Marilyn again

Recorded a Radio 2 programme on Marilyn (no need for a surname). Christ to Coke has had an affect - I now get asked about other iconic images, e.g. Munch's Scream, which generally means some rapid homework. I wrote a blog for the Oxford University website about Marilyn's "Happy Birthday Mr President. It begins:

It’s John F. Kennedy’s 45th birthday at Madison Square Garden on 19 May 1962. Only it’s not. His real birthday is ten days in the future. The compelling mass schmaltz that Americans do with an underlying, knowing absurdity saturates the event. After she has characteristically missed her cue on at least two occasions, the host Peter Lawford finally (and with inadvertent irony) introduces the “late Marilyn Monroe”.
In a glittering faux-nude dress tighter than her own skin and enveloped in a soft fur wrap, that most desirable of female bodies shuffles with exaggerated mini-steps towards the podium, like a penguin on speed. Her floss hair has long given up any pretence to organic life. She is unwrapped by Lawford and ups the sexual ante with mute lip squirming directed at the microphone, which she holds tenderly like a living member. Everything is comically kitsch yet irresistibly powerful.

The rest can be seen on the Univ Press website:
http://blog.oup.com/2012/05/happy-birthday-mr-president-marilyn-monroe-jfk/

For the radio homework Judd lent me disks of The Prince and the Showgirl. Also My Week with Marilyn by Simon Curtis.
The Olivier / Monroe conjunction  is fascinating. He was a great actor and mastered film. Monroe was film. There's a passage in the coronation in Westminster Abbey where the whole narrative of the majestic event is carried by her printed programme and her face. Micro-millimetres of fleeting facial nuances. Whether this is "the method" or natural talent and intelligence is difficult to know. I suspect the latter.
My Week.. has a special resonance - the young man, Colin Clark, who accidentally becomes Marilyn's human outlet during the circus of performing animals, is the son of Kenneth Clark, Lord Clark of Civilisation. Clarks's catalogue of the Windsor drawings by Leonardo remains one of the greatest ever works of art-historical scholarship, and his monograph (for which I provided an intro for the Penguin revised ed.) is as good as any monograph of any artist in its perception and beauty. As so often with such biopics, the first time I saw Branagh as Olivier in the film I thought "you're not Olivier". The first time I saw Michelle Williams I thought "you're not Monroe". A short way into the film, I lost the sense that Branagh was not Olivier. He became a character who was analogous with Olivier. I never lost the sense that Williams was not Monroe. This is not a matter of acting as such, since Williams is superb. It comes from 2 things: 1) Williams is always imitating Monroe, which Branagh does not do with Olivier unless it is when Olivier plays the prince; 2) more importantly, Monroe's magnetic presence on camera is such that it never fades (for me at least), however hard William tries.
I visited the Marilyn exhibition in the Salvatore Ferragamo (shoe) Museum in Florence. Very well done, if too many SF shoes included for thin reasons. Wonderful costumes borrowed from major collectors good film clips. Her notebooks of which there are facsimiles are a revelation. Questing, sad, enigmatic and poetic. One, after she had attended some university classes in Los Angeles in 1950, lists family trees of Florentine artists, Donatello, Masaccio, Lippi et al. I missed my vocation. I could have tutored MM on Renaissance art.

Sarah Simblet's talk

Aaah. That last one was posted by Judd, my excellent PA, who has been grappling with the site as well. What she says is right - a talk by Sara Simblet who worked with me for TV reconstructing the technique of the Leonardo portrait on vellum.  She spoke about her new version of John Evelyn's Silva (1664) on England's woodland trees. What she is doing is extraordinary in her quest for artistic and functional perfection.

I've found at the moment that if I remain signed in I can post blogs. But I not counting on it...

The New Sylva

Aaahh... What a great talk in the tiny village hall in a little West Oxfordshire village last night.

banks and bonking

Still struggling to get into my own blog... On signing in I keep being told that I don't have a blog. I have to re-set everything each time, sometimes with success, sometimes without.

More bankers bonking to the pop of Bollinger corks. The focus is on bankers, but the all big corporations do similar things. Through the major national boards on which I have served, and my contacts with top 100 companies who sponsor exhibitions I have seen at least a glimpse of the ethos that now permeates huge firms. I have also seen the incestuous nature of remuneration committees, whose members are for the most part determining the comparators for their own levels of remuneration.

The culture is of macho management (perpetuated by boards whose members belong to the same  cadre) that sets up the climate for smart-ass manipulators of mechanisms whose only aim is to exploit the financial system, regardless of whether this screws the clients whose interests they are supposed to be serving.

The massive rewards are justified on the grounds that we have to pay for the best at an international level. We can see what the "best" have done. I would be happy to see the best defined in terms of probity, public service, responsibility and competence. Surely we could find people to do this for £1 million a year. Does someone who is paid £2 million work 2X as hard and with 2X the dedication as someone paid £1 million? And so on up the scale. Let other countries pay for the macho manipulators if they want to.

As I have said previously, the nature of what is called the "market" is that it serves to facilitate businesses charge the maximum they can get away with. Since they are all doing this, the predominant impetus is towards ever higher prices for customers, not reduced prices through competition. Competition acts only as an intermittent and partial restraint. At the level of huge corporations the only serious competition is to become big enough to ingest or crush other companies. Since Google and Facebook do not look like traditional companies we should not think they are any different.

But there are no viable political parties that are even thinking about such things.

blog and Facebook

A hiatus. I have experienced big and continuing problems with logging in to my own blog. I'm not confident that it is sorted out for good. I might have to go elsewhere - if it's worth continuing at all. I have reservations about the self-indulgence of the exercise.

I am withdrawing from Facebook. Their decision to reset everyone's default email address to @Facebook is unethical. They did not ask. They did not inform. No doubt the some obscure clause in the terms and conditions let's them do this. It's clearly done for their own self interest.
The pattern is familiar. A company starts with enthusiasm and even idealism. In this phase it is necessarily customer-orientated. Over a certain critical size - probably a combination of staff size with attendant management structures and sheer financial mass - stock corporate behaviour kicks in. The collective interest of the corporation, as defined by one or a few dictatorial  managers and powerful investors, takes over as the end in view. This kind of corporate arrogance is all of a piece with Facebook's lying at the time of the stock market flotation. The one consolation is that in this world of fast moving technological fads, the existing dinosaurs, with their ponderous lack of agility, will be wiped out by the next impact of a meteorite strike  from a nerd in a bedroom. Where is My Space? Ingested by NewsCorp (ugh!) and then sold on. I give Facebook 12 years, Google 20.  Maybe that's too long. I have been to Google's headquarters and seen the bureaucratic ossification close up. It is not a pretty sight, though they try to pretend it's not happening with open-knecked shorts, knackered jeans and California-speak.

The Prado Mona Lisa

The amount of press attention given to the copy of the Mona Lisa in the Prado is astonishing.
http://www.theartnewspaper.com/articles/Leonardo’s+lover+probably+painted+the+Prado’s+Mona+Lisa/26047
etc. etc.
Would the story have even have made the papers if it had been about Raphael? The idea that a copy should be produced in workshop is hardly a surprise. In our book on the Madonna and the Yarnwinder,  Thereza Wells and I showed that the two prime versions developed alongside each other, in this instance with Leonardo's participation in both. The only surprise is that a copy should be made of an intimate, domestic portrait of a bourgeois sitter. Perhaps Francesco del Giocondo wanted two versions. But it is odd. The implications of the landscape for the dating of the Mona Lisa - the background in the copy is aligned with drawings dateable to after 1510 - provides useful confirmation that the painting took a long time, but is not surprising. Was it ever completely finished? Were any of his paintings completely finished? The London Virgin of the Rocks, which was supplied for the frame in S. Francesco in Milan, is not finished. Only the Louvre seemed to think that the ML was completed before Leonardo left Florence in 1507.
Perhaps I shouldn't complain. It all helps sustain interest and helps sell (my) books.
By the way, we have absolutely no reliable evidence about what Salai looked like - and almost no firm evidence of how he painted. The pretty boy with ringlets, often identified as Salai, was a favourite facial type for Leonardo well before Salai came on to the scene.

guns and the Countyside Allaince

The new Executive Chairman of the Countryside Alliance, Sir Barney White-Spunner (could Hardy have invented a better name?) is urging children to take up shooting to identify with the country. Sir Barney, please note:
1) guns were designed for killing at that is still their primary function. Even children know that;
2) putting a gun in kids' hands is to identify them personally with the images of violence that permeate our media;
3) guns should not be domesticated in town our country. They should be available and used only excpetionally;
4) using them for "sport" is predicated upon the user gaining pleasure from the death and suffering of a living creature. Such pleasure is degrading;
5) if shooting is necessary in the countryside for certain specific reasons, it should be considered as a necessary evil rather than a source of delight.
There is of course abundant natural slaughter in nature within the complex interactions and balances between hunters and preys. This does not justify our adding to it for motives that gratuitous, unnecessary and unethical.