By Stuart Mitchner

“London, Waterloo Bridge” by Oskar Kokoschka (1886-1980)

To D.H. Lawrence, who died on March 2,1930 at 45, a “painted landscape is the background with the real subject left out.” It’s also where “the English exist and hold their own.”

Clearly, this is a novelist speaking, as well as a poet, philosopher, essayist in many realms, revolutionary, and a painter for whom landscape is the “background to an intenser vision of life.”

Some Serious Fun

As I make my way to the Princeton University Art Museum, I imagine Lawrence by my side looking the way he did to the doctor he hosted for tea and toast only weeks before he died, “a colorful figure with bright blue coat, red hair and beard and lively blue eyes” who “made the toast himself treating the operation as though it were a serious matter and at the same time great fun” — which is how I’d like to treat the subject of this column and the current exhibit, “Pastures Green & Dark Satanic Mills: The British Passion for Landscape.”

The Art of Being Free

In Princeton art is everywhere and it’s free, a fact of local life Lawrence would surely appreciate even though he once said “Men are freest when they are most unconscious of freedom.” One approach to the free museum takes you past James FitzGerald’s Fountain of Freedom in front of the Wilson School, with its everywhichway streams and spurts and splashes playing out the glory and chaos, acclamation and denunciation, triumph and tragedy of Woodrow Wilson’s life — or, given my companion’s thoughtful stare, D.H. Lawrence’s. Overlooking this misty fantasia is Ai Weiwei’s Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads, which naturally attracts the lively admiring gaze of a poet who goes one-on-one with snakes, eagles, elephants, mosquitoes, and mountain lions in Birds, Beasts, and Flowers (1923). “I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself,” says Lawrence as we cross Washington Road onto the campus. “This, too,” he says as we come to George Rickey’s stainless steel kinetic sculpture Two Planes Vertical Horizontal II on our way to the museum. “A mechanism with a life of its own. Bound on this pedestal, yet it moves freely, like Blake’s gentle wind, ‘silently, invisibly.’”

Blake Opens the Door

There’s no way to get around the presence of William Blake at the gateway to a show that takes the essence of its subject from his poetry — at least not if you’re in the imaginary company of a ginger-haired, blue-jacketed 20th-century prophet. The four-stanza poem introducing “Milton,” one of Blake’s prophetic books, begins by asking did Jesus once walk “On England’s pleasant pastures,” did he gaze “upon our clouded hills,” and was “Jerusalem builded here/Among these dark Satanic Mills?” The penultimate stanza has the poet demanding his “Bow of burning gold,” his “Arrows of Desire,” his “Spear,” and his “Chariot of Fire” before vowing not to let “my Sword sleep in my hand: Till we have built Jerusalem,/In England’s green & pleasant land.”

When William Blake opens the door to an exhibit of paintings of English subjects and themes, all bets are off, the sky’s the limit, anything can happen. Even someone who saw as far and free as Blake would surely be struck to learn that his poem would one day be set to music that in the year 2016 would be seriously discussed as a national anthem to replace “God Save the Queen.” And now that they’ve put Jane Austen’s face on the ten pound note, who knows, the time may come when they put Blake or Lawrence on the twenty. Except Lawrence won’t have it. At my playful suggestion, he quotes from his poem “Money Madness”: “I doubt if any man living hands out a pound note without a pang; and a real tremor, if he hands out a ten-pound note. We quail, money makes us quail. It has got us down; we grovel before it in strange terror.”

This notion of Lawrence at a 21st-century art exhibit celebrating a country for which he had a lifelong love-hate relationship tempts me to tell him how old Blighty loosened up in the 60s and set the world dancing and singing with rock and roll — a green and pleasant/dark satanic life-force that put everything in play like the jets of water in the Fountain of Freedom. I decide to keep a lid on the 60s for now rather than divert his attention from the landscapes, where the English “hold their own.”

Feeling the Light

We’re standing in front of Henry Clarence Whaite’s Shepherd’s Dream (1865) when Lawrence draws my attention to the light. “Look how Clarence lays it plain and simple on the shepherd and his book.” The vision is of angelic figures evolving out of closely woven forest imagery. “The most joyous moment in the whole history of painting,” says he, was “when the incipient impressionists discovered light, and with it, color. There they made the grand, grand escape into freedom. The English delight in landscape is a delight in escape. It’s hidden in the word — landscape/escape.”

Salvator Rosa’s Rocky Landscape with Herdsmen and Cattle (1660) seems to satisfy Lawrence’s requirement for “an intenser vision of life,” which he also admits seeing in Thomas Jones’s The Bard (1774), after Thomas Gray’s ode of the same name. The stormy image of the man with a lyre, his back to the abyss, his foot on the edge, inspires Lawrence to quote the poem’s closing lines, “He spoke, and headlong from the mountain’s height/Deep in the roaring tide he plunged to endless night.” As we walk on, he says, “When a poet jumps off the edge, he lands somewhere. Perhaps on a poem, perhaps not.”

He loves J.M.W. Turner’s Storm (1840-45): “Here’s a vision of life, here’s a presence, here’s the shout of the subject!” But the mood turns predictably grim when we come to the “dark satanic mills” suggested by Lionel Walden’s Steelworks Cardiff at Night (1893-97). “How much darker and more satanic they are now!” (If only he knew!) People are beginning to stare as he breaks into a passionate recitation of his own poem on the same subject, of how “the iron has entered into the soul/and the machine has entangled the brain, and got it fast,/and steel has twisted the loins of man, electricity has exploded the heart.”

Waterloo Bridge

I was free of the music of the present until I came to the paintings of Waterloo Bridge and the Thames, and it was here that D.H. Lawrence, who never had much use for London, left me to my own devices. Just as well. It’s doubtful I could have made him understand the impact of a prolonged submersion in David Bowie’s swansong album Blackstar where he sings with life-in-death passion of “the English evergreens” and “seeing more and feeling less, saying no but meaning yes.” It’s equally doubtful I could have expressed, even if I’d had the music at hand, the timeless beauty of Ray Davies’s song “Waterloo Sunset” about “the dirty old river” he sees “flowing into the night” as he “looks at the world” from his window. Davies once called the song his “substitute for not being able to paint.” He first saw the view from the window of a hospital after a near-death experience at 13. “To me it’s a blessed spot,” he has said, “a truthful spot, where I can get centered.” Writing in his memoir, X-Ray (1995), he saw it as a painting: “The water was a bright brown: almost red. This was probably caused by pollution, but it gave the impression that the water was like blood flowing through a giant vein that led to the pumping heart of the Empire. I felt that there was a bigger tide coming that would completely flood the banks and submerge the Houses of Parliament. This was a tide of reality and change that was soon to turn England on its head.”

In Blake’s Backyard

The views of Waterloo Bridge and the Thames by Léon de Smet in 1915 and Oskar Kokoschka in 1926, and the one of Charing Cross Bridge by Claude Monet in 1902 were all painted in hotel rooms overlooking that “blessed spot.” The hotel was the Savoy. I can almost hear Lawrence groaning at the thought of river views painted from the windows of a luxury hotel. But he’d have approved of all three, I think, particularly Kokoschka’s busy, vibrant, complexly alive and free-feeling view of bridge and river with the dome of St. Paul’s in the distance. And I know he’d have appreciated the idea that William Blake breathed his last nearby, having spent the last seven years of his life in a “plain, red-brick house of three stories” in Fountain Court adjacent to the future site of the Savoy Hotel. From his bedroom window he could see a section of the Thames “like a bar of gold” between the buildings on either side.

“Pastures Green & Dark Satanic Mills: The British Passion for Landscape” will be on view through April 24 at the Princeton University Art Museum, which is free and open to the public six days a week (the museum stays open till 10 p.m. Thursday nights). For more information on hours and other exhibits, visit http://artmuseum.
princeton.edu.