Steve_Bamlett_blog

What do we do to make our time in a major art gallery exhibition significant?

In a recent blog (in full at this link) I started thinking about some mental and emotional linking themes that seem to me to relate two extremely different major art exhibitions that I needed, at I felt I needed, to fit in during a very short visit to London: Anish Kapoor at the Hayward Gallery seen on the 8th July and Francisco de Zurbarán in the National Gallery on the 9th July. That blog, ostensibly on ‘habits’; as a mode of lived life, suddenly dived into the idea of religious vestments characterising how both artists dealt with religious mystery. Here is what I said, as I thought about what Kapoor had to say about the fold in art history and in his own sculpturing of that phenomenon:

Looking at the relation of fold, void and interior / exteriors ought to wait for my proper blog on this exhibition, but here, let’s linger on the fact that some painters potentiated this link unintentionally, or perhaps intentionally given the ‘darkness’ implied in Counter-Reformation Catholic theology from the seventeenth-century. Whilst in London I also saw the wonderful exhibition on Zurbarán (for my preparatory blog see this link), Again I will address this exhibition in a later review blog, but having seen Kapoor the day before my head was stuffed with the import of holes, folds and enclosures. I saw them in Zurbarán’s finest monastic life paintings but particularly around the depiction of habits.

One of the paintings I concentrated upon was Saint Francis in Meditation (c. 1635-9), as pictured in full and in a detail below from that blog:

About this I said:

When a saint becomes more clearly a momento mori, shade can act differently. The monk again has a beautiful face, offered to the gaze of the sinner whilst its gaze looks upwards, as in the process of mediation between God and the mortal suppliant. Here the folds do only half the job for the black of the background, described in the exhibition as the ‘deepest black’ ever evoked in paint, feels somewhat like Vantablack, though not yet invented. Its mysterious evocation of a void larger than any other makes the folds of the habit less important, the shade under the cowl less effective in eradicating the flesh of the face. As a result the mystery of the painting is greater.

Perhaps I could have been fuller on that painting. The upward gaze of Saint Francis is complicated by almost vertical non-optical glare upwards of the skull he holds with its dark voids for eyes, directed at that living but tortured face of the Saint himself, with the dark orifice of a praying mouth (open and deep in darkness). The skull’s optical voids are unseeing but somehow cast their inner darkness up at the occluded frontage of Francis, enforcing the comparison upon which he meditates of the boniness of death and the longing of the flesh for metamorphosis into spirit. I could have emphasised how the folds that cover flesh are as beautiful in as those of the painting (Saint Francis of Assisi 1636) I compared it with but less dramatic rather than ‘less important’ as I expressed it there, quite misleadingly. The true issue of comparison is that the darker themes suggested by the skull are involved with the shadowed suppression of the folds to the front of the saint’s habit, those of the man whose sexual body is the sacrifice to the God he invokes to defy the claim to victory over life of the thought of death (bonily – my neologism – rather than bodily) represented by skulls.

But my concern with folds is not the sole issue I want to isolate in reflecting on how and why I try to find something of a significance to myself in visiting an art exhibition of works so major they can overwhelm. In this blog I want to think about why, for my own purposes, I spend so long on. In my preparation blog for this exhibition based on reviews of the exhibition and its scholarly catalogue, I said in elaboration of my own definitively non-scholarly interests, citing an interest prompted by Jonathan Jones’ review of the show:

There is a sense in which faces are landscapes and I long to see too the Colossal Head attributed to Zurbarán. It haunts with beauty and solidity. Jones describes it as ‘a wall-filling mask of a giant, possibly painted for a stage set: it makes a mockery of proportion yet is beautifully detailed, full of character, weirdly alive’. [1]

For my purposes, that face – visible in the long corridor view between the rooms in my first photograph in the present blog, was situated adjacently to two works I knew very well, but which were so much more beautifully curated in this exhibition, the portraits of Asher and Joseph (both c. 1640-5) that I have seen so many times hanging in Bishop Auckland Castle near my home. The contrast between pieces so well known to me as these last and that strange newly-attributed piece described by Jones, both glancing sideways at each other at the corner of the gallery they occupy, summed up some of the more ordinary pleasures of exhibitions – the delight in seeing older pieces that are hung in perfection in order the better to be appreaciated and detail in the monumental and queer. I was not immune to those pleasure:

That those photographs were taken in quick succession is obvious from the presence and attitude of contemplation of the stately lady who coincidentally appears in both. The face of The Colossal Head fulfills perfectly the transformation of complex almost contradictory masculine attitudes into landscape – tender and passively sensual on the one hand (or rather lips and eyes) and rough, rugged and defensive on the other hand (or in the lined forehead, the bridge of the nose and the shade of the gazing eye sockets, afraid of their own tenderness). You wander across the terrain half afraid of what draws you in whilst you continue nevertheless. It is sublime.

But these large shows offered by exhibitions would not sustain me for long, least of all with the still lifes, which made me eat my jaded words from the preparatory blog, so beautiful and striking were they. The best example is from a piece one is forbidden from photographing (by its lender) though it appears accidentally in the long shot below – a piece of ceramics so three dimensional it appears to float in front of its frame – and it is – merely a yellow jug, or alcarraza (the painting from a private collection named Alcarazza (1650) and represented in the catalogue on page 152 (Fig. 79) :

But, as I look at that reproduction in the catalogue, I lose the luminescence of the thing seen in the flesh (or even suggested a very little in my accidental picture above, though its illusory effects flattened by the angle of vision), its insistence on standing out from its background as if that background were a void that could exist because the piece needed no material support to its solidity. It is extremely beautiful. Other still lifes are showy like that of a Plate of Grapes (1620 – 49) obviously done to match the best known story about trompe-l’oeil hyper-realism in art – the story of the ancient Greek painter Zeuxis and the grapes.

The enclosure of such paintings behind glass is a problem however for such still lifes – which live, if they do t all, only in the detail of the textures and fullness of the fruit. A mere impression of the whole gives little away. Reflection on grape-skin identifies the inner pressure on the skin and its mature rounding that gives volume and lightness to each grape and depth to their clustering in bunches. This painting is relatively small (28 x 36 cm.) but is rich in detail – the favoured ones being the difference in the way black and white grapes create reflections on the silver platter, as if we saw here the difference in translucency between them in such a way that light is given body, as if too had differing densities, each grape being shaped by the way the skin-burst (pressured from within by the formation of the growth of watery juicy flesh) captures light, relative to the purity of its surface tension – either from atmospheric dust settle on them or internal decay. Yet the glass captures my questing face too much in reflection (eben in the world before the photograph is that so) to allow us to see that detail

But detail matters in the masterworks too, as in the most horrific of the huge (this one 212 – 163 cm.) Crucifixions, Christ on the Cross with the Virgin, Mary Magdalene and Saint John (1655). None of the other Crucifixions emphasise Christ’s agony as this does, perhaps reflected in the witness of Saint John, who, I think seems to mediate its interpretation and darken it, putting the grief of Mother and dear friend, the ubiquitous Magdalene in the shade. Yet, from conversations I overheard this painting troubled some because of it anatomical detail in relation to light. One gentleman spoke of the difficult of feeling the volume of the legs, though his wife spoke of that being related to the shadow caused by the fall of light. Certainly close to you can see the outline of the occluded inner legs as if the light falling on it so intensely came obliquely from the west, as in the evening, fitting for a stage so near death. Yet had the gentleman a point about the risk the artist takes with the legs in order to create that deeoing void between them. The source of light that would create such shadow seems different from that on the torso, I sometimes feel but I remain in uncertainty about it on the whole. Whilst we look at the cross directly and frontally, the lighting of the body seems to twist it, favourings its left side, and yet urely such light would show the void between the legs as less static, the left leg (as we look upon it) more shadowed than the right.

Does that matter much. It may not, but it does lean me to thinking that that there are problems here because of the need of the artist to show the depth of symbolic voids pertinent to Christ’s death, that almost threaten any sense of his embodiment. And having noticed that I though about what fascinated me about those failed nudes in the two examples of The Labours of Hercules. In each of the examples Zurbarán emphasise a prominent leg, as if he had prided himself on drawing that and fleshing it out. In each case the featured leg is set against a mythical beast in the detail (the Bull of Crete in the first, Cerberus the canine guard of the Underworld in the next. These legs ought to be examples of strength in terms of the allegory but Zurbarán, gives us legs loose in muscle, and tension or strain that are, moreover, ao lit that we see too much of their flesh and in extension and perhaps in evocation of surface fleshly volume.

In some ways this was detail hunting that lessened my pleasure, but this is not the case in his narrative pictures of ecclesiastical events and subjects. One can’t help loving The Body of Saint Bonaventure (1629) but part of the delight is surely in that huge red hat covering his feet, forcing itself on our attention without explanation, or (at least) none I know. Moreover, although the catalogue praises the skill that goes into the faces of King James I of Aragon (crowned) and the mitred Pope Gregory X, I was inclined to pay more attention to the pairs of men over the head of the dead Bonaventure, who seem to mirror each other – the lay gentlemen behind the two monks, in each pair similarly faced men with the left one of each differing in having a beard. And the detail that grabbed me the most was that of the array of hands in the focal centre of the picture that contrast the whitened flesh of the dead Bonaventure’s hand, with its red signet still on, and the fleshly hands of Gregory pointing down and that of the monk who helps ti stabilise the crucifix in the dead saint’s deathly pallid hand that is no longer capable of grasp. That is so beautiful but even more so in a monumental painting of his size (245 x 220 cm).

In the catalogue, Chastel-Rousseau and Long point to the painting of The Circumcision of Christ as one that mirrors the Bonaventure painting’s ‘figure arrangement and group dynamics’ with their ‘equally theatrical composition’, and The Circumcision’s enhancement ‘by backlighting , accentuating the figures silhouetted against the dark central column and the architectural landscape bathed in bright light in the background’. All that seems correct, as is the focal centering of the overly chubby and decidedly over-sanguine features of the Christ child annulling the pain that attends child circumcision. The writers point to, in the ‘foreground the gaze of a young page calling us ‘to witness the scene, inviting us in’ ([2] p. 84). But let’s get back to detail for the dark column immediately above the child leas the gaze invited by the page immediately to the detail of the actual act – for the foreskin is being cut at the moment of the painting. The detail, even in a large painting like this obscures the penis of Christ by a thick and mottled thumb of the officiating cleric, allowing the hard cutting instrument to shadow the groin area while still allowing it to be defined, remarkably in such a chubby unrealistic baby. I wonder if the page a much ‘inviyes us in’ as turns from tje suight, asking for judgement from the viewer. of course Zurbarán would not have seen it thus.

But let;s end with what remains my favourite painting, Saint Serapion (1628). Chastel-Rousseau and Long make much of Zurbaran’s choice to shown none of the violence of the English martyr’s torture and death, but point to, instead, his ‘peaceful expression and the dramatically lit folds of his voluminous white habit’ ([2] p. 65). For me these folds are not ‘dramatically lit’ for no purpose – they complicate the vision of death as believers in the continuing life of the spirit must do. They show the layers that are on the cusp between surfaces and inner depths, Behind the wing-like fall of the robes to the inner costume fitting tightly around the young man’s body, as his lips become the cusp to an inner world, his eyes closed in death that is not unlike sleep, to the light that strikes through from the void within. There is something so beautiful about the patch of light on the upper eyelid that feels full of hope, whether you find it in the Christian message or not. Commissioned for the mortuary chapel of the Carmelite Monastery of the Merced Calzada in Seville, it might have pointed to life even behind sacrifice of the body that must have mattered to young monks. But there is some violence. The label to the body, shaded by its torn part stands out to the viewer – with violence enough implied to an audience that knew the saint’s story. It was rematkable to me how much my attention was called to the realism of this detail.

Whether all this amounted to some ‘significance of my own’ I can’t say. In truth my attention was fragmented and although I felt joy in seeing the paintings nothing really gelled in my mind to pull the experience together. But I wouldn’t have wanted to miss this exhibition. There is so much more that strikes you than i mention here. Do go!

With love

Steven xxxxxxxxx

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[1] Jonathan Jones (2026) ‘Zurbarán review – ecstatic visions, primitive surrealism … and the finest loincloths ever painted’ in The Guardian (Wed 29 Apr 2026 00.01 BST) Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2026/apr/29/zurbaran-review-spanish-master-national-gallery-london, cited in my blog at: https://livesteven.com/2026/06/17/when-the-subject-is-seeing-why-exclude-visual-art-for-that-too-allows-us-to-see-in-more-than-ways-that-are-entirely-visual-this-blog-is-an-explanation-of-why-i-go-to-art-exhibitions-this-i/

[2] Charlotte Chastel-Rousseau and Rebecca Long (2026: 65) ‘The Major Commissions’ in in Francesca Whitlum-Cooper, Daniel Sobrino Ralston, Imogen Tedbury & Rebecca Long [Eds.] Zurbarán London, National Gallery Global Ltd.: 63 – 87.