Tom Keating on Painters

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Tom Keating (1917–1984) was a fascinating character who you don’t really hear about today, despite his brief flush of notoriety in the late 1970s. A versatile artist, Keating worked for many years as a restorer of old pictures, cleaning huge history paintings while also helping art dealers turn damaged canvases into saleable works. The ease with which he could imitate other artists and their techniques prompted some of his employers to start requesting wholesale fakes, which he produced for a while until he discovered that his paintings were being sold for substantial sums while he was still being paid a labourer’s wage. His defence of his subsequent career as an art forger hinged on this experience; he claimed that the situation turned him against the entire art market, and prompted a resolve to undermine the galleries and auction houses by flooding them with as many fake paintings as possible. Keating’s illicit activities became headline news in the late 1970s when he and his partner were prosecuted for selling a number of fake Samuel Palmers.

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Episode 1: Turner.

Being a versatile artist myself I’ve always been intrigued by the forgery business. If you have any degree of skill in an artistic medium the thought soon arises that you could turn that skill to imitating the work of an artist who used similar techniques. In my case this has never gone further than doing one-off pastiches. Outright forgery raises the level of the game; it also raises the stakes since you open yourself to legal consequences if the forgery is exposed. Art forgery is an unusual combination of skill and cunning (the artists being forged must have plausible gaps in their oeuvre; provenance has to be invented), archaeology (the older the work being faked, the more important it is to use authentically aged or antique materials), and a peculiar bloody-mindedness to go to all this trouble while never being able to admit in public that you were the creator of the forgery.

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Episode 2: Titian.

Tom Keating on Painters was a short TV series broadcast by Channel 4 (UK) in 1982, in which Keating demonstrated his knowledge of historical painting techniques by imitating the work of several well-known artists. If he hadn’t presented a follow-up series about Impressionist artists two years later Tom Keating on Painters would be unique in being a rare TV series about painting which isn’t a guide intended to instruct the amateur artist. Keating’s sole concern in these short films is to show how five artists—Turner, Titian, Constable, Rembrandt and Degas—created their work. In each film he describes the stages of the painting process (pastel in the case of Degas) but this is never a course of instruction. In the sixth film he talks about art restoration, something he continued to work at once his forging exploits had been exposed. Art forgery is one subject he doesn’t mention at all.

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Episode 3: Constable.

The main thing I remembered about this series was that two of the demonstration paintings were reverse views of a pair of pictures that always top lists of the nation’s favourite works of art. Turner’s The Fighting Téméraire and Constable’s The Hay Wain are monuments rather than mere artworks, occupants of that rare class of painting that you see so often in reproduction it can be difficult to set aside their ubiquity and see them afresh. Keating achieves this to some degree by taking each painting back to the bare canvas then building it up again from a different point of view, showing us the stern of the old warship in Turner’s painting, and the arrival of the horse and cart at the river in the Constable. The demonstrations repeat work that Keating had already done when he painted finished versions of the reversed views for his own amusement. The films only show the early stages of the paintings but enough is demonstrated to indicate the opposed techniques of each artist. Turner and Constable were exact contemporaries but Turner’s later paintings seem to belong more to the 20th century than the 19th. So too with his technique which begins with a light canvas rather than working up light colours from a dark ground.

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Episode 4: Rembrandt.

The films about Titian and Rembrandt show more of the traditional approach, with Keating copying Titian’s Tarquin and Lucretia, and inventing a self-portrait of Rembrandt with his son. The latter is the least successful of the five imitations, Keating doesn’t seem to have been very good with portraits. Much better is his variation on The Ballet Class by Degas, an oil painting which he recreates using the pastels that Degas often favoured for his other work. This last picture is the only one that really looks finished but then pastel is a simpler medium. All of these films would have benefitted by being longer and going into more detail but such is the nature of television, the most compromised medium of all.

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Episode 5: Degas.

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Episode 6: Restoring Pictures.

Previously on { feuilleton }
More Aubrey fakery
Aubrey fakery

Chronicle: The Vase

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The sound on this old VHS recording is terrible, as the uploader admits, but I’ll write about the programme as a placeholder in the hopes that a better copy turns up one day. The vase in question is the Portland Vase, a vessel believed to have been made in Rome during the reign of Augustus, which has been housed in the British Museum since 1810. The vase is notable for being an exceptional example of cameo glasswork, a type of decorated glass in which an object is fashioned in one colour then dipped into a pool of glass of a second colour to create an extra coating. Once the glass has hardened, portions of the outer coat are carefully carved away, leaving a surface of relief decoration. The carving process can take years to complete. Josiah Wedgewood’s famous jasperware was a ceramic imitation of cameo glass; Wedgewood even borrowed the vase for a while to make a copy.

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The Portland Vase fragments (1845) by Thomas H. Shepherd.

The other notable fact about the Portland Vase is that it was smashed to pieces in 1845 by a drunken student, and has since been pieced together on three separate occasions, the first time shortly after its destruction, the second time in 1948 when the vase was dismantled and reassembled using shellac to fill some of the gaps between the larger pieces. The most recent reconstruction in 1989 was filmed by the BBC for this episode of Chronicle, a process which once again required the careful dismantling of the vase then its rebuilding using more durable glues and filling materials. Reading about these reconstructions had me wondering about the logistics of dismantling a 2000-year-old antique, especially one fashioned from such a fragile material. Conservators Nigel Williams and Sandra Smith spent nine months working with 230 fragments. If you share my curiosity about their work, this damaged recording is worth persevering with, the film provides a rare opportunity to see in detail the restoration of one of the world’s great art treasures. It’s also a reminder to myself to go and see the vase the next time I’m near the British Museum, which I often am when I visit London. Despite having visited the museum many times, the vase is one exhibit I’ve yet to see.

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Weekend links 783

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An illustration by William Heath Robinson for A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1914).

• New music: How To Shoulder The Radiance Of Revelations by Dadub; Leviathan by Stephen Roddy; and Echoes Of The Hollow Earth by Cryo Chamber.

• At Sight & Sound: “Every time I look at the film, it gets better.” Stephen Soderbergh on Jaws.

• At Public Domain Review: The Language of Form: Lothar Schreyer’s Kreuzigung (1920).

Leafing through the merveilleux-scientifique novels today allows for a dual rediscovery: firstly, it uncovers the previously unrecognised richness of Belle Époque scientific fiction, which did not perish with the works of Verne. The stories take in journeys to Mars, solar cataclysms, reading of auras, psychic control, weighing of souls, death rays, alien invasions, even strolls among the infinitesimally small. But exploring the genre also offers insights into the cultural history of the era, marked by a significant permeability between science and pseudo-science. Reading this work, we can learn a lot about the aspirations, fears and beliefs of early 20th-century Europe.

Fleur Hopkins-Loféron on the evolution of French science fiction after Jules Verne

• Mix of the week: A Twin Peaks mix for The Wire by Lori Eschler & Dean Hurley.

• Steven Heller’s font of the month is Kefir.

Patrick Wolf’s favourite albums.

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Frou-Frou Foxes In Midsummer Fires (1990) by Cocteau Twins | Midsummer Night (2010) by The Time And Space Machine | Midsummer Boulevard (2022) by Hawksmoor

Omnibus: A Portrait of Raymond Chandler

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The full title of this BBC documentary is Down These Mean Streets a Man Must Go: A Portrait of Raymond Chandler. The film was broadcast in 1969, ten years after Chandler’s death, and has been on iPlayer recently to judge by the logo in the corner, but it’s not one I’d seen before. It would have been ideal viewing a couple of years ago during my attempt to watch all the films listed in The Big Noir Book. While working my way through the film list I was also reading some of Dashiell Hammett’s novels (The Maltese Falcon is excellent; The Dain Curse is terrible) and all of Raymond Chandler’s novels. Or almost all…I didn’t read Poodle Springs, his final book, left unfinished then completed by other hands. I enjoyed the Philip Marlowe novels so much I was tempted to start them all over again after I’d reached the end of Playback. Added to the enjoyment was the opportunity to see how much the books were mauled when they passed through the Hollywood mill. The BBC documentary opens with a clip from The Big Sleep which has always been the best of the adaptations (it can be difficult getting Humphrey Bogart out of your head when you’re reading Philip Marlowe’s narration) but even this one alters the story while downplaying the sexual content (homosexuality and pornography in the novel), something that all the films of the 40s do their best to avoid.

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A Portrait of Raymond Chandler was written by John Foster and Fred Burnley who present the writer via his own words in a sequence of dramatised interviews and enactments of scenes from the novels. There’s also a brief interview with JB Priestley, an intriguing thing in itself as I’d no idea that Priestley knew Chandler. The enactments don’t work very well—all the very small and very English rooms look nothing like Los Angeles architecture—but Edward Judd makes a decent attempt to apply his hard-boiled manner to the detective role without any Bogart impersonations. Judd appeared throughout the 60s in a succession of science-fiction films, and the film works best when he’s reading from the novels. Omnibus used him for the voiceovers a few years later in another portrait of a writer, Fear and Loathing in Gonzovision, a film about Hunter S. Thompson. The Chandler documentary appeared just ahead of the wave of renewed Hollywood interest in the Marlowe books that broke in the 1970s. Among the film clips there’s a short scene from the soon-to-be-released Marlowe, an updated adaptation of The Little Sister which isn’t one of the best Marlowe films but it has some nice interior shots of the Bradbury Building, and you get to see Bruce Lee demolish James Garner’s office with his feet and fists.

Previously on { feuilleton }
The Big Noir Book, or 300 films and counting…

Playhouse: Aubrey

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Aubrey was a TV play for BBC 2’s Playhouse strand, an eighty-minute drama enacting events from the last three years of Aubrey Beardsley’s life. It was broadcast on 22nd January, 1982, and never repeated. After I digitised my own VHS copy in 2008 I wrote a somewhat taunting post about it, showing stills from the scenes that matched Beardsley’s drawings while refusing to make the video itself more widely available. I was subsequently surprised when the writer of the play, John Selwyn Gilbert, turned up in the comments to justifiably bemoan the BBC’s refusal to make so much of its vast archive publically available, an iniquity always compounded by the British public having paid for all those broadcasts in the first place.

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Fast-forward seventeen years and here at last is a copy of Aubrey at YouTube, albeit in compromised form (see below). Since I wrote my original post I’ve become more acquainted with the TV productions of director Philip Hammond so it’s worth giving Hammond a little more credit for the success of the production than I did originally. Hammond’s directing career ran from the 1960s through to the 1990s, with significant contributions to Granada TV’s landmark adaptations of the Sherlock Holmes stories, and a very creditable three-part adaptation of Sheridan Le Fanu’s Uncle Silas which the BBC broadcast as The Dark Angel in 1989. Television has never encouraged the kinds of stylistic flair you find in cinema but Hammond’s later productions stand apart in their mise-en-scene and frequent use of artistic detail. Many of his later productions achieve unusual effects by shooting scenes through reflections in sheets of glass. Elsewhere you’ll often find characters framed in mirrors (as happens in the opening scene of Aubrey) or lit by saturated light from a stained-glass panel.

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Hammond takes a different approach with Aubrey which was shot on video in studio sets. The production design is almost exclusively black and white; many of the sets and compositions frequently mimic Beardsley’s drawings, with decorative motifs framing the scenes. The general appearance is stagily artificial but the details of the script are nevertheless accurate. John Selwyn Gilbert was also the writer, producer and narrator of Beardsley and His Work, a documentary which had been broadcast on BBC 2 three days before Aubrey. Gilbert’s drama follows Beardsley from his dismissal as art editor of The Yellow Book in 1895, through the foundation of The Savoy magazine with Arthur Symons and Leonard Smithers, to his untimely demise in Menton on the French Riviera. Rula Lenska plays Aubrey’s sister, Mabel, with Sandor Elès as André Raffalovich, Simon Shepherd as John Gray, Ronald Lacey as Leonard Smithers, Christopher Strauli as Arthur Symons, Mark Tandy as WB Yeats, and Alex Norton as Max Beerbohm. John Dicks was evidently chosen for his facial resemblance to Beardsley but he’s a decade too old for the role, and looks too healthy for an artist enduring the final stages of a tubercular illness that would eventually kill him. But this is a minor complaint.

More of a problem is the way the play has been uploaded to YouTube in the wrong screen ratio. All TV broadcasts prior to the 1990s are 4:3 but this one has been horizontally compressed to something closer to a square. It is possible to rectify this if you download the video (I currently use 4K Video Downloader) then use Handbrake to write a new copy of the file with the picture size set to a 4:3 ratio. Or maybe you’d rather watch the squashed version…

And while I’m on the subject of Beardsley on screen, Chris James has made available a new copy of his short animated film, After Beardsley, which is now complete, and not chopped into three parts as it was before.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
The Aubrey Beardsley archive