Untold Stories (62 page)

‘What do you feel?' asks Blunt.

‘Baffled,' says Chubb, ‘and also knackered'… this last remark very much from the heart.

Blunt, though he's exasperated, can't resist instructing his tormentor, aware, though, that the policeman's naïvety may be a ruse to entrap him or soften him up. He tries to explain that the history of art shouldn't be seen as simply a progress towards accurate or naturalistic representation.

‘Do we say Giotto isn't a patch on Michelangelo because his figures are less lifelike?'

‘Michelangelo?' says Chubb. ‘I don't think his figures are lifelike frankly. The women aren't. They're just like men with tits. And the tits
look as if they've been put on with an ice cream scoop. Has nobody point ed that out?'

‘Not in quite those terms.'

And I suppose that is what I feel about Michelangelo's women, though I don't like to say so. Husky, I suppose the word for them – steroidal almost. I don't think any of them would be allowed in the 100-metre dash without giving at least one urine sample.

In
A Question of Attribution
the Queen is made to have some doubts about paintings of the Annunciation.

‘There are quite a lot of them,' says the Queen. ‘When we visited Florence we were taken round the art gallery there and well … I won't say Annunciations were two a penny but they were certainly quite thick on the ground. And not all of them very convincing. My husband remarked that one of them looked to him like the messenger arriving from Little-wood's Pools. And that the Virgin was protesting that she had put a cross for no publicity.'

This last remark, though given to the Duke of Edinburgh, was actually another flag of distress, stemming from my unsuccessful attempts to assimilate and remember an article about the various positions of the Virgin's hands, which are a careful semaphore of her feelings … a semaphore instantly understandable to contemporaries but, short of elaborate exposition, lost on us today. It's a pretty out of the way corner of art history but it leads me on to another question and another worry.

Floundering through some unreadable work on art history, I've sometimes allowed myself the philistine thought that these intricate expositions, gestures echoing other gestures, one picture calling up another and all underpinned with classical myth… that surely contemporaries could not have had all this at their fingertips or grasp by instinct what we can only attain by painstaking study and explication, and that this is pictures being given what's been called ‘over meaning'. What made me repent, though, was when I started to think about my childhood and going to a different kind of pictures, the cinema.

When I was a boy we went to the pictures at least twice a week, as most
families did then, regardless of the merits of the film. To me
Citizen Kane
was more boring but otherwise no different from a film by George Formby, say, or Will Hay. And going to the pictures like this, taking what was on offer week in week out was, I can see now, a sort of education, an induction into the subtle and complicated and not always conventional moral scheme that prevailed in the world of the cinema then, and which persisted with very little change until the early sixties.

I've been trying recently to write about some of the stock characters of films of that period and I'll talk about two in particular in the hope that I can relate one sort of pictures to the other.

A regular figure in films of that time was a middle-aged businessman, a pillar of the community, genial, avuncular, with bright white hair, and the older ones among you will know immediately the kind of character I mean if I show you this actor. His name is Thurston Hall, and this is another actor, Edward Arnold. Their names are unimportant but they were at that time instantly recognisable.
*
I certainly knew at the age of eight that as soon as this character or this type of character put in an appearance he was up to no good.

The character speaks:

The converse of this character, though he is seldom in the same film, would be the man who has been respectable himself once but who has made one big mistake in his life – a gun-fighter, say, who has killed an innocent man, a doctor who bungled an operation – and who by virtue of his misdemeanour (and the drink he takes to forget it) has put himself outside society.

Thomas Mitchell was such a doctor in John Ford's
Stagecoach
, and though such lost souls are more often come across in westerns they turn up in the tropics too, their frequent location the back of beyond.

The character speaks:

He concludes:

Now though this analysis may seem a bit drawn out, the point I am making is that the twentieth-century audience had only to see one of these characters on the screen to know instinctively what moral luggage they were carrying, the past they had had, the future they could expect. And this was after, if one includes the silent films, not more than thirty years of going to the pictures. In the sixteenth century the audience or congregation would have been going to the pictures for 500 years at least, so how much more instinctive and instantaneous would their responses have been, how readily and unthinkingly they would have been able to decode their pictures – just as, as a not very precocious child of eight, I could decode mine.

And while it's not yet true that the films of the thirties and forties would need decoding for a child of the present day, nevertheless that time may come; the period of settled morality and accepted beliefs which produced such films is as much over now as is the set of beliefs and assumptions that produced a painting as complicated and difficult, for us at any rate, as Bronzino's
Allegory of Venus and Cupid
.

Looking at pictures is an odd mixture of the public and the private. It is public but it is not communal as, say, the theatre is. We are happy when we go to the theatre to find it full, but we prefer a gallery to be if not empty then not crowded. This is because though the setting is public the experience is private; other people do not contribute to it as they do in the theatre or the cinema. One is not part of an audience or a congregation. And though it adds to the pleasure to have someone to share the pictures with and talk them over, one doesn't really want it to go beyond that. So that when arrangements are made because they have to be made for the experience to be communal – as at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, for instance, where Rembrandt's
Night Watch
is in a kind of auditorium – I feel (though always grateful to sit down) that there's something wrong.

In his autobiography John Pope-Hennessy talks about discovering painting in Italy when he was a young man in the thirties, and how ‘one's impressions of works of art become more vivid in the ratio of the trouble one takes to see them'. Of course he didn't realise how lucky he was. Nowadays everything is trailed and signposted to such an extent that the chances of genuine discovery are very slim; what is hard to find, in Europe at any rate, is something that is hard to find. Still, I can see that, while one is occasionally irritated by children scouting round the gallery on some trail or other, what the education department is trying to do for them, even artificially, is give them some sense of discovery about paintings.

Seeing them sitting round their teachers on the floor of the gallery I wonder whether they'll ask the questions that really puzzle them. It always used to bother me as a child, for instance, that the crucifixion of Christ was always depicted as more decorous than that of the thieves,
their agonies much more graphic and protracted than his, who ought to be their superior in suffering as he was in everything else.

Jesus' crucifixion was also much more attended too … and I wondered why one of the Holy Family couldn't occasionally walk over and pay one of the other crosses a visit. The thieves after all never had any family with them, and it's what we always did if we went to see someone in hospital and there was someone on the ward with no visitors. Joseph, too, I used to feel, was unregarded, always elbowed out of the way by the Wise Men and never even getting to hold the baby. Then there was Judas.

I've always had a sneaking sympathy for Judas, partly because without him Christianity would never have got off the ground and also because since one of its central tenets is the forgiveness of sins then Judas ought to be right up there at the top of the forgiveness list. Judas is the real test of Christianity. He's the T-shirt that's been soaked in oil and ketchup and I don't know what else and yet, washed in the blood of a lamb, ought to come out whiter than white. Instead of which he's never mentioned; like Trotsky under Stalin, he's a non-person.

Caravaggio,
The Taking of Christ

In paintings he's generally presented as such a stage villain, red-haired, pointy-eared and with a treacherous cat under his chair that a child at any rate might think Jesus must have been a bit of a fool to choose him in the
first place. This is partly what makes for me the newly discovered Caravaggio in Dublin so impressive. Here Judas doesn't seem to me much of a villain at all; he seems genuinely puzzled and can't look Christ in the face. I certainly don't see much villainy there, what's happening to him as terrible as what's happening to Christ, who's quite passive and, because he's looking down, almost abstracted from the scene.

It must be harder, though, for many children coming into the Gallery these days than it was, say, thirty years ago, simply because their knowledge of Christianity is much patchier now than it was then, not to mention of course their knowledge of classical myths. Still, even a little knowledge has its drawbacks and multiplies the opportunities for error. The turn of the century novelist Samuel Butler wrote in his notebook how he had come into the Gallery with his Aunt Worsley:

But almost any reaction in front of a picture is better than none. Confronted with the
Grotesque Old Woman
attributed to Quintin Massys, a lady who remarks ‘Well, to me she has a look of Mrs Ridsdale' may seem to be missing the point, ignoring as this does the picture's past as a drawing by Leonardo and its future as the model for Tenniel's Ugly Duchess in
Alice in Wonderland
. But if it is Mrs Ridsdale that fixes it in the mind, no matter.

The portrait of
Alexander
Mornauer
only came into the collection in 1991, but had it been here twenty years ago a child might have been struck by its resemblance to the TV actor Raymond Burr portraying the detective Perry Mason. And that of course is not the kind of remark that would have gone down well at I Tatti or, I imagine, with Sir John Pope-Hennessy, but it doesn't matter. You've got to start somewhere, and anything that hooks you onto a picture and makes you look again at it is better than nothing. And certainly more helpful than being told, ‘You should look at this. It's a masterpiece.'

Sometimes when one's reading a book, a novel say, you come across a thought or a feeling which you've had yourself and, thinking it peculiar to yourself, you haven't expressed it or communicated it… and now here it is set down by someone else. And it's as if a hand has come out and taken yours.