Introducing the Flemish Primitives

  

The Cloth Hall, Ypres:
an example of the wealth of Flanders
in the 15th century

An unusually full week, full of enjoyable activities and lots of culture. I didn’t manage to write a blog mainly because pockets of free time seemed to be full of locating, transferring and eventually arranging in order, over 70 images to accompany the talk I shall give to the Art Appreciation group in May. Entitled Flemish Primitives it offers a little insight into some of that group of painters established mainly during the second half of the fifteenth century, chiefly in Flanders. I have had such an interesting time researching info on Jan Van Eyck, Petrus Christus, Hans Memling and Rogier Van Der Weyden.

Between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries, Bruges had risen from being the administrative centre of Flanders to become one of the leading trade metropolises of the Middle Ages. The rapid economic expansion this entailed was due to the extraordinary growth of the cloth industry which formed the basis of wealth for Flanders as a whole, and in particular, for the cities of Ghent, Ypres and Brugge. Additionally, Bruges had become seriously important because of its geographical location near the sea, enhanced particularly after the catastrophic floods off the Flemish coast in 1134 created the Zwin channel which connected Brugge directly to the North Sea via the outer ports of Damme and Sluis. I knew that Bruges was seriously important during mediaeval times but had absolutely no idea that, by 1500 there were 200,000 people living in Brugge, more than twice the number then living in London and twice the number living in Bruges now!

City view of Bruges 1562
Marcus Gerards

Burgundian court in Bruges, reconstruction

The Dukes of Burgundy, one of the great early mediaeval European powers, held court in various parts of the Burgundian Netherlands encompassing the Low Countries; Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and northern France from the end of the fourteenth to the end of the fifteenth century. The era was also marked by tremendous artistic and cultural growth and this huge region under Burgundian rule attracted and inspired some of the most talented artists of the European Renaissance with the presence of the Court naturally attracting the best artists. Bruges, an especially favoured destination of the dukes, became the artistic hub while the Church, too, wealthy and of central importance to life generally, presented huge opportunities for artistic commissions. Large numbers of Flemish painters and craftsmen developed, virtually making the city of Brugge in particular, their atelier, providing the conditions for the eventual emergence of the Flemish Primitives who also colonised Brussels, Ghent and Antwerp.

Portrait of a Man.   Jan van Eyck
Considered to be a self portrait.

Possibly the best known artist of the Flemish school was Jan Van Eyck who worked with his talented older brother, Hubert, until the latter’s death in 1426. They researched over several years the properties of oil paint [though they did not invent oil paint] and Jan discovered that if the essence of turpentine was added to the pigment, it allowed a slower drying time preserving a greater shine on the pigments used. In turn, this permitted far greater detail in the scene depicted than when tempera paint, which was egg-based and presented with a more opaque characteristic, was used. Details of this important development were kept secret by the Van Eyck brothers but Jan’s painting, in particular, benefitted from this discovery.

Jan’s masterpiece, The Adoration of The Mystic Lamb, made for, and still in, St Baafskathedraal in Ghent, was, in fact, begun by his brother Hubert who probably designed this huge 12 panelled altarpiece before his death in 1426 but painted entirely by Jan before its installation on May 6 1432. It is still considered one of the major masterpieces in the world and Jan van Eyck counts as an art supremo across the centuries. That being so, it is delightful to read the lovely story of the inscription on an original frame [lost in a storm in 1521] which declared, “Hubert van Eyck ‘greater than anyone’ started the altarpiece but Jan van Eyck ‘second best in the art’ completed it in 1432.”

The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb
St Baafskathedraal, Ghent
Designed by Hubert van Eyck
Painted by
Jan van Eyck 
1432

Fromage Forever

Camembert de Normandie

Astonished to read that Brie and Camembert are all under threat of reduced production and possible extinction. This is difficult to believe as these famous French cheeses seem noble and eternal! However, there IS a shortage, increasingly so during the past
decade. Apparently it has become more difficult for cheesemakers to grow the key fungus needed to produce these cheeses. Over the years, the albino fungus has developed mutations which interfere with its normal ability to produce spores which makes it harder for the fungus to clone itself as Nature intended. The  French National Centre for Scientific Research [CNRS] has published its Camembert  research findings this week to general consternation. Camembert, for instance, is so quintessentially French that not only is it regarded as a national treasure it is also rumoured to be part of the DNA Francais! Its very name, the original Camembert de Normandie, is protected and is clearly defined as only made in certain regions with milk from specified heritage breed cows. Only then can the sacred name be used.

Statue of Marie Harel in Vimoutiers. The legend
attributes invention of Camembert to Marie.

The popular origin story is that Marie Harel, a farm woman from the Norman village of Camembert, first made the cheese in 1791 during the French Revolution. According to folklore, Marie provided shelter for a priest from Brie, home of a similar bloomy rind cheese, who was fleeing the Revolution. She was given the recipe in return for her good deed and she subsequently adapted the recipe to follow her region’s cheesemaking traditions. Historical records show that Marie existed and was indeed a farm woman from Camembert at the right time though there are no records to back up the date of 1791. However there are records to show that unique cheeses were being made in Camembert before Marie’s birth in 1761.

Marie’s descendants continued to use her name and her recipe to produce  delicious cheese, and its fame spread ,the more so when a grandson provided Camembert to the grandson of Napoleon 111 in the 1860s. In the 1920s the producers of Camembert revived Marie’s story in its publicity material and in the Thirties, a statue of Marie was erected in Vimoutiers in hommage to her historical contribution to cheese-making. The CNRS is presently exploring plans to provide producers with slightly modified strains of the fungus through genome editing. It considers the fact that these special cheeses are increasingly produced by a few large manufacturers may inadvertently or otherwise, be affecting microbial diversity.

One of my earliest discoveries when I moved to Bury St Edmunds two years ago, was a Camembert-like cheese, complete with round box and milky rind, for sale locally; it is named Baron Bigod Brie. and I remember raving about it and suggesting it was even better than the French original! I have since discovered that it is made at Fen Farm Dairy in Bungay, Suffolk and the following is filleted from the publicity about this special cheese.

Herd of Monbeliarde cattle which produce milk
perfect for Brie cheese-making.

"Baron Bigod is the finest traditional Brie-de-Meaux style cheese produced in the UK and one of only a handful of its type in the world to be made by the farmer on the farm. Beneath the nutty, mushroomy rind, Baron Bigod has a smooth, silky golden breakdown which will often ooze out over a delicate, fresh and citrussy centre. Baron Bigod is made by hand in small batches, very early in the morning so that we can use the fresh milk straight from the cow. The mould cultures are added to the warm morning’s milk and it is gently gravity-fed into small vats just a few metres from the milking parlour, where the rennet is added. The curds are carefully hand-ladled into large moulds, using traditional pelle-a-brie ladles and the young cheeses are hand salted and then aged for up to 8 weeks in a cave-like environment. It is a unique expression of the incredible milk of our free-ranging Montbeliarde cows and the diversity of our wildlife-rich grazing marshland.”

The actual result of all of this Suffolkian cheese activity, is poetry, not only in the above description, but also in the wonderful Baron Bigod Brie which emerges. In case of bewilderment, the difference between Brie and Camembert is outlined as follows:

Brie is typically aged for a longer period, around anywhere between five and ten weeks, which results in a mild and buttery flavour. Camembert, on the other hand, is aged for a slightly shorter period, usually around three to four weeks.

Fen Farm Dairy, Bungay, Suffolk.

Le Moulin de Vimoutiers.

Close-up of the famous statue of 
Marie Harel in Vimoutiers.
She is attributed in the region with inventing Camembert.

Wicked Little Letters

 

Olivia Colman as Edith Swan

Edith Swan with Rose Gooding.

To the cinema to see the above Olivia Colman film which was greatly enjoyed by the audience in Screen 1 in the Abbeygate Cinema. I always go in the afternoon and only go when the seating plan online shows me, reassuringly, that there are many viewers disinclined to view on my particular afternoon. So imagine my amazement when I entered to a virtually full cinema. A popular film then, partly explained no doubt by the expectation of lots of salty language! And a thoroughly enjoyable plot based on real incidents in Littlehampton, Sussex in 1921 when filthy poison pen letters began to arrive at various addresses. The so-called Littlehampton Libels became a national sensation, debated in Parliament, causing prurient outbursts in newspapers and local outrage. The language is often funny but the emotions powering the narrative, are not.

Much-maligned free spirit Rose Gooding
Played by Jessie Buckley.

The apparent victim and recipient of some of the letters was Edith Swan, a church-going, meek and sweet-natured, clean-living lady who lives with her parents. A wholly respectable spinster, no less. Her next-door neighbour, Rose, a single mother and unrepentant, nonconformist free spirit who loudly swears and shouts as she drinks in the local pub, as noisily free and carefree as the men around her, is considered deviant, not only by her neighbours but also, when the finger is pointed, by the police too. They choose to explain away evidence showing Rose is innocent, sufficiently long for her to spend two periods in jail. Edith is meanwhile elevated to angel status as she smiles demurely and mutters Christian asides of tolerance and forgiveness.

The original P.C Gladys Moss.
Also the first woman P.C.
to ride a motor cycle in her work

A mixture of DIY sleuthing and sustained clever observation and deduction by the only [the very first] police woman in Sussex are successful. P.C. Gladys Moss is routinely ignored or insulted by her police colleagues and the locals. She quickly pinpoints the culprit and despite constant brush-offs from  her police boss, eventually

P.C. Gladys Moss with neighbourly sleuth.
Anjana Vasan is Gladys.

manages to expose Edith. The film does also clearly convey the position of women in the Twenties; the first woman in the police force in Littlehampton is treated as less able than her male colleagues by the public and her boss. Non-conforming women are viewed as almost certainly deviant while the ideal woman conforms, agrees and tries to please. Interestingly, I have read somewhere that Gladys Moss, this very first policewoman in Sussex now has a blue plaque dedicated to her in Worthing in Sussex, for her pioneering work in that difficult role.

Edward Swan, Edith's father.

An interesting element in the story [some might say, the whole basis of the narrative] is the outright bullying and control exercised by Edith’s tyrannical father of whom both her silent mother and the eagerly obedient Edith, are frightened. He treats his daughter cruelly, giving her outlandish childhood punishments like writing out 200 ‘lines’ and wholly restricting and controlling her behaviour by barking commands and restrictions in the wholly ‘normal’ expectation of obedience. I think this is now referred to as compulsive control, often witnessed in marriages that break down but here utilised with relish by the father. This is a chiefly light-hearted film but it is, effectively also, a story of a toxic family dynamic which Edith attempts to survive. The subsequent rage experienced by Edith emerges in the entirely untypical language [for her] of the anonymous letters she writes. Her fury, long repressed, has to find an outlet and after 40 years or so of unending control and domination by her father, she finds an escape in the writing and release of the letters. She discovers a secret joy in the shockingly obscene language she can secretly use to hurt and upset others; here is a hidden therapeutic power Edith stumbles on which nurtures her self esteem and represents her little silent victory over the forces of control and coercion.

This could have been a much darker, perhaps more interesting, film though probably not one to fill Screen 1 at the Abbeygate on a wet Saturday afternoon!

Edith Swan in newspaper photo

Rose and supportive neighbours

Edith Swan in 1923

Mary Ann Swan,
Edith's mother in 1923.

Rose Gooding in 1923.

The Zone of Interest + T he Life of Joseph Wulf.

 

The beautiful Hoess family garden with watchtower
and other buildings in Auschwitz camp visible
beyond the walls

I recently saw this memorable film, The Zone of Interest,

Hedy and baby admiring the flowers

which shows the daily life of an upwardly mobile couple and their five children. Rudolf Hoess is the commandant of Auschwitz and his wife is Hedwig, Hedy, and throughout, the film shows their idyllic life with family picnics by the nearby river and wonderful days of play and fun in their huge and gorgeous garden lovingly tended by prisoner-gardeners and prized by the parents. Their exceptionally large and luxurious house is in the so-called Zone of Interest of Auschwitz camp and several thousand people who lived in this vicinity have been moved away for security reasons; only high-ranking SS officers and their families live near the camp now.

The house, a luxury villa, with
mature trees to screen the view
of the crematorium

The film never shows beyond the garden wall, built by Rudolf who had also had suitably placed mature trees planted to help obscure the  sight of the crematorium. This charming garden abuts the outer wall Auschwitz but there is a constant pall of dark smoke billowing from the unceasing chimneys of the death factory next-door and a constant background patchwork of menacing sounds: occasional guards shouting; thinner cries and screams of the prisoners; dogs barking; gunshot now and then. But Hedy and Rudy stroll contentedly in their spacious garden, admiring the roses and the lilacs while the children splash and play noisily in the small pool. The Hoess family hears only the sounds of contentment.

Rudolf Hoess
Admitted to killing 2 and a half
million Jews in Auschwitz

Rudolf, sentenced to prison for murder in his youth, is depicted as an efficient, high-level functionary totally committed to the cause of National Socialism; his single-minded devotion to Nazism has helped his swift rise through the ranks of the S.S. Hedwig loves gardening and especially her garden, but she also adores trying on her new, exceptionally beautiful, lush mink coat whose owner had gone up in smoke next-door. And she experiments happily with other booty; unknown perfumes in beautiful bottles and expensive lipsticks in golden cases. She knows she is lucky and screams angrily when a letter arrives which may send her husband to a promotion elsewhere. She is a kind mother and happy wife but says, conversationally to her maid,  

"

Hedwig Hoess
1908-1989

"I could have my husband spread your ashes over the fields of Babice.” She isn’t really threatening, just chatting.

The film score is by Mica Levi and it is sparse and at times chilling but always atmospheric. The film begins with a young, unknown Polish girl playing a simple melody. Because I had difficulty in understanding everything in the film with its dialogue in German, and the sub-titles displayed too briefly for me to catch everything, I searched online to find more and was not disappointed.

The Life of Joseph Wulf

Joseph Wulf 1908-1974

Before the music is played by the Polish girl, a voice speaking in Yiddish introduces the tune as the work of Joseph Wulf, composed in 1943 in Auschwitz 111. As the music begins, the lyrics, sung emotionally by Wulf, appear also as sub-titles in the sole example of direct Jewish testimony in the film. Wulf never wrote down the words or music but memorised both.

Polish girl playing Sunbeams in
The Zone of Interest.

Sunbeams, radiant and warm,

Human bodies, young and old;

And who are imprisoned here,

Our hearts are not yet cold.

Joseph Wulf, a German-Polish Jew born in Chemnitz in 1912 and raised in Krakow, had a rabbinical education but trained as an agronomist. His life changed utterly with the Nazi invasion when all the Jews of Krakow were rounded up and restricted to life in the Ghetto where life was overcrowded and harsh, although he did meet and made friends there with poet and songwriter, Mordecai Geburtig and painter, Abraham Neumann. Wulf eventually managed to escape and join the Resistance but was captured in 1943 and deported as slave labour to Buna-Monowitz, a sub-camp of Auschwitz. He vowed, if he survived, to commit his life to exposing Nazi war crimes. Wulf fled a death march in 1945 and spent the postwar years as a historian, chronicling, among other subjects, the Holocaust and showing how Nazi ideology had left its stamp on art. He also became a member of the Jewish Historical Commission and a co-founder, in Paris, of the Centre for the History of Polish Jews. He helped preserve the work of the already famous Gebirtig, and a lesser known composer, Jakub Weingarten, and made home recordings of his own songs, Sunbeams, and a sentimental song about his wife.

The execution of Rudolf Hoess
for  war crimes
in 19\46.

One of Joseph's many
publications.

He lived in post-war Paris but settled in Germany in the 1950s, publishing his first documentary on the Holocaust in German and campaigning to establish a research centre on the study of Nazism, in Wannsee where the Final Solution had been shaped. This met with resistance but it eventually came into existence in 1992 long after his death, with its library named after Wulf. On October 10, 1974, Wulf jumped from the window of his apartment in Berlin; a few months before his suicide, he had written to his son, despairing of how little impact his life’s work had had on German academics who believed that his scholarship as a Jewish survivor was biased.

“I have published 18 books about the Third Reich and they have had no effect. You can document everything to death for the Germans. There can be the most democratic government in Bonn but the mass murderers walk around free, live in their little houses and grow flowers.”

It is a tiny but fitting tribute to Wulf that this much-acclaimed film is introduced by his words, music and voice which serve as a testimony to a life lived in some pain.

Postscript

Bret Werb, staff musicologist of the U.S Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, in 2002 came across the existence of recordings Wulf had made, in a dissertation footnote. Contacting the author, he discovered that the information had come from a documentary by German journalist, Henryk Broder who had Wulf’s actual tapes. Apparently, Wulf had organised community singing with other labourers in the camps with songs memorised but not written down. He recorded Hasidic melodies and songs by Geburtig and Weingarten between 1966 and 1967 in a West Berlin theatre, accompanied by Friedrich Schulz on piano. In July 2021, Bridget Samuels the music supervisor of The Zone of Interest contacted Werb looking for a piece of historical music, if possible, from Auschwitz and in Yiddish. Wulf’s little recording was the only possible candidate, most songs from the camps being in Polish. His music, played on the piano by a Polish girl, juxtaposed next to scenes of the Hoess family plundering desirable belongings of dead Jews, is portrayed as an expression of hope and spiritual resistance.

An historically interesting photograph
of Richard Baer, Josef Mengele and
Rudolf Hoess.
All did their share of trying to achieve
the Nazi Final Solution.

“We who are imprisoned here …

Are wakeful as the stars at night.

Souls afire, like the blazing sun

tearing, breaking through their pain

for soon we’ll see that waving flag,

   the flag for freedom yet to come.”

Romeo and Juliet

 

Tom Casey 
Romeo

Ophelia Charlesworth
Juliet

 

ROMEO AND JULIET

THEATRE ROYAL, BURY ST EDMUNDS

15^th Feb 2024 matinee

Benjamin Prudence.
Paris; Mercutio; Balthasar

Just seen the above performance in the beautiful Theatre Royal, and was amazed at how unexpectedly brilliant the drama was. There was a large school party in the stalls and the performance felt intended to appeal to just such a youthful audience. Checking up online I discover, to my delight, that this pacey and inventive version was created primarily to appeal to students and teachers of English and Drama. A brilliant idea in itself because to hook teenagers into Shakespeare on stage, is potentially life-changing for the students, and for teachers to be able to call upon such energy and youthfully inventive drama on stage to help present Shakespeare in an exciting way to youngsters, is incredibly helpful and inspiring. So often, Shakespeare at school for students is a boring, little understood ‘duty’ and course requirement, wearily worked through, appropriate quotations memorised, and the whole, discarded as quickly as possible. The pupil audience there today will not forget this Romeo and Juliet easily; nor will the many older theatregoers in the auditorium. Whatever the target audience for this production, the appreciation and enjoyment extended across a wide age range.

Mae Munuo
Benvolio; Friar; Associate Director

This energetic production with its loud modern music, inventive use of video, and six young actors recently graduated from various Schools of Drama, certainly hits the spot; the entire audience seemed to be thrilled with what they had just experienced. No actor seemed to speak his part; everyone shouted, called, expostulated, as they dashed hither and thither, energy bursting out of each leap and dash; each remark and question all caught mid-move. It felt young and real and, en passant. caught the essence of being young, and exciting, and on      the threshold of life.

Online I discover afterwards that there are Directors of Sound Design; Video Design; Lighting; Fight; plus an Associate Director who is also in the cast. So, a lot of expertise and experience went quietly into this production when no one save the cast was looking! All credit to the New Wolsey Theatre, Ipswich for such innovative and far-reaching efforts, supported again, I believe, by Suffolk Council which has retracted its original proposal to stop funding theatre among other cultural activities. Perennially short of money, no doubt, but trying to do the right thing. Anyone responsible for supporting the New Wolsey would have been gratified to have seen this afternoon’s performance and the audience reaction.

Ciaran Forde
Capulet; Prince/; Apothecary

Bethany O'Halloran
Lady Montague; Nurse; Tybalt; Friar

                                                       Little History of the Theatre Royal.

Theatre Royal was designed and built-in 1819 by William Wilkins. With many of its original features still intact, it is the last remaining Regency playhouse in the country and one of the most beautiful, intimate and historic theatres in the world. Theatre Royal’s designer, William Wilkins (1778-1839) was an architect of national repute responsible for the National Gallery in London and Downing College, Cambridge. He opened Theatre Royal Bury St Edmunds on 11 October 1819. As the proprietor of the Norwich circuit, he employed a small company of players to undertake an annual tour of six theatres; Yarmouth, Ipswich, Cambridge, Bury St Edmunds, Colchester and Kings Lynn. Each was open for just one or two short seasons during the year. Theatre Royal Bury St Edmunds opened for the Great Fair in early October to mid-November and was only available for special events at other times of the year. At that time, it would certainly have enjoyed large audiences, particularly as the local community would not have been able to travel far for entertainment until the arrival of the railway in the 1840s.

Theatre Royal, Bury St Edmunds

Interior, Theatre Royal, Bury St. Edmunds

 

 

                                                                           

 

 

La Fleur de la Jeunesse

 

My mind is full of artistic images and floral language as I read, ‘Monet: The Restless Vision’ and of the long, long years, though mainly in his extended old age, during which he gradually established his beloved Giverney with its expanding multi-floral, multi-layered gardens and waterways. Alongside this garden of delights, grew his immensely ambitious and ambitiously immense Grandes Decorations, his huge collection of outsize canvases portraying the movement and fluid shades and hues of the water and plants around him. “The ephemeral drifting lilies and dark downward coursing images of willows" flowed over hundred of canvases as he painted furiously, almost as though directed by an inner 

Claude Monet in one of his studios, in front of
part of his magnificent collection of Les
Grandes Decorations.

command. He began these late majestic works in 1912 and continued throughout WW1 and afterwards; in spite of sons fighting in Verdun; his enduring friendship with Clemenceau, an important French leader during the war, journalist, politician and eventually Prime Minister of France; and the relatively close proximity of war to Giverney, Monet from his mid-seventies cultivated this extended, all-surrounding canvas garden as if possessed, his efforts belying his age and increasing frailty. These monumental paintings were intended to form one connected artistic theme; he had stumbled on the idea of an extended range of canvases on the one subject painted in different moods and lights and weather, and had used the notion again and again to great effect. His series on Haystacks, Cathedrals, Houses of Parliament, Charing Cross Bridge and Poplar Trees were immensely admired and influential.

It is in reading Jackie Wullschlager’s wonderfully-researched and written hommage to Monet that I have been prompted to wander back into the thicket off my own life, partly instigated by my noticing again the three photographic portraits of my sisters and me taken, I think, in 1955. Suddenly I can see, and wish I could paint, the memory of those girlish birthday parties in July, in perpetual sun in memory, when perhaps a score of happy, chattering little girls sat around the long borrowed table on the small front lawn, to eat paste sandwiches and delve into squat tumblers full of striped jelly, fruit and custard. Over the years, we grew from these noisy party children to the photo stage of our lives, to “jeunes filles dans la fleur de la jeunesse, apparitions delicieuses et passageres.” [p187] A passage of time, too full and busy for us to notice our slow maturing at the time. Or perhaps, we merely took it all for granted. Living, day to day, was the thing!

*-The three photographs, were taken at 21, 19 and 15 by a local photographer who offered to take them for free; an offer not to be missed by a poor working class family! He needed photographic portraits to enter some competition which interested him and, as he lived near us, had thought that we would make suitable models. Looking at them now, seventy years later, I see the smooth beauty of the faces, the youthful trust and innocence personifying the transience of youth. Qualities I never ever consciously noted in the past; they were simply ‘our photos’ on the wall, chiefly unnoticed and unappreciated. Now I see that they are a metaphor for Life! I know of the maturing, the changes, the stages, the gains and the losses, the history of our lives, with much unnoticed or remarked upon. And now that both my sisters have gone, towards the end of my life, looking back is pleasurable, often painless; sometimes a little painful, while offering insight and a closer observation of formerly elusive moments; memories of dreams and dramas re-surface and add to the richness of life now.

Giverney, September 2023 when my grand-daughter
and I visited.

The Japanese Bridge as painted by Monet, part of his
Grandes Decorations.

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