Uncategorized

Francis Bacon: Human Presence

~ michaeljhealy ~ Leave a comment

Is it appropriate to measure the greatness of a painter by the range of human feeling they elicit in the viewer or display on the canvas? Perhaps narrow and deep should be sufficient, picking at one feature of human existence over and over again, worrying relentlessly at a scab to burrow deeper to discover and uncover the real wound beneath the surface. The thought occurred to me walking around The National Portrait Gallery’s outstanding exhibition of Francis Bacon’s portraits, Francis Bacon: Human Presence.

Bacon understood despair and the awareness of futility. He knew something about the longing to accept and impose cruelty. Suffering, isolation, and pain are never far from the canvas. He detected such things in the artists and paintings he admired, in Velazquez, Picasso, and Van Gogh. He discovered over time his own language in paint to express such things. His greatness lies in that language. His reputation is growing all the time, eight decades after he made his first impact on the world, and his work reverberates even more powerfully now when so many experience the world as a threatening, ominous, and lonely place.

Where is the affection, tenderness, and love in Bacon’s world and work? An exhibition devoted to his portraits might reasonably be expected to be a useful starting point, perhaps in paintings of his friends (including Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach) or lovers (Peter Lacy, George Dyer, and John Edwards). But Bacon’s grim inspection of the skull beneath the skin is abundant even here and the portraits are full of snarling, grimacing, and screaming faces, many of them distorted by injury and pain. Only in some of the later paintings, especially one of John Edwards, is some tenderness detectable. Did Bacon soften slightly in old age?

This was one of the most impressive and compelling exhibitions I have seen in recent years. An opportunity to see some really important pictures rarely on display (notably the double portrait of Freud and Auerbach which I had only see before in reproductions), and confirmation, if confirmation is needed, of what a great (and grim) artist Bacon was.

Juno and The Paycock

~ michaeljhealy ~ Leave a comment

Sean O’Casey’s classic drama was first staged in Dublin in 1924. It had been written two years earlier when civil war was raging in Ireland. A hundred years on, Juno and The Paycock has become a staple of Irish theater, but is less frequently performed elsewhere. I have seen it on two or three occasions, once in London for sure decades ago and once in New York City more recently. It is a challenging piece to stage. In the wrong hands, the comedic parts can easily descend into caricature, the tragic parts can look maudlin, and the whole can come off as sentimental. When I learned that one of my favorite actors, Mark Rylance, was taking on a leading part in the play in a West End staging, I was keen to get a ticket but also a little apprehensive. O’Casey’s plays explore universal themes, but they are very explicitly Irish. How would decision to cast all three of the main parts to two English actors and one American play out?

It proved to be a problem (none of them could sustain a reliable or authentic Dublin accent throughout the performance I saw), but not the most serious problem. Act 1 was played for laughs, with Rylance (Captain Boyle) made up to look like Charlie Chaplin and hamming it up at every opportunity he was given. The audience loved the Vaudeville-style brilliance, but as the drama turned towards darkness and tragedy it proved impossible to pull it back from the brink of farce. The terrible sadness at the heart of Juno and The Paycock was never shown because the early humor proved too hard to resist and rein in.

It is a play about the places we find meaning, consolation, and redemption. Religion for some, politics for others, not to mention the distractions of alcohol and romance. For Juno, family is everything. Her tragedy is to be the only one in her family to realize that.

Nicholas Hawksmoor: London Churches

~ michaeljhealy ~ Leave a comment

I can hear the bell of St. Anne’s, Limehouse tolling as I write. The church is preparing to celebrate its 300th anniversary, and every time I walk past it, I imagine what the local people must have thought back in the 1720s when this monumental structure started to take shape around them. Even today, with Canary Wharf’s glass and steel towers looming in the distance, St. Anne’s holds its place proudly, but three centuries ago it must have been nothing short of astounding.

I was inside St. Anne’s recently to see an exhibition of photographs taken by Helene Binet and displayed to mark a project to restore all of Nicholas Hawksmoor’s extraordinary London churches. Hawksmoor was the great beneficiary of Queen Anne’s so-called Fifty Churches Act of 1711. The grandiose project envisioned originally never came to full fruition. Only twelve churches were completed. Nevertheless, the vision gave us what many today call the Hawksmoor Six: St. Anne’s, Limehouse, St. Alfege in Greenwich, St. George-in-the-East, Christ Church, Spitalfields, St. Mary Woolnoth, and St. George’s, Bloomsbury. We can add the decommissioned church of St. Luke’s, Old Street, and the now demolished St John Horsleydown, but it’s the Six that most people know and that are the subject of the conservation effort.

As I strolled around looking at the huge, imposing photographs, and reading about the restoration appeal, I got talking to a volunteer who alerted me to a wonderful book by Mohsen Mostafavi and Helene Binet, Nicholas Hawksmoor: London Churches. Binet’s sharp black-and-white photographs steal the show here, but the floor plans and stylized outlines of each church are also rendered beautifully, and are accompanied by short essays. No book can do justice to the splendors of these remarkable and precious churches, but when I’m away from London I like to dip in to London Churches to remember them.

Has anyone seen Charlotte Salter?

~ michaeljhealy ~ Leave a comment

I have read many novels by Nicci French over the years, including the reliably excellent Frieda Klein series. They are dependable, plot-driven page turners, filled with the usual narrative twists and turns that the genre demands and with more or less believable characters. The latest standalone story, Has anyone seen Charlotte Salter?, checks all those boxes. A woman goes missing on the evening of her husband’s fiftieth birthday party, leaving behind her stunned and bewildered children. Thirty years pass without any trace of her. No body, no sightings. Just the mystery of her sudden, inexplicable disappearance and the hole it left in the lives of those who loved her. No plot spoilers here …

There is no way to deny the authors’ mastery of the genre. Years of experience are visible on every page. Having said that, my interest in the plot and characters started to flag at one point, and it took the introduction of a new character two-thirds of the way into the novel to revive it. Even then I turned the final page feeling that the denouement was rushed and unconvincing. An enjoyable, workmanlike performance from Nicci French, but not a classic.

The Western Wind

~ michaeljhealy ~ Leave a comment

The Western Wind is a novel set in a small and isolated English village at the end of the 15th century. Its narrator is the local priest, John Reve. John’s parish, Oakham, is a farming community, mostly poor, mostly hardworking, and mostly god-fearing. As the story opens, its wealthiest and worldliest member, Tom Newman, is missing, feared drowned in the treacherous local river after unprecedented storms and floods. His torn shirt has been found, nothing more, and the villagers are distressed and fearful. The local dean, representing ecclesiastical and temporal power, has arrived to investigate, making things uncomfortable for Fr. Reve.

My summary makes the novel sound like a medieval mystery story. To some extent it is, but there’s so much more to The Western Wind. It’s a beautifully written and thoughtful tale about faith, superstition, and power, and about how and where we find meaning in life. It’s a novel that never strives to be explicitly historical, but is filled with authentic detail of life in a medieval English village. It plays with time, telling the story in reverse, and this helps make medieval Oakham shockingly modern. It’s best read slowly and carefully, with every sentence savored.

Autocracy, Inc.

~ michaeljhealy ~ Leave a comment

The emergence of autocratic regimes has been one of the defining features of the global political landscape in recent years. Russia, China, Venezuela, Zimbabwe, North Korea, Belarus. The list goes on and on. In Autocracy, Inc. Anne Applebaum gives a short but compelling account of the phenomenon, focusing less on why these anti-democratic leaders have prospered and more on how they operate. It’s a necessary and urgent read, written with passion, intelligence, and deep experience. Anyone troubled by and curious about what is happening ought to read it. For me the most eye-opening part of her account was the interconnectedness of the autocracies, the sense that they operate very effectively as an international system, a supportive network that offers an alternative world order. It’s a network that relies heavily on the willingness of the international finance community to hide and launder the autocrats’ ill gotten money and on a global diaspora of friends and fellow travelers to sustain it.

I would have liked the author to emphasize more strongly how the autocrats have studied the playbook of Western democracies when it comes to propaganda techniques and other ways of controlling their messaging. The anti-democratic regimes have built upon techniques devised and deployed over many decades by Western democracies to spread their own ideology. Autocracy flourishes for many reasons, not least because the financial systems based in liberal democracies enable it and because it has learned how to use and extend some of its tools to great effect.

Coriolanus

~ michaeljhealy ~ Leave a comment

I have seen several remarkable performances of Coriolanus. Two stand out in my memory. Ian McKellen took on the role at The National Theatre in 1984. I remember it as a blood-soaked staging, and the picture below seems to confirm that.

More than fifteen years later, I saw Ralph Fiennes play the part of the arrogant Roman in a darker, more psychologically intense staging at (I think) the Gainsborough Studios in London. It has always been one of my favorite Shakespeare plays, so I was excited to head back to The National Theatre recently to see how David Oyelowo would interpret the role. The production was still in preview, so the cast was still working out the kinks. (Oyelowo forgot his lines at one point, but recovered after a nerve-racking moment). Overall, it struck me as a cinematic, polished, and slightly flashy staging. It felt a little muddled in design terms. Generals brief their battlefield commanders via cell phones and video calls while soldiers fight with swords and shields. The action moves from sleek, expensive, hotel-style interiors to unadorned public spaces staged like a museum. Performances were generally very strong.

Coriolanus is very much a play for our times. Politicians inflated with hubris and boastfulness, pretending to care for the people when it suits, but otherwise deeply contemptuous of them, and fickle, easily. manipulated electors. Does any of that sound familiar or urgently relevant to our times?

Henry Moore: Shadows on the Wall

~ michaeljhealy ~ Leave a comment

Henry Moore first attracted significant public attention during the Second World War when the drawings he made of Londoners sheltering from the Blitz in tube stations were first published. Although Moore’s reputation today rests mainly on his monumental sculptures, those intimate drawings of men, women, and children taking refuge in such claustrophobic conditions remain powerful and affecting. The Courtauld in London has displayed some of this work in a small exhibition called Shadows on the Wall.

The premise of the exhibition is Moore’s fascination with those confining walls, ceilings, and tunnels – architectural elements that he explored further in his well-known drawings of the Yorkshire coal mines and that were far more than simple backdrops for the human figures he represented. It’s an interesting idea. Looking closely at the drawings, the fusion of the human and the architectural becomes more pronounced.

The engrossing exhibition in London ends soon, but a catalog authored by Penelope Curtis and others is available.

Cork City Musings

~ michaeljhealy ~ Leave a comment

Even Cork’s greatest admirer would struggle to say the city is a pretty one. The dominant theme is one of grayness. Gray buildings under skies that are often that particular gray that signals rain. It can all seem a little grim at times in the city center, somewhat neglected and shabby. But whatever it might lack in prettiness, Cork has character, charm, and energy in abundance.

For decades the city has been little more than the beginning of my frequent trips further west, but recently I had the opportunity to spend a couple of days there, and I enjoyed it very much. The food scene is vibrant (highlights included Goldie and Nano Nagle Cafe), and there is, of course, no shortage of historic pubs. Sin E for traditional music, The Oval, Mutton Lane, and Arthur Maynes for unique atmosphere and craic in general. The Crawford Art Gallery is an unmissable spot and I was delighted to visit before it closes for major restoration work. Tempting as it might be to skip the city en route to the glories and splendors of West Cork, that would be a mistake. Linger a little and let it work its magic.

On This Holy Island

~ michaeljhealy ~ Leave a comment

Oliver Smith had long dreamed about completing the camino, the ancient pilgrims’ walk to Santiago de Compostela. The pandemic put the realization of that particular longing on hold. He started to think about focusing his interest in pilgrimage in a different way, reflecting instead on the pathways and destinations, ancient and modern, to be found closer to home, and planning an adventure across the sacred landscape of his native Britain. On This Holy Island is the result.

Some of the places that featured in his journey are familiar to almost every Briton. Stonehenge, Glastonbury, Avebury, Lindisfarne, and the White Horse at Uffington – these are places we learn about at school (even if we never get to visit them or understand their significance). But the history of pilgrimage in Britain encompasses a much broader topography, physical, emotional, and spiritual.

Smith writes with a self-deprecating charm and a light touch. This isn’t some dry, heavy thesis about the nature and meaning of pilgrimage. It’s a fact-filled, anecdote-filled travelogue, a book of encounters and conversations as much as wanderings and destinations.