Iceberg in Mist

Between 1968 and 1970 Gerhard Richter painted a remarkable range of 'damaged landscapes', as they are termed by Mark Godfrey, the curator of Tate Modern's Gerhard Richter: Panorama. These include aerial views of cities in thick grey paint, the colour of ash and rubble, that Richter later likened to images of the destruction of Dresden but which might equally be seen as warnings of some future apocalypse.  One of these, Townscape Paris (1968), is a painting I referred to rather tentatively in one of my very first blog posts here.  At the same time Richter was also painting a very different kind of townscape, reproducing details of architectural models, and these too seem dystopian - windowless blocks showing no sign of life, casting shadows over empty white roads that resemble the patterns on a circuit board.
 

Another monochrome aerial view from 1968, Clouds, provides glimpses of an abtsracted version of the German countryside - imagery that Godfrey compares to the opening sequence (above) of Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will (1935). Two years later Richter began a very different series of cloud paintings, this time treating them as isolated objects, white against featureless blue-green skies.  They resemble Alfred Stieglitz's famous cloud photographs, Equivalents (1927), which in turn (as Rosalind Krauss points out in that weighty tome Art Since 1900) could be viewed as Duchampian readymades - uncomposed and detached from their environment.  Alps II (1968) might be a close-up of a storm cloud and is barely recognisable as a landscape painting, certainly a long way from the heroic image of German mountains celebrated in those early Reifenstahl films.

Seascape (Sea-Sea) (1970) is described in the exhibition as a 'collage of two photographs of the sea, one inverted to appear as the sky. The painting creates a momentary illusion of a coherent seascape, until it becomes clear that the ‘clouds’ in the upper half of the painting are waves. It creates a sense of discontinuity and suggests Richter’s acknowledgement of the gulf separating him from the moment of Romanticism.' It made me think of Rothko's grey paintings, with the patterns of waves replacing Rothko's brushtrokes.  Mark Godfrey views them as a cross between Capar David Friedrich and Blinky Palermo: an attempt at the kind of radical abstract statement Palermo was making in his Cloth Paintings using the traditional medium of a seascape.  Another point of comparison is Vija Celmins and, like her, Richter also produced images of black and white fields of stars.

In 1971 an exhibition of Richter's recent work, painted in flat colour rather than black and white, prompted various critics to compare him with Friedrich.  Landscape near Hubbelrath (1969), for example, shows an empty view with a road sign where we expect to see, in Friedrich, a church spire.  Richter said that his art lacked the spiritual underpinnings of Romanticism: 'for us, everything is empty'.  However, Mark Godfrey argues that Richter and Friedrich both aimed to create a sense of unfulfilled desire (readers of this blog may recall an earlier post on the way Friedrich composed 'obstructed views').  This approach may have seemed particularly appropriate to a post-war German artist working at a time when the purpose of painting itself was being called into question.

There is one more interesting example of Richter's engagement with Friedrich later in the exhibition, a painting called Iceberg in Mist (1982).  I have mentioned various artists here before who went north to paint the Arctic seas -  Peder Balke, Lawren Harris, Per Kirkeby - and Richter made his own trip in 1972, looking for a motif as powerful as Friedrich's The Sea of Ice.   Mark Godfrey mentions that on his return Richter made 'an extraordinary and little-known book of black and white photographs of icebergs', printed, like the two halves of Seascape (Sea-Sea), both upside down and right side up.  In this way Richter rejected the single sublime image and arranged the photographs in such a way that 'their overt subject became more or less irrelevant.'  Richter's urge to thwart our desire for spectacular landscapes is also evident in the later painting, where we cannot even glimpse the tip of the iceberg as the whole view is shrouded in mist.

Caspar David Friedrich, The Sea of Ice, 1823-4

A Voyage Round the Coast of Great Britain

Three years ago the Folio Society published a new edition of William Daniell's A Voyage Round the Coast of Great Britain.  The original book came out in eight volumes between 1814 and 1825, contained 308 hand-coloured aquatints and sold for £60 ('one and a half times what a fisherman or sailor aboard a merchant ship could expect to earn in a year at the time').  A second hand copy of the Folio version (in the excellent Much Ado Books shop) cost me rather less than this.  It includes only 114 of the best aquatints and cuts out almost all of the rather dry commentary Daniell wrote, replacing it with extracts from the writings of contemporary travellers.  The original intention was for Richard Ayton, an aspiring writer and friend of the family, to accompany Daniell on his travels.  But the two of them parted acrimoniously after the first year, having got as far as southern Scotland (the Voyage commenced at Land's End). Daniell pressed on alone, returning to his coastal journey every summer, delayed only by famine in Scotland (1816) and economic crisis and fear of revolution in England (1819).  Ayton never did become a successful author and his short life came to a sad end the year Daniell finally completed his great project.  The cumulative achievement of the Voyage was recognised by the Royal Academy, who elected Daniell a full member in 1822 - as C. J. Shepherd notes in his introduction, 'the artist that he beat to secure his lifetime's ambition was John Constable'.

Among the texts assembled to accompany Daniell's aquatints in this edition, the most vivid impressions of the coastal landscape are provided by writers like Keats, Southey, Scott and Dorothy Wordsworth (whose travels in Scotland I have discussed here before).  But the book encompasses many other interesting voices - Joanna Schopenhauer at Lancaster, Jane Austen at Lyme, the 'exquisitely fashionable' Hermann von Pückler-Muskau in Brighton, James Johnson, author of 'An Essay on Indigestion; or Morbid Sensibility of the Stomach and Bowels', in Liverpool, a gentleman called Charles Cochrane who for some reason went to Margate disguised as an itinerant Spanish gypsy guitarist, the ornithologist Charles Fothergill who visited Flamborough Head 'resplendent in 'white and green hat; a Belcher neckcloth with my short collar appearing over it; a dark green jacket with silver buttons; [and] sky blue pantaloons'', composer Felix Mendelssohn, who sent home a few bars of music which would become the Hebridean Overture, and the 'excitable young Polish tutor and future revolutionary' Krystyn Lach-Szyrma, who was so overwhelmed by Fingal's Cave, a 'glorious cathedral made by nature's hand', that he threw himself into the sea.

Cover by David Eccles,

after William Daniell's In Fingal's Cave, Staffa

In his Preface to A Voyage Round the Coast of Great Britain, Robert Macfarlane writes that seeing Daniell's aquatints leads us to imagine Britain only by its outline.  'The interior falls away, and all that is left is the frame.  And what a frame it is!  Some 7,500 miles of coastline, forming a continuum from storm-crashed headlands to beach-front amusements, from salt-marsh to heathland, from 400-million-year-old gneiss to endlessly recast mudflats.'  With this in mind it is clearly impossible to pick out a typical view - the two shown below I liked for the non-naturalistic regularity of their rock formations and the precisely distributed seabirds and grazing sheep.  Yet despite their variety all of Daniell's aquatints have the same harmonious, muted palette of slate blue, grey green and pale browns.  He may, as Macfarlane says, portray all kinds of meteorological conditions - 'a doldrummish sea day in Ilfracombe, sails drooping in the heat, gives way to a Force 7 off Holyhead' - but the weather somehow always looks British.    

 Near view of one of the Shiant Isles

Needles Cliff and Needles, Isle of White

William Daniell's journeys coincided with the rise of picturesque tourism and bathing resorts, the Napoleonic Wars, the Highland Clearances and the rapid development of industry and infrastructure.  Robert Southey, for example, toured the Highlands with Thomas Telford, whom he nicknamed Pontifex Maximus, the great bridge builder. In one of this book's extracts from Southey's Journal of a Tour in Scotland in 1819, the conversion of the Marquess of Stafford's estate's into extensive sheep-farms is criticised: 'a quiet, thoughtful, contented, religious people' forcefully transplanted from the glens to the sea coast.  At the other end of Britain, Dover had recently been scarred by vast new fortifications to keep out the French, a fact that William Cobbett found perplexing - 'what the devil should they come to this hill for, then?'  He concluded bitterly that 'more brick and stone have been buried in this hill than would go to build a neat new cottage for every labouring man in the counties of Kent and of Sussex!' Shakespeare's Cliff (which I have written about here before) was also visited by artist Benjamin Robert Hayden who stood looking at it, 'almost lost in the embruno tint of twilight'.  There he imagined 'a Colossal Statue of Britannia' built on top of it, 'surveying France with a lofty air.'

I could go on, but I'll end this post at Lulworth Cove, where Daniell painted the rocky outcrop of Stair Hole with its striking recumbent folds.  The book includes an extract from the recollections of the Irish playwright John O'Keeffe who spent a summer at Lulworth with his children.  As soon as he arrived, O'Keeffe set off with his son, called Tottenham, to explore the Cove itself and the craggy rocks above.  At the end of the day 'we returned to our abode with appetites sea-sharpened, and sat down to a roast loin of lamb, delicate boiled chickens, tongue, green-peas, young potatoes, a gooseberry pie, thick cream, good strong home-brewed ale and a glass of tolerable port-wine.'  Next morning they were off again, climbing Hanbury Hill where O'Keeffe recorded two of the local landscape terms - patches of land called 'knaps, larger or smaller, each divided from the other by a grassy rising, termed a launchet.'  Tired from the climb, he and Tottenham sat down to look at the view - 'before us, the great expanse; above, the blue serene; around, the melody of birds; scarce a breath from the still bosom of the deep, and the vertical sun shedding his glories on the scene.  Neither the scream of sea-gulls, crows, and puffins, could prevent me falling into a slumber, and, in a sort of sweet demi-dream, I could hear the rushing pinions of birds that must have flown by very near me, and felt the rabbits that I fancied ran over me.'

Walter Benjamin's Grave

'The cemetery faces a small bay directly looking over the Mediterranean; it is carved in stone in terraces; the coffins are also pushed into such stone walls.  It is by far one of the most fantastic and most beautiful spots I have ever seen in my life.'

- Hannah Arendt, letter to Gershom Scholem, 21 October 1940

Michael Taussig's essay, 'Walter Benjamin's Grave: A Profane Illumination', describes the cemetery of Portbou, the small town on the border of France and Spain where Benjamin died in 1940.  Carrying his possessions in a heavy black briefcase, Benjamin was led there over the mountains by a young woman, Lisa Fittko.  'It was the first time she had made the trip.  Benjamin was her first refugee ... She got lost.  They backtracked.  Then they found their way to the summit: "The spectacular scene appeared so unexpectedly that for a moment I thought I was seeing a mirage ... the Vermillion Coast, an autumnal landscape with innumerable hues of reds and yellow-gold.  I gasped for breath - I had never seen such beauty before."' But the the Franco government had cancelled all transit visas and on the night of September 25th Walter Benjamin, fearing repatriation, took an overdose of morphine tablets.  Hannah Arendt, then still in the South of France, came to look for his grave soon afterwards. Lisa Fittko and her husband Hans continued the dangerous work of escorting refugees across the border.  Hans took to wearing a Basque cap and sandals to blend in with the locals.  Sometime he would sit for hours on a cliff projection looking out to sea.

Dani Karavan, Walter Benjamin Memorial at Portbou, 1994

The beauty of this place, which so struck Hannah Arendt and Lisa Fittko, seems at variance with its  history of displacement and disappearance.  Michael Taussig first visited Portbou in 1987 and found the whole town a sad monument to Benjamin's death - 'cold, nasty, and enigmatic.'  But now, on returning fifteen years later, he comes upon the new monument to Walter Benjamin, designed by Dani Karavan, an artist from Tel Aviv.  An iron triangle forms a doorway leading to steps that take you down the slope of the hill towards the sea.  At the bottom there is a thick pane of glass inscribed with Benjamin's words: 'It is more arduous to honour the memory of the nameless than that of the renowned.  Historical construction is devoted to the memory of the nameless.'  The words could be taken to refer as much to the victims of Franco as to the Nazis.  Looking back up the stairs, the doorway frames a rectangle of blue sky, echoing the view of the breaking waves below.

Later, inside the cemetery itself, Taussig is struck by a virtually identical set of steps, leading from the graves to the chapel.  He recalls Benjamin's surrealist conception of the 'profane illumination', where something provides a new kind of experience whilst retaining the trace of the kind of religious illumination it has surpassed. In the cemetery at Portbou there are niches bearing the names of the dead and a common grave, the fosa común, in which Benjamin's remains may actually lie.  The monument, by contrast, is a profane illumination, which 'gathers its strength through the open expression of namelessness as empty space, sea and sky.  It truly is an emphatic statement on the weighting of the world by its nameless dead.'  Standing on the headland Taussig feels the full force of the transmontaña wind.  'Can we imagine a state, a religion, or a community bound to remembrance which would have thye courage or craziness to call a wind a monument?'  Walter Benjamin once wrote that the best way to light a cigarette is with a flintstone and fuse.  'The wind blows the matches out, but the harder the wind blows, the more the fuse glows.'