Wordy

Simon Schama

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781471180118
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia mondiale

' Wordy is about the intoxication of writing; my sense of playful versatility; different voices for different matters: the polemical voice for political columns; the sharp-eyed descriptive take for profiles; poetic precision in grappling with the hard task of translating art into words; lyrical recall for memory pieces. And informing everything a rich sense of the human comedy and the ways it plays through historical time. It's also a reflection on writers who have been shamelessly gloried in verbal abundance; the performing tumble of language - those who have especially inspired me - Dickens and Melville; Joyce and Marquez.' Simon Schama Sir Simon Schama has been at the forefront of the arts, political commentary, social analysis and historical study for over forty years. As a teacher of Art History and an award-winning television presenter of iconic history-based programming, Simon is equally a prolific bestselling writer and award-winning columnist for many of the world's foremost publishers, broadsheet newspapers, periodicals and magazines. His commissioned subjects over the years have been numerous and wide ranging – from the music of Tom Waits, to the works of Sir Quentin Blake; the history of the colour blue, to discussing what skills an actor needs to create a unique performance of Falstaff. Schama's tastes are wide-ranging as they are eloquent, incisive, witty and thought provoking and have entertained and educated the readers of some of the world's most respected publications - the Times, the Guardian, the New Yorker, Harper's Bazaar and Rolling Stone magazine. Wordy is a celebration of one of the world's foremost writers. This collection of fifty essays chosen by the man himself stretches across four decades and is a treasure trove for all those who have a passion for the arts, politics, food and life.

ART, ARTISTS AND CRITICS

It was Camille Corot’s landscapes that drew from Paul Valéry the confession that ‘we should apologise for daring to speak about art’. Perhaps it was the incomparable purity of Corot’s light, captured by painting outdoors in the Forest of Fontainebleau, which made a poet feel inadequate about rendering it in prose. But any honest writer about any kind of fine art will share Valéry’s sense of clumsiness at the futility of translating vision into text.

Nevertheless, we try. Why? Partly, I suspect, from enthusiasm’s overspill: the urge, not necessarily egotistical, to share insight born of accumulated knowledge, but also released by what Duchamp (meaning it unflatteringly) described as the ‘retinal shudder’: the visceral response that takes place in the material presence of the work itself. Walter Benjamin was wrong. The aura of a work of art ‘in the age of mechanical reproduction’ has only become more unreproducible with digital ubiquitousness. So even with the ancient task of ekphrasis – thick description – as its calling, non-academic art writing still has useful work to do.

It positions itself somewhere between the monstrous heaviness of catalogue essays, their ball and chain of theoretical solemnity clanking along behind the work itself, and the necessarily summary captions on the wall. The most memorable art writing is often the most personal; a transmission from the moment of fresh encounter. My late lamented friend Robert Hughes was incomparably brilliant at delivering those quick, rich exclamations, and was (as were we all) horrified and depressed when Time magazine decided it could do without art criticism altogether.

I began writing art criticism for the TLS (a new editorial departure launched by its then editor John Gross) in the 1970s; principally but not always about Dutch painting. The challenge then, as it has remained – through the years of writing reviews for the New Yorker – was how to be invitational and instructional at the same time; to deliver an impression of what awaited the beholder but also to supply the modicum of knowledge and questioning that would make for a richer gallery experience. Some of the pieces here add to that mix, visits with contemporary artists themselves. Artists can be notoriously laconic about their work, as they have every right to be. I spent one of the most tortuous hours of my life trying, at the Hay Festival, to extract from Howard Hodgkin (whom I had known for years) any kind of insight about his painting, an excruciating ordeal some of the audience enjoyed as a priceless moment in the theatre of cruelty, the verbose critic undone by the obdurate silence of the master. But just as many – especially the women artists featured in the pieces that follow, who gave me the time of day – can be thrillingly eloquent about their art and how they came to conceive and execute it. It’s their creative hospitality that gets critics, especially this one, off the hook of Valéry’s embarrassment.

THE PALACE OF COLOUR

How blue can it get? How deep can it be? Some years ago I thought I’d hit ultimate blue at the Guggenheim Bilbao where a sheet of Yves Klein’s blue was displayed on the gallery floor. Klein had a short career (dying at thirty-two), much of it obsessed with purging colour of any associations external to itself. Gestural abstraction, he thought, clotted with sentimental extraneousness. But in this search for chromatic purity Klein realised that however ostensibly pure a pigment was, its intensity dulled when mixed with a binder such as oil, egg or acrylic to make useable paint. So he commissioned a synthetic binder intended to resist light-wave absorption and to deliver instead maximum reflectiveness. Until that day in Bilbao I’d thought him a bit of a monomaniacal bore, but Klein International Blue (as he patented it), rolled out flat and elsewhere pimpled with saturated sponges embedded in the paint surface, turned my eyeballs inside out, rods and cones jiving with joy. This is it, I thought. It can’t get any bluer, ever.

Until, that is, YInMn came along; the fortuitous product of an experiment in Mas Subramian’s materials science lab at Oregon State University. Oxides of magnesium, yttrium and indium were heated together at 2,000°C with the idea of making something useful for the electronics industry. Instead what emerged was a brand-new inorganic pigment, one that absorbed wave lengths of red and green, leaving as reflected light the bluest mid-blue ever. Subramian made sure to send a sample to the Valhalla of pigments, the Forbes Collection at Harvard University, where it sits with 2,500 other specimens of pigment documenting, visually and materially, the whole millennia-long history of our craving for colour. Among the blues on its shelves are ‘Egyptian Blue’, a modern approximation of the very first synthetic pigment engineered five millennia ago, probably from the rare mineral cuprorivaite, heated with calcium and copper compounds, silica and potash, to around 850–950°C, and used for faience, the decoration of royal tomb sculpture, and the wall paintings of temples. After that ancient technique was lost, blues strong enough to render sea and sky were made from weathered copper carbonate: azurite (from Persian izahward), known to the Greeks as kuaonos, in Latin caeruleum, our vision of cerulean. Azurite was crystalline bright but liable to fade in binder and when exposed to light and air. But in 1271, Marco Polo saw lapis lazuli quarried from a mountain at Badakshan in what is now Afghanistan, which, elaborately and laboriously prepared to remove impure specks of glinting iron pyrite, became ultra-marine, the blue from ‘over the seas’, as expensive, ounce for ounce, as gold and so precious that it was initially reserved for the costume of the Virgin. In addition to all these, the Forbes Collection also has poor man’s blue for the jobbing painter – smalt made from crushed cobalt, brilliant when first laid down but notoriously fugitive, fading over the centuries to a thin green.

The Forbes Collection owes its existence to the belief in the interdependence of art and science, but it is also an exhaustive archive of cultural passion. For as much as high-minded theorists over the centuries have condescended to colour as retinal entertainment rather than high concept, painters themselves have often had a different view. In a modernist rehearsal of the ancient quarrel between disegno (drawing) and colore, Wassily Kandinsky, no conceptual lightweight, characterised colour as fully occupying painted space, in contrast to line, which he argued merely travelled through it. At any rate there is no doubt that colour wars can get serious. The Forbes Collection, which acquires newly minted pigments along with its trove of historical specimens, has a display of Vantablack, which absorbs so much – 99.6 per cent – of light waves that it has to be grown on surfaces as a crop of microscopic nano-rods. Originally invented for military use (those disappearing aircraft flying through Donald Trump’s starwars dreams), the sculptor Anish Kapoor saw that it might produce spectacular vacuums for his own work; a collapse of light that would work as a designed black hole. But working with Vantablack’s producer he reserved the pigment for his own use. An outcry spurred the invention of a competing ‘Singularity Black’, marginally less absorptive but also translatable into paint. More dramatically, the artist Stuart Semple was driven to create a ‘Pinkest Pink’, making it freely available to the art world with the express exception of Kapoor. Undaunted, Kapoor found a way to obtain a sample: coat, not his pinky, but a middle digit and flip the pigment bird online to Semple and his critics.

While enjoying these pigment brushfires – and displaying them in a vitrine for the public – Narayan Khandekar, the head of the Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies at the Harvard Art Museums, knows he presides over something immeasurably more serious: a priceless resource for understanding the construction and preservation of works of art. The vast library of colour is housed along with technical laboratories in the airy, steel and filtered-glass addition the architect Renzo Piano designed for the Fogg Museum. Rows of them stand and sit in tubes, jars and bowls, visible through floor-to-ceiling glass-fronted cabinet doors. Khandekar, learned and expansively eloquent, had the winning idea of displaying them as a line unspooled from the classical colour wheel, reds at one end, greens at the other. There are the showy products of nineteenth-century chemical innovation: viridian green, cadmium orange, and the chrome yellow with which van Gogh was infatuated but, over time, has begun to fatally darken his sunflowers. But the unique heart of the Forbes Collection are the natural and historical pigments that were the staples of a painter’s inventory before chemically synthesised paints replaced the impossibly esoteric, the dangerously toxic, the prohibitively expensive and the unreliably fugitive.

Among those relics is Dragon’s Blood, reputed in antiquity and the Middle Ages to have got its vividness from the deep wounds of dragons and elephants locked in mortal combat. The pigment actually owed its intense redness to resin secreted from trees growing on the islands of Socotra (in the Arabian Sea) and Sumatra, especially the rattan palm and the draecena draco. But the Forbes sample of Dragon’s Blood has faded, most likely from exposure to ultraviolet light, to a dusty rose, not much different from the blushing nineteenth-century pigment named ‘cuisse de nymphe émue’ – thigh of an excited nymph. But the light fastness of Dragon’s Blood has always been as unreliable as its mythology. Even in the early fifteenth century, Cennino Cennini’s practical manual Il Libro dell Arte had warned artists, beguiled by its reputation, that its ‘constitution will not do you much credit’, meaning it was likely to prove fugitive in light and air. Better to stick to madder root, red ochre or red lead minium, in use since classical antiquity.

But many of the Forbes specimens preserve the poetic mystique of their origins. There is a murex shell from the eastern Mediterranean, a quarter of million of which were needed to make a single ounce of ‘Tyrian purple’, the colour edging the togas of magistrates, senators and generals in the Roman Republic, and a whole lot more toga in the case of the emperors. There too is a loaf of toxic tawny-red cinnabar, for centuries the indispensable ingredient of vermilion. Buy it in solid cakes and give the top of it a little tap, Cennini advises, lest some scoundrel pass off stuff adulterated with brick dust. Here too is the copper-arsenite Scheele’s Green, synthesised at the beginning of the nineteenth century and more dazzlingly vivid than traditional verdigris, the latter laboriously made from the particles given off by copper when eaten by vinegar or strong red wine. A variant, manufactured a little later, Emerald or Paris Green was so cheap to manufacture and so dazzling to behold that it coated Victorian wallpapers, children’s toys and, according to the colourman (a preparer and vendor of artist’s materials) George Field, who was horrified at it getting into the hands of the young, even confectionery. Bonapartists mourning the death of their hero believed the British had poisoned Napoleon passively but deliberately by having him sleep in a room papered with the deadly green, the damp of oceanic St Helena conspiring to produce the arsenic exhalations that did for the captive Emperor.

Here too are two tubes of Mummy Brown, made from the rendered gunk of the Egyptian dead, thought to be rich in bituminous asphalt used in embalming and as a shield against insects and fungal decay. Pounded and mashed Mummy had been in continuous demand in Europe for medicinal purposes at least since the sixteenth century, as it was thought to cure pretty much anything, from gastric pain and menstrual obstruction to epileptic fits. An early Mummy trader, Sir John Sanderson, shipped 600lbs of assorted bits and pieces in 1586 to satisfy an eager market. Colourmen and druggists often shared the same inventory and the same slightly occult alchemical reputation for possessing exotic secrets unavailable to the common run of men. ‘Bitumen’ – a cover-all term for the asphaltic muck – was prized for its tawny glow, but the romantic taste for the oriental macabre in the nineteenth century had a lot to do with its reputation as a unique pigment. Costume paintings of the kind fashionable in the 1830s and 1840s were gravy-brown (and heavily varnished), as if patina conferred historical authenticity. You could reach for the cuttlefish sepia or burnt umber, but if Turner needed loamy richness, he reached for Mummy. Eugène Delacroix, an arch-orientalist, is said to have used Mummy in his ceiling painting for the Salon de la Paix in Paris’s Town Hall in the 1850s, though since the chamber was destroyed in the Paris Commune of 1871 we will never really know. Its vogue was short-lived. By the middle of the nineteenth century, Laughton Osborn’s Handbook for Young Artists and Amateurs in Oil Painting advised ‘there is nothing to be gained by smearing our canvas with part of the wife of Potiphar’. Specialists in history pictures like Alma-Tadema loved it, but according to Edward Burne-Jones’s wife, Georgina, when he told the pre-Raphaelite that he was about to go see pieces of Mummy before they were turned into pigment, Burne-Jones snorted that the name was just a childish fancy. On being assured the Mummy was real enough, Burne-Jones insisted on giving his own tubes of the paint a burial in the garden, planting daisy roots to keep the Mummy company, rather in the spirit of Egyptian resurrections. Alison Cariens, the learned Harvard Museums’ conservation coordinator, who showed me withered chunks of desiccated Mummy in the collection, explained that while no DNA had been found in samples to suggest ground-up human bones, the millennia may well have degraded biological material beyond reliable analysis. And in any case, she added, humans were often accompanied by mummified animals for their journey to the afterlife, so that a tube of Mummy Brown might well be constituted from the remains of long-gone crocodiles or cats.

The Harvard Collection is not confined to jars or the collapsible tin tubes invented by an American artist in London, John Goffe Rand, in 1841, superseding pigs’ bladders, which had for centuries been paint containers but, when pierced to squeeze the paint, had a tendency to dry out notwithstanding their stoppers. The Forbes shelves contain a whole universe of paint sources: cuttings of red madder root, the most common source of red dyestuff, convertible into pigment when cloth clippings were dissolved in alkali, then combined with alum to make insoluble red lake. The minute silvery bugs heaped in a glass bowl like a crunchy bar snack are the Mexican Dactylopius coccus – scale insects that swarmed on prickly pear cacti and whose crushed bodies produced the lustrous carmine-crimson that so excited Caravaggio and Rubens. After the Spanish conquest of Mexico and the discovery of the brilliant colour in native painting and textile dyes, buggy cochineal almost immediately supplanted traditional red from the Kermes vermilio scale louse found on evergreen oaks in eastern Europe, but they were expensive and laborious to harvest, a two-week window after the feast of John’s Day at the end of June being the only time the kermes would swarm in multitudes enough for commercial production in Poland and Armenia.

Seductively beautiful pigment sources abound on the Forbes shelves: rocks of arsenic-sulfide realgar and orpiment, blazes of flame-orange locked within the crystals. Cennini attached a health warning to his advice about the twin perils, though mysteriously he also claimed orpiment to be just the thing to cure a sick sparrowhawk. Too spellbinding not to get a closer look, I stuck my head in the cabinet. ‘Don’t breathe, dont touch,’ warned the kindly, vigilant, Alison.

Further along the row is a greyish-greenish wrinkled ball, about the size of a baseball, a section sliced open to reveal yolk-bright Indian Yellow. Yellow of any kind never had much traditional purchase in Christian iconography, where gold signified the aura of sanctity. But when Baroque masters experimented with extreme effects of light and dark, the hunt for a light-fast deep yellow became urgent. Rough, intense yellow was the colour of choice for Caravaggio’s plebeian coarsely clad rumps, thrust through the picture plane at the beholder in the Crucifixion of St Peter or kneeling at the feet of the Madonna of Loreto. The cheapest, most widely available traditional yellow was made from unripe buckthorn berries but was too fugitive for the likes of Rembrandt. Instead, the pigment supplying the bloom of yellow on the luxurious costume of Lieutenant van Ruytenburgh in Rembrandt’s Night Watch and the scrim of primrose light hanging over Vermeer’s Woman with a Pearl Necklace in Berlin is the gracefully pale lead-tin yellow, which, despite being in common use in the Netherlands as ‘massicot’ in the seventeenth century, went into oblivion until being recognised once more as a distinctive pigment in the 1930s. In the early eighteenth century antimony combined with lead became the base for one of the first synthetic pigments – known in England as ‘Naples Yellow’. But when the European powers made invasive inroads into India in the eighteenth century they would have seen the deep, rich, glowing yellow used to paint walls and images on them, as well as Mughal book illustrations. Botanical pigments like saffron and turmeric had been used in Persian and Turkish art for centuries, but this was something altogether more chromatically vibrant. The first samples of the pigment available in Bengal, Bihar and in some centres of Rajput painting, like Jaipur, were known by many Indian names – piuri, puri, or gowgli, a corruption of Persian gangil, meaning, significantly as it would turn out, ‘cow-earth’. The amateur artist Roger Dewhurst recorded buying and using it in 1786. But it was in the early nineteenth century that Indian Yellow established itself as something special in the Romantic palette. Especially beautiful in watercolours, Turner used it for the washes describing the limpid radiance of Venetian dawns and sunsets. The infatuation could lead him astray. His romantically imagined Jessica, Shylock’s daughter, painted for the Earl of Egremont, stands in front of a wall so screamingly yellow that facetious critics called it ‘woman standing in a mustard pot’.

And then there was the smell. Depending on the sensitivity of your nostrils, the aroma of unrefined Indian Yellow was either interestingly pungent or rank and disagreeable. To a number of those getting a nostril-load of it, the pigment had a distinct whiff of castoreum, the aroma, prized by some, of a secretion from a gland close to the anus of beavers – which can’t be that bad since it’s still used in commercial ice cream as a substitute for vanilla. But for those who didn’t care for it, the odour proclaimed the origin of Indian Yellow in animal urine. George Field and many others thought the animal in question was the camel; others speculated about elephants, water buffalo and cattle. During the nineteenth century, this whole matter became an ongoing controversy. Failing to discover nitrous traces, a chemical analysis in the 1840s argued that Indian Yellow was much more likely to originate in a plant, possibly the Mycelium tinctorium, as its name suggests in common use as a dye, and notorious for its pissy odour.

In 1883, however, in response to a query from a German chemist, the director of the Royal Botanical Gardens, Sir Joseph Hooker, was able to shed light. An expert on the materials of Indian arts and crafts, T. N. Mukharji was sent to the village of Mirzapur in the Monghyr district of Bihar where he had met gwala workers who produced the Indian Yellow sold in Calcutta. He had also seen with his own eyes, he reported, cattle being fed on decaying mango leaves (and water); this yielded the strong urine that, evaporated in earthenware pots set over a fire and after further baking in the sun, produced the precious yellow powder. The gwala trained these cows to urinate four times daily by stroking them where it counted, but understandably the cattle didn’t look too healthy on this regime. Periodically, ‘to keep up their strength’, Mukharji wrote, they would get a diet supplement, but the pigment would lose something of its startling, fiery intensity. By the turn of the century the suffering of the animals led the British-Indian government to ban production, and certainly by the 1920s Indian Yellow had pretty much vanished from colourmen inventory. But was any of this true? When Victoria Finlay, the author of Colour: A Natural History of the Palette, travelled to Monghyr around 2002, she failed to find any local memory of cows fed on mango leaves for the brightness of Indian Yellow and decided that the whole thing must have been yet another fable in the great treasury of colour lore. But that story hasn’t ended.

In any event, the great collection on the fourth floor of the Harvard Museum is more than a treasury of colours and stories. For Edward Waldo Forbes, director of the Fogg from 1909 to 1944, pigment hunting and gathering was not just a matter of encyclopaedic entertainment: the creation of an archive of lost or languishing colour; it was all about the union, urgently needed, as he believed, of art and science. His own pedigree spoke to the paradox: Boston Brahmin but with one grandfather a railway magnate, the other the metaphysical philosopher-poet, Ralph Waldo Emerson. With a Massachusetts schooling, culminating, inevitably, at Harvard, Forbes was a typical product of the generation that believed that gilded age materialism could be redeemed by the ‘western civilisation...