Balcony in the Forest

I recently read this beautiful novel and will mention it here for the way it evokes the Ardennes forest landscape during the winter of 1939-40. Its hero, Grange, is a lieutenant in the French army posted to a concrete bunker on the Belgian border. 

Ostensibly readying for war, Grange instead spends his time observing the change in seasons, falling in love with a young free-spirited widow, and contemplating the absurd stasis of his present condition. This novel of long takes, dream states, and little dramatic action culminates abruptly in battle, an event that is as much the real incursion of the German army into France as it is the sudden intrusion of death into the suspended disbelief of life.

At the start of the book, Grange takes up his appointment and travels in an empty train along the River Meuse. "A train for the Domain of Arnheim", he thinks, referring to the Poe story with its uncannily perfect landscape which I wrote about here some years ago. The forest has a different quality of strangeness. As he is driven up to the blockhouse in an army truck, Grange observes the denseness of the trees, with just an occasional path like an animal trail. On this watershed there are no streams but at one point 'a thread of clear water ran: it added to the silence of the fairy-tale forest.'

The dreaminess of this world is partly down to the way Grange experiences the landscape on night patrol. Here is an example: 

There was a powerful charm in standing here, so long after midnight had sounded from the earth's churches, deep in this placeless gelatin masked by pools of fog and steeped in the vague sweat of dreams, at the hour when the mist floated out of the forest like spirits. Grange gestured to Hervouët and both men held their breath for a moment, listening to the great respiration of the woods around them that made a kind of low and intermittent music, the long, deep murmur of an undertow that came from the groves of firs near Les Fraitures; over this tidal undulation they could hear the crackle of branches along some nocturnal creature's course, the trickling of a spring, or sometimes a dog's high-pitched howl roused by the moon, such sounds rising at one moment or another out of the smoking vat of the forest. As far as the eye could reach a fine blue vapor floated over the forest - not the dense fumes of sleep but rather a lucid, quickening exhalation that disengaged the mind, making all the paths of insomnia dance before it. The dry and sonorous night slept with its eyes wide open; the secretly wakened earth was full of portents once again, as in the age when shields were hung in the branches of oaks.

I looked up reviews of the NYRB reprint (the translation was first published back in 1959), but couldn't find much online. There is one in the TLS that says 'for all its oneiric qualities, A Balcony in the Forest presents Grange’s fantasies in prose that is lyric, yet precise; Richard Howard’s translation of 1959 still seems fresh. Unfortunately…' - and unfortunately at this point the paywall kicks in so I cannot see what the caveat is! It might concern the young widow Mona, who has been criticised as a male fantasy figure, although I confess I was captivated by her and reminded of the women in Nerval's Sylvie, a book whose admirers included Julien Gracq. There are some excellent articles on Gracq online, for example, Seth Lerer's in the Yale Review and Paul Dean's in Literary Matters, which has a detailed discussion of Balcony in the Forest (which would spoil the story if you want to read it). I have written briefly here before about Gracq's 1976 book of fluvial reveries, The Narrow Waters.

Finally, I will mention that the NYRB paperback has an excellent cover that uses a detail from Peter Doig's etching Concrete Cabin (1996). Doig's cabin is surrounded by trees but very different to the bunker Grange and his four men inhabit. It is Le Corbusier's Unité d'Habitation in Briey-en-Fôret, northeast France (further south than the setting for the novel), partly derelict when Doig visited it in 1991. As an essay on the Christies site puts it, 'the strange, displaced nostalgia that haunts so many of his landscape paintings has here been transferred from the isolated barns and houses of Canada to a large building in France.' Doig's paintings and etching now preserve a memory of Le Corbusier's building before it's renovation (and perhaps also prefigure a time when it will fall into ruin again).

The evergreen forest seethes and roars

There are still a couple of weeks to see From the Forest to the Sea: Emily Carr in British Columbia, an exhibition I have already referred to here.  It was her paintings of trees that most impressed me and their qualities are well described in Laura Cumming's review:

'Carr paints young pine trees aspiring tall but fragile in the silvery light of dawn, the air scintillating around them like St Elmo’s fire. She paints clearings in the forest where the sunlight is tinged with the deep green of the trees, which spread across the canvas like an all-over Jackson Pollock. An astonishing painting of windswept trees shows the painter’s arm moving round the scene like the wind itself, the forest branches shivering and roaring, the air made visible in a sort of spectral transparence that appears to lie both in and on top of the painting.  As the painter Peter Doig remarks in the catalogue, you don’t just see Carr’s trees, you hear them too.'

This auditory quality is evident in Emily Carr's prose description of the Canadian forest in The Book of Small (1942):

'The silence of our Western forests was so profound that our ears could scarcely comprehend it. If you spoke your voice came back to you as your face is thrown back to you in a mirror. It seemed as if the forest were so full of silence that there was no room for sounds. The birds who lived there were birds of prey -- eagles, hawks, owls. Had a song bird loosed his throat the others would have pounced. Sober-coloured, silent little birds were the first to follow settlers into the West. Gulls there had always been; they began with the sea and had always cried over it. The vast sky spaces above, hungry for noise, steadily lapped up their cries. The forest was different --she brooded over silence and secrecy.'

The Canadian composer and acoustic ecologist  R. Murray Schafer quotes this passage in his book The Natural Soundscape.  Every type of forest, he suggests, produces its own keynote. 

'Evergreen forest, in its mature phase, produces darkly vaulted aisles, through which sound reverberates with unusual clarity – a circumstance which, according to Oswald Spengler, drove the northern Europeans to try to duplicate the reverberation in the construction of Gothic cathedrals. When the wind blows in the forests of British Columbia, there is nothing of the rattling and rustling familiar with deciduous forests; rather there is a low, breathy whistle. In a strong wind the evergreen forest seethes and roars, for the needles twist and turn in turbine motion.  The lack of undergrowth or openings into clearings kept the British Columbia forests unusually free of animal, bird and insect life, a circumstance which produced an awesome, even sinister impression on the first white settlers. ... The uneasiness of the early settlers with the forest, and their desire for space and sunlight, soon produced another keynote sound: the noise of lumbering.'

Emily Carr, The Remains of a Forest, 1939

Source: Wikimedia Commons

The Jack Pine

Painting Canada: Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven is another superb exhibition at Dulwich Picture Gallery, following others I've described on this blog: Salvator Rosa, Paul Nash, Adam Elsheimer.  Reviewers (like Brian Sewell) will inevitably have to provide some background information on the Group of Seven, whose work has not often been seen in the UK.  In Canada, as Ian A. C. Dejardin says in the catalogue, their work has been endlessly discussed 'to the point of exhaustion.  Yet their visual legacy remains supremely powerful: many Canadians, raised with reproductions of the Group of Seven's most famous paintings on their classroom walls, still see their own country through the Group's eyes ... Few of us in Europe could point more than vaguely on a map to any of the locations these artists depicted.  These are painted woods, trees, lakes and mountains only.  Nonetheless, non-Canadians should be aware: we are on holy ground.'  As I know some readers of this blog are Canadian (see comments on my last post...) I'd better admit that a lot of these paintings were completely new to me.  

Tom Thomson in Algonquin Provincial Park, 1914-16

Source (all images here): Wikimedia Commons 

At the start of the exhibition, there is a quotation from Fred Housser, who wrote the first book about the Group of Seven in 1926: "This task [of expressing the spirit of the Canadian landscape in paint] demands a new type of artist; one who divests himself of the velvet coat and flowing tie of his caste, puts on the outfit of the bushwacker and prospector; closes with his environment; paddles, portages and makes camp; sleeps in the out-of-doors under the stars; climbs mountains with his sketch box on his back."  The idea of an artist who 'closes with the environment' reminds me of recent British land artists who have walked in Algonquin Park and other landscapes explored by the Group of Seven.

When Tom Thomson died in 1917, his memorial described him as 'artist woodsman and guide'.  Photographs show him fishing and canoeing; one of these was the basis for Peter Doig's White Canoe (1992) (see also my earlier post on Doig's Figure in a Mountain Landscape paintings).  However, as Dejardin points out in the catalogue, Thomson was actually rather a snappy dresser when out and about in Toronto and he made a point of adding some expensive cobalt blue to the marine grey used in painting his canoe.  In 1919 the wealthiest of the group, Lawren Harris, had a boxcar fitted out as a travelling studio for a trip north on the Algoma Central Railway.  It sounds more comfortable than the floating studios of the Impressionists, but this didn't detain some of the artists: as A. Y. Jackson observed, sitting in the boxcar, 'the other chaps are all out sketching under umbrellas.  They are all trying to turn out four a day and can't stop if it rains.'

 Tom Thomson, The Jack Pine, 1916

Tom Thomson's most famous paintings, The Jack Pine and The West Wind, are shown alongside their original sketches in the exhibition's first room.  Each is a majestic landscape visible behind the drooping form of a pine tree, its branches seemingly surrounded by a faint aura.  Pine trees seem to have inspired poets and artists all over the world so it seems surprising in retrospect that (according to Housser) the Canadian artistic establishment, unable to see beyond European and Hudson River landscape visions, considered their native Jack Pine trees unpaintable before Thomson came along.  There is a Pine Island in Georgian Bay (part of Lake Huron) and this exhibition includes two 1914 sketches of it by Thomson and a night scene by Jackson, where the trees stand over a pool of deep blue in which you can see the reflections of stars.
 

Six of the Group of Seven, plus their friend Barker Fairley, in 1920

From left to right: Frederick Varley, A. Y. Jackson, Lawren Harris,

Fairley, Frank Johnston, Arthur Lismer, and J. E. H. MacDonald.

In 1925 a critic noted that the Group had been 'tree mad', but also, successively, 'lake-lunatic, river-ridden, birch-bedlamed, aspen addled, and rock-cracked.  This year they are mountain mad.'  The exhibition's room of mountain views includes Frederick Varley's Hodleresque The Cloud, Red Mountain (1927-8) and Lawren Harris's stylised, almost art deco Mt Lefroy (1930), although I preferred the more direct, less abstract approach of J. E. H. MacDonald, especially a view of a small turquoise lake in the gathering snow with the Japanese-sounding title, Mountain Solitude (Lake Oesa) (1932).  The final room collects more of Harris's Theosophically-inspired landscapes from the late twenties - radically simplified mountains and ice bergs under grey skies, sometimes parted with shafts of light, reflecting his search for those 'moments in the North when the outward aspect of nature becomes for a while full luminous to her informing spirit - and man, nature and spirit are one.'

The Heart of Old San Juan

As mentioned in an earlier posting, the Tate have a major Peter Doig retrospective at the moment. When I looked round last week I was interested to see some of the more recent paintings, having been to an earlier show at the Whitechapel in 1998. The Whitechapel exhibition leaflet, shown here, starts predictably by explaining that Doig is like Friedrich and Turner, but also not like them - it compares his attitude to nature and artifice with contemporaries Jeff Wall and Lari Pittman. Gerhard Richter is also referenced, along with Munch, Hopper and Magritte. Despite all these correspondences, it's impressive that Doig's art of the nineties remains so distinctive. All his work is interesting, although the exhibition at Tate Britain gives the impression of a fairly intense five-year burst of creativity at the start of the decade, encompassing landscapes inspired by, for example, the film Friday the 13th, Le Corbusier's Unité d'Habitation apartment, various Canadian winter scenes and an empty field at night.
The Tate leaflet here shows a detail of Country Rock (1998-99), with the painted archway under the Don Valley Parkway in Toronto, which it describes as a nondescript 'in-between' space. It quotes Doig: "A lot of my work deals with peripheral or marginal sites, places where the urban world meets the natural world. Where the urban elements become - literally - abstract devices." A similar kind of painting from the same time shows an empty basketball court, The Heart of Old San Juan (1999). However, these relatively people-free human landscapes have been replaced in Doig's more recent paintings with scenes that include figures derived from found postcards, snapshots or earlier art. Somehow, these simpler, more figurative paintings seem even more mysterious than his landscapes. As Adrian Searle has written "genuine disquiet pervades Doig's newest work. The man climbing a palm in one appears oblivious to the shadowy forms in the sky filling the rest of the canvas. The stories are dissolving, leaving only emptiness and murmurs."

Figure in a Mountain Landscape

Peter Doig is coming to Tate Britain for a talk next month. I was told the tickets all went within 30 minutes of going on sale, so sadly I won't be able to report on what he says, but I'll try to get to the exhibition. Doig tends to re-work his themes, one of which is Figure in a Mountain Landscape, examples of which are here, here and here (this last one is subtitled, for no clear reason, 'I Love You Big Dummy', which is presumably a Captain Beefheart reference..?) The original for Doig's cowled figure en plein air is a 1935 photograph of Franklin Carmichael, one of the Canadian Group of Seven painters, sketching at Great Lake Nortern Ontario. Rather than paint and repaint a landscape from nature, Doig paints and repaints a photograph of someone painting a landscape from nature.

There is a short article about Doig in the latest issue of Tate etc. by the Brooklyn-based critic Lyle Rexer (great name!) He says that Doig benefits from "a certain Richter effect, that is from anti-Platonist critiques, when it came to be understood that he, too, often preferred two-dimensional images as models to the common reality of the breathing world." When I said in a previous post of Gerhard Richter's landscapes "there is little comfort to be had in these highly artificial paintings, based on photographs or picture postcards" I was of course referring to those who would seek spiritual solace in Nature or desire a painting that transmits the artist's feeling for a particular place. But of course many contemporary viewers will want precisely to be reassured that this is not what is happening. Rexer says that one of Doig's curators, for example, "went so far as to assure us that there is no nature painting here, no plein air, only good studio conceptualism." However, in a sense Peter Doig simply approaches painting in a traditional way. It's just that instead of painting, say, Cadmus and a snake in a landscape, like Poussin, Doig paints Berry Oakley and a canoe in a landscape.