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While newspapers and TV waste our time with poseurs and trash, a Titan as great as any old master has passed away unnoticed (except by his grateful followers, who had been gathering in the last few years in the Facebook page). Jeff Jones - later in his/her life Jeffrey Catherine Jones - was simply the greatest artist in my lifetime. Newspapers across the world ought to have cleared their front page and made this an above-the-fold lead news item, instead of wasting time nattering about Tracy Emin's political affiliation and the absurd pyramid of salt in Piazza del Duomo; but there has never been an age yet when merit was so distinct from success. I say firmly and with no fear of being ridiculed by time that Jones will be remembered, when time does justice of all the self-advertising rubbish, as one of the masters of all time.

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000364187639

I would like to write an obituary, but to find the right words for this genius has stumped me since I first came across his/her comic and paintings. One can talk about composition, about brushwork, about spotting blacks (in ink sketches) and holding lines, of anatomy and perspective and colour, but in the end these are only features. I think the best I can say is that s/he was the best, incomparably the best, in understanding what painting was and what it could do. And if this seems cryptic, it is because I can get no closer. Study his work, look at it for yourself; and sad and angry though I feel at this untimely death (his/her last years were stormy, with a bankruptcy, a sex change and apparently not much creativity, and I had hoped that s/he was about to recover), deserted as I feel myself (his/her work had been a fundamental part of my artistic life since my teens), I feel even sorrier for those of you who will only make the acquaintance of this giant after s/he died.

God Who have made us in Your image
That we might perceive the beauty of Your creation and so of You,
That we might be able to make images in Your likeness, and by making images to live,
That we might show in what we make a ray of the beauty of Your Creation and of You,
Forgive the sins of this Your servant,
Hear the voice of gratitude and prayer of all whose lives he enriched,
And taking him past all the abyss of doubt and terror
Take Jeffrey C.Jones to the depth of Your light
Where You live and reign for ever and ever.
Amen.
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The worst and most damaging heresy - still largely unconscious and unchallenged - in modern thoughtRead more... )
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The trouble with having a style is that you may produce something that looks finished and polished when it really is nothing of the kind. My attempt at an answer to [profile] elskuligr a few days back was one such thing; I was falling asleep on my feet as I wrote, and I managed to miss nearly every point of importance I wanted to make. But my unfortunate facility gave the piece a deceptive air of polish. A less generous opponent than [profile] elskuligr might well have asked me what I was really trying to prove, since it is not clear at all.

What I really should have said, then, is something like this. For the impact of Othello on reader and spectator, we do not need to know that Iago is a Spanish type. We do not need to know that Spain was England's enemy as Shakespeare wrote, that every Englishman regarded her as the great perturber of European peace (nor that the Spanish, with more justification, saw Elizabeth's England in the same light); that negative ethnic cliches about intrigue and poison were universally believed. We do not even need to know that Shakespeare was a secret Catholic (the evidence is overwhelming), that his admiration for Italian city states such as Venice was pretty nearly boundless, that he tended to shift on Spain alone the poisoner-intriguer ethnic cliche that other contemporaries tended to spread equally between Spain and Italy (think of Webster's hideous picture of Italy); not even, perhaps, that Turkey was regarded pretty much as what was left of the West looked at Hitler about 1940. We do not need to know any of those things, because Shakespeare has distilled from them all those elements that are universally relevant to human experience rather than merely local. We do not have to resurrect dead slanders against Italians or Spaniards to feel the full force of something like Iago: my God, how many underhanded, ambitious, resentful, destructive persons can be found in the average office, the average workplace? How many of us have seen a popular and admired person admit into his/her company someone wholly unworthy of it, and the ruinous results? We do not need to feel the terror of Turkey to understand that the fall of a personality as full, rounded, beautiful and bold as Othello is a catastrophe that diminishes us all: Shakespeare has brought out his excellence, not only in such magnificent language as "Put up your bright swords, for the dew will rust them!", nor even in the way he masters a violent riot merely by stepping in, but in the memorable romance with Desdemona - if such a woman, everyone understands, falls in love with such a man (and how eloquently he describes their falling in love, in the presence of all the great men in Venice!), he must be worth what he seems. In other words, the central experience afforded us by a great drama such as Othello does not depend on local associations: because it is rooted in universal experiences, it can be understood pretty much across the board.
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I have long since come to the conclusion Read more... )
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I have been moderately ill (nothing to worry about, I assure you) for a few days, so this entry is later than I meant it. The event it describes took place last week. Even so, it is something so wonderful and important that I decided to post it anyway.

You will not often find me speaking well of the rich, especially of the rich by hereditary privilege. There is, however, a certain kind of good deed that is possible only to those who have enormous amounts of money to dispose of – amounts such as to allow large-scale beneficence while being certain of not beggaring one’s heirs. This kind of behaviour was more common in ancient and medieval times, when generosity was held to be a virtue of kings and great lords; but it has not died out even now – and just yesterday the world was reminded what enormous wealth could do, if used for anything other than selfish ends.

One of the richest families in Britain are the Sainsburys. Not only have they founded what is now the second largest retail chain in the kingdom, but, unlike other famous founding families, they have managed both to keep the business in their collective hands and to keep it prospering. The wealth this generated has been spread down four generations and across a remarkably large number of Sainsbury cousins, one of the richest of whom was Lord Simon Sainsbury.

Lord Simon had already done a lot for the heritage of the United Kingdom by being one of the chief donors in the collective Sainsbury gift that allowed London’s National Gallery, the greatest art museum in Britain and one of the greatest in the world, to expand its exhibition space by, I should guess, fifty per cent. I visited the Sainsbury Wing several times, and regard it as a valuable addition to London. However, when his will was made known yesterday, it became clear that this was only part of what we all owe him. He has left eighteen paintings to the National and Tate Galleries (the Tate Gallery is the art museum dedicated specifically to British art). And not just any paintings. One of those of which the most fuss was made was a Francis Bacon – a painter I loathe; but there were no less than three splendid Lucien Freuds – Freud being without a doubt the greatest living British painter – and it went up from there. A Gauguin still life – beautiful. A Bonnard. The best Douanier Rousseau I have ever seen (they were shown on TV). And to close the list, two truly incomparable Monets – incomparable, of course, except to other Monet masterpieces. As far as I am concerned, Monet is one of the greatest painters who ever lived, to be mentioned in one breath with Rembrandt, Tiziano, Raffaello, and – this may be heresy, but I think so – superior in achievement to Michelangelo. And these two were wholly representative of his achievement: an incredibly atmospheric early (1875) landscape with figures in snow, and a glorious late painting of water and reflected light, of the kind that nobody except Monet ever thought of doing, and of the very best of his kind. I could have looked at it for hours. Luckily the bequest will have a public exhibition next summer before being split between the two museums, so I can look at it as a whole and from life rather than a TV screen.

This is not just a munificent gift, but one made by a man who knows what is good (I’ll forgive the Bacon) and who, being able to buy what he wanted, has thought long and hard on what to buy. Every one of those paintings was significant. Not just a Douanier Roussau, but that Douanier Rousseau; not just a Monet or a Freud, but those Monets and those Freuds. The museums could never have bought even one of them, at today’s art market prices. And Lord Simon has left them to the country, to be enjoyed and learned from by anyone who cares to (access to the great London museums is generally free). This is an act that positively improves London and England; that adds to the stores of beauty, artistic truth, and artistic thought available to the capital. Not many people can make such a claim. No doubt there will have been some tax advantage to the residuary heirs; such bequests are encouraged by law, and carefully negotiated in advance with the tax authorities. But the quality and consistency of the gift reduces any mercenary motives to insignificance, whether or not they were there. As far as I am concerned, a gift of such quality deserves to have all tax remitted for ten years in sheer gratitude.

We do not have the language to properly thank a man for something like this. Once upon a time – I do not know whether they do it still – the National Assembly of France used to vote thanks to successful politicians or generals or diplomats with the austere and economical formula: “Citizen so-and-so has well deserved of the Fatherland”. Something like that ought to be said now: for Citizen Simon Sainsbury truly has a great and unique claim to the gratitude of his country, of his fellow-citizens, and indeed of the whole civilized world.
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This essay originated in a surprising little discovery I just made. Like everyone else who is interested in modern history, I knew that the Nazis had a marching song called the Horstwessellied, from an early militant who had died in a street riot. Recently I became curious to hear it.

The first thing that struck me was a slight feeling of disappointment.Read more... )

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