AND ANOTHER THING
Finding space for Guido Reni's 'Mayday Massacre of Major's Multitude'
PAUL JOHNSON
So that's the end of politics for a bit. I have been catching up on missed exhibi- tions. At the British Museum there are the haunting faces of the Egyptian dead, many beautiful or pathetic, some roguish, all two millennia old: the most moving show in London. Then there is George Grosz at the Royal Academy: an overrated satirist, least attractive when he is seizing you by the lapels to make a political or sexual point but endearing when he is just painting peo- ple in the street. His wet-paper watercolour technique is devilishly effective and I have been copying it. But the important show is Denis Mahon's collection at the National Gallery (free, too), which includes a whole room of Guercino drawings. Mahon is one of those silent, secretive scholars who move behind the scenes of the art world, doing significant things. He had the eye and the means to collect people like Guido Reni and Guercino when those early Baroque masters were despised and going for mod- est prices.
Such artists, chiefly from Bologna, should not be overrated. Guercino's draw- ings are so good it's disappointing that his paintings are not better. And Reni is little more than a showman. But I like him all the same; he cheers me up. He was much favoured by Maffeo Barberini, who became Pope Urban VIII in 1623 and set about establishing himself as a patron of the arts. His younger brother Antonio belonged to the Capuchins, one of the most austere orders in the Church. When he was made a cardinal and decided to build a new church for his order — Santa Maria della Con- cezione — there was a struggle between him and his elder brother over its decora- tion, the Pope wanting splendour, the Capuchin monk simplicity. By way of a compromise, Guido Reni was asked to paint an altar picture, and he produced a wonderfully graceful and elegant work, 'The Archangel Michael Trampling on the Devil'. It could be read either way: as beau- ty (Michael is handsome and wears light colours) driving out ugliness, or as simple nobility of form (the composition is plain and uncluttered) suppressing ostentation. It was much admired for 150 years, then fell out of favour in the 19th century.
In the 1950s, I was raising a family and poor, but art was often cheap in those days. In a junk shop in High Holborn (long since disappeared) I came across a version or a copy of Reni's 'Archangel Michael'. Reni was a compulsive gambler and at one time employed 200 people churning out stuff. But my heart warmed instantly to this won- drous paladin settling Satan's hash with his sword, one delicately sandalled foot on the fiend's head. It was huge, glazed, in a fine Victorian frame and weighed a ton. The owner of the shop had conceived a dislike for it and claimed it took up too much valu- able space. I offered him a fiver, which was happily accepted: 'I'll be glad to see the back of that fellow.' With some difficulty, the painting was taken to my nearby offices at the New Statesman, and when I was in charge there, in the second half of the meretricious Sixties, it hung defiantly behind my editorial chair, albeit under the new title of 'Progress Expelling Reaction'.
When I left the building in 1970 to write huge historical tomes, the question arose: what to do with the Reni? There was no room at my house in Buckinghamshire, which was stuffed with paintings already. Happily, Tom Stoppard, who lived in the same village, had just bought the splendid Nicholas Hawksmoor house Iver Grove, and was looking for something big and dig- nified to hang on its grand staircase. So the Reni was handed over to his keeping and hung there in majesty for a quarter of a century. Now Tom has sold the house and returned the Reni to me. It arrived ten days ago and I had forgotten what a fine work it is, so full of colour, drama and energy. By an extraordinary coincidence, the new stu- dio I built last year in the garden of my London house has a main wall which might have been designed for the Reni. So there it now is, and will remain till I die, to pour Baroque scorn on my own feeble efforts and to add a bit of class to the joint.
The art of buying and owning paintings is not to take them, or oneself, too seriously. Art is made to be enjoyed. I like to look at my best paintings every day, and talk to them. I give the sculptures an appreciative pat. I don't care terribly if the watercolours deteriorate with exposure to the light — the modern business of only looking at them in subaqueous gloom defeats the whole purpose of art. I am not interested in the market. I never sell what I have collect- ed, though I sometimes give paintings away. The objects I have gathered over half a century are my chums. When Francis Bacon, a nice man but a worthless painter, used to argue with me about his work, in the Colony Club, I told him I would not give any of his canvases house-room. He said, 'You can hang one of them in your place for a bit and see if you get to like it.' Me: 'No. My other paintings wouldn't stand for the intrusion.' Paintings are particular. That's one reason I'm glad old Reni is in the studio and not in the drawing-room, where the pre-Raphaelites would have to squeeze up to make room and would cer- tainly object. After all, it was their fugle- man John Ruskin who demoted Reni in the first place and put him in the aesthetic dog- house for a century.
My wife Marigold says I am positively not to buy another painting ever — there is nowhere to put them. But I recall her saying that in the early 1960s. Things I like have a way of insinuating themselves into the house. Thus the other day I bought an exquisite little canvas by that Victorian vir- tuoso George Smith, of a young maiden hanging out of a first-floor cottage window. He called it 'Good Morning', but after careful scrutiny, detecting a hint of invita- tion in the girl's gaze, I have renamed it 'Come Up and See Me Some Time'. A per- fect space for this bold miss was found instantly. So it goes on. It is true the Widgery problem has not yet been solved. Three generations of Widgetys painted Dartmoor, and the best of them, F.J. Widgely (1861-1942), produced an enor- mous landscape which I regard as the culmi- nation of his life's work. I acquired it two years ago. The frame is stupendous, its glass is a quarter-inch thick and it weighs even more than the Reni. Mr Lacy, the great framing expert, says that, if hung, it will pull down not merely the wall but the entire house. So there it lies, unhung, like a strand- ed whale, and Marigold is getting impatient. But God will solve this problem, as he solved the Reni one. And, come to think of it, isn't it time to retitle the Reni again, in honour of Tony Blair's victory: 'The Mayday Massacre of Major's Multitude'?
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