This is my review of The Vanishing Man: In Pursuit of Velazquez by Laura Cumming.

Art critic Laura Cumming has a gift for helping us to appreciate paintings more fully,

She has a particular feeling for “Las Meninas”, the enigmatic masterpiece by Velasquez which mingles “the watchers and the watched”, bringing us, the onlookers into the picture: the Spanish Infanta in a group of maidservants and court dwarves make direct eye contact with us, except that they may in fact be observing the king and queen, glimpsed Arnolfini portrait-style in a background mirror, who may once have stood where we now stand, being painted by Velasquez himself, portrayed with his palette at a huge canvas to one side. His brushlike tapering fingers merging into the brush itself, “no more than a darting streak of white” – “the whole painting has been set in motion by its delicate tip, which effectively vanishes”.

Laura Cummings continually marvels at how often sketchy and thin brushwork when viewed close up, could create such fine detail of clothing with sheen of silk and transparent white collars. Faces are so expressive that they seem alive, startling us with their modernity: the portrait of the misnamed Pope Innocent X disconcerted viewers, as if they were meeting him in the flesh. Philip IV of Spain preferred not to submit to the unflinching truthfulness of Velazquez’s portraits as he grew old, but retained the court painter he had employed as a very young man, although for the last decade of his life Velasquez was promoted to High Chamberlain and seems to have produced relatively few works yet of high quality, including Las Meninas .

Although held in high regard, Velasquez was not free to travel, gaining permission for only two admittedly lengthy visits to Italy, but retained his artistic independence in the convention-ridden Spanish court. His most striking portraits are of ordinary people: the dignified water-seller, realistic drops of liquid trickling down the curved side of a ceramic pot; the old woman frying eggs in which the translucent fluid can be seen in the process of solidifying into white; the dwarves portrayed with dignity; self-assured Moorish assistant who chose to remain with Velasquez despite gaining his freedom; actor Pablo de Valladolid casting his shadow on a void which serves to focus us on his theatrical presence. Ever experimental, the painter even produced an inspiration for impressionism in the outdoor scene of the Medici Gardens, tall cypresses rising above a white cloth draped over a balconied terrace with a crudely boarded-up archway.

Since comparatively little is known about Velasquez, the book often seems padded out with overblown speculation and a detailed sub-plot regarding the obsessive efforts of Reading printer John Snare to gain recognition for the portrait he had acquired of the youthful prince destined to become Charles 1. Whether or not this is a genuine Velasquez, the tale demonstrates how the casual, inconsistent description and classification of paintings together with a lack of x-rays and other dating techniques made it so hard to attribute them accurately until well into the C20, if then. It would of course have helped if Velasquez had signed his work. It is also disturbing to read about the dealer who, having “cleaned up” a “Velasquez” to make it more attractive to a buyer, had it darkened and aged to fetch a better price to suit the tastes of a wealthy alternative bidder.

Although the colour plates are of good quality, the main weakness of a generally fascinating book is the need for more of them, and better cross-referencing with the text, even if this added a little to the price. The small black and white photographs integrated in the text do scant justice to the painter’s work. I had to make a note of some titles of paintings described at length so that I could search for their images on line.

⭐⭐⭐⭐ 4 Stars

This is my review of The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft by Claire Tomalin.

After somehow failing to appreciate Mary Wollstonecraft’s importance, perhaps because of the anti-feminist backlash which arose after her death and dominated British society until the C20, I have at last been won over by Claire Tomalin’s excellent biography, rightly praised by the historian Plumb: “There is no better book on Mary Wollstonecraft, nor is there likely to be”.

Mary is portrayed very honestly, warts and all, as often controlling and opinionated, in her youth prone to dominating less intelligent and assertive girls, yet demanding their affection. Once she had discovered the sexual attraction of men, she could repel them with her intensity, even naively suggesting on at least two occasions some kind of “ménage à trois”, and in turn was bitterly disappointed by their preference for relationships with pretty but less clever women, although they seem to have enjoyed the stimulus of her conversation. On finding herself pregnant for a second time, her insistence on marriage to the philosopher-writer Godwin seems in contradiction to her feminist principles, but she cannot be blamed for seeking some security after being driven to attempted suicides (she was prone to depression) over the humiliation of abandonment by her fickle lover Imlay, leaving her with a small daughter.

On a more positive side, Mary was courageous if foolhardy, setting off alone to experience first-hand the French Revolution in Paris despite the danger of the psychopathic Robespierre and the guillotine, or to Scandinavia with a baby and nursemaid in tow, to help solve Imlay’s financial problems. An original thinker on the basis of experience of unfair treatment as a girl and of her reading rather than formal education, she displayed a surprising confidence, being one of the first to launch into print against Edmund Burke’s attack on the Dissenters as a dangerous force likely to bring dangerous revolution in England: her “A Vindication of the Rights of Man” brought her instant fame, on a par with Thomas Paine. Determined to support herself, she was not afraid to approach her influential publisher Johnson with a request for work.

Ironically, her widowed husband Godwin not only tarnished her reputation by his frankness over her practice of “free love” but belittled her in stating, “The strength of her mind lay in intuition….yet in the strict sense of the term, she reasoned little”. In fact, what shines out across the span of more than two centuries is the coherence of her thoughts, her wry wit and eloquence. For instance, while acknowledging the violence of the French Revolution, she justified the need to achieve greater quality: “to preclude from the chance of improvement the greater part of the citizens of the state…can be considered in no other light than as monstrous tyranny…. for all the advantages of civilisation cannot be felt unless it pervades the whole mass.”

The death in childbirth of a vigorous, healthy woman who had recently found happiness was very poignant, but Mary would have been furious had she lived to read such observations from female writers as “ “in the education of girls we must teach them more caution than is necessary for boys…they must trust to the experience of others… must adapt themselves to what is”, “girls should be more inured to restraint than boys”, “must soon perceive the impossibility of their rambling about the world in quest of adventures”.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 5 Stars

This is my review of Queen of the Desert: The Extraordinary Life of Gertrude Bell by Georgina Howell.

The great wealth of the steel-making Bell family gave Gertrude the means, confidence and connections to pursue a succession of interests. After becoming the first woman to be awarded a First in Modern History at Oxford, Gertrude found the conventions of upper class life in late Victorian England far too constraining. She became a linguist, translator of Persian poetry, mountaineer who achieved a number of “first” ascents of challenging peaks, archaeologist, desert traveller, writer, intelligence officer, confidante of King Faisal in the newly formed Iraq of the 1920s and Director of Antiquities who established a museum in Baghdad.

She was clearly enthralled by the romance of Arab desert culture, not least the handsome sheikhs in their striking robes, who may have accepted her because she was so unlike any other woman they had ever met: when she came to their tents bearing gifts and wearing evening dress, they called her “the Khatun” or “Desert Queen” but when she appeared in breeches riding astride she probably seemed to them more like a man.

Georgina Howell’s heavy use of lengthy extracts from letters and reports is as effective as she intended in conveying a sense of Gertrude’s ability to communicate, great energy, enthusiasm and wry wit. We gain a strong sense of a determined, opinionated woman who was often unconsciously snobbish – anticipating the need to correct the governess likely to call napkins "serviettes" – and contemptuous of “quite pleasant little wives” who meekly conformed.

At times, I was aware of repetition, or longwinded description that is hard to digest, but in the main the author’s marshalling of a mass of information is quite impressive. I find her a little too uncritical of Gertrude’s active campaigning as founding secretary of the Women’s National Anti-Suffrage League in 1908: the idea that do-gooding visits with her mother to the homes of the working poor had convinced her that women “at the end of their tether” managing families on a tight budget simply did not have time to gain the education to vote seems patronising, even hypocritical in someone so resolved on fulfilment in her own life.

Yet, Gertrude was in some ways quite conventional: in her early twenties, she accepted her parents’ rejection of a fiancé considered to lack the means to support her, although his death in ambiguous circumstances shortly afterwards must have haunted her. Love was the one area in which success eluded her – a prolonged affair was doomed since it was with a married man who clearly had no intention of leaving his wife, while despite her physical bravery it seems Gertrude could not find the courage to consummate their relationship.

Perhaps owing to lack of evidence, Georgina Howell glosses over Gertrude’s probable suicide on finding herself in her late fifties having run out of fresh challenges with only the bleak prospect of a painful death from decades of chain-smoking. I often had a sense of a life frenetically packed with activity which masked an inner unsatisfied longing.

I suspect that Gertrude’s role in the formation of an independent, “democratic” Iraq is slightly exaggerated, but it is a fascinating tale which inspires me to read more about Arab history. The parallels with today are very striking: the unstable union of tribes over which Faisal attempted to hold sway, the reluctance to accept British support in keeping control, the difficulty of defining a border with Turkey and accommodating the Kurds, the divisive Shia-Sunni conflicts prompting Gertrude’s “blackest hatred” for Ibn Saud’s Akhwan (now Wahabis) “with their horrible fanatical appeal to a medieval faith…. the worst example of an omnipotent religious sanction”.

⭐⭐⭐⭐ 4 Stars

This is my review of Footsteps by Richard Holmes.

“Age of Wonder”, the brilliant biography of the lives of enlightenment scientists who inspired Romantic poets like Coleridge and Shelley prompted me to read “Footsteps” published by Richard Holmes thirty years earlier. This short book is a series of four essays describing his forensic retracing of the journeys and temporary resting places at key stages in the lives four famous writers.

In 1964, a precocious eighteen-year-old Holmes, at times somewhat pretentious in his desire to develop a written style, wanders through the beautiful wilderness of the French Cevennes in the wake of Robert Louis Stephenson and his long-suffering and frankly abused donkey Modestine. Four years later, as a Cambridge graduate rejecting the security and status of a well-paid conventional career, Holmes sets off for Paris to draw some parallels between the idealistic youthful hippy revolution of 1968 and the cataclysm of the French Revolution, with a focus on Mary Wollstonecraft, the feminist icon who in fact was unable to prevent her life being controlled to some degree by dominant men, but who experienced some of the most terrifying aspects of the “Reign of Terror” under Robespierre, unlike Wordsworth who had scuttled back to the safety of the Lake District. In 1972, Holmes loses himself in Italy in order to explore the self-imposed exile of Shelley. Finally in 1976, a fascination for what C19 photography can reveal to a biographer leads Holmes to immerse himself at the risk of his own sanity, in the life of the gifted but troubled Gérard de Nerval: “one is tempted to say that, had Nerval been born earlier he would have been saved by religions; had he been born later he would have been saved by psychoanalysis”.

What makes Holmes’ biographies so remarkable is his capacity to “get under the skin” and seem to inhabit the minds of his subjects. In “Footsteps” he includes interesting reflections on the at times all-absorbing to the point of obsession process of biography, as he begin to understand it. He perceives himself as “a sort of tramp permanently knocking at the kitchen window and secretly hoping he will be invited in for supper” or even as a ghost of past writers.

More than simply the collection of factual material, there is the “creation of a fictional or imaginary relationship between the biographer and his subject… a degree of more or less conscious identification with the subject”. He identifies the “moment of personal disillusion” when the biographer is “excluded from or thown out of the fictional rapport he has established” by a lack of reliable evidence. So, in the absence of “proof”, I was surprised by his theory that Shelley had an affair with his wife’s friend Claire Clairemont which led to a miscarriage, after which the poet adopted a foundling child born on the same day only to have it fostered elsewhere and die soon afterwards.

Perhaps inevitably, the essay format makes for a somewhat fragmented work, and the autobiographical passages can appear contrived and an almost irritating distraction from his subjects. “Footsteps” is a seedbed for the later flowering of a masterpiece like “Age of Wonder”, and it has made me want to read more of Mary Wollstonecraft’s clear, perceptive and remarkably “modern” work, and brought me to appreciate more the tragedy of Shelley’s circle and the genius of his poetry, realising that I have been too quick to reject Romantic poetry for its flowery sentimentality.

⭐⭐⭐⭐ 4 Stars

This is my review of Return: A Palestinian Memoir by Ghada Karmi.

Forced to leave Jerusalem as a child under the 1948 Nakba or Palestinian Exodus, Ghada Karmi felt the need to experience life in one of the semi-independent areas set up on Palestinian soil under the Oslo Accords of the 1990s. In 2005 she moved to Ramallah in the West Bank to worked as a consultant in media and communications for the Palestinian Authority.

As she might have foreseen, this proved to be a privileged sinecure in a closed bubble of complacent bureaucrats and politicians bent on furthering their status and material interests without rocking the boat, of expatriates caught up in romanticised demonstrations against an Israeli occupation which did not affect them personally, and poorly paid junior staff who kept their heads down for fear of losing their hard-to-obtain jobs.

Despite this, she managed to witness examples of ongoing injustice: camps like those in Gaza, “islands of memory in an erased landscape”, increasingly the sole places where isolation and hardship keep the fight for an independent state alive; Qalqilya, a town on the Green Line between pre-1967 Israel and the West Bank, surrounded by a twenty-five foot wall with razor wire and watchtowers ironically reminiscent of a concentration camp, but justified by the need to keep suicide bombers out of Israel and to protect settlers from their Arab neighbours; one of the few farms in Hebron still Palestinian-owned, where the defiant owner agonised over his withered vines, deprived of water by the Israeli authorities which disconnected his piped water supply and blocked his well, as part of the process of connecting the surrounding Israeli settlers.

Ghada Karmi made me realise for the first time how many Palestinians live outside camps, assimilated over time into countries like Jordan and Israel, inevitably resigned to the situation even if it makes them second-class citizens. She portrays the West Bank as a land of self-delusion: there is no sense of solidarity with Gaza, and many bright young people are employed by NGOs, precariously dependent on grants of foreign aid, to produce detailed research reports which remain unused. Likewise, frequent references to the conferences and political initiatives are depressing since we know now they failed to achieve any progress. It all seems like a displacement activity to allow the Israelis to consolidate their displacement of Palestinians. I was also intrigued to learn that middle class West Bank families wish to get their children educated at American universities, undeterred by the irony that it was US support which protected and empowered Israel.

I was interested in the views of Ghada Karmi’s ageing father: when she expresses concern over the apparent increase in traditional Islam as a “retreat into the past” which will “play into the hands of the West”, he counters that it is the West which has armed Israel and left the Arabs “dependent and enslaved” – “Islam is all they have left”. Sadly, this is the closest we get to her sole major omission: an epilogue updating events on the rise of a democratically Hamas and the increase in fundamentalist terrorism in the Middle East.

Although the author comes across at times as a self-absorbed and possibly difficult person, her intellect rises above understandable emotion to provide a revealing and thought-provoking analysis of an ongoing injustice which left me, like her, with a sense of “gut-wrenching despair” which needs to be more widely understood.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 5 Stars

 

This is my review of Red Love: The Story of an East German Family (B-Format Paperback) by Maxim Leo.

When Maxim Leo and his girlfriend were arrested by the East Berlin police in a final fatuous show of strength before the Wall was opened, she happened to have in her pocket an illegal church newspaper which had been given to Maxim by one of his parents' friends, who had written a piece in it about her reasons for leaving the Communist Party. Maxim was ashamed how quickly he caved in to pressure and "confessed" to all this, although the ultimate irony was that the friend herself turned out to be an informer for the Stasi. It seems that it was hard to avoid being roped into this role – even Maxim's parents almost drifted into performing odd tasks for the Stasi. In another example of the sinister idiocy of the Communist regime, Maxim was denied a place to study for a professional qualification, since his liberal-minded artist father Wolf shouted at his headmistress for allowing machine gun training using live bullets on a school trip to "military camp".

The ludicrous twists of life under a communist regime are legion: on returning from fighting in the German army, Wolf's father Werner makes an arbitrary decision at a tram stop over which line of work to pursue – teaching in a vocational school or stage-set painting: the first tram to arrive takes him east to the teacher training college in the Soviet zone, later blocked off behind the infamous Wall, so he becomes a Communist by chance, this being the best way of "getting on" in the GDR. Maxim's maternal grandfather Gerhard fought for the French resistance in his youth, but opts for life in East Germany because, in his rejection of fascism he convinces himself that communism will create a fairer society. Thus, Gerhard and Werner, who come by very different routes to support the same surreally oppressive and sclerotic system, subject their families to lives of petty restriction and doublethink. It takes Maxim's sensitive, academic mother Anne years to be able to break free psychologically and think for herself. This causes many arguments with her independent-minded husband Wolf. Yet, ironically he finds it much harder to come to terms with freedom when the two Germanies are combined – he seems to feel the need for authority to fight against.

This is a fascinating, wry and often moving account of three generations of an East Berlin family, researched by the author after the fall of the Wall and when it was almost too late to gain first-hand information from his grandparents, who had at least left some written records. Maxim seems to have survived remarkably unscathed mentally by the stress of belonging to an intellectual bourgeois family in a communist regime, perhaps partly because his grandfather Gerhard's status gave him an advantage at times e.g. to get permission to travel abroad, Gerhard's family was in fact relatively quite well off, and, despite all the infighting, Maxim clearly received a good deal of love and attention, particularly from his parents.

My only minor reservation is over what I find to be the irritating tendency to use the "historic present" most of the time. The translator has presumably done this in order to maintain a sense of immediacy as in the original German. Some sentences do not seem to "fit in" to the text, and odd translations such as "fat blanket" for "thick blanket" have already been noted in reviews.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 5 Stars