Making Colour @ National Gallery, London

I may not be the best person to judge the worth of an exhibition called Making Colour, just opened at the National Gallery. I have a lot of preconceptions about colour in painting, particularly, the way that colour should and shouldn’t be discussed in the description and analysis of painting. I am also always skeptical of the National Gallery’s reorganization of its own paintings into a special exhibition that then costs anything between £8-£15 to enter. And an exhibition such as Making Colour seems to be summer filler, in between Veronese and Rembrandt whose late works are on display in the Autumn. So take what I have to say with all precaution.

Sassoferrato, The Virgin in Prayer, 1640-50

Making Colour is really just that: an exhibition about the way that artists in the late medieval, through the Renaissance and into early modernism, made colour.  Blue, green, yellow, red, purple, gold and silver are each given a room in the downstairs five galleries. There is all sorts of interesting information on how colour pigments were made, the search for stable colours, the introduction of manufactured colours in the nineteenth century, how to make gold leaf, and Queen Victoria’s penchant for purple. If you don't know a lot about colour, the exhibition will help to see painting through this lens in a new light. It encourages viewers to look at the very technical aspects of colour manipulation on the artist’s palette and the canvas.

Michael Pacher, The Virgin and Child Enthroned with Angels and Saints, 1475

My disappointment in the exhibition came because it was about nothing other than the technical aspects of making colour. There was no mention of the political value of lapis lazuli, for example. The patron’s struggle for recognition, his flaunted wealth through the use and amount of blue; the association of blue with capitalism, with ownership, with power and the competition between painted blue and the great expanses of nature – the sky, the sea. None of this was even hinted at in the room devoted to blue. There was discussion of the development of certain colours, but only from a technical perspective, namely to find stable pigments. None of the factors other than the technical that influenced colour, its fabrication, its thematic and formal uses were mentioned. For example, the historical demands, economic demands that drove the pursuit for colour were overlooked. Similarly, there was very little discussion of gums, resins, lacquers, tempera and oil, and how the mixing of colour with these substances was so key to the development and use of certain colours and dyes at certain historical moments.

Edgar Degas, Combing the Hair, 1896

The other thing about the exhibition that I found a little gratuitous was that the paintings were all hung as mere illustration of who used what colour and when. The aesthetic value of the paintings was completely erased in preference for a focus on the fact that blue, green, red and so on, were used to depict a given object or scene. I say this and yet, there were a few exceptions to this, but I wonder if my noticing of the aesthetic or painterly techniques was because for some of those on display, it’s impossible not to see them as much more than the sum of the colours used. For example, to look at Botticelli and not see magnificence and exquisiteness would be so contrary to instinct that I can’t imagine it happening. His Saint Francis of Assisi with Angels, c. 1475-80 is on exhibition in Making Colour, and it reminded me that sometimes the National Gallery’s showcasing of its own paintings out of their aesthetic or historical context can bring lovely surprises. If this painting has been on display at the National Gallery, I have never seen it, so the fact that it is included in Making Colour was a redeeming feature of the exhibition.

London's East End: Too Cool for School

Do I celebrate or commiserate the extraordinary changes that continue to take place in London's East End? When I lived in London in the 1980s, I went to the East End for one reason only: to visit the Whitechapel Gallery. Places like Bethnal Green were where the cab drivers lived and spoke a language I didn't understand. Shoreditch didn't really exist as a location on anyone's map, and Hoxton Square was so radical that those who lived there were at best scarey, at worst, outright dangerous. Today, I could barely breathe for the effort made to be fashionable, edgy and consciously cool.

Fully veiled women, drug dealers, young couples eating scrambled eggs, smoked salmon and home made bread jostle for space on the pavement on Bethnal Green Road. Pink hair and piercings are more than a regular sight; they are de rigeur. Even the graffiti is made to order for the trend seekers in Shoreditch. Apparently, Banksy was commissioned to decorate the wall opposite Shoreditch House, a private members club only for those cool and trendy enough to be nominated. French, German, Polish and Russian are heard on the streets, mixing with dialects of all descriptions from the Indian sub-continent. Art in its most experimental and nascent forms and media springs up all over the place, changing the faces of walls by the day. This aspect of the East End is definitely to be celebrated.

In the early 2000s I went with one of my London friends who knew the hottest, coolest and trendiest spots that London had to offer. We walked down to Spitalfields, browsed through the racks of the interesting and absurd clothes of young designers, had "real coffee" - unheard of in most other parts of London outside Old Compton Street until five years later — and a bowl of noodles for £5. We sat on old wooden benches, the kind found on the streets of Bangkok as a place to sit while eating street food. Spitalfields is now unrecognizeable: the architecturally redesigned roof structure covers the wares of immigrant vendors, surrounded by chain stores, and there's even a website. There's no trace of the hustle and bustle, the smells and the disarray of the old fruit and veg market.

Crowds to compete with Ginza

The crowds in and around Spitalfields, Brick Lane, Shoreditch High Street are deep and the neighborhood more a place to be seen than somewhere to go for serious shopping. I don't doubt that there are boutique stores to visit, and restaurants with a reputation, coffee so good it's written up in Time Out, but there's no discovering unknown corners, or bargains to be stumbled upon in these parts. Don't get me wrong, this London is better than the one I knew in the 1980s; when the book of English cuisine was a very slim volume, homosexual activities could be a criminal offence, when there was no such thing as public life, and I was told by everyone I met "you're not from round here," as if I hadn't realized I was a foreigner. London today is appealing and open on many levels. But as is often the way, "gentrification" — even of the carefully crafted "I am cool and creative" variety — brings with it hoards of people, inflated prices, the loss of local traditions and cultural flavours.

London's East End is changing so rapidly that I am sure it's only a matter of time before the investment bankers, corporate millionaires and off-shore speculators move in and buy up. Why not? They have purchased and homogenized most of the rest of London. I am sure that it won't be too long before I am bemoaning the extinction of the "too cool for school" who colour these streets.

London: A City Behind Closed Doors

A Typical View from an English Window - cold, rainy and glum outside

Time spent in London is always eye-opening, never the same as the last time, and usually mixed in with some frustration. It’s a city I have lived in at various times over the past 26 years. Despite my familiarity with its streets, its history, its “corners,” as the Germans would say, London is a city from which I have always felt estranged, a city that has always held secrets it would never disclose to me. And I have always maintained that I don’t ever fully understand London because I am not English. Even though its history is supposedly my history, I have no history here. As an Australian, I grew up playing monopoly, competing to buy houses in Mayfair, on Park Lane, hotels on Leicester Square, and a stake in King’s Cross Station. As children we sang English nursery rhymes, we dreamed of riding in double decker London buses and at school, when we learnt history, we learnt of beheadings in the Tower of London, the lives of King’s and Queens, and dead bodies found in the Thames following the plague. In literature classes we learnt Chaucer and Shakespeare, Johnson and Eliot, both George and T.S. were assumed central to a respectable education. As a result when I first stepped foot on British soil, I knew it better than many who might have lived there all their lives. Still, I had no access to the people, their secrets, what makes them who they are.  I could ride my bike through Lincoln’s Inn Fields and imagine Martin Chuzzlewit striding down the street, or even see Little Dorrit on a boat headed down the Thames, but I had nothing to say to the real Londoners who haunted these streets. We may have all spoken English, but I did not know their language.

English Roses

It was when I lived in London in the early 2000s, immediately following September 11, when the world was filled with suspicion and prejudice, that I was most struck by the need to be an insider. London is a club, and to get in anywhere after 11pm, you had to be a member. I was Australian, I was never a member. I enjoy London most when I am not living there, when I am not commuting there and when someone else is paying for me. The cost of living, particularly housing in London, is, as the French would say “hors de prix” I don’t know how I thought I would ever have a house on Mayfair when the reality could not be more different: a shoebox in Shoreditch would be out of my price range today. The cost of living is only the beginning of what makes London in accessible. It’s a city for members only.

 

St Pancras Train Station

In my recent trip to London, I saw the blanket of secrecy that is permanently thrown over London from a very different perspective. London today is so much more open than it ever was when I lived there, most recently, ten years ago. Restaurants now have glass facades, the plethora of cultures and races that make up the fabric of the city appear to live together with a healthy degree of integration. And staying in Dalston, London was surprisingly experimental and creative. Coming from conservative Paris, I was heartened to see that pink hair, tattoos, platforms and piercings were not merely acceptable, but de rigueur. And yet, the secrecy, the hidden world of authentic London is frustratingly inaccessible to the casual tourist that I was in May.

Lost in London

I was shocked to see that Time Out no longer exists in any recognizeable form. While once it was expensive and filled with information on every cultural event, shopping secret and off-piste titbit, now it is free. This must not be mistaken as making the weekly what’s accessible to all. Now that it is free, Time Out is best used as scrap paper for scribbling reminders, doodling while on the telephone, a wrapper for used chewing gum. Not only is there nothing of interest to make it worth the effort to bend down and pick it up from the tray, but the lack of listings makes it mere clutter on the kitchen table. I asked various friends and strangers how they know what’s going on in London now that Time Out might as well not exist, and the answer was always the same “oh, you hear about things”. No one was ever able to explain how a visitor like myself would ever “hear about things.”

Taxidermist on Essex Road, Islington

London has changed so much since I left seven years ago, and it’s now a cool and happening place. I asked the woman in the neighborhood coffee joint why they closed at 6pm. Her response was so typically English: “I know, we are like that” When they don’t know they answer, because they have never been taught to admit as much — a habit that makes asking directions of anyone other than a black cab driver, a nightmare — they either make it up, or with a smile, announce “it’s always been like that”. I asked if people in London drank coffee after 6pm – “oh yes,” she brightened up “we just do it in secret.”

Topiary creatures at the Hayward Gallery

Another big secret that I found extremely frustrating: as a biker who didn’t know my way so well around north east London, too often the street name was posted 20 metres in from the corner, if at all, meaning that by the time I found it, I was already on the wrong (usually one way) street.  What for me was the obscure logic of this placement of street signs prompted a conversation with an American friend. I bemoaned that street names were posted too late, and oddly amused at my naieveté, my friend said, “I think that’s the point; they don’t want anyone to know.” Feeling too much the foreigner by this point in the conversation, I nodded and agreed, but really, I had no idea why the British would want to keep the names of their streets a clandestine affair. Unless of course, it is just another ploy to keep us foreigners out of their club.

With all the secrecy and hidden world of London, I chuckled to see some of their attempts at openness. On the Thames, just behind the Tate Modern, sits what has been called “Neo Bankside: An innovative, award winning and iconic new residential development" with apartments starting at £1.2m. If you are looking for a view of the river, you will be spending closer to £4m. Historically, the Thames is not a river that has been known for its picturesque qualities, its romantic overtones or seductive draw. Neither is the idea of a river view in keeping with the spirit of the "real" London. This is a city that has built a reputation, an appeal and a steady stream of tourists and immigrants on the promise of revealing its secrets, but ultimately ever does. But, as my American friend would say, “perhaps that’s the point”. Perhaps London’s pretense at, and our belief in openness is a convincing distraction from the reality, and thus, a convenient camouflage for a secret door to which I will never have the code.

In November we go to London

American friends visiting Paris, here to write a travel blog — 30 days in Paris —  quizzed me on buying Eurostar tickets and making hotel bookings in London. At first I thought, how strange, that a travelog on Paris would need to include London. But for those of us who live between lands, London is as much a part of Paris as Monoprix and the metro. And in November, that’s what we do: we are all, at some stage in the month, on the Eurostar to London. In November, the Christmas lights that turn Paris into a fairytale land have not yet been put up. And in November, when the rains of October are done with, before it gets really cold and the Eurostar gets stuck in the tunnel, the streets of London are at their best. For those of us in the English speaking community here, London is a suburb of Paris in the way that Brooklyn is a suburb of New York City. Some of us go to great lengths to avoid the train journey over (or under) the water, convincing our friends we, not they, are at the center of the world, and therefore they must travel to us. While some of us commute it daily, and others of us even love it so much we eventually move there, still others go for the shopping (still more interesting in London than Paris), the art or to have dinner with an old friend. Whatever our relationship to London, for all of us, it is somewhere on the expatriate map of Paris.

It was because of London that I moved to Paris. No longer able to afford the expense of London, Paris was to halve my living costs. But it wasn’t only the expense of London that eventually forced me to take up residence in the 11^th arrondissment. It was the difficulty of living as an English speaking foreigner in a city that insisted, daily, on the fact that I didn’t belong. Being a foreigner in a city of people who speak the same language is more alienating than living in a foreign language. In London I was expected to belong, expected to be a part of and to share the values and cultural reference points, the social mores and customs, all because I spoke the same language. But the English language is where my affinity with this world not only begins but ends. 

It was, perhaps, because I did not take the Eurostar to London, and instead travelled from my job in southeast England on the local Southeastern trains, that the difficulties of living in England came flooding back to my mind. When I traveled to London in November to see the Muybridge exhibition, I was reminded of all the reasons why Paris is easier than London. Funnily enough, it is primarily because of, not despite, the fact that English is my first language. In London, I was overwhelmed, frustrated and resentful at the dominance of the negative. In November I found myself flailing in London’s culture of no. As an Australian, London is stressful, nothing works, the idea of customer service is a misnomer, a tube strike means total shutdown of all public transport, and if I want to buy a ticket for something, an event, a talk, a train or a day at the races, there’s a fairly good chance that the answer will be: “no."

Louise Bourgeois' Mother

Another British custom that has always bemused me is their erection of barriers, everywhere. When I lived in London I could never swim laps in the public pool because they cordoned off the 50m blissful expanse of water into boxes, each box occupied by a different group: children, the aerobics class that looked and behaved more like water lilies, and lap swimming was relegated to one 20m lane. The English also like to build walls in their houses – the idea of a huge open space, must somehow frighten them. Not like me whose country is 5000 miles wide with nothing on that road. I imagine, for the English, an open space might offer too much possibility, freedom and the promise of desire. Knowing the British passion for building barriers, you would think I would be able to laugh in the face of them. But no! When I tried to enter the train station in Canterbury in November, new turnstiles had been installed. Unsurprisingly, these “high tech” machines rejected my ticket. A man stood watching me, the train in the station, ready to leave on the other side of the barrier. He wouldn’t let me through even though my ticket was valid, insisting there must be a reason why the turnstile rejected my ticket. It is moments like these, traveling in London and England, that I long for the metro etiquette of going through the turnstile with the stranger in front of me, and knowing that if I miss my train, I will wait a maximum of three minutes, not one hour, for the next one.

Metro at Gare du Nord

I know such comparisons are a cheap rhetorical device. Especially because many might argue that Paris is also predominantly, a culture of no. But my experience in Paris is that they start with “no” and slowly but surely, through persistence and good humor on the part of the petitioner, the Parisians always end up at “yes.” This may be for myriad reasons that I don’t understand because I am not French. Just as I don’t fully understand the British culture of no. Perhaps it is their fear of the consequence of doing things differently. Or it may even be because of a pride in jobs they approach with a solid protestant work ethic. However, what I do know is that it is far more enjoyable to flirt with the French ticket officer, plead ignorance and naievety in foreigners’ French, than it is to understand every word of a crusty old Englishman with an illogical rationalization he passes as justification. Repartee with a Frenchman, in French, is a delight, and when I become drawn into pleading in English with the "cheers Chas crew" before I am even on the train to London, I can't wait to get back on the Eurostar, and home to Gare du Nord.

Eurostar train at Gare du Nord