Desk Notes No.8

Cezanne's uncertainty, and Tiny Traces at the Foundling Hospital

Nov 27, 2022

Dear friends,

I’m writing to the sound of my favourite album. The Killers’ Hot Fuss. I have a set of seven inch records. Each has an album track on one side and a B-side on the reverse. They’re impossible to listen to unless you linger close to the record player, ready to change it over every three and a half minutes. I gave up many years ago and made a digital copy. I’ve always loved songs with a narrative and The Killers’ stories are cinematic in the extreme.

I was twenty-one and graduating when Hot Fuss came out. The music is forever tied to that time. As I turn 40, only the track, Believe Me Natalie, feels more relevant than it did in 2004.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published
This is your last chance to find a go-go, dance to disco now,
Forget what they say in Soho,
Leave the ‘Oh no’s out

I’m not sure I’ll ever love another album this much. When The Killers announced a European tour for their second album Sam’s Town I was desperate to get tickets. Nottingham’s Rock City sold out instantly. The band were going up like a rocket. It felt like the last chance to see them in an intimate venue. I did the only logical thing and booked tickets for the Bataclan in Paris.

I didn’t have a camera that night but I can still see the gold lights, the moustaches, and the little piñata sitting on a piano that came direct from a nineteenth century saloon. I still get shivers when I hear Enterlude - “We hope you enjoy your stay, it’s good to have you with us, even if it’s just for the day.” Earlier that afternoon, my future husband proposed on the banks of the Seine. Every time I applauded I was afraid the ring was going to fly off, vanishing under a crowd of trampling feet. I had a feeling that life was opening up before me. It was the 15th of November 2006.

Nine years later, almost to the day, 90 people lost their lives when terrorists stormed into the venue with machine guns and suicide vests. I often think about the audience that night; the joy they felt when the band came out, the potential life held for them, their anticipation for futures about to begin. Instead their lives were halted, arrested in that moment. In their coverage of the criminal trial earlier this year, the London Review of Books shared the survivors’ depositions. Shali, aged 25 said, “I’m not alive. I just breathe. I’m still 18, when I’m 24. Actually, I turned 25 in March.” Sandrine, aged 48, told the court:

“I am wearing the same clothes that I wore that night. I am wearing the same clothes because for six years I haven’t left. I see it without seeing it… The person I was died that day. I’ve spent six years stuck in a room, saying: ‘Tomorrow you’ll get up.’ But my body says: ‘If you get up, you’ll die.” Because that’s what happens if you get up, what happened in that room — you got up and you died.”

In this November issue of Desk Notes, you’ll find:

Pictures - Cezanne at Tate Modern until 12 March 2023; and Notes on Photography & Accident by Moyra Davey, from her collection, Index Cards, published by Fitzcarraldo Editions

Places - Tiny Traces: African & Asian Children at London’s Foundling Hospital - an exhibition at the Foundling Museum until 19 February 2023

Pictures

Cezanne at Tate Modern until 12 March 2023

Notes on Photography & Accident by Moyra Davey, from her collection, Index Cards, published by Fitzcarraldo Editions

Browsing the shop waiting for my time to enter Tate’s new Cezanne exhibition, I heard it excitedly described as, “a marathon.” I was sceptical - how big could it really be? But I should have trusted this grey-haired enthusiast. I only made it half way, before I needed to sit down - something I do very rarely in galleries. I’m like a child on Christmas morning, always too eager to see what’s next.

Eleven rooms of Cezanne and the variety was staggering. The first four are chronological, exploring how Cezanne’s interests developed from the “dark” and “violent” - of which I had no idea - to the “colourful and considered” style popularised and celebrated by the gallery in Still Life with Fruit Dish (1879-80). A painting titled The Murder (1870) is as far from ‘Cezanne’ as I could imagine. Gallery notes tie his, “sexualised imagery,” in Three Bathers (1875) and The Battle of Love (1879-80) to, “the gritty realistic style of writing,” belonging to his childhood friend Emile Zola. The remaining rooms - themed around still life, landscapes and bathers - reveal picture-by-picture how Cezanne’s technique developed and shifted.

“By approaching painting as a process and investigation, where uncertainty plays an integral role, he gave his medium a new lease of life,” writes the Tate in their introduction to the exhibition. “Cezanne linked the formal process of art-making he called ‘realisation’ to his personal experiences, or ‘sensations’.”

I had just finished reading Moyra Davey’s essay, Notes on Photography & Accident, and this reference to ‘uncertainty’ piqued my interest. I’m yet to get a firm grip on the role of uncertainty in Cezanne’s work and process, but I’m interested in the way it relates to his ideas about perspective. In Cezanne’s Doubt, Maurice Merleau-Ponty writes:

“By remaining faithful to the phenomena in his investigations of perspective, Cezanne discovered what recent psychologists have come to formulate: the lived perspective, that which we actually perceive, is not a geometric or photographic one. The objects we see close at hand appear smaller, those far away seem larger than they do in a photograph. (This is evident in films: an approaching train gets bigger much faster than a real train would under the same circumstances.) To say that a circle seen obliquely is seen as an ellipse is to substitute for our actual perception what we would see if we were cameras: in reality we see a form which oscillates around the ellipse without being an ellipse.”

As Eric Michaud puts it:

“Cézanne does not paint the effect; he paints the conditions for the production of the effect, preparing the conditions for its possible emergence in others’ eyes.”

So Cezanne’s paintings have uncertainty built-in, they hand the power to the viewer. Davey says something similar about photography:

“For [Roland] Barthes, accident is wholly subjective; it is what interpolates him into any given photograph.”

In other words, the viewer’s role as interpreter allows them to become a part of the photograph - its meaning becomes indefinite and disparate as a result. It’s a similar story with written works. Barthes defined ‘writerly’ texts as those in which the reader’s active involvement in the construction of meaning creates not merely readerly pleasure but bliss or ‘jouissance’. Davey’s essay collection is the very definition of such a ‘writerly text’, its fragmentary mixture of notes and diary entries giving readers freedom to construct the ideas for themselves. There’s joy in solving the puzzle. In writing about photography, Davey is also writing about writing:

“[In the margin] someone has written: “I mix chance and choice somewhat scandalously.” I copy this phrase into a notebook, a perfect encapsulation of my own desire for contingency within structure. I decide to allow chance elements, the flânerie, as it were, of daily life, to find their way into this essay.”

Could it be that uncertainty, chance and accident play a much a bigger role in all art forms than we readily admit? For Davey, the element of real-world surprise is much more interesting in a photograph than the realisation of an idea. Digital tools, which enable photographers to ‘stage’ their photographs, are stripping the art form of its most fundamental quality. She recalls the words of photographer Garry Winograd:

“In the simplest sentence, I photograph to find out what something will look like photographed.”

In 2017, photographer Joel Meyerowitz visited Cezanne’s studio in Aix-en-Provence. Noticing the grey walls which gave hanging objects the characteristic flatness of Cezanne’s paintings, he describes, “the urge to take each of his objects in hand and look at them against the gray wall. The director of the atelier kindly allowed me to do this. My impulse was to place each one in the exact same spot on his marble topped table and just make a simple record of it. I wanted to see for myself how a photograph would treat these objects and their relationship to the wall, while the changing variations of afternoon light played across the gray background, offering a meditation on the dimensions of perception.”

Places

Tiny Traces: African & Asian Children at London’s Foundling Hospital - an exhibition at the Foundling Museum until 19 February 2023

In 1739, shipbuilding philanthropist Thomas Coram successfully petitioned the crown for a Royal Charter to establish the first Foundling Hospital for London’s abandoned babies. The Hospital was in such great demand that mothers who could not care for their children had to enter a ballot system. Drawing a white ball ensured her baby was accepted, a red meant the reserve list. Mothers drawing black balls were turned away. ‘Successful’ mothers left a small identifying token with their child, in case they ever had the means to claim them back. The Foundling Museum’s new exhibition, Tiny Traces, is the result of an intensive, three year research project aiming to re-connect the Hospital’s children with the global context of empire (from which many of the Hospital’s donors and Governors derived their wealth).

Hannah Dennett, the exhibition’s curator, explains that:

“The challenge was how to identify African and Asian children in the record. There was no official policy to record children’s ethnicities when they were taken into the Hospital, so I knew I would need to look for any mention of the places of origin of parents, or references to the skin colour of children amongst other information relating to foundlings.”

Once the children had been identified from admission forms and mothers’ petitions, Dennett used their identification numbers to trace them from infancy with foster mothers, through their time as children in the Hospital, and into their apprenticeships as adolescents. “Sadly,” writes Dennett, “most of the identified children died in infancy or in young childhood, and this illustrates the high child mortality rates among all the foundlings, and in wider society at the time.” Where possible, Dennett traces the survivors into adulthood. With help from Margaret Makepeace, lead curator of the East India Company records at the British Library, she also traces the lives of two Asian mothers whose children were admitted to the Hospital: “they both returned to India in the service of English families.”

Tiny Traces explores how the experiences of Black and Asian children differed from that of other foundlings. The exhibition is very text heavy - original letters, petitions and newspaper reports make up the majority of items on display - but visitors can also see tokens left by the mothers and view a collection of contemporary etchings along with modern artworks, including one from Kehinde Wiley. The Museum warns that the original documents contain unacceptable language and negative depictions. Among the discoveries there are also harrowing tales of abuse and neglect.

“Noah Watkins’ billet noted that he was a ‘tawny child’ when he was admitted to the Foundling Hospital on 16 November 1757. He was sent to be nursed by Mary Norton in Twyford, Berkshire. A letter from Inspector Hughes to the Governors revealed the horrific details surrounding the little boy’s death on 10 December 1758. Noah had been removed from Mary Norton after he ‘received such a contusion under its breast almost big eno’ to thrust the fist into’. Hughes stated that Noah’s wound was neglected by Norton because Noah was ‘a black’. Noah died from his injury.”

Thankfully Noah’s case was not typical. There was, “no evidence to suggest that the Hospital had problems finding women willing to wet nurse African and Asian babies, and raise them in their homes for five years.” And in at least one case, the mother’s fortunes took a positive turn:

“Martha of Calcutta petitioned the Foundling hospital in May 1778, having given birth to a ‘mulatto’ girl, and the infant became foundling number 17342, Ann Watson. Martha later married William Green of Barbados, and in 1786 returned to petition the Hospital to reclaim her daughter. The family planned to travel to Sierra Leonne as part of the government plans to create a new colony there for Black people living in Britain at the time. The Foundling Hospital granted the petition, and Ann was reunited with her mother, but we do not know if they did indeed leave Britain for Sierra Leone.”

Wishing all a very festive December! Have you been to see any of the exhibitions in this month’s Desk Notes? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

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