Archives

On Thursday afternoon I was lucky enough to help out in the British Institute Archives. After the success of the brilliant Forgotten Bookmarks exhibition in the library the team wanted to bring the exhibition to an online audience. To do this obviously required a lot of scanning to accurately reproduce the beautiful and delicate paper notes, letters, cards and clippings for the website, and I was more than happy to assist. 

After my morning Italian class I headed straight to the library. Here, behind a pair of white painted doors, I was introduced to the archives, a haven that contains years of history. Talking to Alison the Institute's Archivist I also discovered that the Institute holds an extensive collection of works by Edward Gordon Craig, a brilliant modernist theatre practitioner, which came as a rather wonderful surprise. It's incredible to think just how many creatives have been drawn to Florence over the years. Alison explained that Craig and his wife Dorothy Lees Neville lived in Florence and even founded a theatre magazine here called The Mask. After Craig left Italy, Dorothy continued on in Florence rescuing his archive from the Nazis before leaving his books and publications to the Institute. 

It was wonderful to be able to spend the day amidst such beautiful objects, hand-painted books, black and white photographs, and ornate letter-press fonts. Now I know about the Edward Gordon Craig collection I'm certain I'll be thinking of reasons to linger in the library archives more over the next month. Also watch out for the website write up of the Forgotten Bookmarks exhibition which will hopefully allow a closer look at the incredible documents found between the pages of the library books.

Libri Bianchi di Lorenzo Perrone

Have you been to the Harold Acton Library recently? If you have you may have noticed the eerie but beautiful work of Lorenzo Perrone hanging from the shelves. Libri Bianchi or Shakespeare in White is a free exhibition that transforms books into glorious art objects, stripping them of words with white paint, while recreating them and allowing them to speak in a whole new way. Taking inspiration from Shakespeare each book is inspired by a certain play or line that Perrone then interpreted onto the pages of the books themselves. However the large totem of books you can see in the final picture is the exception. It's made up of 100 books, each book commemorating a year in celebration of the Institute's centenary, an incredible feat! 

As the exhibition is in its final week be sure to catch it before it heads over to London. For more information see the British Institute website here. 

Forgotten Bookmarks

Everywhere I turn in Florence at the moment I seem to stumble upon art exhibitions. Whether in churches, piazzas, small side-streets or even the opening corridor of the British Institute’s Harold Acton Library there always seems to be something beautiful waiting to be seen.

The current exhibition that welcomes visitors to the library in the small chequered-floored corridor looks at the forgotten bookmarks that have been found over the years in the books on the library shelves. The glass cases in the entrance hall house everything from letters and newspaper cuttings to museum tickets and illustrations. While looking through the original Baedeker guide used in the Merchant Ivory film of A Room with a View (whose anniversary is coming up at the end of this year) the British Institute's Director Julia Race discovered an old museum entry ticket in the pages, and so the exhibition was born. 

As well as personal notes and letters – 'What a beautiful lot of wine!' one begins – there's even a letter from Ava Levenson, a novelist and friend of Oscar Wilde, about her upcoming novel Tenderhooks. It's incredible to see the forgotten fragments of past lives that live on in the books we read, and especially those that have passed through the haven that is the Harold Acton library in the busy centre of Florence. I've often thought of a library as a crowd of voices, each book another thought, another idea, another story, just waiting to be discovered. In this exhibition the objects on display only enhance this feeling.

Libraries are communal spaces, and reading is often said to be a solitary activity, browsing the library books and realising how many have done so before me and left their small but traceable marks is somehow comforting. While studying the ornate map of Florence that was found folded up, I can't help but wonder if I've accidentally left anything between the pages of a book that might be found by an unsuspecting stranger many years from now. I wonder what my 'Forgotten Bookmark' will be . . .

An Englishman in New York

Director of the British Institute of Florence Julia Race & Artist Bill Jacklin 

This week's Culture Talk saw British Artist Bill Jacklin take to the floor with an immersive and intimate survey of his works from New York. Jacklin left London in 1985, after studying Graphics at Walthamstow and painting at the Royal College of Art and moved permanently to the Big Apple, whose energy attracted him. Here he discovered Manhattan had not really been painted after WWII, and many of his first subjects came from scenes he witnessed on a daily basis that remained common but neglected by the artistic community. 

As a draughtsman Jacklin responds directly to stimuli, to images he encounters in real life, many sketches (often as many as 40/50 studies) form the basis for a painting and the final composition that piece will take. He began by looking from the windows of his apartment on 6th Avenue, and his second floor studio in the famous Meat Market, finding renaissance crucifixion scenes in the hanging produce brought in and out by the butchers each day. 

Light is a fascination for Jacklin: ‘light and the effect of light on surfaces’. It’s an interest that enlivens what would normally be mundane scenes; even in ‘Sandwich Eaters’ he finds beauty, a strange geometry and light that frames ordinary figures in vividly new perspectives. Double images are also a feature of his work, a trait developed from his love of film and his continuous drafts, where occasionally he will simply paint a scene, only to look again a moment later and paint the same subject again as it has changed. By paralleling the camera Jacklin emphasizes the mystical qualities of paint, his subjects capture the essence of things, the refracting light of fireworks in the sky, the subtle reflections of raindrops as they fall. His skill as a speedy draughtsman also allowed him unprecedented access to the city; his photographic eye permitted entry to Police station waiting rooms and other contested spaces where cameras were unable to enter. 

Despite wandering the entire city Jacklin found himself drawn back to certain places again and again. He went up to 87th avenue to replicate the crowds walking down by the Rockefeller centre, 42nd Street ‘when it wasn’t Disneyland’, Grand Central Station – looking back he laughs realising he’s only really painted a few streets of New York. One of these recurring subjects is skaters, but also the chess players in Washington Square which in Jacklin’s eyes becomes a triptych, figures represented in double as they move from one frame to another. A ‘sister painting’ depicts the same place at night with a woman invading the scene as she runs after her stolen bag. 

Turner is a clear influence, as is Whistler, the crowds of the city become something mystical in Jacklin’s eyes, a surging force where ‘the movement of the crowds are forming my music, my muse’. The rhythms of a scene replicate themselves in paint, Washington square and the skaters are portrayed as ‘swirling and whirling’, ‘I'm a sucker for that subject’ he confesses, the motion of bodies a means of portraying the intimate relationships between people as they’re played out upon the ice. 

'I never paint anything if I haven't been there. I have to have a relationship. I paint about Relationships.' After all 'making a drawing is making a mark'. For Jacklin the process of creation is practically primal: 'I'm creating my own language, the painting comes out of the making of a mark'.  Listening to him talk about his process is captivating: ‘The paint informs the subject it’s not the other way around’. 

He works large but often starts out small, showing us the pastel studies for a painting that only measures 12 inches but turned into 12 feet by its completion, almost it seems by accident: ‘you do it and then you've done it’. Moving through different sizes, moving through different modes of interpretation and presentation, these transformations of the work become a means of articulation, enabling Jacklin to ‘work through who I am’. 

Jacklin is quick to note at the start of his talk the strangeness of having an Englishman talk about his New York art in a city as culturally rich as Florence. The last few slides he shows us are the few pieces he has completed in the past of Florence with the rich reflections and colours of the dying sun shifting in a mirage of the Arno. Talking about the crowds milling in Piazza del Republica it’s hard not to wish that perhaps Jacklin might make Florence the next city he encounters in paint. ‘I guess that’s the difference between Florence and New York’ he ponders when looking back at his New York work, ‘things change much faster, a building comes up and comes down.’ ‘I paint about change’.

When asked how he knows his work is finished he notes that there’s a running joke that it’s only ‘when the truck comes up’ to collect it. His best work so far? ‘What I’m going to do next’. Let's hope Florence might see some more of Jacklin in the years to come. 

Back to School

A week has already flown by, so I thought it was about time I show you where I spend most of my mornings here in Florence, the language school! As well as the famous Harold Acton Library the British Institute own another space for their famous language centre which is based on the north side of the Arno in the beautiful Piazza Strozzi, just a quick stroll across Ponte Santa Trinita and through Via de Tornabuoni and Via Porta Rossa (both streets studded with every exciting designer shop you can imagine). Handily it's got the wonderful Odeon bistro coffee shop based just below it and the famous Cinema Odeon Firenze right around the corner, so right in the thick of things while still just outside of the main tourist trails. The long corridors are lined with gorgeous art works, an assortment of comfortable chairs and a couple of very welcome vending machines. 

Every morning just before 10am I climb the many flights of stairs up to the last floor (there is a lift but I figure it's good practice to counter the vast quantities of delicious pasta I'm consuming). Here, usually in room 11, I study with my fellow Beginners till 12:45 (with a coffee break – ovviamente!). There are quite a lot of us at the institute this spring term, so we're divided into groups, for us there's Group 1 and Group 2, with everyone from a Hungarian banker, gap year and university students, post-university students, writers, musicians and nursing assistants. A wonderful mix of people from all walks of life who are all just as excited to be in Florence learning Italian. Perfetto! 

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Picasso and the meaning of Guernica

Robin Blake after his talk / Picasso painting

When Pablo Picasso visited Italy in 1917 he went to the Sistine Chapel. Once there he admired the Raphaels: 'Good, very good,' he observed, 'but it can be done, don’t you think?' Turning to Michelangelo’s Last Judgement, he paused: 'Now this is more difficult.' Out of the astonishing 15,000 paintings Picasso produced during his lifetime, Guernica is the most powerful and well known. It is also, like Michelangelo’s Last Judgement, a work whose sheer size is part of its potency. Robin Blake started the spring season of cultural talks at the British Institute of Florence with a brilliant lecture on the painting, movingly on the same day (26 April) as that terrible massacre of the Basque town of Guernica all those years ago.

Blake began by transporting us back to the 1937 International Exhibition in Paris for which the piece was commissioned, a world of grand gestures where the Spanish Pavilion – with a beautiful statue by Alberto Sanchez,‘The Spanish People Have a Path that Leads to a Star’ – sat right next to the Nazi one. This was a time when Spanish republican art was still vibrant, and the chance to exhibit at the Biennale was an honour.

Since Picasso is quite unlike his Spanish contemporaries, Blake compares him to the Paris Surrealists with whom he worked, whose aim was to invite the viewer to be puzzled. Blake defines Picasso’s skill as one that manages to capture ‘the meeting place between the private and the mythic’. He was a master of balance, depicting, as Blake poetically puts it, ‘The harlequin and the whore / the matador and the minotaur'.

Robin Blake speaking in the Harold Acton Library 

What Picasso was able to depict in Guernica is not defiant heroism – but a fall from this: a tragedy. The job of tragedy for Picasso was to provoke fear and pity and to hold them in equilibrium. Looking back through his work, it’s clear that for Guernica he drew strongly on the bullfights of his homeland. The suffering picador’s horse is an image that tortured Picasso from a young age. ‘He saw the horse as an innocent,’ Blake notes: after all a bullfight ‘is not the horse’s fight’. What Picasso saw in the horse was pity, and with this pity he evoked fear, bringing a greater conception of tragedy to the tradition of the Spanish people. Although Picasso experimented greatly in the 1920s and 1930s, it’s possible to see an abiding theme in the horse as prey to the rampant bull. The innocent tragic figure, however distorted, pervades his work.

Blake showed us how it was this repetition of tragedy and horror, the subconscious themes of his earlier work, that Picasso drew on for Guernica. The painting is 'grounded in reality and emotion', and also 'particularly rooted in its time and place'. Through the drafts of the painting it is possible to understand the movements of Picasso’s vision and its evolution. Following the news of the bombing of April 1937 Picasso abandoned his original idea of depicting the artist’s studio for the commission, choosing instead to tackle the devastation of war head on.

Over several days he created a series of sketches; then he stretched a huge canvas and got down to work. Although he didn’t like studio assistants, his lover Dora Marr produced a series of photographs recording the stages through which the canvas developed: the tangle of bodies that appears at the feet of the horse and the bull, the sudden additions, as flames appear, then the sun. What becomes evident is that he was still working out what he was trying to do as he went along. The process of completion was a process of understanding. 

What Marr’s images also show are Picasso’s whims: at one point, very late in the process, he experiments with collage, but then rapidly discards the idea. Dora even helped adorn the central horse. Change is constant. The sun suddenly becomes a light bulb; a lamp takes the same shape as those lamps held by the concrete statues that Picasso originally intended to bracket the canvas in the pavilion. Studies of the mother and child characters develop in isolation. At one point the mother climbs a ladder clutching her child – one of Picasso’s only coloured sketches for Guernica to survive. The revolutionary fists that appear in so many of the first outlines as a central motif fade into the chaos. Violent defiance and hope through pain is eventually abandoned as pity and fear take over. Picasso comes to realise he doesn’t need revolutionary fists in order to create something truly revolutionary!

When it was finally completed the piece was ‘mind-bogglingly large’, roughly 8 by 4 metres. The canvas was rolled, wrapped, and taken to Paris. Initially it wasn’t well received: with no sickle and no promise of victory it hardly depicted the socialist-realist vision of defiance that many were hoping for. However, in a few years what had once been a local disaster was becoming a wider phenomenon: as world war broke out many cities were bombed and Guernica was on tour. Eventually it settled in MOMA in New York, where it stayed for more than thirty years, and finally gained the reputation it deserved as a great statement of pacifism and of powerful anti-war sentiment.

Half of the joy of talks like this is the proximity of speaker to audience. What would normally be a didactic process becomes one of collaboration. When Blake opened up to the floor, asking the audience what Guernica meant to them, there were some impressive answers. One person noted the importance of an isosceles triangle that structurally held the painting together, and how it gained from this. Another recalled visiting the painting the day after 9/11 and how its potency gained new and stirring connotations. Dubbed one of the most important paintings of war in the twentieth century, what is most striking about Guernica is how its meaning is far from fixed. If anything this talk confirmed that part of Guernica’s incredible sway over its viewer is its ability to constantly garner new meanings. One can’t help but feel that like Picasso’s changing sketches, the significance and meaning of Guernica is still evolving in our own troubled times. 

For more information about the cultural programme at The British Institute of Florence visit the programme here. 

Interestingly in Naples there is currently an exhibition called Picasso-Parade featuring Picasso’s work from his Italian journey in 1917. After this talk I’m certainly thinking of hopping on the train to pay his work a visit!

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