorama of flesh, politics and spirit which others previously gave to life's continuation. The oscillating eye clarified for its individual self the purest colours of the spectrum: the historical rainbow of Jean Clouet's Francis I, the Pieta (School of Provence); then on to the use of classical mythology in the landscape . . . the legends of the past, the myths coming through the eddies: subject-matter for some, filler in the landscape for others - a release from the dogma of over-defined, repetitive Biblical statements which abounded in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
George de Latour, with his use of flat black areas against decoration, showed as much feeling for surfaces as any modern texturalist. Antoine Watteau continued on from Poussin's Classicism in the best rendition of the allegorical . . . a Baroque Arcadia showing the human journey beyond the physical. His Harlequin with Low Horizon rang a bell for Goya. One sees the joy in the paint itself in Fragonard and from Chardin to Braque and Cubism.
Out into the heat again, four beers away from the Museum for Impressionist painting. Here, old friends gazed down from the walls and (with the refreshing colour) acted as a balm on my reeling senses, proving that good painting needs no explanation or intellectual analysis: the essence is prevalent. I bowed my head to Gauguin and Van Gogh, who whispered to me that certain Expressionists sympathetic to their cause (and to mine) were hanging out in the Musée d'Art Moderne, among twentieth century contemporaries.
Out in the gardens again (again four beers) only to find out that the Musée d'Art Moderne was closed for a week for renovations. Paris was too expensive for me to reside in any longer: and cheese was starting to bore me.
I left for Spain on a fast French train and arrived in Madrid twenty hours later. I found a reasonable pensione, but again food was expensive. I stayed here four days, visiting the Prado and meeting Gough Whitlam viewing the Black Period of Goya. I said to him: 'Why don't you buy one for good old down-under country?' He naturally evaded the question, and replied with Australian aplomb: 'They should spread it around more, mate!'
The highlights of the Prado were the Black paintings of Goya (Spain's Tony Fomison), and Rubens' more cosmic works - for example, the delightful Danae and the Stars.
To Alicante for two days on the Costa Blanca: two days in the sun to relax and digest the weight of Spain's past. Organised tourism abounded: fish and chips for the Anglo-Saxons, frankfurters and beer for the Eastern Teutonics. From Alicante to Port Bou by train; then a further twenty-two hours via the French Riviera to Roma.
I had arrived at last! Verdi, Botticelli, and chaos! Plus MAMA! - Fellini's twentieth century circus - with Aida to prop them up after closing time. The railway station was crowded with tourists, pimps, con-men and all varieties of human condition. It was boiling hot. . .coconut on ice conditions.
I found a pensione (seven thousand lire per night) just down from the Piazza del Republiqua (single people charged as double). This lasted for three nights until I found a room for three thousand lire in a hotel run by the Salvation Army in the old district of Rome, opposite the Porta MagRio.
I made a bee-line for the Vatican Borgia Apartments and went through the Secret Chambers illustrating the Saints and the liberal arts - culminating in the Halls of the Creed and the Sibyls. The iconography of the frescoes developed on the upper walls by Pintoricchio (1454-1513) was notably festive: a contribution to knowledge of the life of the Papal court. The power, the trappings of religious wealth went on and on.
Then, the Sistine Chapel! Angels with foreshortened giants trumpeted down from infinite physical space. In corner niches putti romped in the shadows of the architecture and the cracks in the plaster. . . Repent! Repent! - Or else! Most people would think of the physical torture Michelangelo went through and the conditions he was made to work under. I think he did a great job. I consider him monochromatic however - painterly in a sculptural sense. The paintings of Botticelli on the side walls, smaller in size, lost nothing in stature.
I visited the Villa Borghese. I did it all! - from the sculptor Bernini to Caravaggio . . . an excess of works and so little time. I even called on the British School of Rome. The building is as large as the Beehive. The doors were protected by a washerwoman who refused my entry in broken English. She said that the Director was in bed at noon and would I please leave because I lacked authenticity as I couldn't speak English properly.
Italian light was like sharpened twilight: even the dawn portrayed the closing of the days. Centuries tumbled into my meagre brain like Fellini's Satyricon. Search as I would I couldn't see for seeing - there was too much around! Centuries were vying for recognition in a profound sense of the use of space and time. I was groping through antiquity for the essence of historical endeavour, like a Puritan let loose. Rome was propped up with nineteenth century iron rails. Archetypal statues, displaying broken perfection, gazed down from precarious heights. Rome (and the whole of Italy) was a mausoleum, its past so mighty
it was still in the air
you could see it
just like an old woman's long stockings
hanging
poking
out of an aspadistra'd window
to catch the last rays
of a rectangular weeping sun.
Then the dampness to increase the acidity
in the joints of the dear departing
. . . they say in Italy, if you whisper
the name, Raphael
you don't notice Jupiter or
Mars!
(Questo quello)
The National Gallery of Modern Art was a relief. . .and yet it seemed anachronistic. Painters from the 1930's, the 1940s, and even the 1950s seemed like tired late French Impressionists. They were relieved by the American abstract expressionist painters (e.g. Kline). Then there were the kinetic colourists with their illusory voyage in search of subject matter like strobe lights in a discotheque. I felt that the technical apparatus was the real art - as it is in television with its credits for lighting - produced by angles, directed by sifter: a touch - but don't get married.
Rome, the centre of Western culture, describes the dilemma of Western man. Nothing artistic or spiritual holds a place in its materialistic consuming from the cradle to the grave society. Art in the open for everybody is a commercial operetta, a collective demise, a garden party for the social environmentalist, a counting of hands for the definition of form.
To me, Rome was an Atlantis above the sea, a Lost Horizon. After four weeks. . .goodbye to Porta Maggio, the Pantheon, the Vatican and Bellini. I arrived in Siena on the 20th of July, 1976.
The hills looked like the hills of Cheviot, North Canterbury . . . except for the lighter sky and red brick villages, the churches atop the hills . . . dryness like a Cheviot high summer.
Siena is a Medieval city, an architectural gem of the Medieval-Renaissance period. It sits at the bottom of three hills and is structured like an arena, so that to move away from the central Piazza del Campo requires an uphill climb (with guides).
One should arrive at the Piazza del Duomo, where the cathedral is situated - an extraordinary piece of decoration. . .black horizontal lines around every pillar, which gives one the feeling of Medieval sticks of Blackpool rock. However, the sculptured reliefs were a change from the over-styled and precious cathedral. The Romanesque section (excluding the nave) reminded one of a temple of Isis and Osiris.
Siena seemed to be a place of reverence to educated Italians - a middle-class shrine to past nobility. It is a traditional centre for music (also a rip-off centre), its isolation condoning a higher degree of inflation. In the National Picture Gallery, a collection of paintings in chronological order. Amazingly concentrated were the twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth century works of art. They ranged from Guido da Siena to Sodoma.
After seeing Sienese paintings, local and natural colours become boring compared with the emotional content in the colour of the twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. From Guido da Siena's Madonna and Child (orange glazed over gold, lineal tones) to Duccio (1250-1320), with more humanistic individual emotions creeping into the Madonnas, to Niccola di Segna (fl. 1345), with, again, more human feeling coming into his Christ figures (though they still reflect the icons of the Justinian period). Everything is expressed ornamentally, including the clothes: but the flat flesh is awkward, frightened, and tinted toward reality. The counter changing of gold is flat against the forms of figures, trees, rocks. In fact:
Golden wrath
thundered down from spiritual
backgrounds
flesh. . .blue-robed
Nobles, red
enveloped in cosmic reality
pumped from their hearts
the stuff of consciousness
creating certainty for existence
in a continuing chorus of
hallelujahs
a visual mantra
a reason
they knew that the flesh was inferior
and we don't, it seems?
and must pay homage, plus duty, to the custodians.
Alan Pearson, painter and poet, was born in 1929 and graduated Diploma of Fine Arts with Honours, Canterbury School of Fine Arts in 1961. He has been a designer for television and an art teacher, and has shown his work in many exhibitions in New Zealand and abroad. He was described by the critic Rodney Wilson (Art New Zealand 1) as a leading member of 'the exclusive club of New Zealand portraitists'.
In June 1976 Pearson travelled overseas on a Queen Elizabeth II Arts Council grant, visiting Britain, France, Spain, Italy and Germany. Here he describes his encounters with traditional and contemporary European art.
Originally published in Art New Zealand 6 June/July 1977