Untold Stories

by Alan Bennett

  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:

  I am not an elaborate villain, nor is my spirit particularly tormented; crime in my case is not a substitute for art. It is just that my silver hair and general benevolence, invariably supplemented by a double-breasted suit, give me the appearance of an honest man. In the movies honest men do not look like honest men and suave is just another way of saying suspect. Bad men wear good suits; honest men wear raincoats, and so untiring are they in the pursuit of evil that they sometimes forget to shave.

  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:

  In westerns I will generally team up with the tough wise-cracking no-nonsense lady who runs the saloon, who in her turn, inhabits the audience’s presuppositions about her character. They know that a life spent in incessant and lucrative sexual activity has not dulled her moral perceptions one bit. They remember Jesus had a soft spot for such women, and so do they.

  I am frequently a doctor, in particular a doctor who at a crucial turn of events has to be sobered up to deliver the heroine’s baby or to save a child dying of diphtheria. Rusty though my skills are, I find they have not entirely deserted me and I am assisted in the operation by my friend the proprietress of the saloon. She is tough and unsqueamish and together we pull the patient through, and having performed a deft tracheotomy my success is signalled when I come downstairs and say, ‘She is sleeping now.’

  He concludes:

  But though I rise to the occasion as and when the plot requires it, there is never any suggestion that I am going to mend my ways in any permanent fashion. Delivering the baby, flying the plane, shooting the villain … none of this heralds a return to respectability, still less sobriety. I go on much as ever down the path to self-destruction. I know I cannot change so I do not try. A scoundrel but never a villain, I know redemption is not for me. It is this that redeems me.

  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 pai
nting 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:

  We were before Van Eyck’s picture of John Arnolfini and his wife. My Aunt mistook it for an Annunciation and said, ‘Dear, dear. What a funny notion … to put the Holy Ghost in a hat!’

  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.

  It’s a sentiment I later put into the mouth of Hector, the eccentric schoolmaster in The History Boys, but something similar, which one might call evidences of humanity, happens in pictures. The most notable example in one of the most popular paintings in the Gallery is in the Piero Baptism … and it’s the man taking off his shirt. There’s something obscurely comforting in the fact that they took their shirts off 500 years ago much as we do now, this piece of naturalism more vivid for its contrast with the hieratic figures of Christ and the Baptist in the foreground who are, of course, like all the figures in Piero’s pictures, stern and unsmiling. They wouldn’t get far advertising toothpaste, Piero’s people.

  Piero della Francesca, The Baptism of Christ

  In Piero’s Nativity, another favourite picture, there’s an oddly modern piece of observation where Joseph is relaxing in the background, one leg resting on the other and showing the sole of his foot. In view of this relaxed behaviour one might be forgiven for thinking that Joseph is celebrating the birth of the baby by smoking a large cigar. But that’s an illusion, and not the kind of illusion Sir Ernst Gombrich specialises in.

  Paradoxically, animals are often there in paintings to introduce the human touch. In Catena’s A Warrior Adoring the Infant Christ it’s a little dog. In Hogarth’s The Graham Children the cat has maybe jumped up to get at the bird, but it’s also for the sheer pleasure of clawing the upholstery. In Veronese’s The Family of Darius a monkey is distracting one of the little girls, or maybe alarming her, as it’s quite a sizeable creature.

  Cats and monkeys enable me to say that the News of the World used to have on its masthead, if it could be called a masthead, the motto ‘All human life is there’. I shouldn’t think anybody on the paper knew the source of the quotation, which in full reads ‘Cats and monkeys, monkeys and cats, all human life is there.’ And the author – about the most unlikely person one would think of in connection with the News of the World – is Henry James.

  Piero della Francesca, The Nativity

  Staying with Veronese, the most affecting touch in the painting isn’t the children, though, or the monkey, it’s Alexander himself. He’s portrayed as a very young man, and here is someone who is the master of the known world but who still can’t quite manage to grow a satisfactory beard. I find that very human.

  In Titian’s The Vendramin Family the children are generally what strikes one as most human, especially the little boy with the dog, but the most appealing figure is Leonardo Vendramin, who seems much less impressive than his father or his uncle, a bit weak, simple almost, and the only one in the picture whose entire attention is fixed on the relic on the altar, which is what the picture is ostensibly about. He’s like one of the weaker brothers in The Godfather who you know will end up getting bumped off.

  Titian, The Vendramin Family

  Finally in this catalogue of human touches, The Mantelpiece by Vuillard, whom I think of rather perversely as a French Harold Gilman – simply because Leeds Art Gallery, where I first discovered paintings, has a very good collection of Camden Town paintings which I got to know long before I ever saw any French paintings of the same date. This could be in Camden Town. I love the mantelpiece; I love the wallpaper; I wish it were my mantelpiece and my picture.

  I was going to end on a rather clichéd note by saying that we shouldn’t take the National Gallery for granted. But of course the opposite is true; the more institutions and freedoms and benefits one can take for granted �
�� of which in my view free state-supported galleries and museums come high on the list – the more civilised a society is. Free public libraries are another, but we certainly can’t take them for granted. Around the time I was beginning to write this lecture I read a piece by Madsen Pirie, the Director of the Adam Smith Institute, dismissing public libraries as simply providing free entertainment for the middle classes. When such views can be so unabashedly expressed and taken seriously by government a free National Gallery can’t be taken for granted at all.

  Not having to pay to come into the Gallery doesn’t mean that one does-n’t value it. One of the most rampant misapprehensions of the last fifteen years has been the notion that we only value what we pay for, and that to be given something – even when what is supposedly being given is actually our own, as these pictures are – means that we set no store by it. All my experience, and in particular my education, for which my parents never had to pay a penny, belies that.

  In my view we should put no obstacle, financial or otherwise, between the people and their pictures. They belong as much to a boy or girl sleeping in a doorway in the Strand as they do to the benefactors whose names are emblazoned on these walls. With its lectures and educational programmes what has been created here in the National Gallery, particularly over the last ten years and in the teeth of the prevailing orthodoxy, is a free university of art, free and to a high standard. It does a wonderful job.

  But like most public institutions today the Gallery is required not merely to do its job but also to prove that it is doing its job. It is an exercise that is at the same time self-defeating and self-fulfilling. The current orthodoxy assumes that public servants will only do their job as well as they can if they are required to prove that they are doing their job as well as they can. But this proving takes time, and the time spent preparing annual reports and corporate plans showing one is doing the job is taken out of the time one would otherwise spend doing it… thus ensuring that the institution is indeed less efficient than would otherwise be the case. Which is the point the Treasury is trying to prove in the first place. And every public institution now is involved in this futile time-wasting merry-go-round.