ARTS LAURA GASCOIGNE BONFIRE OF VANITY
The biblical book Ecclesiastes is strikingly resonant in today’s Britain and has inspired an exhibition at London’s Royal Academy exploring time, transience and human folly
G
overnment ministers these days don’t have much time to consult the Bible, but if they felt in need of divine guidance they would get
little help from Ecclesiastes. Education? “In much wisdom is much vexation, and those who increase knowledge increase sorrow” (1:18). Work and Pensions? “All toil and all skill in work come from one person’s envy of another. This is also vanity and chasing after wind” (4:4). Sport, Defence and Business? “The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor favour to the skilful; but time and chance happen to them all” (9:11). The Chancellor, meanwhile, can stop counting the cost of the deficit, as “what is lacking cannot be counted” (1:15). And it’s no good blaming Labour’s handling of the economy in the boom years: “Do not say, ‘Why were the former days better than these?’ For it is not from wisdom that you ask this” (7:10).
Ecclesiastes might be a peculiarly British prophet of doom, a likely inspiration for Private Frazer in Dad’s Army. No earth- shattering apocalypses for this Old Testament preacher; just an endless cycle of travail and vexation without even the guarantee of a heavenly reward, for “who knows whether the human spirit goes upwards?” (3:21). Yet despite, or because of, his miserabilism, Ecclesiastes feels like an old friend. A quick dip into his few short pages imme- diately reveals more familiar quotations than you meet in Shakespeare, while his existential angst makes him appear astonishingly mod- ern. To every thing there is a season, he said himself, and the aftermath of the Comprehensive Spending Review seems the perfect moment to dust him off and welcome him back from the wilderness, as the Royal Academy has presciently done in its new Ecclesiastes-inspired exhibition, No New Thing Under the Sun (until 9 January 2011). Mixing 30 historic and modern works from the Academy’s own collection with 20 con- temporary pieces from outside, the show is conceived, says its young curator Gabriel Coxhead, as “a sort of agnostic sermon … a
meditation on a variety of ideas concerning life and death”. In its eclectic fashion, it covers all the biblical bases. Human vanity is comically exposed in Hogarth’s 1761 engraving of The Five Orders of Perriwigs as they were worn at the late Coronation, measured architec- tonically and, more ludicrously still, in a 1658 print by Flemish engraver Pieter Clouwet picturing the exiled royalist Duke of Newcastle astonishing the Gods on Olympus – and horses on earth – with his command of his airborne steed. Human folly finds a victim closer to home in Gillray’s 1797 cartoon, Titianus Redivivus, mocking the then President of the Royal Academy, Benjamin West, for being conned by quacks flogging patent recipes for painting like Titian. The powerlessness of science against death
is suggested by a twentieth-century Still-life: Vanitas (c. 1979) of a skull and an alchemist’s mortar by Sir Lawrence Gowing RA, but brought home more forcibly by the eigh- teenth-century écorché figure standing in the middle of the room. The transience of earthly power is illustrated in one of Piranesi’s Grotteschi of a ruined and overgrown Rome and, from more recent memory, in Appointment with History; Tirana 20 February 1991, a contemporary painting by Mona Vatamanu and Florin Tudor recording the toppling of a giant statue of Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha. The fragility of human identity in the face of time is subtly evoked in Idris Kahn’s ghostly image of four sisters made by superimposing a 30-year series of photographs, while the struggle of human memory to overcome mortality is touchingly conveyed in Julian Trevelyan’s etching of a French Cemetery (1980) with the memorial inscriptions – “à notre père”, “à notre mere”, “à mon épouse” – carefully transcribed on to the gravestones in the artist’s hand. For my tastes, there are too few images of eating and drinking – the only respites from gloom Ecclesiastes allows – and not enough recognition of the upside of the life cycle acknowledged in his most oft-quoted verses. Only one contemporary artist, Peter Harrap, attempts to capture the poetry of opposites
John Constable’s Rainstorm over the Sea at Brighton, of 1824-28
in the famous lines beginning, “To every thing there is a season”. His small oil painting Something to Nothing (2010) focuses on a patch of urban wasteland where an aban- doned trainer, its logo half-choked with moss, lies alongside a discarded copy of Grazia with a celebrity in last season’s sunglasses on the cover. Around these forgotten fashion state- ments, this season’s growth of spring violets pushes up through the ground. One suspects that, despite his poetic streak, Ecclesiastes had no concept of art. One of his complaints against the Creator is that he has given humanity a sense of the eternal without any accompanying explanation, “they cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end” (3:11). Although this still troubles scientific minds like those of Dawkins and Hawking, it has never much bothered artists who tend, with William Blake, to content themselves with finding “eternity in an hour”.
It probably took Constable less than that to dash off the vivid oil sketch in this exhi- bition of a Rainstorm over the Sea at Brighton. Constable hated the vanity of Brighton, which he called “Piccadilly by the seaside”, but he was forced to go there for the health of his wife, Maria, who suffered from TB. Painted between 1824 and 1828, this tiny sketch of inky black clouds raining down fury on the not-so-distant horizon could have been a reflection of his mood: in 1828, Maria died. It makes a better memorial than Trevelyan’s gravestones, by fixing eternity at a point when she was alive.
When Ecclesiastes lamented, “The people of long ago are not remembered, nor will there be any remembrance of people yet to come by those who come after them” (1:11), he was reckoning without art – and without printing, which preserved his poetry and his prophecies of doom from the oblivion he pre- dicted for them.
13 November 2010 | THE TABLET | 27
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40