‘The Roundhouse of International Spirits’: Arp, Benazzi, Bissier, Nicholson, Richter, Tobey, Valenti in the Ticino
Kettle’s Yard, Castle Street, Cambridge, until 15 March
‘I turned it into a palace’: Sir Sydney Cockerell and the Fitzwilliam Museum
Fitzwilliam Museum, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, until 17 March
The Ticino is the Italian-speaking canton of Switzerland, home to Lakes Lugano and Maggiore. In the early 1960s, it played host to a number of artists who were drawn by its natural beauty and the presence of other artists and intellectuals. It is the focus and reason for this immensely enjoyable exhibition at Kettle’s Yard, which is well worth making a trip through the snow to see.
It opens with a large and splendid carved board relief by Ben Nicholson entitled ‘February 1960 (ice-off-blue)’. Composed of brown and blue-white slanting rectangles, it’s perfect for a day of snow and slush (the conditions when I visited) and is all about the organisation of movements, energies and textures, balances and disturbances, and has echoes of landscape in its architecture. Opposite hang a group of four Nicholson drawings and etchings, the familiar jug-and-bottle department varying the architecture, with the expected breathtaking brilliance of line. In between is an organic-looking sculpture by Raffael Benazzi, like a boxing glove or vast seed made of elmwood, containing a miniature iron obelisk.
Then comes a whole group of Italo Valenti collages, which reproduce poorly, so my advance impressions from the substantial catalogue (£10.95 in paperback) had not prepared me for their subtle and smouldering grandeur. The same formal arrangements also work in oil, as can be seen from the delicious little painting ‘Oleggio’ (1967), simply black and grey with a pulse of green. Then the visitor encounters Julius Bissier, a German artist who proves to be the show’s major revelation. We are first shown some of his woodcuts but move swiftly on (via a couple of really good Arp collages and a group of contemplative Tobeys) to his calligraphic brush drawings and most importantly, his paintings. These are either watercolour on paper or tempera on canvas, and introduce colour into abstract compositions which are gentle, lyrical and utterly beguiling. Right on the edge of being fey, they have a sure grasp of universal symbol which saves them from sentimentality or obviousness.
The double-height gallery has some more magnificent Nicholsons, the best Tobey and some interesting small Arp sculptures. This is a show which explores the work of differing artists within a shared context; even Hans Richter, better known as a film-maker, has something to add, something to share. Highly recommended.
Inspired by January’s enthusiastic editorial in Apollo, I determined to visit the Fitzwilliam exhibition celebrating the career of its most dynamic director, Sir Sydney Cockerell (1867–1962). It was Cockerell who put the museum on the map, acquiring some of its most famous treasures, doubling the size of the building and filling it with great things arranged in lucid and accessible ways. His famous boast ‘I found it a pigsty and I turned it into a palace’ was not far from the truth; certainly, he banished its provincial mien and made it international. He has been called one of the greatest museum directors of all time, and he was without doubt a powerful personality. Thomas Hardy’s biographer Claire Tomalin recounts how Cockerell, when first in pursuit of an autograph manuscript by Hardy, had actually read none of the novels. Tomalin writes: ‘This makes him sound more like a bounder than a scholar, and there were always two sides to Cockerell, the red-hot enthusiast and the cool fixer.’
It was an approach that worked. During his long directorship (1908–37), Cockerell trebled the collections, and oversaw such key acquisitions as Titian’s ‘Tarquin and Lucretia’ and the two marvellous predella panels by Domenico Veneziano, which remain among my favourites of the 15th-century Italian paintings in this country. Cockerell was a manuscript aficionado, so that department benefited, but so did most others, with Greek vases and later applied arts doing particularly well. Although not an academic (he’d initially gone into the family coal business), he was a great enthusiast for the arts and the trusted associate of such figures as John Ruskin, William Morris and George Bernard Shaw. His practical energy and ‘the bullying and wire-pulling for which I am so justly famous’ made him a power to be reckoned with. Called a ‘scrounger of genius’, he was able to cajole and charm the most generous donations. In the informative hardback accompanying the show (price £24.95) there’s a cartoon by Sir Clive Forster Cooper of St Cockerellius relieving a poor traveller of a manuscript. Typical.
The display is limited to one room and includes a good representation of manuscripts (the superb 14th-century Macclesfield Psalter is here, celebrating the centenary of the Friends of the Fitzwilliam, founded by Cockerell), along with such treasures as the original of Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ and Jude the Obscure. There are fine things by Turner and Blake, an ancient Egyptian papyrus of the Book of the Dead, a Mozart autograph score, beautiful Persian ceramics, drawings by Burne Jones, a group of Rossettis, Samuel Palmer’s ‘Magic Apple Tree’, and much more. A small intense exhibition, it’s a notable tribute to a remarkable man.
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