PABLO PICASSO (1881-1973)

 

For the sake of argument, blame it on Picasso -

The long slide down into the black hole
Of Cubism, doodling and abstraction –
Vaguely Miro, very Rothko.

And whilst admiring his sheer brio  -

The elegance of line, exuberant colour
And formality of composition -
It is always with that proviso.

Pictures turning reductively into patterns -

Klimt slipping into Kandinsky
And Kandinsky trickling into Klee -
Vaguely Matisse, very Mondrian.

Minimalism and gimmickry

Becoming the market’s order of the day
And, as with haute couture, modern art
Turning away from people and into easy money.

Thus fashion wins over art and application,

Whilst Picasso’s paradox states that
‘Art is a lie that makes us realise the truth’ -
If you can but see through his fabrication.

So applaud his balls and bravado,

His modernity and iconoclasm,
But remember the void he opened
And blame it all on Picasso.

(2015)

 

At the risk of sounding like a philistine, I've never been much taken with Picasso - not even 'Guernica', which seems to impress most people. The above poem, though, is not meant to be taken entirely seriously. I'm not one of those people who dismiss modern art lock, stock and barrel but, at the same time, I do believe a great deal of charlatanry has taken hold since Picasso appeared. The painting, 'Mediterranean Landscape' used here, is however, one his I do admire.

BANKSY ( ? )

O Mystery Man, who are you
With your stencils and spray can?
Are you a vandal or a vampire
That only ventures out at night,
Wearing, perhaps, a helmet with a light?

A rioter throws a bouquet;

An athlete throws a bomb;
That little Vietnamese napalm girl
Is taken for walk, holding hands
With Ronald McDonald and Micky Mouse.
There’s kissing cops as Christ shops ‘til he drops;
A street-cleaner spraying over cave paintings
And another covering up Pink Floyd’s Wall.
Mona Lisa turns, lifts her skirt, shows her bum,
And there round the corner is Queen Victoria in heels
And suspenders, getting head from a lesbian chum
While a Royal Guardsmen pisses up another wall.
The Grim Reaper appears on a Bristol pleasure boat;
A hoodie runs off with an Olympic ring;
And a child’s balloon is the letter ‘o’ in ‘No Future’.
A graffiti kid remembers when this was all trees
As seas rise in warning, threatening to submerge
The legend, ‘I don’t believe in global warming’.

Not just another arsehole with an aerosol

Then, who can neither draw nor write,
Scribbling and dribbling pathetic tags
Like long-lasting litter or dog-shite:
Not simply then, yet more urban blight.

But Banksy, you mystic of the mural -

Are you singular or are you plural?
Turning antics into antiques, what a nerve!
But maybe you’re right, in the end, to aver
That society gets the kind of vandalism it deserves.

(2015)

 

I had started showing these 'painter poems' to a couple of friends and one of them suggested I 'do Banksy', which might not have occurred to me - happily, I think it turned out quite well so thanks for the suggestion Professor Newsinger. 

J. M. W. TURNER (1755-1851)

 

The quiet canals

And sunbathed ruins

Of his stately classical style

Melt into the later whirl

Of colour and instinct

                                                 That will become

The new world

Of Impressionism;

The indistinct now his forte.

 And he is away:

His vision going where it will

Without constraint.

Ships with skulls for hulls

Pulled into the harbour

For the last time;

A steam train in the rain;

Blizzards and blazes;

Mist and hazes;

Eruptions, fog and typhoon;

Waves and wrecks and cloudwrack

And human figures - though faint -

Almost lost

Amidst the torrential blur.

 Black sails in the sunset;

Golden days before they end;

                                        A brilliant yellow zig-zag

Splashes without precedent on a lake; 

Sunset, moonrise, nightfall, daybreak:

And Turner is in his element,

In the eye of the vortex;

Spinning the weathers

In his revolution of paint.

(2015)

Three years ago when I began what has turned into this series, the artist I most wanted to write a poem about was Turner - but it simply wouldn't come. It finally arrived in the spate of poems which came out in late 2015. The picture - referred to in the final verse - is sometimes simply called Scarlet Sunset, sometimes Sunset at Rouen.

CLAUDE MONET (1840-1926)

 

 

 
 

 

A long way from Giverny,
On my park of the ruined abbey,
I cross the white stone bridge
As it glitters over the River Soar
And walk to the boating lake.
Through the oriental garden I go,
Crossing little wooden bridges
Painted red and green amidst trees,
Over lily ponds and nesting swans
And think of Monet afloat in his studio

Dreaming of ladies with parasols

Who gaze out to sea from cliff tops
In big hats and long white dresses.
He recalls maybe haystacks in a heat haze
And poppies cascading down slopes;
Sunshine blinding through a door
Opening on dappled paths in full bloom.
In his mind’s eye, the incandescent snow
On sunlit winter fields before it’s gone;
Glimpsing trains steaming into stations
And a peasouper London Parliament
Blazing in his fading memory’s store
Where Impression Sunrise awoke, perhaps,
From Turner’s Scarlet Sunrise at Rouen.

In the rising and the dying of the light,

The angles shifting this way, that way,
The scenes painted over and again.
Waiting for the weather to change
And the seasons to turn and turn again,
His eyes flicker like those of Turner,
Faltering with age, rubbed staring sore
As they strain at the blurring palette,
But still catching what they saw and more
In their half colour blind cataracts of light.

 

 

 The picture above the poem is Impression Sunrise - the painting often credited with starting the movement of Impressionism. Turner's Scarlet Sunset accompanies my Turner poem on this blog.

The one at the bottom here is, of course, part of the series of numerous studies of his later garden at Giverny by Monet himself. When taking photographs of the garden in Abbey Park mentioned in the poem, I've produced a few quite passable imitations - one of which can be viewed on the Photo Gallery of this blog.

 

(IGR 2015)

 

JOSEPH WRIGHT OF DERBY (1734-97)

He catches something, perhaps,
In Darwin’s grandfather and Arkwright:

If not enlightenment,
Then something out of the ordinary
Of his other, blander portraits.
Meanwhile, as the old light of the world dims.
His destiny shapes in the twilight, waiting to show.
Shadow and light, light and shadow,
Chiaroscuro, chiaroscuro.

 By candles and lamps,
Children’s faces are lit
In pleasure and wonder
Above an orrery of moons and planets,
Or as a letter is read,
Or girls dress a kitten,
Or a boy blows up a bladder
And an alchemist boils urine
In the ball of a flaring flask
Inside what may be a church,
Whilst what might be a sun
Rising or setting, frames an Indian widow
Lamenting her husband

And perhaps a whole way of life.
Chanting long and low;
Light and shadow, light and shadow,

Chiaroscuro, chiaroscuro.

 Not much interested in sunlight,
It was fire that fascinated Wright:
Candles and lanterns in the night;
Forges and fireworks;
Flames and phosphorous;
Vulcan’s white-hot spear,
Tossed out of Vesuvius
Into cavernous clouds of smoke
And the blacksmith’s crowded shop
Where a white-hot iron bar
Is hammered in the sparkle and glow;
Shadow and light, light and shadow,
Chiaroscuro, chiaroscuro.

 But moonlight is never far away:
If the sun was God for Turner,
Then the moon was Wright’s goddess.
See it there in the room where the scientist
With his air-pump suffocates the bird under glass
To the horror of the children,
But note the boy in the corner at a curtain,
Revealing the moon through the window.
In the sea caves of the painter’s brain,
He gazes out - like that same scientist -
At moons over dark sails and lighthouses
And above a bridge and a volcano.
Shadow and light, light and shadow,
Chiaroscuro, chiaroscuro.

 (2015)

 

The painting is An Experiment On A Bird In The Air Pump and can be seen - along with several of the other pictures referred to here - in the excellent Derby Museum & Art Gallery.