After the Alice Neel show Karl and I walked around the general Barbican area and to make sense of what we had seen, compared it to the Lucian Freud show at the National Gallery which we had seen on Remembrance Sunday last November. In the Freud retrospective, he starts off being not technically great and then just gets better throughout his life, painting with more and more depth and texture, putting more ‘life’ onto the canvas, trying to catch smaller moments or aspects of character in his subjects. Becoming more himself throughout.
I said to Karl that I thought this was because Freud saw himself or wished to see himself in a lineage of great portrait painters, the masters in a way, the canon. (I read a lot of Freud biography in the first lockdown, when I was writing fiction about painters, and maybe I’ll write about that process another day.) Karl agreed and said that it was clear Neel wasn’t interested in such criteria for portraiture and that the humanist streak in her work maybe even blocked out any room for seeing herself in such a lineage. She was a painter of the people, not just of people, and her evolution in the exhibition at the Barbican is not from naive and unsteady painter to great one, like Freud, but from one with an unsteady relationship with portraiture itself to one with a masterly grip on it. I really liked that. It is the opposite of what I expected from a retrospective.
We talked then about how maybe her work, her oeuvre, should make us question our way of viewing portraiture as adhering to a particular canon or lineage, a tendency towards perfection. Perhaps it’s not about that at all. Perhaps that’s just a product of liberal arts education, “the humanities”. It was funny, really, that I left the exhibition feeling less sure that I actually liked Neel’s work aesthetically and more sure that I was obsessed with what it was in a philosophical sense, why not use that word. The ideological project of it, if nothing else. What painting is for – engaging with humanity – and why.
The day before we went with Rosalind to see Woolf Works, which Roz and I had wanted to see for ages. Now this I loved on a different level – it was pure entertainment. The first act is Dalloway, with Alessandra Ferri as Woolf herself stalking the stage watching her characters do horrible things. It is very like the Ashton Enigma Variations – brown clothes, sweet music, prewar sensibilities in each dancers’ movements. The second act is Orlando and at first I despaired: prewar was gone and in its wake we had techno, lasers, blips and bloops so electro from Max Richter’s score that when I glanced down at the orchestra I saw cellists in the pit stretching their necks, picking at their cuticles and yawning. Oh, she’s crossing gender boundaries, I thought, obviously, watching a dancer in gender neutral costume bouncing over the laser that bisected the stage. But over the course of the act, things changed. When ballet is good it doesn’t hit you over the head with each new thing – it builds piece by piece, each element landing on the last one and creating something new. As the act went on I was no longer even conscious of when a dancer was male or female, not that it mattered. But that in itself was a first in my ballet-watching experience. The music, also, was very good – even the cellists got their turn in the end.
I couldn’t see much of the third act as in our box we were rotating who got the bad seat, and it was my turn. I missed my chance to look down at the orchestra a final time – after Tár, who doesn’t relish an opportunity to glance at the conductor in the darkness, lit solemnly from below? But the ovation at the show’s end was nuts, completely insane and endless and Alessandra Ferri bowed with solemn and timeless dignity. I felt so lucky to have gotten to see her at this end of her long and impressive career – the last living prima ballerina assoluta. I think that ballet is one of those things where the barrier for experience in an audience is so high and only gets higher the more you see. You need to see hundreds of ballets, countless times, in order to consider yourself a seasoned ballet watcher. I’ve been to the ROH maybe 12 or 15 times in the last four years and only once have I heard a bravo. (It was during the aforementioned Enigma Variations, surprisingly.) But to see Ferri at nearly 60 was an unbelievable privilege. Afterwards we went with Roz to the Delauney for coffee, then, overly caffeinated, I bought a new pair of high waisted blue jeans from Nudie as a birthday gift to myself.
But yes, nuance. Lately many of the books I read and TV shows I watch seem to feel it necessary to spell things out, to give the reader little morsels (usually followed by long extravagant morsels of exposition), and taken en masse it makes me feel stupid. I don’t mind it sometimes, when I’m in the mood for it. I read a crime novel recently by Jane Harper that really tickled me in this way, it was an atmospheric and immersive read and thus the exposition felt seamless. Also, there are moods when you want to be spoon fed things because you want, or I want, to be smooth brained and happy, entertained and passive. Who could bear being challenged by culture every time they sit down on the couch? Couldn’t be me. But also increasingly I long for the grey areas. I love the little ambiguities, and not the big purposeful ones that point, in red neon, to the great and unavoidable ambiguities of our time. Just the gaps in things (that’s how the light gets in), and the follies of being human. The way I could see that Ferri’s 59-year-old body, while still more athletic than an Olympian, hurt when she danced with her partner on stage. The way Neel painted her celebrity peers like she was an interloper in their lives when they all shared the same city, the same era, the same streets and when she’s the one who ended up with the presidential awards and the acclaim. The things you pick up on – the things I pick up on, when I’m walking around a gallery or trying to make sense of a ballet. Another thing I am enjoying recently, if enjoying is the right word, is Bedwyr Williams’s pivot to weird comic short stories on Instagram, his recurring and usually Welsh characters who we pick up and drop off with almost at random. These harsh endings in the Instagram slideshow format are jarring (like a great short story!) and in the comments there are often people asking other readers to explain the significance of such and such a detail on the final slide, like that might explain everything. ‘Tis the nature of being alive,’ a commenter might reply. ‘Little things catch your attention and you can’t always explain why.’
Springs 
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