Venezia

I went to the Venice film festival! Kicking myself for not plucking up the courage to ask strangers to take my picture as we were speeding along in a vaporetto or hopping over the red carpet with my press lanyard, but you can't have everything.

One of the most enjoyable mornings I spent in Venice was actually wandering around an exhibition on the history of the film festival in the abandoned Hotel des Bains. You can read my article on it for AnOther here.

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.

In the Studio

Sadly Libri Bianchi by Lorenzo Perrone has now come to an end in the Harold Acton Library. However something I forgot to mention previously, during my first few days in Florence I was lucky enough to stumble upon Lorenzo's studio. It turns out I live just around the corner from where he creates his incredible white books in Oltrarno (south of the Arno). Walking into the Institute for my Italian lessons one day I glanced over the street to see his works peeking out from behind his studio door and thought they looked familiar. Gaining confidence I popped by head around the corner one day to say 'Buongiorno' and he was kind enough to let me take a few photos of him at work. It was incredible to watch and document the process of just how much work goes into creating his beautiful art objects and the variety of creations he's made. Don't miss them when they go on show in London later this year. 

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The Marvels of Clarence Bicknell

                       

Continuing with the botanical theme (see my post on visiting the orto botanico) this week's cultural talk at the British Institute was about ‘The Marvels of Clarence Bicknell’. Although well known and respected in Liguria, the Riviera and the Martine Alps, this intrepid botanist, writer, and artist remains relatively unknown in the UK. Impressive given that there are several species named after him, everything from Pimpinella bicknellii, a beautiful small white flower, to a particular type of Australian ant. 

Next year is Bicknell’s centenary so I’m sure this won’t be the last we’ll be hearing about his work and beautiful watercolours over the next few months. 2018 is also the release date for his first official biography by Valerie Browne Lester, which should hopefully give more context to the prolific recorder and the 7,000 plus artefacts, of pressed flowers, letters, and paintings that he left behind. Graham Avery, previously a fellow of the European Institute and now at St. Antony’s College Oxford, and Bicknell’s own relative Marcus reflected in their talks that Bicknell never courted the English elite while he was working, he didn’t go to any of the important meetings and practiced outside of England, so his impressive legacy has largely been ignored. 

We began the evening with a short documentary produced by french film maker Rémy Masséglia, which certainly transported us all into Bicknell’s Riviera world. With swooping landscape shots of the luscious fields and mountainous areas that Bicknell explored it certainly set the scene beautifully for Graham Avery’s brilliant exploration into the self-taught botanist's work. Born in 1842 in Herne Hill near London, the 13th child in a large family, Bicknell ended up studying at Cambridge University and entering the Anglican church. After doubts with his faith he wrote ‘I fear I have become rather narrow’, and soon after taking on the chaplaincy at All Saints Church in Bordighera threw off his dog collar at the age of thirty-five and threw himself into the flowering plants and ferns of the surrounding environment and neighbouring mountains. His first published book Flowering Plants and Ferns of the Riviera, came soon after in 1885. 

In 1897 he discovered prehistoric engravings while out walking in the mountainous Fontanalba and took to heading out each day to make delicate rubbings and copies of the engravings in order to raise awareness of their existence, sometimes lying flat out on the rocks for several hours to capture the images as precisely as he could. He loved the area so much that he ended up building a house there which he named Villa Fontanalba. Sadly the estate is now owned privately, but from the sounds of it, the hand crafted interiors with their mural walls and hand-painted scenic depictions rival that of the Bloomsbury group. 

One very interesting point that was made when flicking through Bicknell’s elaborately decorated guest-book for his Villa Fontanalba (which alone speaks volumes for the care and artistry that Bicknell took with the details of his home) was that he had written the entire document in Esperanto. Apparently this was common for Bicknell who was deeply involved in the movement for the universal language pioneered by a Polish doctor that envisioned a means of international communication. He was even vice president of the Esperanto society in Italy. 

Described by Avery as ‘incredibly modest’ his humble work ethic of concentrating on recording his findings (as opposed to interpreting), hindered his fame abroad. At one point Avery laughed and compared the fascination that Bicknell had with flora and fauna akin to collecting stamps, with each botanist always eager to see a specific they had yet to see before, specimens were traded around like stamps, each flower had its own particular fascination and worth to the beholder. Bicknell spread dried plants all over the world in correspondence with a variety of influential botanists, a dedicated writer his commitment to communicating with his friends, family and contemporaries can be attested by the vast paper trail he left behind, such as his 700 plus archive of postcards and letters to Émile Burnat. His carefully hand illustrated notes are incredibly inspiring in a world where pen and ink correspondence feels fairly neglected (also an excellent reminder that it's always a good idea to send more postcards). 

It was wonderful to learn so much from such a passionate assortment of people about a man whom otherwise I would probably have never come across. I particularly loved the fact that Bicknell preferred wild flowers over cultivated ones, one book he owned was called 'the triumph of the dandelion', and I think the title says a lot about the optimistic spirit of this adventurous botanist.  

Graham Avery ended by telling us all the best places to visit Bicknell’s work. For those interested they are as follows: Biblioteca Bicknell (Bordighera), Musee des Merveilles (Tende), and Val Fontanalba. They've all certainly made it on to my ever growing list of places to visit! 

For more information about Clarence Bicknell click here.

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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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