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It was a little audacious - and perhaps would not have been possible without HS1 (maybe I could have got a 7.30 London train, and Victoria'd to King's Cross, but no; a 7.25 HS1 would have been brutal but made a difference, but there's a gap at that time of day, because who wants to get into London for 9am?). A daytrip to Newcastle upon Tyne. I booked it late, so it was pricey, but in Newcastle for 1pm, wander to the Laing Gallery (with a side mission which failed due to the internet clearly being out of date), wander around the exhibition until it's about to close, coffee in Caffe Nerd, 18.31 train back to London, in bed for midnight.
What could possibly go wrong?
Not much, really, but my left foot was a bit temperamental, cheers for asking.
I've been struck for a number of years by some huge John Martin canvases - he's contemporary with Turner and Constable, but for me fitted in the same mental box as Joseph Wright of Derby for sublimity. Think Apocalypse. Think volcanoes. Think Old Testament things. Think Close Encounters of the Third Kind and sunset over Tatooine. There were various paintings in the Laing collection - he was a north eastern lad - but this is the first major exhibition of his work in thirty years (as is John Martin: Painting the Apocalypse Wednesday 22 June 2011 - Sunday 4 September 2011 Millennium Gallery Sheffield and the John Martin: Apocalypse 21 September 2011–15 January 2012 Tate Britain, the Tate at least acknowledging Laing).
I'm only really just beginning to organise my thoughts - and I think I will enjoy the Sheffield version even more, without wanting to take anything away from the Laing. Martin is sort of a landscape painter, although he gets labelled a History painter, whose typical canvas is of a huge landscape with maybe one or two figures in it, usually dwarfed by the landscape. We look into a sort of a bowl - there are typically cliffs at the left and right of the picture, and in the background, behind a seemingly endless valley, Alp like mountains. And maybe, in the haze, a huge city.
Here's one version:
From the selection here, he begins with Classical scenes, some inspired by Ovid, others by Byron, Bulwer-Lytton and other contemporary poets, and then onto Old Testament scenes - Adam and Eve, Nineveh, Joshua, the writing on the wall... Whilst there are pictures of contemporary London, even then the landscape bends to fit in a central valley, whether Richmond Park or even Kensington Gardens. It's only from the accompanying mezzotints that you see the New Testament scenes, in addition, of course, to the Last Judgement triptych, hidden by the gallery by screens, for dramatic reasons; there is a crucifixion, but Revelations is the key. His Paradise Lost series provides a missing link (and set designs for Revenge of the Sith....)
In some cases, you wonder how much this is imagination (he doesn't seem to have gone on a grand tour - there's no way he could have afforded it) and how much a mutated Newcastle, built up the side of a river valley. His painting of Victoria's coronation - a rare contemporary topic and an interior scene to boot - shows a commercial side to an artist paying his way.
There's another side to Martin, which is hidden away in the watercolour room, although these are the mezzotints and lithographs. A map of London with his plans for a circle railway and railways along the Thames, north and south bank. I must check the dates - those mainline terminals are only being built in his lifetime: Brunel's Paddington, Stephenson's Euston and so forth. Plans for fresh water and drains for London. (His plans were ignored or stolen, much like those for his brother's mining lamp.) Drawings of dinosaurs (he slips them into the mezzotint of The Expulsion of Adam and Eve for good measure). He's there at the start of modern geology, and clearly knows something about architecture and archeology... Then there's another brother, confusingly called Jonathan Martin, who tried to burn down York Minster.
I was getting hints of Blake (the apocalypse and the sublime landscape), Brueghel (Biblical landscape) and Bosch (the sense of allegory), and a sense of this being anti-Turner (Martin sticks a train in one of his last judgement canvases). He's both historical and contemporary.
A sense of disappointment, perhaps, from trying to work out how the exhibition fits the theme of The Great British Art Debate. Does he have anything to say about Britishness? Is it good for me? Is it too popular? There are paintings of British locations, but is that enough?
And then I started reading Max Adams's The Prometheans (aka The Firebringers) on the train home - a sort of The Lunar Men but a decade or so later, although the cast overlaps. This is a biography of Britain c. 1780-1850, centering on Martin and his brothers (evangelist Jonathan, soldier Richard, inventor Wlliam), but moving into people he knew: William Godwin (and his daughter), Isambard Kingdom Brunel and his father, Davy and Faraday, Babbage, the Stevensons, Prince Leopold, the Reform Acts, the Railway Acts, Bazalgette... I'm two thirds of the way through the book, and I have a sense of context the exhibition didn't quite give me. And with some of the paintings, there is perhaps a sense of more allegory than I'd pondered as London becomes Babylon on Thames.
This version is in Newcastle until early June - and is free - and I clearly need to do more homework before Sheffield. There's a lot of thoughts about commercial art and the sublime which are waiting to be thought.
What could possibly go wrong?
Not much, really, but my left foot was a bit temperamental, cheers for asking.
I've been struck for a number of years by some huge John Martin canvases - he's contemporary with Turner and Constable, but for me fitted in the same mental box as Joseph Wright of Derby for sublimity. Think Apocalypse. Think volcanoes. Think Old Testament things. Think Close Encounters of the Third Kind and sunset over Tatooine. There were various paintings in the Laing collection - he was a north eastern lad - but this is the first major exhibition of his work in thirty years (as is John Martin: Painting the Apocalypse Wednesday 22 June 2011 - Sunday 4 September 2011 Millennium Gallery Sheffield and the John Martin: Apocalypse 21 September 2011–15 January 2012 Tate Britain, the Tate at least acknowledging Laing).
I'm only really just beginning to organise my thoughts - and I think I will enjoy the Sheffield version even more, without wanting to take anything away from the Laing. Martin is sort of a landscape painter, although he gets labelled a History painter, whose typical canvas is of a huge landscape with maybe one or two figures in it, usually dwarfed by the landscape. We look into a sort of a bowl - there are typically cliffs at the left and right of the picture, and in the background, behind a seemingly endless valley, Alp like mountains. And maybe, in the haze, a huge city.
Here's one version:
From the selection here, he begins with Classical scenes, some inspired by Ovid, others by Byron, Bulwer-Lytton and other contemporary poets, and then onto Old Testament scenes - Adam and Eve, Nineveh, Joshua, the writing on the wall... Whilst there are pictures of contemporary London, even then the landscape bends to fit in a central valley, whether Richmond Park or even Kensington Gardens. It's only from the accompanying mezzotints that you see the New Testament scenes, in addition, of course, to the Last Judgement triptych, hidden by the gallery by screens, for dramatic reasons; there is a crucifixion, but Revelations is the key. His Paradise Lost series provides a missing link (and set designs for Revenge of the Sith....)
In some cases, you wonder how much this is imagination (he doesn't seem to have gone on a grand tour - there's no way he could have afforded it) and how much a mutated Newcastle, built up the side of a river valley. His painting of Victoria's coronation - a rare contemporary topic and an interior scene to boot - shows a commercial side to an artist paying his way.
There's another side to Martin, which is hidden away in the watercolour room, although these are the mezzotints and lithographs. A map of London with his plans for a circle railway and railways along the Thames, north and south bank. I must check the dates - those mainline terminals are only being built in his lifetime: Brunel's Paddington, Stephenson's Euston and so forth. Plans for fresh water and drains for London. (His plans were ignored or stolen, much like those for his brother's mining lamp.) Drawings of dinosaurs (he slips them into the mezzotint of The Expulsion of Adam and Eve for good measure). He's there at the start of modern geology, and clearly knows something about architecture and archeology... Then there's another brother, confusingly called Jonathan Martin, who tried to burn down York Minster.
I was getting hints of Blake (the apocalypse and the sublime landscape), Brueghel (Biblical landscape) and Bosch (the sense of allegory), and a sense of this being anti-Turner (Martin sticks a train in one of his last judgement canvases). He's both historical and contemporary.
A sense of disappointment, perhaps, from trying to work out how the exhibition fits the theme of The Great British Art Debate. Does he have anything to say about Britishness? Is it good for me? Is it too popular? There are paintings of British locations, but is that enough?
And then I started reading Max Adams's The Prometheans (aka The Firebringers) on the train home - a sort of The Lunar Men but a decade or so later, although the cast overlaps. This is a biography of Britain c. 1780-1850, centering on Martin and his brothers (evangelist Jonathan, soldier Richard, inventor Wlliam), but moving into people he knew: William Godwin (and his daughter), Isambard Kingdom Brunel and his father, Davy and Faraday, Babbage, the Stevensons, Prince Leopold, the Reform Acts, the Railway Acts, Bazalgette... I'm two thirds of the way through the book, and I have a sense of context the exhibition didn't quite give me. And with some of the paintings, there is perhaps a sense of more allegory than I'd pondered as London becomes Babylon on Thames.
This version is in Newcastle until early June - and is free - and I clearly need to do more homework before Sheffield. There's a lot of thoughts about commercial art and the sublime which are waiting to be thought.
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