Sketchbook

Moderna Museet, Stockholm 14/4/15

Ferries

"When you entered Manhatten by the Lincoln Tunnel twenty years ago [i.e. in 1960] you saw from the high west bank of the Hudson a vision that lifted your heart and in some measure redeemed the potholes and noise and lunacy and violence of the city. You saw the magic row of transatlantic liners nuzzling the island, their classy, frivolous red and black and white and green uttering their critique of the utility beige-gray of the buildings. In the row might be the Queen Mary or the Queen Elizabeth or the Mauretania, the United States or the America or the Independance, the Rafaello or the Michelangelo or the Liberté. These were the last attendants of the age of travel, soon to fall victim to the jet plane and the cost of oil and the cost of skilled labor."

Paul Fussell, Abroad

A number of years ago, I was commissioned to make some artwork for a cruise ship. A perk of this commission was that, many months later, when the ship docked in Southampton, the artists who had made work on board were invited to visit the ship while it was docked for the day. The ship was the size of a monstrous slab block of local authority housing, filling the terminal like a luxury hotel combined with a shopping centre. Inside, it gave the impression that it was anything but a sea going vessel, all the while insisting that this was in fact the case by being festooned with the symbols of maritime nature on almost every possible surface available for decoration. This also gave the ship's interior an appearance of, not so much opulence itself, but an idea of the opulence of sea-going travel, available, in reality, to relatively few people decades ago (there was certainly no steerage class on this ship, and travel by large ocean-going vessels is now very much a choice which reflects on those using it). The Baltic ferry from Stockholm to Helsinki taken on the route to St Petersburg felt very much a scaled down version of this, leading one to imagine that in the age of the "jet plane" and the budget airline, travel over the waves is largely an anti-utilitarian simulacra of that idea of a golden age that Paul Fussell was writing about.

Before the Channel Tunnel of course, the Channel ferry was the first glimpse of 'abroad' for those leaving England - or perhaps an interstitial space, neither home nor abroad. Unlike the huge cruise liner mentioned, or indeed the Baltic ferry, the Channel ferry never quite isolated its passengers from the reality of the means of transport. My earliest crossings to the Continent were by ferry, and, in the first instance, by hovercraft, like the telecommunications towers written about, a symbol of progressive technological advance now firmly stuck in the age when this was seen as symbolic of national pride - a future now gone. Although young, the main memory I have of the hovercraft was the aeroplane-style seating, the idea being that the crossing was to be so rapid that the passengers did not need to get up and move about for the duration. The hovercraft has been discontinued for many years. Later crossings were by more traditional ferry; when travelling to Paris by coach in 1994, I wrote that on the way there, we were not stopped at customs either at Dover or Calais, being waved, or waived, through on the coach itself. The return journey was not as pleasant: a customs official got on to the coach itself at Dover, and, after a student swore at her, we were all made to get off the coach and go through passport control individually. The coach driver, who had spent the duration of our stay in Paris drinking in the bar at the hotel, was rightly sarcastic about this as all the students got back on.

Taking the now-discontinued overnight ferry from Harwich to Esbjerg in Denmark some years ago, not knowing how easy it was to go through the boarding procedures, we got a train one hour earlier than needed, just in case, and as a result, had to wait in the tiny International terminal building in Harwich which has precious little facilities to speak of. There were very few foot passengers for the ferry, the security was simple, and one did not feel the weight of the state bearing down on the individual. Judging by the small amount of containers on board, the ferry did have some practical use in terms of imports and exports.

The resolution to Alice In The Cities occurs on a ferry across the Rhine. Having exhausted all leads in trying to find Alice's grandmother, after discovering that the house in Alice's photograph was now lived in by someone else, Philip decides to take Alice to his parents. At a kiosk beside the road, Philip finds a newspaper with a report in about Alice, but this is not acted upon. On the ferry across the Rhine, Alice asks Philip, "Are you looking forward to seeing your parents?" As the camera concentrates on the woman singing, accompanied by the boy who catches Alice's interest, sufficient to take a Polaroid photograph, we see the policeman that Philip and Alice had encountered in Wuppertal raising his sunglasses as he recognises them. He gets out of his car to approach Philip, saying that Alice's mother had been found. The few scenes that follow - Alice in the policeman's car, with Philip tailing them in his hired car; Alice giving Philip a hundred dollar bill "for your ticket"; and then the two of them on the train to Munich - are all a coda to this resolution of the quest to reunite Alice with her family, while still leaving the protagonists forever in movement, in the final shot of the two looking out of the train window as the aerial shot becomes ever higher and wider, seemingly in the camera's desire to encompass the whole of the Rhine valley.

Picture Galleries

I was in Hamburg on a Monday. As seems a common convention in Northern European countries, the Hamburger Kunsthalle was closed. This may have been frustrating if I had the time to do anything other than get wet in my search for locations from The American Friend. On the trip from London to St Petersburg, we had 24 hours in Copenhagen - on a Monday. As a result, with culture shut for the day we went up the Round Tower, worth the small fee for the uniqueness of walking up a spiral ramp to the top, blessed with views all across the rooftops of the city - and, in the distance, the Oresund Bridge and the just visible outline of Sweden, the next day's journey by train. Returning from St Petersburg, we found ourselves in Helsinki on a Monday, with almost everything shut there.

Last week, in Copenhagen on a Wednesday, I went to the Statens Museum for Kunst. Enjoying their permanent collection (as well as an excellent temporary display on Durer's Triumphal Arch of Maxilimilian, shaming the British Museum's desultory display of the oversized print, for years badly lit next to the toilets), there was a realisation of the parochial qualities on institutions back in the UK which pretend otherwise: the National Gallery in London has very thin coverage of Northern European, specifically Scandinavian, painting. Of course, the National Gallery began as one man's collection, and represented the limitations one would expect; however, the idea that Italian painting, and specifically Italian Renaissance painting, was the pinnacle of the art persisted for many decades and perhaps is still informing acquisitions.

I arrived in Stockholm on this occasion in time for the Easter weekend. Certain things were shut, but some places ritually closed on a Monday were in fact open on Easter Monday - because this counted as Sunday for the purposes of opening times. However, the National Museum in Stockholm is currently undergoing major rebuilding work, so is closed (I did see the Denise Grunstein exhibition under the auspices of the National Museum at the Konstacademian; the most interesting of the photographs were those showing the backs of paintings from the National Museum, echoing the Cornelius Gijsbrechts painting in the Statens Museum in Copenhagen from the late seventeeth century of a back of a painting). I also visited the Thielska Galleriet. This is the house and collection of Ernest Thiel located at the far end of Djurgården. Most of the paintings, sculpture, drawings and prints were contemporary art from the decades immediately each side of 1900. Gifted to the state as a whole in 1924, it is the collection of one man, again, but the effect of the stasis of the collection as a capsule of taste is interesting: as well as those artists whose reputation has endured (Munch, Gaugin, Toulouse-Lautrec) or has increased (notably Vilhelm Hammershøi, represented by the large Five Portraits), it also includes artists whose reputations have dissipated since (I'm thinking of Anders Zorn, previously I've known Zorn from Lumsden's The Art of Etching; the collection having many etchings and some paintings, still popular in Sweden, but not more widely). Then there are the artists whose work remains largely unknown outside Scandinavian countries: Carl Larsson, Bruno Lilijfors, Gustav Fjaested, Karl Nordström, Esther Almqvist.

Two of the Karl Nordström charcoal drawings in the Thielska Galleriet concentrated on skies, taking up enough of the composition to be considered cloud studies; one of which featured just one large cloud. Having recently made a few paintings of clouds, as a means of making work free from many other concerns of subject matter that they felt as near to being just about painting itself as I can approach. Some of these paintings were based on photographs taken on the journey to St Petersburg; in the Hermitage, we saw a painting of a large cloud by Fyodor Vasilyev, which felt like a felicitous coincidence; the whole journey once leaving Copenhagen, through Sweden, the Baltic and Finland, was accompanied by bright and fine September weather. As well as the trompe l'oeil paintings by Gijsbrechts in the Statens Musuem For Kunst in Copenhagen this Spring, I also found some cloud paintings by  J. C. Dahl.

Postcards 3

Stockholm 8-11/4/15

A View from A Room

As briefly described in the post Writing on Trains, while taking my short excursion through Germany and Denmark, I was able to keep writing this blog mostly during the course of the various train journeys. Now in Stockholm for over a week, being static there is no longer the same propulsion to write with the cascade of new impressions; instead, a different set of impressions is created, not through novelty but by repetitions of now familiar rhythms.

Staying at Telefonplan, in the southern suburbs, the regular rhythms are the trains of the T14 Tunnelbana line - Stockholm's light rail system. Due to the landscape that the city is built upon, these trains frequently move from above ground to underground (as the name suggests) and back again. Directly outside the two windows of the room I am in, immediately parallel to the road this building is on, the railway line comes out of a cutting from Telefonplan station, bounded by a rocky outcrop on one side, and pass over a bridge crossing a road, before going into a tunnel into the hill bounding the horizon. This hill, with some apartment buildings among bare trees and some evergreens on the ridge, is just conceivably reminiscent of an Italian landscape, firs or pines standing in for cypresses, of the kind Northern European artists were seeking out in the late 18th and early 19th century (such as Thomas Jones or C. W. Eckersberg). This is the scene that I've drawn on two of the postcards. At different times of day, the trains' frequency changes, and during busy morning and early evening periods, the regular T-bana trains are joined by older rolling stock, announced by a slightly higher pitched whine. These blue trains have a near-generic look of many European cities' light rail trains, such as classic Paris Metro trains, older Berlin (or Hamburg) U-bahn trains - boxy, unstreamlined, with ridged metal panels, rounded corners to the narrow windows on the doors, individual seats, bare metal pillars and handles.

Although there was snow on the first morning after my arrival, the weather has turned fine since and the passing of the day is figured by the changing direction of the sun harshly back-lighting the scene during the height of the day, throwing the rocks and concrete of the embankment into sharp relief during the evenings with a parallel direction to the road and railway. A series of flags outside provide a regular snapping sound of ropes against poles in the wind.

The architecture at Telefonplan has an unadorned utility that is hard to date: large tall blocks of many floors with regular grids of windows, the brutal bare concrete tower that dominates the local skyline. Small details betray something of their age: the extensive use of terrazzo, for window sills as well as stairs, the small amount of wood in a few areas, and the tapered pillars outside. In the Spårvägsmuseet, Stockholm's transport museum, there was a display of photographs by Sven Goliath (1918-1989), which included a shot of Telefonplan from 1954, clearly showing the concrete tower and existing buildings very much as they are today. The whole complex which now includes offices, the art school, and accommodation and other services used to be the headquarters of Ericsson, and a bust of L. M. Ericsson stands on the corner diagonally opposite the station, next to one of the curious public telephones of the Rikstelefon with its odd flared lattice base. The main factory and office buildings were designed by Ture Wennerholm and built 1938-40; the 70 metre high tower was added after the Second World War, and designed by C. Dahl Steffensen. The tower is referred on the Swedish Wikipedia page about the Ericsson factory at Telefonplan to by the compound word kortvågsforskning, which translates as 'short-wave research' - this must be for microwave transmissions, the impetus behind the Kaknästornet written about under 'Panoramania'. The tower is not open to the public; however, opening a door at the end of a corridor on the top floor - the seventh floor - of the accommodation block, led into the adjoining building, into a stairwell that went as high as the 13th floor, halfway up the height of the Telefonplan tower opposite.