{"id":1733,"date":"2018-02-02T13:20:39","date_gmt":"2018-02-02T13:20:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/?p=1733"},"modified":"2021-01-27T17:13:05","modified_gmt":"2021-01-27T17:13:05","slug":"dick-french-on-the-town-march-2017","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/?p=1733","title":{"rendered":"Dick French: On The Town – March 2017"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n

Now my wedge is worn down to a nubbin so I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m trying to scratch a few dibs out of this art world. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d done a few beauty panels and I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m punting them round town when I meet this dame in Covent Garden. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve known her a year or so and now she\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s working the spigot in this bar on Long Acre. Now this is a classy trap, inhabited by the better class of West End rum pots. This Judy is Class A and she dresses in a manner that suggests she\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not afraid of catching cold. I like the way she always lets her bra strap hang down. She\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s from that Hungary, where I hear you can commit all manner of depravity in the street without attracting attention. This must be dispiriting for them as likes an audience. I had a nightmare once when I had that Joan Collins over a bar stool of a Friday night in the French and nobody was taking any notice. During the season she\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s always glued to the rugby on the tele so I enquire into this situation and she says to me like this: \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcIt\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not the rugby Dick, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the men.\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 And then she pulls me close and whispers in my shell-like, and I reply to her like this: (but this confidential riposte comes out a bit louder than intended, causing no small amusement and then some among the rum pots.)<\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u02dcA week off work to recover? I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t believe it. The team maybe!\u00e2\u20ac\u2122<\/p>\n

By and by comes Oat Willie. Now this is a curious character and carries a little sack of oats over his left shoulder at hip height. He alternates fistfuls of beer on the right with fistfuls of oats on the left. He\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s fond of talking about his practice so much that many of the rum pots consider him to be no great asset to the community and give him the back of their necks. He\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s fond of the bogey weed and I personally consider him to be higher than a cat\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s back, which is no great commendation. By and by he shuffles off down the bar to gaze at Zo\u00c3\u00ab, for such is the pancake\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s name. He even offers her a dip in his little sack but she declines, it being a bit sweaty after a couple of pints. He associates with such low-lifes as John the Stud and Dave the Reptile who really have no business in a high class art blat.<\/p>\n

Dirty Harry sends me a free hack ticket to that Royal Academy to have a glaum at this show of Russian Revolutionary art. So I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m sitting on the No 14 bus admiring the great relief along the front of the Gaumont cinema in Shaftesbury Avenue. It takes you from medieval times to the Charleston and apart from the Parthenon it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s one of the greatest friezes I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve ever seen. A traffic jam is not always such a bad thing.<\/p>\n

At the Academy they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve draped the balustrades in red swags and put in a beautiful new crimson stair carpet at the entrances so it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a bit disappointing when you get inside. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not that the pictures are particularly bad, although few of them appeal to me, but most share that \u00e2\u20ac\u0153cellar-stored\u00e2\u20ac\u009d look common to many early 20th century paintings; cracked, yellowed and dingy. A few things I liked. A painting by Isaak Brodsky which reminded me a bit of George Bellows\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s shock worker, a figure stripped to the waist standing on a crane jib. Like Bellows but without the enjoyment in the paint, which is a characteristic of most of these artists. None of them relished the medium. Maybe they couldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t afford to.<\/p>\n

Israel Lizak is an exception with his painting Walk. It reminded me a bit of Gorky and is an abstraction of an elegant woman in a hat from \u00e2\u20ac\u212228. And then there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Vladimir Tatlin who you could say has pride of place with his large model of The Worker\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Flying Bicycle. It never flew but it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a great idea. And there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s rather a beautiful small photo of the profile of poet Anna Akhmatova by Moisei Nappelbaum (see illustration). She was denounced by the Bolsheviks as \u00e2\u20ac\u02dchalf-harlot half -nun\u00e2\u20ac\u2122. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Her tormented mouth through which 100,000,000 people scream.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d There\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a woman down our street like that.<\/p>\n

On the way out a woman who was clearly upset was saying how sad it had all made her feel. And I had to agree. Apart from all the ghastly goings-on I can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t stand pictures of peasants.<\/p>\n

Up the Burlington Arcade the Fountain Pen Shop has closed down. Some of them cost many hundreds of pounds but were rather beautiful. On Berwick Street the blood oranges have just arrived and the daffodils have come out in the French pub.<\/p>\n

Sent on a mission on your behalf I failed miserably. It had been suggested I look at the David Hockney retrospective, an unpleasant job but someone\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s got to do it. The queue was such, hundreds of them, that I lost all enthusiasm. Even after buying a ticket \u00e2\u20ac\u201c twenty quid! \u00e2\u20ac\u201c you have to wait around for an hour before they let you in.<\/p>\n

I decided to look at the Paul Nash show instead. A wise decision. The first room is called Dreaming Trees. They look like etchings but are mostly pen and ink. The catalogue describes them as \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcSymbolist\u00e2\u20ac\u2122, but I disagree. Trees, hills, landscapes and a few ghostly figures which take time to emerge. They convey a sense of mystery which is not transcendent but embedded in the nature of all things themselves. There\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s no need to look for anything else, \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcthings\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 are sufficient for those with eyes to see. Then came the war and a remarkable transformation. He started to work in oil and to make the pictures for which he is most famous.<\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u0153There are men who want the war to last forever. Feeble and inarticulate may be my message. But it will have a bitter truth and may it burn their lousy souls\u00e2\u20ac\u009d 1917<\/p>\n

Starburst shell over the Ypres Salient at night … blacks and various shades of viridian, the light from the starburst picking out the troops helmets as they go slightly downhill on the duckboards. In the same room are The Menin Road and We Are Making a New World, the paintings for which he is most acclaimed.<\/p>\n

After the war he turned again to landscapes with rather mysterious qualities but without the intensity of his pre-war work. In the \u00e2\u20ac\u212220s he went to live in Rye and got to know the 20-year-old Edward Burra \u00e2\u20ac\u201c Nash was 35. Burra disliked Nash\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s wife Margaret, who was much involved in folk music and morris dancing.<\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Such fun. We do Widdy Come Toddy, Parson\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Fuddle and Fuck a Chickabiddy and Flummox a Bubby Nit in the Navel. And also Maiden Heads Bung-Ho.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d (Burra\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s letters)<\/p>\n

Nash himself was quietly appalled by how his wife carried on. Burra considered that Nash couldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t draw but although his figures were rather weak it didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t really matter in his best work. Then in the \u00e2\u20ac\u212230s he became committed to the idea of International Modernism which is strange considering how idiosyncratic his work had been. He liked the idea of a life force within inanimate objects and put together arrangements which nowadays look like very ordinary art school exercises. Later on in the \u00e2\u20ac\u212230s he got involved with the Surrealists.<\/p>\n

There\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s an interesting film of him during the Second World War working in the scrapyard of German bombers at Cowley in Oxford, the drawings and photographs of which led to his famous picture Totes Meer of 1940. The chalkiness of a lot of his pictures, which I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve always considered one of his drawback, didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t really bother me, until the very late things of wheeling sunflowers which are supposed to be symbolic of death. He died in 1946.<\/p>\n

Dick French<\/strong>
\nThe Jackdaw Mar\/April 2017<\/em><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Now my wedge is worn down to a nubbin so I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m trying to scratch a few dibs out of this art world. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d done a few beauty panels and I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m punting them round town when I meet this dame in Covent Garden. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve known her a year or so and now she\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s working the spigot […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[420,412,419,418,417,421,35,407],"class_list":["post-1733","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comment","tag-anna-akhmatova","tag-covent-garden","tag-george-bellows","tag-isaak-brodsky","tag-israel-lizak","tag-moisei-nappelbaum","tag-paul-nash","tag-the-royal-academy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1733","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1733"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1733\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2176,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1733\/revisions\/2176"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1733"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1733"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1733"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}