The EbonyTower
David Williams (abstraction)
The International Gothic had always interested the scholarly side of him. He had … the biographical and critical introduction to “The Art of Herry Breasley”. His parents were both architects. He went to art college. Brought up in a household where contemporary art and all its questions were followed and discussed constantly and coherently, he could both talk and write well. He had some real knowledge of art history. Always rather fond of being liked, he developed a manner carefully, blended of honesty and tact. He was popular as a teacher and lecturer.
His own work came under the influence of Op Art and Dridget Riley. David decided to try his luck of living by his own painting alone. But various things – one of which was a small crisis of doubt about his own word, non shifting away from the Riley influence– drive him to look for extra income. ‘His own work began to get enough reputation as it moved from beneath the Op Art umbrella to guarantee plenty of red stars at his exhibitions (продано). He remained a fully abstract artist in the common sense of the adjective (a colour painter, in the current jargon). His paintings had a technical precision, a sound architectonic quality inherited from his parents’ predilections, and a marked subtlety of tone. To put it crudely, they went well on walls that had to be lived with, which was one good reason that he sold; another was that he had always worked to a smaller scale that most nonfigurative (абстракционист) painters. Nor was he the kind of person who was ashamed to think of his work in flats and homes, enjoyed privately, on his own chosen scale.’
David was not devoid of ambition. He still earned more by his painting than his writing and that meant a very great deal to him. ‘His marriage had been very successful, except for one brief bad period when Beth had rebelled against “constant motherhood”. David had always admired his parents’ marriage. His own had begun to assume that same easy camaraderie and cooperation.’
David was a young man who was above all tolerant, fair-minded and in`quisitive (любознательный, пытливый). (42-44)
It was the best propaganda for humanism based on the freedom to create as you liked. 68
Abstraction – you did not want how you lived to be reflected in your painting, or because it was so compromised so settled – for-the-safe, you could only try to camouflage its hollow reality under craftsmanship and good taste. Geometry. Safely hid nothingness.
He kept on painting according to the usual model. He was afraid to create smth out of the ordinary, challenging His art was devoid of human feeling.
David cared too much for what people thought about him, he cared for public recognition, but not what he thought of himself. He lived in terms of public opinion. He cared for his stables (?) not for his art. David’s decency sitting, demands of his own artistic outlook brought him to the edge of the spiritual emptiness. Coeb was a mirror to him. David became an artistical man, in the process of his work. He regarded the traditional painting as ‘obsolete’. Cavid was hopelessly handicapped, ‘a decent man and eternal also-ran (посредственность, заурядныйчеловек; пустоеместо ( вискусстве, политикеит. п. ). David lost all his illusions.
Henry Breasley
A particular ‘great man’ could also be the most frightful old bastard. He could also, it seemed, be charming – if he liked you. Naïve as a child in some way.
He was a lifelong ‘exile and can’t bear to be reminded of what he might have missed.
Born in 1896, a student at the Slade in the great days of the Steers-Tonks regime, a characteristically militant pacifist when cards had to be declared in 1916, in Paris (and spiritually out of England for good) by 1920, then ten years and more in the queasy – Russia itself having turned to socialist realism – no-man’s-land between surrealism and communism, Henry Breasley had still another decade to wait before any sort of serious recognition at home – the revelation, during his five years of “exile form exile” in Wales during the Second World War, of the Spanish Civil War drawings. Like most artists, Breasley had been well ahead of the politicians. To the British the 1942 exhibition in London of his work from 1937-38 suddenly made sense; they too had learned what war was about, of the bitter folly of giving the benefit of the doubt to international fascism. (…) The mark was made; so, if more in private, was the reputation of Breasley’s “difficulty” as an individual. The legend of his black bile (чернаяжелчь) for everything English and conventionally middle-class – especially if it had anything to do with official views on art, or its public administration – was well established by the time he returned to Paris in 1946. Then for another decade nothing very much happened to his name in popular terms. But he had become collectible, and there was a growing band of influential admirers in both Paris and London. In England he never quite capitalized on the savage impact, the famous “black sarcasm” of the Spanish drawings; yet he showed a growing authority, a maturity in his work. (40)
Though he had always rejected the notion of a mystical interpretation – and enough of the old-left-winger remained for any religious intention to be dismissed of court – the great, both literally and metaphorically, canvases with their dominant greens and blues that began to flow out of his new studio had roots in a Henry Breasley the outer world had not hitherto guessed at… He himself had once termed the paintings ‘dreams’, there was certainly a surrealist component from his twenties past, a fondness for anachronistic juxtapositions. Another time he had called them tapestries, and indeed the Aubusson atelier had done related work to his designs. There was a feeling – ‘an improbable marriage of Samuel Palmer and Chagall’, as one critic had put it in reviewing the Tate Retrospective – of a fully absorbed eclecticism, something that had been evidenced all through his career, but not really come to terms with before Coetminais; a his of Nolan, though the subject matter was far less explicit, more mysterious and archetypal… ‘Celtic’ had been a word frequently used, with the recurrence of the forest motif, the enigmatic figures and confrontations. (41-42)
Henry feels that full abstraction represents a flight from human and social responsibility. He called abstraction betrayal in the history of art, ‘mess of scientific pottage’
Don’t hate, can’t love. Can’t love, can’t paint.
Art is a form of speech. Speech must be based on human needs, not abstract theories of grammar. Or anything but the spoken word. The real word. 71
Appearance: He was white-haired, though the eyebrows were still faintly grey; the `bulbous (вформелуковицы) nose, the misleadingly fastidious (презрительный) mouth, the pouched [au] (сзобом) grey blue eyes in a hale (здоровый, крепкий ( преим. остариках )) face. He moved almost briskly, as if aware that he had been remiss (слабый, неэнергичный) in some way. (47)
The old fellow spoke in a quirky [э:] (странный) staccato manner, half assertive (агрессивный), half tentative (экспериментальный); weirdly [iэ] (таинственный) antiquated slang, a constant lacing of obscenity (непристойность); not intellectually or feelingly at all, but much more like some eccentric retied admiral. They were so breathtakingly inappropriate, all the out-of-date British upper-class mannerisms in the mouth of a man who had spent his life comprehensively denying all those same upper classes stood for. (49) There was something boyish about him; but the ruddy, incipiently choleric face and the pale eyes suggested something much more of a genial old fool than he was; and must know he deceived no one. (49)
The old man regretted nothing at heart; or only the impossible, another life. Somehow smth of the former sexual bantam clung physically around his old frame; he could never have been particularly good-looking, but there must have been an attack, a devil about him, a standing challenge to the monogamous. One could imagine him countlessly rebuffed, and indifferent to it; enormously selfish, both in bed and out; impossible, so one believed in him. And now even those many who must have refused to believe had been confounded: he had come through to this, reputation, wealth, the girls, freedom to be exactly as he always had been a halo [ei] ореол, сияние) around his selfishness, a world at his every whim (каприз; причуда), every other world shut out remote behind the arboreal (похожийнадерево) sea.
What he would finally remember about the old man was his wildness, in the natural history sense. The surface wildness, in language and behaviour, was ultimately misleading – like the aggressive display of some animals, its deeper motive was really peace and space, territory, not a gratuitous (неимеющийоправдания) show of virility (мужественность; смелость, храбрость). The grotesque faces the old fellow displayed were simply to allow his real self to run free. It began to seem almost the essential clue; the wild old outlaw (дикоеживотное), hiding behind the flamboyant screen of his outrageous behaviour and his cosmopolitan influences, was perhaps as simply and inalienably native as Robin Hood. (100-101)
He had the quick freedom of the line, its firmness and vigour. 108
Henry stands for that old green freedom that David tries to achieve and that he fails to achieve.
Diana (Mouse)
… a slim girl of slightly less than medium height and in her early twenties; brown and gold hair and regular features; level-eyed (пристальныйвзгляд) rather wide eyes, and barefooted. She was unmistakably English. (37) There was smth preternaturally grave about her, almost Victorian.
Herry could not do without her.
Her movements were deft, at home in this domestic role. David wondered why the old man had to make fun of her; taste and intelligence seemed after all much more plausible than silliness. Nor did there seen anything Pre-Raphaelite about her now; she was simply a rather attractive bit of seventies bird. She had fine features, very regular and well-proportioned; a good mouth; and the very clear eyes, blue-grey eyes set more intense by her fanned complexion, had lost their afternoon abstraction.
The Mouse was allowed to be herself.
She was an art student. Fine arts
She had an honesty which was an emancipated middle-class one based on a good mind and proven talent.
She saw through old Henry. The person she couldn’t see through was herself.
The precise blend of the physical and the psychological, the reserved and the open, the controlled and the uncertain.
She was so innocent in some ways. She was so inconsistent.
Technically the drawing was impressive, if rather lacking in individuality. The coolness that was pleasant in her personality became a kind of coldness on paper, something too painstaking and voulu.
They were sort of a took-up. These girls were tired of everything; society, men. They realized that they could be useful to somebody at least – Henry. They were a reminder of the sort of life he lived himself when he was young. Henry helped them to believe in themselves to realize that they can be useful. They paid him a tribute for being their nuisanee.
The 3 towers.
The Ebony tower – stands for vanguard, but at the same time it stands for mediocrity and conformism. And people who inhabit the ebony tower are blind to everything but their own illusions. The title comes 2 aspects: the one is for abstractionism and everything it represents; and it concerns everyday life or human aspect. The title suggests the romantic colouring to the book.
Art became a branch of greed, of shrewd investment.
128 Tuning way from nature and reality had atrociously distorted the relationship between painter and audience; now one painted for intellects and theories. Not people; and worst of all not for oneself.
The whole headlong postwar chain, abstract, expressionism, neopriminivism, Op Art and pop art, conceptualism, photorealism… they were like lemmings, at the mercy of s suicidal drive, seeking Lebensraum in an arctic sea; in a bottomless night, blind to everything but their own illusion.
The Ivory Tower – the trend in art (art for art’s sake). Art is for the selected. This kind of Art declared that the public is unable to perceive real art. These people refused to represent their art for the general recognition. As the consequence they lost contact with the other world.
The BrassTower – a trend in art in which the primitivism, barbarism, the simplicity are worshipped. (Strickland)
-the clumsiness of technique
--intentional simplification
Three main principles of the Impressionism
-nature is regarded as a whole
-they were the fist to paint out of doors
-they never mixed colours;
-they painted in touches, in brush strokes.
The 3 towers stand for distorted art in this or that aspect.
1