by Natalie Bennett

You’re visiting the exotic and foreign Eastern Empire at the Royal Academy, but you begin on more familiar ground: in Classical territory – a spectacular full-room mosaic. While the subject of a modestly sized white marble sculpture is Jonah, the style is entirely Classical, as is that of a head of Constantine nearby.

But by the time you get to a sarcophagus front from Constantinople in the last third of the 5th century you’re heading into a recognisably Christian aesthetic; the saint’s hand is turned in benediction at a wholly impossible angle and his proportions greatly exaggerated for effect – symbol is becoming more important than harmony and naturalism.

But there’s also a reminder of just how kitsch the late empire could be — a trait we tend far more to associate with the Eastern Empire — in three elaborate gilded chair ornaments from Rome, and a multicoloured cameo from the same source. And one case of ivory demonstrates clearly the disappearance of perspective that becomes so characteristic of icons; some have it, if roughly; the makers (and presumably consumers) seem not so much to have lost the knowledge as lost interest. (Loss of perspective is what cubism did, of course, and we think that’s brilliant.) With a diptych leaf with a Byzantine empress in ivory from the 6th century, you couldn’t get a finer piece of craft work.
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by Natalie Bennett

Many of the male portraits in the Renaissance Faces exhibition at the National Gallery are well known, iconic even – take Hans Holbein the Younger’s “The Ambassadors”. Although among the famous depictions of women here are the wife of Giovanni Arnolfini, and the much talked about Quinten Massys “The Ugly Duchess”, a savage portrait of female old age.

So to get a different perspective on the Renaissance, and meet the best collection of the women of the age now possible, I decided to go around the exhibition concentrating on the women – and the real women. (There’s obviously been a commendable desire here for gender balance, but it did lead to Virgins and “ideal” women being included among the genuine portraiture.)

One of the oldest real faces of women we have from anywhere is one of the youngest people here, a portrait that is probably of Blanche, daughter of Henry IV of England, who married Ludwig of Bavaria in 1402 at age 10. (The portrait here is probably from a few years after that.)

In profile, as is usual for the time, she’s notable for savagely plucked eyebrows and a thorough ageless face. (Perhaps the way the artist dealt with her youth.) Not looking into our eyes make her seem distant, aloof and much older than her years

It’s carefully bland, unlike Alesso Baldovinetti’s “Portrait of a Lady” c 1465, which has a faint, Mona Lisa-like smile. You feel like she’s glimpsing you feel out of the corner of her eye, and something of the set of the jaw suggests a strong character.
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by Natalie Bennett

There’s much pressure these days on museums and galleries to be “relevant”, to be “interactive”, to be “accessible”. All too often this results in embarrassingly clunky efforts by curators to get down with “the kids”, to squeeze ancient objects into modern debates, to take multimedia places it should be decent left out of.

Taking Liberties – the Struggle for Britain’s Rights and Freedoms, the exhibition that has just opened at the British Library, is very much a reaction to these demands – but it suffers from none of the typical faults. When you look at an early version of the Magna Carta, with the debate over 42 days detention echoing in your ears from a nearby screen, then this is a genuine, unmistakable case of history being relevant to today.

The continual rediscovery and reinvention of the Magna Carta at the heart of English law is perhaps the most powerful single story here. The exhibition pays rightful honour to Sir Edward Coke in rediscovering and redeploying the Magna Carta in the 17th century, and notes that William Blackstone, whose Commentaries dominated teaching of English law, celebrated it as the as the fount of modern liberties and the rule of law. But I was most pleased to learn that a woman had a role in this. Possibly the first printing of the Magna Carta in English was by “Elisabeth, widow of Robert Redman” in 1541.

Again we’re back to modern day parallels though, with the history of the Haebus Corpus Act of 1679. Learning that it was passed after judges, jailers and politicians manipulated old rules by moving prisoners between jails or transferring them to Scotland, one immediately thinks of George Bush, Guantanamo and the whole “they’re enemy combatants” sleight of tongue.
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by Natalie Bennett

There’s both irony and inevitability that my introduction to a great Australian artist, Fred Williams, should have been not during my first 25-odd years in Australia, but much later in London, today at the Tate Modern. I read there that for the art world he emerged in the 50s and 60s, but when I was at school in the 80s in Sydney the continuing cultural cringe ensured that “Art” meant long-dead white males – the European masters.

Williams had taken the inevitable path for the talented post-war Australian, coming to London to art school, and there’s one of his early works on show in the “Sign and Texture” exhibition at the Tate Modern, in which he is the dominant artist. There’s an early piece from London in 1955, “Coal Delivery”, displaying a murky, peasouper palette. Back in Australia, his “St George River” from 1960 traces of that influence remain – the richness of the brown is distinctly European.

By “Dry Creek Bed” (1977) his palette has evolved to perfectly capture the washed-out, tired tones of Australia’s ancient soils, combined with the dangerous reds of a leaping bushfire and the drained olive of a eucalypt in mid-summer. And he’s perfectly evocative of the landscape despite the abstraction of form: this semi-aerial view of in this narrow, mindlessly meandering, river through the sharply cut sandstone cliffs, exposing the bones of this ancient fragile ecology instantly took me back to a landscape of my youth – the dangerous wildlands around Fitzroy Falls just south of Sydney.

Nearby at the Tate is “Burnt landscape II”, its great sweeping horizon managing to convey the immensity of the fire’s power, its overwhelming textured blackness firmly routed in reality.

That Wlliams didn’t make it into my art curriculum might not have only been because of nationality. There’s something dangerously radical in his way of seeing the river as it really is, not in photographic form but its skeleton, its essence. Just looking at this painting took me back to hearing Tim Flannery, Australia’s foremost scientific public intellectual, saying that this fragile, damaged land could sustainable support just a few million rapacious humans.
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by Natalie Bennett

I can still remember the Eureka moment when I grasped that the book was a technology; when you think about it not as a given, but an artefact of time and place (and an artefact that even in my time has changed quite a lot – the relative cost has dropped enormously, and people now treat books far more casually than even a couple of decades ago.) Suddenly something that seemed a given was much more complex and interesting.

Forefronting the book, exploring its nature, understanding what it does to us and what we do to it, are at the centre of the Victoria & Albert Museum’s exhibition Blood on Paper: The Art of the Book. It is meant entirely as a compliment to say that this could easily be at the Tate Modern – or even the Pompidou in Paris; this is an intellectually sophisticated exhibition, if an uneven and sometimes oddly selected one.

It begins with by far its most powerful, even haunting piece, Kiefer’s “The secret life of plants”, a huge, 2m-high “book” of lead sheets bound with cardboard. On the “pages are partial maps of the stars. The stars themselves are solid accretions of white, thick and chancelike, the human labels, long strings of numbers laid on them by Nasa, and the occasional galaxy names are roughly written on with removable tape, the cardboard binding and these are frail, ephemeral things but the lead and the stars that mark it might survive, you feel forever, to be read (as nothing else we could leave conceivably could be read) by a future alien long after human life has disappeared into oblivion. (I can’t find an image of this particular work, but it is broadly similar to this.)

Many parts of the exhibition are more traditional – artists simply illustrating books, fine art bound with words. Standout among these for me included the edition of Jane Eyre illustrated by Paula Rego (you might recognise the name from her wonderful Germaine Greer portrait in the National Portrait Gallery). Today it was open at the page that has the text describing Mr Rochester’s young French ward Adele charming lady visitors. Beside it is a powerful lithograph of an uncertain child sitting in the lap of a gowned but far from aristocratic lady. In the background are figures from a child’s nightmares, giant menacing nurses, and a scene of a woman being torn from her bed. Nearby is Louise Bourgeois’s etching of a spider, both beautiful and terrible and Balthus’s lithographs for Wuthering Heights nearby are equally dark.

But it is when the artists play with the book, mutilate, trap it, deform it, that this exhibition really gets interesting, and has an explanatory power.
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by Natalie Bennett

At the heart of I Saw Myself there is a woman – a powerful, self-aware, sexual, physical woman. This is Eve before she was castrated by the Abrahamic religions. She’s not good – but she strong, and she glories in that strength. She’s a Western Kali – whether she uses her power for good or evil is to her incidental.

The woman, the queen, is Sleev, played here with passion and breath-stopping charisma by Geraldine Alexander. As the playwright, Howard Barker writes in the introduction, “we know the epic status of the faithful wife“. Here he grants the same to the faithless. As Sleev not so much says but proclaims: “I’m not Penelope, that flaccid packet of fidelity.”

Sleev plays the women and men around her like sacrificial pawns. She’s super-intelligent, manipulative, and magnificent, and with a different set of genitals she’d have made a superb king – a young Hal, but with brains. She plays games to stave off ennui, and is disappointed that no one can compete. We get little sense of her husband, killed in battle, but he was obviously no match for her. The only person in this troubled court who sees through her, but is still unable to resist her through the barrier of class, is her “best maid”, Ladder, played with sophisticated, passionate restraint by Jules Melvin.

This is a grand tragedy, in a pattern familiar for more than two millennium, yet there’s something new and fresh here in the previously unstageable honesty, and the preparedness to see and engage with women in their own terms. (It’s hard to believe this was written by a man.) Unlike their predecessors over many centuries, these characters aren’t trapped by stage convention into metaphors and symbols for sex – when they talk about sex, when they have sex, then that’s presented in all of its full frontal humanness.
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