SECRET EXCHANGES
Long Prose
Copyright © 2012 John O'Loughlin
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CHAPTER
ONE
He was so very pleased
to be sitting in such close proximity to the paintings he had specifically brought
Gwendolyn Evans along to the Tate Gallery to view; to have them all round him
in a dazzling profusion of light and colour.
Yes, it was fundamentally here, with these largely
abstract-looking canvases, that modern art began. Here, with Peace, Burial at Sea, Norham Castle,
Sunrise, Mountain Scene with Lake and Hut, Mountain in Landscape, and
Sunrise with a boat between headlands, all painted between 1835-40 in a
manner which, to Turner's contemporaries, could hardly have been expected to
win widespread understanding, let alone critical adulation! Yet here they were, exhibited on the wall in
front of Matthew Pearce, painter and sculptor, together with his latest
girlfriend, who had never seen them before.
Here for the eye to behold was the revolutionary break with tradition
which, not altogether surprisingly, had caused such a scandal in Turner's day, obliging the great painter to keep so much of his later
work largely to and for himself. In
these and similar paintings, matter had been broken down, virtually erased from
the canvas in order that light and colour could come shining out of it with a
brilliance and importance scarcely dreamed of by earlier painters. Here form, if and where it still existed, had
been subordinated to content, the material displaced by the spiritual, and the
resulting impression was so nebulous ... that one might have taken it for pure
abstraction - devoid of the even slightest reference to external reality. No artist before Turner had dared to be so
biased on the side of the spirit. More
exactly, no artist before Turner could have conceived of the possibility or
legitimacy of being so spiritually biased, especially prior to the nineteenth
century. It wouldn't have been relevant
to the age, an age, at least from approximately the 14-18th centuries, of what
Spengler would have called 'great art', or art that reflected Western man in
his egocentric prime - balanced, in varying degrees, between his subconscious and
superconscious minds in the ego at its dualistic height. Torn between the sensual
and the spiritual, the mundane and the transcendent.
Around the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in particular,
when Western man was in full-flower, there could not have been the slightest
possibility of an art arising which betrayed a distinct predilection for the
spirit - for light and colour over form and substance. Had, by any quirk of evolutionary fate,
something approximating to a late Turner been produced then, it would have
struck people as a mess, not art but rather something akin to an artist's
palette - one that had taken a number of diverse paints and suffered them to be
experimentally blended. With the
nineteenth century, however, a great change came over the Western mind, a
change initiated by the Industrial Revolution, itself a product in part of the
Napoleonic Wars, and the subsequent growth of towns and cities to a size quite
unprecedented in the entire history of mankind.
No longer was civilized man finely balanced between the sensual and the
spiritual, the subconscious and the superconscious minds, but in the process of
becoming increasingly biased on the side of the transcendent - in short, to
whatever reflected his growing isolation from nature in the artificial urban
and industrial environments he had created for himself in response to
evolutionary necessity. From the
nineteenth century, it was becoming increasingly evident that Western man had
passed his prime as an egocentric being, a recipient of dualistic tension, and
accordingly entered a post-egocentric epoch of transcendental lopsidedness, in
which the influence of the superconscious came to play an ever-more decisive
role in shaping his destiny. Hence Turner's
late canvases, which reflected the imbalance that was characterizing modern
man. And hence, too, their great
importance and significance to such eyes as could be expected, at this more
evolved juncture in post-egocentric time, to appreciate them - a greater number
of minds, it should be evident, than would have done so shortly after they were
first painted.
Yet, despite the eulogistic comments which Matthew Pearce was
making on behalf of the half-dozen or so brightly painted canvases in front of
him, Gwen's eyes weren't all that appreciative, her mind remaining rather
unmoved by them, even though, thanks in large measure to the esoteric
information being imparted to her by Matthew with regard to the general
direction of human evolution, she was now in a better position than ever before
to understand them. Had she been honest
with her boyfriend, instead of trying to please him by feigning enthusiasm for
the works, she would have confessed, there and then, to the sad fact that a
majority of the paintings on display in this particular section of the Turner
bequest left her stone cold, absolutely failed, for one reason or another, to
interest her. But from feminine tact,
which embraced a certain fear of what Matthew would think of her if she
disappointed him in this way, she did her best to appear sympathetic, to share
his unquestionable admiration for those exhibits upon which he specifically
chose to comment.
However, it was far from easy!
For even with the best will in the world, she couldn't bring herself to
view paintings like Mountain
in Landscape and
Not that Matthew Pearce was unduly garrulous or imposing, and
therefore necessitated one's constant attention on his conversation. Yet he was certainly not a man to allow
himself to be led from painting to painting at a rate corresponding to the
disinterestedness of his partner! On the
contrary, standing or sitting in front of a Turner from 3-5 minutes, as he
devotedly did in a number of instances, it was obligatory for her to fix her
attention on the relevant painting for a corresponding period of time, even
when it wasn't of any particular interest to her. A sign of impatience would almost certainly
have offended him, a cursory inspection of the other occupants of the room no
less than a tendency to flit from one painting to another independently of his
guidance and running commentary.
Feminine tact was enough to tell her this - now no less than previously!
Yet it wasn't enough to tell her that, after a couple of
minutes' silent inspection of Stormy sea with dolphins, Matthew would
suddenly change mental track and, for the first time since setting eyes on the
Turners, launch out on a swift stream of criticism concerning the manifest
turbulence of the scene portrayed, which he considered the worst aspect of
Romanticism and the one he could least abide.
For, to his way of thinking, the turbulent was by nature Satanic,
opposed to evolutionary progress towards blissful passivity, and, for that
reason, something to be condemned.
"God knows," he continued, speaking in a fairly quiet though
firm tone-of-voice, "Delacroix and Gericault were worse offenders against
'the peace that passes all understanding' than ever Turner was! Yet that doesn't mean to say that he wasn't
guilty, from time to time, of following suit and producing works which, in
their Romantic turbulence, correspond to the demonic. That and the one next to it, the Snow
Storm, are typically Romantic in this respect. They seethe with negativity, with horribly
tortuous activity. Not my favourite
Turner, by any means!"
He broke away from the canvas in question, as though from an
evil spell, and briskly led Gwen towards the next room, which contained works
by other English painters. He looked
quite stylish in his tight black denims and puffy zipper-jacket, stylish
enough, at any rate, to attract the passing attention of two young women, who
caused Gwen to look at him from a broadly personal viewpoint herself and
reflect upon his tidy, if informal, appearance.
His dark-brown hair, gathered into a short pigtail that gently curved
down from the back of his head to his neck, had been washed only the night
before and looked perfectly docile. With
his aquiline profile and large blue eyes, he was certainly more handsome than
the previous men in her life, which was of some consolation. He was also more intelligent, though not
perhaps more highly-sexed. As yet, it
was still too soon for her to get him into proper sexual perspective, since she
hadn't known him long enough. But time
would doubtless tell, and thus enable her to extend her assessment of him to
such matters as were of specific importance to her as a woman, not simply as an
intellectual.
Before entering the next room, however, Matthew halted near the
exist in front of one last Turner, a relatively small work entitled The Angel Standing in
the Sun, for which he confessed a special fondness, deeming it one of the
master's most spiritually noble productions - a shedder of dazzling light. "Admittedly, not one of his most
abstract-tending works," he softly remarked. "Yet the whole concept of angelic
transcendence and light is really too beautiful. Not altogether surprisingly, it was one of
his last works, dated 1846. I can't help
but admire its mystical symbolism. It is
virtually an epitome of the coming post-human millennium, of man become
superman, or angelic being, surrounded by spiritual light in blissful
self-realization. For, of course, the
essential light of the post-human millennium won't be the sun, though that will
doubtless continue to exist in heathen selflessness for some time thereafter,
but the light of spirit in the superconscious - the clear, as opposed to
unclear or chemical, light. Yet before
his death, Turner left us this magnificently paradoxical symbol of mankind's
future destiny, one which will continue to shine in the hearts of men
throughout the coming decades."
He looked sideways at Gwen to gauge her response, which, as
before, appeared to be fairly sympathetic.
She smiled back at him but remained silent. She didn't have much to say, since it was all
rather bewildering to her, and he sensed as much from her reticence. He sensed, too, that she was probably too shy
or reserved to talk in art galleries and was slightly embarrassed by his speech. Nevertheless he felt that he had to say
something, if only to justify being in her company. It would have seemed stranger to him had they
gone through the rooms without exchanging a word, as some couples evidently
did. Hitherto he had always gone along
to the Tate Gallery alone and had remained wrapped-up in himself, enshrouded in
silence and thoughtful contemplation of the paintings. Now that he was accompanied by a woman,
however, he considered it his duty to speak, to offer comments on several of
the exhibits which particularly impressed or even depressed him. And, besides, he had a burning desire to
instruct, to enlighten, to expatiate. He
hoped he wouldn't be wasting his breath on Gwen who, after all, was an
intelligent young woman - intelligent enough to have gone to college, at any
rate, and got herself a teaching diploma in French, which she was currently
justifying in her capacity as French teacher in a south London
comprehensive. So, if that was anything
to judge by, she ought to be appreciative of the merits of a great painter when
she saw one, and accessible, moreover, to such evolutionary theories as he was
only too keen to impress upon her for her own good.
Leaving the last room of the Turner bequest, they stepped
across the threshold of the next room, which was divided into two sections, one
small and the other large, and were immediately confronted by the turbulence of
a huge canvas by Francis Danby entitled The Deluge, at which Matthew quickly took
umbrage for its Romantic ferocity - the sight of so many twisted, struggling
nude or semi-nude bodies endeavouring to climb to safety from the rushing
flood-waters onto the rocks and trees that lay to-hand, offering the victims of
the deluge a temporary shelter from the waters of death. Not a particularly agreeable spectacle, by
any means; though a work of undoubted ingenuity, reminiscent of the turbulent
waterscapes favoured by Gericault, Delacroix, and, on occasion, the great
Turner himself. Compared with John
Martin's The Plains of Heaven, which was exhibited, curiously, in the
same section of the room, it was indeed a hellish context, its violence in
complete contrast to the blissful serenity of one of Martin's greatest works,
the only work on view of which the latter-day artist would allow himself to
think highly. In fact, the three
canvases by this artist on display here could be assessed, according to him, on
the basis of a descending order of merit, The Plains of Heaven, being
wholly transcendent, signifying the apex of tranquil spirituality, The Last
Judgement, with the Saved blissfully to one side of the canvas and the
Damned agonizingly to the other, presided over by Christ and His angels,
signifying a compromise between Heaven and Hell, and, finally, The Great
Day of His Wrath, focusing on a cataclysmic upheaval in which numerous naked
bodies were hurled with the falling, lightening-cleft rocks into a dark abyss
of raging hell, signifying virtually the furthest possible remove from blissful
tranquillity. One shuddered at the sight
of it, of so many panic-stricken people plunging helplessly to their doom in
the ugly black abyss between the sundered rocks! Romantic pessimism could go no further. The great evil at the root of life was
indubitably manifest.
"So far as I'm concerned," said Matthew, suddenly
breaking the horrified silence into which he had fallen in the presence of this
gruesome work, "the scene before us is positively primeval in its
cataclysmic turbulence, a record, one might argue, of pagan man, or man
tyrannized over by the moral darkness of his subconscious and living in fear of
a wrathful and largely materialistic deity.
It seethes with negativity, it knows no compromise. Unlike the scene depicted in The Last Judgement,
which could be said to signify the mentality of Christian man, or man torn between
the hell of materialistic damnation and the heaven of idealistic salvation,
half-way up the ladder of human evolution in some egocentric compromise. And there, at the apex of evolution, one
finds not a trace of Hell. For the
compromise has been superseded, and instead of seething negativity one has
blissful positivity, instead of death - life!"
He was of course referring Gwen's attention to The Plains of Heaven,
which he considered significant of the culmination of transcendental man's spiritual
aspirations. As yet, we were still too
close to the dualistic compromise for comfort; we still had a long way to go
before attaining to a life of transcendent bliss. Yet we were certainly heading in the right
direction, our spiritual bias on the side of the superconscious was becoming
more evident all the time and would doubtless continue to develop over the
coming decades ... until such time as not a trace of egocentric dualism
remained, and we entered the post-human millennium - the heaven that John
Martin had ingeniously symbolized through a tranquil, otherworldly landscape
peopled by the Blessed.
Oh yes, there could be little doubt that we were now closer to
that heavenly culmination than Western society had ever been in the past! We were no longer as dualistic, thank
goodness, as our egocentric forebears in the heyday of Christianity. We didn't give much credence to Hell. We didn't like the concept of compromise. Still less what had preceded it. The Great Day of His Wrath could hardly be
expected to attract all that many enthusiastic admirers these days, least of
all for its cataclysmic subject-matter!
No, it was to The Plains of Heaven that the enlightened modern
man instinctively turned, eager to see there the goal of human evolution. This painting had relevance to him. The others didn't. This was John Martin's highest conceptual
achievement, a fact which Matthew was keen to impress upon his girlfriend as
they stood in front of the large canvas for about three minutes, admiring and studying. And he was no less keen to impress upon her
the fact that, taken together, the three canvases in the vicinity of where they
were standing signified a summary of human evolution, beginning with the
pre-Christian, progressing to the Christian, and culminating in the
post-Christian - the wholly transcendent.
A journey, as it were, from agony to bliss via a dualistic compromise.
"Yes, I see your point," Gwen admitted, smiling
coyly. "Psychologically, one could
argue that The
Deluge is on a similar plane to The Great Day of His Wrath," she
added, turning back towards the Danby, plunging from the heights of Heaven to
the depths of Hell in a split second.
"Indeed!" concurred Matthew, following her across the
room. "Although Danby does at least
provide one with an angel weeping over the death, it would appear, of a flood
victim. Yet that's psychologically
inept, in my opinion, since angels shouldn't weep. As symbolic representatives of transcendent
spirituality, they should be incapable of indulging in negative emotions. They should pertain to the blissful
tranquillity of Heaven, not weep like poor wretches from a more mundane
realm. They should be spiritually
consistent - bringers of love and joy. A
weeping or angry angel would seem to be a contradiction in terms."
"Well, Francis Danby evidently considered it symbolically
apt to have a representative from the divine realm saddened by all the evil
afoot," Gwen declared pithily.
"So it would seem," Matthew conceded, smiling
wryly. "Yet is still strikes me as
rather surreal, if you see what I mean.
An angel in Hell? Very
unlikely! Unless, of course, it was a
fallen angel. But, then, fallen angels
aren't really angels in the true sense, are they?"
Gwen couldn't very well argue with that! She simply moved on a few paces to a canvas
by Samuel Colman entitled The Destruction of the Temple (c. 1830) which, with its
lightening-stricken crumbling stone and panic-stricken inhabitants, appeared
unequivocally hellish, unequivocally on a psychological level with the
pre-Christian. Undoubtedly a very
imaginative work, but hardly one guaranteed to inspire one with any great
confidence in the coming post-human millennium!
Nevertheless, as they were about to take their leave of it for the
larger section of Room 16, Matthew elected to say a few words in praise of the
transparency of a majority of the figures therein portrayed which, so he
maintained, was agreeably transcendent.
No such comment, however, could he allot to the Pre-Raphaelite
and associated paintings which now confronted his weary gaze as, reluctantly,
he shuffled after Gwen and stepped into a world of late Victorianism. Ugh, how he had come to loathe the
Pre-Raphaelites! How reactionary they
seemed to him these days, in light of what the Impressionists had been doing in
Not that the Middle Ages were as black or bleak as was
sometimes thought by contemporary liberals.
Yet they were by no means as agreeable as a spell in the fanciful
illusions of Pre-Raphaelitism might have led one to suppose! Nor would they have offered one much
consolation for the upheavals of modern life.
There was nothing particularly heavenly about an age of mounting
dualism. Nothing charitable about the
great castles which had been erected to protect the nobility from fellow
noblemen, popular unrest, and foreign invasion.
Compared with the present, it was undoubtedly closer to Hell, even given
all the horrors and limitations which beset the modern world. Yet the Pre-Raphaelites didn't want to see
that. They preferred to turn their back
on industrial progress and large-scale urbanization for the sake of a
comforting illusion which medievalism seemed to offer them. They preferred to think in terms of an
illusory Golden Age of the English past in which chivalrous knights came to the
timely rescue of beautiful damsels in distress, and people lived in harmony
with nature. They had no desire to learn
from Constable or Turner and follow in their progressive footsteps by adopting
a transcendental approach to painting.
That was left, on the contrary, to the Impressionists, those glorifiers
of spirituality in light and colour, those disintegrators of matter. The Pre-Raphaelites, by contrast, appear to
have had scant taste for spiritual leadership - assuming they would have known
how to recognize it in the first place.
Instead, they preferred to thematically regress not merely to the
previous century but some five or six centuries, and to paradoxically pretend
that such a regression was effectively a kind of progress. To them, an aristocratic society would have
made more sense than a proletarian one.
It would have corresponded to a Golden Age, whereas what was going on
around them in the industrial world signified a tarnishing of the mean, a
societal 'fall' from natural grace, which no right-thinking person could
possibly condone. Therefore back to the
days of old when knights were bold and England not yet ruined by
industrialism. Yet not as far back, it
has to be admitted, as the ages favoured by Poynter, Alma-Tadema, and Lord
Leighton, to name but three historical painters. No, let us give them some credit. They weren't that reactionary. Five or six hundred years merely - not a
couple of millennia!
It was with some psychological displeasure that Matthew Pearce
observed the titles and subject-matter of the paintings on display here, in the
larger section of Room 16. He was not at
all resigned to what seemed like an enthusiasm for them on the part of Gwen,
who peered eagerly into the canvases, let fall a whispered "too
beautiful!" or a respectful "so choice!" every now and then, as
though to assure him that she had a fairly developed aesthetic sense and was
confident he would agree with her as a matter of course - a thing which, to
some extent, he was superficially prepared to do, since the paintings here, as
elsewhere, of the leading Pre-Raphaelites were of course generally quite
beautiful and obviously the work of highly skilled artists. Yes, naturally! No-one with an ounce of culture could
possibly deny that such exhibits had beauty and were accordingly deserving of
some respect. Yet all that was somehow
beside-the-point, painfully irrelevant to the evolution of modern art, and he
was disappointed with Gwen, after all he had said to her, that she couldn't see
it. To her, they were skilfully painted
representational works with noble subject-matter. To him, by contrast, they were traitors to
the age, down-dragging influences in an age of mounting transcendentalism.
Yes, of course King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid, The Lady of
Shalott, and The Knight Errant, painted by Bourne-Jones, Waterhouse,
and Millais respectively, were accomplished works, done with loving care and an
eye for detail. One couldn't doubt
that! Yet how frightfully anachronistic
they seemed, how devoid of contemporary significance when compared with
Turner's most revolutionary works - works, for example, like Scene in
Venice, Venice from the Salute, or even Interior at Petworth,
the abstract impression of which was to set the tone for the next century and
influence all or most of the leading painters of the age! Could one say the same of the
Pre-Raphaelites? Not if one knew
anything about modern art! Theirs was a
lost cause, as lost as that of the French Symbolists, with their fin-de-siècle
decadence. From Turner, the torch of
modernism had passed to the Impressionists, especially to Monet, Sisley, and
Pissarro, and from them it was handed down more diversified to the twentieth
century via the Post-Impressionists, Nabis, and Divisionists who, in their
various ways, were to keep the belief in progress alive and weather the storms
of decadence and reaction which swept all about them. But The Lady of Shalott, in front of
which Gwen was now standing, rapt, it appeared, in wholehearted admiration, had
very little faith in progress and nothing to say to modernity. The stream which bore its heroine away from
Camelot was only a variant on the current of reactionary sentimentality which
enabled Waterhouse, its Tennysonian creator, to be borne away from the
nineteenth century towards an imaginary realm of medieval romance. There was little about the work to suggest
that a new era of human evolution had recently got under way, superior to
anything in the past. Strictly speaking,
it wasn't an integral part of late-nineteenth-century art. It had no real relevance to the age. It had simply been imposed upon it out of a
longing for mythical escape. To Matthew
Pearce, however, it was something to be escaped from! He had no desire to tally there any longer in
the world of the reactionaries. He
couldn't share Gwen's respect for Pre-Raphaelitis.
"But don't you like it?" she protested, as he tugged
her away from the Waterhouse, as though from a bedbug, and made for the room's
nearest exit.
"No, I bloody well don't!" he firmly and almost
categorically asseverated, not bothering to look at her. "I've no respect for
down-draggers!"
She didn't quite understand him, but said no more. She was disappointed that he didn't share her
tastes in art, yet in no way anxious to quarrel with him. She knew that he had his reasons and wouldn't
be diverted from them by anything she said on behalf of her own. She had to accept him. Yet she was conscious, as they walked back
through the earlier rooms again and on towards the main exit, that an
apocalyptic-like rift had opened-up between them - one doubtless born of their
dissimilar wavelengths - into which they were now tumbling, as into a hell of
their own contrivance. No matter how
hard she tried to learn from him and accept his views as her own, she couldn't
surmount her previous conditioning overnight, so to speak, and thereby climb
straight onto his level of awareness.
The words she heard him speak made no real impression on her soul. She wasn't ready for them. Her pretence of complicity in awareness had
been exposed in Room 16, and she knew he resented it. Now she was secretly angry with herself for
having allowed her natural response to the genius of the Pre-Raphaelites to be
aired in such obviously eulogistic terms, completely overlooking the fact that
Matthew might not think so highly of it.
Instead of continuing to play second-fiddle to him, she had suddenly
taken the lead, and it was not one that he had any intentions of following. It had been a foolish miscalculation on her
part!
