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I’ve been to several exhibitions recently and keeping up my posting about them is proving difficult, so here’s a start with my visit to the British Library a couple of weeks ago. I went to have a look at their exhibition on Henry VIII. The exhibition isn’t free, but you do get an audio guide recorded by guest curator Dr David Starkey. If you’ve seen his documentary, you’ll already know most of the key facts presented, but what makes this exhibition particularly good is that it brings together many key original documents and portraits that would normally be difficult to see without traipsing all over the world.
For example, the highlights include the earliest known portrait of Henry VIII by an unknown artist and the Holbein portrait of Edward VI as a baby, both of which are usually held at the Berger Collection at the Denver Art Museum. This collection also holds a portrait of Elizabeth I by Hans Eworth and portraits of several other key figures from British history. Also on show is a 1527 love letter from Henry VIII to Anne Boleyn on loan from the Vatican Library, a portrait of Katherine of Aragon by Michael Sittow normally kept in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, and the 1534 Act of Supremacy and Henry VIII’s will both from the National Archives in Kew. The exhibition also includes the Beaufort Book of Hours, a portrait of Anne Boleyn from the Dean and Chapter of Ripon, the Armada Portrait of Elizabeth I from the private collection of Mark Pigott OBE and the famous document announcing the birth of Elizabeth I, where you can see the word ‘prince’ is corrected to ‘princes’.
I was so glad to be able to see these original documents all together and for that reason alone, this exhibition is definitely worth visiting. Apart from this however, there are several other interesting aspects of Henry VIII’s reign that are brought to light in the exhibition.
Firstly, you can see many documents edited personally in Henry VIII’s own handwriting and the exhibition draws attention to these alterations with interactive exhibits and transcriptions of what Henry wrote. It is certainly interesting to see how far Henry was personally involved in the break with Rome and how confident of his own religious authority he became, even attempting to alter the ten commandments himself!
In addition, the exhibition contains many original maps, plans of coastal defences and designs for tents for the Field of Cloth of Gold. I generally find historical maps fascinating, so there are plenty of opportunities to see the development of the English view of the rest of the world, as it was during Henry’s reign that cartography really began to thrive. The tent designs also give a vivid insight into what the Field of Cloth of Gold must have been like as they are surprisingly detailed and colourful.
The exhibition ends on the 6th September, so get down there and see it if you haven’t already. Even if you can’t, there are several great podcasts available in conjunction with the exhibition, including three recorded lectures by David Starkey, which supply most of the information presented in the exhibition in an interesting and engaging way.
Stephen Fry does a lot of online work, including his blog, Twitter feed and website, but if you’re going to look into any of his projects, I recommend his podcasts, three of them in particular. He is a very persuasive speaker and these essays/speeches are clearly intended to get his views across, but whether or not you agree with his ideas, what I think he always succeeds in doing is to portray a concise history of the subject with his trademark wit and fascinating examples. We’re not talking in-depth history here, but the podcasts are still really enjoyable and interesting to listen to.
Broadcasting
This podcast is a speech that he made at London’s Millbank for the BBC last year about the future of the BBC and the licence fee and it is one of my all time favourite podcasts. He charts the history of BBC broadcasting in a way that made me realise how much it has given to this country through it’s programming, particularly in regard to comedy.
There is an argument that comedy is a greater public service than any other genre of art or culture: it heals divisions, it is a balm for hurt minds, it binds social wounds, exposes real truths about how life is really led. Comedy connects. The history of BBC comedy in particular is almost a register of character types, a social history of the country. Hancock, Steptoe, Mainwaring, Alf Garnett, Basil Fawlty, Baldrick, Victor Meldrew, Alan Partridge, Ali G, David Brent, the matchlessly great General Melchett – it is much harder to list character types from serious drama who have so penetrated the consciousness of the nation and so closely defined the aspirations and failures of successive generations. A public service broadcasting without comedy, is in danger of being regarded as no more than a dumping ground for worthiness. Seriousness is no more a guarantee of truth, insight, authenticity or probity than humour is a guarantee of superficiality and stupidity.
You know when you visit another country and you see that it spends more money on flowers for its roundabouts than we do, and you think … coo, why don’t we do that? How pretty. How pleasing. What a difference it makes. To spend money for the public good in a way that enriches, gives pleasure, improves the quality of life, that is something. That is a real achievement. It’s only flowers in a roundabout, but how wonderful. Well, we have the equivalent of flowers in the roundabout times a million: the BBC enriches the country in ways we will only discover when it has gone and it is too late to build it up again. We actually can afford the BBC, because we can’t afford not to.
Language
In this podcast, Stephen Fry launches an attack on pedantry and expresses the need for people to have pleasure (or jouissance) in their language. He also gives an interesting insight into the history of the development of the English language and therefore why it is so important for language to remain completely free to change as society does.
Think of London. Some of its outline was determined by the Romans who conquered it two thousand years ago, since then atop the ruins of the Roman, Saxon, Dark Age and Norman London was constructed a medieval city of winding streets, jostling half-timbered mansions and soaring stone cathedrals and churches. Then came, after the Tudor and Jacobean palaces and halls and after the restoration a period of renewed classical elements, the squares and avenues of Georgian and Regency London, elegant, spacious and harmonious. The Victorians brought long suburban streets, warehouses, libraries, schools, town halls and railway stations and in the twentieth century arrived a new architecture, office towers, corporate headquarters, airports, housing projects in glass and concrete, American and European statements of self conscious modernity, statehood, brutalism, socialism, capitalism and democracy.
It isn’t I think, too much of a strain to see the history of our language in similar terms. A long sticky flypaper onto which at varying times of their importance the church, royalty, aristocracy, industry, commerce and international entertainment have accreted themselves. Saxon and Roman elements overlaid with the Norman French and Chaucerian and Church medieval English. A great renaissance of Shakespeare, the Bible of King James, Milton and Dryden leading into the classical English of Johnson and Pope. The Victorian English of industry, Dickens and music hall giving way to the English of the twentieth century, all the way through the arrival of radio and cinema, the political language of fascism, communism, socialism and finance, the Americanisms, the street talk, the rock and roll, the corporate speak, the computer jargon … and here we are. Glass and concrete sentences right next to half-timbered Elizabethan phrases, a Starbucks of an utterance dwelling in an expression that once belonged to a Victorian banker, an Apple Store of an accent in a converted Georgian merchant’s lingo. You get the point. Whether or not we are aware of the difference between a transitive verb and a preposition, a verb and a vowel, we are willy-nilly, heirs to Marlowe and Swift, just as that new Waitrose is a descendant (albeit a bastard one) of the Parthenon.
iTunes Live Festival
There’s no available transcript for this speech, but here Stephen Fry makes some possibly controversial points about illegal downloading. However, he also begins with a run through of the history of human expression and how it has been recorded and circulated from the Stone Age to the age of BitTorrent and DRM.
Rarely seen photographs of 19th century London are going to be revealed at an exhibition at the British Library in October. Many of the photos were originally taken in order to preserve the history of the city, while industrialisation altered its appearance significantly. The exhibition will also include images from around the world during the period, but the ones I found most interesting are those representing real people and the construction of key London sights, such as the Underground and Nelson’s Column. The photos that have been released also include one of Hippo Obaysch in London Zoo, who was donated by Egypt in 1850. From The Guardian:
The animal’s arrival at London zoo caused huge excitement and visitor numbers quickly doubled. But, as is often the way with celebrity, interest waned as people began to realise the star didn’t do very much.
The image of Obaysch will be one of more than 250 rarely seen 19th-century photographs to be exhibited at the British Library’s big winter show, details of which were announced today. Incredibly, for an institution which has some 350,000 photographs spread across its various and vast archives, this will be the first major photographic exhibition to be held at the library.
John Falconer, the library’s head of visual materials, said: “Although we have what is undoubtedly a world class collection of 19th-century photographs, these have not been particularly prominent in the public eye. This exhibition is an attempt to remedy that.”
The exhibition, Points of View, will run at the British Library from 30th October 2009 to 7th March 2010 and will be free. There’s a little more information about it on the British Library website with a video of some of the photographs.
