The Baroque Exhibition

Attempting to escape from things that were on my mind yesterday--principally, the unfairness of my mother's illness--I took myself off to the Baroque exhibition. You can lose yourself in art, and myself and my Korean companion did. We didn't realise the time, and eventually were thrown out as the building closed.

Baroque, and the associated rococo, are odd terms for the European art movement of the mid-seventeenth to mid-eighteenth century. The Victoria and Albert museum is clearly taking a unified and contemporaneous approach, and describing it as a sort of globalised, coherent style. What occurred to me, wandering around the fantastic exhibition, was how diverse its roots were, however.

You can't expect museums to be rigorous intellectual historians, and of course clearly identifying sources sometimes causes the sort of upset that causes exhibition loans to be withheld. But Baroque, I think, came from six springs; the counter-reformation, the court of Louis XIV, the Austrian rivalry with France, and the English and Scandinavian fascination with central styles to which they were peripheral. It was then globalised by the resource and manufacturing methods of the Iberian and Dutch Empires, and applied to American and Indian Ocean colonies. I suppose a sixth separate strain, which is much underplayed, is the Chinese fascination with it.

All of this was quite too much for a museum to convey in commentary, but it did by simple association, or at least I think that it did.

Analysing myself, the observation may be somewhat trite. People in art galleries always want to seem clever and to have an angle, or at least blowhards like myself do. I rather sensibly bought my companion a recorded commentary, so she could stick earphones on and not have to listen to me. Last time I paraded around the Byzantine exhibition, I ended up mini-lecturing people around a map and talking rubbish.

Baroque art is a profoundly conservative form that appeals to my cultural predilections. It is conservative precisely because it appealed to a counter-reformation sensibility; to the idea that there are pure forms above the day-to-day, later described as 'Beauty' or 'Art', which can be perceived and which have multiple sensory impacts but which can't really be rationalised. This was, in a sense, the Catholic response to the otherwise sensible Protestant idea that God could be reasoned out and understood from words and a book.

Baroque also had an intense appeal to dictators and absolutists, I suppose for precisely those reasons. What surprises me is how often it is mistaken for a coda to the Age of Reason. That, I think, is because almost no one associates Austria Hungary or Russia with enlightened Despotism, or understands what they were, and because most people associate France in this period, if they think about it at all, with dissidents and philosophes and then mistakenly associate the baroque with them. Or perhaps, pure reason is just as dictatorial as pure monarchy and pure revelation. In mixture is life.

All quite mundane. My senses are still a bit shocked, a little like ears take days to recover from rock concerts, though I'm no expert on that sort of thing. I was amused to see a relatively light take on the comically corrupted Church of the time in the Roman section--Pope Innocent X's silver bust leads one in--and strained attempts to describe transubstantiation near pictures of various mistresses. Innocent, you'll recall, (he wasn't) is one of my favourite popes, since he was good to his women, sent Ireland lots of guns and used the law in particularly shifty ways. I've only previously encountered him in Velasquez, though he was the great-grandson thrice removed of the borgia pope whose daughter once scandalised the Vatican by occupying the papal throne during a meeting. There's a lovely late nineteenth century depiction of that in the Tate by Cowper.

Small details stood out to me as my mind wandered. For instance, Hitler's moustache popped up. Well, obviously not really, but I've often wondered where that silly sort of filtrum-covering style he had came from, and assumed that he was aping Chaplin or that it was something to do with cut-throat razors. Looking at a picture of a King of Prussia, however, I noted exactly the same sort of moustache, which contrasted with the 'British' pencil-line effort of King Charles II noted in Pelle's bust of the same.

That Austrian git was so desperate to belong to Berlin's history. Really, there doesn't seem to be anything unpolluted by the Nazi stench; its bad enough that they ruined the Eroica symphony, though I suppose I can now enjoy Chaplin a little more again. Isn't it odd how Baroque styles could manifest themselves again on both sides of the channel, though?

Walking home through Chelsea, I found a very cheap album based around a commentary on Steve Ditko, who drew some of the first Spiderman and Dr Strange stories, and who, I discovered, was a devotee of Ayn Rand. That was why he fell out with Stan Lee, or rather, Rand provided a way for him to articulate his hatred of criminals, his control of stories, and his pay demands. Her ideas translated into pictures are also why Peter Parker became a sort of anti-hippie romantic fascist for a short time in the sixties stories, according to Blake Bell.

really, Rand and her 'objectivism' seem, like Winslow Taylor's time and motion studies, to have cheapened every life and talent they touch. Maybe I'm just being lazy, and in agreement with Abbie Hoffmann's selfish remark during the Chicago 8 trial that 'work' was a four letter-word, though. What Ayn rand really represents is a sort of super-Americanism that merged with anticommunism because of her refugee status after the disasters of the Great War. The echoes from that event just keep tumbling on.

That was how I ended the day; hiding in a very hot bath with a pretentious history of a cartoonist, thinking about how Rand's articulation of the selfish laid the groundwork for neoconservatism, and, given how much Alan Greenspan was a devotee of hers, for our current mess. I suppose that your mind protects itself by distance from exposure to things as rich as the baroque, or, in my case, as timely. It's odd to trace a moody spider man and a financial crisis to a Russian nut though. Is dementia the random association of unconnected things or too great an awareness of their linkages?

I have the 'art bug', I think. No wave in a swimming pool could have been as pleasant as the Polish symbolism, and Bernini sculptures that washed over me this week. I guess the Rodchenko exhibition, which I wish I would have time to see, given my natural anticommunism, might have a different effect, but, well, its only a guess. I watched a film about Frida Kahlo this week (as part of a double bill with My Neighbour Totoro, which was charming) and Constructivism, which featured a bit in it, didn't seem too uninteresting.

Of all the ways to waste time I recommend on this blog, however, reader, art is the best. Get yourself down to a gallery if you can, or grab a book by a really great commentator like Robert Hughes or someone if you must. I bet that you won't regret it, but then again, I'm hiding from things, so what would I know?