Monet Across Three Decades: From Jeanne-Marguerite Lecadre in the Garden to Meadows at Giverny

Monet – Jeanne-Marguerite Lecadre in the Garden (1866)

Monet – Corner of the Garden at Montgeron (1876)

Monet – Pond at Montgeron (1876)

Monet – Meadows at Giverny (1888)

The exhibition Impressionism: Sensation and Inspiration at the Hermitage Amsterdam – contextualising Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, Degas and Sisley by juxtaposing them with their 19th Century forebears, contemporary Salon artists, intermediaries and successors; and which I mentioned in a previous piece on Cézanne’s Banks of the Marne – ended last weekend. I visited on Sunday and looked in particular at four canvases by Claude Monet, placed consecutively but at some distance apart in the largest of the exhibition’s rooms, showing Monet’s art across three decades of his career.

Together they demonstrate the way in which Monet’s work moved through and beyond Impressionism. Often considered the arch Impressionist, typifying the movement’s emphases on painting en plein air, and using vivid colours to display the transitory effects of sunlight, Monet’s art should not be reduced and perceived only as a mirror of the movement. The four paintings show different approaches to composition, and Monet achieving Impressionistic results then extending his art in the direction of pure subjectivity, tending towards abstraction. They show too that a vastly diminished palette can produce something which more closely depicts the way we see, and which abounds more fully in light.

The earliest painting on display, Jeanne-Marguerite Lecadre in the Garden (also known as Woman in the Garden, Sainte-Adresse), was completed in 1866, when Monet was just twenty-six years old. It appears the most composed, the most ordered of the four paintings; and well demonstrates Monet’s predilection for painting ordered nature, in the form of gardens and enclosed scenes. Three principal objects – Jeanne-Marguerite; the central white tree, in bloom, with red flowers underneath; and the yellower tree to the right – and their shadows, at equal distance from one another, structure the space. The vibrant reds of the flower bed complement the greenery, and throw the woman’s white, sun-lit dress into relief. There is a visual progression also from the vivid white of the dress through the blooming central tree, to the smaller trees and flowers which enclose the scene at the far right.

Monet would later depict shadows comprised of shades of blue, even in paintings of the summer. His experimentation with blue shadows was one of the things which led critics of his work in Paris in the 1870s to call his works ‘leprous’. In Jeanne-Marguerite Lecadre in the Garden the shadows are dark and solid, and the use of blue delimited to the sky in the upper right corner of the painting. The effect suggests a warm and still summer day. Yet the stillness of the sky, a block of blue more steely than azure; the solidity of the shadows and the other darker tones in the painting; its order; and the relative flatness of the canvas, of the brushstrokes in the grass and in the trees in the background – all this gives a sense of something staged and static. The light which illuminates the woman’s umbrella is not as luminous upon and does not pick out in the same way the trees to the picture’s centre and right. The overall atmosphere becomes somewhat unsettling, an image approximating that of the geometrically defined garden which features, intercut, in the film Last Year at Marienbad.

With the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in July 1870, Monet spent eight months in England, then four in the Netherlands before returning to France. The painters he was able to study during this time – notably Turner and Constable – significantly influenced the specifics of his art. In 1876 he completed a series of four canvases commissioned by Ernest Hoschedé, a wealthy department store magnate, and intended to furnish the drawing room of his château at Montgeron, on the outskirts to the south-east of Paris. The two paintings Corner of the Garden at Montgeron and Pond at Montgeron are more Impressionistic in their quicker, looser brushstrokes: the former lifted by a vivid and lively cyan-blue sky atop distant hills; the latter capturing a woman who leans on the trunk of a tree whilst she fishes, the sunlight breaking through the trees in a flurry of light-blue horizontals reflecting off the pond’s water. The two paintings depict a wilder, obviously much more expansive garden, and Monet’s handling of light is more consistent.

Still, there is something potentially problematic inherent in Monet’s methodological imperative. His insistence on painting in nature, attempting to capture the essence of its fleeting moments, encourages the quick application of unmixed colour – and the result can sometimes be slightly jarring, lacking in subtlety, the colours not quite coming together. The use of a limited palette is a logical and practical extension of Monet’s devotion towards painting en plein air.

Meadows at Giverny was painted twelve years after the Montgeron canvases, in 1888. Through the course of those twelve years, Monet lost his wife. Camille – who frequently modelled for Monet as well as Manet and Renoir, and with whom Monet had two children – died of illness in 1879. In 1883, Monet discovered Giverny, a commune on the right bank of the Seine in northern France. He rented a house there and moved with his family, which now comprised not only his children, but also Alice Hoschedé and hers: the two families had lived together briefly before Camille died and before Ernest moved to Belgium in the late 70s; and Monet and Alice would marry in 1892 after Ernest’s death. By 1888 Monet was emerging from the poverty he and his family had suffered through the late 60s and 70s, with Paul Durand-Ruel selling more and more of his works. He was able to buy his house at Giverny, plus additional land, in 1890, and would live there until his own death in 1926.

In Meadows at Giverny there are four predominant colours – two greens, an ochre and a lilac-grey. With the minor addition of a few strokes of pink and blue – the blue a variation, a darker tone of the lilac-grey, used in the shadows – these colours alone comprise the painting. This canvas as well as any suggests Cézanne description of Monet’s talent: ‘Nothing but an eye, but, my God, what an eye’. The brushstrokes are short and close and criss-cross in the foreground, and are more sweeping in the sky; the paint is laid thickly, producing an awareness of fluid shape and texture. The colours interplay harmoniously, the atmosphere is airy; the painting stands as a pure evocation of light.

Tales of the January Transfer Window

Across most of Europe, there are but days left of the January football transfer window. The period in which clubs in England, Spain, Germany, Italy, France, Portugal, the Netherlands, Belgium, Turkey, Greece, Slovenia, Austria and Scotland may buy players ends, at various times of the day, this Thursday, January 31. The transfer window shuts on Thursday in Denmark too; but not in Sweden, Norway or Finland, whose domestic seasons are yet to begin and whose transfer windows, therefore, run until April and May.

Of all the exceptions, perhaps the most notable is in Russia, where the transfer window opened yesterday and will last until February 27 – a difference owing to the Russian league’s extended winter break, an inevitability of their switch this season to an autumn-to-spring calender.

The Serbian transfer window began on January 14 and will run to February 8; the Swiss on January 16, to February 15; and the Ukrainian, Bulgarian and Polish windows are still to commence, the former opening on January 31 and persisting for two weeks until February 15, the latter two windows both opening on February 1, and closing on February 28.

January has seen little activity amongst Europe’s most prestigious clubs. Mario Balotelli may still complete a move from Manchester City to Juventus or AC Milan, perhaps provisionally on loan if neither club is willing to pay a fee in excess of €20 million. Juventus have already strengthened their attack, taking Nicolas Anelka on loan, and agreeing a deal for Fernando Llorente, who will move from Athletic Bilbao on a Bosman transfer at the end of the season. The other major happening involves another pre-contract agreement, with Pep Guardiola’s decision to join Bayern Munich as manager from the summer. Yet despite the relative lack of big-club movement, the window has borne host to transfers and non-transfers interesting in their own rights as stories, and which also raise a variety of issues concerning transfer regulations, the distribution of money in football, and player’s rights versus their worth as assets and their contractual obligations to clubs.

One week ago, Hoffenheim demoted German central defender Marvin Compper – a regular in their side for four seasons, and having played sixteen games for them this campaign – to their reserve side, stating that the player had expressed an unwillingness to aid the club as they struggle against relegation. Hoffenheim currently sit in 17th place in the Bundesliga, in one of the division’s two automatic relegation spots. In December they replaced manager Markus Babbel – whose once promising managerial career, after a strong initial spell with Stuttgart, now appears much diminished – with Marco Kurz. Compper refuted the charge the club laid against him, but with his contract set to expire at the end of the season, had apparently been turned by Fiorentina’s reported interest.

With Compper out of sight and necessarily out of mind, Hoffenheim moved quickly to sign David Abraham, an Argentinian centre-back, from Getafe for a fee of €4 million. Hoffenheim’s general manager, Andreas Müller, pointedly praised the new signing, saying, ‘David Abraham has, from the first meeting with us, demonstrated a strong willingness to accept this difficult challenge here at Hoffenheim’. Kurz remarked on Abraham’s qualities, ‘The particular strengths I see are his speed and his handling of one-on-one situations’.

In fact, Getafe only signed Abraham last summer, on a free transfer upon the expiration of his contract with Swiss side FC Basel. That move was beset with intrigue: believing they had Abraham already committed to a deal, at a late stage Hamburg registered their interest in procuring the player. There was talk of Hamburg paying Getafe compensation to take Abraham’s registration in their stead, but the amount of money proposed by Getafe – the same €4 million they have ultimately sold him for – sufficiently deterred Hamburg and their manager Thorsten Fink, who had worked with Abraham at Basel. In the waning days of the summer window, Galatasaray expressed an interest in the central defender, but were rebuffed with Getafe having little time in which to bring in a replacement.

With Abraham to Hoffenheim, Compper did depart for Fiorentina last Friday, for the relatively minor fee of a couple of thousand euros. He joins Rafał Wolski, a young Polish midfielder signed by Fiorentina on the same day from Legia Warsaw; and Giuseppe Rossi, for whom Fiorentina paid €9.5 million to Villareal. Rossi, still only 25 years old, hasn’t played since October 2011, undergoing three operations on a torn anterior cruciate ligament, suffered during a game against Real Madrid. He is scheduled to remain sidelined for another couple of months. For their part, Getafe have in essence replaced Abraham with Sergio Escudero, a left-sided defender who they have taken from Schalke on loan.

Evidently not too perturbed by missing out on Abraham in the summer, Galatasary have completed what are arguably the two most high profile transfers of this window. Concluding a €7.5 million deal for Dutch captain Wesley Sneijder last week, they have followed that up with the signing of Didier Drogba on an eighteen-month contract, thereby bringing to a close Drogba’s short spell at Shanghai Shenhua.

Whilst much has been made of Sneijder’s contract dispute with Inter Milan – with some outlets depicting his wage demands as the barrier preventing a move to a perceived top European league – in reality, Sneijder has accepted a contract at Galatasary which will furnish him with little more than he would have received by agreeing to Inter’s proposed renegotiation. Inter wanted to spread the money they agreed to pay Sneijder in 2010 across an additional year’s contract, thereby reducing his wage to around €4 million each year; whilst at Galatasaray, Sneijder will earn a yearly wage of €4.5 million. Clearly none of the elite clubs in Europe’s more highly rated leagues thought they could utilise Sneijder, or that he currently represents value for money taking what is, after all, still a top player’s wage. From a footballing perspective, however, there is logic to Sneijder’s move. He will get immediate Champions League football, and with the addition also of Drogba to a squad already containing a host of experienced Turkish players – including Hamit Altintop, Selçuk İnan, Hakan Balta and Burak Yilmaz – plus the solid young central defender Semih Kaya, and already-present imports like Emmanuel Eboué, Albert Riera, Felipe Melo, Johan Elmander and Nordin Amrabat, Galatasary will be hoping to progress beyond the next round of that competition, in which they will meet Schalke.

A saga has unfolded across January concerning Fabricio Coloccini’s continued employment with Newcastle. Rumours and suggestions began circulating towards the end of December regarding Coloccini’s happiness and his imminent future, stimulated by the vocal expressions of interest of San Lorenzo, an Argentinian club for whom Coloccini’s father, Osvaldo, is a coach. Whilst dismissed initially as the idle declarations of a club merely striving to content their supporters with a display of ambition, the rumours continued until it was widely announced, on January 11, that Coloccini did in fact want to leave Newcastle for Argentina, and with immediate effect, owing to personal reasons.

Newcastle’s captain and most consistent player for the last three seasons, the club were understandably reluctant to let Coloccini go – especially given the remarkably meagre terms on offer. San Lorenzo admitted themselves quite incapable of paying any sort of transfer fee for the player. Further complicating the matter, having signed for £10.3 million in 2008, only in the summer had Newcastle and Coloccini agreed to extend his £60,000 per-week contract for another four years, until 2016. Newcastle embarked upon a sustained attempt to placate the player and reconcile him to at least another six months with the club; at the same time demonstrating the potential cost to the player of reneging on his contract. Meanwhile, San Lorenzo, led by their chairman, Matías Lammens, continued to express their desires, setting several none-too-tempting deadlines by which Newcastle should release their man. In the end Coloccini has agreed to stay with Newcastle for the time being, releasing letters addressed, first, to the San Lorenzo fans, proclaiming an undying love; second, to Newcastle’s supporters, thanking them for their encouragement and stating his commitment.

Elsewhere, the Brazilian striker Vágner Love is back at CSKA Moscow after one year’s absence, with Flamengo’s financial difficulties forcing them to let the player go. Flamengo still owed CSKA €6 million for their purchase of Vágner Love last January, with CSKA waiving the amount in order to secure the player’s return. Corinthians, more moneyed, signed Alexandre Pato from AC Milan for €15 million, on a four-year deal. Napoli have loaned Chilean attacker Eduardo Vargas – for whom they paid €11.5 million only a year ago – to Grêmio for twelve months. The Russian transfer window has seen a lively start, with Italian defender Salvatore Bocchetti set to complete a move from Rubin Kazan to Spartak Moscow. Finally, Diego Lugano has moved from Paris Saint-Germain to Málaga on loan for the remainder of the season.

A Note on Measurements (with Kladdkaka Variation)

Having previously lived in two countries, England and Sweden, moving recently to my third, the Netherlands, I well appreciate that the commonly utilised units of measurement differ between countries and provide, therefore, considerable consternation when it comes to cooking in general, and baking in particular. I recently posted a recipe for a Swedish kladdkaka – a sticky chocolate cake – which asked for ‘dl’s of certain ingredients. I have of course been inundated with messages ever since, some frantic and desperate, some mailed and covered in butter or cocoa powder, thankfully none threatening, all asking me – just what is a dl?

Well, dl stands for decilitre. One decilitre, as the name duly indicates, is equivalent to one tenth of a litre, or one hundred millilitres, ml. So we can already construct a sort of chart:

1 litre = 10 dl = 1000 ml

A litre is a measurement of volume; therefore the units litre, dl and ml ought – so you might think – to indicate quantities of liquids. However, in my kladdkaka recipe, I used dl as a measurement of solids, calling for 3 dl sugar, and 1.5 dl plain flour. In Sweden, the decilitre is the standard by which all ingredients are measured. All recipes use decilitres, and the predominant measuring implement is a stack of spoons or cups, ranging from a teaspoon, through a tablespoon, to a half decilitre and then a full decilitre. Packets of flour and sugar in Sweden indicate on them how much a decilitre of the contained substance translates to in grams.

When I use the measurement ‘dl’ in my recipes, take this for granted:

1 dl flour = 60g flour

1 dl sugar = 80g sugar

Finally, for additional clarification in American:

1 cup = 2.37 dl

and

1 dl = 0.423 of a cup

So therefore:

1 cup flour = 142.2g flour

1 cup sugar = 189.6g sugar

You are to refer to this note whenever you seek to make one of my recipes yet strike upon confusion over the quantities and measurements provided; or else when you simply endeavour to engage in the humane, intellectual act of reading.

By way of a bonus, serving to addend and enhance my previous post, and as an illustrative example of one of the ends to which it can be turned, what follows is a photograph of a cake I have made using the kladdkaka recipe. The photograph contains within it the information by which its object may be reproduced. I simply made the kladdkaka recipe twice, and put mascarpone (Italian, pronounced ‘mar’-‘scar’-‘poh’-‘nay’) and a blueberry and raspberry jam in the middle. On one side there are blueberries, washed, eatable; on the top vanilla sugar, for which you may substitute icing sugar.

Heteroglossia in the Music of Ariel Pink

I sometimes think that popular music criticism – taking popular music very broadly as a whole, and the criticism of popular music as something distinct from the criticism of classical music (a distinction which generally holds strong, in spite of a number of crossover artists or artists whose music draws from and fits alongside classical composers and compositions) – lacks critical and theoretical terms by which the art concerned may be discussed. Artists are frequently placed within movements, whether on a musical basis or, increasingly, because they are perceived to be part of some other aesthetic or media group or trend (take, for instance, the suitably nebulous notion of ‘tumblr-wave’); their music is discussed in terms of genre, and the deviation from and amalgamation of established genres; and production techniques and the fidelity of recordings may also receive mention. Yet there are relatively few terms which seem to seek to analyse what popular music is doing in the same way that theoretical terms abound in and are a fundamental part of literary criticism.

Typical of many, I first came to really know the music of Ariel Pink through Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti’s 2010 album, Before Today; which was one of my favourite albums of that year and served as encouragement towards listening to more of Pink’s music. Pink and his band’s latest album, Mature Themes, likewise became one of my favourite and most listened to albums of the past year. A couple of months ago, I attended their concert on the back of the album at the Melkweg in Amsterdam, and profoundly enjoyed it; and in contemplating its various aspects – from Geneva Jacuzzi’s bold and detached, highly performative opening act; to Pink’s presentation, singing through the first several songs from the steps at the rear of the stage, his back to the audience, his face transmitted in close-up via Jacuzzi’s video-camera; to the music itself – I thought about Bakhtin’s concept of heteroglossia and feel that it serves well to describe the structure and the matter of Pink’s compositions.

Heteroglossia is defined by Bakhtin as ‘another’s speech in another’s language, serving to express authorial intentions but in a refracted way’. It translates literally from the Russian, разноречие (‘raznorechie’), as ‘different-speech-ness’. Applied by Bakhtin primarily within the realm of literature, it essentially defines the way in which all language, in use, draws sometimes explicitly and deliberately, but always implicitly from each of its previous uses, thereby bearing numerous possible meanings and intentions and leading in innumerable directions. It explains that whenever we speak or write, our words carry with them the voices and motivations of other people and other groups, and that meaning is therefore uncertain and contested.

Bakhtin opposes heteroglossia to unitary langage, which is described as centripetal rather than centrifugal (that is, directed towards the centre rather than moving outwards and away from it), and which attempts towards ‘guaranteeing a certain maximum of mutual understanding and crystalizing into a real, though still relative, unity’. The utterance is the core expressive unit wherein the opposition between unitary language and heteroglossia plays out. Thus every utterance is defined as a ‘contradiction-ridden, tension-filled unity’, and,

‘The processes of centralization and decentralization, of unification and disunification, intersect in the utterance; the utterance not only answers the requirements of its own language as an individualized embodiment of a speech act, but it answers the requirements of heteroglossia as well; it is in fact an active participant in such speech diversity.’

Ariel Pink’s music is heteroglossia in musical form. It is music as ‘contradiction-ridden, tension-filled unity’. The work of few other musicians embodies within it so many competing voices, and where there do appear areas of potential conflict – be they in questioning, conversational or argumentative lyrics, or in the music, in the use of samples to take one possible instance – they tend to be subsumed by the artist’s central presence, constituting in the end a singular musical statement and presenting a coherent point of view. Likewise, where other artists utilise vocal harmonies, the effect, and the affect, is often something communal. By contrast, the multitude of voices in Ariel Pink’s music are never subsumed.

Pink’s music is heteroglossic primarily on the level of individual songs, where Pink’s voice often achieves remarkable, sudden and layered shifts in pitch and tone (a facet of his singing which was particularly apparent live); and where seemingly disassociated lines are interspersed or throwaway expressions interrupt or addend that narrative provided by the verse. ‘Pink Slime’ features a combination of spoken English and spoken Spanish, singing in two distinct pitches – with backing which alternately corresponds to and complements Pink’s vocals, mumbles, repeats the title, or else expresses in ‘uhs’ and ‘ahs’ – and intermittently surging synths. Breaking amidst the falsetto, bass and sound-effects of ‘Beverly Kills’, the alternately sleek and frantic exclamations ‘Can’t stop the press!’ and ‘I can’t break the headline’ entwine and dissipate, resolving without verbal conclusion into twirling synthesizer.

The movies are explicitly referenced, and there is a borrowing and a manipulation of movie lines in ‘Kinski Assassin’, where Pink sings ‘I will always, I will always, have Paris’. Pink evokes without setting his evocations within a solid past or present context; and his modification of Casablanca’s famous line is dialogic in the Bakhtinian sense in that it doesn’t merely show that movie’s influence, but provides an interpretation which can alter our viewing of the actions and emotions in the film. The difficulty of finding concrete meaning in anything, and in expressing in a singular and consistent way, is formulated in ‘Mature Themes’ in the succession of lines, ‘I’m sorry but it’s true, / truth is shameful and vile, / so I’m not real and I won’t call you / and I want to talk about mature things (daily)’. There is uncertainty too in the chorus, where it is unclear whether Pink sings ‘I want it to be good’ or ‘I wanted to be good’, his repetitions of ‘to be good’ increasingly desperate so that the word ‘good’ loses any simple sense. More, throughout the album, across songs, the range of musical genres and the different modes of mixing on display – with Pink’s vocals sometimes at the forefront and clear, sometimes deep, muddied and surrounded – increase the sense of a music full of different speech.

Pink’s music has been discussed within a dichotomy of sincerity and insincerity. Pitchfork, in their blurb rating Mature Themes the 21st best album of 2012, question the sincerity of the cover of ‘Baby’ which closes the album; and a similar sentiment characterises their discussion of the song itself in their list of 2012’s ‘top tracks’. ‘Baby’ – a cover of a previously obscure song from brothers Donnie and Joe Emerson’s 1979 album Dreamin’ Wild; uncovered over the past few years and re-released in 2012 by Light In The Attic Records – is an ethereal combination of soul, funk and hopeful longing, to which Pink adds whispers and moans and doo-wop, Flamingos-style ‘shoo-bops’. I’m not sure that it is adequate to question Pink’s sincerity in the song, or to to identify the locus of his music’s interest as its fluctuating between the poles of sincerity and insincerity. For Bakhtin, even at the peak of high poetry as a centralising linguistic force, the ‘heteroglossia of the clown sounded forth’ at street level, in everything from mythology and folk tales to bawdy songs. However, the use of language for comedic, ironic or parodic purpose alone, while it may be double-voiced, ultimately remains within an individual dialogue. It fails to be truly heteroglossic in the way that Pink’s music always is, even when covering another artist’s work, even when it does attain moments of communality as it markedly does in ‘Round and Round’, special precisely because the moment is brief and a shift in its own right.

I don’t mean to suggest in discussing Ariel Pink in this way that there is something especially literary about his art, or that he is alone in achieving a decentralisation of popular music. Yet I think this decentralising is one of the effects of his music; and I think the concept of heteroglossia provides an interesting way of thinking about him as a musician. It is notable that, despite his fluent Spanish, Pink works predominantly with and within an American musical tradition. Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of a minor literature, in their work Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, shares points of similarity with Bakhtin’s concept of heteroglossia. Where heteroglossia decentralises and disunifies language, minor literature aims to ‘deterritorialise’ it. Deleuze and Guattari argue that ‘A minor literature doesn’t come from a minor language; it is rather that which a minority constructs within a major language’, and it is this that Pink’s music achieves: with a dialogic understanding of American culture, and with the heteroglossia that is a part of his compositional practice and an inherent facet of his voice, he makes a searching, significant and experimental ‘minor’ music out of major American pop culture.

________

Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature, and Bakhtin, M. Discourse in the Novel, in Leitch, V.B. (ed.) The Norton Anthology of Theory & Criticism (Second Edition: London; Norton, 2010)

Bakhtin’s Discourse in the Novel is available as a PDF file from the Iowa State University’s website: http://www.public.iastate.edu/~carlos/607/readings/bakhtin.pdf

Banks of the Marne, by Cézanne

The Hermitage Amsterdam is currently home to two complementary exhibitions. The first, Impressionism: Sensation and Inspiration, with a tagline explaining that the works on display are ‘Highlights from the Hermitage’, endeavours to place the Impressionists within their French Nineteenth Century context. It shows Neoclassicists Alexandre Cabanel and Jean-Léon Gérôme, the Romanticism of Delacroix – who Van Gogh regarded as the supreme colourist, and about whom he wrote in September, 1888,

‘Now, it is true that I see in impressionism a resurrection of Eugène Delacroix, but as the interpretations are both divergent and also rather irreconcilable, impressionism cannot yet formulate a doctrine. That is why I am staying with the impressionists, because it means nothing, and commits you to nothing, and as one of them I do not have to take up any position.’

– and intermediaries, including Charles-François Daubigny and Carolus-Duran, alongside Monet, Pissarro, Degas, Sisley and Renoir.

The second exhibition, entitled simply Vincent, with the subtitle ‘The Van Gogh Museum at the Hermitage’, shows a selection from the Van Gogh Museum’s collection whilst that museum is undergoing refurbishment in order to meet updated Dutch safety and security regulations. The exhibition is organised thematically rather than chronologically, the seven themes comprising, in order, ‘Practice makes perfect’, ‘A style of his own’, ‘The effect of colour’, ‘Peasant painter’, ‘Looking to Japan’, ‘The modern portrait’, and ‘The wealth of nature’. Whilst some of the earlier themes in particular are conceptually slight, the exhibition itself is coherent and succeeds in providing novel points of connection. Impressionism is open until January 27; whereas Vincent will run until the end of April, when the Van Gogh Museum will reopen with a major exhibition celebrating the museum’s fortieth anniversary, to be called Van Gogh at Work.

I visited Impressionism last weekend, and especially admired a painting by Cézanne, Banks of the Marne (1888). Cézanne achieves in this painting one of the purest and most convincing depictions of water I’ve seen; and he does this by largely replicating the river bank in the water below, presenting a reflection that is almost a mirror image. The trees and the residence on land appear reflected at the same angle, and with the same dimensions. Cézanne’s palette – with its predominant blue-greens offset by the white villa and its ochre roof and balcony – also remains constant, with the darker tones in the water serving to differentiate and providing a sense of depth. Whilst there is nothing amounting to a rippled brushstroke, the short and dense diagonals which give the trees their matter are replaced in Cézanne’s water by looser horizontals.

Around 1888 when Cézanne painted Banks of the Marne, he also worked on a number of other water paintings, experimenting with different ways of representing, different ways of bringing his canvases together. Bridge over the Marne at Créteil, with its view looking down the river, features geometric curves and larger blocks of colour as trees, reflected in the water with vertical rather than horizontal brushwork. From the same period, the more abstract Bridge over a Pool consists of a mass of vivid green diagonals which encroach upon and enclose the bridge, the water only delineated by some darker tones and shadows; and Aqueduct and Lock repeats Banks of the Marne‘s trick, the aqueduct immediately mirrored in the water below, here slightly extended and outlined, with unfastened foliage hovering above on each side.

Banks of the Marne recalls an earlier work, Zola’s House at Médan (or Le Château de Médan), which Cézanne completed between 1879 and 1881, Zola having bought the house in 1878. The painting depicts the banks of the Seine – of which the Marne is a tributary, running southeast from Paris – in an unusually rigid and symmetrical fashion: whereas Banks of the Marne is broadly split into river bank and river, here the canvas is divided into the five horizontal sections of river, river bank, houses, hills and sky, with tall trees rising vertically at regular intervals between the houses. Cézanne’s palette is much brighter, the sensation sunnier, with intense yellows, greens and ochres and a bold blue sky. Still, both paintings confront the viewer in a similar way: we look directly across a stretch of water towards a river bank, densely leafy, something solidly constructed and impenetrable. Like in the later painting, so here Cézanne indicates those reflections in the water through more loosely painted, horizontal brushstrokes.

De Leeuw, R. (ed.) The Letters of Vincent van Gogh, trans. A. Pomerans (Penguin, 1997)

Ought We to Sit Down?

Over the last few weeks the BBC has waged a quiet and implicit campaign against office, kitchen and dining chairs, deckchairs, armchairs, couches, sofas, and settees, benches, stools, divans and chaises longues. Floors too – with or without rugs; most extending into corners, a necessity of their design – have found their once various uses circumscribed by the broadcasting corporation.

I believe that in parts of England some people refer to an item of furniture called a ‘puffee’; I believe that this resembles and in some cases is in fact a sofa, on other occasions more like an ottoman, without back or arms; cursory research suggests the term is of Indian origin, and still finds use in that country; whatever the word is, whatever object it entails, the BBC suggests you should use neither word nor object much any longer.

For what the BBC are explicitly against is sitting down. In a New Year’s article describing the confusion caused by governmental exercise guidelines – which have called variously for two-and-a-half hours of moderate exercise each week; one-and-a-quarter hours of ‘vigorous activity’; a combination of the two; or exercise five days per week which may include certain elements of the housework – and which remarks on their resulting inefficacy, the doctor under whose name the article appears laments most of all that ‘the crucial thing – to get up and move around as often as possible’ is precisely that which is most oft overlooked.

And so, in an attempt to bring clarity to something so muddled and muddied – something encased, so it may be put, in a flabby verbiage – the doctor advocates his own ‘Twenty Plus’ campaign, which means, in a word, you must never sit down for a period longer than twenty minutes. You are to add to this bedrock of healthfulness with a daily twenty minute walk, and fitful twenty-second bursts of rapid, even crazed movement.

This advice seems so impractical, so apart from the course of typical everyday civilised life, that it ends up the most confusing advice of all. This doctor would have the predominant forms of both popular and high culture eradicated in the ways they are presently known. In the United Kingdom, perversely, the ITV television network, with advertisement breaks, could be watched; but even BBC shows which persist for half an hour would prove too much, with viewers forced to stand and move and miss those vital moments of storyline development before the denouement of their drama, or the steps which go towards cooking the final dish of their cookery show, or the remnants of news, sometimes lighthearted, before the weather. Football stadiums would contain neither all-seating nor all-standing zones, but one zone in which sitting then standing was, if not absolutely obligatory, still very strongly advised; or else games would have to be predetermined, with some incident provoking standing occurring at least once before the clock progressed beyond 0:19:59.

Theatrical, balletic and operatic performance would be broken up into such portions, with so many intervals, that the attendees would become terribly and dangerously drunk; or, in the case of pantomime, for instance, surfeited with ice cream. In some countries there already exists an obnoxious and thoroughly un-artistic practice whereby cinemas split films into two, to provide an additional slot for the procurement of popcorn and corbonated soda and sweets; if the doctor had his way, this practice would not only spread forth, but multiply too; or alternately the audience would, every twenty minutes, have to stand en masse or partake in a sort of bodily Mexican wave, one row at a time.

William Burroughs, in a piece entitled ‘The Beginning Is Also The End’, first published in 1963 in the Transatlantic Review, wrote, ‘Give me an old wall and a garbage can and I can by God sit there forever’. Under the BBC’s surreptitious new directives, today Burroughs could not contemplate such a procedure. His physician would inform that his attempt towards transcendence would inevitably come undone owing to the ineluctable stiffness of his limbs.

A second article by the BBC, bolstering the point made in the first, advocates standing rather than sitting during a day’s work. By way of support they refer to Nabokov, whose use of a lectern when writing has become one of his defining characteristics within the collective consciousness. The BBC article fails to mention, however, the extensive physical activity partaken by Nabokov throughout his life whenever hunting butterflies; that he would begin the day with a bath; that, beginning his daily work at his lectern, ‘Later on, when I feel gravity nibbling at my calves, I settle down in a comfortable armchair alongside an ordinary writing desk; and finally, when gravity begins climbing up my spine, I lie down on a couch in a corner of my small study’; and that he ended each evening reading in bed from nine until half-past eleven.

Nabokov’s Playboy interview, in which he discusses his typical day: http://kulichki.com/moshkow/NABOKOW/Inter03.txt

Amsterdam in the Snow

As in much of Northern Europe, so too has it been snowing in Amsterdam; some yesterday, especially yesterday evening and last night, and more today. I took a whole host of photographs today around lunchtime, particularly in the Vondelpark, extending my walk and stretching my legs as far as the Museumplein. Here are fourteen of the photographs I took; there are more, fifty-five in total, on my Flickr page.

Demba Ba and Papiss Cisse: Why They Have Not Worked Together, Why Newcastle May Improve Now They Are Apart

Demba Ba left Newcastle and his signing for Chelsea was confirmed last Friday morning; he played for his new club and scored twice in their 5-1 FA Cup victory at Southampton the following day; and his appearance on Wednesday night against Swansea only from the substitute’s bench, and then much too late, has put a certain pressure on Rafa Benitez given Chelsea’s defeat and Fernando Torres’s poor run of form, or alternately – given that this form has lasted at least a couple of seasons now – his absolute lack of ability.

Meanwhile, Newcastle comprehensively lost their FA Cup tie away at Brighton and – in the middle of a run which has seen them lose seven of their last eight games; or eleven of their last fourteen; or which has seen them record just two victories over their last sixteen matches in all competitions – are presumably, in theory, hope against hope, in the process of locating and procuring a replacement striker.

The signing of right-back Mathieu Debuchy was overdue but nevertheless much needed and wholeheartedly welcome. Yet Newcastle’s defensive line, the foundation of last season’s success, has been increasingly exposed this, conceding fifteen goals over the last four games; and if this Friday morning’s suggestions regarding Fabricio Coloccini – a story broken on the back page of The Independent after increasing rumours over the last several weeks – turn out to bear truth, then Debuchy alone will be insufficient towards improving the team’s defensive strength and organisation. It may still be expected that he’ll provide width, crossing ability and an attacking intent which the side has lacked down the right flank for more than two years. Ideally, his signing would see the team shift and settle upon the 4-3-3 formation which worked to such effect during the latter part of last season, and which seems to suit most of the players currently in the squad.

Despite Debuchy’s signing, even prior to the latest stories surrounding Coloccini, given the horrible run of results, and the team’s apparent lack of direction since the early stages of a season entered into without sufficient summer strengthening and reinforcement, the loss of Demba Ba, the club’s leading goalscorer by some margin, may have seemed a devastating blow. Yet from my perspective, as a Newcastle fan, it neither seems nor feels that way, owing to a range of issues which centre round the inability of Ba and his Senegalese striker partner Papiss Cisse to perform effectively together.

Cisse was signed last January, some of the £35 million received a year earlier for the sale of Andy Carroll finally being spent on a striking replacement. At that point in the 2011-12 season, Demba Ba had already managed 15 goals for the club; alongside Cisse for the remainder of the campaign, he only managed an additional one, in a match against Aston Villa in which Cisse came off the bench in the opening stages due to an injury sustained by Leon Best. While Ba began to struggle in front of goal, Cisse went on to finish the season with 13 goals.

With Hatem Ben Arfa establishing himself within the side as the months progressed, becoming an integral part of the team only in the season’s final third, Newcastle moved towards a 4-3-3 formation, Ben Arfa in his favoured position on the right of a front three, and Demba Ba occupying a position to the left of Cisse, who played as the central striker. For a period of time, even in this wider position, Ba was still getting chances, finding good goalscoring positions, and struck the woodwork on several occasions and was generally unfortunate not to score more goals. Towards the end of the season the chances dried up; but nevertheless Ba was an important part of a functioning and entertaining team, which finished the season strongly and only narrowly missed out on the top four.

Yet it was increasingly reported that Ba was unhappy playing on the left; and with the player seemingly of bold character and ready to express his agitations, and apparently possessing a degree of power owing to the stipulations of his contract allowing him to leave the club for a relatively small fee, at the start of this season Alan Pardew forewent the 4-3-3 and tended instead to accommodate Ba in a 4-4-2. In truth, the formation fluctuated uncertainly game after game, sometimes appearing like a 4-3-3 initially, sometimes a 4-5-1 or 4-4-1-1; but the strongest inclination was always towards a quite rigid 4-4-2, which does not get the best out of Ben Arfa, the club’s most talented attacking player, nor their host of centrally-minded midfielders including Cabaye, Anita, Marveaux, and present-day Gutierrez. Moving into late November and then December – with Ba scoring on a fairly consistent basis but Cisse struggling for form and lacking confidence; with Pardew increasingly negative as the side’s form deteriorated; and then especially after Ben Arfa’s injury – Cisse began playing down the right, more and more in a 4-5-1 formation requiring him to fulfill much defensive work, leaving Ba the team’s striker and sole attacking outlet.

Certainly Ba and Cisse utterly failed to complement each other playing together in a 4-4-2. Both are greedy for goals, and would occupy the same positions and make the same runs, neither dropping deep nor moving wide on a regular basis to provide options and to support the team’s build-up play. In fact, there was a tendency at times for both players to charge towards the opposition penalty area whenever Ben Arfa picked up the ball, expecting him to beat hoards of defenders and provide simple, unaided goalscoring opportunities. Both playing as strikers, and with a certain competition between the two, the pair played selfishly and too similarly. Still, they aren’t identical players; and in their differing gifts, they were capable of playing well together, and really working for the team, precisely in the 4-3-3 formation which was really stumbled upon last season.

Both players are supremely clinical and creative finishers: with the ball in or about the box, they see opportunities to strike which other forwards don’t see, and are agile and alert and can finish in a variety of ways. Whilst both possess reasonable pace and good acceleration, neither player is exceptionally quick, and they are not especially assertive when it comes to battling opposition centre-backs and winning balls in the air. Where the two differ, their different capabilities make Ba well suited to a wider role, Cisse well suited (and only suited) to a central one. Ba is capable of running with the ball from a deeper position, playing a pass, and cutting inside from the left and shooting from outside of the area. Cisse can exchange quick passes in the confined space between opposition centre-backs, is better at holding up the ball than Ba, and where they both move effectively off a last defender into space, I think Cisse is also better at finding space in the penalty area.

Undoubtedly Ba scored at an exceptional rate throughout his time with Newcastle. His record stands at 29 goals from 54 competitive games – just over a goal every two games; or 0.537 goals a game. Comparing him with previous leading goalscorers of my lifetime, his strike rate is just ahead of Alan Shearer’s, whose 206 goals were scored over the much more extensive period of 395 games (0.522 goals a game); behind Les Ferdinand’s, with 50 from 81 (0.617); and behind Andy Cole’s, with a phenomenal 68 from 83 (0.819). He betters Michael Owen’s rate of 30 goals from 65 games (0.461) (Owen also appeared fourteen times from the bench); and considerably betters the goalscoring ratios of even respected strikers like Craig Bellamy (42 from 119; 0.353) and Faustino Asprilla (18 from 50; 0.36). Ba’s conversion rate may well better that of anybody listed above: he scored goals in a team which often wasn’t fully functioning or creating much. Still, he didn’t carve his own chances in the way that Cole did through his pace and extra agility; didn’t offer the aerial threat of Ferdinand or Shearer; and didn’t contribute as much to our overall play. Cisse currently stands with 18 goals from 35 competitive games.

The point is that knowing the extent to which this season’s system has utterly failed; believing that it wasn’t soon going to be rectified by the manager, and that Ba readily and even aggressively pushed the move away from the 4-3-3 which brought our only spell of genuinely good football in recent memory, his signing for Chelsea doesn’t in the end feel like a disaster. The speculation regarding his availability was disruptive, especially since it seemed encouraged by the player and his team of agents and advisers, and his departing felt inevitable; it presents a chance to move on and to establish a coherent attacking shape and style of play. With Cisse leading the line, Ben Arfa scheduled to return at the beginning of February, and the signing of an established attacker capable of playing proactively, capably and contentedly in a secondary or wider role, Ba’s departure could be turned into a positive, could be a cause for optimism. Of course, this is Newcastle; the signing of a new forward does not appear imminent; the manager seems increasingly out of his depth; our captain reportedly wants, needs, absolutely must leave the club this transfer window; in short, in a word, there are other problems.

A Swedish Kladdkaka Recipe

Kladdkaka translates from Swedish into English as ‘sticky cake’. It is a chocolate cake that uses relatively little flour in relation to its quantities of sugar, butter and egg; and owing to this, to the mixing of ingredients, and to the cooking time, the result is something with a sticky centre. It is a popular cake made often in Sweden and eaten just as regularly as it is made. However, unlike semlor, buns with a whipped cream and marzipan or almond filling, which are eaten on Fettisdagen (‘Fat Tuesday’, i.e. Shrove Tuesday, which serves as Pancake Day in the UK and elsewhere), or lussekatter, saffron buns eaten on Luciadagen, St. Lucia’s Day, December 13, the kladdkaka has no day devoted to it.

Ingredients

• 100g butter
• 2 eggs
• 4 tbsp cocoa powder
• 1.5 dl plain flour
• 3 dl sugar
• 0.5 tsp salt
• 1 tsp vanilla sugar

Notes pertaining to these ingredients

I usually use castor sugar, but you can use a light brown sugar if you prefer or if you just want to experiment in your baking or in your life. Vanilla sugar is common in Sweden, in Scandinavia taken as a whole, and in central Europe as far as I’m aware, but can sometimes be hard to find in England: you may forget the vanilla sugar, or use vanilla essence or the seeds from a vanilla pod. Add more cocoa if you want a richer cake. In fact you are free to add a variety of things depending upon your inclination: chopped hazelnuts, chocolate, orange zest, I have added all these to the basic recipe with reasonably satisfying results; though of course the more you deviate from the basic recipe, the less right you have to proclaim, ‘I have made an authentic Swedish kladdkaka!’.

Method

• Heat your oven to 200C, or else, shall we say, 180C if your oven is with fan.
• Mix lightly in a clean bowl the two eggs with all of the sugar.
• Melt the entirety of the butter, and add, mixing, to the already mixed sugar and egg.
• Blend in the dried ingredients: the cocoa, flour, salt and vanilla sugar (or alternative).
• Put the runny, gooey mixture into a tin, tray or dish: something which is capable of baking the kladdkaka. I tend to use a square stoneware dish, 23cm in each direction.
• Bake in the oven for around 10 minutes.

The cake should not quite be firm or springy to the touch by the time you take it from the oven; instead, it should remain sticky if penetrated with a knife or skewer. It may take fifteen minutes rather than ten, depending upon unforeseeable circumstances. Serve with whipped cream or ice cream, icing sugar, berries, whatever makes you mentally comfortable, but physically salivate.

Flower Painting I

I bought some flowers just prior to Christmas, arranged them in a glass vase, and as they were beginning to wilt a week or so later I painted them. Here is that painting, from three perspectives: daytime up close; evening up close; daytime from a little distance.