Month: Oct 2024

Silk Roads – British Museum Exhibition

Exhibition / 26 September 2024 – 23 February 2025

An attempt to overcome the simplistic, exoticised and orientalised view of the Silk Roads, which created a first globalised economy and world, the Silk Roads exhibition at the British Museum is an exciting, revisionary and thought-provoking array of objects and materials.

The story of the exhibition is told elegantly and clearly: that this is not just the story of one single road, but of many. That this is not just the story of silk. This is the epic story and journey of connections, countless. How the Silk roads influenced histories and cultures across the world as ideas spread and economic trade transformed into a cultural exchange of ideas. One beautiful example is the spread of Buddhism from India across the Silk Roads, the belief system that still shapes much of the world today. Another I hadn’t heard of was the Sogdian whirl which came to China, an example of how ideas and bodies were changed and charged through the interaction with diversity and difference.

The networks explored through the objects create an astonishing encompassing of craft, materials and locations, from Tang Chinese ceramics exports intended for ports in the Middle East to garnets from India found in Suffolk. And so, our mental networks of assumed histories are updated, surprised and stimulated.

Intriguing stories of the personalities of the Silk Roads are showcased in the exhibition. There is the English smuggler, Willibald and a Chinese princess of Legend who unfolded the secrets of producing silk to her new kingdom. There are many such enticing morsels throughout. The reality of silk as currency, and the tales of fabulous places, such as Tang China with its capital Chang’an. This was for a time the largest of the cities in the world, boasting a population of one million people.

The exhibition has diversity. For instance, it describes the foreign populations that mingled in Tang China’s cosmopolitan cities who are displayed as figurines from the time.

Treasures abound. Absolutely and astonishingly sublime, spectacular, sensational. Indian art, a whalebone casket. There was an amazing dagger and sheath decorated with gold, garnets and glass alongside a gold shoulder clasp with garnets and glass. So supremely beautiful and perfect. A wonderful decorated gold bowl from Romania featuring a griffin mauling a goat, deadly and dazzling. There are treasures from the Dunhuang ‘Library Cave’ which contained some 70,000 manuscripts, paintings, textiles and other objects.

Mysteries abound too, the temptation to delve and discover, to explore. The unknown meaning of the ‘comma-shaped’ jade ornament in the Korean peninsula and the Japanese archipelago. Shipwrecks with cargoes of brilliant treasures, the mental journey as you imagine the crew’s connections and intentions, as you travel in thought with them through history.

Some favourites in the exhibition for me were the display showing how Sanskrit was read in Chinese, as my family comes from India and my middle name is in Sanskrit, and the display on how geometric designs were diffused throughout Islam. I also particularly enjoyed looking at the treasures salvaged from the shipwrecks. The gift of the sea and of discovery.

The exhibition has contemporary reference as it tells us as we exit, that the connections forged on the Silk Roads will continue to shape the present and the future.

Fabulous as a journey through space and time, the exhibition really enlivens history. And it serves as a useful corrective to the modern day assumption that in the old times the people were unenlightened, unadventurous, prejudiced and isolated. There is a pluralistic and nuanced feeling to the presentation, to its revisionist spirit and to its celebration of human diversity and cultural exchange. A beautiful story that is told with beautiful things and beautiful people. Amazing.

Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers

The National Gallery

14 September 2024 – 19 January 2025

Synonymous with the figure of the great and suffering artist, for many, Vincent Van Gogh represents the quintessential meaning of modern art. ‘Poets and Lovers’ brings together his best loved paintings alongside ones that are rarely seen in public. His drawings are interspersed throughout.

Over just two years in the south of France at the end of the nineteenth century, Van Gogh’s fertile and versatile imagination created a revolution in style which married the wonder of the Japanese vision with all the spirituality and poetry of the West. The exhibition encompasses this transformative and influential, inspirational journey in Arles and Saint-Rémy as masterpieces such as ‘Sunflowers’ were painted and the artist explores – with all of his fevered intensity – the realms of poetry and love.

Van Gogh struggled with mental health issues during this time – the current psychological and spiritual crisis that is marring humanity in this moment and therefore of the utmost relevance and significance to us. The exhibition shows how he transcended suffering. And that it was because of this suffering that he became Van Gogh. The exhibition is a demonstration of the strength of the human and of our resilience, creativity and adaptation in the face of collapse and breakdown.

Portraits abound as do scenes of the garden, including the most revealing imaginative grounds of the asylum where Van Gogh was treated. Each picture shows how Van Gogh coupled poetry and romance with an inner vision of things external to create beauty and the vivid life we see in each of his swirls and pirouettes across the canvas to envisage anew nature and individuals.

Highlights of the exhibition include ‘Starry Night over the Rhône’ (1888, Musée d’Orsay), ‘The Yellow House’ (1888, Van Gogh Museum), as well as the National Gallery’s ‘Sunflowers’ (1888) and ‘Van Gogh’s Chair’ (1889).

This is the first major exhibition devoted to Van Gogh in the National Gallery’s rich history.

….

Well researched and genuinely generous to the artist’s ouevre, the Van Gogh exhibition really is a delight for those that love his work and want to know more about his life and inspirations. What was particularly interesting for me was the devotion to the literary and artistic influences on the man as some of the most famous episodes of his existence unfolded: the friendship and arguments with Paul Gaugin and, notoriously, the episodes of mental illness. Van Gogh emerges as the devotee of romance novels, a dreamer and a romantic.

The selection of paintings work as an artistic map of Van Gogh’s journey and exploration of a new locale. He investigates the landscape creatively and with inspired fervour. He remakes the world into his own shape. We see how from a first infatuation, darker and darker elements of the landscape and the world crystallise in the works, the descent into mental difficulties.

As we walk around the many rooms of the exhibition, we mirror Van Gogh’s tracing of the territories around him that he claimed: and we claim that artistic map of the world ourselves, these two years of life amidst the countryside, the Yellow House and the asylum.

Love is a major theme of the exhibition, Van Gogh’s dream of love. The desire to belong to someone. The early landscapes are idealised worlds of love populated by couples, romance and poetry. Van Gogh repeatedly associated poetry with love. This love counterbalances with the cold institutionalisation of the asylum where, perhaps, love is impossible.

On the walls of the exhibition, we see morsels of Van Gogh’s letters to his brother Theo which explain and promote his work. The words allow us to see what his intentions were behind each of the works, the deep river of emotion behind every brush stroke, what was attempted as expression and idealisation. The powerful voice of the man and his humanity and feeling.

Profound, moving, inspirational. This is how I would describe the Van Gogh exhibition. A delight for the lovers of Van Gogh and also, a meditation on how place transforms personality and creativity and how personality and creativity transform place. The magical canvases and portals into the imagination and poetry of Van Gogh and humanity itself are on show here. Who could object or criticise this wonderful achievement?

…

Suneel’s Notes

When I looked at the portrait of ‘The Lover (Portrait of Lieutenant Milliet)’, I was struck by the sadness of Van Gogh. The artist, all alone, dreaming of love, had looked upon Milliet with envy because of his success with women. Here was the artist, the dreamer, the creator of beauty, looking at what the women love: a man of the state. The man synonymous with the power of the state and its violence. A man of violence. I too looked at this figure in this uniform that was the object of female desire with sadness and resignation, remembering my own failures in love. And I shared the subversive vision of Van Gogh who had reversed the star and crescent which was the regimental emblem of Milliet’s infantry unit the Zouaves. A desire to change the desires of others. A desire to transform and subvert the symbols of the state. A criticism of love and its conservativism. A desire for revolution and change. A desire to reverse reality.

What after all is envy? The imaginative desire to transcend and to transform reality so that it is the self that is favoured instead of the other. You contemplate the fortune of the other and the love that the other receives through their privilege and their adherence to the status quo and you feel that you deserve the same no matter how different you are. Envy is not inferiority. Envy is the feeling of life and others not having been fair to you. If life is unfair, at least in the imagination you can be fair to yourself. Because you deserve love too. And if the only way to get love is to shake the foundations of the world, this can be done in art.

Against the man of violence, we protest love. Against the staring face of the state and its coercion and violence, we protest love. Against power, the powerless protest love. Sadly. Against the blue background of depression and the blue scars and bruises of the heart.

…

The garden abounded in Van Gogh’s art. The beautiful garden. The dream to have a garden, to be in the garden, to tend the garden, to live a life in the garden away from the troubles of the world.

But the flowers? The flowers were little dots and dashes. What was of the magnificence and study was the sturdy tree. The trees dominated, swirled and danced in the flow of the artist’s brush and pen. Invigorating, powerful, the connection with nature, with healing. For many of the gardens were in the midst of mental suffering, in the asylum. Those trees were anchors which held the artist down to the world. Their patterns and their growth an inspiration to go on, to keep on finding beauty, to grow again.

And then, the sunflowers and the oleanders and irises. What Van Gogh could not give attention to in the garden, he gave attention to within the home. Away from the overpowering force of the garden and the outside world. Once more, he could concentrate. The meaning of the flowers became clear to me. The attention to beauty, to life. It could come back again from the assault of the senses that was the outside world.

…

Van Gogh. An artist. A poet. A writter of letters.

But above all, a reader. A dweller of the imagination and of the city of beauty.

Many paintings and drawings inspired by novels. And the one that struck me the most in what he read and how he presented his reading was Zola’s The Sin of Abbe Mouret (La Faute de l’Abbé Mouret), about a priest that forgets about his vows of chastity.

For Van Gogh is a man consumed with the passion of love and the passion to love. And love is what he is not getting in his life or from his art.

And that one novel, of falling in love, of feeling the madness of love, of forgetting the self, destroying the self, falling completely, completely… This is the dream of love. The dream of the artist. The dream of the lover of beauty.

And when you have understood what that novel is and the role of nature and the flowers within it, including in the tragic ending, that is when you understand Van Gogh and his art as a whole.

I have loved Van Gogh’s art my whole life. The dancing, mesmerising swirls. The vivid colours, brighter and more intense than this drab life that we have to live. A man that dreams of absolute love, whose art is a plea for that absolute love. The absolute love which I give to Van Gogh. However different he is from me. However we may disagree on things. He is the poet and the lover. And in that, he is me.