Artist's studio in Sofia

I left Bucharest in mild fog at 08.00 on Saturday but, once across the Danube, Bulgaria welcomed me with blue skies and a superb display of autumnal colours - and also a typical culinary experience from Sylvie, starting with pumpkin soup. And great help from her two sons in transferring my belongings to the new flat.

  

Being given a foreign friend’s flat is a great cultural experience - as well as privilege. By definition there are shared interests – and therefore new books and objets d’art to explore and appreciate. My new flat here in Sofia is a bit of an artist’s studio – on the top floor of a 1960s 10 storey building with two huge, heavy rectangular windows in the slanted roof.  And the flat is liberally endowed with paintings, sculptures and books – with many of the books being on painting. So I am in my element – already having discovered a beautifully designed book on Bulgarian paintings in the 1920s – published in 1996 by Ruzha Marinska.  

For the last 5 years, my base in Sofia has been in the reasonably fashionable Lajos Kossuth St just off Xristo Botev. The new flat may only be 10 minutes’ walk from my old one but it is in the quartier of brutal socialist modernism and post-modern capitalistic brutalism – with one of the early huge Shopping Malls which are now slowly strangling the lifeblood of the vibrant Sofia which first attracted me cheek by jowl with the 10 and 20 story blocks of the 1960s. Fortunately I am still within the same easy walking distance of the swimming and keep-fit facility of Rodina Hotel.

Pork sausages, Marmite and....Romanian politics

One of the many pleasures I’m looking forward when I (Insallah!) get to Sofia at the weekend is at last visiting the shop of the guy who has sold me my haggi in the last few Januaries. Up until now, these small bags of succulence have been exchanged like quality drugs on quick encounters on Sofia corners. But Andy’s foods offers, amongst other British delicacies, pork sausages and also a strange dark jar with a yeast-based product (loved and hated equally by the world) whose name I now always forget – so forgive me as I use my usual technique of rattling through the alphabet to trigger off the old memory- that’s it MARMITE!!

I wonder if Andy has seen this article on this sausage event in the UK - and whether any of its products will show up in his Sofia shop?

The painting is a Stanley Spencer - "the sausage shop" - who is vastly underrated by the British cultural afficiandi.....And I know of it only because of Barbara's It's About Time site

Here in Bucharest, I can't begin to recount the latest nonsenses - apparently parliamentarians are now (for the third time!!) contemplating impeaching the President. This time they seem to have some merit on their side. But this place really has become Ruritania!!! 

Jules Pascin - man of the world from the Danube

Last year, while I was compiling my list of almost 150 20^th century Bulgarian painters whose work appealed to me, I would occasionally come across the name Jules Pascin – associated with (for me) unimpressive sketches being auctioned locally.

Slowly I learned there was more to the man – and that he had in fact spent little time in Bulgaria (even schooled for 6 years in Vienna) and was more famous in France and America for his paintings of women. Barbara’s It’s About Time blog gives a great series of these -which have, for me, more than a touch of Egon Schiele to them.
I have unashamedly stolen most of the text which follows from her blogpost about him - for which many thanks!

There’s a great catalogue of his works on paper here which gives a detailed chronology. And also here.

He was born in Vidin in 1885 on the Danube as Julius Mordecai Pincas of well-off Italian-Serbian & Spanish-Jewish parents who moved first to Russe (my Bulgarian sources tell me) and then Bucharest, Romania. He was educated in Vienna from age 10-15, returning in 1901 to Bucharest, where his family had settled, working briefly in the office of his father's grain-merchandizing business.

He was, however, becoming passionately interested in drawing, for which he showed precocious talent. His early talent drew the attention of the famous Bulgarian caricaturist Alexander Bozhinov.

At the age of 16, he became the lover of a woman who ran a brothel in Bucharest; and was allowed to draw the residents.In 1902 he went back to Vienna to study painting and, in 1903, he moved to Munich, where he attended the art school run by Moritz Heymann. Some of his drawings appeared in the renowned German satirical journal Simplicissimus when he was only 19 when he got a contract with them and met Georg Grosz.

After Pascin moved to Paris in 1905, he changed his name to spare his family who were apparently ashamed of his dissolute life-style and became a central figure in the social & cultural life of the cafes & studios of Montparnasse – meeting in 1906 his future wife Hermine David (also a painter). He lived in the United States from 1914 to 1920 where he taught at the Telfair Academy in Savannah, Georgia, associated with the Telfair Art Museum. Pascin married Hermine David at City Hall in New York City and become a citizen of the United States.

He & Hermine painted in New York City as well as in Miami, New Orleans, & Cuba.

Returning to Paris in 1920, he continued to compose paintings of delicately toned, thinly painted, but poetically bitter & ironic studies of women - including his wife, his mistress, & some prostitute acquaintances. 

Although Pascin's watercolours, oils, and drawings were generally well received, a series of unfavourable reviews in 1930 left him severely depressed. Suffering from depression & alcoholism, he committed suicide on the eve of a prestigious solo show by slitting his wrists & hanging himself in his studio in Montmartre. On the wall of that studio, he left a message written in his blood saying good-bye to his love, Cecile "Lucy" Vidil Krohg. In his will, Pascin left his estate equally to his mistress, Lucy Krohg, & to his wife, Hermine David.

winter arrives in the village

A few flakes of snow drifted gently down at 08.00 and the village (1,300 metres high) now lies with a thick covering.....and winter preparations are not quite complete.
This is my neighbour in the early afternoon preparing to recycle his cow manure on his fields.

My house is in the immediate background.

It's remarkably warm in the house with its solid rock base - although the car doors are already frozen.

Love of Words - Wry Fry

I spent a wet Saturday afternoon happily watching England’s most beloved and best performer/writer in action – namely Stephen Fry. The 50 Not Out video gives an excellent sense of Fry’s various roles over the past 4 decades – and why the British public (with very few exceptions) love him so much. I certainly do.

I would be interested to know how well his dry wit carries across cultural divides. I will never forget the incomprehending reaction of an Italian friend to a short clip I showed of the wild Scots comic – Billy Connelly. And it wasn’t so much a question of the West of Scotland accent as the subject matter, perspective and delivery!
Fry’s acclaimed role as the butler Jeeves in the televised series of the PG Wodehouse novels about the relationship between a butler and a “toff” in the 1920s might, similarly, seem a bit restricted in its appeal – delightful as it certainly is to a British audience.

His solo performance for more than hour at Sydney Royal Opera House is simply stunning – his intelligence and goodness come across so strongly even in front of such a large audience.
His Amsterdam talk to a more typical small group  is even more touching. Anyone who encourages reading and a love of words - let alone self-deprecation - is a hero in my terms.

He has been a prolific writer of essays from an early age – and has been very frank about aspects of his life which most people would rather hide. It took some time for his “manic-depressive” condition to be properly recognised – and his TV documentary on the secret life of a manic depressive must have helped a lot of people who suffer from this condition. He has even written a book about the writing of poetry.   

Talking of good and fair writing, the extended New Yorker editorial of Obama is a good exemplar.

Of conspiracy

"People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public..." 

thus Adam Smith in 1776

The catalyst for this post was today’s news that a Greek editor has been arrested (in mid-broadcast) for daring to publish an official list of tax evaders which the Head of the IMF (no less!) had given a year ago to a previous Greek Minister of Finance and which seemed to have disappeared - although it has led to some suicides. Here's the guy's story in his own words.

I had first come across this story of the Lagardes memory stick earlier this month in the Diary of Deception and Distortion blog whose admirable mission statement I wrote about a few weeks back and which I continue to read with a variety of emotions. At one level I admire the guy’s insights and confidence – but, at another, I have trouble with the degree of conspiracy his various stories imply.

The internet is full of conspiracy theories relating to such things as 9/11, the Kennedy assassination, World Government, the Bilderberg Group etc

But I’ve never been a great conspiracy theorist – more a naïve, cock-up man! Not that I don’t agree the world is full of scheming characters - more so in the last few decades under the malign influence of the neo-liberalist pandemic of selfishness let loose by Margaret Thatcher, The World Bank etc.

And neo-liberalism, I need to make clear, has never been a conspiracy – rather an open, full-fledged (and so far successful) war! 

Conspiracies are secret and face two major obstacles – first the lack of malleability of social and economic forces. Or, as Robert Burns put it much more eloquently in his great 1785 poem To a Mouse,   

The best laid schemes o' Mice an' Men,
Gang aft agley,
An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain,
For promis'd joy!

The mess which governments often make of things (and the counter-productivity of much ambitious policymaking) is, of course, one of the central arguments which neo-liberals have used in their (so far) highly successful drive to strip the state of powers and to hand its functions over to private interests. In passing we should note that their theory, of course, does not allow that private organisations (particularly the huge and unwieldy companies which dominate the markets) might also share these same features of “goal displacement”, inefficiencies etc. Nor does it recognise the additional costs for the public services now being taken over of (a) the huge “transaction costs” in parcelling rail, health and educational services into the manageable pieces required for contracting; (b) the additional managerial costs and profits the new private companies need; (c) the costs of the regulatory framework which has to be put in place to ensure various standards are met; and (d) the continued financial underwriting by the taxpayer when things (as they generally do and have!!) go wrong.   

My apologies for this (rare) rant – but I am just so angry about how an intellectually fatuous and vacuous argument about government inefficiency has held sway for so long. The reality is that all human organisation is complex and difficult – regardless of whether it is private or public. Public perceptions are different largely because private enterprise has been able to buy itself a good press – both directly and indirectly (funding of a variety of intellectual activities)   

I said there were two limits on the conspiratorial scheming of elites. The second, I would suggest, is simple lack of trust – honour amongst thieves. People are more cooperative than ever imagined by economists – but not the elites (see Al Mant’s marvellous (but typically out-of-print) book on Leaders We Deserve). Three years ago I blogged about the positive aspect of trust and cooperation on which so many post-war governance systems operated (and some Scandinavian) still do) but which the neo-liberals have done their damnest to destroy. An excellent detailed history is here for those who want to know.

And the damage it has done to those who a few decades saw themselves as guardians of public integrity is vividly shown in this story of greed and hypocrisy.  

But one form of conspiracy I’ve always viewed as a "very real and present threat" as, I think, they now say – the conspiracy of silence which the Jimmy Savile story now running in Britain exemplifies very strongly. One of serial child molestation over several decades by a TV star which apparently most senior people in the media knew about but few complained of - partly because values were different from now; and partly because of calculated fear...

A year ago today, I had a post about the development of training systems in this part of the world. 

Finally a couple of examples of how great the art blog - It's about Time - is. Two recent posts about the English painter Stanley Spencer here and here

Essays and images

Three years ago today my blog paid tribute to the “essay” form of writing.

…. I remember the impact which the essays of 18/19^th century English writers such as Addison, Francis Bacon and Charles Lamb made on me at secondary school. “What is truth, said Jesting Pilot, and would not stay for an answer” is apparently Bacon – although I get rather confused that the wonderfully evocative piece on burning pork is apparently by Charles Lamb – not Bacon! I start to google the various names and find a wonderful website devoted to.....essays - y compris... Lamb’s on pork. It was, of course, Michel de Montaigne who started this art form in the 16^th Century in his castle near Bordeaux– and his "Complete Works" stands on a shelf above my study door. As I read Malcolm Gladwell’s essays, I suddenly hear in my mind the tones of Alaister Cooke - as he read his Letters from America (for almost 50 years). What an institution he was! Weaving a spell as he slowly moved from his opening ear-catching sentences through a charming analysis of part of the American system to a laconic conclusion. And then I thought of Tom Wolfe – whose 1970 essay “Mau-mauing the flak catchers” was such a merciless description of the funding culture which grew around the US War on Poverty. Unfortunately I couldn’t find this essay online – although (thanks to Wikipedia and New York Magazine) I could download his even more famous satire of “the radical chic”. If only someone would do a similar satire on EU funding – someone surely must have!! But it’s beyond a joking matter!

I then went on the say that Wolfe invented the marvellous phrase “shit-detector” – but I now discover that this was actually Ernest Hemingway’s phrase - 

The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it.

When I googled the phrase I discovered this lovely blog by an Australian ceramicist which, sadly, stopped in 2011. One of my quieter passions has been for ceramics. But the blog images of the ceramicist are still archived. Nothing, however, can compare with Barbara’s It’s About Time daily blog which performs two immense public services – introduces us to American and European painters (generally of the early 20^th century) few of us have ever heard of; and stuns us every day with beauty.

Tom Wolfe has not only been an amazingly creative and powerful essayist but has also - as this beautifully written essay argues -  uniquely captured sociological insights about particularly East-coast USA

The painting which adorns this post is one of a series on a recent post she gave us about a Russian painter Natalia Goncharova (1881-1962). Little wonder that her blog has had more than 2 million hits. Goncharova was a member of the Der Blaue Reiter avant-garde group from its founding in 1911.  Goncharova moved to Paris in 1921 where she designed a number of stage sets of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. She became a French citizen in 1939.

Scottish exceptionalism?

I am a Scot – although it’s interesting that I forgot to include this in the list of ways I set out in a 2010 blogpost in which I could (and had) describe myself over the years! Perhaps this reflects my ambivalence about nationalism.

Most people are proud of their nationality – I certainly am – but some are hesitant. We are told that Germans, for example, associate more easily with their Land (Province) than with the country – although Peter Watson’s recent and encyclopaedic German Genius sets out in amazing detail what German culture and science have given the world. At the other end of the scale, the Hungarian arrogance I experienced when I worked and lived there for a couple of years seemed to be a psychological defence against their feeling that Hungary had failed in everything it had attempted. Emigre Hungarians, however, have an amazing record – witness Arthur Koestler, photographic genius Andre Kertesz, and economist Thomas Balogh. 

Romanians, as I said recently, are a proud people – that is not the same thing, I suspect, as being proud of their nation. Most Romanians I have known are ashamed of how their nation’s governing elites have behaved over the years - but react violently to external criticism. They are certainly proud of the contributions which various Romanians have made to modern life eg the jet engine (Coanda) – although the guy who became Head of Romania’s Cultural Institute in a recent political coup seems to have made a bit of a fool of himself in suggesting that Romania invented the…radiator    

All this is by way of an introduction to the post I did exactly two years ago on the Scottish contribution to the world – at least as seen through the eyes of an American historian, Arthur Herman in his book The Scottish Enlightenment – the Scots invention of the modern world (200). One of our younger generation of writers summarises the story nicely

The Knoxian reformation of the 16th century had resulted in 100 years of almost uninterrupted violence and bloodshed. Three consecutive failed harvests at the end of the 17th century, against the backdrop of England's imperial growth, set the circumstances for Scotland's ruling classes to sell out its sovereignty - literally. The Earl of Roseberry was paid £12,000 from a slush fund operated by the London government to enable the merger between Scotland and England to take place. But rather than suffer the expected dilution into insignificance, Scotland became proportionately the most significant player in the union's empire. And through innovations in philosophy, education, commerce, engineering, industry, architecture, town planning, soldiering, administration, medicine and even tourism, the Scots invented the modern world of capitalist democracy. The springboard for this was the most powerful legacy of the Presbyterian revolution: a universal (or near-universal) education system.
The Presbyterians popularised the notion that political power, though ordained by God, was vested not in the monarch or even in the clergy, but in the people. Yes, Scottish Presbyterians could behave like ayatollahs and the Kirk could regularly incite public executions for spurious blasphemy or witchcraft charges. But one of the last acts of the Scottish parliament was to establish a school and salaried teacher in every parish.
The effect of this was that by 1750, with an estimated 75% level of literacy, the Scots were probably the most well-read nation on earth. The dichotomy between authoritarian repression and liberal inquiry in Scottish society was embodied in Robert Burns. At 16, the poverty-stricken Ayrshire ploughman was versed in Shakespeare, Alexander Pope, Locke, the Scottish poets and the French Enlightenment philosophers. The knock-on effects of the education act were felt in universities and the book trade. By 1790 Edinburgh boasted 16 publishing houses.

I knew about Adam Smith and David Hume (although not properly appreciated the latter’s arguments eg “reason is – and ought to be – the slave of passions”). I knew about the openness of Scottish universities in medieval times and their strong links with continental universities (not least as a final stage of legal education); about the Scots role in the British Empire (and in exploiting the opium trade); and that most of the stuff with kilts is actually a Victorian invention. What, however, I hadn’t realised until I read the book were things such as 

·         The speed with which Scotland apparently changed from a backwater of Iran-like religious domination and prejudice to playing a leading role in the development of the “study of mankind”

·         just what a galaxy of stars there were in Edinburgh and Glasgow between the last 2 Scottish uprisings of 1715 and 1745. Frances Hutcheson I had vaguely heard of – but not his core argument that “all men of reflection from Socrates have sufficiently proved that the truest, most constant and lively pleasure, the happiest enjoyment in life, consists in kind affections to our fellow creatures”.

·         The role Scots politicians played in liberalising British politics in the 1830 period

·         How major a role Scots played in the American revolution – and, indeed (on the downside), in the development of its “revivalist” religious tradition!

Many people feel that Arthur Herman has gone too far in his claims - and there is a short professional piece here which takes a more balanced view and reminds us that most Scots (certainly in and around Glasgow) are renowned for a strange sense of victimhood and inferiority.
Coincidentally, another book with a similar argument has just appeared - Capital of the Mind - how Edinburgh changed the World