Month: Aug 2026

Escape from the country

And from politics!

Some days stay silent in the memory, other days won’t let go. I’d planned a day visiting galleries in London, and last Wednesday didn’t disappoint. The 17th century Spanish painter, Zurbaran, at the National Gallery, was my focus in the morning and, by way of a total contrast, two much talked-about exhibitions, Tracey Emin and Frida Kahlo, at Tate Modern, in the afternoon.

For the Zurbaran, I headed down a vast flight of stairs to a subterranean space they keep for special exhibitions. It can be a little gloomy down there, which added to the impact of the crucified Jesus in the very first room, Jesus brilliantly lit, against a black background. There’s also St Peter, crucified upside down. Objects of veneration, commissioned by Carthusian (and other) monks who had no doubts, valued immediacy not elaboration, they knew their God. A world so different from ours.

Other commissions didn’t quite match that opening room for impact. But there is magic in a small still life, lemons, oranges and a rose, with a small cup, almost real, touchable, against a stark black background. And finally, ‘Agnus Dei’, a lamb, its legs bound, as brilliantly lit as the crucified Christ, and again, a black background.  

An hour later, the magic colours and serenity of a Virgin and Child, by the Dutch artist, Gerard David. Painted in 1515, two years before Martin Luther turned the world upside down and reduced the virgin to an ordinary mother. No more had she her role as a pathway to paradise.

From the National Gallery to the Tate Modern, and two exhibitions by remarkable women artists. Zurbaran and Gerard David belong to another age. Tracey Emin and Frida Kahlo are absolutely of our time.

First, Tracey Emin, an exhibition by a living artist opening her life to the public gaze. I wanted to see it, but as a man I simply didn’t and don’t feel competent to comment. Better I leave to a review in the Guardian: ‘Tracey symbolises the height of the 90s, its sex, drugs and booze, successes and excesses, but this show isn’t about that. It’s about how she has put her life out there, laid herself bare – and pushed us all to come to terms with our own emotions in the process.’

It’s that level of engagement, whether or not her paintings and bronze sculptures measure up, that is extraordinary and unprecedented.

A short hop across the Tate Modern’s third floor took me to the Frida Kahlo exhibition. Again, so much hype. Another woman artist who has become iconic, but in her case, long after her death. Her self-portraits are like no others, and her clothes: I now know what rebozos (shawls) and huipiles (sleeveless blouses) – the tehuana dress that she adopted – look like. Her honesty about her disabilities is unflinching.

She lived, like Emin, exactly the way she was, totally honest, but by contrast she had all the advantages of stable family and a marriage to Diego Rivera which is a story in itself. We watched Salma Hayek as Frida in a 2002 movie a month or two ago. In truth, I learnt more from the movie than the exhibition about Frida.

What the exhibition also focuses on, maybe to excess, is her legacy, as a champion of ‘Mexicanidad’, that is, being Mexican; as an icon for feminists and the LBGTQ community; and as the subject of a quite amazing breadth of Frida-celebrating merchandise.

Media and merchandise can fragment a legacy, take out meaning and substituting display. A sign of our times. What no-one is trying to do, as far as I am aware, is produce Tracey Emin merchandise. The real Tracey is simply too powerful, too immediate for that.

Getting along with the neighbours

There’s a big difference between love thy neighbour and love thy neighbours. Just how far should that love for our neighbours extend? To the next street – to fellow citizens – why not the whole wide world?

I heard a few days ago about a local church helping Iranian Christians, refugees living in a local hotel, who’d escaped from persecution in Iran. This is in stark contrast with the much-publicised demonstrations, elsewhere in England, against immigrants housed in local hotels, with the likes of Tommy Robinson and Elon Musk pulling the strings.

I read later about a mother and daughters in South Africa, refugees from the Congo Republic, being hounded out of their home, and the door locked against them – left in the street.

I was in Calderdale last week. It’s an area of the West Riding of Yorkshire where I’ve a family connection. The towns and villages of the hill country voted Green and Labour in the council elections back in May. The conurbations voted uniformly for Reform. Reform has some pretty unpalatable things to say about refugees, and immigrants more broadly, and brutal policies toward boat people.

At the other extreme is a poem I read last week from the Cold War era, by Wendell Berry. He bridged the gap between himself and Russia by imagining a conversation with a Siberian woodsman (OK, not quite your ordinary Russian!):

‘Who has imagined that I would not speak familiarly with you,/ or laugh with you, or visit your house and go to work with you in the forest?…’

I felt a connection with the poem. But he was imagining himself as a visitor. What if they were living side by side? When two peoples with different nations, beliefs, lifestyles find themselves in close proximity they look to put up boundaries, to create exclusion zones. And if they can’t, and divisions become politicised, tolerance and co-habitation morphs into division and hatred. 

The key word is ‘politicised’. There is always a leader or leaders who draws up battle lines, metaphorical or literal, usually arguing a case based on a very partial interpretation of history. Once they are drawn, people have to take sides.

Putin has etched out the battle lines in brutal fashion in eastern Europe. Given their history is there any basis for Ukrainians to trust Russians, or vice versa? We may have our own outsiders’ views of that conflict, but that’s not a relevant consideration.

Likewise Palestinian and Israeli. Many early Zionists imagined Jews and Palestinians living side by side. But so much hatred has been screamed and blood spilt since then. Today we’ve reports of West Bank settlers attacking Palestinian Arab villages, and burning mosques.

Remove a central authority, which could be, as with Austro-Hungary in 1918, an empire (the one-time Habsburg empire) of many centuries standing, and you may just reap a whirlwind. Languages and cultures long interwoven are too easily polarised. Think Ethiopia and the bitter battle between ethnic groups. Migrations following on from population expansions wreck cultures as they have in the Darfur region of Sudan, pitching agricultural against pastoral, villager against nomad.

In there, somewhere, always, a charismatic leader.

Or impose a central authority: I’m thinking of Han domination in China, and the brutal suppression of Tibetans and Uyghers. Above all, we have religion. ‘Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition,’ was a famous Monty Python line. We can laugh now. The reality was brutal, as with so much religious persecution down the centuries. Missionary zeal too often tipped over into violence.

I remember minarets and churches side by side when travelling through Yugoslavia in 1969 and how in the early 90s they somehow forged enmities not ploughshares and fought each other. I remember hot sleepy days, and people rubbing along.

It was too easy for Wendell Berry, looking at photographs. The face-to-face reality is something very different.  We may imagine a warm relationship but if we’ve disputed borders, disputed territories, disputed histories, we may find we have to take sides. We are locked in, like it or not.

Immigration also sets up pressures and, again, we have to take sides. We may simply not be safe sitting in the fence. ‘Which side are you in’ is title of a famous American trade union song from the 1930s, also recorded by Billy Bragg.

I should on this argument be going face-to-face with Reform voters in Calderdale. But I can’t easily gainsay their responses if they feel threatened by new arrivals. But they should beware their self-appointed leaders.