Capt Dreyfus, Emile Zola and Major Picquard vindicated 1906-2006

This year I gave a conference paper called Captain Dreyfus, The Impressionists and the Politics of Anti Semitism, largely using the images from my blog article, Pissarro, Degas, Zola and Capt Dreyfus, France's ugliest moment. There were at least three heroes whose careers had been destroyed during the affair between 1894-1906, Alfred Dreyfus and Émile Zola of course, and also the heroic Major Georges Picquart who provided the evidence to the court about the real traitor. Major Picquart was later court-martialled for his revelations, proving once again that the French army was going to severely punish whistle blowers.

In both the blog post and the conference paper I left the story at the point where Captain Dreyfus was fully vindicated in 1906, three years after Pissarro was buried in Paris’ Père Lachaise cemetery. It was clear that the bitterness from this case remained in France for a very long time, on both sides of the affair.

One conference goer who heard my paper asked if I had ever seen a statue created by Louis Mitelberg called Hommage au capitaine Dreyfus. I had not. Apparently in the 1980s President François Mitterrand had ordered and paid for this statue of Dreyfus, planned to be located at the École Militaire in Paris. Even after almost 100 years, the French Minister of Defence was bitter about losing the Dreyfus treason case and refused to allow the statue in, or in front of their building. The reader should once again note that the courts had fully exonerated Capt Dreyfus in 1906 and returned him to his army rank with full honours and pay!!

Hommage au capitaine Dreyfus, by Louis Mitelberg, 1985 

Today the statue can be found at the exit of the Notre-Dame-des-Champs metro station and a second version of the statue has been placed at the entrance of the Museum of Jewish Art and History in Paris. Quite separately, in 1999 the City of Paris agreed to name a square in the 15th Arrondissement after Alfred Dreyfus; it is at the corner of the Avenue Emile-Zola.

In 2006, President Jacques Chirac must have been sick and tired of Ministry of Defence’s attitudes and decided to mark the centenary of Dreyfus' return to the army, via a state ceremony. The great grandchildren of these three French heroes, Alfred Dreyfus, Émile Zola and Major Georges Picquart, were present at the 2006 ceremony; it was held, very appropriately, in the same cobblestone courtyard of Paris' École Militaire where Captain Dreyfus had been officially disgraced (see below). In his speech, President Chirac wisely noted that "the combat against the dark forces of intolerance and hate is never definitively won".

Capt Dreyfus' disgrace in École Militaire, Paris. Published in Le Petit Journal of Jan 1895. 

At the same conference, I was referred to the book The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Family's Century of Art and Loss, written by Edmund de Waal and published by Farrar Straus Giroux in 2010. de Waal, curator of ceramics at the Victoria & Albert Museum, described the experiences of his family over decades, as I analysed in a previous post. Now I want to return to the book and focus on the Dreyfus trial.

In 1870 the sons of the Ephrussi family were sent out of Odessa to establish the family banking business in Vienna and Paris. Charles Ephrussi became a serious connoisseur and art collector who flourished during France’s Belle Epoque. He was a collector of paintings in general, and a patron and friend of Impressionists in particular, including Degas, Renoir, Monet and Manet. He bought Une botte d’asperges from Manet and was included in Renoir’s Luncheon at the Boating Party as the out-of-place chap in the top hat and suit at the back of the party, talking to his secretary.

Renoir, Luncheon at the Boating Party, 1881, Phillips Collection Wash DC

Important patron and friend of the arts though he was, Charles Ephrussi did not escape the anger of the anti-Semitic artists. Degas bitterly criticised Renoir for accepting too many commissions from so-called Jewish financiers.

Renoir was even nastier. He complained when Ephrussi began buying works of “Jew art” by (the non-Jew) Gustave Moreau: “It was clever of him to take in the Jews, to have thought of painting with gold colours… Even Ephrussi fell for it, who I really thought had some sense! I go and call on him one day, and I come face to face with a Gustave Moreau!” When the Dreyfus case broke, Charles Ephrussi found himself excluded from the company and friendship of the worst anti-Dreyfusards Renoir and Degas, the very artists he had so handsomely supported.

Bligh, Mutiny on the Bounty, breadfruit

TWO gold medals, awarded to William Bligh (1754 –1817) of Mutiny on the Bounty fame, are to be offered for sale at auction at Melbourne's Dallas Brooks Centre by his descendants (26th-28th July 2011).

This Cornish lad had a rapid rise up navy ranks. Captain James Cook, of international fame, made Bligh his sailing master on the Resolution.  Bligh accompanied the great man in July 1776 on Cook's final voyage to the Pacific.

In the 1780s, Bligh was a captain in the merchant service. Then in 1787, he became commander of HMS Bounty. The botanist Sir Joseph Banks wanted to transplant a crop of breadfruit to the West Indies as food for slaves. The Bounty arrived in Tahiti in 1788, having been delayed 11 months by severe weather, only to find that the breadfruit was out of season. Bligh decided to give the crew six months' shore leave in the tropical paradise; there they waited for the new seeded breadfruit to grow into saplings mature enough for transportation.

Transplanting Breadfruit from Tahiti 
by Thomas Gosse, 1796. 
National Library of Australia

Many of the crew settled into cosy domestic relationships with local women, making life in Tahiti very pleasant. So when it was time to sail for the West Indies in 1789, there were already rumblings in the ranks. Under the leadership of Fletcher Christian, the crew mutinied at sea and placed Bligh and 18 loyal followers in an open 7-metre boat with food and water, but with no charts or navigation aids.

Why did the crew do it? Probably not because Bligh was a vicious and cruel ship captain, at least by standards of the time. He might have been an arrogant sod, but he was an educated man, a scientist, and a captain interested in the health and welfare of his crew.

Bligh, in what is regarded as one of the greatest seagoing feats in history, navigated from the memory of his charts, guiding the overloaded and unstable vessel on a very long voyage and arriving in Timor 47 days later.

A second successful attempt was made to transport the breadfruit, accomplished in 1793.

The mutineers turning Lt Bligh and some of the officers and crew adrift from His Majesty's Ship Bounty, 

by Robert Dodd, April 1789

The first medal up for auction today was awarded in 1794, given by the Royal Society for Bligh's successful work relating to breadfruit. Bligh’s medal carries the inscription on the rim: BREAD FRUIT TREE CONVEYED TO THE WEST INDIES. The estimate for the medal is $50,000.

The second slightly smaller medal, estimated at $200,000, is the Naval Gold Medal 1795, awarded to ship captains. Bligh won it for his role at the Battle of Camperdown 1797. This was an important naval action between the Royal Navy fleet and the Dutch navy, in which the British captured 11 Dutch ships without loss of any of their own.

After his exoneration by the Court Martial inquiry into the loss of the Bounty, Bligh remained in the Royal Navy. He even served under Admiral Nelson in one important battle or another in 1801.

Bligh was offered the position of Governor of New South Wales by Sir Joseph Banks and appointed in March 1805 at a hefty salary. William Bligh was the fourth Governor of NSW between 1806-1810, still very professional and exacting, and still irritating other people. He was aware that some of the officers were acting in their own interests, at the expense of farmers. When he legitimately questioned the unjust trade and land grants being exercised by New South Wales Corps officers, Bligh was arrested by the army in 1808. This was Australia’s only military coup and for the next two years, until the arrival of a new Governor, officers of the Corps took over the role of Governor! Only when the new Governor Lachlan Macquarie arrived with his own regiment in 1810 was justice regained.

Another trial back in Britain and another promotion for Bligh! He was promoted to rear admiral of the Blue and then to vice-admiral in June 1814. What a career!

Portrait of William Bligh, 1804. National Library of Australia (left) and his medal (right)

Rooms with a View in C19th paintings

The art exhibition called Rooms with a View: The Open Window in the C19th was held in the Special Exhibition Galleries, Metropolitan Museum of Art New York, April-July 2011. This exhibition focused on the Romantic motif of the open window as first captured by German, Danish, French and Russian artists around 1810–40. 

Even though the exhibition has closed, you can still read the catalogue essay which was written by Sabine Rewald. And the review by Dr Ben Harvey.

You might have thought this was a limited topic for art historians to get exercised about. Especially since many of the rooms were sparsely furnished and very quiet. Most had one figure who was captured reading, writing or painting; some had more than one figure; the rest had no human presence at all. All 60 works in the catalogue had just one thing in common – an open window.

I am very familiar with the lone figure standing in front of an open window in 17th century Dutch art, so I had expected a lot of comparative works by Vermeer, Dou and de Hooch for example. But sadly there is very little mention of what came before 1800. I found just half a page lightly mentioning C15th Northern Renaissance artists, and the Dutch and Flemish interiors like Vermeer’s Girl Reading a Letter at the Open Window c1659.

So I went to Martha Hollander for an explanation about 17th century Dutch paintings. In her book An Entrance for the Eyes: Space and Meaning in Seventeenth-Century Dutch art, she suggested the view outside C17th Dutch windows positively enriched the primary scene at the centre of the canvas! Even if their open windows invited an analysis of the relationship between public and private life in urban life, Dutch artists never intended to detrimentally compare an unfulfilled life inside the home with a happier one outside.

Perhaps it was for this reason that the Metropolitan brought in paintings for this exhibition from museums in the USA, Denmark, France, Austria, Sweden, Italy and especially Germany, but not from the Netherlands.

Friedrich, View from the Artist’s Studio, c1805, 
graphite and sepia, 31 x 24cm. 
Belvedere, Vienna.

I will start with the most influential example of German artist Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840). In View from the Artist's Studio, Window on the Right, c1805–6, the viewer can see that Friedrich’s studio in Dresden faced the river Elbe. In this small sepia work and its pair, the artist did not seem to be very interested in all the activity out on the Elbe River; rather he focused on achieving a finely tuned balance between the darkened interior and the bright outdoors. I don’t think he quite pulled it off, since the inner walls were too bare and prison-like. But perhaps that was intentional. In this sober presentation of the cut-off point between the inside home and the outside world, Friedrich discovered a Romantic symbol for longing.

Friedrich’s influence was such that his followers settled in Dresden, then a centre of Romanticism. The motif of the open window was not previously known to the Carl Ludwig Kaaz, Johan Christian Dahl and Georg Friedrich Kerstin, but it soon appealed Friedrich’s immediate art circle. Because the younger men copied it and turned it into the classic Romantic subject, View from the Artist’s Studio took on a greater importance that might have been obvious.

Kersting, Woman Embroidering, 1811
oil, 47 c 37 cm, 
Goethe Nationalmuseum Weimar

Georg Kersting (1785–1847) was another German artist who was 11 years younger than Friedrich but they were great friends and professional colleagues. After Napoleon defeated Prussia in 1806-7, Prussia was occupied by French troops. But by 1812-3, Napoleon retreated and a patriotic spirit revived in Germany. Yet Kersting reflected none of Dresden’s war destruction, plagues, hunger or, later, 300,000 French prisoners of war.

In a small oil, Kersting depicted artist Louise Seidler quietly embroidering in an immaculately clean room. The cool light of a summer morning, pale green walls and pale blue-and-white sky were all very gentle. Only the Empire-style furniture, curtain, musical accoutrements and potted plants on the sill gave a sense of the sitter’s personality.

Was Louise Seidler in mourning? Was she sick? The Rooms With a View catalogue suggests that this painting was not intended as a portrait of Ms Seidler, and clearly it was not a landscape; instead it was a study of contemplation and morning light.

Menzel, Artist's Bedroom in Ritterstrasse, 1847, 
Oil, 56 x 46 cm, 
Alte Nationalgalerie Berlin.

Adolph Menzel (1815–1905) was another German artist, but much younger than Caspar David Friedrich and Georg Kersting. He painted this small oil picture of his bedroom in daylight shortly after moving into a large fourth-floor apartment on Ritterstrasse, a lovely new district of Berlin. Menzel too was interested in the effects of light in a very ordinary bedroom. But Menzel turned expectations exactly upside down: he painted the person and furniture inside with room with broad brushstrokes but used exacting details in depicting the view of the distance city outside the window.

How is that possible? Every first year Perception student knows that the human eye can see details up close, but the further away an object gets, the blurrier it becomes. Clearly Menzel used the room interior only as a context for what he was most interested in: the rapidly expanding, and very exciting city outside.

The images in Rooms With A View were well painted, thoughtfully curated and beautifully printed in the catalogue. The question the viewer at the exhibition and the reader of this book has to answer is: “what theme held these 60 early-19th century works together”?

The German Romantics loved untamed nature invested with emotion. They valued their belief in the primacy of feeling, even in natural phenomena. So Rewald’s answer needs to be examined from that Romantic perspective. "The Rom­an­t­ics found a potent symbol for the exper­ience of stand­ing on the threshold between an interior and the outside world. The juxta­pos­it­ion of the close familiarity of a room and the uncertain, often idealised vision of what lay beyond was immediately recog­nised as a metaphor for unfilled longing”. Tahlib said “luminous windows were a yearning for some-thing distant & ineffable, a metaphor for spiritual longing”.

In Constant Moyaux’s View of Rome from the Artist’s Room at the Villa Medici 1863, Rewald’s thesis seems perfectly sound. In Georg Kersting’s Young Woman Sewing by Lamplight 1823, no outside world is visible. Was the young woman longing silently and secretly? Even the best art historian could not answer that question.

Rooms With a View front cover
Friedrich, Woman at the Window, 1822

Rooms with a View: The Open Window in the 19th Century was written by Sabine Rewald for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. It was published by Yale University Press, New Haven and London in 2011 and supplied by H Niyazi of Three Pipe Problem and Inbooks. Many thanks.

Ethel Carrick and E Phillips Fox: love, art

The Art, Love and Life: Ethel Carrick and E Phillips Fox exhibition will continue in the Queensland Art Gallery until 7th August 2011, focusing on an important art marriage. By the turn of the 20th century, their two careers were developing nicely so there is plenty to see. The exhibition uses their paintings to analyse life and society, from bustling urban life, to more peaceful views of family life.

Ethel Carrick (1872–1952) was born near London and studied at the Slade School of Fine Art in London. She became fascinated by the work of Monet and Pissarro, and produced impressionist views which were shown at London’s Royal Academy. Born in Melbourne, Emanuel Phillips Fox (1865–1915) studied art at Melbourne's National Gallery School. He moved to Paris in 1887 to learn at the Academie Julian and the Fine Arts School with the masters, and was lucky enough to study under the incomparable French artist Gerome.
  

Ethel Carrick Fox, French Flower Market, 1909, 

private collection

Ethel Carrick Fox, The Quay at Dinard c1911, 

private collection

So how did they meet? Carrick went to the artists’ colony in St Ives in Cornwall where she met Phillips Fox in 1901. Carrick was fortunate in her choice of husbands since Phillips Fox was already sensitive to women and family life. And once they married in 1905, they settled in Paris where he produced gentle, romantic domestic scenes of women and domestic scenes. And he supported her work as well.

They were not just contemporaries who merely worked in art together. As a married couple, they travelled, ate, painted and slept together, in the centre of Paris until 1913 and then through Europe, North Africa and lastly Australia. The more colourful and exotic the material, the happier they were.

Carrick and Fox’s works celebrated a way of life that was leisured and elegant. They loved the life themselves and Edwardian audiences (loosely 1895-1915) also loved painted beach scenes, picnics and family meals al fresco. The gallery believes that Phillips Fox’s Al Fresco 1905 and Carrick Fox’s Manly Beach 1913, in particular, show how inviting French and Australian beach culture was.

In one sense, the leisured life was not particularly nationalist or specifically Australian in taste. That should not sur­p­rise us. Phillips Fox left Australia in 1887, before the inspirat­ion of the Box Hill and Heidelberg artists’ camps had developed. And he was outside Australia during all the national­ist excitem­ent leading up to Federat­ion. If we had to compare Phillip Fox to anyone, we could best com­p­are the subject matter with that of Mary Cassatt, Auguste Renoir and Berthe Morisot. His long white Ed­wardian dresses exactly capt­ur­ed the light and atmosphere of a summer's day. You can smell the fresh summer grass in all the paintings and feel the dap­p­led sun on the women’s dres­ses. Str­o­k­es of light filled colour flitted on the canvas surface.

E Phillips Fox, Loves me, loves me not c1909, 

Art Gallery of Western Australia

As well as creating their own beautiful works, the couple certainly participated actively in the art scene in Australia. Fox helped establish the Melbourne School of Art in 1893, and continued to teach and support Australian artists throughout his own career. When Phillips Fox passed away in 1915 at a young age, his wife continued to carry on his legacy, promoting her late husband’s work. Unfortunately that meant that his works became very well known in Australia; her works slipped into relative obscurity.

Read the essays in Art, Love and Life: Ethel Carrick and E Phillips Fox, the beautifully illustrated 224 page colour catalogue that accompanied the exhibition. The essays analyse some 100 works assembled from galleries and private collections across Australia. There is no better way to explore the life and times of the Phillips Fox family.

Ochberg's dedication, 2011

In 2005, The Jerusalem Post ran an appeal for information about South African philanthropist Isaac Ochberg. He was the man who helped to finance, and centrally participated in the rescue of Jewish children in 1921 from the Pale of Settlement (Ukraine in particular) and their resettlement in South Africa. A film called The Ochberg Orphans was the result, directed by Jon Blair in 2008.

You might know of heroic figures during WW2 eg Irena Sendler, Oskar Schindler, Raoul Wallenberg, Varian Fry and Nicholas Winton but 1921 seems very early for heroic gestures. Many thanks to my South African friends for bringing this story to my attention.

In early 1920s, reports got through to South Africa of tragic pogroms occurring in the Ukraine. Following the collapse of the old Czarist Empire in 1917, rival Red and White armies were fighting for control. Although the battles did not start out as particularly anti-Semitic, the Jews' condition deteriorated. Famine was followed by typhoid epidemics for the entire population, but it was made worse for the Jews by pogroms. Ukrainian and Polish peasants joined forces with reactionary military forces to massacre Jews wherever they found them inside the Pale of Settlement.

Jews begged their cousins in South Africa for help. These pleas immediately stirred South Africa's Jewish communities. People asked at meetings across the country if at least the children could be rescued from the Ukraine. Before any organisation could step in, generous offers of financial and other assistance were made by Russian-born Cape Town businessman Isaac Ochberg.

Two questions became critical: How could the orphans be rescued from a war-torn region, and would the South African government create any difficulties in admitting them? The Prime Minister, General JC Smuts immediately granted permission to land.

As reports of the Jews' plight continued to arrive in South Africa, the size of the tragedy became clearer. 100,000-150,000 Jewish men, women and children were slaughtered by Ukrainian nationalists and another 400,000 Jewish orphans were starving. The next step was for someone to travel to Eastern Europe and make arrangements on the spot. Ochberg agreed to go. For two months Ochberg travelled by train, wagon and on horseback around the Pale, looking for orphaned children. The Ukrainian children knew only that "The Man From Africa" was coming and he was going to take some of them away to a new home, on the other side of the world.

Ochberg's worst problem was how to select which children to take and which he had to leave in Eastern Europe. Since the South African government required that the children had to be in good physical and mental health, careful selection was essential. In addition, only those who had lost BOTH parents were accepted. In Pinsk alone, so many children had been orphaned that 3 new orphanages had to be opened.

Isaac Ochberg 1879–1938

Ochberg moved from town to town, collecting orphans. How did he get the children out - on wagons!

Three months later, with the 200 children in London, he wrote to the leadership in South Africa: "I have been through almost every village in the Polish Ukraine and Galicia and am now well acquainted with the places where there is at present extreme suffering. I have succeeded in collecting the necessary number of children, and I can safely say that the generosity displayed by South African Jewry in making this mission possible means nothing less than saving their lives. They would surely have died of starvation, disease, or been lost to our nation for other reasons. I am now in London with the object of arranging transport and I hope to be able to advise soon of my departure for South Africa with the children."

A tremendous reception awaited the orphans when they came ashore in Cape Town. So large was the group of children that the Cape Jewish Orphanage was unable to house them all, so 78 went on to Johannesburg.

Many youngsters entered Cape Town High School where a new extension to house the Ukrainians was named the Isaac Ochberg Wing. Ochberg served on the Cape executive of the South African Jew­ish Board of Deputies and bequ­ests were made to Jerusalem’s Hebrew Uni for scholarships. The hero died in 1937 while on an ocean voyage, 59 years old. He was buried in Cape Town at one of the largest funerals ever seen there. Ochberg left what was the largest ever single bequest to the Jewish National Fund. The JNF used it to redeem land in Israel called Nahalat Yitzhak Ochberg - which included the kibbutzim of Dalia and Ein Hashofet.

An Ochberg dedication ceremony will take place at Kibbutz Dalia on 19th of July this year, 90 years after the rescue project. For the thousands of descendants of his orphans, he is the reason they are alive. The original orphans'  children and grandchildren will honour Ochberg’s memory by the establishment of a JNF Memorial Park and museum that will bear his name. As the Blair film suggested, Ochberg's legacy is a reminder that a small group of people can, through their actions, make a big difference.

two Ochberg orphan families

at the Ohberg dedication

isaacochberg.org

The orphans' names have been published in Tracing the Tribe: The Jewish Genealogy Blog. It is recognised that the list is not yet complete and that the spellings may be imperfect.

Charles Dickens' years in Broadstairs, 1837 - 1859

Charles Dickens (1812–1870) spent much of his adolescence and adult life living in London. He and his wife married in 1836 then travelled a great deal, within Britain and overseas. But they always came home to London: 48 Doughty St Holborn (till 1839), 1 Devonshire Terrace (1839-51) or Tavistock House (1851-60). The Holborn house is now a Dickens museum.

While he was still living with his wife, and even after he unceremoniously turfed her out in the 1850s after their 10th baby was born, Charles Dickens and his children spent their summer holidays in Broadstairs, Kent.

High on the Broadstairs cliff top, overlooking Viking Bay, stands a tough-looking house. Originally built in 1801 and called Fort House, it was used as a coastal observation station. I can't tell if the first residents in Fort House were more interested in keeping an eye on the local smugglers or if their biggest concern was Napoleon's navy.

By the Dickens era, Fort House had became a perfectly normal residence with lovely rooms. The place was renamed Bleak House after Dickens’ novel of the same name, written earlier when he was living in Tavistock House London. This was a case of real life copying art.

Bleak House, Dicken's holiday home in Broadstairs from 1837-59.

Dickens must have considered Broadstairs more than a relaxing beach resort during his 22 years there. It was here that he wrote much of his novel, David Copperfield. For ages the lofty Bleak House was a museum; visitors could see where Dickens had worked in his study to the right of the building, looking straight out to sea. This house has now reverted back to a private house, but at least there is an inscribed medallion portrait of Dickens, outside the building.

Luckily many of Dickens’ artefacts, furniture, documents and letters can still be seen at the Dickens Museum, located at Dickens House on the seafront. Visitors can see, for example, a decent collection of prints by HK Browne (Phiz), one of Dickens's principal illustrators. And a writing box, a gift from Dickens’ lifelong friend and biographer John Forster. This house had a slightly weaker connection to Dickens - it was here that Miss Mary Strong lived, the woman who became the model for Betsey Trotwood in David Copperfield. Did he personally visit Miss Strong in her home? I certainly hope so.

Dicken's House Museum, Broadstairs. exterior and one room with Dicken's artefacts

Some rooms in the museum deal with Victorian Broadstairs in general, rather than Dickens in particular. There are Victorian costumes, posters and photography of old Broadstairs on display. So it is appropriate that the museum should play a central role in the annual Dickens Festival each June. Locals and visitors are invited to dress-up in Victorian costumes, evoking an era when Broadstairs was a much loved holiday spot.

Charles Dickens must have been a popular drinker because at least three pubs in Broadstairs claim him as a patron. Right below Bleak House, facing the harbour, is the Tartar Frigate Public House. Named after the naval ship, the HMS Tartar, this was a popular drinking place for sea going types (sailors, fishermen and smugglers) in Dickens’ era. The 200+ year old Charles Dickens Public House, right on the seafront, also loved the Dickens connection. And finally the Royal Albion Hotel was a place where Dickens stayed when he didn’t want to be in Fort House. It too is in the centre of the old town, along the seafront.

Dickens 2012 will mark the bicentenary of Charles Dickens’ birth. The year will launch a major celebration of events and activities in London, but also in Kent. The Broadstairs museum will host a season of lectures and special exhibitions to celebrate the house’s connection to Dickens.

Charles Dickens

Israel's first museum for contemporary design

In 2006 a centenary exhibition celebrated the life and work of Boris Schatz (1867-1932), founder of Bezalel Academy of Arts and Crafts in Jerusalem in 1906 and of the National Bezalel Museum (now Israel Museum). The exhibition was called The Father of Israeli Art, a retrospective exhibition celebrating the life work of Boris Schatz.

The first museum for contemporary design in Israel and one of the existing few anywhere (perhaps 10 or 15 across the world) was designed by Ron Arad Architects. Born in Tel Aviv, Ron Arad graduated from the Jerusalem Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in 1973. The link with Boris Schatz was both irresistible and now complete.

The USA$18 million costs were funded totally by public money and the new museum was carefully located in Holon, a cultural town of 200,000 that is virtually a southern suburb of Tel Aviv. The Museum for Contemporary Design opened in March 2010.

weathered steel ribbons wrap around the two galleries

Arad's split-level museum is made up of a pair of geometric display spaces, together with a studio design space for artists and designers. Outside the building's massive, sinuous curved ribbons cling to the core in flowing  modernity. These sinuous ribbons are made from Corten weathered steel, carefully fulfilling the principles of sculpture, architecture, design and art for the enjoyment of the public. As I am not instantly drawn to very modern architecture, I will look forward to exploring for myself how enjoyable it is.

The architects say that their five sinuous bands of coloured weathered steel actually form a visual key that carries visitors into the building, through it and then out, instantly becoming a string that ties the whole building together. But all good architecture should do that, I would think.

The two simple rectangular galleries are indeed there, once people get through the ribbons. Visitors move through the open-sky Upper Gallery or down the winding staircase, from the lobby to the Lower Gallery. These 750 square meters spaces will showcase exhibitions developed by international design curators. The galleries will have both contemporary and historical pieces from a range of design disciplines, including industrial, fashion, textiles, jewellery.

The museum says it is committed to pioneering a creative arena for the exploration and examination of design principles and interpretations. So the architecture is more than simply exterior walls to house a collection and keep the weather out, exactly as you would expect from an organisation interested in design.

exhibition area: The State of Things

The first exhibition in 2010 that looked very interesting was The State of Things: Design and the 21st Century. It presented 100+ products covering the contemporary practice, consumption and cultural impact of modern international design. The curators worked in 8 categories: New Essentialism, Mutant Remix, Of the Body, Social Anxiety, Beyond the Designer, Super Beauty, Craft Economy and Design Lab, showcasing objects ranging from ordinary household items to modern life-enhancing and life-saving technologies. All of the objects were utterly up to date, through either the materials employed, the concepts conveyed or the uses intended.

Will the external colours and shapes of the Contemporary Design Museum develop the same iconic status as the Guggenheim in New York and the Sydney Opera House? I hope so.

Ruskin, JMW Turner & problem sex

John Ruskin (1819–1900) 's life was always going to be difficult with an extremely devout Calvinist mother. The young man grew up to be intellectually skilled but socially unskilled. At least as far as potential marriage partners  went. After getting his degree at Oxford, he began his career as an art critic, writer, full time thinker and part time artist.

Ruskin soon began collecting pictures by Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851). After graduation in 1842, Ruskin busied himself writing an admiring book about Turner, whose work had been unkindly reviewed by the art critics. The book was called Modern Painters, published in five volumes 1843-60. He then followed this work up with The Seven Lamps of Architecture 1849 and The Stones of Venice published in three volumes 1851-53. Ruskin was clearly a very productive and very talented writer.

Effie Ruskin, modelling in The Order of Release by Millais, 1853, Tate.

In 1848 Ruskin married the gorgeous, young, energetic Effie Gray (1828-97), a marriage that was annulled after six years because he could not or would not tolerate her sexuality. The evidence is readily available. In a letter to her parents, a sad Effie claimed her husband was repulsed by her. "He alleged various reasons, hatred to children, religious motives, a desire to preserve my beauty, and finally this last year he told me his true reason... that he had imagined women were quite different to what he saw I was, and that the reason he did not make me his Wife was because he was disgusted with my person the first evening."

Ruskin confirmed this in his statement to his lawyer in the annulment. "It may be thought strange that I could abstain from a woman who to most people was so attractive. But though her face was beautiful, her person was not formed to excite passion. On the contrary, there were certain circumstances in her person which completely checked it."

Fortunately for Effie, she did not have to remain a virgin for the rest of her life. After the annulment of her marriage to Ruskin, she agreed to be the model for John Everett Millais' painting The Order of Release 1853. In 1855, she married Millais and they had eight delightful children.

John Ruskin in Venice, 1856

Now back to JMW Turner. The rather poorly dressed, badly spoken artist never married, but he did have one very satisfying relationship in the 1730s that lasted until his death in 1851. Martin Gayford wrote that Turner lived in domestic bliss in Margate with his landlady, a buxom and illiterate young widow called Sophia Booth. It seemed to have been the best period he ever spent with a woman, and since income was no longer a problem, the two of them spent more of the time in bed than out of it. Lucky Turner!

Since Turner was not playing out the role of famous artist in Margate and then in Chelsea, he did not use his real name locally. He called himself Admiral Booth while visiting his favourite watering holes.

Turner died at the age of 76 in 1851, leaving behind some 300 paintings and 19,000 drawings that Ruskin catalogued. But Ruskin did more than cataloguing. Ruskin claimed that in 1858 he burned bundles of paintings and drawings done by Turner during the Sophia Caroline Booth era, to protect Turner's posthumous reputation. Turner's reputation would have been at risk, presumably, because either Turner and Booth were living in sin, or because the paintings and drawings had sexualised content. In either case, Ruskin had been vigorously defending Turner for 10 years and felt betrayed by the older man.

Ruskin's friend Ralph Nicholson Wornum (1812-77), Keeper of the National Gallery, 1855 til his death, might or might not have known about the destruction of Turner's works.

Turner, Waves Breaking on a Lee Shore in Margate, c1840, Tate.

Were the censored paintings and drawings erotic? Did they show Sophia Booth lounging around in dishabille? Now I don’t care if Ruskin liked sex with women, sex with men, sex with prostitutes or no sex ever in his entire life. He was an adult who was perfectly capable of making his own decisions, even socially inept ones. But he made decisions that affected Turner’s legacy. And even if the paintings and drawings that he destroyed were awful, Ruskin still didn’t have the right to deny art historians, collectors, galleries and art lovers access to Turner’s total ouevre.

Readers might like to read William James’ book The Order of Release - The Story of John Ruskin, Effie Gray and John Everett Millais, published by John Murray in 1946.

Robert Hewison's book Ruskin, Turner and the Pre-Raphaelites, was published by the Tate in 2000. It accompanied their exhibition of the same name.

Napoleon's house in exile: St Helena

Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte was exiled, for the first time, following his abdication at Fontainebleau and arrived on Elba Island in May 1814. He was allowed a personal escort of some 1000 men and a household staff, plus he was given the title Emperor of Elba and rule over its 110,000 people. It may have been exile, but life was good.

Longwood House, St Helena

When Napoleon Bonaparte was sent into exile for a second time, his British captors were very serious about him not escaping, as he had done from his first exile. It was inevitable that the British would be very angry with their violent enemy who, for 20 years, had cost them blood, sweat and many tears.

They selected St Helena Island, a remote Atlantic island located between the equator and the tropic of Capricorn, 1920 ks off the west coast of Africa. The island, with its fortress-like geology, was uncomfortably exposed to the strong trade winds. In June 1816, the French Commissioner wrote about St Helena that “This is the most isolated, the more unaffordable, the most difficult to attack, the poorest, the most unsociable and the dearest place in the world”.

Longwood's salon, renovated

Longwood House was the residence of Napoleon during his St Helena exile, from December 1815 until his death in May 1821. It is situated on a windswept plain, 6 ks from Jamestown. Formerly the summer residence of the Lieutenant Governor, Longwood was converted for the use of Napoleon in 1815 but it was never truly posh.

As L'AUTRE SAINTE-HÉLÈNE has shown, Longwood House offered the following rooms to the exiled ex-Emperor :
1. his bedroom
2. his study
3. his bathroom
4. a small service room for his valet
5. the dining-room where Napoleon entertained his followers
6. the library
7. the salon where Napoleon and his guests retired after dinner
8. the parlour, where his billiard table stood and
9. the veranda
The rest of the pre-existing rooms were service rooms: kitchen, a common room for domestic staff, storage space and a laundry.

St Helena's isolation in the Atlantic Ocean

New rooms were built after 1815, for the officers and their families, as laid out in the contemporary architectural plans. A section of the servants’ quarters and the generals’ wing has been dedicated to a good collection of Napoleonic era prints, furniture and objects.

In Feb 1818, Governor Sir Hudson Lowe proposed to Lord Bathurst that Napoleon be moved to Rosemary Hall, an empty house that was located in a more hospitable and sheltered part of the island. But Lord Bathurst saw that Longwood House was quite a distance from any other dwelling, thereby reducing any communication with the outside. Escape would be harder to plan.

The Emperor chose Sane Valley for his own burial site. He hiked into Sane Valley on one of his walks and was delighted with the peaceful landscape and attractive plants that grew there. He was indeed buried in this Valley of the Tomb. But as we know, but Napoleon didn’t know, his body was later (in 1840) exhumed and returned to Paris.

After Napoleon's death, Longwood House reverted to the East India Company and later to the Crown. Reports of its neglect reached Napoleon III who, from 1854, negotiated with the British Government for the house’s transfer to France. In 1858 it was transferred to the French Government, along with the Valley of the Tomb for a sum of £7,100. Since then both sites have been under the control of the French Foreign Ministry; a French Government representative has lived on the island and has been responsible for managing both properties.

Napoleon on St Helena, by Charles Von Steuben

The French Government planned to demolish the neglected building in the 1940s. Amazingly Longwood House was saved, and was accurately restored by French curators although I suspect much of the material is not original. But it doesn't matter because the house is now an important historical museum owned by the French government.

Country Life magazine (13th April 2011) reported that sections of the Lockwood House Museum are now crumbling and in urgent need of repair. An appeal has been launched by the Foundation Napoleon to rescue the house, its grounds and its woods. The French Ministry of Foreign Affairs is also well aware of the exceptional historical importance of the French domains on St Helena.

Napoleon was buried in the Valley of the Tomb, in 1821.

If you thought Foundation Napoleon had an uphill battle convincing people that Napoleonic history on St Helena was worth saving, consider this. The Royal Mail Ship St. Helena already offers voyages between the UK and Cape Town, via the island of St. Helena. The ship recognises that it is virtually the only way of getting to these remote, rugged and beautiful islands. Everything on them must be delivered by sea. Ship visitors are taken to examine, amongst other places, three Napoleonic sites:  the Briars, where Napoleon stayed when he first arrived on the island; Longwood House, where he lived; and the Valley of the Tomb, where he was buried.