by Alan Bennett
GWEN JOHN, Portrait of Chloe Boughton-Leigh, 1910–14
Gwen John was the sister of Augustus John – or perhaps one should say that Augustus was the brother of Gwen, because whereas since her death in 1939 her reputation has continued to grow, his is now rather patchy. She was the opposite of her brother in almost every respect, by nature diffident and retiring and painting with restraint and delicacy but with great strength. She was a friend of Rodin and an admirer of Whistler and a few years ago she was vividly (and bravely) portrayed on television by Anna Massey.
In her dedication and asceticism and her lack of concern for her reputation (she seldom exhibited her work) Gwen John conforms to one notion of what an artist should be just as her more flamboyant bohemian brother conforms to another.
ROGER FRY, Portrait of Virginia Woolf, c.1910
Portrait of Nina Hamnett, 1917
DUNCAN GRANT, Still-Life, 1930
Roger Fry is represented in the collection by a small and not very interesting landscape. He was more influential as an aesthetic theorist than as a painter but I’ve always found his portraits particularly satisfying. The portrait of Nina Hamnett which is in the University of Leeds’ art collection is an excellent example.
The portrait of Virginia Woolf is on loan to the Gallery and must have been painted about 1910. The strained expression and hunched shoulders suggest that it may have been done on the verge of one of her frequent breakdowns. But she didn’t like having her portrait painted so maybe that’s where the tension arose.
Duncan Grant was married to Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf’s sister, and this still-life was painted in 1930.
Painters seem an altogether nicer class of person than writers, though they often make good writers themselves. They’re less envious of each other, less competitive and with more of a sense that they are all engaged on the same enterprise. I once met Duncan Grant when he was very old and asked him if he was envious of other painters. There was a pause, then he said, ‘Titian, sometimes.’ It was a good remark because besides being a joke it was also a rebuke to me for being so shallow-minded.
Seeing the little boy when we were making Portrait or Bust laboriously spelling out the label under Barbara Hepworth’s Dual Form then looking up at it, grinning and saying, ‘It’s good is that!’ makes me realise that there comes a point, particularly in music and the visual arts, where one’s taste stops developing – or at any rate falters. Thus in English music I never got much beyond Walton and Vaughan Williams, and in English painting, though I don’t quite stop, I certainly slow down in the late 1950s and begin to settle for what I know already. Thus I like the smoother, suppler forms of Henry Moore and dislike (or don’t feel easy with) the pointy-headed figures that come later. And, unlike the little boy, don’t go much for Barbara Hepworth.
JACOB KRAMER, The Day of Atonement, 1919
JACOB Epstein, Bust of Jacob Kramer, c.1921
Tramps are, I suppose, an occupational hazard of art galleries, particularly these days, but I should be sorry to see them turned away, their right to look at the pictures (or not look at them) every bit as inalienable as mine.
Still, I can see they can pose problems. I wrote a television play once in which there was a scene in a provincial art gallery with a conversation between a down-to-earth attendant and a casual visitor:
VISITOR: Now then, Neville. Not busy?
ATTENDANT: Ay. Run off us feet. (The gallery is empty)
VISITOR: I could do with your job.
ATTENDANT: It carries its own burdens. We get that much rubbish traipsing through here I feel like a social worker. This is one of their regular ports of call, you know. Here and the social security. Mind you, they don’t come in for the pictures.
VISITOR: No?
ATTENDANT: No. They come in for the central heating. Genuine art lovers you can tell them a mile off. They’re looking at a picture and what they’re looking for are the effects of light. The brush strokes. Economy of effect. But not the lot we get. Riff-raff. Rubbish. Human flotsam. The detritus of a sick society. Shove up half a dozen Rembrandts and they’d never come near. Turn the Dimplex up three degrees and it’s packed out. (He stops another visitor) You’re not looking for the Turner?
VISITOR 2: Sorry?
ATTENDANT: No. Beg pardon. That’s generally what they all want to see. Anybody who has any idea. ‘Where’s the Turner?’ Flaming Turner. I can’t see anything in it. Looks as if it’s been left out in the rain. We had Kenneth Clark in here once. Same old story. ‘Where’s the Turner?’ I’ve never seen a suit like it. Tweed! It was just like silk. Then some of them come in just because we have a better class of urinal. See the Turner, use the urinal and then off. And who pays? Right. The ratepayer.
(Afternoon Off, 1979)
There was often a tramp in here in the late forties, hanging about the gallery or slumped over an art book in the corner of the Reference Library. Except that he wasn’t a tramp; he was quite a distinguished painter, Jacob Kramer, and his bust by Epstein is one of the most powerful pieces of sculpture in the Gallery. Kramer was Jewish, his family from the Ukraine, one of many thousands of Jewish families who came to Leeds at the end of the nineteenth century. As a young man he was a Vorticist and an associate of Wyndham Lewis and William Roberts. I’d find it hard to say what Vorticism is; I think of it as the jagged school of painting, Cubism with an English slant, but both Kramer’s Jewishness and his Vorticism can be seen in his The Day of Atonement, which was unveiled in the Gallery in 1920 to a storm of anti-Semitic protest.
There was still a lot of anti-Semitism in Leeds even after the Second War, and I can remember Jewish boys in my school being regularly bullied, one boy in particular, Alan Harris, always coming in for it. The masters used to turn a blind eye and even collaborate, one master catching him a terrific slap across the face for very little reason. Years later when I was in Harrogate I ran across this master, now tranquilly retired, in a tea shop and as he came up to me I thought, Oh yes, you’re the one who hit the Jew. Nowadays Asians have replaced the Jews in the front line, living where the Jews used to live, the difference being that nowadays we talk about prejudice, whereas in those days one never mentioned it.
Kramer himself died in 1962 indistinguishable from a lot of the tramps whom you’ll see outside. Except that in 1966 Leeds College of Art was, briefly, renamed after him, so he was more respectable in death than he ever was in life.
Though the collection is particularly strong on twentieth-century British pictures there are inevitably gaps. There are only two watercolours by Eric Ravilious, for instance, one of my favourite painters, who caught the atmosphere of wartime Britain better than anyone. Though there are two paintings by Duncan Grant there’s nothing of any great interest by his long-time associate, Vanessa Bell.
Another absentee is Hockney (except for several etchings), though with the glut of his paintings at Saltaire the region isn’t exactly going short. Perhaps some of the ancient rivalry between Leeds and Bradford still persists. I’m sure one of his paintings would be better placed here than on the wall of some Californian millionaire.
In the documentary Portrait or Bust I told the story of how I was mistaken for Hockney in a tea shop in Arezzo. It continues to happen. A few months after the programme went out I was marooned in Nice airport with two or three hours to wait for a plane. Unless I’m being paid for I travel economy but my travel agent, who has an exalted view of my status, has VIP put on my tickets, a largely futile gesture which seldom ever gets me upgraded. However, rather than sit on a hard bench for three hours I thought I’d use my notional status to wangle my way into the Club Lounge.
A stone-faced stewardess barred my way and I laboriously stated my case, whereupon she grudgingly undertook to make a telephone call. As she was phoning there was a tap on my shoulder. It was an English woman who, judging by her luggage and general demeanour, had a hereditary right to be in the Club Lounge and had been in Club Lounges from the cradle. ‘Could I’, she said kind
ly, ‘congratulate you on your designs for the Rake’s Progress?’
At which point the stewardess put the phone down and said, ‘No. You can’t come in here.’
The English have never been entirely comfortable with art and are happiest thinking of pictures as decor; I certainly prefer paintings in settings, feel easier with a picture in a room than when faced with it on a blank wall. Twentieth-century paintings in particular benefit from a domestic surrounding. I liked the mixture of paintings and furniture in the recent exhibition about Herbert Read, for instance, and the intimate galleries at Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge carry that mixture further. The paintings can benefit too, and the shortcomings of the Bloomsbury painters become virtues when one sees their pictures as part of a comprehensive (if haphazard) decorative scheme as one does at Charleston. And of course this applies to much grander artists too. How many old master paintings, now seen in splendid isolation in galleries, were once part of rich and complex decorative and devotional schemes that we can now scarcely imagine?
Which makes me feel less frivolous five centuries later for liking to see a vase of flowers, say, beside or even in front of a painting.
The focus of this selection has been unashamedly retrospective, concentrating on the pictures I got to know in this Gallery when I was young. What my generation had then, which I think has weakened since, was a powerful sense of the city. I’ve mentioned that Atkinson Grimshaw’s painting of Park Row reminded me of Genoa or Florence. I don’t think it’s fanciful to take that further and say that in the forties and fifties one had a sense of belonging to Leeds that can’t have been unlike the feelings of someone growing up in a fifteenth-century Italian city-state.
There were the arms of the city for a start. Everywhere in Leeds in those days one was confronted with the owls and the lamb in the sling and the motto ‘Pro Rege et Lege’. One could not escape those arms. They were on my schoolbooks and they were at the tram stop; they were on the market; they were over the entrance to the Central Library (where, rather battered, they still survive). At every turn there was this reminder that you were a son or daughter of the city.
Its relics persist and in unexpected places. Staying at the Metropole Hotel while we were making the TV programme on which this selection is based, I happened to go down the side of the hotel and there, for no particular reason and seemingly over the kitchen door, was the familiar coat of arms, the stamp of Leeds.
I’m sure this sense of place survives but in a different form. The West Yorkshire Playhouse will centre some people’s sense of identity. Leeds United (never much of a team when I was a boy) will centre others’. And I would not be so foolish as to say things were altogether better then or worse; they were different. Of one thing, though, I am sure.
My affection for this collection began in the late 1940s and it’s coupled in my memory with other formative experiences of that time, with the books I borrowed from the public library next door, for instance, or with the concerts by the Yorkshire Symphony Orchestra that I heard every Saturday night in the Town Hall. The pictures were free, the library was free and the concerts (at 6d a time) were virtually free. And I was being educated at Leeds Modern School, which was, naturally, free and in due course went off to university, at first on a scholarship from Leeds, then on one from my college, free again.
Now if the assumptions – I would not call them a philosophy – that have informed government and public life over the last fifteen years are true, I would not set much store by the paintings I saw here, the books I read next door, the music I heard over the road, or the education I had up at Lawnswood. I had not had them to pay for and nor had my parents, so because they were free I am assumed to have taken them for granted. Only if I had to pay my way would I really appreciate them. Or so the libertarian argument goes.
Nothing is further from the truth.
I valued then as I value now what I was given in Leeds, as I’m sure most of my generation did and do.
But what am I on about, you say? The Art Gallery is still free, and though the suburban branches have been cut back the libraries are still free. Which is true. But they are not free, as once they were, because they are every citizen’s birthright. I am not even sure we have a birthright now. No, they are only free because the government has not been able to devise a legal method of stealing them from the public for short-term financial gain and putting them out to private tender. If, as seems likely, we are now going to have to pay to die, why should we not also have to pay to look and to read?
Here is a picture of a boy looking up at a Barbara Hepworth.* I see myself fifty years ago and I know that through no fault of his own he is going to have a harder time of it than I had. And I think that is wrong.
* In the BBC film of Portrait or Bust.
Making York Minster
It is a morning in May and York Minster is already thronged with visitors. In the vast octagon of ancient glass that is the chapterhouse we sidestep the crowds gazing up at the windows and slip unnoticed behind one of the great iron-bound thirteenth-century doors.
Here there is another door set in the thickness of the wall and a narrow spiral staircase that takes us high up above the vestibule of the chapterhouse to the door of what is in effect an attic. It’s a cold, dark, dusty loft and as I scramble thankfully across the threshold and look around the dim interior it appears as if we have come into some sort of cloakroom, with racks and racks of what seem to be stiffened remnants hanging in bundles from the rails. Or, with no two pieces the same, the shapes could almost be pelts and this a kind of curing place.
It is tall and narrow with windows set low in the wall and above them an elaborately beamed roof, the timbers so fresh and sharp they recall Philip Larkin’s lines in Church Going:
From where I stand, the roof looks almost new –
Cleaned, or restored? Someone would know: I don’t
The someone who does know is my companion, Louise Hampson, the cathedral archivist, who tells me it’s a scissor-beam roof, dating like the rest of the room from the fourteenth century, and that this is the masons’ loft, put up almost as an afterthought on top of the chapterhouse vestibule to serve in effect as the drawing office of the medieval Minster. Like the vestibule, it’s L-shaped, with the long arm of the L taken up with racks not of remnants, still less pelts, but shapes of wood and blackened zinc, the patterns for some of the countless architectural features of this vast building.
At first glance the other half of the room seems empty; it’s just a long stretch of dusty grey floor covered in a layer of crumbling plaster. Only when you scrutinise the floor more carefully do you see that there are shapes in this dust, outlines of mouldings, arches even, and that it is not a floor at all but a vast drawing board.
It was on this floor, thinly washed with lime plaster or gesso, that were traced the designs for crucial pieces of construction in the building of the Minster, the earliest of the designs still detectable that of some window tracery in the retro-choir, known to have been put up in 1356. The loft itself was probably constructed thirty years or so earlier as a drawing space needed for the rebuilding of the Minster’s west end.
Not all features would need to be traced out here. A standard arch, for instance, that presented no difficulties could be put up on the spot. It was more complex constructions, two or three arches springing from the same pillar at different angles, for instance, that would need preparatory drawings and a tracing on the floor that could be made into a templet. This would then be taken down to the site, either in one piece or in sections, and used when shaping the stone. I would have called it a template but as John David, the current master mason, points out, this is a nineteenth-century spelling; templet is what the medieval masons would have called it. So the spelling (along with the templets themselves) is here preserved.
This is not just out of piety. The templets that remain are mostly from the early nineteenth century, when the master mason was William Shout, and are still used, or at least referre
d to, when some tricky design problem has to be sorted out. There is information in these scraps of wood and discoloured zinc that could not be stored on a computer. The fabric of a centuries-old cathedral is more like a body than a building, odd, asymmetrical, hunched, sometimes awkwardly, into the place it has occupied for over a thousand years and thus resistant to computerised planning or adjustment. The job of the master mason now does not differ in essentials from the job of William of Colchester, say, master mason in 1404, and though John David’s 8-by-13-foot drawing table may have replaced this lime-washed floor its function is the same.
With a pair of medieval dividers, which are still in use in the Minster, John David demonstrates on a piece of modern concrete how simple it is to score out a design so when the floor became overcrowded with old material it would only need the thinnest wash of lime or gesso to provide a clean unbroken surface. It would be as easy as cleaning a blackboard.
How many men worked on the fabric of the Minster would presumably depend on what work was being done, but the records of their names, the hours they put in and how much they earned are preserved in the master masons’ rolls in the Minster archives. The tracing floor itself is undocumented and in England only one other, at Wells, has survived. There are similar installations, though, on the Continent, and there must once have been many more here. A building of the size and complexity of Fountains Abbey, for instance, must have had some sort of drawing office; one only has to think of the fan vaulting at Gloucester or Westminster Abbey to realise that they couldn’t have been put up simply by rule of thumb. Such installations as there were may have been more provisional than this at York, and once they had served their purpose there was likely to be no reason to preserve them. But even had their function and historical significance been recognised, the evidence for such drawing floors would have been easy to overlook, as they must often have seemed, as this one does, just like a crumbling surface crying out for renewal.
