Tags
Calouste Gulbenkian, Correlli Barnett, Defeat, Elizabeth I, Elizabeth II, Frederic V. Grunfeld, Gulbenkian Foundation, Helena Fourment, J.H. Plumb, John Walker, Karl Maria von Clausewitz, Peter Paul Rubens, Thomas Gainsborough, Troubadours, Vietnam War
The cover of this issue shows Portrait of Helena Fourment by Peter Paul Rubens, accompanying the article “How I Didn’t Get Mr Gulbenkian’s Art” by John Walker, former director of Washington’s National Gallery of Art:
The Gulbenkian Collection, the greatest in breadth and standard of quality assembled by one person in our time, has now become public property. A new building has been erected in Lisbon, both as a museum and as offices for the Gulbenkian Foundation, one of the world’s largest…
When I attended the opening of his museum, I wondered whether he would have been pleased. I was not, however, sufficiently disinterested to make a fair judgment. A personal failure was involved. For eight years, from 1947 to 1955, I bent every effort to acquire both the collection and the foundation for the United States. In the midst of the final negotiations with Calouste Gulbenkian death touched this extraordinary man, surprising him as much as the skeleton in Holbein’s Dance of Death surprises its victims. True, he was eighty-six, but he had expected a span of life longer than that of his grandfather, who died at 105.
Horizon caption: ‘Calouste Gulbenkian, opposite, master collector of art and oil concessions, poses in 1934 before an apt emblem for himself: a fiercely aloof hawk, the Egyptian god Horus.’
Horizon caption: ‘In art, as in life, Gulbenkian was an admirer of beautiful women. Elizabeth Lowndes-Stone, the wife of a country gentleman, sat for the bridal portrait on the facing page by Thomas Gainsborough. Bought through an antique dealer for $168,750 in 1923, the painting had belonged to Baron Alfred-Charles de Rothschild.’
Also in this issue:
In his ‘In the Light of the Past’ series, J.H. Plumb’s ‘The King’s New Clothes’ traces how dress has changed over the centuries:
Clothes, like so many other aspects life, have suffered an almost complete revolution. In the Far East and in the less westernized parts of Africa, clothes still confer status and grandeur, as they once did throughout the world. But clothes are no longer an indication of rank in the West – not even for the greatest in the land. President Nixon dresses like tens of thousands of other prosperous, well-groomed, middle-aged Americans in somber suits and somewhat gayer leisure clothes. The Queen of England – except on very special occasions – does not wear anything different from any other middle-aged woman of her country; style, color, cut, differ in no way.
What a marked contrast this makes with the ancient great…Even, perhaps especially, Elizabeth I, would have been amazed, and possibly outraged, by the inconspicuous modesty of her namesake. For clothes used to set men apart, enhance their glory, touch them with a divinity to which the men who toiled and worked, or bought and sold, could never aspire.
One of the reasons for the excessive preoccupation of monarchs and aristocrats with clothing in the sixteenth century may be the establishment of printing and engraving. This opened up he opportunity not only for creating awe and adulation but for broadcasting satire and ridicule on a scale that was unthinkable in previous ages….It is not surprising,, therefore, that Elizabeth I’s Privy Council forbade printers to publish any likeness of the queen until an authorized portrait had been agreed upon.
In mid-1970, the United States was being torn apart over the Vietnam War, while Great Britain was dealing with its long post World War II decline. In ‘How Nations Take Defeat’, Correlli Barnett notes that the United States and Great Britain had not suffered ‘complete national defeat’, but
‘…defeat does not always come in the guise of national catastrophe…It can come slowly, like the onset of disease – a cumulative warning that national power has overreached itself. It can come without a defeat in the field: for while defeat is more often the case, there may be instead a mere failure to win. And ‘to win’ does not mean the simple, even childish, notion of some military men of forcing an enemy into total surrender à la 1945, which some arrested juveniles have recommended as an American course of action in Vietnam. ‘To win,’ as Clausewitz pointed out, means either achieving your political and strategic objects, or in a defensive situation, thwarting the enemy’s intentions. ‘To lose’ can therefore mean simply a frustrating failure to achieve your goals, even though your armies may stand undefeated. The demoralizing effects of such impasses are compounded by the inevitable prolongation of the dilemma, and disillusion, often bitter and self-destructive, follows the failure to achieve the expected decision.
…America is far from being the first great imperial power to undergo such a searching experience. History affords similar examples, and millenniums earlier than such recent parallels as the French agony in Indochina or in Algeria. These historical examples display a characteristic pattern that unfolds both before and after the moment of confession of failure: first comes the gradual realization that that there is a limit to imperial strength; then follows the consequent sense of bafflement, the weariness as the struggle drags on, the difficulties of extrication from the predicament, the search for a fleeting success or a diplomatic formula that will disguise the failure and cover the retreat; then the divisive effects at home, the accentuation of social troubles; and finally the far-reaching influence on national attitudes toward foreign affairs. Yet, although the onset of such failures has a repetitive pattern, national responses to military bafflement differ widely, just as the individual response to ill fortune varies from one person to another, sometimes inducing a crushing despair, sometimes a resolute effort at a fresh start.
Historical examples he cites include the Roman defeat in the Battle of the Teutoberg Forest, ‘Spanish embroilment in the Netherlands’ in the sixteenth century, and England’s loss of empires in France and America.
In ‘The Troubadours’ regular Horizon contributor Frederick V. Grunfeld compares the mediaeval singers with the pop stars of the then-present:
Some aspects of the scene may seem vaguely familiar: scores of long-haired young men roaming the country with stringed instruments under their arms, singing songs that proclaim a sexual revolution – urbane, immensely influential songs that catapult some of their authors into the ranks of the rich and famous. But the time is the twelfth century, the place is southern France, and the young men in question are known as troubadours, which is to say ‘composers,’ since the verb trobar (to find, to invent) covers all manner of poetic and musical invention.