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Index: Art & Architecture

Meandering through la Belle-Époque.

Anthony Howell: ‘The impression must include everything, like a poem; the scene it conveys authenticated by each and every sense. Realising this, through Huysmans’ stimulating reviews, I began to wonder about literary impressionism. Who could be considered an impressionist poet? Verlaine? For me, like Marie Cassat, much of the time, he’s a bit wishy-washy.’

The last Mantegna.

Michelene Wandor: ‘In her will, Mrs van Hopper left me her library. As I went through the books, deciding what to keep and what to give away, I accidentally dropped a copy of Petrarch. Out of it fell a typed letter, addressed to a Count Alessandro Rietti. Three words were underlined in red: the names Isabella and Andrea, and the word “pearl”. The letter referred to a lost painting by Andrea Mantegna, a portrait of Isabella d’Este, the beautiful and powerful wife to one of the Gonzaga Dukes of Mantua.’

George, what is Fluxus?

Simon Collings: ‘In one of the clips Mekas comments: ‘Warhol and George, Warhol and Fluxus, somewhere there, very deep, they were the same. They were both Fluxus, both dealt essentially with nothingness. Both dismissed the current life civilization, everything that is being practised today, everything is the same, didn’t take any of it seriously. Both took life as a game, and laughed at it, each in his own way.’’

Swincum-le-Beau.

Shukburgh Ashby: ‘Richard Fitzwalden, the 18th Baron, is said to have taken a piece of chalk and drawn a line down the stairs, running S to N. The eastern apartment was built for the Baron and his mistress, and the western reserved for his wife, Emma Fitzwalden. On the ground floor, Emma Fitzwalden used the Venetian doorway to the S, and Richard Fitzwalden the door on the N front.’

Tintoretto is Venice.

Michele Casagrande: ‘Ultimately, the definitive exhibition of the late Tintoretto would turn out to be Venice itself: the Venice of the second half of the sixteenth century, where he lived, worked, and made his mark. ‘

Heard in Tintoretto.

Hoyt Rogers: ‘At San Marcuola the / table is static / as a refectory plank / on a fresco in Milan…

Tintoretto: after and before.

Hoyt Rogers: ‘The past, as our imagination transforms it in the present, already evolves into the future. This was the lesson I learned from Tintoretto in work after work—a lesson that quickened my steps and restored me to reality, that multivalent realm of ‘the seen and the unseen.’’’

Tintoretto and Venice.

Introduction: ‘This portfolio brings together essays by Michele Casagrande and Hoyt Rogers, in Italian and English. To mark the anniversary, the Civic Museums of Venice and the National Gallery in Washington have jointly organised a splendid retrospective in both cities.’

The Beginning and the End of Art

Tronn Overend: ‘There are rights and obligations, notions of justice and a facility of logic, plus the recognition of different “beliefs and intentions” in others. Denis Dutton notes there is nothing that is culturally specific about these human traits. They are as “universal as the blinking reflex”. Games, jokes, gossip; feelings of envy, pride, shame and grief are the human condition. To this list must be added the making of art.’

Tactile, untouchable.

Anthony Howell: ‘There’s a deep poetry in Mary Maclean’s work, as time will tell. We live in a world where the wood is overwhelmed by trees, but we must have faith that in the long run, true quality will be recognised and prevail.’

Underground fiction.

Michael Hampton: ‘A Ficto-Historical Theory of the London Underground is neither a fiction nor a history (though it borrows traits from both) but a courageous, if odd, hybrid. In 1776 Dr Johson remarked of the digressive novel Tristram Shandy, that “Nothing odd will do long”, underestimating its innovative features. It would be easy to make the same mistake again, ignoring the way Jobst as “amateur-scholar” has defamiliarized the experience of riding “the Tubes”. ‘

Permanently Uncanonical.

Nigel Wheale: ‘Schwabsky describes Denise Riley as ‘one of the finest writers of the English language; along with the late Anna Medelssohn [“Grace Lake”] (like Riley born in 1948)’. He relates her to the group of poets that followed on from ‘the remarkable generation born in the later 1930s, of whom Lee Harwood, J.H. Prynne and Tom Raworth may be the other most salient names’.’

Artaud in Ireland.

Peter O’Brien: ‘Is it possible, entre-deux-guerres, to be more insightful than to imagine and begin planning for the coming apocalypse from the western precipice of the continent? And is there a safer place in Europe during the years of World War II than a lunatic asylum? Artaud spent the entire span of that second war in various asylums. When France was occupied by the Nazis, various of Artaud’s friends ensured that he was transferred to the psychiatric hospital at Rodez, in south-central France, well inside Vichy territory.’

The new life of Whistler.

Walter Sickert: ‘If Whistler has himself left, in an interesting and passionately felt life-work, a contribution to our better understanding of the visible world, he has also done another thing. He has sent the more intelligent of the generation that succeeds him to the springs whence he drew his own art — to French soil. ‘

Looking back in anger.

Alan Wall: ‘Kitaj was obsessed all his life with Cézanne, and Cézanne certainly believed that everything needed in life and art was here, right before us, but we had to learn to see with utter integrity, and that meant ridding ourselves of false visual conventions. It is not the subject-matter of art that makes it lofty, but its method of perception. ‘