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Tag Archives: Lawrence Durrell

Photographs

27 Sunday May 2018

Posted by Paul Kincaid in art, books

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A.J. Ayer, Cyril Connolly, Evelyn Waugh, Frederick Ashton, Ian Collins, Joan Leigh Fermor, John Betjeman, John Craxton, John Rayner, Kenneth Clark, Lawrence Durrell, Lucien Freud, Margot Fonteyn, Niko Ghika, Olivia Stewart, Osbert Lancaster, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Xan Fielding

the photographs of joan leigh fermorThe Patrick Leigh Fermor industry has been busier since his death than he ever was in his lifetime. This year alone we have had a wonderful exhibition at the British Museum devoted to Leigh Fermor, Niko Ghika and John Craxton; which was in turn accompanied by an even more wonderful book, which to my mind is a model of what a book associated with an exhibition should be like. And now Ian Collins and Olivia Stewart have produced The Photographs of Joan Leigh Fermor: Artist and Lover. (Personally, I could have done without the somewhat saccharine quality of that subtitle; but then I could have done without much of the account of her life that occupies rather too much of this book, particularly since so much of it is devoted to telling us, repeatedly, how devoted she was to Paddy, and by extension how wonderful Paddy was.)

Joan Eyres Monsell, who became Joan Rayner before she became Joan Leigh Fermor, was almost a cliche. She came from the sort of family that makes Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited seem rather common and lower class. Her immediate ancestors include a member of Gladstone’s cabinet, a Chief Constable of the Metropolitan Police, a polar explorer, a First Lord of the Admiralty, a hymn writer, and, of course, a Baron. They were rich, influential, massive landowners, and residents of a stately home in the Cotswolds, Dumbleton Hall. She was the archetypal rebellious daughter of privilege, moving in artistic circles, friends with Cyril Connolly and John Betjeman and Lucien Freud and Freddy Ayer and Kenneth Clark and Osbert Lancaster and so on, and sleeping around with those of them who weren’t gay. When she married the journalist John Rayner in the late-1930s, he was monogamous, she wasn’t; the marriage did not last. And Joan helped to cement her position in this bohemian set by using her wealth, buying art from the artists, offering support for those who needed it.

Yet at this time she was also establishing a career for herself as a photographer. Her photographs appeared, often uncredited, in several of the Shell Guides that Betjeman was editing, also in the magazine Architectural Review, and in various other books and magazines. At the outbreak of the Second World War she was commissioned to photograph the heritage that was considered most at risk from German bombs, though with the onset of the Blitz this turned into a record of the damage done, her work appearing magazines like Horizon. As well as her photographic work, she served briefly as a nurse, and then trained to become a cipher clerk, being posted to Algiers, then paddyMadrid, and finally in 1944 to Cairo, where she met Paddy. (It somehow confirms things I’d begun to suspect from my other reading about Leigh Fermor to see him described here not just as charming, but as “indecisive, impractical and clumsy.”) They met again, after the war, in Greece, and began the romance that, in all I’ve read, seems to subsume everything else about her.

She continued to take photographs for various magazines for the next few years, but most of her work was to support Paddy’s journeys around Greece to research his books, Mani and Roumeli. Then, sometime around 1960, she simply stopped being a professional photographer. She had always been dismissive of her own talents, referring to her photographs simply as snaps, and from then on seemed to have largely reserved her photography for recording the house and Kardamyli that she and Paddy were building (mostly with her inheritance). Which is a pity, on the evidence here she was, at her best, quite a remarkable photographer.

greek villagersShe used, practically throughout her life, a Rolleiflex taking a square 6×6 negative. To show them at their best, the book is (almost) square, with the photographs placed in the middle of a grey page. It is a presentation that I find benefits the photographs while at the same time being frustrating to the viewer. I’ll come to the frustrations in a moment, but first let me just extol the pictures themselves. The early ones are haunting evocations of war-damaged London: an arched gateway set within fragments of wall at Haberdasher’s Hall, with nothing else standing, and in the foreground snow piling on the rubble before the gate; a barrage balloon floating almost directly above the tower of Hawksmoor’s St Anne’s seen from the grime of Limehouse Cut. There are too few of these, then suddenly we are in Greece and the character of the photographs has changed dramatically. Some are almost abstract: square blocks of an old village standing above a winding pattern of terraces like one of Ghika’s landscapes; a small family of goats plodding wearily up a zigzag stairway clinging precariously to a cliffside. Some are touristy: the Lion Gate at Mycenae, the ruins at Delphi, archetypal orthodox churches almost disappearing into rugged landscapes. Some really are family snaps: Paddy, of course, dancing among ruins or gazing moodily into the distance; and friends like Xan Fielding and Lawrence Durrell and John Craxton. There’s a wonderful series of margot fonteyn & Freddy Ashtonphotographs of Margot Fonteyn and Frederick Ashton performing dance exercises on the deck of a caique, using the ship’s rail as a bar; and there is a beautiful picture of Fonteyn sunbathing nude. But it is the photographs of rural life in Greece that are so wonderful: a muezzin calling out from a ramshackle wooden platform; craggy-faced shepherds in baggy pantaloons grasping crooks taller than they are; clusters of women in traditional costume; an old soldier with a long white beard and his rifle; young men clustered round a ricketty table in a crumbling kafeneion; the ribs of a boat that is being built but that looks like the skeleton of some long-dead sea monster. These are amazing glimpses of something alien and yet extraordinarily human.

I could, quite frankly, have done with less of the life of Joan Leigh Fermor that fills out the last 80-odd pages of this book, and more of the photographs of Joan Leigh Fermor. This is little more than a fragment of her output, after all. At one point there is one of her contact sheets, showing 12 pictures that are not otherwise included in the book. One of these shows a young woman in a floral print dress standing in a barren landscape, but with what looks like the skull of a horse over her head. That is a photograph I want to see full size, that is a photograph I want to examine more closely, that is a photograph I want to see explained.

But there is one of the problems I have with this book. The photographs are displayed, in the main, one to a page. There is nothing else on the page, nothing to distract from the picture, except a small white page number. There are no captions, no information about what we are seeing, until you turn right to the back of the book where you will find a list of photographs. Typically, what this tells you is as follows:

62  Margot Fonteyn
64  Corfu
65  PLF, Corfu
66  Phaestos
69  PLF, Kameiros, Rhodes

And that’s it, that’s all we get to know. This is not particularly fulsome information, there isn’t even a date. Admittedly, this seems to have been Joan Leigh Fermor’s fault, as a note at the head of this list says: “Unless Joan Leigh Fermor made a not of where a photograph was taken on the contact sheet, the location was not recorded.” As for dates, all we are told was that the London photographs date from 1940-41, and the rest between the 1940s and 1960s. It’s frustrating; many of the photographs are timeless, but those of rural Greek life are not, they are specific to a time and a place, and I suspect a lot of them are tied to particular local events and practices.

These are, for the most part, wonderful photographs and I could spend a lot of time looking at them. But they do leave me wanting to know more.

 

 

Greece

28 Wednesday Mar 2018

Posted by Paul Kincaid in art

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Dirk Bogarde, George Katsimbalis, Gerald Durrell, Henry Miller, John Craxton, Lawrence Durrell, Maureen Kincaid Speller, Niko Ghika, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Paul Nash

Many years ago, not long after Maureen and I had got together, we went up to Edinburgh to visit her friend Moira. At one point, Moira got out a bunch of photographs she had taken while on holiday in Greece some ten years before (in other words, let me be clear, some ten years before I even knew Moira existed). In one photograph, taken on the Acropolis, the central figure, perfectly framed and in sharp focus, striding directly towards the camera, was me.

Somehow, that weird coincidence encapsulates Greece for me. It is a locus made up of coincidences and connections, it is where all things come together.

Greece

Nikos Hadjikyriakos-Ghika (1906–1994), Study for a poster. Tempera on cardboard, 1948. Benaki Museum – Ghika Gallery, Athens. © Benaki Museum 2018.

I first encountered Greece (if that is the right way to put it) through Gerald Durrell’s My Family and Other Animals, which remains one of the funniest books I know, and also one of the loveliest. This led me inevitably to the work of his brother, Larry, particularly those exquisite travel books, Reflections on a Marine Venus and Bitter Lemons. From Lawrence Durrell I moved on to his friend, Henry Miller, and The Colossus of Marousi, the only one of Miller’s books I’ve been able to read with unalloyed pleasure.

That is one set of connections. Another set sprang also from Durrell, in a way. I developed a taste for travel literature, which I kept up for quite a few years until I OD’d on the stuff while reviewing it for places like The Good Book Guide and British Book News. Along the way I happened upon a book called A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor. When, as a result, I grabbed everything I could by Fermor, it was somehow no surprise that this led me back to Greece. (Although it seems only tangential to my literary discovery of Greece, I also devoured anything on TV relating to the country, such as the 1970s series like The Lotus Eaters and Who Pays the Ferryman?, and of course old films such as the Dirk Bogarde wartime adventure, Ill Met By Moonlight which seemed to be on TV endlessly when I was young. And Bogarde, of course, was playing Paddy Leigh Fermor, though it took me a little while to make that connection.)

In truth, the more I read about Leigh Fermor (and I’ve read biographies and letters and the like) the less I think I would have liked him in person. He was an incurable snob who spent much of his life freeloading on the rich and aristocratic types he fawned over. And yet I find him endlessly fascinating: he wrote like a dream, of course, and he had a genuine and admirable gift for friendship. He seemed to know everyone who was anyone in the postwar world of art and letters, and everyone loved Paddy.

ghika craxton fermor

Niko Ghika, John Craxton, Joan Fermor, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Barbara Ghika

Two of his lifelong friendships were with the Greek painter, Niko Ghika, and the English painter, John Craxton. (To give you a glimpse of what a peculiar world this was, Craxton first went to Greece immediately after the Second World War when he was encouraged to do so by the wife of an ambassador, who then gave him a lift in a bomber. “Of course she did,” Maureen commented, when I pointed this story out to her.) Now this triumvirate is the focus of an exhibition at the British Museum. I will probably write about this exhibition at greater length when I’ve had a chance to absorb the substantial catalogue that goes with it. For now, these are a few initial thoughts.

Although Leigh Fermor was clearly the glue binding this group together, he was strangely absent from this exhibition, or at least he was out of the limelight. He was there in photographs, in quotations from some of his books and articles dotted about the place, but the focus, rightly, was on the magnificent paintings by Ghika and particularly Craxton. Though it was amusing to see a handful of Leigh Fermor’s letters on display, all with “IN HASTE” scrawled across the top; that seemed to be the only way he ever wrote anything.

ghikaGhika’s paintings could be, I think, somewhat disturbing. They were crowded with labyrinthine twists and turns in which the more you looked at them the more you seemed to be lost. But they were overgrown with a profusion of plants and leaves and flowers, a riot of colours, as if they were something out of a Jeff VanderMeer novel. And there, among Ghika’s friends, among the regular visitors to his home on Hydra, was George Katsimbalis, who was Henry Miller’s Colossus of Marousi, which brings us back round to tie in another set of connections.

craxtonBut the work we both fell in love with was by John Craxton. Bold lines, often very few colours, and an incredible vigorous sense of life, especially in the numerous paintings of groups of men around cafe tables or performing Greek dances. I’d seen his work before, since he provided the cover illustrations for all of Leigh Fermor’s books from Mani onwards, but I hadn’t realised this until we got to the exhibition. There is something pivotal in his work, we kept catching echoes of Paul Nash in one direction, Picasso in another, and was there something Ruralist or even possibly Preraphaelite in some individual pictures? Certainly I need to see more of his work.

 

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