5 May: Old Master Bloat
Sitting in the basement café of the National Gallery, catching my second wind. My gawd. It’s like trying to eat an entire 4-layer chocolate fudge cake in one sitting, to take in all of this in one day.
Now here’s my latest scheme for world peace – the Old Masters Distribution Plan. It’s my settled belief that every museum ought to be given one Old Master – the Warren G. Harding Memorial County Museum in East Nowhere should have one Rembrandt or El Greco or Vermeer. Then everybody would have a chance to see why the Old Masters are something else again, without having to get on a plane. When you have a setup like the National Gallery, with eight or nine Raphaels in one room, it just makes you wonder why those other guys aren’t so good – the quantity inures you to the quality. And in return for redistributing their Old Masters, the big museums would get interesting crap from the provinces.
I can’t even begin to describe my favorites – a life-sized Mystery Date portrait of Christine of Denmark(part of Holbein’s circuit of courts to paint pictures of eligible princesses for Henry the VIII to choose Mrs. Numero-Four-o. What he got was Anne of Cleeves.) Gigantic portrait of Carolyn Jones – well, no, Contessa Somebody – but the greatest depiction of satin in a painting in human history. In the medieval section, lots of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover conglomerations of saints. Daphne and Apollo subtly and elegantly depicted by a guy with chiffon epaulettes chasing a gal with branches for arms. The Arnolfini wedding! What can I say about that? Heavens, he looks like a pill. “Look at all these wonderful things I have bought – the matching bed-and-bride set.” Another triptych of saints that looks like a Laugh-in set – “Catherine, must you bring that wheel with you everywhere? It’s time to get over it, hon…” St. Michael looking down to make eye contact with the demon under his feet as he skewers it. And why the random pickles in Crivelli’s altarpieces?
More: The unnamed Swabian woman; the Uccello St. George; Sint Jan’s virgin; Grotesque Old Woman; St. Margaret of Antioch; Elizabeth Vigee LeBrun -- a self-portrait in the sort of straw hat you usually see on broken-down old horses. And speaking of horses, magnificent portrait of Whistlejacket by Stubbs. Finally, the dogs in the Cosimo “Satyr Mourning over a Nymph” – “Somehow or other, this has got to translate into snacks.”
In the evening, I headed out to meet Sarah and Dhez for the Ripper Walk at Tower Hill – but alas and alack, they didn’t make it in time. It was a good tour, though the group was very large (probably close to a hundred) – the guy who gives it is Donald Rumbelow, the “world-famous Ripperologist” you see in every documentary on the subject. Considering that he’s been giving this walk/talk every Sunday for the past fifteen years, he does a good job of making it live. You start off at dusk in a fairly modern stretch of town, then every stop goes deeper into the old East End – the spaces get smaller and darker, as the details grow more gruesome. Rumbelow talked about the politics between the two sets of police forces that were investigating the murders and the lives of the women, bringing them to life as individuals. You got a chance to see how small an area it was, and how brief were the intervals between life and death – one woman was seen alive less than fifteen minutes before her death. Rumbelow went over a variety of theories about who the Ripper was, but committed himself to none of them. We ended up near the Ten Bells, the prostitute’s bar, but it was more crowded than I like. (There were lots of other, imitation Ripper walks going on at the same time.)