Picasso's Plates, by Carol Drinkwater

                                                               La Guerre 1952  Pablo Picasso

                                                             Picasso Musée National, Vallauris

Forgive the brevity of this post. I am up against several deadlines at present and I am very short of time. Again!

In these wintery days, there is little that can be more heartening than admiring some of the art that came out of this corner of the Côte d'Azur throughout the twentieth century. Warm vibrant colours and exceptional landscapes. This post is really an excuse to share with you some of my favourites and some that are new to me. A breath of beauty to brighten up these days.

Picasso War and Peace 1952

There are many fine galleries down here along French Riviera celebrating the work of so many great artists who made this part of their world their home. Bonnard spent his life in the village of Le Cannet where I buy my morning baguettes, just a half a kilometre from our farm. A new Bonnard museum has recently been opened there and, although small, is well worth a visit. There are several exhibitions offered every year. It also offers fabulous views down across the red-tiled rooftops to the sea. Picasso lived with his last wife, Jacqueline, less than a kilometre to the rear of us. Occasionally, I turn a corner and there I am in front of the inspiration for someone's masterpiece. 

Renoir, for example, and his olive trees in Cagnes-sur-Mer. His home has also been transformed into a fascinating museum dedicated to his life and work.

Picasso in his studio in Vallauris

I was reminded of all of this by chance this week when I was contacted by a television company who are making a mini-series about Pablo Picasso. The episode they wanted to discuss with me concentrates on Pablo's ceramic work in Vallauris. 

In 1946, Picasso went to Vallauris to visit the annual pottery exhibition. This small hillside town has been known for its pottery since ancient times. Back in the day it produced wonderful examples of amphorae used to transport wine and olive oil, but it really came into its own as a pottery centre during the 19th century. A century later, Picasso's arrival on the scene brought another injection of life and a new direction for this local industry.

Glazed vase. Art Nouveau period. Potter: Delphin Massier. One of three brothers all working in their father's family pottery business in Vallauris. This example was fifty years before the arrival of Picasso.

During his 1946 visit, Picasso met Suzanne and Georges Ramie who owned the Madoura workshop and were to change his life. He was keen to try new forms of art. The couple offered him space in their studio. He returned the following year to their workshop and began to experiment with ceramics for the first time.

The rest is history. The town was revitalised. Artists came from all over to experiment with paint on cooked clay and give new forms to pots and cooking utensils.  So taken was Picasso with this work that he bought himself a property in Vallauris, Les Fournas, an ancient perfumery. This he converted to create for himself a large studio. 

His Vallauris period was between 1948 to 1955 even though he continued to experiment with ceramic and linocuts for the next twenty years and returned to the town regularly. He even married his last wife, Jacqueline, in secret in the town hall there. I believe Jacqueline was a young cousin of Suzanne Ramie.

Picasso working with linocuts in his Vallauris studio.

Here are a few examples of the groundbreaking pottery work Picasso produced over a period of forty years. I hope they will bring joy and sunshine to your day.

Next month I will be again talking about The LOST GIRL as the paperwork is to be published on 8th March.

This is a series of eight plates, La Corrida

www.caroldrinkwater.com

Tamara Karsavina & Henry Bruce, Part Three by Janie Hampton

Tamara Karsavina aka Mrs Henry Bruce in 1923. 

Karelia, Russia. July 1918. The British diplomat Henry Bruce, his lover the ballerina Tamara Karsavina and their 19-month-old son Nikita are fleeing for their lives. But having left their home in Petrograd to escape danger, the further they went, the worse it got. Here is the final part of their epic journey.  Read Part One of their adventure  here,  and Part Two here.
Half way between Petrograd and the White Sea, Henry and Tamara discovered they had unwittingly crossed the front line of the Russian civil war and were now among the Red Army Bolsheviks. The commissar of Sumozero village believed they were foreign spies and told them they would be rowed to the next village across the lake. But his men were drunk and there was a storm brewing. Tamara’s patience ran out and she screamed at him. She was sympathetic to the communists but she could not tolerate bad behaviour in a drunk commissar, not even in the name of  "Peace, Bread and Freedom".

Tamara as Pimpinella in Pucinella

The commissar ordered them to be locked overnight in a barn, from which Henry knew they were unlikely to emerge alive. Then he remembered he had an old permit to travel to Moscow, signed several months before by the Bolshevik leader Georgy Chicherin. Gambling that the commissar was unable to read more than Chicherin’s name, Henry showed it to him, and then threatened to report him for disobeying government orders. It worked, and the commissar declared they could, after all, continue round the lake on their hired horse cart, but under armed escort. They still had to cross the River Suma by raft.

Map of their route by cart  from Lake Sumo , to Murmansk by steam train
and through the Arctic Ocean in a coal-boat.

The next day, at Xvornii village, they were handed over to another Red Army commissar who recognised Tamara. Much to Henry’s surprise he issued them with a pass to continue. But it was for only twelve hours, not nearly long enough to reach the White Sea. Henry protested, and the commissar simply told them to get moving. Heading towards the Arctic Circle, the nights remained light.
Twenty-four hours later, they reached the fishing village of Sumsky Pasod on the White Sea and realised they had crossed back into friendly territory. But the Red Army was closing in and the villagers were leaving. They leaped into the last boat and a fisherman rowed them up the White Sea to Kem harbour. From there they walked seven miles across the marshes to the railway line.
At Kem station they found a throng of refugees, unsure from whom they were escaping – was it the Germans, Whites, Reds, or Finns? The railway line had been built in 1916 to transport arms and food from the Arctic Ocean to the German-Russian front. Now that Russia had made peace with Germany, the single track between Murmansk and Petrograd was being commandeered by both Whites and Reds to move their respective troops and supplies, north and south. When Henry asked to buy first-class tickets to Murmansk, the station manager told him, ‘I shall be obliged to close this conversation, Comrade, if you speak in tones unworthy of a socialistic state. And it is useless to bring the Lord into it. The rules state there is no Lord, but our saviour Lenin.’
The train steamed out of Kem just days before the small town fell to the Red Army. Progress was slow: on orders from the Czar, the track had been built in only a year by Chinese labourers and 10,000 Austrian prisoners of war, without a proper survey. At bends the locomotive tilted precariously and at weak bridges everyone clambered out and walked across behind the train. The approach to the watershed between the White Sea and the Arctic Ocean was so steep that the train had to take a second run. The exhausted family travelled into the Arctic Circle past the snow-capped Khibiny Mountains and beside navy-blue lakes. It was a beautiful but terribly remote landscape, unchanged when my daughter Daisy and I travelled the same route 80 years later to the nuclear submarine city of Murmansk.
In 1918, Murmansk, 850 miles north of Petrograd, was then only one year old, a single dusty street of wooden barracks called Pall Mall. Hugh Walpole described it as: "Simply the end of the earth. There are a few vessels, and nothing else save wolves and ptarmigans". The local forces were continually changing allegiance and that month Murmansk’s commissar was in alliance with the British general. Tamara and Henry found a railway carriage to sleep in but it gave little protection from the relentless sunlight, stifling heat, mosquitoes and stench of reindeer. When they heard that Tsar Nicholas II and his family had been assassinated in Ekaterinburg, they realised that they would not be returning to Russia soon.
Two weeks later they boarded a British collier as ‘Purser’ and ‘Stewardess’ and steamed up the Kola Inlet and into the Arctic Ocean. For two days and nights, a storm raged. For Tamara, the fiercer the wind blew, the more her memories of the past months diminished, as she vomited repeatedly over the rail. The crew and their exhausted passengers felt their spirits rise as they threaded their way through the islands of Norway and out into the North Sea. Near the Orkneys, a German submarine fired a torpedo which missed their hull by a matter of yards.
Tamara, Henry and Nikita arrived on the east coast of England at Middlesbrough in late August 1918. It had been a journey of two thousand miles by steamer, horse and cart, on foot, in a rowing boat, by train and by collier boat. That same month the Red Terror began in which over a million Russians were tortured and killed. In November the World War officially ended, although British, French and American armies continued to fight, and on the losing side, until 1922.

Tamara Karsavina aka Mrs Henry Bruce,
in her kitchen in London in 1948.

Tamara Karsavina, formerly wife of Vasili Moukine, was now ‘Mrs Bruce’. How this came about we do not know. Under Russian orthodox law, divorce was impossible, and after the revolution the Bolshevik government abolished marriage. Did Tamara marry Henry in Petrograd, as they both claimed? Or perhaps the captain of the collier married them somewhere in the Arctic Ocean.
Henry’s employers at the Foreign Office posted him to Tangiers, ‘a quiet posting away from it all’, but only on condition Tamara stopped dancing. When Diaghilev pleaded with her to rejoin the Ballet Russe, Henry chose to leave the diplomatic service and the family settled in London.
With the Ballet Russe, Tamara worked with Matisse, Nijinska, Picasso and J.M. Barrie. She appeared in silent movies with Leni Riefenstahl and Johnny Weissmuller.
 In 1930, shortly after Diaghilev died, Tamara helped start the Royal Academy of Dance and her autobiography, Theatre Street, was published. An abridged edition appeared in the Soviet Union in 1971, with all references to Henry, Nikita and their escape from Russia deleted.

Tamara looks at a portrait of herself painted by
Sir Oswald Birley in 1920, The Tatler, 1951.

Until her eighties Tamara choreographed and taught ballet to leading dancers including Margot Fonteyn. She never returned to Russia and died in London aged 93, nearly 30 years after she had buried her beloved Henry. Tamara and Henry had led one life that was only known in the Soviet Union; and another life after their escape in 1918 that was only known in Britain. It was a strange fate for one of the twentieth century’s greatest dancers.

Henry James Bruce, British diplomat, 1934.

Nikita went to Eton College, served in the Intelligence Corps during the Second World War, married and became an advertising executive with Schweppes. In 1971 he attended my wedding – one of many distant cousins in tail coats. If only I had known to ask him about his parents and early childhood.

Tamara and Nikita shortly before their escape from Russia in 1918.
Henry's cousins were surprised that he had recently married a dancer, and
that their child was already walking. Tamara's good nature soon won them over.

Here is a silent movie of Tamara in 1923: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMsHWuLbsOI
Tamara Platonovna Karsavina (1885-1978). Henry James Bruce (1880-1951). Nikita Bruce (1916-1993)

"After Altamira, All is Decadence" Carol Drinkwater

                                            A cave painting of lions at Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc

It has been reported in the press this week that a replica of the Grotte Chauvet has been created. It will be open to the public by the time you read this.  The original, containing thousands of prehistoric animal and figure drawings, will no longer be accessible to visitors because our human presence is putting the artwork at risk. This is not a question of hooliganism or graffiti. It is simply the erosion caused by our attendance there, our exhalations near the paintings. A friend who is staying with us remarked that it was a great pity that one should buy a ticket to visit a copy, even one hailed as a near masterpiece. I disagreed with him, recalling one of the most memorable experiences of my travelling life: a visit to the caves of Altamira.

Altamira (a UNESCO World Heritage site), located a few kilometres from Santillana del Mar in Cantabria, northern Spain, was the first site with cave paintings to be discovered, in 1880. How the discovery came about was quite by chance and a rather lovely if sad story.

                                                                   Bison, Altamira

In 1875, a Spanish landowner, lawyer and amateur anthropologist, Don Marcelino Sanz de Sautola, learned that a stone mason, while quarrying locally, had unearthed some rather unusual caves. Don Marcelino went to take a look. He found a pencil-thin aperture. It had been revealed after millennia by the landslides caused by the mason’s gunpowder explosions. Don Marcelino slid through the opening and found himself within a series of labyrinthine caves, chambers and tunnels that measured in length some 270 metres, almost a quarter of a kilometre. This dark hidden space had not been visited for at least ten thousand years. Don Marcelino, even in the crepuscular light, noticed markings on many of the cave walls but he could not make out what they were.

Three years later while he was attending the Anthropological Sciences pavilion at the World Fair in Paris, he spotted a display of prehistoric tools. He learned that they had come from caves in France. This knowledge inspired him to return to the Cantabrian caves and begin excavations. Digging around outside, he unearthed bones, spears, shells and tools. He returned to the site on a regular basis and on one of these trips he took his eight-year-old daughter, Maria, with him. As the story goes, penetrating the caves, oil lamp in hand, the small child looked up at the very low ceiling and remarked, ‘Look, Daddy, at the painted bulls.’ In fact, the child was pointing at a series of paintings in red ochre of a herd of prehistoric bison.

                                                                           Picasso

I try to picture that moment. The moment when Don Marcelino was witnessing, confirming what he had found. The relevance of his discovery, the realisation that his work had not been in vain. This revelation was a moment he had been working towards for several years. Back then, one hundred and thirty years ago, cave art was a completely unknown archaeological science. De Sautola was the first to propose it. A pure, untouched paleolithic universe.  He was standing in the midst of what had once been a prehistoric settlement or meeting place, where the hunters or their wives, their women perhaps, were artists, a community of artists who whiled away their time painting the world that existed for them beyond those caves where they lived or sheltered.
One of the sights that touched me deeply were the handprints.  Those early artists have imprinted the cave walls and ceilings with impressions of their hands. Handprints. Their signatures, perhaps?

Don Marcelino published a small book on his findings, with copies of many of the illustrations he had seen at Altamira and other, lesser sites in the area. He was mocked. The scientific world did not take him seriously. The Church also declaimed him, vociferously so. They were keen to discredit such findings for fear the discoveries threatened the omnipotence of God or put the subject of evolution into the spotlight. Tragically, Don Marcelino Sanz de Sautola died in 1888, a disillusioned man. The brilliance of his investigative work and his findings were not recognised until 1902.

My reason for making the pilgrimage to Altamira was because I was searching for ancient olive stories. The birth of, the beginnings of agriculture. Olive pressing, the cultivation of olive groves, for my book The Olive Tree. Might these hunter-gatherers have lived on a diet of fruit, berries? Might they have pressed juices from these fruits? To create lighting, for food? Might there have been wild olive trees growing in the vicinity?

I had bought my ticket to visit the caves of Altamira online weeks in advance and had arranged my travel schedule to fit in around the date allocated to me. The guided visits are limited to ten persons and they are not very frequent. Imagine my disappointment when I learned that I would not be visiting the original caves but a neighbouring replica. I felt a little cheated (It was probably mentioned on the website where I purchased my ticket but the information was in Spanish and I must have missed it).

During the 1960s and 70s, the paintings were showing early signs of damage caused by the damp breath, exhalations of carbon dioxide from those flocking to visit the rupestral art. I was assured the neo-caves opened in 2001 would not disappoint.

And they did not. The reproduction has used identical colour pigments fashioned from the same powders as the originals. Every bump and incline, every rockface, nuance and contour has been represented down to the minutest detail.

I think we were nine in my group plus the guide. Everyone of us was moved to tears. I am not exaggerating. One couple, Japanese if I remember correctly, were on their knees in front of one of the images, weeping at the sheer beauty, the purity and exhilaration of the artwork. Picasso, who from his earliest days was fascinated by primitive art, visited these caves, the originals, before 1939, when he exiled himself for the rest of his life from Franco’s Spain.

His words when he exited las cuevas were: 'Beyond Altamira, all is decadence.'

                                                              Hand with fish, Picasso

I left the site in a state of euphoria, wandering the hillsides for hours looking at, into colours, at light, as though I had never seen grass or trees or cows before, reluctant to return to the town, to noise and modernity. I had seen the world anew. I did not find olive clues in the vicinity but the experience did put a new spin on my journey. The first time. Man’s very first experiences. It was as though my sight had been unshackled. My travels continued for another nine months or so. No other place I visited reached back in time as far as Altamira - how could it? - but when I sat beneath millennia old olive trees trying to imagine the people who had planted the trees, who harvested them and pressed their fruits, I frequently recalled the simplicity and purity of the artwork at Altamira. Once Upon a Time… when Man and Nature lived hand in hand.

www.caroldrinkwater.com
Twitter: Carol4OliveFarm