15th to the 21st of January 2024

Diary of an aesthetic innocent, Shakespeare, films.

An aesthetic innocent at the Wallace Collection

In my ongoing quest to understand art I’ve been reading a book published in 1927 by philosopher Katharine Gilbert titled Studies in Recent Aesthetic. I came across a useful phrase in the chapter ‘Remarks on the Ugly’:

It is now taken as aesthetic innocence to apply the word ‘ugly’ to the portraits of wrinkled old women, cacophony in poetry, discords in music, angularity in drawing or roughness of dramatic utterance. The shrinking from complex and uningratiating representation, if there is something powerful offered, is imputed to the timidity or intellectual narrowness of the spectator.

I think this is where I am right now, an aesthetic innocent, though I wouldn’t attribute timidity or narrowness to my good self, obviously. I want to learn more, how to appreciate art at a level other than that of the innocent.

Anyway, I went to the Wallace Collection last Tuesday. It was one of those bright blue crisp London days and I walked the two miles or so from King’s Cross to Marylebone through Fitzrovia, a lovely part of town with some fine buildings.

I went specifically to see A Dance to the Music of Time by Nicolas Poussin.

I was expecting a much larger painting and was a little disappointed by its actual size. The feeling was akin to that of the band in Spinal Tap when they realise the Stonehenge sarsen stones they had commissioned as a stage prop were a mere foot high rather than full-scale.

Anyway, I sat and gazed at the painting for a while, waiting to be moved but alas nothing came, had I failed? I had been led to believe I would be moved! Maybe this will come later. I enjoyed the painting and consider it beautiful and perhaps, at this stage in my attempt at connoisseurship, an archetype of what is beautiful, good and true. Something like that anyway.

More Shakespeare

I read Romeo and Juliet, gosh, what an ending, I wasn’t expecting that! I guess I probably knew somehow it would all end bad, it’s not labelled ‘a tragedy’ for nothing.

I’ve started on Love’s Labour’s Lost, which so far I’m enjoying.

Films

Last week I enjoyed Sink The Bismarck!, filmed in 1960, slightly wooden acting but excellent fun if you enjoy war films. Charley Varrick, from 1973, stars Walter Mathau in a menacing story of the aftermath of a bank heist gone-wrong, recommended. (both films on YouTube).

Have a lovely week!