Showing posts with label Leonardo Da Vinci. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Leonardo Da Vinci. Show all posts

31/01/2017

Ten Leonardo da Vinci Drawings at The National Gallery of Ireland

On Thursday 9th June 2016, Carol and I went into the National Gallery of Ireland to see ten drawings by Leonardo da Vinci from the British Royal Collection. Dublin was bathed in the golden light of dusk in late spring and the women on the streets seemed to glow with fecundity though none more so than a beautiful, slender, auburn haired, golden tanned, pregnant woman in a bright pale blue sun dress and with flip-flops - I saw passing outside the National Gallery.                                                                                                      
                        
I had not ventured out to see an exhibition in about four months and I was frankly sick to death of contemporary art and saw no point in frustrating and angering myself anymore with the trivial, commercial and eager to please crap of my peers and wondered why anyone still wanted to make or write about art. Art for me had ended in 1985 when Neo-Expressionism stopped being the major movement of the day and Neo-Geo took its place. I simply did not give a dam about the zillions of pastiches and rehashes of style done with such a waste of materials and human energy since 1985 and whose only merit was commercial, moralistic or as the embodiment of identity politics. I could not identify with an art world that had turned from an arena of truthful, personal, freedom of expression - regardless of the personal cost - into a gilded cage populated by extreme left-wing and Feminist moralisers who schizophrenically also hung around art galleries and private member’s clubs trying to sell their art to corporate billionaires. I was now just a highly informed philistine and carried on with my own art because it was the only thing that kept me sane. Moreover, as a middle-aged artist, I had long since stopped being influenced by other artists and had come to realise that no one could help me in the midst of my painting - than myself. In fact, I had to think hard to think of the last exhibition that had actually inspired or aided my own work. But I really would have a been a philistine - if I had passed up the opportunity to see drawings by da Vinci! And as it turned out, this was to be one of the most inspiring exhibitions I had seen in a long time.                                            


I had glanced at the drawings on the National Gallery website and was struck by how introverted and lacking in bravura flashiness they were but I hoped that in the flesh they would have more impact. Seeing them in the dimly lit gallery space was thus a revelation. Da Vinci’s drawing were on thin sheets of paper mostly no bigger than postcards and I had to peer to see all their details. What I saw in the flesh was a grandeur of vision on a small scale - I had never witnessed in any other artist. Only Dürer came close to da Vinci’s power as a draughtsman on a small scale. The paper da Vinci used was made of cotton rag, hot pressed and no more than 90lb in weight. The paper was so thin that one could see the marks from the verso of the sheets - which he frequently made use of on both sides. Those sheets that had drawings on both sides were exhibited in double sided glass frames which one could walk around. The exhibition started with a short and succinct video demonstrating the materials and techniques of da Vinci the draughtsman. As you know, I loathe video pieces of any kind in exhibitions, but as a technical geek, I found it highly informative and loved hearing about the materials da Vinci used.                                     
                           

You know one of the reasons, I got an E in my first ever essay on art in Art College at the age of eighteen, was because it was on Picasso’s Les Demoiselle d’Avignon and since I had never seen it in the flesh - I found it almost impossible to write about. I still haven’t seen Les Demoiselle d’Avignon and I still don’t feel fit to write about it. I was nineteen then and even now at forty-five - I find it as hard to write about art works I have never seen. Seeing da Vinci’s drawings in low resolution JPGs on the National Gallery website gave me little idea of the material quality of the drawings in the flesh. Even when I went home and looked at the drawings in high resolution photographs in various books on da Vinci at home - I found the experience strangely detached. But in the gallery, where I had to navigate other viewers, peer into the glass frames under dim light and strain to see all the fine details of da Vinci’s line - it was a full erotic experience.                                                                              
                                                      
The last time I had a chance to see da Vinci drawings was in 2007, in the Chester Betty Gallery, but I had come away from that very frustrated and disappointed. The Codex Leicester, actually contained no standalone drawings, and those on the margins of The Codex Leicester were restricted to water and engineering - a subject I had no interest in and even if I did, I did not speak Latin and did not have a mirror to reverse da Vinci’s famously reversed writing. So it was a relief to finally see drawings of real impact in this exhibition. The ten drawings captured some of da Vinci’s chief interests, a female portrait with da Vinci’s much copied enigmatic and benign smile, a study of blackberry bush, study of river water damage on an embankment, studies for horses, studies of cats and one drawing of from a series of ten about a deluge which reflected da Vinci’s pessimistic fascination with the end of the world. There was nothing narcissistically flashy or extravagant about these drawings. In fact, they seemed incredibly private and introverted works made for da Vinci’s own pleasure and understanding. They convinced slowly and devastatingly.                                                                                                                                  

The great criticism of da Vinci, was that he had so many ideas - but realised too few of his projects. That is of course true, which is why it is his drawings that are arguably his greatest achievement, because it is in them that we witness his encyclopaedic interest in the natural world and plans for his many inventions. Today, these are prized almost as conceptual statements worthy in their own right - irrespective of whether or not he actually ever carried them to fulfilment - and in fact a sketch by da Vinci is often more important and profound than whole frescoed rooms by his technically skilled and hardworking but dim witted peers. Not only was da Vinci an incomparable genius at the start of the Renaissance - he was a genius with an open arena to play in - and you can see the pleasure and intensity of experience he brought to all his studies. He was like Columbus discovering America - or more recently Steve Jobs at the start of the personal computer age – with limitless room for discovery and an unassailable right to call himself the first and best - before many. Moreover, da Vinci’s omnivorous intellect and knowledge meant that everything he drew no matter how humble - was freighted with such an intensity of scrutiny and understanding - that he could make even a few branches from a blackberry bush seem epic in import.                                                            


The last great artist to bring such fresh intensity to the sketchbook from life, was the teenage Pablo Picasso in Spain at the end of the nineteenth century. Moreover, even though I have always considered drawing from life a vital part of one’s training, I have always had my doubts about the practice of students today being told to go out into nature and the city - to draw life - because so much of our real lives today are experienced through mediated images - that drawing from nature and physical human life - is actually unnatural and a hopelessly nostalgic, escapist fantasy. Scurrying out on expeditions into the real world - to do drawings from life today - is about as cliché, retrograde and mendacious as the nature poems of ‘poets’ living in tower blocks surrounded by digital screens, listening to Beethoven on their iPhones. In this Post-Modern world, real life only happens - when there is a power cut – and we don’t enjoy it!                             


Unlike like so many artists since the invention of photography and the cult of Impressionism, da Vinci’s drawings, did not superficially record the fall of light on bodies or objects – instead they recorded both the inner and outer structure of forms - and tried to find the source of their life. His vision of the body and nature was thus not of the fleeting and subjective but rather of the timeless and ordered. Moreover, da Vinci’s drawings proved that not only was he a great draughtsman working from life - but even more importantly - he was a great draughtsman working from his memory and imagination. Take for example his sheet of drawings of cats which are all perfectly realised in all kinds of rest, motion and fight. I have drawn periodically my cats and know that even when asleep they rarely stay still! So to draw them from life when they are resting is difficult enough - but almost impossible when moving. So da Vinci’s drawings of cats were as much about his almost photographic memory and knowledge of their anatomy as mere observation. Likewise, in the final drawing of a deluge, we see da Vinci’s knowledge and imagination create an image beyond mere appearances that may have been incorrect in minor details but overall - was epic in it cataclysmic vision of nature.                                                                                                          

For me da Vinci is the greatest draughtsman in art history because of the vastness of his range and subject matter - with only Dürer coming close to him. He continues to be an influence on young artists and Jean Michel Basquait for example was obsessed with reworking, blowing up and roughing up da Vinci’s drawings - particularly those related to anatomy. Da Vinci’s humble drawings for me were like a blessed liberation from the tyranny of the Post-Modern Neo-Salon artists of today like Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst and countless other rich nobodies who try to cow their peers with vast projects executed by teams of hired underlings, skilful failed artists, technicians and factory workers. You could frankly pile up all the tonnes of ‘art’ produced by most of these Post-Modern, Neo-Salon Robber Barons and it would not mean a fraction of what a tiny, feather weight drawing by da Vinci means - not only to me - but to Art History. That is why da Vinci is so inspiring - he offers no excuses to the young artist. So you can’t afford to hire thirty lackey painters to paint vast oil on linen photo-realist confections or fifty foundry workers to take a toy you found in a Poundshop and turn it into a ten-ton bronze? So you can’t even afford a small canvas and oil paint? Surely you can afford a sheet of paper and a stick of black chalk? Let’s see what you can do with that! And if you do paint - just paint twelve small and medium sized - timeless masterpieces!

13/03/2014

Leonardo da Vinci Codex



On Wednesday June 27 - I went with my Carol to the Chester Beatty Museum. This museum housed a lifetime of collecting by Sir Chester Beatty. It was one of the finest collections of rare manuscripts, Bibles, Korans and Asian artefacts in the world. The Chester Beatty museum was one of the multi-cultural venues in Ireland - but this was profound multiculturalism - not the rubbish of contemporary 'identity-art' or the advert bullshit of the media and fashion world. However, we had not gone to see the permanent collection - we went to see the Leonardo Da Vinci's Codex Leicester exhibition - one of this geniuses many notebooks - this one centering on science, the natural world and water. The Codex Leicester had originally been owned by the Earl of Leicester but recently been purchased by the Billionaire Bill Gates – founder of Microsoft. Sad to say it was one of the most boring exhibitions I have ever seen.
             

Don't get me wrong - I thought Da Vinci was not only the greatest draughtsman and one of the greatest artists who ever lived - he was also the greatest intellectual in human history. Smug ignoramuses of my day - carped that he painted so little (only twelve known paintings), that he finished nothing, that many of his ideas had been already been discovered by other naturalists and scientists and that many of his inventions did not work. However, frankly I didn’t care a dam! Da Vinci was one of the last intellectuals who could encompass in his mind all the discoveries of science and art. By my day - subjects were so specialist that it would have been utterly impossible for another polymath like Da Vinci to emerge.
             

However, I had no interest in science - or the movement of water – so these works seemed very dry to me. On the other hand, I knew that anyone interested in Science would have gone crazy for this exhibition.
             

The display of the notebook pages was also highly irritating as well. The pages were displayed on Plexiglas's so that you could read both sides of the page - all that was fine. However, the pages were about two foot away from the plate glass display cases and the lighting almost pitch black. Da Vinci's writing was so crabbed and small - in Italian and written in mirror writing - that it almost impossible to say that we had really seen the work at all. Thankfully, there was a great little catalogue for €20 -that we bought - and it was wonderfully illustrated.
             

Seeing these thin sheets of paper (no more than 72lb and almost transparent in display) - spot lit dimly in a darkened room – struck me as all a little too theatrical and similar to the worshiping a religious relic. Of course, these objects had to be preserved – but there were ways of doing it without ruining the viewer’s pleasure.
             

I still to this day remember when I saw the greatest drawing I had ever seen. It was 1996 and I was in the National Gallery in London - when I came upon Da Vinci's sublime preparatory drawing for the oil painting Virgin and Child with St. Anne, c1508. The drawing was housed under bulletproof glass - because a few years earlier a lunatic had come into the gallery with a shotgun and blasted the drawing. The National Gallery’s repair of the drawing was masterful. This huge drawing (it was nearly six feet by four feet) in charcoal with white chalk highlights on tinted paper - sent shivers down my spine. There was more depth and profundity to this drawing than in hundreds of thousands of other paintings I had seen. Part of the reason for its power was Da Vinci's maternal complex, which allowed him to express so tenderly - the love between mother and child.
             

So of course I was hoping for the Codex Leicester to have wonderful drawings but there were few actual drawings embedded in or on the margins of his text and they were too small. Still to my mind – Da Vinci was the greatest draughtsman in human history. Michelangelo could have given him a run for his money - but there was so much more variety to Da Vinci's work - portraits, nudes, religious subjects, inventions, nature studies, plans for sculpture, cadaver studies, anatomy drawing and so on - Michelangelo basically drew nothing but the male nude or male nude transformed into a woman! Dürer certainly had nothing to be ashamed of - but his work lacked the grace and fluidity of Da Vinci's drawings. Robert Hughes put it best when he said Da Vinci drew like an angel. Recently Picasso had also challenged Da Vinci - but I still think that drawing for drawing - Da Vinci was the best.
             

Leaving the Da Vinci exhibition - we went upstairs to the permanent collection room subdivided between all the world religions. This room was filled with some of the most moving, technically skillful, devout and heartfelt manuscripts, Bibles, Korans, Russian Orthodox Icons and Buddha’s. The earliest works were Egyptian Demotic Text on Papyrus from Ad100! Then there were small fragments of Greek text on Papyrus dating as far back as AD150-200! If you believed in a God - these were essential things to visually and spiritually consume - for they recorded the earliest manifestations of faith in Gods or later one God.
             

Cave painters had a Pagan belief in the magic properties of animals and they paid them lavish and profound homage in their pictures. However, modern religions as we know them only really began with the Egyptians, Jews, Greeks and Romans followed by the Christians, Muslims and Buddhists. Personally, I was a nihilistic Atheist and opponent to organized religion - but even I was profoundly moved by these religious texts and statuary.
             

The time individual pages of these Bibles and Korans took to illuminate was mind-boggling. Looking around these many works, I was flabbergasted by the minute detail, sure drawing, rich colour and deep feeling, which these dignified art works possessed. Anyone who thought that Islam was a brutal and barbaric religion – should have seen Koran's like these - for what they proved - was just how much dignity, imagination and disciplines these artists and devout believers had. Of course in Islam it was strictly forbidden to draw realistically - so in compensation these Islamic scholars and master illuminators created rich, dense abstract patterns - reflecting upon the complexity and yet also the order of the Islamic imagination. The Islamic use of gold and lapis lazuli was heartbreaking meaningful. Yet again, I was struck dumb by the minute calligraphy, symmetrical order and integrity to all of these Islamic designs.
            

 Another category I loved was the wonderful Jataka painted folding books from Burma (c1800s) - laid out like a folded accordions. The colours and drawing in these work was so daring and even avant-garde. The Buddha's in bronze or in prints, or painted scrolls – were sumptuous and highly reasoned works of great refinement.
             

So too were the Indian miniatures but they were also highly complex images - unmistakably Indian but clearly also influenced by the best and most refined of the West and Islam.
             

Finally, I was intensely moved by a group of about eight Russian Orthodox Icons - painted in Tempera on inch thick small blocks of wood. The design, subtle and daring colouring, even naïve drawings of these works made a powerful impression on me.  The sincerity of these artists - was not in doubt!
            

 However, it got me wondering if there were any artists in my day - whose work was so intensely devout, pious and heartfelt. I doubted it. These artists lived in an uncorrupted world before mass media - and their belief in God was no mere affectation - it was an obsession. The last great Religious artists in the West were Georges Rouault in the early twentieth century and Mark Rothko at its end. In his bitter yet empathic watercolour studies of prostitutes and his stain glass like oil paintings of Christ - Georges Rouault gave a modern retelling of the sins of vice, the suffering of women at the hands of men and the passion of the Christ. In his ethereal early colourful abstracts and later darker abstract canvases - Rothko was the last painter to believe that art could act as an intermediary between man and God.
             

Only their work struck me shorn of the sick sentimentality, crass decadence, posturing and jolly spiritualism of my modern ‘spiritual’ world - the type of rubbish spouted and shown on Oprah.  For me Rothko was one of the greatest religious painters of all time and certainly, no one in the West had his intellectual probity, anguish, obsession, and idealism. His depression and final suicide - was like that of van Gogh - no mere accident - it was the nihilistic summation of a life spent in maddened thirst for meaning, feeling and intelligent Religious faith.
             

Overall, the Chester Beatty collection proved to me what a rich and varied tapestry human civilization was. It also proved that some of the most timeless and modern art in the world - was created over a thousand years ago.