Contemplation & Fury

“That must have been something..." the elderly lady said, shuddering, to her companion, while she was gazing at a print depicting the Iconoclastic Fury in Antwerp anno 1566. Statues were being pulled down from pillars, stained glass windows smashed, loot was carried out of the church and people with sticks ominously roamed the streets. (1)


"Divine Interiors" the exhibition was called. The violent opening print formed a stark reminder of iconoclastic trauma but was followed by a host of more contemplative paintings of church interiors, some showing a bare abstract space, others fully staffed. All equally fascinating, soothing, enchanting.

Some of these painted church interiors are mesmerizing by the sheer spatial rhythm of perspective, stern & pure. Others enchant by the magical suggestion of light & atmosphere. And, also, many of these paintings move today’s individualist spectators in an unexpected way: by conveying a sense of self-evident community - people at home in their church, strolling, chatting, worshipping, children playing, dogs roaming about. 


Art history teaches that the depiction of church interiors was a Protestant invention: praising the sober abstraction of empty church interiors. But then  again, lavishly decorated church interiors could showcase the glories of the counter-reformation – so Catholics quickly adopted the genre too.


Historians also found that in reality the churches in the Low Countries only recovered slowly from the religious unrest. For many years after the re-Catholization churches were often still dilapidated, shambling structures, a far cry from the elegant interiors depicted on these paintings.

So how many of these paintings are make-belief, idealisation and propaganda? And which is Protestant propaganda, which Catholic propaganda? Ambiguities abound. The painters’ allegiances are not always clear.  
And what is the role of sheer technical virtuosity – l’art pour l'art without meaning or message, enjoyed purely as visual experience? And how many of these paintings were simply commercially inspired, specimens of a serial production of pictures as “Souvenirs of Antwerp” for out-of-towners.
Propaganda, empty virtuosity, serial souvenirs .... and yet, there we are, we visitors from a secular age: intently gazing, deeply moved, enthralled, awed perhaps by a glimpse of transcendence? 

We stand there, we imagine being in that space, sensing the light, gauging distances, roused by spatial & musical harmonies.    


Yes, there’s music, too, in many of these paintings – singers singing, variations, perhaps,  on that first  dazzling church interior by Van Eyck, with its singing angels, its vision of luminous grace.

Beyond any aged theologies, beyond any past partisan propaganda or commercial motivation – more than 4 centuries later these paintings of church interiors (2) can still move, evoking (and perhaps satisfying?) human longings for transcendence.

Art shan’t ever save the world, but at least it can capture and represent deep human sensitivities & longings. Beleaguered as we are, we may tell ourselves . “It still will keep a bower quiet for us”(Keats).

But then again, “how dare such a terrible planet have art at all?” (Murdoch)

Furious notes

(1) “History isn't only what we inherit, safe and sound after the fact; it is also what we ourselves are obliged to endure." Cynthia Ozick sternly admonished. Sipping my morning tea, tapping the smartphone, the news hit instantly:”more than 80 people killed in Nice”. Innocents slaughtered on a boulevard by the sea. By a sadist who was inspired & emboldened by a fascist religious fundamentalism that has spread like a cancer throughout Europe, throughout the world. But let's seek solace all the same in divine interiors, in contemplative spaces. Let's cherish, at least for a moment, the illusion of transcendent beauty and peace which  churches offerso gracefully

(2) Even for non-believers in the west, churches retain this aura of grace. A sheltered space where one can contemplate the architectural harmonies, bask in the filtered light, find relief in the illusion of a timeless meditation. Usually there are not that many faithful around – though, always, a few elderly parishioners are busy watering the flowers, sweeping the dust. A few older people may be sitting there, too, silently praying. I always then feel a vague regret, and wonder who is to be pitied – those elderly parishioners who have witnessed the decline of the Christian faith in our countries; or we, the stray visitors. 
Now it appears that even those frail elderly people can inspire hate. Yet another couple of those savage sadists (self-proclaimed soldiers of that fascist ideology which has fast become the scourge of our time) burst into a village church, attacked the handful of elderly faithful and slit the throat of the 85 year old priest.

of ports and books, and images of escape

Although contemporary ports are a rational economic affair – the imagination is fortunately slow to adapt. Who would not project onto ports, a promise, if not of happiness, then at least of travel & escape? 

My actual naval experience is limited to a train tour (25 years ago on a cheap youth eurorail ticket) of Europe’s port cities. Maritime romance was, alas, in short supply everywhere, but among the visited cities, Hamburg, even though bustling with commerce & industry, did appeal most to the imagination. 

I now read (1) how the busy commercial people of Hamburg came rather late (& reluctantly) to culture & artistic education. And if they did,  it was partly thanks to the  "Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg"  : this wonderful joint venture of the entrepreneurial & dazzlingly wealthy Warburg banker brothers and the eldest, melancholy & nerve wracked,  non-banker brother, Aby Warburg. 

In 1933 the library escaped from the Nazis by boat, via the port of Hamburg.

“He came back from Italy with four thousand books. Seven years later, in 1911, he has fifteen thousand books. 

In 1933, more than sixty thousand books will leave Hamburg for England, aboard of two steamships."

The kind of sentence to keep alive the immemorial lure of ships on the horizon.  

 Notes

1.     « Aby Warburg ou la tentation du regard », by Marie-Anne Lescourret
2.  The link of the text with the photos is admittedly tenuous – one is a picture of the river Scheldt taken from the MAS building in Antwerpen, and the other is a photo (detail) from a Netherlandish painting, taken in Suermondt museum in Aachen.  In fact, there only is some  subjective contemporaneousness, in terms of reading & photographing – both camera & Warburg book accompanied me on my year-end escapist trips.

The Summer Pursuit of Happiness

Nothing like a sunny Summer Saturday in Belgium to watch humankind’s stubborn pursuit of happiness (1) in action.  It had been raining for days with temperatures nearing winter levels, but now, 25 degrees were imminent.  So overnight the inundated staying-at-homers had switched from coats & pullovers to sprightly summer attire, and found themselves optimistically thronging the train platforms to board a train for a suitable summer day trip.(2)

Luckily, from my commuter days a long time ago, I still knew how to manoeuvre to get a seat in a chock-full train.  The elderly couple opposite me looked equally content to be seated – he was spelling out the sports-pages, regularly sharing comments with his wife who made approving noises without for a moment letting her intent gaze stray from the pictures in the Ikea-catalogue.

Jealously, I tried to emulate this woman's unperturbed concentration amidst the clamour of elated people on a summer train.  In order to contribute to the happiness of this summer day, I carried with me a small booklet:  “The Beautiful”  “Het Schone” - a stately Dutch translation of an un-apologetically convoluted analytical German  philosophical text (3) .   

Mustering all my (rather fading) powers of concentration, here's what I read about the work of art:

 “Wat betekent het dat hier niet iets werkelijks wordt vervaardigd, maar iets waarvan het ‘gebruik’ geen werkelijk gebruiken is, maar wat zich karakteristiek verwezenlijkt in het beschouwend verwijlen bij de schijn? “ (4)

“Het beschouwend verwijlen bij de schijn”!


"The Contemplative Dwelling on a Mere Image"!

What a lovely phrase to dwell on indeed. And the perfect permit for my contemplated day of happiness! 

While everybody was storming beaches, forests, amusement parks and zoological gardens, I was going to stroll through the deserted summer streets of Antwerp; I was going to do dwell in (for sure) deserted art galleries; losing myself and finding the world in images. (5)

And indeed it was happiness: to walk aimlessly through a city that had slowed down, with people lazing about on terraces, sharing an illusion of carelessness - with summer stillness reigning outside the shopping streets and with the elation of hearing cyclists whizzing by rather than cars roaring by.

 And happiness it was indeed : to wander about the rooms of a small but carefully arranged exhibition with few acclaimed masterpieces, but with many more petits maîtres to discover or to meet again (6). Ah, so that is how Fantin-Latour (with his so very still paintings - often depicting women painting or reading) looks like: an intense yet introverted presence.
Happiness it was, to look at the photos in the exhibition (7) which boldly claims to want to instil in its visitors the same disinterested elation as  experienced by a walker “bevrijd van de druk van werk, zorg en haast”. (8)    

And then, of course, this being Antwerp – there is always the river.  The grand river Scheldt – bringing the ways and the smells of the great outdoors.  A huge Russian ship lay moored to the quay, a  container boat chugged along, a speedboat speeded up. There was  the sun, the water, the wind – fragments of music drifting from the other side of the river (ah the wistfulness of Arab music), mingling with the screeches of seagulls, with the deep bass of a ship’s horn, and, faintly, coming from the city, the sound of a church’s carillon joining in.

Happy Notes

1.   Happiness depends on shutting off empathy, I recently read. Or just shutting off global newsfeeds.
2. It would be really bad taste to compare the storming of trains by frenzied day-trippers to the storming of the Calais channel tunnel by frantic migrants. 
3.  “Het Schone” –  Hans-Georg Gadamer
4.  "What does it mean that not something real is manufactured here , but something of which the “use” is not an actual use, but the contemplative dwelling on a mere appearance/image” [translation suggestions are very welcome] 
5.  " Dankzij het schone lukt het op den duur zich de ware wereld opnieuw te herinneren. Dat is de weg van de filosofie."  “Thanks to the Beautiful, one can in due course again remember the real world. That is the way of philosophy” 
6. Exhibition TourDeFrance    (Antwerp Museum of Fine Arts Extra Muros)
7.    Fotomuseum Antwerpen  Exhibition Fotomuseum Anwerpen ;  
8.  "freed from the pressure of work, care and haste”