Knausgaard 'School of Night'

 The School of Night by Karl Ove Knausgaard.  2025

 

 

I really like Knausgaard’s writing - the simple way it flows, the inclusion of all sorts of cultural references, the surprises in the plots, the introspection and the convincing detail. Not the lack of chapters.

This one is all about a narcissistic man, who deceives himself and  behaves badly.
It’s hard to believe that in the undescribed gap of 20 years he has found a woman who agreed to marry him and have a child.
I believed that he feels close to his little boy and also that he simultaneously and dangerously wants some distance from him.
He lacks insight and foresight but has somehow found great success in life.

As the protagonist, Kristian, is a photography student there is a lot included about this medium and his progress with it.
Along the way  there are many references to Christopher Marlowe and to Faust and a sense of karma.
He meets a strange character called Hans who I expected to lure him into something evil but it’s more complicated  and inexplicable than that.

We do not find out why Kristian is the way he is, alienated from his family, unempathic  towards  the women he meets, old fashioned in his stereotyped views.
It’s unusual for an author  to try to inhabit such an unpleasant character but despite disliking  Kristian I still wanted to read on and find out what fate had in store for him.
It’s shocking to be alongside him, realising how little one knows what others are really thinking.

Like Mephistopheles the author gives and takes away and we the readers, having entrusted hours to the story, are held willynilly in its grasp until we emerge battered by fate.

Wild Thing - a life of Gauguin by Sue Prideaux

 ‘Wild Thing - a life of Paul Gauguin'  by Sue Prideaux, 2024

 

 

Another book on Gauguin, this time covering his whole life and evidently using extensive new research.
It’s also vividly written - a page turner of art history- and has a lot of illustrations.
Sue Prideaux is good at evoking the era and context in which Gauguin lived - whether the decadence of modernised Paris or the colonial impositions on Tahitian culture.

She brings her own insights, such as how Gauguin admired Manet’s ‘Olympe’ and shocked the art world in Paris with his South Seas versions of female nudes and black versions of Christian stories which the Pope had declared forbidden blasphemy.

I hadn’t realised that a stock market crash left stockbroker Gauguin needing to find and fail at other jobs, or that he long wanted to be reconciled with Mette his wife and their children and that he was faithful to her for a long time and unlike Van Gogh did not visit brothels.

It was also a long time before Gauguin became a success as a painter. However Theo Van Gogh, so strangely unable to sell Vincent’s pictures, sold one of Gauguin’s for 300 Francs 1988, which my googling tells me would be £3,000 in today’s money.

It seems his wife Mette was a prominent entertainer of avant garde friends in Denmark. Also Gauguin had a circle of cultural friends in Paris such as Strindberg, and at that time there was great interest in Norway and in symbolism.

The author emphasizes Gauguin’s support of women's rights and his lack of racism and  his practical helping of Polynesian folk against the inequities of colonial rule. He was very interested in the  culture of the islands, where French missionaries were in conflict with a very different attitude to sexual conduct. Gauguin was provided by his local neighbours with offers of their young daughters, with several of whom he formed relationships and had children. The age of consent was both in France and in her colonies only 13
It’s rather a confused picture Prideaux gives where native cannibalism and infanticide  is hinted at and for all the talk of freedom there was an expectation that young women would be sexually available to much older men they scarcely knew, whilst at the same time they were able to leave them and unmarried pregnancy and abortion were accepted.
Gauguin had a lot of health problems, some stemming from injuries during a fight in France, but was not syphylitic - three teeth found of his after he died having been extensively examined by scientists.

Prideaux writes carefully about Gauguin’s art, getting the reader to look again at long known paintings such as one of women on a bench which was in my classroom at my girls’ grammar school in the sixties but turns out to be of prostitutes.

 

Gauguin frequently clashed with the French authorities, wrote articles for a satirical political magazine  and was arrested at the end of his life for libelling an official. He was by now much wealthier and had had built a house he entitled ‘The house of pleasure.’ 

 Gauguin evolved from devoted family man and establishment member however rebellious  at heart to being the wild man in the tropical jungle with a string of pubescent lovers. A great story with the topical problem of predatory male figure in a society that allowed this, and with subject matter he made his own - of a sort of mythic shangrila in which he lived an all too difficult life living on tinned food and sending out his colourful visions of life in a distant place to sell in the western art market. 

Penlee House, Penzance Jan21-April 16 'Through the Lens' and 'Face to Face'

 Penlee House   Harry Paul ‘Through the Lens.’ & ‘Face to Face: Portraits from Penlee’s Collection.’
Jan 21 -  April 16 2026

These two shows contrasting one man’s photography with portraits by many artists make me think of many questions about the two forms of art.
I started with the paintings - some of whose creators will have referred to photographs. Portraits take time and skill, often conversation takes place between artist and sitter. They may have informative backgrounds. Some are of named people whereas others have titles denying them even a name. One of the newest acquisitions, by Leonard Fuller, of a young woman, looking as fresh as if it was done yesterday rather than in 1930, is entitled ‘The Silver Jacket’.

 

 

 Another is called, ‘An old Jew’, by Opie, 1779, but thought to be of Rabbi Abraham Hart. Another is ‘Maroon and Gold’ by Ruth Simpson.
Walter Langley uses his picture of Grace Kelynack, an old lady,1883, to bring us a poetic title that makes us think, ‘Time moveth not, our being ‘tis that moves’ from a verse by Henry Kirke White.
Most controversial is Dod Proctor’s naked adolescent girl, displayed alarmingly as if for sale and labelled ‘little sister’, 1933. Presumably this was not objected to then in a different era, although even on grounds of being severely badly proportioned it might have been criticised. It’s rather an embarrassing shock within the show.

We can learn much about the social history of the times from both the paintings and the black and white photos of Harry Paul, 1914-1957. 

 Some of the equipment used is displayed. I overheard visitors exclaiming as they found  images of people they knew.
Here the spontaneity of quickly taken photos, which can catch a moment of interaction, maybe a smile, shows the new medium off well. 

 

Compare a stiffly posed painted  ‘’woman mending nets’ by Ralph Todd, probably 1920’s, with the 1950’s photograph of net mending -   Philip Paynter of St Ives. However Fred Millard not only paints a finely observed woman threading a needle, 1885, but combines this with the philosophical title, ‘The thread of life runs smooth as yet’. Maybe he used a camera to help him catch the detail, then probably needing to use his eye to record the colours.

So we see here that although no one asks if art is photography, photography is surely an art.