Art Student Book Four 1971-72

Art Student Book Four 1971-72

Giles Winterborne

Art Student Book Four 1971-72

Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1A: El Prat

Chapter 1B: Only a Beggar

Chapter 2A: Museu Picasso

Chapter 2B: Demoiselles

Chapter 2C: Spanish Flu

Chapter 2D: The Spanish Civil War

Chapter 3A: Pillars of Hercules

Chapter 3B: Purple

Chapter 3C: Punic Wars

Chapter 3D: Hannibal

Chapter 3E: Cádiz Memorial

Chapter 3F: Kiss Me hardy

Chapter 4A: English Abroad

Chapter 4B: Aladdin

Chapter 4C: Delacroix

Chapter 4D: The Raft of the Medusa

Chapter 5A: Mint Tea

Chapter 5B: Having Paris

Chapter 5C: Whirling Dervishes

Chapter 6A: Córdoba

Chapter 6B: Reconquista

Chapter 6C: Charlemagne

Chapter 6D: Cervantes

Chapter 6E: Tilting at Windmills

Chapter 7A: Toledo

Chapter 7B: As I Walked Out

Chapter 7C: El Greco

Chapter 7D: Bisagra Gate

Chapter 8A: Biscuits

Chapter 8B: Horsemanship

Chapter 8C: Gran Corrida

Chapter 9A: The Third of May 1808

Chapter 9B: Black Paintings

Chapter 10A: Velázquez

Chapter 10B: The Spinners

Chapter 11A: Europe

Chapter 11B: Titian

Chapter 11C: Alabaster

Chapter 12A: Exhausting

Chapter 12B: Hieronymus Bosch

Chapter 12C: Vollard Suite

Chapter 13A: Santander

Chapter 13B: Altamira

Chapter 13C: Last of Spain

Chapter 13D: Battles

Chapter 14A: Au Pair

Chapter 14B: Eiffel Tower

Chapter 15A: Tropical Fish

Chapter 15B: A Right Erbert

Chapter 15C: Baldassare Castiglione

Chapter 15D: The Wedding at Cana

Chapter 15E: Virgins

Chapter 16A: Le Concert Champêtre

Chapter 16B: Third and Final San Romano

Chapter 16C: Burgeon

Chapter 16D: The Coronation of Napoléon

Chapter 16E: Marbles

Chapter 17A: Is Paris Burning?

Chapter 17B: Victor Hugo

Chapter 17C: Académie Suisse

Chapter 17D: Absurd

Chapter 17E: Occupation

Chapter 18A: Austerlitz

Chapter 18B: Battle of Waterloo

Chapter 18C: Scrumpy

Chapter 19A: Sedan

Chapter 19B: Paris Commune

Chapter 19C: Amazons

Chapter 19D: Smock

Chapter 20A: Corot

Chapter 20B: Gustave Courbet

Chapter 20C: Realism

Chapter 20D: Hector Berlioz

Chapter 20E: Vendôme Column

Chapter 20F: Richard Wallace

Chapter 21A: Symbolism

Chapter 21B: The Flowers of Evil

Chapter 21C: Sappho

Chapter 21D: Paul Verlaine

Chapter 22A: Nadar

Chapter 22B: Impressionist

Chapter 22C: Clemenceau

Chapter 22D: Lodgings

Chapter 23A: Following Eyes

Chapter 23B: The Wallace Collection

Chapter 23C: Overground

Chapter 24A: Libido

Chapter 24B: Burroughs

Chapter 24C: Michael Faraday

Chapter 24D: Crooked Billet

Chapter 25A: Bankside

Chapter 25B: Fortescue

Chapter 25C: The Devils

Chapter 26A: Walkabout

Chapter 26B: Outback

Chapter 27A: Ways of Seeing

Chapter 27B: Henry Cole

Chapter 27C: Painting is dead

Chapter 27D: Constantine Ionides

Chapter 28A: Whitechapel

Chapter 28B: Decipherment

Chapter 28C: Thesis

Chapter 28D: Basil

Chapter 28E: Reflection

Chapter 29A: Prunella Clough

Chapter 29B: Caitlin

Chapter 30A: King of the Swingers

Chapter 30B: Rye bread

Chapter 30C: Celesta

Chapter 30D: Perambulator

Chapter 30E: Delicatessen

Chapter 30F: Inspired by Dante

Chapter 31A: The Third Man

Chapter 31B: Graham Greene

Chapter 31C: Carol Reed

Chapter 31D: Doobree

Chapter 31E: Spitfire

Chapter 32A: Green salad

Chapter 32B: Scriblerus Club

Chapter 32C: The Threepenny Opera

Chapter 32D: Hansel and Gretel

Chapter 32E: Grimm

Chapter 33A: Mona Inglesby

Chapter 33B: Mother Brown

Chapter 33C: Marbling

Chapter 33D: Grist to the Mill

Chapter 34A: The Old Vic

Chapter 34B: The Wars of the Roses

Chapter 34C: Gaunt

Chapter 34D: Lord Alfred Douglas

Chapter 35A: Swallows and Amazons

Chapter 35B: Four Just Men

Chapter 35C: Southbourne

Chapter 36A: Fingerprint

Chapter 36B: Lysistrata

Chapter 36C: Life

Chapter 37A: Gay Rich

Chapter 37B: Otello

Chapter 37C: Alfred Hitchcock

Chapter 38A: Shepherd’s Bush

Chapter 38B: Cold War

Chapter 38C: Lewis chessmen

Chapter 38D: Metropolis

Chapter 38E: Akira Kurosawa

Chapter 39A: Diploma Show

Chapter 39B: Cabaret

Chapter 39C: Christopher Isherwood

Chapter 39D: Night Mail

Chapter 39E: Churchyard

Chapter 40A: Solaris

Chapter 40B: Lawrence of Britannia

Chapter 40C: War Paint

Chapter 40D: Sydling St Nicholas

ART STUDENT Book Four 1971-72

The Introduction

If you wanted to enjoy yourself back in 1968, and were so inclined, you might possibly think about going to Art College, perhaps in London, and spending your summer holidays wandering around the great galleries of Europe including the Louvre, the Prado and the Vatican, as well as visiting the Parthenon, the caves of Altamira and Pompeii.

This account of such indulgence, a mosaic of short episodes, is the platform for presenting the History of Art, Literature and especially Film as it was encountered, using hyperlinks for reference and illustration. A series of five books presents the whole rose tinted reminiscence beginning with the first book in Bournemouth-by-the-Sea, all that time ago, when Modern Art was, indeed, still relatively modern.

The many references to Literature and History, throughout the books, reflect what the Fine Arts once enjoyed. This was a happy synthesis between Art, History and Literature. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the Fine Arts were deprived of this by other Art forms, which included Illustration, Photography, and particularly Film. The consequence of these developments was an ideology of what little remained. This was called Modern Art.

It was all such a long time ago but I would, nevertheless, not want to embarrass the characters I describe so I have made everybody anonymous and given them the names from the dramatis personae of Thomas Hardy novels unless, of course they are undoubtedly dead.

I hope the inclusion of pronunciation advice is not too annoying but Goethe, Nietzsche, Ingres and Laocoön are really just asking for trouble.

The sad fact, and one of the reasons for this eBook enterprise, is I was talking to the once fellow student recently, the character I call Springrove in the books, and he and I agreed we would not follow the same path and go to Art College today; the immense debts incurred would not be worth the education, much of which is self-driven anyway.

The internet provides education, access to images, commentary, discussion, platforms for publishing and the means for expression which were not available then. Today I would write a blog, and have exhibitions online, because I think constructive criticism is also important. Whether you take heed of it, or not, is another matter.

ART STUDENT Book Four 1971-72

Chapter 1A: El Prat

They could make out the unfinished spires of the Sagrada Familia in the distance after being deposited in downtown Barcelona by the bus from the airport. Yet another fine mess; how did they manage to do it? It was all down to presumption.

After last summer they were careful to check the airport, and it was Heathrow this time, but their flight to Tangiers was in the air now, as we speak! The nine o’clock flight had taken off half an hour ago. For some reason they had unthinkingly presumed the flight, like last year, would be nine in the evening. Not so, and with student flights, that was it, they had lost the seventeen quid. And they still had to get there!

Giles had spent the night at the Springrove residence and they had just had a leisurely breakfast. When Johnnie, face aghast, put the phone down after speaking to Heathrow, they were soon striding down The Avenue towards Turnham Green Station, discussing the dire situation with excessive profanity. Quick as they could up to the British Student Travel Centre at 231 Tottenham Court Road to book the next flight. Giles and Johnnie sat on the tube scowling at the other passengers.

Andy had pulled out at the last minute; the reason was money. He was expected to help out in his father’s barber shop in the holidays and he did not have the means to earn that sort of money; it was just not possible. Johnnie said he sounded upset on the phone.

At the Student Travel Centre they discovered there was not another flight available to Tangiers for the next few days. What were they going to do? Where was the nearest? There were two seats still available on a flight to Barcelona tomorrow night. They took them.

They were still not sure about Morocco but they were informed they could take a train down south to Algeciras, pronounced al ja seeras, and get a ferry over to somewhere called Ceuta, pronounced soota, and from there a coach to Tangiers. All that money wasted and two days down the drain, oh well.

Chapter 1A: Hyperlinks

Barcelona

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barcelona

Algeciras

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algeciras

Ceuta

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceuta

Chapter 1B: Only a Beggar

As was his wont, Antoni Gaudí, pronounced gow dee, was just popping down to his local church for a quick prayer and confession, his daily spiritual wash and brush up when, as was his wont, he stepped out into the road, for a quick butchers up at the basilica he had designed, and was now in the process of building. The consequence of this was he was duly run over by a tram.

He was covered in dust from living on the site of the new basilica in Barcelona, the Sagrada Família and, whilst his spirituals were spotless, he had been letting himself go somewhat recently. Something of a dandy when he was a young man he was now dishevelled in appearance, wearing rags, and carrying no identity papers; the policeman attending the accident thought he was a beggar, and so did the hospital where he was taken. He was somewhat neglected and died the next day in 1926.

Gaudí had taken over the building work of the basilica in 1883 and increasingly contrived to change the designs to accommodate his own aesthetic, a quite singular combination of Gothic and Art Nouveau. Not the full monty, the Sagrada Família was only a basilica. It was not a proper cathedral because it did not have a coffee machine in the cloisters. Nevertheless it was going to be something when it stopped looking like a building site; Salisbury must have looked like this but not for quite so long.

Giles and Johnnie did not bother with going too close; this was one of the many sacrifices to economy they had to make on this trip. They passed by the Casa Milá, the Miracle Home, or La Pedrera meaning the Quarry, Gaudí’s sumptuous block of curving flats with wrought iron balconies, built between 1906 and 1910, on the bus to the Picasso Museum, after changing their travellers cheques, and booking the train and ferry to Tangiers.

Chapter 1B: Hyperlinks

Antoni Gaudí

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antoni_Gaud%C3%AD

Sagrada Família

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagrada_Fam%C3%ADlia

Art Nouveau

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_Nouveau

Casa Milá,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casa_Mil%C3%A0

Chapter 2A: Museu Picasso

Giles had seen Anne Seaway, from Bournemouth College of Art, at Wimbledon when she had come up to visit Taffy the last week of term. She was at Bath College of Art now, at somewhere called Corsham. That same day she met Springrove and, from what Johnnie had been saying, over the holidays their acquaintance developed and they were now thoroughly involved; he seemed quite struck. Well, what do you know?

Giles noticed a poster advertising a bullfighter, called El Puno, on the way into the Museu Picasso. Picasso and Matisse were the heavies of early modern art coming out of Paris; Pablo Picasso had joined George Braque, pronounced brark, to develop Cubism.

Everything they had taught Giles at Bournemouth about what was estimable for a draughtsman was evidenced in Picasso’s early work, particularly his forthright and unflinching use of line when drawing the nude. His father was a painter and art teacher but even by the time they moved to Barcelona, when Picasso was fourteen, he had been taught very well indeed and had eclipsed his father in ability.

Much of the early work then, that was on display in the Museu Picasso had been done in Malaga, where he was born, but Picasso himself wanted the museum to be in Barcelona, where it included his analytical work on the Velasquez painting, Las Meninas, which they hoped they would see later this trip.

Most of the work on show was done before 1917 and covered the Blue Period 1901 to 1904, when he was shuffling between Barcelona and Paris. The Blue Period was thoroughly blue in every way, emaciated and miserable figures enduring their suffering. The Rose Period, 1904 to 1906, that followed was when Picasso spiritually ran off and joined a circus. Harlequins, from the Comedia d’elle arte, feature alongside acrobats in these not quite so fraught paintings. El Greco was always an influence on Picasso.

Picasso met Gertrude Stein, the wealthy American, living in Paris, who started collecting his work and introduced him to Henri Matisse, pronounced onree ma tees. Then Picasso moved to Montmartre, a district of Paris, to a filthy, run down place they called Le Bateau-Lavoir, which burnt down last year, in 1970. Here he would get to know the concrete poet, Guillaume Apollinaire, Jean Cocteau, Amedeo Modigliani and Christopher Wood. He would also start work on Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.

Chapter 2A: Hyperlinks

Museu Picasso

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Museu_Picasso

Pablo Picassso

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pablo_Picasso

George Braque

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Braque

Cubism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubism

Las Meninas

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Las_Meninas_(Picasso)

Blue Period

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picasso%27s_Blue_Period

Rose Period

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picasso%27s_Rose_Period

Gertrude Stein

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gertrude_Stein

Henri Matisse

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_Matisse

Montmartre

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montmartre

Chapter 2B: Demoiselles

Pablo Picasso knew he was going to paint something special when he stretched the eight foot square canvas for Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, pronounced dem mosels daveen nyon, because he lined the back of it; you only do that for specials. Not even Colin, the technician, did that.

Influenced by The Opening of the Fifth Seal by El Greco, Les Grandes Baigneuses by Paul Cézanne, and the Blue Nude (Souvenir de Biskra), by his, more famous, rival, Matisse, Picasso began work on Demoiselles in 1907.

It portrays five prostitutes working in a Barcelona brothel, which would have been a quick walk from this very museum. No perspective is employed; the faceted figures are unattractive, rather confrontational in fact, and two of the prostitutes have faces which are obviously primitive tribal masks. Paul Gauguin had exhibited at the first Salon d’Autumne in 1903, and his was another influence in this concern.

‘When there’s anything to steal, I steal’ was a quote attributed to Picasso, much later, but not only did he mean painting practice, but literally, and from the Louvre. Ancient Iberian statue heads used in Demoiselles were nicked on his instructions. Apollinaire, poet and playwright, the defender of Cubism, indeed the man who termed the word Cubism, knew the thief, and let him stay in his house, as his secretary.

Guillaume, pronounced gee ome, Apollinaire, was born in Rome, of an aristocratic Polish mother, and moved to Paris, where he became a big noise in the radical artistic circles of the time. He knew everyone who was anyone. Not only was he concerned with Cubism but also with Orphism, of whom Robert Delaunay was a major protagonist, and then later with early Surrealism. After being wounded badly, in the First World War, Apollinaire died in 1918 of Spanish Flu, aged thirty eight.

Chapter 2B: Hyperlinks

Les Demoiselles d’Avignon

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Demoiselles_d%27Avignon

The Opening of the Fifth Seal

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Demoiselles_d%27Avignon#/media/File:El_Greco,_The_Vision_of_Saint_John_(1608-1614).jpg

Les Grandes Baigneuses

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Demoiselles_d%27Avignon#/media/File:Paul_C%C3%A9zanne_047.jpg

Blue Nude (Souvenir de Biskra)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Demoiselles_d%27Avignon#/media/File:Matisse_Souvenir_de_Biskra.jpg

Guillaume Apollinaire

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guillaume_Apollinaire

Chapter 2C: Spanish Flu

An operetta, The Song of Forgetting was being premiered in Madrid at about the same time as the first outbreaks of Spanish flu occurred, in 1918 at the end of the First World War. In the operetta was a Don Juan, pronounced don one, character who sang The Naples Soldier and it was quipped this song was as catchy as the flu!

The association of the malign womaniser, Don Juan, corresponds with the pernicious epidemic. The only country that was not censoring the press, at this time of war, was neutral Spain and so people thought it started there and was particularly virulent. Spanish flu, however, was called Naples Soldier in Spain.

Don Giovanni, pronounced jee varnee, is the Italian equivalent of Don Juan in Mozart’s opera, a wealthy libertine who rushes about seducing women. He first occurred in a play by Tirso de Molina around 1630. Byron wrote his satirical poem Don Juan, but turns the idea around; his Don Juan, is seduced by numerous women. There was a real character, in the form of Giacomo, pronounced jackomo, Casanova, from Venice, who seduced women and wrote about it in The Memoirs of Jacques Casanova de Seingalt 1725-1798, the unexpurgated version of which, Histoire de ma vie, was only published in 1960.

Spanish Flu worldwide killed more people than the Black Death; it killed more people than the First World War. It is thought to have spread because of the huge amount of people collected together on the Western Front who then dispersed.

Chapter 2C: Hyperlinks

Spanish Flu

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1918_flu_pandemic

Don Juan

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Juan

Don Juan

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Juan_(Byron)

Don Giovanni

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Giovanni

Giacomo Casanova

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giacomo_Casanova

Histoire de ma vie

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Histoire_de_ma_vie

Chapter 2D: The Spanish Civil War

The Spanish Civil War, fought between 1936 and 1939, was the Nationalists, led by General Francisco Franco fighting a diverse group of people under the banner of Republicans, which included anarchists and communists, regionalists and republicans. It was a particularly cruel war; which war is not.

Franco’s forces were given aid by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. The four hour terror bombing and strafing of Guernica, by Nazi planes, in 1937, was an experiment in blitzkrieg, pronounced blitz kreeg; that same year Picasso painted a memorial to the Basque town, Guernica, pronounced gur neeka.

Anti-fascist volunteers, from many countries, sympathetic to the republican cause, joined the International Brigade, notably from France, Germany and Italy, but also from all over the world, including Britain. The Prime Minister, Edward Heath, visited Barcelona with a group of students from Oxford and met Jack Jones, now the present General Secretary