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Aphrodite with Beehive

(81 X 76.5 cm)

'LOANED ARRANGEMENTS': JANET BOULTON'S PAINTINGS OF THE INTERIOR OF THE TEMPLE OF APOLLO AT LITTLE SPARTA

 

HARRY GILONIS

 

All poems can be represented by

still lifes not to say

water-colors, the violence of

the Iliad lends itself to an arrangement

of narcissi in a jar.

 

(William Carlos Williams, ‘Still Lifes’)

 

 

The ‘Temple of Apollo’ at Little Sparta, a refurbished cow-byre, at one time served to house works by Ian Hamilton Finlay exemplifying neo-French-revolutionary ideals. The building has since been used mainly for storage; the original scheme, still extant, is largely hidden by artworks sheltering from winter cold or awaiting shipment to exhibitions, as well as by garden tools, packing-crates, rolls of bubble-wrap and the like. Whereas Janet Boulton’s other views of Finlay’s world show responsiveness to his concern for the specific relation between works and contexts, she here takes as subject artworks ‘off-duty’, failing in, or falling short of, full instantiation.

 

Comparison could be made with genre-paintings of art-in-process in the studio, or art-on-display in galleries; but these differ from art not-being-art, a motif Boulton first exemplified in related paintings of garden-sculpture and garden-tools stowed away in the ‘Limonaia’ at Villa La Pietra, near Florence.

 

The fortuitous relations between objects in these watercolours lack the focussed purposiveness of some Finlay works, which, like ‘history-painting’ in the grand manner, centre on the most intense moment in any story. Boulton’s easel is necessarily set further back, in ‘metahistory’, where, in Michelet’s happy phrase, ‘Time and Space are no more’. And yet her eye proposes new relationships and meanings. In Aphrodite with Propeller, a marine propeller, once part of a Finlay sculpture, sits in suggestive contiguity with a statue of wave-born, wave-borne Aphrodite. But this is Aphrodite of the Terror: a red thread around her neck alludes to a fashion among French aristocrats who had lost family members to the guillotine, supposedly partying at ‘Bals des Victimes’ while their world collapsed. For Finlay, the classical deities, too, were victims — of the ‘secular Terror directed against The Ideal’, for him a feature of modernity. The sickle near the Aphrodite’s feet is inscribed “A COTTAGE • A FIELD • A PLOUGH”: a phrase from the French Revolutionary Louis-Antoine Saint-Just, encapsulating Rousseauvian proposals for self-sufficiency.

 

From another angle Aphrodite with Beehive, Aphrodite is twinned with a tall vase with matching thread around its delicate ‘neck’. Violence penetrates the domestic, as (in Williams’s poem quoted above) the twisting stalks of cut flowers can imply flashing blades. Although Corot’s name on a wall-plaque here might evoke the plein-air of his paintings — chiming with wheel-barrow and watering-cans — other narratives are possible. Corot reworked classical mythology, and illustrated a play by the revolutionary André Chenier.

 

Aphrodite’s half-sister, Artemis, appears in Artemis with Tools under cover but similarly red-chokered; beside her, an assortment of ‘revolutionised’ tools. A spade is lettered ‘VENTÔSE’ — February-March in the French-Revolutionary calendar. In that month in 1794 Saint-Just proposed redistributing land confiscated from emigré nobles among the poor, involving them tangibly in the revolution. “OSEZ!” (“dare!”) on the hoe is laconic epitome of Saint-Just’s words Finlay set on a plaque in the Temple: “To dare! is the politics of revolution”. The ‘Ventôse Decrees’ were passed, but not acted-on; and, after a coup later in 1794, in the Revolutionary month of Thermidor, Saint-Just was guillotined, on a day named ‘Arrosoir’ (‘watering-can’). That artefact, too, is here ‘revolutionised’ by Finlay. ‘FRAGILE’ lettered on some used packaging seems apt.

 

The torso-like object at the centre of Couthon’s Column with Wheelbarrow is a section of twisted ‘solomonic column’, personifying Georges Couthon, “almost the ideal Jacobin” though deformed by illness. He too was a victim of Thermidor, guillotined with Saint-Just and Robespierre (his name also appears on a Temple wall-plaque). Here again is the commemorative watering-can, and in the foreground a wheel-barrow, almost a tumbril... To the left, a ‘column’ of military drums, honouring the drummer-boy Joseph Bara, a revolutionary martyr painted by Jacques-Louis David; behind, a column's capital — ‘the Revolution draping itself in the Roman republic’. Above, paired scythes with lightning-bolt blades emblematise the conjunction of revolutionary regeneration and necessary force.

 

Apollo with Le Peletier is perhaps the most elegaic of the group. A mutilated neo-neo-classical figure stands, body held as if in mourning; close by is a bust of the Jacobin Louis Le Peletier, assassinated in 1793. Busts like this were widely circulated; Marat had one in his living-room. David’s famous Death of Marat was a pendant to an earlier canvas, now lost, of the dead Le Peletier; each has the character of a Jacobin pietà. Le Peletier, an educational reformer, proposed free schooling for both sexes; after his assassination Robespierre carried the scheme to the National Convention. It would be salutary to remember Finlay’s — and Robespierre’s — dialectical engagement of ‘terror’ and ‘virtue’, ideals requiring force for their enactment; to honour optimism about the fate of the Revolution, of humanity. The Ventôse Decrees end declaring “Happiness is a new idea in Europe”.

 

There are of course many pleasures not reliant on the dual or shared nature of Janet Boulton’s ‘loaned arrangements’. It is a treat to trace from picture to picture the different ways sunlight moves through the small windows of the Temple/byre, gilding the dusty air as it passes. But such delights can be safely left to the viewer.

 

for E.