Comments on: Journey to the Centre of the YIKES — ! https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2011/10/journey-to-the-centre-of-the-yikes Lollards in the high church of low culture Mon, 31 Oct 2011 21:25:38 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.4.3 By: lonepilgrim https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2011/10/journey-to-the-centre-of-the-yikes/comment-page-1#comment-931408 Mon, 31 Oct 2011 21:25:38 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=22156#comment-931408 You are cordially invited to the end of the world…

http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/eventseducation/lateattatebritain/lateattatenovember2011.htm

]]>
By: mark sinker https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2011/10/journey-to-the-centre-of-the-yikes/comment-page-1#comment-930834 Sun, 30 Oct 2011 19:49:41 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=22156#comment-930834 Dug out the Brontë biog I dimly remembered: turns out that a print of Belshazzar’s Feast hung over the family mantelpiece!

]]>
By: anthony https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2011/10/journey-to-the-centre-of-the-yikes/comment-page-1#comment-930490 Sun, 30 Oct 2011 05:48:06 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=22156#comment-930490 i think that one of the things that is under written is how much work flowed from america to england and vice versa–esp. the tours of the american west, thinking of wilde, obv, but there is something there

]]>
By: mark sinker https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2011/10/journey-to-the-centre-of-the-yikes/comment-page-1#comment-930317 Sat, 29 Oct 2011 22:38:07 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=22156#comment-930317 Fredric Edwyn Church is Hudson River School, pupil of Thomas Cole — and this is good

]]>
By: lonepilgrim https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2011/10/journey-to-the-centre-of-the-yikes/comment-page-1#comment-930289 Sat, 29 Oct 2011 21:22:33 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=22156#comment-930289 There was an exhibition at Tate Britain back in 2002 entitled ‘American Sublime: Landscape Painting in the United States 1820-1880’ which featured paintings which are reminiscent of Martin’s use of scale and light. Examples can be seen here:
http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/exhibitions/americansublime/room7.htm

FWIW I see Martin’s ‘heresy’ as part of a wider tendency at that time to try to combine ‘mythic’ ‘truth’ of religion with empirical truth of science.

]]>
By: mark sinker https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2011/10/journey-to-the-centre-of-the-yikes/comment-page-1#comment-930260 Sat, 29 Oct 2011 19:53:15 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=22156#comment-930260 Hi Anthony! JMartin’s dates are 1789-1854; Richard Dadd’s — as the key fairypainter? — are 1817-86, which makes him roughly a generation later. For Martin, the age of revolution (political and industrial) is the furniture of his youth, and unfolding cataclysm his mjaor mode; for Dadd — who belongs as a weird adjunct to the pre-raphaelites almost — the furniture is industrialism established and empire co-opting the monumentality of first-wave gothic revival. The state is building its own crags, fountains, foundry-vocanoes: for the sublime, Pre-Raph and second-wave Gothic, manifesting in the Arts and Crafts movement from mid-century-ish, all angrily refusenik against the modern poisoned world, did often escape to a tremulous and perverse reading of the mythological (s yes, crowds of folks, but crowds of tiny, gauze-winged, really quite sinister wee folks). A lot of this was actual official illustrations for children’s books — Richard Doyle not so distant from Dadd, a little later H.J.Ford, margins crawling with creepie beasties — but if kidlit’s a pretext for the subject, it’s only half a mask… so yes.

Re America: well JM toured America to tremendous success, and the Hudson River Schooled liked what they saw, but I def think there’s a case for suggesting JM was on the borderland of founding a heretical offshoot of xtianity, not maybe in terms of an actual church, but as you say his imagery. Have to think more about this. LDS = VERY gothic, no?

(ok, so I must go back and do some work on my “gothic” project actually…)

]]>
By: anthony https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2011/10/journey-to-the-centre-of-the-yikes/comment-page-1#comment-930015 Sat, 29 Oct 2011 04:47:38 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=22156#comment-930015 a) this was around fairy painting, etc–and it always struck me as a
bit part of that, but i couldnt quite make the difference.
b) why do they strike me as so american–sort of like the panoramas
around that time, but also hyper religious in a way that seems less
british and more you know lds, jw, millerite, etc–huge work b/w
england and america vis a vis religion, but i wonder about martin’s
trans-national move…

(yr totes right about mezzotints)

]]>
By: mark sinker https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2011/10/journey-to-the-centre-of-the-yikes/comment-page-1#comment-928701 Wed, 26 Oct 2011 13:56:04 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=22156#comment-928701 Think I first encountered Martin when “Belshazzar’s Feast” was used to illustrate a passage in a book my mum’s parents had, on the Brontës at Haworth: half a page about the imaginary land and tales of Gondal, which they wrote tiny little books about as kids. I was super-excited by these stories at the time, not least because I also had a children’s book called “The Twelve and the Genii“, which I liked very much.

]]>
By: Alex S https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2011/10/journey-to-the-centre-of-the-yikes/comment-page-1#comment-928074 Tue, 25 Oct 2011 11:39:58 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=22156#comment-928074 If you want more on his mad brother – and the rest of the brood, all q. interesting – then I recommend Max Adams’ The Firebringers, on sale in the exhibition shop (and also elsewhere). Its wider field is less good – and suffers by comparison with Holmes’ magnificent Age of Wonder – but on the Martins specifically, it is pretty good.

]]>
By: mark sinker https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2011/10/journey-to-the-centre-of-the-yikes/comment-page-1#comment-927974 Tue, 25 Oct 2011 07:28:04 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=22156#comment-927974 Aha, yes, I was confusing Jacques-Louis David with Caspar-David Friedrich! Surnames, people, surnames…

]]>
By: Mark M https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2011/10/journey-to-the-centre-of-the-yikes/comment-page-1#comment-927735 Tue, 25 Oct 2011 00:07:20 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=22156#comment-927735 Re 9: before you even get to the official early Romantics, there was this dude.

]]>
By: koganbot https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2011/10/journey-to-the-centre-of-the-yikes/comment-page-1#comment-927479 Mon, 24 Oct 2011 16:44:16 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=22156#comment-927479 Ha! Didn’t realize until your second paragraph that you weren’t talking about a contemporary artist.

(Yes, I am not up on contemporary art.)

]]>
By: mark sinker https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2011/10/journey-to-the-centre-of-the-yikes/comment-page-1#comment-927471 Mon, 24 Oct 2011 16:33:48 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=22156#comment-927471 I actually wondered how Martin would have seen the Altdorfer (I mean, maybe he travelled round Europe when young), but this often puzzles me a bit about paintings prior to the age of adequate reproduction — which pretty much emerges when JM’s already established his subject matter.

Did Jacques-Louis David paint mountains? Wasn’t there a sublime school of mountains and chasms in the 18th century? (The Hudson River people came after Martin I think.)

]]>
By: lonepilgrim https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2011/10/journey-to-the-centre-of-the-yikes/comment-page-1#comment-927452 Mon, 24 Oct 2011 14:17:57 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=22156#comment-927452 Yes, the Altdorfer painting shares the God’s eye viewpoint that you find in John Martin’s epic images – a spectacular perspective that shapes the somewhat alienating qualities of the pictures. IIRC, the Altdorfer was a reference for some of the battle scenes in the LOTR movies and shares similar qualities of repeated figures (rendered in paint rather than pixels) that emphasise the artifice.

Another relevant image is ‘Coalbrookdale by Night’ by P.J. De Loutherbourg. This featured in the Picture of Britain exhibition at Tate Britain in 2005 in a section entitled Heaven and Hell.

http://www.tate.org.uk/learning/apictureofbritain/heavenhell/midlands.htm

The page linked to above highlights the changes to perceptions of the environment brought by industrialisation and the publication of The Origin of the Species – both of which may have been an influence on Martin’s imagery and the public appetite for them at the time:

]]>
By: mark sinker https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2011/10/journey-to-the-centre-of-the-yikes/comment-page-1#comment-927031 Sun, 23 Oct 2011 22:14:43 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=22156#comment-927031 maybe relevant also: altdorfer’s the battle of alexander

^^^doubleclick to see it big (i had a titanic jigaw puzzle of this as a kid, it took days)

]]>
By: lonepilgrim https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2011/10/journey-to-the-centre-of-the-yikes/comment-page-1#comment-926933 Sun, 23 Oct 2011 17:29:28 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=22156#comment-926933 The same curator, Martin Myrone, organised the ‘Gothic Nightmares’ exhibition at Tate Britain in 2006 and that had some interesting parallels with contemporary culture including one gallery entitled ‘Superheroes’ which appeared to presage Marvel heroes – including Thor and Iron Man – but which also appeared very much of their time with idealised forms and theatrical, compositions.
Details here:
http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/exhibitions/gothicnightmares/rooms/room3.htm
What’s compelling about Martin is how he attempts to render fantastic, mythical events with the appearance of verimisilitude – it’s like Victorian CGI compared to the comparatively Harryhausen or (original) Godzilla style of the earlier artists. However, like CGI, there’s something unengaging about the spectacle, which is made more obvious when he introduces human figures.

]]>
By: mark sinker https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2011/10/journey-to-the-centre-of-the-yikes/comment-page-1#comment-926904 Sun, 23 Oct 2011 15:50:51 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=22156#comment-926904 Incidentally the pic at the top is “The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah”

]]>
By: Bec https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2011/10/journey-to-the-centre-of-the-yikes/comment-page-1#comment-926869 Sun, 23 Oct 2011 14:30:01 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=22156#comment-926869 I really want to see this, but even concessions are a bit pricey. Thanks for the review!

]]>
By: mark sinker https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2011/10/journey-to-the-centre-of-the-yikes/comment-page-1#comment-926867 Sun, 23 Oct 2011 14:27:13 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=22156#comment-926867 Something weird is blocking punctum’s link: try here?

]]>
By: punctum https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2011/10/journey-to-the-centre-of-the-yikes/comment-page-1#comment-926856 Sun, 23 Oct 2011 14:14:17 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=22156#comment-926856 What a good and fortuitous place to link up the next TPL entry.

]]>
By: mark sinker https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2011/10/journey-to-the-centre-of-the-yikes/comment-page-1#comment-926802 Sun, 23 Oct 2011 12:10:03 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=22156#comment-926802 In the middle piece of the actual real Apocalypse triptych, the one which depicts the bottomless gulf opening up between the nice* and the naughty**, he also carefully paints, off in the gloom, an actual train hurtling off into the abyss, so he was presumably still cross his railway system did not make the cut.

*lots of tiny portraits of Victorian slebs, plus Shakespeare, Milton etc, not very well captured since he couldn’t actually “do” faces
**Catholic priests, “moneylenders” (ie Jews), and a whore. I guess he had “issues”, but you don’t paint vast “kill em all let it burn” canvasses unless you’re quite tweaked inside, probably. His brother Jonathan was actually locked up ftb mad — wanted to know more about this — and exhibited a quite hilarious Fall of London, along the same Martin lines, except taking down exactly those that sane brother John said got into heaven. It caused a scandal, and John spent much time and energy protecting and defending Jonathan. Anyway, I ordered the catalogue, so more on this as I find out.

]]>