Ai Weiwei at Blenheim Palace

A minor milestone – this is the 400th post on this blog which began just over four years ago.

Posts here earlier this year have touched on baroque architecture, in particular one on South East Sicily. The more restrained exteriors of English baroque buildings have in the past provided the background to posts concerning Chatsworth and Greenwich Old Royal Naval College. But the most famous example of English baroque is Vanbrugh’s Blenheim Palace, constructed in the early 18th century by a grateful nation for the 1st Duke of Marlborough and now a World Heritage Site. My long-standing intention to visit Blenheim was turned into action by the opening of the Ai Weiwei exhibition which launches the Blenheim Art Foundation’s programme of leading international contemporary art.

Ai Weiwei is too well-known to need much description here. Born in 1957, his family were exiled from Beijing during the Cultural Revolution, returning in 1976. From 1981 to 1993 Ai lived in the US, mostly in New York. After returning to China he became the country’s leading contemporary artist and designer of international standing. His criticisms of the Chinese government led to his being put under considerable pressure in various forms and at present to his being forbidden to travel outside China. It is reported that President Xi Jinping recently advised artists, authors and actors:

Fine art works should be like sunshine from blue sky and breeze in spring that will inspire minds, warm hearts, cultivate taste and clean up undesirable work styles.

so Ai’s work, much of it conveying a pointed political message, is probably not quite what he has in mind. 

There are about thirty works (or more, depending the way they are counted - some works are groups of related pieces) at Blenheim, mostly indoors and distributed among the Palace’s permanent displays ,but some are outside, for example Bubble (2008, above) in the South Park. The interior of Blenheim and its furnishings are mainly grand English aristocratic, but there is a unique focus on the first Duke’s military achievements in a European war over 300 years ago and Winston Churchill’s 70 years ago. Interpolating work by a highly political contemporary Chinese artist can be stimulating but carries the risk of appearing oddly inappropriate. The first piece the visitor encounters is Chandelier (2002, right) in the Great Hall, which, unsurprisingly works well, as does the set of marbles, Cao (2014, below) in the North Corridor alongside Blenheim’s own antique Chinese porcelain.

However, using the Churchill Rooms as settings for Ai’s work didn’t seem as appropriate at first – or is perhaps intended to be constructively inappropriate. Slanted Table (1977, below left) might be a metaphor for what Ai sees as a lop-sided Chinese system and leadership, pointedly placed in front of Churchill as wartime PM - though the latter probably had more power and less accountability to his party during wartime than President Xi does now. The wooden Handcuffs (2012, below right) are displayed on the bed in which

Churchill was born – is it meant to be about childbirth, the parental bonds which children have to break to achieve adulthood, who knows? Ai Weiwei is almost certainly trying to make us think about what we are seeing in its context. As the curators explain:

Ai Weiwei has not been able to leave China since 2011when his passport was confiscated by the Chinese authorities. The exhibition at Blenheim Palace has therefore been realised through a close collaboration between the artist and the Blenheim Art Foundation who have worked together with detailed drawings, architectural plans and models of the site and grounds. lntegrating artworks throughout the richly furnished palace rooms, as well as in the park and gardens, the exhibition will showcase the work of an artist known to raise critical questions on social, cultural and political issues and for his decisive breaking with tradition.

But how to interpret Han Dynasty Vase with Coca Cola Logo and Han Dynasty Vase with Caonima Logo (both 2014, below) in their particular context? The furniture and painting are 18th century, the visitors Artwork Guide gives the dates of the dynasty as 202BC – 220AD and the Coca Cola logo dates from circa 1890. As for Caomina - the Wikipedia entry is essential reading.

More vases from the same period are strangely harmonious in the Green Drawing Room - Han Dynasty Vases in Auto-Paints (2014, below left), perhaps not so much so He Xei (2012, below right) in the Red Drawing Room:

Careful examination of Grapes (2011, below) in the Green Writing Room reveals just how ingeniously this structure made from antique stools has been formed:

The stools date from the Qing dynasty (1644-1911) as does the iron wood from demolished temples used for Map of China (2009 below) in one of the State Rooms; Hong Kong seems to have been positioned nearest the fireplace:

Blenheim’s magnificent Long Library (below top) is used to display prints of the 40 images which make up Study of Perspective (1995-2011, below middle), three wooden spheres Divina Proportione (2006, lower left; icosahedrons, even) and marbles of a helmet and Surveillance Camera (2010, lower right):

The above are only a few of the works on show inside and outside the Palace. In the gallery space which has been created in the Stables Courtyard, there are some fascinating photographs of Andy Warhol’s visit to China in 1982, which emphasise the remarkable material progress of China in the last 30 years, and of Ai Weiwei in New York (below with Alan Ginsburg) in the 1980s and early 90s.

In a year’s time at the Royal Academy in London there will be a major retrospective of this brave, tough and subtle artist’s work. No doubt the RA organisers will be learning about the challenges involved from the Blenheim Art Foundation team. Ai Weiwei at Blenheim Palace ends on 14 December. Any readers of this post on the US West Coast and unlikely to visit Blenheim soon may be able to make the trip to @Large: Ai Weiwei on Alcatraz which runs until 26 April next year (Refraction, 2014 below). It is difficult to imagine any other artist having exhibitions in a palace and a prison at the same time and so redolently.

Update 27 December 2014

This exhibition has been extended and will run again from 14 February to 30 April 2015.

Here is not there

A post about Madresfield Court and how it was depicted in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited appeared here on 3 June. The day before, The Times had published a photograph (below) of the return to Castle Howard of a vintage Rolls Royce used in the filming there of the Brideshead Revisited TV series. (A more detailed story appeared in the Yorkshire Post.)

The day after (4 June), a letter from Professor Emeritus (of architecture) A Peter Fawcett was published in The Times (£):

Sir, Although Hawksmoor’s baroque Castle Howard (picture story, June 2) will be forever associated with Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, his real inspiration came from a building of a very different architectural persuasion: Madresfield Court in Worcestershire. The English Arts and Crafts designer CR Ashbee designed the library in 1902, and the chapel (which features prominently in the novel) is a fine assembly of artefacts from Birmingham’s Arts and Crafts workshops — a far cry from English baroque. Waugh visited Madresfield frequently, and members of its Lygon family owners also appear as prominent players in the narrative.

On 6 June, there were three more letters. Neville Peel thought that:

… Waugh, like other writers, had a variety of sources of inspiration. His description of Brideshead’s central rotunda reminds one of Ickworth and is very far from the Arts and Crafts of Madresfield.

David Bertram pointed out that:

Professor Fawcett deplores the use of the baroque Castle Howard as a visual shorthand for Brideshead, but there was good reason for its use in the TV film. In the novel Charles Ryder says staying at Brideshead signalled the end of his love for the medieval and his “conversion to the baroque”.

Nigel Thomas felt that:

A more obvious candidate is Wardour Castle in Wiltshire, which Waugh would have known through his friendship with Cecil Beaton and the Herberts. Waugh placed Brideshead in a Wiltshire park with a castle that gave its name to a Georgian successor. … Old Wardour Castle overlooks a lake that points to the new mansion on a nearby hill. The largest Georgian house in Wiltshire, Wardour Castle, has splendid interiors and a spectacular chapel. It too was the home to a Catholic dynasty, the Arundells.

which is a little ingenuous given that Sebastian Flyte tells Charles:

“… We had a castle a mile away, down by the village. Then we took a fancy to the valley and pulled the castle down, carted the stones up here, and built a new house.” (Book 1 Chapter 4)

and that New Wardour Castle is in the Palladian style (as is Ickworth), not baroque. On the other hand, a little later Charles remembers:

It was an aesthetic education to live within those walls, to wander from room to room, from the Soanesque library to the Chinese drawing room … from the Pompeian parlour to the great tapestry-hung hall, which stood unchanged as it had been designed two hundred and fifty years before; …

that would be circa 1675, which, while about a century before John Soane started work as an architect and James Paine’s designing New Wardour Castle, was only a few decades before Vanbrugh’s Castle Howard being built in a thoroughly baroque style.

At this point there is a danger of becoming one of those Sherlockians who argue about the exact location on Dartmoor of Baskerville Hall. Obviously it would be pleasing to think that Brideshead was in Wiltshire, South West England, but I suspect the region will just have to be satisfied with Waugh’s having spent much of his adult life there. Not only friendly with the Herberts, in 1937 he had married one, Laura, whose grandmother bought the couple Piers Court in Gloucestershire. In 1956 the family moved further west to Combe Florey in Somerset where Waugh died in 1966. He wrote Brideshead Revisited in Devon in 1944 while on unpaid leave from the Army.

Perhaps Waugh’s notion of baroque in the novel is more a metaphor for Catholicism than a Pevsner-like description of a particular building’s architectural style. His author’s note, "I am not I: thou art not he or she: they are not they” might be extended: “here is not there”.

South East Sicily

Apart from a post about the Ile de Ré last summer, this blog doesn’t attempt tourism or travel. However there was some interest in that one, so here’s another, this time about South East Sicily. There is so much information readily available about Sicily that I can’t add much here that’s going to be helpful. I was intrigued to discover that the regions of Sicily and South West England are similar in size and population (25,711km2 and 5,043,000 population/ 23,828km2 and 5,289,000, respectively), if not much else, including the absence here of active volcanoes, thankfully. 

The history of Sicily is long and complex, stretching back to antiquity and its colonisation by the Greeks around 750BC. The theatre at Siracusa (below, top) and the temples at Agrigento (below, lower) are Greek in origin:

The statue in front of the Temple of Concordia is Igor Miteraj’s
Ikaro Caduto (Fallen Icarus), 2011

but were altered by the Romans who added Sicily to their republic after 242BC. The Casale Roman villa near Piazza Armerina still contains the “finest mosaics in situ anywhere in the Roman world” (UNESCO) from around 400AD:

After the fall of the Roman Empire in the 5th century AD, Sicily frequently changed hands, and during the early Middle Ages it was ruled in turn by the Vandals, Ostrogoths, Byzantines, Arabs and Normans. More than one of these occupying influences can become apparent in the same building. For example, the side of the Duomo (below left) in Ortigia (now part of Siracusa) reveals Doric columns from the Greek temple of Athena and its later use as a mosque:

However, the most significant influence on the architecture of South East Sicily was the powerful earthquake of 1693. At that time Sicily was under Spanish rule but power and resources were controlled by the Sicilian aristocracy and the church. Numerous buildings across the region, including churches and the town houses of the nobility, were reconstructed in the fashionable late Baroque style – eg the front elevation of the Ortigia Duomo (above right).

Probably the largest concentration of Sicilian Baroque is at Noto (Cathedral, above, top) and it can be found in in Scicli (interior of Chiesa di Santa Teresa, above, lower) and elsewhere. The exuberance of Sicilian Baroque makes its English contemporaries (eg the Old Royal Naval College at Greenwich and Chatsworth) seem constrained. Nonetheless, the major academic work on Sicilian Baroque is in English published in 1968 and written by Anthony Blunt (last mentioned here in quite another context). The book’s cover shows the Cathedral of San Giorgio in Ragusa Ibla, a difficult building to photograph because of its railings and the palm trees nearby (below):

In 2002, Ragusa, Noto, Scicli and five other towns in SW Sicily were inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list as "representing the culmination and final flowering of Baroque art in Europe" and grouped as the Late Baroque Towns of the Val di Noto. The Valle dei Templi at Agregento, Villa Romana del Casale and Siracusa/Ortigia also appear on their list, as well as Mount Etna. The restoration of the historic sites has been financed by the EU funding for projects in Sicily, €8.5 billion from 2000 to 2007, with an exceptional degree of success. As La Stampa tartly observed:

Needless to say, the money was not used to lay a single brick of such great works – waterfronts, motorways, marinas – as those that have face-lifted countries like Spain and Portugal. With the notable exception of the island’s museums and historical monuments, which have in fact been renovated.

And there is much still requiring attention, eg the Palazzo della Cancelleria in Ragusa, below, left. Restoration of a different kind is that of Caravaggio’s The Burial of St Lucy (below, right), painted in 1608 and currently on display in Chiesa Santa Lucia alla Badia in the Piazza Duomo in Ortigia.

Visitors to Siracusa can hardly fail to notice a large modern conical building rising above the otherwise rectangular townscape (eg in the view of the Greek theatre above). This is the Santuario della Madonna delle Lacrime (Shrine of Our Lady of Tears), celebrating a local miracle of 1953. The event and the religious significance of the Shrine are discussed on its website. It intrigued me as a large and anomalous piece of 20th century architecture, and there seems to be little about it in guidebooks.

Although the Shrine was completed as recently as 1996, it was designed in 1957 and construction took nearly 30 years. The architects, Michel Andrault and Pierre Parat, were French and their agency, ANPAR, was active from 1957 to 1995. Their last works seem to have been in a rather different style from the Shrine - some of the towers at La Défense in Paris. In February 2014, Jonathan Meades made two programmes for BBC4, Bunkers, Brutalism and Bloodymindedness: Concrete Poetry, in which he made the case for for 20th-century concrete Brutalist architecture, “tracing its precursors to the once-hated Victorian edifices described as Modern Gothic and before that to the unapologetic baroque visions created by John Vanbrugh, as well as the martial architecture of World War II”. I suspect that the Shrine is more Expressionist than Brutalist but there is certainly evidence of béton brut (the imprint of the wooden formwork into which concrete is poured), a technique pioneered in France by Auguste Perret, who for a time, was Le Corbusier’s employer. The architectural interpretations of the Shrine seem to include a lighthouse, a tent, tears and “the elevation of humanity towards God”. I couldn’t help noticing that from the south of the Shrine on a clear day the shape of Etna is unmistakeable, although 80km to the north.


Trying to be helpful: the weather in late March seems similar to that in southern England on a good day in late May, sunny, but not hot or rainy, almost ideal for sightseeing, although continuous sunshine is not guaranteed. In full summer and when crowded, visiting, for example, the Roman Villa (essentially sheds with walkways to look down on the magnificent floors) could be trying. The state of the roads and the topography means that journeys in Sicily seem to take longer than maps might suggest and could be expected to take even longer in summer traffic. But, as Martin Amis attributes to his father: “Italy, nice people, nice food”. Buona fortuna!