my writing

Tag: Art

  • A Walk across Paris, along the Meridian : 3

    The Blut-Fin (location of the Mire du Nord, first siting post for Picard’s measuring of the meridian across France, to begin the first accurate survey of Louis XIV’s realm) was one of thirty Montmartre windmills in 1700, milling grains, pepper, spices, locally-quarried gypsum for plaster and porcelain, crushing grapes. By 1830s most had gone, as…

  • A walk across Paris, along the Meridian 2

    I am standing on the Paris Meridian. (A meridian is an imaginary line connecting the north and south poles of a sphere.) The Paris Meridian was decided upon 6.6km (20,317 pieds de roi, in those days) south of here, on Midsummer Day, 1667, when members of the Academy of Sciences gathered to outline on the…

  • Vincent, Anselm and I

    In 1963 school student Anselm Kiefer received a grant to travel ‘In the footsteps of Van Gogh’, through the Netherlands, Belgium, Auvers and Paris, to Arles. With remarkable self-confidence the eighteen-year-old left his village near the Rhine for the first time, hitchhiked across countries occupied by Germany less than twenty years before, sleeping in barns…

  • Vincent and I: Paris.

    Vincent arrives in Paris in March 1886, ten years to the month after he had left in ignominy – on his birthday, oh these anniversaries! – having been sacked by Goupil’s. His younger brother, Theo, is now manager of a Goupil’s Paris gallery. And he comes as an artist. He arrives from Antwerp without telling…

  • Vincent and I: Nuenen.

    From age 15, a dozen times, Vincent leaves the family home, with a plan and full of optimism, and within a year he is back, a broken failure. I’ve followed him to each place. To London to work in his uncle’s art gallery, Ramsgate to be a teacher, Isleworth to preach, Dordrecht to work in…