Lord Mansfield in his reasons ordering a new trial said:
There is no evidence of the ship being foul and leaky, and that certainly was not the cause of the delay. There is weight, also, in the circumstances of the throwing overboard of the negroes after the rain (if the fact be so) for which, upon the evidence, there appears to have been no necessity.
There is no report on the new trial, but this case probably led to the passing of a statute prohibiting the insuring of slaves against any loss or damage except “the perils of the sea, piracy, insurrection, capture, barratry, and destruction by fire; and providing that no loss or damage shall be recoverable on account of the mortality of slaves by natural death or ill treatment or against loss by throwing overboard on any account whatsoever.”
What is barratry, you ask? It is “fraud or gross negligence on the part of the master of the ship to the prejudice of the owners.”
Look closely at this fire of a painting. In front of the floundering ship, shackled legs and hands rise. A sun, engulfed in pink and red, sets over this grave of water.
Mark Twain, ever the acerbic art commentator, described it as “a tortoise-shell cat having a fit in a platter of tomatoes.”
John Ruskin’s father bought this painting for him in 1844. The acknowledged Victorian critic placed it at the end of his bed so it would be the first thing he would see when he woke up in the morning. He said of it, “… the noblest sea that Turner had ever painted and, if so, the noblest certainly ever painted by man.”
There is an interesting dialogue set out in the 2014 Late Turner — Painting Set Free, Tate Britain London Exhibition , which includes this painting. Turner advised a young artist, “Keep your corners quiet. Centre your interest. And always remember that as you can never reach the brilliancy of nature, you need never be afraid to put your brightest light next to your deepest shadow in the centre.”4 In this painting, there is a white form in the centre, perhaps an angel bursting forth, arm raised, descending in judgment of the massacre of the slaves below.
Turner attached to this painting a couplet from the poem The Fallacies of Hope :
Hope, hope, fallacious hope,
Where is thy marker now?
Ruskin, the foremost English art critic of his day, was a booster of Turner. And then something happened around 1846 and he turned against Turner, saying one of his pictures was “indicative of mental disease.”
JP
Luis de Góngora y Argote (1622)
Velázquez (Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez)
(1599–1660)
Velázquez (Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez), Luis de Góngora y Argote, 1622
Oil on canvas, 50.2 x 40.6 cm
Maria Antoinette Evans Fund (32.79)
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Photo credit: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston / Bridgeman Images
There are not many Velázquez paintings in the Americas, but there’s an extraordinarily good one here, painted when he was very young, only on the cusp of success, in 1622. It’s a portrait of Luis de Góngora, the greatest Spanish poet of the time.
Góngora came to Madrid to court fame and clients. He oozed his way through a grovelling time, creating enemies and self-hatred. The young Velázquez cottoned on to the bitterness in skeptical eyes and pursed mouth. The head shows intelligence, the downturned lips mirror disappointment.
Góngora’s sonnet to El Greco captures his florid style:
Inscription for El Greco’s Tomb
O pilgrim, this enduring enclosure,
Of shining porphyry in gracious form,
Denies the world the most subtle brush
That ever gave wood soul, or canvas life.
His name deserving a greater voice
Than rises from the clarions of fame,
Ennobles this field of sombre marble;
Revere it; before you go your way.
Here lies El Greco; Nature inherited
His art; Art his skill; Iris his colours,
Phoebus his light — else Morpheus his shade —
May this urn, despite its solid nature,
Drink tears, and whatever odours ooze
From the Sabean tree’s funereal bark.
Cervantes was an admirer.
Góngora, however, also had enemies. He feuded with Francisco de Quevedo, a rival poet. Quevedo knew how to hand it out, attacking Góngora’s large nose and accusing him of sodomy, a capital offence. Góngora’s card-playing led to his ruin. Francisco de Quevedo bought his house so he could evict him.
It was not until his portrait of Innocent X in 1650 that Velázquez again turned a merciless eye on a sitter.
JP
Chapter 2
Buffalo, New York
Albright-Knox Art Gallery
13. Gotham News (1955)
Willem de Kooning (1904–97)
Willem de Kooning, Gotham News, 1955
Oil on canvas, framed: 181.61 x 208.3 x 7 cm; support: 175.3 x 200.7 cm
Gift of Seymour H. Knox Jr., 1955
Albright-Knox Gallery, New York
© 2017 The Willem de Kooning Foundation /ARS, New York / SODRAC, Montreal
Photo credit: Albright-Knox Art Gallery / Art Resource, NY
Willem de Kooning calls to mind Kurtz’s final lines in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness , “The horror, the horror,” such is the sheer, transgressive power of his work. Yet the resolution ultimately becomes reflective and resonant, offering the viewer sublime enjoyment for her efforts.
Born in the Netherlands, de Kooning eventually found his way to New York, stopping in New Jersey on the way. There he worked as a house painter! Once in Manhattan, he engaged in a few projects in commercial art, designing fashion advertisements.
His prodigious output alone leaves many of his contemporaries in the dust. The critical feature of de Kooning’s work — that which sets him apart from most artists, except perhaps Picasso — is his juxtaposition of abstraction with forms and shapes. He merged Cubism, Surrealism, and Expressionism into one form, always playing with figure and the background, distorting and diffusing the figure on the canvas, best seen in his Woman series.
De Kooning worked on the Woman series on and off for thirty years. His form of Abstract Expressionist painting was unlike anything on the current art scene. Woman was also a departure for de Kooning in his use of colour. As the Woman series continued throughout his career, viewers can observe the progression of de Kooning’s melding of abstraction and form. In Woman (1950–1952), the figure is contorted and manipulated to force a blending into the background and become indistinct from the canvas, leaving critics to suggest a certain misogyny, given its violence of form. Whether this is so, he had an open and tumultuous marriage to the artist Elaine de Kooning from 1943