Life in the Bus Lane: To Arcadia…by bus

#24

The artist Lucian Freud died on 20^th July at the age of 88. Cy Twombly had pre-deceased him by a couple of weeks, dying on 5^th July at the age of 83. Coincidentally, we followed the Bus Lane around the South Circular last week to visit the Twombly – Poussin Exhibition[1] at Dulwich[2]. Seated on the upper deck of the 201, I read Catherine Lampert’s fulsome obituary of Lucian Freud in The Guardian. She mentions that “The rather sensational Benefits Supervisor Sleeping (1995) achieved a record auction price for a living artist in May 2008, £17m, ….”[3]

I flap the broadsheet pages, fold them once more and begin to read a Death Notice at the bottom right-hand corner, just above ‘In Memoriam’. It records the passing of Audrey Nottman (Besterman) who died peacefully in Liskeard at the age of 90 with her son at her side. A wartime ambulance driver, a versatile and widely published medical artist and scientific illustrator, Audrey has bequeathed her body to science. There will be a tree-planting celebration in September and, in lieu of flowers, donations are invited to Médecins sans Frontières[4]. Audrey has died as she seems to have lived, with more than just a passing thought for the welfare of others.

An image of Lucian Freud – a 1985 self-portrait – dominates the obituary page. As a portrait painter he could pursue his subjects – including himself - to their absolute core and reveal what he found in tectonic forms made manifest at the surface of the skin. Audrey, working to an illustrator’s brief, would have made anatomically accurate drawings, not expressive works comparable with Lucian’s. But if only there were a God, and an after-life, and Audrey Nottman taking the role of the eternal, unsleeping, Benefits Supervisor…Surely her art of living would be worth every penny of some penitent’s seventeen million sobs?

At Dulwich, I find Twombly a much more difficult artist to appreciate than Freud. Even in a newspaper reproduction there’s no escaping Freud’s profundity - yet here I was strolling past some of Twombly’s canvasses desperate to get to the explanatory text on the adjacent wall. Should a good painting remain inscrutable and mute without learned exposition? I think not.

Twombly has some great work in the Dulwich show; the two versions of the ‘untitled’ Bassano in Teverina, 1985, Hero & Leandro (To Christopher Marlowe), also from1985, Bacchanalia: Fall (5 days in November) and the large canvasses of the Quatro Stagioni sequence. Other pieces I just didn’t get at all, even with the benefit of the curator’s text. To me they seemed either slight or wilfully obscure. If you can explain what I am missing in Venus & Adonis 1978, The Second Part of the Return From Parnassus, 1961, or Apollo, 1975, do please help me out.

Among the parallels shared by Twombly and Poussin was an extensive knowledge of classical mythology and an intention to convey some of its dramas in their work. From Virgil they received the notion of a fabled land called ‘Arcadia’ where innocent shepherds dwell in a blissful state. Their contentment might be complete and therefore without drama were it not for the brooding reminder - ‘Et in Arcadia Ego.[5]’ Even in that idyllic state, death is ultimately always present.

So there we were, that day in Dulwich, with our dead artists, Nicolas and Cy and Lucian. Serendipity had added Audrey to their number and I began to wonder if Dulwich Picture Gallery is not also a representation of Arcadia. With proportions that stand like frozen music and Sir John Soane’s masterly neo-classical details, the building was England’s first purpose-built picture gallery designed to be open to the public. It is also a mausoleum. The money to pay for it came (in 1811) from the estates of London art-dealer Sir Peter Bourgeois[6] and his friends Noël and Margaret Desenfans. They did their sponsorship differently in those days. Nowadays, the likes of Coca Cola Corporation and Barclays Bank seek favour, popularity, prestige and commercial advantage by attaching themselves to spectacular sporting occasions and to the Arts. By contrast, the Dulwich trio sought only a nominal immortality.

Soane’s floor plan places the three tombs on the west side of the building, directly opposite the entrance. The mausoleum is a central component of the whole design; unobtrusively linked to the flow of circulation around the adjoining galleries and, like them, lit from above. The Arcadian idyll whispered in the galleries separates the entrance from the mausoleum, thus quietly confirming that death is the only other way out. Et in Arcadia Ego, indeed. Depart in peace Nicolas and Cy and Lucian and Audrey.

[1] ‘twombly and poussin: arcadian painters’. Cy Twombly (1928-2011) and Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665). Exhibition Dates: 29 June – 25 Sept 2011.

[2] Dulwich Picture Gallery, London SE21 7AD.

[3] Catherine Lampert, The Guardian, Saturday 23 July 2011, page 49.

[4] www.msf.org.uk/support_donate.aspx

[5] Et in Arcadia Ego : I take this to mean that “I” (death) am even to be found in Arcadia.

[6] Sir Peter Francis Bourgeois, RA. 1756-1811