Monumental elephants in French public art

By November 1789 the Bastille Prison structure in Paris was largely demolished but what would take its place? On the Place de la Bastille, the very birthplace of the Revolution, Emperor Napoleon wanted a monument to the glorious past. He settled on a great elephant, a statue so monumental that visitors could climb inside through a staircase in one of its legs, and up to a tower on its back. Napoleon planned many urban regeneration projects for Paris and loved monuments to his victories. In this case, he clearly wanted to create a significant triumphal structure to demonstrate his military skills in the East.

Elephant of the Bastille, Paris

24 metres high!!

engraving in Le Magasin pittoresque, 1834.

Napoleon ordered the elephant be cast in bronze, melted down from cannons captured during his military victories. But Nap­ol­eon was impatient. Rather than waiting for this bronze to arrive, he had a full-scale model of the elephant created in plaster and placed on the site. Alas the bronze to transform the elephant into a perm­anent structure never arrived, and as Napoleon’s regime was coming to a rather pathetic end in 1814, the plaster structure was left to rot.


The creator of Moulin Rouge, Joseph Oller and his manager Charles Zidler, were canny businessmen who understood the belle epoque taste for the somewhat Low Arts. In particular Oller had noticed the com­mercial success of the very popular dances at the Élysée Montmartre and de­cided to open a rival dance hall nearby. In October 1889, the Moulin Rouge opened in the Jardin de Paris, at the foot of the Montmartre hill.

The business plan was to encourage rich Parisians to get down and get dirty in a fash­ionable district, Montmartre. The extravagant setting allowed people from all walks of life to mix comfortably. Workers, local residents, artists, the middle classes, businessmen, elegant women and lots of English men travelled to Montmartre to enjoy the entertainment together.

Moulin Rouge, Paris

1900

A decade later, the owner purchased a huge wooden and stucco elephant from the Exhibition Universelle/World’s Fair which happened to be held in Par­is, and installed it in the gardens. The workers made a spiral stair-case entrance to it inside one of the legs and, on a stage housed in its stomach, female dancers performed sensual belly dances. Only men were allowed in and only on payment of a fee (1 franc each). The photo shows mainly women at the tables; pres­umably their husbands are crawl­ing around the inside of the elephant on excited hands and knees. Another possibility was that the men were running an opium den in the elephant’s stomach. Never mind! The outdoor living was very pleasurable, at least in summer.

The elephant was situated at the back of the building, and not vis­ible from the street. But its semi-secret location didn’t save the beast from dest­ruction. Within a decade, the entire construction had been broken up and carted away.


The Ile de Nantes was a large and very busy island in the middle of the River Loire in Western France, responsible for ship building, warehouses and dockyards. But once the shipyards closed in 1987, the island started to look like a tragic ghost town.

mechanical elephant

Island in the River Loire,

Nantes

Since then, the Machines of the Isle has been created by 2 artist-inventors, resurrecting the derelict warehouses of the former shipyards. They were “visualising a travel-through-time world at the crossroads of the imaginary worlds of Jules Verne and the mechanical universe of Leonardo da Vinci”.

Three major machine-projects were planned from the beginning, two of them now completed and operational: Great Elephant in 2007 and Marine Worlds Carrousel in 2012. The final project, the Heron Tree, will not be finished until next year. But that doesn’t matter since in this post, I want to talk about elephants. Nantes’ mechan­ical elephant is amazing and huge (12 ms high). It is made from reclaimed wood and steel, and is so strong that it can carry 50 pass­en­gers for a 45-minute walk. To impress the people watching the performance, the elephant emerges trumpeting from its hangar and sprays visitors with water from its trunk. To impress the passengers on board, it is possible discover the structure of the machinery from the inside and to feel each vibration, while enjoying the impressive view of Nantes.


I am not sure if these three elephants compare well against the Eiffel Tower and Chartres Cathedral as engineering marvels of their times, but the French must have found them very appealing. As did the tourists.

Australia's first female, and very fine Prime Minister - Julia Gillard

Since Australia federated and became a sovereign nation on the 1st January 1901, prime ministers have come and gone. Some were intelligent, some were learned, some were ideologically principled and some were heroic during tough times facing the nation. But until 2010, they were all male. This was a tragedy for the 51% of the population who were not male.

Julia Gillard (born 1961) was the first woman to become leader of the Labour Party and as that party was in power, the first woman to become Prime Minister of this great nation. From 24th June 2010 to 27th June 2013 she was a prime minister with vision, particularly in the areas beloved by ordinary families - education, universal health care, disabilities, the environment and climate change. I did not like the Labour Party's policies on asylum seekers, but no party can be perfect.

Yesterday she was shafted by males who could not tolerate being led by a woman. 

Julia Gillard, prime minister

How do we know that the three years of her prime ministership, when the world was turned upside down by staggering unemployment, a falling USA dollar and rapidly shrinking markets, were hugely successful? Examine the credit ratings by the three international ratings companies: Standard and Poor's, Fitch and Moody's. Of the 193 nations on earth, very very few nations sustained a Triple A rating from all three ratings companies:

Australia
Canada
Denmark
Finland
Germany
Luxembourg
Netherlands
Norway
Singapore
Switzerland
Sweden 

Australia is one of the few.

The Sydney Morning Herald got it right. The hypocrisy in this nation is breathtaking as well as shameful. We treated our first female prime minister disgracefully while she was in office, and now that she has been driven out, it seems she is going to be denied even the solace of having her extraordinary raft of achievements recognised. The prime minister's amazing three years have been thoroughly trashed – by the opposition, by the media and now by the Labour Party caucus. Not even the nine women ministers on Parliament's front bench showed any sisterly solidarity.

Shame, Australia, shame.

**

My nephew, not an insensitive young man at all, said women should just get over the Labour leadership vote. There was no gender issue; just a party trying to win the next election. I shall send him a copy of Nikki Gemmell’s column in the Weekend Australian Magazine (29/6/13). Nikki’s key issue was as follows.

Becoming prime minister, aiming for it, was the holy grail for my generation of women, the daughters of the tide of feminist euphoria that swept the western world 40 years ago. (Me too, Nikki. My crit­ical years as a feminist were 1963-1972). You can be anything, we were repeatedly told – political leader, soldier, captain of ind­ustry, crusader, whatever you want. Blaze the trail.

But now with the insidious destruction of Julia Gillard’s prime min­istership, do we want our shining girls to be harangued, ridiculed, mocked in sustained verbal stoning; reduced to nothing but their body parts, their genitalia openly discussed in public; to be treated so shockingly differently?


A lot of women felt grubbied after that ignominious week.

People might like to read the book The Stalking of Julia Gillard: how the media and Team Rudd brought down the prime minister by Kerry-Anne Walsh. Published by Allen & Unwin just now (July 2013), focuses the right wing, anti-woman media's treatment of on Team Rudd and the slow-death campaign of destabilisation, with its disastrous effect on Gillard and the government's functioning. It is about a politician who was never given a fair go; not in the media, not by Rudd, not by some in caucus.

Love, sex and family wealth in Florence

Two years ago the topic of Italian marriage chests had mesmerised me in this blog. In noble families, marriage in Renaissance Italy involved huge expense by both sides. The parents were obliged to buy costly furniture, clothes and jewels for the young couple, and amongst the most expensive object was a beautifully crafted and painted wedding cassone. This chest was used to store blankets or perhaps clothes at the foot of the marital bed. But more importantly, guests were entertained and family discussions were held in the same space. As the cassone provided the backdrop to the life of the family, the painted decorations on the top and sides of the cassone were carefully chosen, providing both entertainment and instruction.

Cassone, 1460

tournament scene, painted on the front panel

National Gallery London

Tempera on panel, 38 x 130 cm 

As with all furniture, the cassone changed slightly with each generation. By the late C15^th, a new classicising taste became very popular across Italy so we would expect cassoni to be carved and gilded, with painted panels, fluted corner pilasters, friezes and cornices.

A delightful panel from a 15th century Italian cassone was on display at the Biennale des Antiquaires at the Grand Palais, Paris in Sept 2012. Presented by Moretti Fine Art, the panel showed some sort of detailed and colourful battle scene, expensively presented and very wide. 

I was alerted to this cassone by Country Life magazine of 5th Sept 2012. The arts jour­­n­alist recorded that the panel had been part of the Earl of Crawford’s estate for generations, until it finally went to public auction in London in 1946. Did the 27th Earl of Crawford need a quick burst of cash? Did he keep the cassone and only sell the front panel? In 1946 the auction house believed the “classical battle scene was in the manner of the Master of the Cassone”. When the same panel was sold again in 1979, it had been re-identified as by “the Master of the Anghiari Battle”.

  

Left half of battle panel (above)

 Right half of battle panel (below)

Florentine cassone panel, 
45 x 160 cm, 15th century 
Moretti Fine Art.

By the time this cassone was painted, the era of painting courtly romance or religious themes had largely passed; cultivated families were more likely to select classical mythology or historical themes. However I would love to know why war was thought to be an appropriate theme for a young couple. Surely the sight of deadly weapons and battle horses would have been a sexual turn-off!

Gallery president Fabrizio Moretti believed the battle scenes on this panel showed the Roman army clashing with the forces of a rival city-state, perhaps Venice. The martial theme, Moretti believed, implied that the cassone was commissioned by a bride for her groom. It proved the virility of her beloved.

For a cassone theme more related to marriage, see a chest that is in the V&A’s Medievaland Renaissance Galleries. The curators say that marriage chests were normally made in pairs. They were emblazoned with the coats of arms of both families and often decorated with the wedding procession on the front panel. This cassone was made from Central Italian poplar and walnut, joined and nailed, and decorated with modelling in gesso and gilding. The figures were depicted in Burg­undian fashions, which were much in vogue in Florence between 1440-50. This chest was bought in 1863, from an English or Italian dealer in Italy who in 1869 sold the V&A the front panel of what could once have been its pair. This item is a rare example of a surviving cassone that retains its original plinth base.

cassone 1445-50

wedding procession on the front panel

V&A London

My favourite image on top panel of this cassone was where the groom placed the ring on his bride’s finger in the presence of a city dignitary in a red cloak and hat. Clearly the wedding was a secular event which took place in the gardens… and not a priest in sight! On the plinth, the artist painted two pairs of angels holding up the coat of arts of the newly married couple.

**

None of the museums suggests an origin for decorative cassone art. But consider the suggestion from Early Renaissance Painting in Italy that artist Paolo Uccello (1397-1475) may have been the inspiration. Uccello was best known for the three panels in his famous Battle of San Romano (1438-55), painted for the Medici Palace. The paintings were intended as wall decorations and as such resembled tapestries: Uccello was only interested in creating a small box-like space for the action, since he ended the background with a tapestry-like composition of men and animals. His main concern was with the rhythmic arrangement of the elements of the composition across the surface, an emphasis which he underlined with a repetition of arcs and circles. Uccello's focus on the decorative and linear aspects of painting had a significant impact on the cassone painters of Florence. So, I imagine, did his dates.

Eugène Boudin: the man who mentored Monet?

Today my students were examining 19th century artists who painted en plein air.  Partially this was an ideological issue in that a person could only be true to nature if he was standing among nature when he painted. Anything else would be dishonest. And partially it was a technical issue in that light, shadow, colour and wind changed all the time. A person who painted from inside a city studio would not manage to select the right paint colours and effects.

Boudin, Personnages sur la plage de Trouville, 1865

Musée Eugène Boudin, Honfleur

Eugène Boudin (1824-1898) was one of the first French landscape painters to paint outdoors, although he did not start life as an artist. Boudin was born in Honfleur, on the English Channel coast of France, near La Havre. He grew up with the sea at his feet and the sea breeze blowing in his hair. Plus he had another great advantange – his father was a sea man.

The young man visited nearby Trouville where he set up a framing business. There he came into contact with artists working in the area and exhibited the works of Jean-François Millet and Gustave Courbet in his shop. Eventually Boudin decided to toss in the business, to become a full time artist himself. By 1856, Boudin had met the younger artist Claude Monet (1840-1926) and the two of them seemed to have worked together in a successful mentor-student relationship.

Boudin's predilection for the study of light led him to apply the Series Principle at an early stage. This innovative approach prefigured the one subsequently applied by Monet, whose series of Rouen Cathedral was painted long after Boudin's church images. Monet declared “I consider Eugène Boudin as my master” so it is not a coincidence that Boudin participated in the First Impressionist Exhibition with his younger colleagues.

The exhibition called Corot to Monet at the National Gallery London in July 2009 was very helpful in placing Corot and Boudin as the early masters and the young Impressionists as later arrivals.

Because Boudin was at heart a maritime Frenchman, the Normandy coast became a major location for his paintings, en plein air of course. I don’t know how much of a sailor he was, but he certainly showed talent in depicting sand, sea, boats, bathers and the fishing industry. But was he self-taught? I cannot find any record of Boudin having attended any art school.

Boudin,  On the Beach at Sunset, 1865

Metropolitan Museum Art, Washington DC

38 x 58 cm

I had expected Trouville to be a very humble port with nothing more exciting than a few hard working fishermen, chasing their daily haul. But by the time Boudin got to Trouville, the pace of life was rapidly changing, largely I assume because of the new railway connections. The Parisian middle class had discovered that Trouville was a very pleasant place to holiday and then the moneyed families arrived from Britain. Fashionable hotels opened across the road, facing the beach. People dressed very nicely for their daily promenade over the sand, the jetty filled up with pleasure seekers towards sunset and casinos after sunset.

I have included Personnages sur la plage de Trouville 1865 (top) even though it showed sky but very little sea, sand or weather. But it was one of his small, portable canvases that he painted right on the beach, carefully capturing the fancily dressed men and women. We can see the long and voluminous skirts, flowery hats, bowlers, suits and vests. In some of his works, we can also see the gentle city folk holding parasols against the sun. We can also start to see his mastery of light in these small works of art.

In the 1870s, when Trouville Beach Scene was painted, Richard Green said the artist had adopted a freer, flickering brushwork which melded the figures, sea and cloud-flecked sky into one sparkling impression. His palette was a subtle mix of greys, blues, beige and buff, enlivened with touches of red. Boudin rendered both the play and reflection of light and the outline of people and objects; his palette of greys and blues, his shading, his consistent harmony were an accurate reflection of nature glimpsed sensitively. He may have had a sailor's frankness and open-heartedness, but Boudin’s 300 seascapes looked radiant.

Boudin, Entrance to Trouville Harbour, 1888, 

National Gallery London

32 x 41 cm

I have no doubt that Boudin mixed with the Barbizon artists south of Paris. But his choice of landscapes and seascapes was not influenced by Millet, Courbet, Corot etc. Rather it was his younger decades spent along the Normandy coast that inspired his passion for natural coastal images. And he was inspired by the market opportunities - he hoped that the crowds of summer visitors would buy his coastal paintings and take them home, after their holiday ended.

**

The Musée Eugène-Boudin in Honfleur has a decent collection of works by the artists who loved to paint along the coast at a time when Impressionism was just starting. Readers may enjoy the pastels and paintings by Boudin himself.

Monet, The Beach at Trouville, 1870

Monet's new wife and her friend, thought to be Madame Eugène Boudin

National Gallery, London

Each March, the European Fine Art Fair/TEFAF is held in the Dutch city of Maastricht. "The Father of Impressionism: Eugène Boudin and his Circle" is the catalogue written by Susan Morris and published by Richard Green Publishers London in 2016 to accompany this year's TEFAF exhibition.

Detective Inspector Rebus, what does your name mean?

Detective Inspector John Rebus is the star of the excellent detective novels created by the Scottish writer Ian Rankin. Did the inspector ever realise what his surname meant?

King’s College Cambridge found books of riddles and word puzzles that were published in the C16th e.g A Little Book of Riddles (1656). Anagrams and acrostics appeared in books and even high-brow literary journals got involved. Famous writers, poets and statesman such as Jonathan Swift, David Garrick, Horatio Walpole and William Cowper created puzzles for their own entertainment and the amusement of their clever contemporaries.

Jacob Levernier described visual puns, rebuses and codes in late medieval art where “a good pun was its own reword.” Evidence for patrons’ interest could be found in images that drew on witty and often scholarly word play. Creative homonyms and lively rebuses appeared in sculpture, painting and archit­ecture. But Lever­nier was specifically interested in studies that were applied to sculpture whose imagery and message could be correlated to their architectural space.

So what was a rebus? It was a visual pun or allusional device that used pictures to represent words, and especially parts of words. It was a favourite form of heraldic expression used from the late C15th to denote surnames. The ex­ample that most appealed was the rebus of Bishop Walter Lyhart of Nor­w­ich, con­sisting of a stag/hart lying down in water. “Hart” and “lying down” together represented Lyhart.

Sir Ralph Shelton's rebus in Norfolk

Sir Ralph Shelton rebuilt the church at Shelton in Norfolk and in his will of 1497, he asked that his personal devices appear on every roof corbel and niche, as well as the nave aisle windows. The rebus used an "R" plus a "shell" plus a "tun/barrel", together representing the patron of the church: R. Shelton

The rebus alluded to the name, profession or personality of the bearer, and said in Latin Non verbis, sed rebus i.e not by words but by objects. Of all professions, rebuses were most popular amongst churchmen. John Goodall gave the example of John Islip, Abbot of Westminster (1500-53) whose rebus showed an “eye” with a man “slipping” from a tree. 

There were many sculpted “owl” rebuses on the walls, ceiling and tomb in the chantry chapel of Bishop Oldham (d1519), in Exeter Cathedral. Some versions had the word “dom” on a scroll hanging from the owl’s mouth, just in case the viewer needed help in being to read the bishop’s surname. 

Canting arms were heraldic bearings that represented the bear­er's name in a visual pun or rebus eg for Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, the arms contained images of “bows” and of “lions”. But a family might have a rebus as a personal identification device, entirely separate from the family’s formal armorials. For example in the mid C16th Sir Richard Weston’s arms used: Ermine, on a chief azure five bezants. His rebus, on the other hand, was a “tun” i.e a barrel, used to designate the last syllable of his surname. It was displayed on terracotta plaques on his Surrey mansion.

I presume that only the wealthy would require architectural sculpture carved on the front of their homes, and only the very literate would be interested in esoteric word games using three languages – Latin, French and English. The rebus might have been a common literary form of the age but Nils Thomasson published his book in 1661 that set out the rules for creating rebuses. Most importantly, a picture of an object could not be used to represent that word, since that took no intelligence to decipher at all

The V & A Museum has a modern example of a book plate.  This C19th rebus, consisting of “trees” and “bees” was a simple rendition of the author's name Ashbee.

**

In 2007, the author Ian Rankin appeared in an BBC Four series, exploring the origins of his famous character, Inspector John Rebus. Called Ian Rankin's Hidden Edinburgh, Rankin looked at the origins of the character and the events that led to his creation. I would be keen to know if Rankin discussed the hero’s surname. After all the enigmatic inspector was a complex character who was not fully understood by his colleagues or friends.

Eugenia Falleni - a miscarriage of justice in Sydney

I read Mark Tedeschi’s book Eugenia Falleni: a true story of adversity, tragedy, crime and courage (published by Simon & Schuster, 2012) in two nights. The story is indeed tragic, but mesmerising in a car-crash sort of way. And I did not even mind the element of creative non-fiction - that is, while the evidence was based on official court records, the conversations were based on what might have been said.

Born near Livorno, Eugenia Falleni was the eldest of an extremely large Italian family. She migrated with the family to New Zealand in c1877 as a toddler, where her father became a labourer and horseman. From a very early age, Eugenia knew with 100% certainty that she was meant to be a boy; she wanted to work in physically demanding jobs, including in brickyards. In a horrible attempt to normalise her, the father married her off to an older Italian man in Wellington; fortunately she escaped him.

Her conservative Italian parents were disgusted with Eugenia’s behaviour and cut her off from family ties. This was the beginning of a life of secrecy and loneliness.

Eugenia/Eugene was happiest when she became a full time male and joined a trading boat as a seaman. Only after a few years on the boat did the Italian captain accidentally twig to Eugene’s true identity. As a result Eugene soon found himself tormented by the other crew members and the victim of repeated, brutal rapes by the ship's captain.

Eugene was dumped in a rural city in Australia, pregnant and without a cent. The baby Josephine Falleni was born in Sydney, and put into the care of an Italian family.

Eugene now took on a new male identity as Harry Crawford. After a series of working class jobs in pubs and factories, in 1912 Harry started to work for a doctor in an affluent Northern Sydney suburb, responsible for the doctor’s horses and carriages. It was there what he met the doctor’s lovely young housekeeper Annie Birkett, a woman who had been widowed and left with a beloved young son to support. In Feb 1913 after knowing each other for only a short time, Crawford and Annie were married in church in Balmain. 

book cover of Eugenia Falleni, by Mark Tedeschi

Soon after their marriage the couple moved to Balmain where Annie ran a lolly shop. Although their sex life seemed a bit limited and their arguments not infrequent, Annie was a happy wife. She no idea that her husband was a biological woman, and the publicans at the hotel where Crawford worked also believed he was a man.

In 1917 Annie heard about her husband’s true gender from a neighbour. She confronted Harry but he fudged the topic, fearing that Annie would go to the authorities. Worse, Annie decided to leave the marriage by having it annulled, whilst Harry desperately wanted the marriage to continue.

By October of the same year Annie suggested that the two of them have a picnic near Lane Cove River, to clarify their impasse. According to Harry's later evidence, the two of them had a fight because Annie stated that the marriage was definitely over. Apparently Annie accidentally slipped and fell backwards; she hit her head on a rock and he could not revive her.

Harry was in a total panic and as there was no-one else around in the picnic ground, Harry made the ridiculous decision to burn his wife’s body. He left it in open view but made sure it was unidentifiable. Naturally Annie's body was discovered within days, complete with cracks to the skull, but as the police could not discover the body’s identity, she was buried in a pauper's grave. When Annie's son asked Harry about his beloved mother, Harry replied that she had run off with another man.

The tragedy might have made him wary about remarrying, but apparently not. In 1919 Harry met the middle-aged spinster Lizzie Allison and fell in love. They married in September 1919 with Harry recording himself as a bachelor on the wedding certificate. He continued to work in a hotel.

In 1920 after not having any message from his mother, Annie's son had alerted the police to his mother's prolonged disappearance. This led to Annie's body being exhumed and identified. Harry was arrested for murder! He went quietly to the police station but begged that Lizzie not be told about the former wife and definitely not be told about the gender issue. In the event, Lizzie’s very happy life was devastated and she was never seen again. Another life wasted!

Annie Birkett

What a small, gossipy, spiteful, insular place Sydney was in the early C20th. Justinian said that it was a city of boarding houses and itinerants, with suffocating moral codes and an oppressiveness that came from keeping up appearances. The newspapers in Sydney engaged in a feeding frenzy of unrivalled proportions; they could not get enough of the sordid sleaziness of a woman passing herself off as a male, seeing him as a freak and a pervert. A fair trial was impossible and the all-male jury was sickened by the defendant.

In any case, the defence case was absurdly handled since there was no witness, no physical evidence of murder and because Harry adored Annie. The defence barrister, Archibald McDonell, should have made mincemeat of the pros­ecut­ion’s so-called witnesses, both the other picnickers who claimed to have seen the events and the pathol­ogists who claimed to be experts in this field. Archibald McDonell should have acknowledged that the burnt body at the picnic ground was indeed Annie Birkett since the deceased’s jewellery, shoes and false teeth had been firmly identified by Annie’s own son and sister.

The Crown Prosecutor at the trial was William Coyle, the very first Senior Crown Prosecutor for New South Wales and a canny, experienced barrister. His career was seen to prosper as a result of this case.

The trial raises a number of significant legal issues of interest, even today, including
-the standard and onus of proof required in a criminal trial
-role of the judge, jury, Crown Prosecutor & defence counsel
-the elements of murder and manslaughter
-the obligation of the police to take a suspect who has been arrested directly before a magistrate
-the official police caution and the right to silence
-the present day judicial discretion to exclude evidence
-the role of expert witnesses
-irrelevant and inadmissible evidence and exhibits etc

But … but … Australia still had capital punishment in those days, and when Harry was found guilty of murder, he was condemned to death automatically. Only later was it changed to life imprisonment, ironically, because the murderer was really a woman.

Harry Crawford was released after 11 years in gaol in Feb 1931 and quietly ran a boarding house in Paddington. He died in June 1938 and was buried in a pauper’s grave. The inept defence barrister quickly retired from the Bar and lived a few more years in self imposed isolation.

I imagine that most people who read the newspapers in the 1920s and early 30s have long died and the next generations of Australians tot­al­ly forgot about the story. In fact a detailed biography of Falleni/Crawford did not become of interest to academics and lawyers until the late 1980s. Gender studies became popular. People finally understood the difference between transgenderism, homosexuality and criminal offences. Had Eugenia/Harry lived now, official and institutional discrimination would have been banned and lives would not have been wasted.

For the author Mark Tedeschi, the senior prosecutor in New South Wales today, the lessons to be learned by the police, lawyers, judges and newspapers resonate still. Otherwise, as the book says: a press gone feral, a public clamouring for blood and an over-exuberant police investigation would lead inevitably to a miscarriage of justice.

London Bridge in the USA

The book London Bridge in America: The Tall Story of a Transatlantic Crossing was written by Travis Elborough and published by Jonathan Cape in Feb 2013. There are three separate themes in the book that come roughly in ch­ronological order: the C19th bridge built in London, its improb­ab­le sale to the USA and the movement of world power out of Britain and into the USA.

The famous Medieval London Bridge, built in the late C12th, had to be replaced. In 1799 a competition for designs to replace the old bridge was held. The Scottish engineer John Rennie won the compet­ition with a classical design of five granite arches. It was built only 30 m from the site of the first London Bridge and was supervised by the engine­er’s own son. Work began in 1824. The old bridge continued to carry traffic in the meantime, and was not pulled down until the new bridge was opened.

The official opening of the new 283 m long and 15 m wide London Bridge took place in August 1831, in front of King William IV. The total costs, which were huge, were shared by the British Government and the London city council.

The book suggested that the bridge was somewhat inadequate for the traffic it needed to carry almost immediately and by the end of the C19th, it was totally inadequate. People were flooding into the City to work; trains transported commuters to London Bridge Station; carriages, bikes and later cars were everywhere.

London Bridge over the Thames

Late 19th century, overloaded, brown, built up

Photo credit: transpress nz

And there was a second dilemma. The bridge was sinking and the east side was sinking lower than the west side. Even though the bridge was widened and strengthened just after King Edward VII was crowned, it would eventually have to be removed and replaced.

The stroke of genius was in not destroying the bridge, but in selling it on. One London City councillor, Ivan Luckin, was the brain in question. He marketed the bridge as a symbol of historic London, a feat of engineering that could trace its lineage back to its medieval ancestor and even earlier. Were the American buyers really conned into thinking the 1830s bridge was medieval? Did they believe they were actually buying the much more impressive and iconic Tower Bridge? Elborough says no to both questions. The American buyers of the rather boring London Bridge knew exactly what they were getting, but they were swayed along in a mist of history and symbolism.

It was actually a meeting of the minds. Motor and aircraft entre­pren­eur Robert Paxton McCulloch (1911–1977) was the key man in the creation of a new city on Lake Havasu in the Arizonan desert in the early 1960s. And it was McCulloch who decided that his new city needed something significant to make people take notice. The Statue of Liberty was not going to be moved from New York and San Fran­cisco’s Golden Gate was firmly in place. But New London Bridge was actually available!

People may well laugh at Robert McCulloch, but who would have heard of Lake Havasu City, had he not made the winning bid of $2,460,000 in April 1968? Each block was carefully numbered before the bridge was disassembled. The blocks were then shipped across the ocean via the Panama Canal to California, then packed into trucks and driven from California to Arizona. Following reconstruction of New London Bridge, Lake Havasu City re-d­edicated it in a lavish and well publicised ceremony in October 1971.

London Bridge, Lake Havasu City, Arizona

leisurely, palm trees, blue

1971

The Guardian noted that the opening ceremony in Arizona was attended by London's lord mayor and local dignitaries, who feasted on American seafood and Cornish pasties, and were entertained in the sweltering desert heat by Pearly Kings and Queens and madrigal singers, with the recorded chimes of Big Ben in the background. London truly had arrived in the USA. Today visitors to Lake Havasu City (pop 53,000) can go to the London Bridge Resort, see the dragon symbol of the City of London, fly British flags and read the British-American Friendship Plaque.

The real estate moguls of Arizona were thanking McCulloch, not laughing at him. The City of London might have been laughing, but they too were very grateful to the wily American.

Jewish museums - their locations and functions

Firstly I would like to consider some of the world's existing Jewish museums.

The Jewish Museum of Vienna is a museum of Jewish history, life and religion in Austria, starting with the first settlements at Judenplatz in the C13th. Founded in 1896, this was the first major Jewish museum anywhere, supported and run by the Society for the Coll­ect­ion and Preservation of Artistic and Historical Memorials of Jewry. Im­mediately after the Anschluss by Nazi Germany in 1938 the museum was closed, and its contents were sent to the Museum of Ethnology and to the Natural History Museum. It wasn’t until the early 1950s that most of the objects came back to the Jewish community. Today Vienna’s museum is located in Palais Eskeles where there has been an active programme of exhibitions and outreach events since 1993. Today the museum's aim is to highlight the past and present of Jewish cult­ure in Austria. Visitor figures in Palais Eskeles and the museum’s other site reached 59,600 during 2011.

Palais Eskeles, Vienna

Built in the 11th century and modernised many times.

Since 1993, this has been the Jewish Museum of VIenna

Re-opened in March 2010 in Camden, the Jewish Museum of London feat­ures exhibitions that tell the story of Jewish history, culture and religion and reveal the vital contribution that the Jewish community has made to British life. The history of the country's extremely strong Jewish community stretches back to 1066, when the first Jews arrived with William the Conqueror's invading Norman army. Then the museum covers the total expulsion of the Jews by King Edward I in 1290.

Dis­played across four permanent galleries are objects, films and per­s­onal stories that explore the critical issues of immigration and settlement. London’s Jew­ish history is beautifully evoked in displays such as the recreation of an East End tailor’s sweatshop. There is also a C13th medieval mikveh/ritual bath, recently discovered in the City of London. The Holocaust Gallery explores the impact of Nazism through the experiences and personal items of Auschwitz survivors. Through impor­t­ant historical artefacts and films in the Judaism: A Living Faith gallery, visitors can start to understand what it means to be Jewish in modern, multicultural Britain. It must be working; the museum had 60,000 visitors in its first year after the renov­at­ions.

The Manchester Jewish Museum in Cheetham Hill first opened its doors in 1984. The fascinating journey through Jewish history in one of Europe's most vibrant cities has thrilled tens of thousands of vis­itors. The museum is a stunning former Spanish and Portuguese Syn­agogue, a cultural and architectural gem in its own right, the only British museum of its kind outside London.

The former Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue, 

designed by Edward Salomons and built in 1873-74.

Now the Manchester Jewish Museum.

Photo credit: The Victorian Web. 

The Jewish Museum of Australia was established in Melbourne in 1982, focusing on exhibitions that depicted and described Jewish festivals, Sabbath, food and ritual objects. But above all, its collection focused on the history of the Jewish community of Victoria and the places from where these Jews first arrived. In 1992 the Jewish Museum of Australia purchased a purpose-renovated building in Alma Rd St Kilda opposite one of Melbourne’s most beau­tiful synagogues, the St Kilda Hebrew Congregation. School and other groups are invited to tour the general collection and the special exhibitions, and some of these exhibitions travelled nationally.

The Sydney Jewish Museum in Darlinghurst started by identifying the 16 Jews who arrived in Australia on the First Fleet and describes life for those people in the early days of settlement of Australia. Then the Museum moves on to record Jewish settlement throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, and documents and teaches the history of the Holo­caust. It does this over three floors of exhibitions, video presentations, newspaper clippings, pictures, narrations, letters and first hand accounts. There are also guided tours.

The Jewish Museum of Berlin is located on Lindenstraße. The Museum first opened its doors in 2001 in a unique building complex. The complex is known for its architecture with a mixture of the old baroque Collegienhaus, the postmodern Libeskind Building, and the new Glass Courtyard. The exhibitions give visitors the opportunity to exper­ience Jewish German history and culture over many decades. Par­ticular highlights of the museum include the Holocaust Tower and the Fallen Leaves of the Memory Void. For refreshment, Café Schmus within the Jewish Museum specifically offers traditional Jewish cuisine.

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I was delighted to read “Mushrooming Museums” in The Jerusalem Report of 3rd June 2013 by Shula Kopf. She appropriately discussed the open­ing of the new Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw and the revitalised Jewish Museum of Berlin, and pointed out that European Jewish museums are just now recovering the histories that have been lost. The Joods Historisch Museum in Amsterdam also got a brief mention because of its innovative, interactive exhibits that explore aspects of Jewish life and history. As did the Sephardic Museum of Granada in Spain, for obvious reasons. These museums are largely targeted to non-Jewish audiences, since their Jewish citizens are fewer in number than they were before 1939.

But her question “are there too many Jewish museums?” seemed to be focused exclusively on the American situation. The Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco, designed by the brilliant architect Daniel Libeskind, is exhibiting the secret musical history of black-Jewish relations. The long established Jewish Museum in New York had a great programme called “Houdini: Art and Magic”. The National Museum of Jewish History in Philadelphia has “Beyond Swastika and Jim Crow: Jewish refugee scholars at Black Colleges in the USA’s south”. The Skirball Jewish Museum in Los Angeles was designed by the brilliant architect Moshe Safdie and opened in 1996. The Maltz Museum of Jewish Heritage in Cleveland Ohio opened in 2005. 

Sydney Jewish Museum

She should have been focusing on those parts of the world that had thriving Jewish communities until the war, like Vienna, Berlin and Warsaw. Or on communities that grew largely because of Jewish survivors leaving Europe after the war, Melbourne. Their target audiences will be very different, I suspect, from the target audiences of Jewish museums in New York and Los Angeles.

Let me consider one last Jewish museum that Kopf didn't mention. The Communal Historical Museum of Argentina is in the town hall of Moisés Ville, 600 ks from Buenos Aires. The first Jewish immigrants came from Kamentez, Podolsk (now the Ukraine) in 1889 and settled in the area, thus turning Moisés Ville into the birthplace of Jewish life in Argentina. So the museum’s history starts with Baron Maurice Moshe Hirsch’s biggest settlement and the development of institutions and continues with the changes in community life ever since. There are five permanent exhibition halls and two temporary ones which illustrate Jews’ rituals and religious belongings, and the history of the town, described in documents, photographs and objects. Plus an impressive research library.

Moisés Ville used to be a largely Jewish town, having Argentina’s first Jewish cemetery and its first rabbi. But now there are only a few hundred Jews left. So almost by default this has become a VERY important museum, talking largely to non-Jews about memories, heritage and integration.

Communal Historical Museum of Argentina, Moisés Ville

Matisse: art stolen (1987) then restored (2013)

Henri Matisse (1869–1954) lived in Paris where he was an active part of Montparnasse's thriving art world. He spent time in Morocco and Algeria before World War One broke out in 1914, but it wasn’t until 1917 that he moved his home to the French Riviera where the winters were very pleasant.

During the second half of the war, Matisse spent most winters in Nice over-looking the Mediterranean. He often stayed at the Hôtel Mediter­ranée, a Rococo-style building he later described as faked, absurd and delicious! Interior at Nice 1920 was one of a series of images Matisse created using the hotel as a back­drop, all of which are done in his post-war naturalistic style. As with his orientalist odalisque paint­ings, his interiors had detailed floors, furniture, wall paper, shutt­ered French windows and balconies. Matisse often included a young woman somewhere in his scenes. The Art Institute of Chicago focused on the carefully composed scene with its decorative richness, its warm, silvery palette and clear brush strokes.

Readers might also like to search out Odalisque with Raised Arms 1923 which can be seen in the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. The stylistic connections with Interior at Nice continued throughout the early 1920s.

Matisse, Interior at Nice, 1920
132 x 89 cm
Art Institute of Chicago

How very different was Matisse's impressionist gardenscape Le Jardin 1920, a small work consisting of a garden of white roses in the foreground, and bushes and trees in the back ground. It was donated to the Museum of Modern Art in Stockholm in Nov 1977. And although I cannot find who had bought the painting from Matisse, I did find who had donated it to the Museum so many decades later – Nora Lundgren.

The theft of Le Jardin happened in May 1987. Apparently the thief knew which painting he was after and came armed with nothing more lethal than a hammer for the glass wall of the museum and a screw-driver to take down the painting.

26 years later, the painting popped up mysteriously when Charles Roberts, an Essex based art dealer, was offered the piece by a Polish collector. Neither Charles Roberts nor the unnamed Polish collector are suspected in relation to the crime. In fact it was Roberts who searched for information on its background through the Art Loss Reg­ister, a database centred in London dedicated to stolen art. The team at the database company quickly identified the painting as the one they were seeking; the original frame was damaged, but the painting itself seemed to be largely intact.

Once the painting was identified, the director of the Art Loss Register, Christ­opher Marinello, began negotiations for it to be returned home via the Swedish Ministry of Culture. In Sweden, the statute of limitations on art thefts is 10 years and so no police investigation will be possible there. In any case Marinello said that stolen artwork has no real value in the legitimate market place and would eventually have resurfaced anyhow. For the professionals, it was just a matter of waiting it out.

Matisse, Le Jardin, 1920
45 x 34 cm
Museum of Modern Art, Stockholm

But two things seem bizarre. If the stolen art market is estimated at between $6 billion and $7 billion per year, according to the Art Loss Register, other art lovers will be asking if stolen artwork has a value in the ILlegitimate market place? And is there a longer statute of limit­at­ions in, for example, Britain where the Matisse surfaced?

A second comment made even less sense to me. Martinello said the Art Loss Register would norm­ally receive a small fee from insurers for recovering a stolen painting. However the Matisse was government-owned and uninsured, so no fee would be paid. I don't understand - wouldn't govern­ments be much more accountable to the art loving world than private owners?

Readers might like to refer to an excellent blog called Centre for Art Law, an amalgam of art and cultural heritage law resources and reviews.

Melbourne (Aus) and Boston (USA) to amalgamate - re tourism

Melbourne’s international sister city relationship with Boston was established in 1985. As vibrant and learned cities, Melbourne and Boston are connected by a common commitment to excellence in healthcare and medicine, inform­ation and biotechnology, education, the arts and culture. The Melbourne Boston Sister Cities Association Inc, became an independent incorporated community association.

The importance of promoting educational exchange between Melbourne and Boston was recognised, particularly in the strong areas of medical research and the arts. So the City of Melbourne & Sister Cities Association created a series of funded fellowships, awarded annually in the fields of medical research, the arts and education. The aim of the fellowships is to provide opp­ort­unities to expand and enhance Melbourne and Boston’s reputations as centres of knowledge excel­l­ence, while strengthening international relationships in medical practices, the arts and education.

Some winners have stood out. In 2006, Dr Sharon van Doornum travelled to Boston to collaborate with leading experts on research into the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis in patients with cardiovascular disease. In 2007, Dr Emma McBryde, Head of Epidemiology and Victorian Infectious Diseases Service, travelled to Boston, working on trans­mis­sion models for tuberculosis. In 2010, Dr Bob Anderson moved to Boston to further his work in developing treatments into celiac disease. 

Yarra River, Melbourne

Newbury St, Boston

Additionally the Boston Arts Exchange, supported by the Melbourne Boston Sister Cities Association and the City of Melbourne, was introduced to connect two outstanding educational institutions: the Boston Arts Academy and the Victorian College of the Arts.

In the past both Melbourne and Boston often set aside a portion of their outdoor advertising space on city kiosks for municipal advert­ise­ments eg arts festivals; the cities simply swapped advertising space to make room for each other’s promotions. Now Boston will look a little bit Australian this northern summer when advertise­ments promoting Melbourne are put on benches and bus shelters around the city. At the same time, 16,900 ks away, Boston’s image will get a boost on Melbourne tram stops. The posters, which depict glowing night-time images of each city, are scheduled to go up in June and July for a month.

The two cities share strong British and Europe influences, large immigrant populations, many universities, stunning parks and gardens, museums, art galleries, top class public transport, heritage architect­ure, ports, a vibrant café culture and a passion for sport. But they are not going to be taking each other’s tourist trade since Boston should be visited in June-August and Melbourne is best seen from December-April.

Boston has sister cities other than Melbourne: Strasbourg, Hangzhou, Haifa, Padua, Kyoto, Barcelona, Valladolid, Taipei, Brasilia, Sekondi-Takoradi in Ghana and Boston in the UK. Clearly the Bostonians hope to expand their advertising exchange to these other partners later on. Melbourne’s sister cities are, apart from Boston, Osaka, Tianjin, Thessaloniki, St Petersburg and Milan.

I don’t think it is a coincidence that my closest American friends live in Boston. I would add Vancouver in Canada as well, but alas Vancouver is not a sister city of either Melbourne or Boston.

The light rail in Boston's tree lined streets

The trams in Melbourne's tree line streets

Many thanks to William Roberts, Visiting Associate Professor at Massachusetts College of Art & Design, and to the Boston Globe (25th May 2013).