Tag Archives: London art

Puppydog tails

He has been here and fired a gun

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For years we had a very large print on our living room wall by London’s greatest artist, and arguably Britain’s too.

But let’s go back nearly 200 years to 1832 and Somerset House, the former home of the Royal Academy. There John Constable who a decade ago had painted an image, later to adorn every biscuit tin at Christmas, with an idiot getting his waggon stuck in a pond as a boy and dog look on incredulously.

The previous year Constable had had a row with a fellow Academician over him replacing Caligula’s Palace and Bridge with his own chocolate boxy view of a large grey church.

Now, in the gallery of the Royal Academy, before the exhibition commencement, Constable was putting the finishing touches to Opening of Waterloo Bridge, a painting he had worked on for a decade.

I know little about painting, but a few rules I understand. There comes a time when a piece of work becomes overworked, the secret is knowing when to stop. Also, every painting needs a ‘hero’, a point of light, colour or interest to which the eye is drawn before examining the rest of the canvas. This hero should be positioned along the ‘golden ratio’ a point where the eye naturally alights. Numerous mathematical formulae calculate where this falls, but unless you are a master draftsman like Tracy Emin, it’s two-thirds down and one-third across to you and me.

Opening of Waterloo Bridge by John Constable

So here at the Royal Academy is Constable fiddling around with his masterpiece in the last days before public viewing when in shambles the very painter he had argued with this time last year, and whose painting now hung next to his own.

Joseph Mallord William Turner was the antithesis of John Constable. At 56 and only a year older, not that you’d know it, his personal hygiene needed attention, wearing a battered stovepipe hat, an old shiny black coat, and holding a umbrella-cum-swordstick. A large nose, protruding chin and remarkably short, this irascible old man, born in Covent Garden had lost none of his Cockney accent, but he was so confident of his genius he had proclaimed: “I am the great lion of the day”, modesty certainly wasn’t his forte.

Turner stood behind Constable for a time, walked away and returned with his palette and brushes. Walking up to his simple grey seascape, without hesitation added a daub of red, slightly bigger than a coin in the middle of the grey sea, and then left.


Helvoetsluys by JMW Turner

Fellow Academician, C. R. Leslie entered the room and observed how ‘the intensity of the red lead, was made more vivid by the coolness of Turner’s picture…causing Constable’s to look weak’.

Constable exclaimed, “He has been here, and fired a gun”.

Turner didn’t bother to come back for nearly two days, and then, in the last moments that were allowed for painting, shaped the red blob into a buoy.

That simple blob of paint was a bullet across his rival’s bows, showing that less is more. It also goes to explain why every year we have the Turner Prize awarded to the most innovative artists of the day, and not the Constable Prize.

Featured image: Keelmen Heaving in Coals by Moonlight, 1835 by Joseph Mallord William Turner

 

An urban view

Hidden from view, the Centre Point fountains

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There cannot be many post-war buildings which have stoked up as much controversy as Centre Point. Designed by Richard Seifert this brutalist building was completed in 1966 and at 398ft was the second-highest in London.

[T]HE CONTROVERSY did not stop at its uncompromising design as the building remained empty long after its completion. Centre Point’s developer, Harry Hyams, sat on a rising asset as its capital appreciation far outweighed the rental income with the added bonus that the un-let office block did not attract rates.

The fountains, nestled at the windy base of this building, caused by the downdraft as the wind hits its upper floors, once stood a blue mosaic lined pool with five triple-tined-Y-shaped fountains.

Operators of these fountains had an idiosyncratic approach to when they should be turned on. On hot summer evenings, girls waiting for the Astoria to open would sit on the fountain’s parameter wall staring at an empty pool safe in the knowledge they would remain dry. On windy winter nights, aided by the downdraft from 35 storeys above them, hapless pedestrians walking past would get soaked.

Wonky pyramids

Now where these iconic Grade II listed fountains once stood stands the gleaming new station for CrossRail, with its two wonky glass pyramids which the designers describe as crystal sculptural forms. Apparently, the fountains were removed to make way for the ventilation shafts for the new enlarged ticket hall, Transport for London refused to return the fountains to their original location because it was ‘simply not relevant to put something back that does not function.’

The Centre Point fountains were the work of German artist Jupp Dermbach-Mayen who built the fountains at his Swiss Cottage studio in 1963. The fountains, inspired according to Mireille Burton, the artist’s daughter, by designs he had seen at Alhambra, Grenada in Spain, were of different heights and were installed in a blue mosaic pool beneath the Centre Point tower. An integral part of the overall Centre Point design; the ‘Y’ flower shape of the fountains reflected the same ‘Y’ form as the pre-cast concrete inverted and faceted external mullions of the tower block above. The Twentieth Century Society claims the removal of them was symptomatic of a wider problem of post-war art being separated from its architectural context.

Public campaign

When the fountains’ removal was threatened, a public campaign was launched in 2009 to find them a new home. Various locations were suggested including Whitestone Pond in Hampstead where Dernbach-Mayen had been resident. Finally, however, through the intervention of the artist’s daughter and her husband the fountains were given to the Architectural Association. They are now being restored and will be installed at the site of the Association’s school for rural architecture at Hooke Park in Dorset, whether the fountains will be available for the public to view, and positioned in a blue-tiled pool remains to be seen.

Those infamously-sporadic concrete flower fountains will be missed, though . . .