ART & CULTURE 10
SEPTEMBER 9 - 15, 2009
The really wild show
ENDLESS FORMS
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge
MICHAEL PARASKOS
SPECIAL TO THE EPOCH TIMES
Greenaway film revives a
stolen Venetian treasure
ROME (Reuters) - As the 66th
International Film Festival
kicks off in Venice, the world
premiere of The Marriage by
British director Peter Greenaway brings to life one of the
city’s most precious, pillaged
paintings.
The 40-minute film, due to
be screened next Friday, continues Greenaway’s exploration of Paolo Veronese’s The
Wedding at Cana, a vast banquet scene completed by the
Italian Renaissance Master
in 1563 and stolen by Napoleonic troops from Venice
just over two centuries later.
Almost 70 square metres
in area, The Wedding at Cana
depicts the New Testament
miracle story in which Jesus
turns water into wine.
With a mixture of contemporary Venetian and antique
detail, the painting presents
126 figures at a sumptuous
meal described by Greenaway as “a real, and far from
Biblical, party,” according to
Italian daily Il Corriere della
Sera.
As part of this year’s
Biennale art festival, Greenaway exhibited a multimedia installation based on the
painting in the refectory of
the Benedictine Monastery of
San Giorgio Maggiore, where
it was first hung.
But in the new film, which
mingles historical fact and
imagination,
Greenaway
suggests the original subject
of Veronese’s painting was a
scandalous – and blasphemous – rendition of Christ’s
own marriage.
The film, the third in a
nine-part series by Greenaway exploring Old Masters,
continues the director’s inter-
est in the relations between
painting and cinema.
“The two languages have
so much in common that
there should be dialogue,
exchange, between them
much more frequently and
much more directly,” Greenaway said in a statement
released by Change Performing Arts, which produced the
film.
The film-maker, who
trained as a muralist before
starting making experimental movies in 1966, has
produced over 50 short films
and documentaries, as well
as acclaimed feature-length
works like The Draughtsman’s Contract and The Cook,
The Thief, His Wife & Her
Lover.
His latest work will touch
a theme close to the hearts
of many Venetians. For 234
years, Veronese’s masterpiece hung in the monastery’s refectory until it was
plundered in the Napoleonic
invasion of 1797 and shipped
back to France.
The painting was cut in
half for the journey and
pieced back together in
Paris. In the post-Napoleonic
conciliation treaties which
pursued the return of looted
works of art, The Wedding
at Cana was not returned to
Venice and it remains in the
Louvre.
Greenaway’s installation
for the Biennale, which runs
until September 13th, made
use of a facsimile reproduction of the painting installed
in its original place in 2007,
combined with state-of-theart digital imagery, lighting
and sound.
With close-up images of
daughters who dream of independent futures.
Writers writing about writers also forms the basis of
Summertime, the 2009 entry
for South African novelist
Coetzee, a mainstay of the
Man Booker shortlist in the
recent years.
Coetzee, who will become
the only writer to take the
prize three times if he is
named winner on October
6th, tells the story of a young
biographer who is working on
a book about the late writer
John Coetzee. As he interviews friends and relatives, a
complex picture emerges of
Coetzee’s past and character.
The work completes a trilogy of fictionalised memoirs
for Coetzee, 69, who has previously produced Boyhood
and Youth.
Coetzee, who was awarded
the Nobel Prize for Literature
in 2003, first won the Booker
prize in 1983 for Life & Times
of Michael K and repeated the
feat in 1999 with Disgrace.
Another notable contender
on the shortlist – and one
strongly backed by bookmakers who make her favourite for
the £50,000 prize – is Hilary
Mantel, 57, whose intricately
woven historical novels have
a strong following.
Wolf Hall recounts the life
and experiences of Thomas
Cromwell, a clerk to Cardinal
Wolsey during the reign of
Henry VIII.
The youngest author on the
2009 shortlist is Adam Foulds,
34, whose novel The Quickening Maze is based on real
events that took place near
London in the 1840s, telling
the story of the incarceration
of a nature poet, John Clare,
who struggled with alcoholism, critical neglect and
depression.
A novel about a house in
Czechoslovakia owned by
a newly married couple, the
Landauers, is the basis for
Simon Mawer’s entry on the
list, The Glass Room. The Jewish-Gentile couple prepare to
flee as the threat of World War
Two grows.
Alphabetically rounding
out the shortlist is The Lit-
tle Stranger by Sarah Waters,
which tells of Dr Faraday, who
returns to a house, Hundreds
Hall, that he has not seen for
decades only to realise how
the family home has declined.
Waters, 43, has twice been
shortlisted for the Man Booker
before, in 2002 for Fingersmith and The Night Watch in
2006.
As well as the prize, the
winner is virtually guaranteed huge sales in bookstores
worldwide.
Bookmakers are already
offering sharp odds on the
winner, with Mantel’s novel
odds on at 10/11, Waters and
Coetzee at 5/1, Byatt at 6/1 and
Foulds and Mawer offered at
10/1.
In the gutter looking at the stars
BRIGITTE BARDOT AND THE ORIGINAL PAPARAZZI
James Hyman Fine Art
MICHAEL PARASKOS
SPECIAL TO THE EPOCH TIMES
If I am honest I have never
really seen the attraction of
Brigitte Bardot. In Yorkshire
we would have called her
brand of Gallic insouciance
mardiness, and it was not
considered an attractive trait.
Far better the warmth, passion and humour of Bardot’s
contemporary Sophia Loren,
or best of all the beauty and
charm of Audrey Hepburn.
Nothing seemed mardy about
them.
But these are all second
hand perceptions, based
on screen images, celebrity
news stories and of course
photographs, both authorised
and paparazzi. No one really
knows the likes of Bardot,
unless they really know Bardot. For the rest of us there is
only the warped image we see
though the biased gaze of the
media. And in a sense that is
what this exhibition is about.
Coinciding with Bardot’s 75th
birthday, it brings together
work by sympathetic photographers keen to maintain the
mystique of the movie star,
and decidedly unsympathetic
ones, desperate to snap a shot
of Bardot bathing nude in St
Tropez, or an inelegant view
up her skirt as she steps from
a taxi outside a London hotel.
The show starts with some
of the most well-known photographs of Bardot, taken
in the early 1960s by Marcello Geppetti in the Italian
town of Spoleto. They date
from the height of Bardot’s
fame as a Lolita sex-kitten,
and like Guy Farner’s image
of her apparently relaxing
with Picasso at Vallauris
near Cannes, have an air
of informality about them
that is undoubtedly appealing. But at the same time
there is a very definite sense
that the informality is false
and posed, not necessarily through informal scenes
being deliberately staged, but
simply because Bardot was
aware that she was a beautiful young woman under
constant observation. These
photographs contrast sharply
with the work of Tazio Secchiaroli, the original paparazzo,
whose images of Bardot on
the set of the 1963 film Le
Mepris show her genuinely at
work. Although Secchiaroli
is often credited with inventing the intrusive paparazzi,
largely due to Fellini’s pastiche of him in La Dolce Vita,
these images suggest his real
desire was to show a more
honest realism rather than
to debase a star. Indeed, in
Secchiaroli’s images Bardot
is neither a screen goddess
nor a hounded celebrity, but
a woman who appears almost
human.
The exhibition adeptly
The artificial
division between
art and science
was generally
absent from
the nineteenthcentury mind
avoids forcing connections
between artistic ideas and
Darwin too directly, preferring instead to suggest that
the nineteenth century saw a
shift in culture that affected
everyone. This means that
instead of a sudden upsurge in
paintings of dinosaurs, apes
and cave men after the publication of The Origin of Species,
Until October 4th
faces, animated diagrams
and imagined dialogue, the
installation allowed spectators to find themselves
inside the wedding scene, as
it is brought to life.
It attracted between
12,000 and 13,000 visitors
over the course of the summer.
Greenaway
launched
his nine-work synthesis
of cinema and art history,
entitled Nine Classical Paintings Revisited, in 2006 with
Rembrandt’s Nightwatch in
the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, followed by Leonardo’s
Last Supper in 2008.
The next works in the
series are Picasso’s Guernica, a Monet, a Pollock,
Velasquez’ Las Meninas,
Seurat’s La Grande Jatte and
Michelangelo’s Last Judgment.
Byatt, Coetzee and Mantel top Man Booker shortlist
LONDON (Reuters) – Familiar
names headed the shortlist for
one of the world’s top literary
awards on Tuesday with JM
Coetzee and AS Byatt two
of the six authors left in the
running for the coveted Man
Booker Prize.
Byatt, 73, who won the
prize in 1990 for her novel
Possession, makes the 2009
shortlist with The Children’s
Book, the tale of a famous
writer who pens a separate,
private book for each of her
children, complete with family mysteries.
The novel explores issues
of class, love, politics and
idealism among families
across generations, exploring
rebellious sons and wayward
Great art shows can be thin on
the ground in late summer. It is
a sort of dead time before the
new art season starts in late
September. Thankfully this
year the Fitzwilliam in Cambridge has stepped into the
breach with a stunning exhibition exploring the impact of
Darwin on nineteenth-century art.
The show is broad ranging, and brings together work
by artists as diverse as Edwin
Landseer, Max Klinger and
Claude Monet. Alongside a
large number paintings and
sculptures are images by
scientific illustrators, and
historic museum displays of
stuffed birds and the skulls of
apes and humans. In essence
it resembles a dream-like
combination of exhibits from
museums as diverse as the
Natural History Museum, the
Horniman Museum, the Wellcome Institute and various art
galleries both large and small.
The effect is to demonstrate
how different aspects of our
culture once shared a common desire to understand the
world in which we live. This
means the artificial division
between art and science that
is so destructive in life today
was generally absent from
the nineteenth-century mind.
Nothing illustrates this more
in this exhibition than the
seemingly unlikely connection between the artist Paul
Cezanne and the scientist
Fortune Marion, an early supporter of Darwin’s ideas, who
often accompanied Cezanne
on painting trips.
That said, Endless Forms
there was a subtle shift in attitudes towards
both the human and the
natural worlds. In reality this
shift pre-dated Darwin and
had roots in romanticism, as
shown by the inclusion of several paintings by artists such
as Turner, Ruskin and Brett,
each of whom cast analytical
eyes over fossil bearing rocks
long before publication of The
Origin of Species. In this context Darwin’s theories were
still extraordinary, but they
emerged in an environment
that was, in part, ready to hear
them.
Of course, there are images
of dinosaurs, apes and cave
men too, but it was rare for
any artist to avoid such subjects looking ridiculous. In
The Stone Age: Return from
a Bear Hunt (1884) Fernand
Cormon tried to show a prehistoric scene with as much
dignity as Raphael’s School
of Athens. Unfortunately the
result is typically hammy.
Other images are deliberately
comic, often by giving animals human characteristics.
Landseer clearly made the best
of these, but in less capable or
honourable hands the results
could be deeply offensive, and
included in the exhibition are
works by several Victorian
social and political cartoonists
who rarely pulled their punches when making racist jokes.
As an art exhibition, however, the show is spellbinding.
The curators have brought
together an astonishing array
of high quality art works that
are set in a context that is not
only intelligent and informative, but visually spectacular.
traverses the change in the
1980s when a truly unpleasant paparazzi emerged, and
the controlled images of the
film studios gave way to the
shoot-and-tell pictures of the
modern celebrity-snapper.
Notably images in this section of the show are usually
unsigned, ceasing to have
any pretence of art. Although
this type of photograph might
have some function as a documentary image, they also
have the curious effect of not
only knocking stars off their
gilded perches, but dehumanising them. The result
is a show that has plenty of
pretty pictures, but it leaves
you wondering which is preferable, the inhuman goddess
on high or the dehumanised
celeb in the gutter.
Until October 3rd
Dance contest gives
young ballerinas a
shot at stardom
SINGAPORE (Reuters) – The
pirouettes have been perfected, the tutus tended to and
the stage set: will the ballet
discover its next big thing in
Singapore?
Teenagers aspiring to follow in the footsteps of illustrious dancers such as Margot
Fonteyn and Mikhail Baryshnikov will get a shot at stardom
at this weekend’s Genee International Ballet Competition,
being held for the first time in
Southeast Asia.
Regarded as one of the
most prestigious contests for
amateur dancers, the flagship
event of Britain’s Royal Academy of Dance (RAD) also serves
as a platform for emerging
talents to be spotted by professional dance companies.
“It’s quite a unique experience because it’s not often that
a dancer, especially at that age,
has the chance of working on a
solo variation and something
that has been choreographed
specifically for them,” said
Lynn Wallis, RAD’s artistic
director.
The 54 youths, aged
between 15 and 19, were put
through the paces in grueling
eight-hour-long coaching sessions for the past five days,
giving them a taste of what
a professional career might
entail.
Under the watchful eyes
of Wallis and two other choreographers, the competitors
had to master various dances,
including one specially com-
missioned for them.
Judges will be watching
for nifty footwork, the contestants’ ability to engage the
audience and their choice of
music at the upcoming finals
of the 78-year-old competition
on Saturday.
Since 2002, the competition has been regularly held
outside Britain, each time to
sell-out audiences, helping
make ballet ever more accessible to people from all walks
of life.
This year’s competitors hail
from 14 countries including
Australia, Japan and South
Africa.
“Ballet is now seen not as an
elitist art. Everyone can go
and watch it,” said former
Royal Ballet principal ballerina Darcey Bussell, who was
in Singapore for the competition’s gala dinner.
While its audience might
have grown and with performances becoming more experimental, ballet still remains an
art form that requires iron-clad
discipline, exquisite technique
and brilliant showmanship,
concerns never far from the
minds of dancers.
Yet for 17-year-old Camila
de Caso of Brazil, who has
been training for ten years,
ballet is simply about selfexpression.
PIERRE-PHILIPPE MARCOU/AFP/GETTY IMAGES