The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
No country for old men
How Nomadland’s young Chinese director upset the Hollywood apple cart – and made the best American film in years
It took the combined might of Marvel and a global pandemic to bring Chloé Zhao to a halt. The 38-year-old Chinese director had spent her life in motion, relocating from Beijing to a Brighton boarding school at 14, then zigzagging across the United States in her 20s and 30s.
But the past 12 months have been different. Just before Covid struck, Zhao – pronounced “ja-oh” – was in the UK and the Canary Islands filming Eternals, one of the next linchpins of the Marvel blockbuster project. Ever since, she’s barely moved beyond the home in rural California she shares with three chickens, two dogs and a cinematographer – her partner Joshua James Richards, who hails from Cornwall – and an editing suite on the otherwise deserted Disney campus an hour down the road.
Yet during this uncharacteristic standstill, Zhao’s reputation has gone on an epic voyage of its own – from rising star of world cinema to one of the most talked-about filmmakers on the planet. At last month’s Golden Globes, she became the second woman in the ceremony’s 78-year history to be named Best Director, a feat she is odds-on favourite to repeat at April’s Academy Awards. (She was also nominated by the Baftas earlier this week.) Meanwhile in China, she has been both feted by state media as a national treasure and the subject of a social-media hullabaloo after an eight-year-old interview was exhumed in which she’d made some mildly unpatriotic remarks. In other words: she’s hit the big time.
The motor for this ascent is Nomadland. Zhao’s third feature, which arrives in the UK on Disney+ next month, is one of the best American films in years – or perhaps that should be films about America, since so much of its brilliance stems from its watchful outsider’s perspective. Spun out of a 2017 non-fiction book by Jessica Bruder about America’s growing army of middleaged migrant workers, it centres on Fern – a widow (played by Frances McDormand) who criss-crosses the country in search of employment, and possibly also a renewed sense of identity and purpose. Nomadland was shot over five months in 2018 in the wild expanses of midwestern and southwestern America; almost everyone on screen apart from McDormand is a realworld migrant, playing a scripted version of themselves.
Talking from home via Zoom, Zhao is warm, casual and gregarious, and spends the conversation sipping tea from a mug not much smaller than her head. We’re speaking just before the awards-season hubbub, at which point Nomadland’s one major honour was Venice Film Festival’s Golden Lion.
It was McDormand, the star of Fargo and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, who initially bought the rights to Bruder’s book with the producer Peter Spears – and who thought of Zhao to adapt it. A few months earlier, she’d been wowed by Zhao’s second film, The Rider, a modern-day western about a Lakota Sioux cowboy coming to terms with a life-changing accident.
Both director and actress were taken with the way Bruder’s book “captured not just one person’s story, but a time in the United States where an entire generation’s way of life was changing”. Nevertheless, a film would require a central character – so together, Zhao and McDormand came up with Fern, a former English teacher from a defunct Nevada mining town whose own life on the move would intersect with those of her real-world counterparts during the shoot.
It was also McDormand who made possible one of Nomadland’s most striking sequences, in which Fern finds seasonal work in an Amazon warehouse. The actress emailed the company’s senior vice-president to ask if they could film inside one of its vast fulfilment centres, and they became the first independent crew to be granted permission to do so.
Some early viewers took umbrage at the apparent innocuousness of these scenes: Fern is seen contentedly working away on the packing line and chatting to fellow employees about their lot, while at one point she even describes the job to a friend as offering “great money”. “It would be very easy for me to have said ‘Amazon’s evil’,” Zhao explains.
“But while going after it could make me popular on Twitter, I’d rather look deeply at the structural issues that mean people Fern’s age have to work there – or shovelling beets in the frozen winter at night, which is far physically harder than working at Amazon. When you narrow it down to [Amazon], it’s only relevant to now. I wanted to look more timelessly at how older citizens are treated by a capitalist economy, how we see them as disposable unless they contribute. I’d far rather draw people in and plant a seed in their subconscious. To me, that’s the power of storytelling.”
All three of Zhao’s films to date have been shaped by the lives of her non-professional cast members, although this technique took a while to refine. For her 2015 debut, Songs My Brothers Taught Me, filmed on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, “I naively thought that being spontaneous was the same thing as not planning. So I had this attitude that I should just go in there and see what happens, and I think the film suffered because of it”. The Rider, also filmed at Pine Ridge, was far more tightly controlled. In fact, she’d wanted to make a film with its star, Brady Jandreau, ever since watching him train horses years before, but it was only when he suffered a traumatic fall at a rodeo in 2016 that the right plot emerged.
For Nomadland, she talked to travellers throughout the meandering shoot, and asked those with interesting stories if they’d like to be woven into the plot – paid, of course. Some turned out to be naturals: one of the film’s biggest characters, Charlene Swankie, had played an 18th-century carpenter’s wife at a living history museum in Indiana, and was comfortable with the full 25-person crew. But for those sharing deeply personal and sometimes painful experiences, Zhao used a more intimate set-up: just herself, Richards operating the camera, and an assistant.
One man, Bob Wells, the avuncular leader of a nomad community
‘Going after Amazon would be popular on Twitter. I wanted it to be more timeless’
network, talks tenderly and frankly about the death of his son – a loss he revealed to Zhao only a few days before the scene was shot. “I suggested that I could write that into his next scene, and though it took him a while to feel comfortable doing that, on the day he came to me and said ‘I think I’m ready’,” she recalls. “So I showed him the pages of script that I’d written for him, which were effectively his own words from the evening we’d spoken.”
Doesn’t this feel exploitative? “At the end of the day, these aren’t documentaries or even docu-dramas, but fictional films,” she says. “It’s not like we just show up and interview people, and they might say something they regret. Most of the time, I’ve known them for a while, and they trust me, and they’ve seen how we work. And at the end you show them the film, and ask them if they want to cut anything, or if they want to change their name, and I haven’t yet had anyone say they don’t like it.” (In a recent interview, Wells described his role as “very, very healing… a gift to my son’s life and of my life to the movie”.)
Zhao herself had a comfortable upbringing: her father was an executive at a steel company and her mother a hospital worker (they
In his annus mirabilis of 1891, Oscar Wilde wrote his first successful play (Lady Windermere’s Fan), most of Salome, a long political essay and four books, among them his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray. A Faustian thriller for the age of aestheticism, the scenario of Dorian Gray – which Wilde had already published in a shortened form in a magazine – has become as familiar as an heirloom: admiring a portrait of himself, the hedonistic anti-hero is granted his wish to stay fresh-faced, while the painting, stashed in his attic, becomes grotesque in direct proportion to his debauchery and vice. The artwork decays; the body in nature achieves the perfection of artifice.
WH Smith refused to stock the novel on the grounds that it was “filthy”. Wilde’s wife Constance worried that “no one will speak to us”. But it was devoured by a generation agog at its urgings to make the most of youth, pursue pleasure and (for all Dorian’s come-uppance) disregard conventional morality. It alluded to homosexual passion, and hymned masculine beauty: Dorian is dotingly described as an “Adonis, who looks as if he was made out of ivory and rose-leaves”. An Oxford undergraduate called Lord Alfred Douglas read it over and over – “14 times running” – and hastened to meet its author. The rest is history – their love set in train Wilde’s downfall and death, at 46, in 1900.
Film versions sprang up in the early silent era, and the awardwinning 1945 MGM version was notable for using Technicolor for the portraits alone. On stage, there have been both hits – witness Matthew Bourne’s 2008 dance piece Dorian – and misses: such as the plodding adaptation by Merlin Holland, Wilde’s only grandson, at Trafalgar Studios in 2015.
This week sees a new version, unveiled online on the anniversary of theatre’s closure by Covid, to raise funds for the stricken regional sector. It’s a theatrefilm hybrid, by the team behind last year’s ingenious digital spin on Jonathan Coe’s What a Carve Up! Stephen Fry is back, joined by Joanna Lumley and Russell Tovey; rising star Alfred Enoch (the lead in Carve Up!) returns too. But all eyes will be on Fionn Whitehead as Dorian.
The southwest Londoner
(his first name pronounced “Finn”) was just 19 when, in 2017, after no drama training, a sole TV credit (Him) and a fringe production (Natives, Southwark Playhouse), he was cast in Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk. We followed that military debacle in part through his character’s against-theodds survival on the beach, his boyish vulnerability battle-hardening in a real-time rite of passage.
Since then, Whitehead’s good looks and gift for subtly legible emotion have seen him shine in the film of Ian McEwan’s The Children Act, playing a gravely ill teenager whose passionate intensity about his Jehovah’s Witness faith beguiles Emma Thompson’s emotionally at sea High Court judge. Adding to his reputation was his hypnotic turn in the interactive 2018 Black Mirror episode Bandersnatch, as a damaged 1980s geek whose quest to code a video adventure-game was subject to the viewer’s real-time decisions.
Now with Dorian – filmed in just a few days last month at the Barn, Cirencester – comes a fairly heady endorsement of his looks. Over Zoom, Whitehead, looking more boy-next-door than devilish dandy thanks to his glasses, T-shirt and tousled hair, lets out a gentle laugh. “I don’t know… I’ve got the most crooked teeth you’ve ever seen in your life, and moles. It’s very flattering, though.” He inclines his head in thought.
“In the original, Dorian is a beautiful man but the emphasis in this version is on his youth. Is it his beauty that attracts everyone or the fact that people want to be his age again?”
This may be the only adaptation in which being a pretty face really is just the half of it. Writer Henry Filloux-Bennett has brought Wilde’s story into the modern-day realm of tirelessly maintained social media profiles. “I was inspired by the Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma, which looks at the dark side of social media,” he explains. “It suggested that for the first time in history, our primary connections are online as opposed to in real-life. That seemed incredibly dangerous.
‘Wilde advocated aesthetics over ethics – the quintessence of social media culture’
“The deal Dorian now makes is: ‘I don’t mind what you do with my physical body, but keep my online presence perfect’. Instead of a portrait, he gets given a filter that makes him into an even more beautified version of himself. We’ve set it in lockdown, so when he goes out wearing a face-mask, it starts by being a civic responsibility and then becomes a means of hiding the corruption afflicting his body.”
Filloux-Bennett maintains that it’s “a horrible world that people are now living in”. Whitehead agrees: “What I loved about the script is the way it highlights the falseness of social media and what it can do
gVanity case: Fionn Whitehead as Dorian Gray; below, Matthew Bourne’s Dorian to someone, the way they’re projecting an image of their life as they want others to see it.”
He has quit social media entirely. “As I gained more recognition it was something I grew more wary of. I can see it has the potential to do a lot of good – it can engage people in a conversation about social issues,” he says, but “it plays on people’s need for validation and attention. I don’t want to let it control my life. I want to fight and move away from that as much as possible.” For him, the less self-aware an actor is, the better. “You need to be in the moment. The minute you think about how you look, it’s hard to give an honest performance.”
Can the tide be turned? “I think it’s entirely possible and fine not to do social media,” says Whitehead. “This is something that literally occurred in the last 12 years. People were living before it, they will live after it. It’s one of those things: the longer you’re plugged in, the bigger it becomes in your head. It is another form of addiction.”
He’s equally adamant about his right not to talk about his social life or divulge his sexuality. “If you want to be vocal about your sexuality, great. If it’s something that makes you feel empowered, fantastic. Equally, if it’s something you want to be private about, that’s OK too. People’s private lives should be their own. The idea that other people know best about your choices seems bizarre. It feeds on that thing you can get from social media – not feeling you have the power to make decisions for yourself nor trust your own will.”
It’s a paradox that the young actor entrusted with incarnating Dorian Gray for the 21st century should privilege the inner life over external trappings, but Wilde didn’t just anticipate our age of surface; he anticipated its darkness, too.
As Filloux-Bennett says: “Wilde was prescient, he was speaking across the generations. He advocated, even if only in provocation, aesthetics over ethics – and that’s the quintessence of social media culture and youth culture. Dorian Gray’s mental health struggles don’t come from anything other than him wanting to present himself in a different way and that feels like something we’re all battling with right now. I’d say there has never been a better time for us to talk about how we show ourselves to the world.”
The Picture of Dorian Gray streams from March 16; pictureofdoriangray.com
Written by Ivy Compton-Burnett in 1935, A House and Its Head is the merriest tale of human depravity you will ever read. It begins on Christmas Day, 1885: it is breakfast time, and having prepared presents for the children, the patriarch prepares his weapons. When his wife observes that the children are down late, Duncan Edgeworth makes no reply. To further harmless pleasantries, he makes no reply either. But instead, “put his finger down his collar, and settled his neck”.
Oh, Ellen, you want to say, throw a tea cup at him! She cannot, of course. As Thucydides puts it, the strong exact what they can and the weak yield what they must. By the end of breakfast, the nephew of the house, Grant, has lost his best present, a book; his uncle has thrown it into the fire.
We can guess that book is Darwin’s Origin of Species, or some allied work: not new, but perhaps new to Grant, and enlightening to him. Ivy Compton-Burnett likes to explore the slow workings of inheritance – the persistence of family traits in physiognomy and constitution, but also the transmission of quirks and quarrels from the old and dominant to the meek and young: who themselves, in their turn, become martyrs or tyrants. Appearances do not deceive. Grant’s “lively almond eyes” and “smooth black head” mark him out as a charmer who commits follies with housemaids. Sybil, insipidly fair and pretty, is a drawing room Machiavel. Her elder sister Nance, tall and thin with features “set awry,” is the book’s moral centre – and this family badly needs one. Duncan himself is, as Grant notes, a weak man behind his bluster, spiteful rather than masterful. But there is no doubt about the essential relation between parents and children. Parents are, Duncan says simply, “over them,” and in this cheese-paring establishment – “run on women servants,” Ivy notes – it is father who has all the economic power. Having no direct heir, Duncan is prepared to hand his estates to Grant – but Grant is like a number of self-saboteurs in Ivy’s work, and bent on complicating his prospects.
Born in 1884, Ivy Compton-Burnett set her stories in the world of her early years. As she was dealing with passions hallowed by time – avarice, lust, craving for power – she saw no need to trouble her reader with shifting fashions in clothes or architecture. She did not share a background with her characters, but came from the professional middle classes, her father a doctor who married twice and had two families, 12 children in all. Her family was “smashed up,” as she said, by the Great War. Two of her brothers died young, one killed on the Somme. Two of her sisters poisoned themselves in a bizarre suicide pact. Ivy herself was a victim of the flu pandemic and contracted pneumonia; without antibiotics, she said, “one just fought for breath for about a month”. Afterwards she suffered lingering debility and depression. After an early novel, Dolores, which she later disowned, she produced nothing until 1925, when Pastors and Masters was pronounced by the New Statesman to be “like nothing else in the world”.
This slight, sharp, funny book was the beginning of an unbroken run of 19 novels, which gain in coherence and force but which, as one of her friends put it, “escaped the perils of popularity”. Her British publisher did not seem to understand or value her work and did little to promote it. But it is possible that of her contemporaries, she will be read the longest – precisely because she applied the date stamp so firmly, pre-empting judgment on whether she is wearing well. She will always be seen as a curiosity, offering few of the conventional handholds a reader expects. But those who tune into her peculiar resonance find her bracing and necessary. Sometimes you blink at the page: does that mean what I think it means? Robert Liddell, in his 1955 book The Novels of I. Compton-Burnett, expresses the dismay of the new reader: “When I first met Miss Compton-Burnett’s work, in A House and Its Head, I wondered uneasily for some pages whether she could write at all before I discovered she wrote better than any living novelist”.
Ivy’s life is chronicled in two volumes of biography by Hilary Spurling: Ivy When Young is followed by Secrets of a Woman’s Heart, which takes the reader from 1920 to her death in 1969. Her early life was crowded by tragedy. Later events were mostly cerebral, though Ivy knew most of the famous authors of her day and read them with a cold eye. She lived in London in modest affluence, sharing a roof for many years with the antiquarian Margaret Jourdain. Writing by hand in penny exercise books, she created a unique body of work, consistent in manner, style and subject, unaffected by critical opinion, untouched by any external prompt: as if she were listening to inner music of her own. Enough had happened to her, perhaps, for her to make up her mind what human beings were, or could be. There was no need to force artificial excitement into life. Her career was that of a witness.
The settings of her novels are enclosed communities – boarding schools, or the nurseries, dining and drawing rooms of shabby country houses, where multi-generation families stage and witness primal dramas, spied on by busy neighbours and attended by a complement of cooks, butlers, bootblacks and gardeners. In these genteel families, wickedness is seldom punished – it is seldom even named. The guilty thrive, and progress to more advanced sins. If someone locks a desk, the lock will be broken. A simple parlour game will reveal the unspeakable, scrawled on a scrap of paper. Meanness and financial stringency make for routine discomfort, so if the characters come home to a good fire it is because someone has been burning a will.
Summarised, the plot of A House and Its Head seems implausible and melodramatic. It is an accusation you could level at all Ivy’s novels. But Ivy thought otherwise. She told an interviewer, Kay Dick: “I think that there are a good many more deeds done than some people know”. And elsewhere in the same interview: “People have a way of not coming out well in a temptation. They generally behave quite as ill as they can, don’t they?” She added: “Well, not any worse than I should expect them to behave”.
Ivy is as pitiless as Jane Austen. Money makes marriages; love comes a poor second
By the fourth chapter of the story, it is Ellen who is missing from breakfast. It is a circumstance her husband will hardly condone, though it proves that she is dying. Though the neighbourhood doctor has mentioned a change in her, Duncan hates illness so takes no notice. His mourning is complicated and corrosive. When bullies repent, they take care not to suffer alone. Within months, Duncan has outraged the parish by marrying again. Alison is
a troubled beauty scarcely older than her stepchildren. From the time the first teacup is rattled, a storm is brewing. The events that follow include an illicit affair, a divorce, and the murder of an infant in its nursery.
A plot, Ivy said, was only a “washing line” on which she hung her stories. The dialogue carries the tale; it is taut, evasive and barbed, its surface politeness concealing shocking intent. It takes time to get used to the technique, which allows so much to lie between the lines. But once you do, you feel other novelists are trying too hard. In this novel as elsewhere, horrors are punctuated by comic set pieces, and an insidious, sly undermining of everyday piety. The tone and balance could only be sustained by an author in full command of her style and equipped with a chilly moral composure. The characters may struggle and protest, talk behind
their hands and mutter about their intentions and resolve; but they can no more avoid disaster than, as James Michie once put it, “Oedipus could have dodged his meeting at the crossroads”.
And around the crossroads stand the neighbours, giggling. The elderly Gretchen Jekyll, keen and perceptive, doesn’t say any of the consoling things old ladies usually say. Her son Oscar, the parson, is an unbeliever. He is also unmarried, and the cause of rivalry between two cousins, Florence and Beatrice. Beatrice is effusively evangelical, while Florence “had retired from missionary work owing to the discomfort of the life, a reason which she did not disclose, though it was more than adequate”. These ladies have a trainee in the shape of the atrocious Dulcia, with her hearty schoolboy slang and her habit of making a bad situation worse. Dulcia is perhaps the greatest fool Ivy ever created. It is her brother, the laconic, long-suffering Almeric, who is the book’s closest approach to a romantic hero. Sometimes when a woman says, “Get me out of here,” she needs a man who will do just that. Fleeing across the fields, cheered on by the reader, Almeric is lost to the plot. His life afterwards, it seems, is blameless. But most of Ivy’s characters, when they see the cage door open, go straight back in and latch it behind them.
Given all that passes to bruise and break the Edgeworth family, it
is amazing that Duncan can get a third wife. Why does the admirable Cassie, once the family governess, agree to marry him? Ivy is as pitiless as Jane Austen; money makes marriages, and love comes a poor second. A woman needs shelter; it is better to live under a domestic tyrant than to have no home, and better to have a husband than depend on a brother’s charity. But men without resources will do as much or more: compromise where they must, suppress what they know, ignore even rank criminality. Grant is bought and paid for. Sybil ends a wealthy matron. Vice is rewarded. Virtue is derided. And yet, perversely, it is admired and commended. Courage and intelligence sustain spirits that would otherwise be stifled. Gallows humour keeps despair at bay, and sharp wits probe the weak spots in the armour of the conquerors.
Ivy seems to tell her reader, all this is no more than you know; it is what you have always known. She has a needling ability to activate the reader’s innate suspicion about human unworthiness; that ability goes to the root of her peculiar genius. A House and Its Head, like her other novels, can be read again and again. Each time it discloses a little more, as if responding to the reader’s application, and each time it shows a different face, now comic and now tragic, as if reflecting the reader’s mood. The mode is oldfashioned, but the effect is strikingly modern, or postmodern. We seem to be caught in a continuous present. There will always be parents and children, always some chill dawn in which, straight-backed before an insufficient fire, we sit waiting for the action to begin.
Her characters, when they see the cage door open, go back in and latch it behind them
When Federico Fellini met the Swedish actress Anita Ekberg in 1959 by the Spanish Steps in Rome, he had “that sense of the marvellous, of a hypnotic stupor, of the disbelief one feels confronting exceptional creatures like a giraffe, the elephant, the baobab tree”. He didn’t stop there, comparing her variously to “a powerful panther playing the mischievous young girl”, “a lioness proud of her good health” and “a shark emanating the heat of a summer day”. It was as if her sexiness went beyond what was plausible for a human, and belonged rather to Nature. With her, Fellini apprehended for the first time “the platonic reality of things”. “So,” he said to himself, “These are the earlobes, these are the gums, this is human skin...”
“She was a horse!” chimed in Fellini’s friend, Tullio Kezich, in his set diary of La Dolce Vita. It was a chilly March night when they filmed the famous frolic in the Trevi fountain, but Ekberg, said Kezich, “plunged into that cold fountain without hesitation or fuss. She was so Swedish and healthy.” No animals for her jealous co-star Marcello Mastroianni, who had drunk so much fortifying vodka that he was barely able to stand up in the fountain – he said Ekberg reminded him of a Wehrmacht stormtrooper.
Born in 1931, the sixth of the Malmö harbourmaster’s eight children, she left school to become a model (to her strict Protestant parents’ distress) and was crowned Miss Sweden in 1950. The prize was two frocks and a trip to Atlantic City for the Miss America pageant.
Ekberg didn’t speak a word of English, but was taught to trout pout by the modelling agent Eileen Ford – “All the good models look like fish today,” Ford advised – and got a starlet contract at Universal, who offered her lessons in elocution, drama, dancing and riding; she declined all but the last.
Howard Hughes, with whom she was having an affair, wanted to change her nose, teeth and name; she refused that too. With her first pay cheque, she bought a mink stole (“I was tremendously spoiled”) and whizzed around Hollywood in a white Jaguar “laughing at bad jokes”. She made enemies of the press, who called her Anita Iceberg, and of a stripper called Evelyn “Treasure Chest” West, who pelted her with tomatoes during her own nightclub act because she thought Ekberg had sneered at her bosom.
One thing she didn’t do much was work: “People think I’m just a playgirl.” Blaming the immigration authorities, she didn’t appear in a film until 1953, when she popped up as a Venusian guard in Abbott and Costello Go to Mars. Bizarrely, for her first credited role, in Blood Alley (1955), she was cast as a Chinese. Soon the bombshell parts came in – she left Universal to become “Paramount’s Marilyn” after standing in for Monroe on the 1954 Christmas USO tour with Bob Hope, who called her “the greatest thing to come out of Sweden since the smorgasbord” – but her big break was a 1955 Time expose of “Sin and Sweden”, which seized on Ekberg as a symbol of the new, liberated Scandinavian sexual ethos.
Sweden was a problem for Red Scare America: a country that had embraced socialist concepts, and was actually doing well rather well. Eisenhower articulated the counter-argument in 1960 when he claimed Sweden’s welfare policies led to sin, nudity, drunkeness and suicide. Ekberg, now a repository of political as well as sexual fantasies, embraced the role: “You Americans have a darn complex about sex.”
Could she act? In her opinion, “everyone with common sense can”. She won a Golden Globe as Helene opposite Henry Fonda in War and Peace (1956), and her innate charisma translates into a ferocious watchability. Her range was limited, but arguably never tested. It took Fellini to coax the performance of a lifetime out of her, and it is no coincidence that, in La Dolce Vita, she played herself.
A financial crisis in the late 1950s forced many productions to decamp to Rome’s Cinecittà, aka “Hollywood on the Tiber”, where wages were lower. When Ekberg arrived in 1958, the press said the number of hills in Rome had increased from seven to nine. The Pope called her a “danger to traffic”. Some say it was Ekberg who then courted Fellini, driving in ostentatious circles around his film studio until he spotted her. In fact, he had already fallen in love with her photograph, and wanted to build his frieze of Roman life around her.
“When you visit Italy,” said Fran
Grayson Perry and I once disagreed on the subject of Hitler. I was expressing my admiration for the Führer, while Grayson was very much against.
Perhaps “admiration” is a bit strong. I was just expressing enthusiasm really. An instinctive liking for what Hitler did. But Grayson Perry wasn’t having it. He simply was not in favour.
I speak, of course, of Hitler’s watercolours. Fourteen of them had just been sold at auction for £280,000 and we were discussing their appeal. I thought they were rather charming: fairytale castles, little cobbled streets, arrangements of flowers. Grayson thought they were awful.
“I suppose they’re basementlevel competent,” he conceded. “But they’re so plodding. Like they came tenth in the village hall water-colouring competition.”
I had to accept the possibility that I have pedestrian taste. I like nice paintings of pretty scenes. These were evocative images of Viennese squares, mountain lakes, Prague in the fog… just the sort of thing one wants about the place!
That’s not to say I would actually hang a Hitler above the fireplace. If I did, where would I put my poster of the shirtless garage attendant holding two car tyres?
No, I wouldn’t have that monster in the house, of course I wouldn’t. It’s superstition really, because nothing of the man remains on the canvas – they’re not amulets – but I would be queasy to have something of Adolf ’s on the wall. Their provenance guarantees I’d never buy or display those paintings – and that is what so confirms my humdrum taste.
The fact that they’re by Hitler is the only avant-garde thing about them.
According to newspaper articles at the time of that auction, the buyers who stumped up a collective £280,000 were “collectors from Brazil, Germany and the United Arab Emirates”. They sound nice. I wonder what the auctioneer was saying as he chivvied them along?
But perhaps it was a canny investment. Two years ago, a similar auction was raided by police on suspicion of forgeries, which means, if you think about it, that some people consider a painting worthless if it’s not by Hitler.
In Grayson’s Art Club, recently returned to Channel 4 for a second series, members of the public submit artworks they have made (paintings, sculptures, tapestries, anything they like on a weekly theme of Grayson Perry’s suggestion) and he chooses his favourites to appear in an exhibition. It’s like a grown-up, lockdown version of “the gallery” which featured at the end of Tony Hart’s programmes when I was little. I always loved that section. I never sent anything in.
So, in watching the selections, we are able to see what rings the great man’s bell. Come on then, Grayson! Let’s see what you do like, if Hitler’s so repellent to you!
Perry himself is wonderful.
It’s very good news for British culture that this fellow has come to prominence. He’s so articulate and clever, so talented and likeable, so odd and interesting. He has such hinterland, such chiaroscuro; you’d be hard pressed to name anyone else on mainstream television with such pain in their soul and such joy in their heart.
All these qualities make him ideal to curate an exhibition to depict the state of the British psyche after a year of tortuous lockdown. He also had the foresight to marry Philippa, an author and psychotherapist of profound understanding, who lurks in his studio bringing texture to the series like crayon shavings on a collage.
Philippa was a good, early selection from Perry in the artistic creation of his own life – which is a considerable achievement of its own; he is clearly a repaired person, a range of materials assembled into something magnificent. And (as with the greatest artworks) the visible brushstrokes, the evidence of effort, just make him more compelling.
What of his choices for the lockdown exhibition? There’s not a lot of stuff that I would put in my living room, but as I say, I think all art should be a painting of some boats, a street or a horse. If you can get all three on the one canvas, just tell me where to send the cheque.
(Grayson Perry has actually been in my living room; God knows what he made of it. One can’t be sure because he’s very polite. In last week’s episode of Grayson’s Art Club, he shouted “I like them!” about David Bailey’s paintings, which he can’t possibly have done. David Bailey is far worse than Hitler. Don’t quote me out of context.)
Nevertheless, the art in the series is beautifully chosen to tell a story, each piece speaking volumes about its creator, their life and our nation. I’ve been moved to tears several times, often catching myself unawares in the middle of being scornful. Harry Hill hugging a tree with his mother’s face on it. The woman who painted a square crowded with images of her husband “because all I’ve seen for months is Jack, Jack, Jack, Jack, Jack”. Another who stitched a comfort blanket to commemorate her early menopause. All of it ridiculous and devastating.
Can making art keep us sane? Grayson Perry says: “It can help us alleviate the boredom, inspire and console us, and tell us some truths about life.”
Can it? Didn’t work for Hitler. He painted in his spare time, of which unfortunately there wasn’t enough.
Mind you, he was rejected by the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, which he found humiliating. This kept up the high standard of that celebrated institution, but some say it triggered the Second World War. Swings and roundabouts.
One woman stitched a comfort blanket to commemorate her early menopause