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Railing Against It: The Silenus of the Crammed

March 21, 2012
Art Seen, Looking at Art, National Gallery, Railing Against It
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Morning Train

As we pull into a station two large herring gulls are slowly tearing apart a McDonalds bag, the train leaves and the birds walk with a proprietorial air down the platform.

In the seat across the aisle a youngish woman makes noises, reminiscent of a dog about to be sick. She (the youngish woman) has a transparent plastic cup and a can of Red Bull in front of her. From a carrier bag she opens a rectangular golden cardboard box and takes out a bottle of brandy. She tops up the cup and places a ham roll beside it. Her hair is red, as is her phone and all of her accessories – earrings, bracelets, flashes on trainers etc. It is 7.30 on a Saturday morning. As the train pulls away from the station she rushes towards the toilets.

“Of course, I won’t buy a new one, a perfectly ordinary biro, Why should I?”

“In the old days…”

“Of course, In the old days you could repair things, but now, I don’t see that I should.”

“In the old days…”

“Of course, in the old days, you would have signed it out wouldn’t you?”

“It would have lasted you for ever”

“Of course, you’d have looked after a thing like that, wouldn’t you?”

Both together: “in the old days…”

At the coffee shop

A well-dressed couple order extra-large and complex arrangements of what is really, sweetened milk with added cream, caramel, chocolate and finally coffee flavourings. They add a thick pink creamy looking drink each, and a couple of pain au raisins to their order. It takes them a while to organise carrying out this feast as they are both carrying large sporting bags.

“Ignorant of misfortune/ Living without worry”

Witnessing these searches for gratification makes me think of paintings of Silenus. There are different approaches to this god, Titian’s ‘Bacchus and Ariadne’,

Titian: 'Bacchus and Ariadne', 1520-3, oil on canvas, 177 x 191 cm. National Gallery, London

and Van Dyck/ Rubens’ Studio’s ‘Drunken Silenus Supported by Satyrs’,

Attributed to Anthony van Dyck/ Studio of Rubens: 'Drunken Silenus supported by Satyrs'. 1620. Oil on canvas. 134 x 197 cm. National Gallery, London.

(both in the National Gallery, London) show the usual iconography: the hugely fat figure; the surrounding Bachante; riding on a donkey in the Titian. This is the Falstaffian Lord of the Revels, clearly, but happily showing the effects of that indulgence. The teacher and companion of Bacchus/ Dionysius, the god of wine and good times; someone I’ve always felt close to. The Van Dyck figure, in particular, seems a joyful image, the brushstrokes, the palette, the smiling red face, the white hair, everybody’s favourite uncle, even if he is blind drunk and cannot walk.

Whereas the darker delineation around the stumbling Silenus in Rubens painting,

Peter Paul Rubens: 'The Drunken Silenus'. 1618. oil on canvas, 212 x 213 cm. Alte Pinakothek, Munich, Germany.

although delicately held up by the pair on the left, is an altogether different and lonely character. To add to this theme, the woman (the face anyway) on the lower left looks surprisingly like the young person on the train. Rubens’ driven, but falling demi god, is closer to the Greek mythology later revisited by Nietzsche (The Birth of Tragedy). The melancholic, pessimistic and wise Silenus pursued by King Midas. For example when the golden king asked what is best thing for man, Silenus replies:

‘you, seed of an evil genius and precarious offspring of hard fortune, whose life is but for a day, why do you compel me to tell you those things of which it is better you should remain ignorant? For he lives with the least worry who knows not his misfortune; but for humans, the best for them is not to be born at all, not to partake of nature’s excellence; not to be is best, for both sexes. This should our choice, if choice we have; and the next to this is, when we are born, to die as soon as we can.’

( from Aristotle: ‘Eudemus’)

 Afternoon Train.

 Man to my right eating Salt and Vinegar Monster Munch, drinking Carling Black Label, bellowing into his mobile about borrowing requirements and bank lending rates. Behind, a baby screams. In front a woman eats a very ripe banana from a yellow storage box, it is shaped like an ideal banana. Two seats down, earnest young Asian men are talking about mathematical formulae and what happens when you substitute P for X – I think. Schoolchildren are everywhere, talking about ‘Games’ and teachers and work not done, and ‘then my dad did this’ and ‘my mum did that’. And ‘she said’ and ‘I was like’ and ‘I texted her’ and on and on in a continuous stream of high-pitched jollity.

It is a relatively new train, the announcements are up as loud as they will go, the sibilance could take off the top of your head and fill it full of strong smelling, potato based, snack opportunities.

“Look, look, look what I’ve bought”

“What?”

“I got ten sets of eyelashes, all sorts”

“Like, wow”

We all partake of nature’s excellence, each of us be-ing in our own particular way.

‘Bacchus and Ariadne’ Titian, 1520-3

July 3, 2011
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http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/titian-bacchus-and-ariadne

On my way out of the National Gallery, due to closures, I took a different route and passed Titian’s ‘Bacchus and Ariadne’. A painting I have been looking at, on and off, at least once a month I should think, for about 50 years. Thinking about that painting afterwards an image came immediately to mind: I want you to imagine two people both aged about 19 or 20, she has her hair fanned out into a huge mane, it is dyed orange, some white, some black. His hair is dyed also, mostly a sort of white colour with a great red streak across the front. They are dressed in black, but with some pieces of vivid coloured clothing, hand painted shoes for example. It is the later 1970’s and this couple are standing in front of a painting that is an astonishing blue, this painting in fact.

But when I very first saw it, Bacchus and Ariadne would have looked like a sort of brown colour. It was cleaned in early 1969 and that must have been the point when it really came into my consciousness. I can still remember the shock of first seeing that intense blue, the vividness of the colours the brightness of the contrast between the blue and the red. And I suppose, given the date, and what was happening in London in 1968/9 it must have mirrored the clothes and the excitement that was going on around us. I would have been about 12 when this happened. It was no doubt on that journey as many others to London, that I remember going to places like Carnaby Street with my parents and seeing the clothes and the painted walls and thinking that, like this newly bright painting, the world was an exciting place to be. Later, as I went through school and had to read things like Robert Graves Greek myths and Ovid’s Metamorphoses I began to get more sense of the story, although in fact this image largely comes from Catullus, a much more exciting writer I think.

As in so many paintings the clue to the story is in the details, top left on the sea is a small boat. The boat belongs to Theseus, him of the slaying of the Minotaur fame. Ariadne, the daughter of King Minos, had shown Theseus how to escape from the labyrinth after slaying the Minotaur, in return for Theseus taking her away from Crete and making her his princess. On the return from Crete they stop at the island of Naxos, Ariadne falls asleep on the beach and Theseus abandons her there. This painting is set at the point at which she both realises her loss, and suddenly sees and fall in love, at first sight with Bacchus. In fact the whole painting is full of those sort of glances. For a young man at an all-boys school seeing this sort of thing was heady stuff. And Bacchus himself was an appealing figure, the god of wine, of parties, of good times. I can remember reading the Greek myths in astonishment at what they got up to and couldn’t help but compare it to the frankly rather dull behaviour of Protestant approved Christianity. My parents were defiantly atheist, but in those far off days we did seem to get an awful lot of morally improving Christian stories, and without any of the, for boys anyway, appealing gore of Catholic saints and martyrdom. In that earlier mythology Bacchus, as part of his earlier travels had been to the Middle East and then India, that’s why his chariot is drawn by exotic animals. Also because his patron, Alfonso d’Este, kept them, this painting is part of a very upmarket interior decoration scheme. It was while Bacchus was on his travels that he discovered the worship of the juice of the vine. In other words wine and the ecstatic rituals and rites that went with it, which is what we see here in his followers, the Bacchante. Paralleling the development of a young adult?

Pursuing that theme of love further, as no doubt I was trying to do myself, rather unsuccessfully if memory serves me correctly, notice up in the sky above Theseus’ ship, a circle of stars. Bacchus has thrown Ariadne’s crown (given to her by Theseus) into the sky, Bacchus is immortal, he promises her that she will become immortal in the sky as the constellation Corona. Perhaps you could see this as a parable for male behaviour, one man promises to make her his princess, but once he has had his wicked way with her he abandons her on the beach, the next man, says he’s a god and promises her the stars. Unusually in the myths (and life?), Bacchus and Ariadne stay faithful to each other forever.

At school I began to find out more about how to look at painting, and some of the specialist terms. For example: contrapposto, the Italian for against the body and the description for the pose of both Ariadne and Bacchus and others, Look for example at the Bacchante struggling with snakes. Wrestling with snakes was part of the Bacchic cult, as was eating raw meat by the way, hence the animals head being dragged along by the small boy. And the satyr brandishing an animal leg. But this snake wrestler also refers to the Laocoon which (according to Vasari anyway) had been dug up in 1506 in peach orchard just outside Rome, under the very eyes of Titian’s great rival; Michelangelo. Including this pose is a form of one-upmanship, although Titian hadn’t been to Rome by this point he would have known this sculpture and the sort of use Michelangelo was putting it to. You can see this sort of showing off even more clearly in the way Titian signs his name. Alberti, in Della Pittura had written that only the best artists could imitate gold with colours rather than the material itself “there is greater praise and admiration for the artist in the use of colours”. Not only has Titian imitated gold with colour, he has made it even more difficult by placing the vase on a yellow cloth and has painted his signature in the ellipse of the vase. This is someone at the height of their powers really showing off.

In my gap year I worked for six months at the Marley Company in Lenham, Kent making floor tiles. Not much connection between Titian and floors, between art and industry you might think, as indeed many of my fellow workers tried to point out. I can remember trying to explain the contrapposto position of Bacchus to someone as we heaved great sheets of lino about, twisting our bodies in dynamic forms etc, not surprisingly he didn’t think we were very godlike and was not impressed.

I went to Venice as part of my own travels, the city where Titian was born and worked, a city known for its intense colours as the pigments came down the silk route from the east. A city steeped in art and trade, particularly in textiles and dyeing cloth, hence the emphasis on cloth and colour in this painting. After that first journey, perhaps inspired by Bacchus and Ariadne I have been back to Venice many times since, for the Biennale exhibition, and will be going again in a couple of weeks.

My first year at University was spent studying the Renaissance, I learnt for example about materials used, the importance of ultramarine, the pigment that gives Bacchus and Ariadne it’s vivid, intense blue. A pigment made from the mineral lapis lazuli, that only came into Venice from Northern Afghanistan, dug out of the Sar-e-Sang mine, very near to the two huge Buddhas that where destroyed by the Taliban. Incidentally these huge statues were originally painted blue and red, ultramarine and carmine.

Back to the image I started with. It was from University that I took my girlfriend to see my favourite work of art in the National Gallery in London, we made a special trip, hours in a coach. We stood in front of the painting in our coloured clothes; I think she was about as impressed as my fellow worker at Marley Floors. One thing she said though that stays with me, “This place” she said looking round and Claire was not from the University, “this place is not for the likes of me” and I remember being horrified by that.

I had never thought of art and art galleries as being closed to anyone, art and art galleries have always felt like home to me, since early days sheltering from bullies in the art room, or seeing this painting in my pram (apparently). I suppose that is why I am writing this.

And that brings me to the most recent part of the painting to come to my notice. This figure in the top right hand corner: Silenus, was, traditionally, Bacchus’ teacher, he is described as the oldest, wisest and most drunken of the followers of Bacchus, typecast no doubt. But that sense of trying to get others to appreciate, to understand or just to enjoy art perhaps it was planted then in front of a painting I have been looking at for over fifty years

Claire by the way left me soon after for someone much more glamorous, someone who was to become the leader of one of the top Goth bands in the country, that was my fault obviously, not wearing enough black, and liking bright paintings, as I still do. And will do for the next fifty years, I hope. Though, if the Coalition has its way it will be in pension poverty and no doubt, by then we will have to pay to see such an important painting. After me one/ two/ three/ four: ‘No Ifs, No Buts, No Public Sector Cuts’.