Tags
1066, 1939 New York World’s Fair:, Academie des Beaux-Arts, Amos 'n' Andy, Anglo-Saxons, Auteuil, Battle of Hastings, Bayeux Tapestry, Change, Claude Monet, Conservationism, Dick Gregory, Edward the Confessor, England, Futurama, Giverny, Gustave Caillebotte, Harold Godwinson, Institut de France, James Reston, Jean-Léon Gérôme, John Brooks, Louvre, Lyndon Johnson, Michel Monet, Musée d’Art Moderne, Musée Marmottan, Normandy, Nymphéas, Orangerie, Pierre Schneider, Roger Starr, William the Conqueror
This issue’s cover shows a part of the Bayeux Tapestry, commemorating the 900th anniversary of the Battle of Hastings, featuring King Harold Godwinson:
Also in this issue:
In ‘1066’, Morris Bishop writes about the battle which changed English – and world – history:
He describes William the Conqueror, bastard son of Robert, Duke of Normandy and the tanner’s daughter Arlette or Herleva:
The stain of bastardy discolored his character and his life. When he attacked Alençon in 1051, the garrison of an outlying guardhouse hung some hides on their walls and shouted: “Hides for the tanner!” (“Hides” had the undermeaning of “whores.”) William took the mockery ill. He burned the thirty-two guardsmen out of their stronghold, cut off their hands and feet, and catapulted the one hundred and twenty-eight extremities into the city, which surrendered.
He was a brooding, angry boy…
The article includes a full rendering of the Bayeux Tapestry in black-and-white, with close-ups of major scenes in a colour fold-out:
Harold took the throne after the death of King Edward the Confessor (“very good, very weak and childless—more monk than king, everyone said, and impotent besides”). Harold was ‘the most powerful man in England’:
He was very tall, mighty, blond, Nordic; he was also honorable, hearty, and gay, a sportsman, an English country gentleman, much beloved in his time and still beloved. The England that he controlled, under the king, had a population of about a million and a quarter. It was a civilized land with effective government and administration, laws, currency, communications; it had its own thriving literature, its own distinctive art; it was far more peaceful than Normandy. If we could visit it, we should recognize much that is familiar—the rolling, furrowed fields, the huddling thatch-roofed villages, the graceful dispositions of English landscape. But we should see no castles and great houses and only rare, humble churches; for roads we should have only the weedy, pitted Roman ways and farmers’ tracks. Chiefly we should be struck by the great forests of oak, ash and beech, where wolves still dwelt, as did woodcutters and charcoal burners, and shy Gurth the swineherd with his charges.
The day of Hastings, October 14, 1066, was one of the decisive days of all history. The battle itself was nip and tuck; the shift of a few elements, a gift of luck, could have given the victory to the Anglo-Saxons.
If Harold had won at Hastings—and had survived—William would have had no choice but to renounce his adventure. He could not have prevailed against the aroused masses of the island, led by their determined king. He could not possibly have raised reinforcements in France. There is little likelihood that anyone would have attempted an invasion of England during the next millennium—at least by water. England would have strengthened its bonds with Scandinavia while remaining distrustful of the western Continent—even more distrustful than is the present case. The native Anglo-Saxon culture, art, and literature would have developed in unimaginable ways. I should be writing these words, and you would be reading them, not in English but in Anglo-Saxon, and William the Conqueror would be dimly known in history only as William the Bastard.
In ‘Monet’s Revenge’, Pierre Schneider writes about the discovery of a previously unknown collection of paintings including forty-two by Claude Monet after the death of his son Michel in 1966, when they were left to the Musée Marmottan. There were more at his estate at Giverny ‘practically unguarded, ever since Monet’s death in 1926.’
Michel Monet left this artistic treasure to France, but not to the Louvre. His will—the twelfth he had drawn up – made the Institut [de France] the legatee on condition that it make room for the [total of] one hundred and thirty-eight works in the Musée Marmottan, one of the four museums which it administrates. And therein lies the joke, for the Musée Marmottan is a fairly small bourgeois mansion in Auteuil, crammed with bric-a-brac from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. Quite incongruously, it boasts an impressionist collection already containing six superb Monets, but it is only open on weekends (except in the summer) and few are its visitors. To show the new Monet ensemble it would have to build a new wing.
Why did Michel Monet make this weird choice? In deference to his father’s resentment against the Louvre, it has been alleged. True, the national museums did their best to refuse the extraordinary impressionist collection bequeathed by Caillebotte in 1893 and at last—reluctantly —accepted only part of it (eight out of sixteen Monet canvases). But the [Academie des] Beaux-Arts [which is part of the Institut de France] was no less hostile. Indeed, one its leading members, the academic painter Gérôme, threatened to resign from the Institut ‘if the State were to accept such garbage.’ It is more likely that Michel Monet remembered that, in 1937, the Curator of the Louvre suggested the removal of the Nymphéas from the Orangerie to the Musée d’Art Moderne. Into the early fifties this disparaging proposal was brought up again and again. At Marmottan, meanwhile, the Monets slept—but at least they slept in peace.
In ‘The Anatomy of Change: 1939-1966’, John Brooks writes about the America of twenty-seven years earlier and how it had changed. The article was a shorter version of the introduction to his 1966 book The Great Leap: The Past Twenty-five Years in America:
…[We] are probably the first nation in history in which advocacy of things as they are is automatically and permanently a defensive position: we unhesitatingly equate change with progress. ‘We want change. We want progress…and we aim to get it,’ said President Johnson in a 1965 speech, treating the two words as synonymous…’Change is the biggest story in the world today and we are not covering it adequately,’ said James Reston of The New York Times in an address at Columbia University in 1963.
He looks at how the world of the future was imagined at the 1939-40 New York World’s Fair:
The most graphic representation of the future, and the most popular exhibit at the Fair, was the General Motors Futurama. Designed by Norman Bel Geddes as his conception of the world of 1960, it was the largest animated scale model ever built, containing 35,000 square feet of miniature highways, cities, towns, and farms, half a million miniature buildings, a million trees, and fifty thousand scale-model vehicles. Doubtless many of the twenty-five million persons who rode through the wonders of the Futurama on a moving platform either gaped in disbelief or considered the whole thing a pleasant fantasy. In fact, some of Bel Geddes’s visions have come more or less literally true; some continue to seem unattainable, and some of those now seem undesirable as well; and a surprising number have been surpassed so decisively that they now seem almost absurdly timid…
Here were the expressways cutting through cities that, in the years after 1939, were indeed to make cross-country travel so much faster; here was the expansion of suburban living that was indeed to take place on a vast scale; here were the interstate superhighways that were to ruin the railroads in the postwar period. The 100-mile speed limits that the Futurama envisaged have not developed, nor have 150-story skyscrapers, nor has the segregation of vehicular and pedestrian traffic to separate levels in cities…Still, in its vision of the general tone of the future America—bigger, richer, more impersonal, more mechanized, more crowded—the Futurama was a remarkable essay in prophecy.
So the prevision of 1939 was weakened by a depression just behind, and shadowed by a war just ahead. But if some miraculous seer could have overcome these limitations, he would hardly have been acclaimed. If he had been able to show 1939 the real 1960, or 1966, nobody would have believed him.
In ‘On the Side of the Cities’, outspoken thinker on urban affairs Roger Starr argues that ‘conservationists can be wrong’:
Much as I treasure my fishing trips, my fellow men in the cities have their own claim on the wilderness. And as the pressure of increased population rises relentlessly, the issue before the city is no longer how to conserve the wilderness for those who can reach it, but how to conserve the human species altogether. It seems to me that in their resistance to hydropower, to high-tension overland electric power transmission, to the provision of greater access to undeveloped land for mass recreation, all of which mean compromising pure wilderness, some of the conservationists are themselves opposing a fair try at the most serious of conservation problems. And how few of the urban critics, believing in the wonders of community of interest, have dared to stand up to them.