ARTS Kate Winslet is a fine actor and a beautiful woman (and there’s always a hint about her of the headmistress we all had a crush on), but I do not want to see another picture of her until 2014. Five years should do it. It’s a bit rich for a member of the profession that contributes to information overload to complain about overexposure, but too much is too much. A little scarcity value is often a good thing.
At the National Gallery’s new Picasso show this week, too, I was reminded that more is not necessarily more – although the great man would have enjoyed the superb light show that drenches the Trafalgar Square frontage of the building in brilliant projections (the scale of it would satisfy even a Picassoan ego). Projecting Picasso’s masterpieces on to stonework is perhaps the equivalent of printing Monet’s waterlilies on an umbrella – standard museum-shop fare, writ large – but what is really special is the way the changing light clothes the familiar structure in brilliant blue, making it an Indian temple, then rich ochre (ancient Greece), then outlines the columns with skittish pink as if a child had coloured them in, and so on. Here is the familiar made new, made (if you like) scarce.
Another old familiar who is facing information overkill is Charles Darwin. Only two months into his double anniversary year (for anyone who has been hiding in a cave for some time, the relevant dates are his birthday, earlier this month, and the publication of On the Origin of Species later in the year) and already we have a small tsunami of books, plays, exhibitions and programmes. One theatre group, eager for its own slice of scarcity value, promises “Live worms on stage!!” Compelling drama no doubt; it’s one I haven’t yet managed to catch.
The BBC’s new series with Andrew Marr, which starts on Thursday, seems almost slow off the blocks – but it promises to be meaty. When discussing “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea” it’s hardly possible to make claims too sweeping, and Marr investigates the way Darwin’s theories have penetrated every area of our thinking – religious, political, social, artistic.
The first three in that list, yes; I’m never sure about the last one. Certainly, Darwin is central to our sense of ourselves – the ultimate rationalist, yet the purveyor of wonders to a godless nation – and artists thrive on a sense of wonder.
Rather than crushing the creationist miracle of nature with the cold weight of science, Darwin taught us to see endless tiny miracles in the feathers of a finch or the curve of a seashell. He may be responsible for my addiction to animal programmes on television, the ones in safari parks where the commentary goes: “It’s a big day for Gladys the tapir, who faces surgery for her ingrowing toenail, and elsewhere the keepers are busy putting suncream on the bats.” But can he be credited, however distantly, with the fact that Picasso’s “Nude in Turkish Head-dress”, a glowering pop-eyed quasi-cubist nude sitting legs splayed, with breasts and belly cascading sloppily down, looks extraordinarily like a huge female ape? I don’t think so.
In the decades following the publication of the Origin in 1859, art seemed as much as ever concerned with religious and mythological subjects, or social scenes in the form of narrative pictures. The era’s foremost painter of the natural world was Landseer, with his spaniels and stags and the great bronze lions now gazing all night at the Picasso projections in Trafalgar Square.
Architecture ignored Darwin and carried happily on with its Gothic Revival – a repudiation of modern scientific thought writ in stone. And this duly begat the Arts and Crafts movement, which was nostalgic, Luddite, anti-progressive. No science there.
It’s said that great ideas are somehow swimming around the zeitgeist, and are picked up simultaneously by thinkers in all sorts of fields, but in 1859 literature, too, was looking in other directions – Tennyson published Idylls of the King in that year (more Gothickry for fashionable escapists), but for the socially aware there was George Eliot’s Adam Bede and Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, Tolstoy’s ironically titled Family Happiness and Goncharov’s brilliant dissection of the malaise of the Russian gentry, Oblomov . These were modern writers more urgently concerned with mankind’s contemporary social organisation than with mankind’s origins, and as the 19th century moved on this focus got more intense.
My examples may be too literal, and of course art is affected by any stream of thought that enters the culture. The Schim Kunsthalle in Frankfurt has a show called Darwin: Art and the Search for Origins that examines just this question. One of the featured artists, the Austrian Gabriel von Max, kept a troop of monkeys in his home and painted them often. My favourite is of a group of tetchy-looking primates all trying to sit on the same small ledge: it is entitled “The Critics”.
Also overworked at the moment: those alliterations of woe, “credit crunch”, “current climate”. But the current climate is also a climate in which someone can pay £13m for an armchair. It’s a chair that was graced by the backside of Yves St Laurent – I suppose that’s scarity value for you.
Peter Aspden is away
