The power of images

Black and white phography is a wonderful if neglected art-form - particularly from the early-mid part of the 20th century when brutalisation extended to give us concrete. Masters of the genre were Ansel Adams, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, Robert Doisneau, George Brassai and Andrei Kertesz 

Today I want to pay tribute to a couple of Bulgarian masters – Stoyan Sertev and Ivo Hadzhimishev. I had a fascinating lunch yesterday with Ivo – recognised as Bulgaria’s best photographer – after I had found a wonderful production of his - "STOYAN SERTEV (1906 – 1974) AN EPOCH IN BLACK & WHITE" which contains photographs of prominent artists from the late 1940s. Those of Nikola Tanev, for example, have taken the breath away of friends I have shown it to. Others show sculptors working on the monumental work of the period. 

Stoyan Sertev was actually a musician whose other passion was the camera. His huge archive has kept hundreds of frames from 1939 till the end of his life. He mainly shot works of art and their creators, architectural projects, theatrical and opera performances. 

Ivo Hadzhimishev was responsible for an exhibition on his work at the National Gallery late last year (and also the catalogue) and says about the latter: 

“The images that we can see in front of us have passed the test of time – they have emerged from oblivion, and, with them or because of them, a multitude of Bulgarian artists and intellectuals who have left a trace in Bulgarian and European culture have returned and taken their place in the image memory of Bulgaria. These photographs have been lived through. They have been created first and foremost by the heart and spirit – and that is their value!”

Bulgarian National Radio provided recordings of “Avramov” quartet from the Gold Fund for the audio disc accompanying the edition and Alexander Sertev’s family.

The first photograph is of Nikola Tanev - with an actress friend in 1947 at Sozopol.

The book gives an amazing feel for an era and some of the personalities which dominated it - particularly poignant in view of the traumatic events of that period. The book deserves a higher profile - significant that my friends had never seen a copy.......  

The photo on the right has, in the middle, the unmistakable figure of Vladimir Dmitrov- the Master - and, below that again, a favourite of mine Zdravko Alexandrov

I find it so important to have such personal reminders of my favourite artists. It is one thing to see their paintings and some text about them - quite another to see their photos, particularly if animated - or sometimes better - caricatures!

I was reminded, as we talked, of photographs displayed in the hallway of the building in which painter Tsanko Lavrenov’s grandson now lives. showing the devastation from the allied bombing of Sofia 

They were taken by Lavrenov in the immediate aftermath of that bombing. There is an interesting article here on the subject 

Indifference to our European Neighbours

A post in September last year drew attention to the scandalously superficial treatment which Europeans get of their neighbours. Michael Lewis’s detailed articles (in Vanity Fair) on German, Greek and Irish aspects of the global financial crisis a few years back was an exception which proved the rule. The London Review of Books (belying its name) is about the only publication which gives us in depth coverage of issues and (occasionally) countries. 
France and Germany, whose traditions would lead you to expect such intelligent treatment of other societies, disappoint - despite Die Zeit, for example, being a weekly, with the additional liberty that offers.
In desperation I have now added New Left Review and a new-look New Statesman to the list of journals which now wend their way to my mountain retreat. Already I feel a difference!! 
Time perhaps to revise the assumption about non-intellectual Brits? 

And also to ask a simple question - there are tens of thousands of journalists and academics churning out articles in (hundreds of) thousands of journals in the general field of politics and social policy. Can we not think of a way of making the better of these pieces more accessible - in various European languages?? That's the Eurozine concept - but they're selecting from a rather precious bunch of cultural magazines whose language doesn't take many prisoners! 
There are a few other titles which are trying this idea - eg Project Syndicate but from a rather narrow ideological base ; and Le Courrier International which gives us articles from a variety of (global) newspapers - but these ARE newspaper articles and suffer from the limitations of that genre. 
Time for more experimentation!

One of the factors which gets in the way of even this simple idea is the specialisation of political, professional and academic silos - just have a look at the lists of academic magazines at publishers such as Elsevier,Sage or Wiley. Twenty- odd years ago journals such as Parliamentary Affairs, Political Quarterly, West European Politics and Government and Opposition offered civilised reading. Now, with the exception of Political Quarterly, you get highly specialised  topics with boring technocratic prose.

 On June 24 2012 I wrote 

In my days, we had the magazine Encounter (Der Monat in Germany) which gave me stimulating articles by renowned French, German and Italian writers, for example, but was then discovered to have been funded by the CIA and soon folded. Where is its equivalent these days? Le Monde Diplomatique and Lettre International perhaps - except there is, sadly, no English version of the latter - and only a short version in English of the former (whose language is, in any event, a bit opaque). 

In 2004 Carl Fredrikkson wrote an article about the need for a proper European public space where ideas were exchanged across national boundaries and Jan-Werner Muller returned to the issue earlier this year with an important article entitled The Failure of European Intellectuals?

But I am actually asking for something simpler - clear and insightful writing about different European societies. The recent publication on The Inner lives of Cultures could give us only one European system!

Indifference to our European differences - part I

Three years ago, to the day, I was expressing my concern about the absence of good writing on specific european societies and systems

it's actually easier for a Brit to find about what the Chinese are feeling and discussing than it is to get a similar sense about the various countries of Europe! If you don’t believe this, have a look at the reading list in section 6 of my briefing paper on administrative reform in China. This gives a rich variety of material which can be read about relevant current developments in China. The Chinese-American migration and intellectual exchange has been a powerful mechanism to give us that.

There seems very little equivalent for individual countries of Europe. Ralf Dahrendorf , Tony Judt, and Perry Anderson are some of a very small group who have had the ability to focus intellectually on European countries and communicate them to us clearly. Perry Anderson’s papers on the ongoing debates in countries such as France and Germany which he brought together in his 2009 book The New Old World are exceptional. 

I would like, for example, to plug into the thoughts of greens, left and other groups in the heartland of Europe – and learn what they are doing in practical actions (social enterprise), policies and discussions to help shape a shared vision and agenda for social change.
Where do I go to find this out? Newspapers and journals are too general – and books (apart from Paul Hawkens and Paul Kingsworth) so specialised and numerous that it needs a specialist to help. But where are the "gatekeepers" to help us identify such pe0ple? In posts in previous years, I’ve tried to give a sense of the limited number of good books on, for example, contemporary French, German, Italian or Spanish societies – let alone Polish or Romanian ones!

Sadly, the subsequent years of intensive reading have given me no reason to revise my judgement about the paucity of intellectual efforts to transcend European national borders. Indeed one book which I found last year in Sofia’s second-hand English bookshop (The Elephant) strongly confirms it. It’s Malcolm Bradbury’s 1995 Dangerous Pilgrimages – transatlantic mythologies and the novel which looks at mutual American-English influences on the development of the novel in the past couple of centuries.

I thought I had found an equivalent Modernism – a guide to European Literature 1890-1930 which Bradbury had edited a few years earlier – but it turns out the book is a rather stale series of essays on only the key European figures of that period. Nothing comparative since 1930!
My post of 17 March 2011 went on -

The barrier to our understanding of developments in other European countries is not just linguistic. It stems also from the intellectual compartmentalisation (or apartheid) which universities and European networks have encouraged in our elites. European political scientists, for example, have excellent networks but talk in a highly specialised language about recondite topics which they publish in inaccessible language in inaccessible journals. What insights they have about each other’s countries are rarely made available to the wider public. The same is true of the civil service nationals who participate in EC comitology or OECD networks – let alone the myriad professional networks. We talk about gated communities – but they exist virtually as well as physically. 
Sign and Sight used to translate outstanding articles by non-English language authors (but folded in 2013) - so Eurozine is left as the only network of 75 European highbrow journals and translates interesting articles into at least one major European language

In principle, the most interesting books on a country’s society should be written by nationals of that country – they after all know it best - and duly translated. For example  Luigi Barzini’s The Italians probably still gives us the best insight into Italians despite being written more than 50 years ago. And Geert Maak the Dutch.

But generally, it is outsiders who seem  more able to capture the essence of a country and its people - eg Peter Robb key aspects of Italy; Theodor Zeldin the French; John Ardagh (several decades ago) the Germans. Spain is better served - although Gerald Brennan's South of Granada also remains (after 50 years) one of the best insights.....although this week's book by Jeremy Treglown looks to rival if not supplant it

What does all this tell us about modern writers I wonder? I suppose translators are just too busy to form an association and do some writing themselves?

Recently I referred to an interesting study of 10 societies - The Inner Lives of Cultures only one of which, sadly, was European – Romania. But the chapter was an insightful one  - if missing any references.

The painting is one of Atanas Matsourev's wonderful aquarelles. His technique is amazing - they look so much like oils. I met him a few weeks back - and bought this sketch. a self-portrait. 

Benn's inspiration

It's extraordinarily difficult to sum up a person's life - there are so many phases and different (if not conflicting) facets....I was deeply involved as a Regional politician from 1970-1990 and experienced Tony Benn's positive and negative aspects powerfully - if not personally. 
He was latterly a deeply divisive figure within my party - making few concessions and bearing a heavy responsibility for the breakup of the Labour Party and for Thatcherism. 
From 1990 I was a (distant) spectator and could experience (and admire) him simply as a diarist and (marginal) activist - exposing brutally the realities of the British political system. 

Alternately I respected him; rejected him; and revered him........Did I change - or did he? Or was it our expectations which changed? The answer, I suppose, is all three. We never remain the same - nor do those who judge us (with different and varying standards) . 
I am sorry that so few of the obituaries I am reading do justice to such complexity................There are some interesting interviews - but they are recent. To get any sense of Tony Benn, you have to go to the Diaries which he actually seems to have started in 1940!................

My last post on his passing was a long one - as befits a man of his complexity and fascination. For someone who had such polarising policies, he had a very even, if not sweet, temperament. He was reason personified, idealistic and boyish in his enthusiasms. 
The Obituaries section of The Daily Telegraph is recognised as Britain's best - and has a long entry here for those who want all the detail on Benn's long life - and its significance for British politics.

The last part of my tribute in the previous post emphasised Benn's almost religious commitment to the decency and struggle of ordinary people - as expressed, for example, in the history of the Levellers (of the 17th century) and the Chartists (of the 19th) and the values of the non-Conformists and Quakers. He was not a religious man but, like many of us, he had a strong moral strength which was based on the religious beliefs of his parents....... 
A good short video here - with various appropriate tributes......

It is interesting that several of the tributes to Tony Benn have made the simple point that he “encouraged people”. The journalist Gary Younge observed him for many years and has given perhaps the most eloquent comment on this part of his appeal -

The two things that stood out were his optimism and his persistence. He believed that people were inherently decent and that they could work together make the world a better place – and he was prepared to join them in that work wherever they were.This alone made him remarkable in late 20th-century British politics. He believed in something.

For some this was enough: they were desperate for some ideological authenticity, for someone for whom politics was rooted not merely in a series of calculations about what was possible in any given moment but in a set of principles guiding what was necessary and desirable. Criticisms that he was divisive ring hollow unless the critics address what the divisions in question were, and how the struggle to address them panned out.

Benn stood against Labour's growing moral vacuity and a political class that was losing touch with the people it purported to represent. The escalating economic inequalities, the increasing privatisation of the National Health Service, the Iraq war and the deregulation of the finance industry that led to the economic crisis – all of which proceeded with cross-party support – leave a question mark over the value of the unity on offer.
 What some refuse to forgive is not so much his divisiveness as his apostasy. He was a class traitor. He would not defend the privilege into which he was born or protect the establishment of which he was a part. It was precisely because he knew the rules that he would not play the game.He hitched these principles to Labour's wagon from an early age. Its founding mission of representing the interests of the labour movement in parliament was one he held dear. He never left it even when, particularly as he got older, it seemed to leave him. His primary loyalty was not to a party but to the causes of internationalism, solidarity and equality, which together provided the ethical compass for his political engagement. When people told him that they had ripped up their party membership cards in disgust, he would say: "That's all well and good. But what are you doing now?" 

The devotion that has poured out for him since his passing is not simply nostalgia. The parents of many of those who embraced him in recent times – the occupiers, student activists, anti-globalisation campaigners – were barely even conscious at the height of his left turn. They are not mourning a relic of the past but an advocate for a future they believe is not only possible but necessary.

The trouble for his detractors was that Benn would not go quietly into old age. He didn't just believe in "anything": he believed in something very definite – socialism. He advocated for the weak against the strong, the poor against the rich and labour against capital. He believed that we were more effective as human beings when we worked together collectively than when we worked against each other as individuals.

Such principles have long been threatened with extinction in British politics. Benn did a great deal to keep them alive. In the face of media onslaught and political marginalisation, that took courage. And, in so doing, he encouraged us.

A dissenting prelate put it this way in his tribute -

All history is the history of struggle, and religious history was, for him, no different. "For many, many centuries, political arguments were fought out in religious terms, and I've never thought we can understand the world we lived in unless we understood the history of the church. All political freedoms were won, first of all, through religious freedom."
Likewise, there is no way of understanding the politics of Tony Benn without understanding the very English traditions of religious dissent that so shaped his imagination.Asked last year how he would like to be remembered, he answered: "I would be very pleased when I die if somebody put on a stone: 'Tony Benn – he encouraged us'." Well, he encouraged me. Tony Benn, rest in peace.

The quintessential Englishman - Tony Benn - RIP

I have been collecting various links on the subject of old age – being very aware of how many of my erstwhile heroes had reached (and surpassed) the critical age of 90 eg Denis Healey, Diane Athill and Helmut Schmidt.

I had confidently expected Tony Benn to join their ranks – but have just learned that he has been struck down at 88  

How to explain this maverick left-wing British politician to my global audience?

·         First that he was quintessentially English in background – his grandfather founding a famous publishing company. This privileged background gave his socialism a slightly artificial tone - despite its undoubted genuineness (his family came from non-conformist stock). He never really "belonged"...... 
Benn became a (Labour) parliamentarian in 1950 (before I came to political maturity a decade or so later) and was a technocratic Minister in the Labour governments of the late 1960s. His famous Diaries, which he started in 1942, give a unique perspective about (if not insight into) our political culture in those days.

·         After the Labour defeat of 1970, reflecting perhaps wider social changes, something changed in him and he became increasingly left-wing and a real thorn in the power system of the Labour Party. He developed (with Stuart Holland) an alternative economic strategy and was the catalyst for the split from the party of the “social democrat” wing led by Roy Jenkins which then doomed the Labour party to 18 wasted years. I famously shared a political platform at the Port Glasgow shipyards with him in 1978 during the highly-charged referendum about a Scottish Parliament.

·         I had been a great admirer until then but felt that he had “lost the plot” as he threw his lot in with the “wild left”. In retrospect, however, the right who took control of the rump of the Labour party were hardly any better!

He was, as The Guardian editorial put it, 

one of the most charismatic, most controversial, most inspirational and most divisive public figures of the second half of the 20th century. He evolved into one of the great political educators, a role to which he was ideally suited by his personal charm, his sense of humour, his passionate interest in new people and new ideas, and his profound commitment to the importance of politics. Long after he stopped being a player at the top table of politics, he fired new generations with an interest in how power works. Unlike many of his contemporaries, there is no doubt that he will always be remembered.

Let his obituary tell the story -

·         When Labour lost the 1979 general election, Benn was well placed to assume the leadership of the left, and began to propose constitutional changes to give greater representation to the views of activists and trade unionists in drafting the manifesto and in selecting MPs. Militant and other Trotskyite groups who had perfected techniques of entryism sponsored the resolutions on party reform. Two very different groups were now following Benn. On the one hand there were revolutionaries of various kinds, many of whom wanted to destroy capitalism and did not mind killing off the Labour party in the process. On the other, Labour's left wing felt disappointed and betrayed by what they saw as the failures of the party's five years in office. The more progress Benn made with his demands for reform, the greater the possibility of a split became. When Callaghan resigned the leadership in 1980, Benn came close to running against Foot, but decided to stay his hand.

·         Despite Foot's passionate appeal to unity, Benn did stand against Denis Healey in the September 1981 election for the deputy leadership. Healey won, under the reformed system that Benn had championed, by less than 0.5%. This margin was accounted for by some of the MPs who would soon be leaving for the Social Democratic party, launched the previous March – though others of this group actually voted for Benn in the hope that he would win.

·         Labour began the long, hard climb back to power. The left of the party split – the Tribune group backing Foot and later Neil Kinnock and Benn setting up his own Campaign group in 1982. He declared the 1983 election a triumph because never before had so many people – 27.6% – voted for a socialist programme. Foot managed to keep Labour in the game, and when Kinnock took over after the election the high tide of Bennism had been reached. It took a decade to roll it back completely, but Benn's realistic challenge for the leadership was over.

In 1987 the first volume of his diaries appeared, covering the period 1963-67. Subsequent volumes then appeared almost annually, covering the whole of his career. At the same time Benn began to present more and more reform bills to the Commons. He did not do things by accident. The switch from trying to capture the party to producing an endless flood of words, in bills, the diaries, collections of essays, videos of speeches, CDs, DVDs, through websites and in semi-authorised biographies formed the great project that filled out his final years.

In response to the flood of his own words the public's perception of him shifted. Much of what he said was highly critical of the Blair governments and the European Union. He appealed to the anti-war movement, the anti-globalisation movement and Ukip supporters in about equal measure. Benn's self-image remained stubbornly self-confident: as he once said: "It's the same each time with progress. First they ignore you, then they say you're mad, then dangerous, then there's a pause and then you can't find anyone who disagrees with you."

 He had half a century in parliament. Then he had an Indian summer as a national radical treasure, the Home Counties' favourite revolutionary. He will be remembered as a great parliamentarian, a great radical and a great diarist. He will be forgotten as a practical politician and a political thinker. In the end his reputation will be significantly greater than the sum of his achievements because of the vast archive he accumulated and the quality of his diaries. He was like Samuel Pepys – someone who described an age without ever having shaped it – and is remembered for his words rather than his deeds and by many for his personal kindness and generosity with time and conversation.

The Guardian editorial put it very well -

Like his Puritan heroes, Tony Benn belongs in the great tradition of English revolutionaries – a passionate radical destined to be loved in popular memory for his defence of democracy and freedom, whose passing leaves the political world a smaller place.

There is a streak of madness in all who stand for office - and there was a time when I felt that the messianic streak in Benn had got out of hand. To understand him properly requires understanding the tradition he came from - ie the radical,Christian non-conformist tradition of the Levellers,the diggers,the Quakers and Methodists,RH Tawney,Kier Hardie and Stafford Cripps. He once said:

''My mother taught me that the Bible was about the Kings who had power and the Prophets who preached rightousness.She taught me to be on the side of the Prophets and I have always tried to do that although it has got me into a lot of trouble''

Critics

Critics – whether of the film, theatre, art, book (or indeed wine!) sort – are not exactly the most admired profession. For most people they hardly exist but they loom very large in the worlds of artists, authors and actors. A cutting review of a book or play can arouse murderous feelings in creative people. And reviewing can be a powerful weapon for those critics who fancy their own creativity. Just think of Clive James’ waspish pyrotechnics about films – still going strong stylistically  if now physically weaker.

I’m now back in Sofia and immediately visit my local (second-hand) English bookshop. I am trying to divest myself of books since I have, in a couple of weeks, to close down the nice old flat I’ve had in the centre of Sofia for the past 16 months. But I can’t resist a bulky collection of film and literary reviews called Nobody’s Perfect from one, Anthony Lane, who has apparently been film critic at the New Yorker since 1993 and also one of the best, at least according to John Banville

Nobody's Perfect shimmers with positively Nabokovian elegance, wit and delicacy of expression; it is hard to recall when one was made to laugh out loud like this and at the same time shiver with aesthetic bliss, unless it was the last time one re-read Lolita.Two examples must suffice, picked at random: Richard Burton in Where Eagles Dare "took a rockbound Bavarian fortress with the calmness that comes only to those who have previously stormed Elizabeth Taylor"; Jeanne Moreau seemed "the spirit of Cannes incarnate, with a voice that made you feel you were being seduced by a coffee grinder".

This review of the book is also useful – not least for its link to some fellow film critics of whom the most interesting, for me, seems to be Jonathan Rosenbaum 

The processes, of course, involved in creating a book or painting are, of course, so very different from those involved in a film or play. In one case solitary and ascetic – in the other multi-discplinary and commercial. Films attract the most viewers – and paintings the least.  So art critics, not surprisingly, are the most inaccessible not least in their jargon –despite the best efforts of writers such as John Updike and, above all, John Berger whose Selected Essays I bought recently from the fantastic Frost English bookshop in Bucharest. The Essays were reviewed at length in LRB but behind a paywall 

I still have a subscription so let me share some of the comment  -

Berger recognised that photography presented a new challenge to the tradition of painting. Not only was it intrinsically realist: it had largely escaped the reach of the art market. Photographs could be commodified – and were – but, for the most part, they circulated outside the market. They were kept in a drawer or an album rather than displayed.

By now Berger had become acclimatised not only to France but also to the peasant culture of the Alpine village where he had lived since 1974. More and more, the peasantry became his central focus. The continuity of their history and traditions was unbroken, to a degree closed off from the urban culture which increasingly dominated the world, with its project of perpetual change and renewal. England had long ago discarded the last traces of peasant culture: there were farmers, but farming had itself become an industry, fully mechanised and intimately linked to massive food companies. In his 1979 novel, Pig Earth, he took on the role of one of those traditional village storytellers who, in his own words, were an ‘organic part of the life of the village’. The villagers enjoy the tales they are told by ‘the man who has stayed at home, making an honest living, and who knows the local tales and traditions’.Not surprisingly, the artists who now occupied his attention included Millet and Van Gogh, painters about whom he had first written in 1956.

Eventually, in 1972, Berger attacked conventional art history head on in Ways of Seeing, a series made for BBC2 in collaboration with Mike Dibb and others, and intended as a riposte to Kenneth Clarke’s Civilisation. This is a summary of the book
 In many ways the BBC series was directly inspired by Benjamin’s essay, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, particularly in its emphasis on photography as the upstart young rival of painting, the product of an industrial, technological and commercial age. Berger made a number of important points in the course of the series.

That seeing is dependent on looking, which is itself an act of choice. That the objects of our looking are not simply things but the relationships that exist between things, and between things and ourselves. That every look establishes a particular relationship between ourselves and the world we inhabit, and that it is at the same time highly personal, reflecting the concerns of the viewer, the bearer of the look. 

My own feeling is that critics are wrongly disparaged. After all, they bring an incredible knowledge to the table. The pity is that they so often feel it neccessary to use that knowledge (of previous work) as a weapon in a struggle for superiority instead of as a means of instruction........

Beautiful Books

Neagu Djuvara is a Romanian intellectual with a striking history (he's 97 years old) and has just produced a Brief Illustrated History of Romanians which immediately goes into my short list of “beautiful books”.

To qualify for this honour, a book has to fit standards none too easy to specify – such as paper type (thickish and rough), format, balance of text and illustrations, typeface, graphics and textual content. 
Book cover design, however, for me is an overrated art.

In principle, art and cookery books should be beautiful – but their glossiness is usually offputting – Beaneaters and Bread Soup and Food from Plenty are exceptions. And travel books should be attractive eg the Pallas Athene books on Czechoslovakia (out of print) and Romania.

John Berger and Jean Mohr’s A Fortunate Man (Penguin 1969) is probably top of my list of beautiful books. Its perhaps significant that its pictures are in black and white – as, naturally, is Andre Kertesz’s On Reading (see also here)

A History of Reading by Alberto Manguel is also a treat - both for content and visual impact.

As someone who can spend a few hundred euros on a single painting, I should probably be willing to pay more then 20 euros for a book - and be more demanding in my requirements of books. Indeed, having (self-)published several little books, it is probably time again to venture down that path - this time perhaps producing a "beautiful book"!  

It was only a few years back that I realised that I had become a collector – initially of various small objects which appealed to me in the various countries I visited. Painted boxes; wooden spoons; ceramics; figurines and sculptures....Curiously, some of my favourite objects are (empty) notebooks – products of those countries which craft superb specimens of such wood/paper products eg Italy, Latvia and Bulgaria. I succumbed only yesterday to such a notebook – Chinese, I have to confess, this time and for 2 euros only! One of them is shown in the 20 November post.

Winter was curiously dry in this part of the world. Little rain – let alone snow – apart from a few days in January - with Bucharest having a metre of the stuff for a couple of weeks. I drove up to Bucharest on 1 March – spring’s official opening which has been marked since then by continuous rain. At least the farmers will be happy!