The Masterpieces
1. Musée des Beaux Arts by W.H. Auden (1938)
Wystan Auden (1908-1973) was British-American and one of the most celebrated poets of his generation. He would emigrate from the UK to the USA in 1939 on the eve of the Second World War (something for which many in the British establishment never forgave him). But before he crossed the Atlantic, he saw his role as a form of literary journalist. After witnessing something of the horrors of the Spanish Civil War, he travelled around Europe as many increasingly felt the inevitability of renewed conflict, a mere twenty years or so after the Armistice ending the previous war.
In Brussels, he visited Belgium’s fine art museum, and found himself gripped by several works in the gallery’s Brueghel room. Pieter Brueghel the Elder (c1525-1569) was a Dutch Old Master who specialised in complex group scenes and landscapes, often setting biblical or mythological narratives in the world of his contemporaries. In the course of his poem, Auden alludes to three such paintings, although it is the 3rd (Landscape with the Fall of Icarus) which held his primary focus.
For follow up:
- The official website for the Brussels Old Masters museum
- Good engagement with the poem by Oliver Tearle (his Interesting Literature site is great)
- I enjoyed this discussion on the great Poetry for All about the poem (although I am not sure I completely chimed with Shankar Vendantam’s take)
- The W. H. Auden Society
- The relevant section of Ovid’s Metamorphoses in prose translation (Book VIII: 183-235)
2. Kandinsky's Color Study: Squares with Concentric Circles (1913)
Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) was a pioneering Russian-born artist and theorist who emigrated to France in the 1930s after living in Germany (including a decade teaching at the famous Bauhaus). He was committed to finding ways to create ‘pure’ art through use of abstraction and colour especially.
His first career was in academic law, and he was very successful, being offered a professorship in Estonia before he was 30. But he turned his back on it to concentrate on painting, beginning his studies in Munich in 1896. He moved back and forth between Central Europe and Russia even after the 1917 Russian Revolution, but he soon realised that his outlook was worlds apart from that of the new regime.
Quite what his beliefs were is hard to pin down, but at the very least he was influenced by a unique cocktail of Russian Orthodoxy, Theosophy, Wagnerian theories of total art, and much besides. He was famously synaesthesic (as Sophie explains in the episode) which features in his extraordinary 1910, Concerning the Spiritual in Art.
I (Mark) absolutely loved Amor Towles’ wonderful 2016 book, A Gentleman in Moscow, not least because of a rather ghoulish fascination with the early years of the Russian Revolution.
When I heard about its TV adaptation with Ewan McGregor, I was nervous, to say the least. Thankfully, I thought they did a really good job of it in the end. But I became totally obsessed with the Opening Titles, which clearly owe no little inspiration from Kandinsky! Simply beautiful…
3. Lingus by Snarky Puppy (2014)
Snarky Puppy is a jazz fusion collective started by the legend that is bassist Michael League (right) in 2004. Since then over 40 musicians have played with them at various points, though they usually feature 10-15 players at a time in the studio or live.
Their 2014 album We Like It Here was made while the band was doing a huge European tour, and was recorded before a live audience in Utrecht, Netherlands on four consecutive nights.
The final track, Lingus, apparently got its title from the fact that League was jotting down parts for the different musicians while on an Aer Lingus flight!
League explained the group’s membership ethos to All About Jazz. If a player could earn more for a gig outside the band
… we’d get a substitute and if the substitute played well, then it felt like, ‘Well, they learned the music and played great, what a waste for them to learn all that for one gig…’ so we would kind of just keep them in the Rolodex, so to speak, and rotate them in and out. Then it became a thing where we started touring so much that guys couldn’t do all the dates, or didn’t want to, or whatever.
That would change the way that they played the music. And then even when that new person left, that memory of that new relationship with the music would remain. So really we just kept building on the personalities of the new people that would come in, brick by brick. …in general, the guys understand what the band is – a rotating cast…
But I don’t really think of Snarky Puppy as a collective. It’s just a large band and sometimes people aren’t there. It doesn’t feel like a revolving door, it doesn’t feel anonymous at all. The guys who have played gigs with us the least have still played several hundred gigs. That’s more than most people play with their own bands. So it’s very much a tight, familial unit. Everyone feels very, very close and very essential, also.
Photos (r) ©Andrea Rotili (at the Fano Jazz Network)
Also mentioned
- From Joel: dramatic song miming in churches!
- From Sophie: The Rings of Power
- From Mark: Carl André’s pile of bricks: aka Equivalent VIII which the Guardian’s Jonathan Jones called “the most boring controversial artwork ever”!
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