ARTicle 4 for l’Edicola / Kelvingrove Museum

It’s a gloomy Friday afternoon in Glasgow. I have just arrived to the city after a long 6-hour train journey from London. I’m slightly wiped out from the general lack of sleep and am craving a strong coffee, a chunky cookie and some epic art. My friends Faith and Sam have already arrived and are waiting for me at the Kelvingrove Museum, located in the West End of Glasgow. This late-Victorian building, which opened its doors in 1901, can be described as a blend between a typical heavy, grand scale Victorian civic building with a highly ornate Spanish Baroque style, which really blew us away the minute we saw it (so much so that, little did I know, I would be returning on the Monday!). My friends are already sat at the café inside the building, enjoying a wonderful organ recital, which appears to be happening on a daily basis these days within the main hall. I proceed to joining them once the recital ends and we begin our journey of exploration through the museum. The first thing we notice is an installation hanging in the gallery’s open space called ‘Floating Heads’, by Sophie Cave. The contrast between her 50 expressive and eerie life-sized sculpted heads, dramatically lit from different angles, with the space’s massive, grounded red sandstone pillars, heavy granite columns, and soaring stone arches is truly striking. Needless to say, that was a rather good start to ‘re-energising’ me!

Continuing our visit, the experience only continued to escalate in grandeur. The exhibited works ranged from paintings of Vincent Van Gogh to Claude Monet and Albert Marquet (one of my favourites), all the way to famous Scottish artists I was unfamiliar with like James Guthrie and George Henry, both members of the legendary ‘Glasgow Boys’ (a late 19th century group of painters who moved away from the rather formal, academic Victorian style that dominated Scottish art at the time, and who were heavily influenced by French Impressionism, plein-air painting and Japanese art).

Despite all these works being extraordinary, the two true highlights of my experience at Kelvingrove would have to be one very obvious answer and a more niche one. Starting with the latter, the ‘La Faruk Madonna’ is series of three religious paintings that were made by an Italian prisoner of (the second world) war called Giuseppe Baldan and painted on old flour sacks near Berbera (modern day Somalia). The triptych shows the Virgin Mary in the central panel, accompanied, naturally, by two angels, one on each side. All three characters are enveloped by the desert landscape of the camp, which is rather unusual for a biblical representation of the Virgin Mary and angels. Evidently considered to be a Christian series of paintings, ‘La Faruk Madonna’ calls upon a much deeper meaning: the power of art in evoking spirituality and thus providing a sense of hope to those in despair. Not only did it hold a spiritual and psychological function for the prisoners of the camp, but I would suppose, considering the process of this particular painting, it would have had a real ‘art therapy’ function for Baldan. In other words, he would have used art as a tool to simultaneously escape from the current reality of the difficult state he found himself in and also confronting corners of his mind he hadn’t interacted with before. By painting this triptych and connecting to Mary and the angels, Baldan transformed the environment of imprisonment (at least on a psychological/mental realm) into a place of faith and community through creativity. The archetype of the mother and child (as illustrated through Carl Jung and Erich Neumann’s work) is one that I would assume a large amount of prisoners (even the non-religious ones) would have been able to connect with, as it represents care, protection, tenderness and the bond between parent and child; a deep void that would have been lingering at the camp for many young men separated from their families during their captivity.

Now on to the former highlight of my time spent at Kelvingrove Museum: inevitably, Salvador Dalí’s 1951 ‘Christ of Saint John of the Cross’. Naturally appearing to Dalí in a ‘cosmic dream’ after having come across the Spanish mystic Saint John of the Cross’s incredible drawing of the crucifixion, Dalí chose to keep his sense of perspective, but alter the element of pain present in Saint John’s drawing, which I found intriguing. The crucifixion is a historical event that is charged with excruciating agony, grief, guilt, despair… However, Dalí chose to not only paint it from a higher viewpoint, as if we, the viewers have an almost bird’s eye view perspective of the scene, as one would imagine God to have, but he also to depict Christ’s body as unscathed, free from wounds and blood. Christ, here, is presented as a beautiful figure, almost already healing from the load of suffering and simultaneously experiencing the process of resurrection, to a certain extent, as he is nailed to the cross. He is presented almost as a figure of empowerment, when we are so accustomed to seeing Christ on the cross as he is described in the bible in this scene: completely depleted from any sense of hope and undergoing utter human betrayal. The dizzying angle somehow draws us into the piece and the landscape of Port Lligat (the Spanish coastal village where Dalí lived, making the heavenly Christ suspended above this particular landscape, one that was deeply familiar and personal to him). Dalí was trying to reconcile modern science and Catholic faith (the faith he grew up in), developing what he called ‘Nuclear Mysticism’, considering Christ as analogous to the nucleus of an atom… Definitely an interesting opinion to have, and one that I do not share personally as his cosmic metaphor replaces the person of Christ and the historical meaning of his death and resurrection. I have been fascinated with this figure since the beginning of time and would love to continue on this subject in the next article…