Another Moving Work from Fredrik Backman

 

 

 

My Friends   (2025)

By Fredrik Backman

Atria Books, 434 pages

★★★★★

 

Louisa is a teenager, the best kind of human. The evidence for this is very simple: little children think teenagers are the best humans, and teenagers think teenagers are the best humans, the only people who don't think that teenagers are the best humans are adults. Which is obviously because adults are the worst kind of humans.

 

If you read these words to me before I read them and asked me who wrote them, I would guess Fredrik Backman. There are very few writers with a grasp of human nature, a youthful spirit, and a sense of humor, who can match Backman. He also deftly skirts the borders of sentimentality before exiting to make profound points.

 

Backman is best known for A Man Called Ove, a novel that should be on your reading list. If you saw the lame English remake movie (or even the vastly superior Swedish original), trust me; you have to read Backman to appreciate him.

 

My Friends is his tenth novel and a welcome break from his Beartown novels. They too are fine, but might not be your forte if you’re not into ice hockey. My Friends looks at teenagers, present and past. As Backman writes, “It's strange, the things you remember from your childhood, perhaps what you forget is even stranger. When you think about summers growing up, it feels like the sun was always shining, there's never any wind or rain in nostalgia.” How true, how true!

 

The novel opens with a crime that’s not a crime. Louisa is on the cusp of her 18^th birthday, is mourning the death of her orphanage pal Fish, and is on the run from the latest foster home in which she was placed. On her birthday she will be considered an independent adult. She wanders into an art auction in hope of scoring free food. Imagine her surprise when hanging on the wall is the painting of the postcard that is her most-prized possession: “The One of the Sea.” Louisa is moved to fury by the pretentious and ignorant remarks made by potential buyers, sneaks behind the ropes, and begins to spray paint a row of skulls–not on the painting, but on the blank wall beside it. Very few “see” the skulls the artist painted on the canvas. Louisa also knows,  “It isn’t a painting of the sea. Only a damn adult would think that.” Only her quickness and a leap into a culvert prevent her arrest. There, she meets a disheveled man whose POV is remarkably like hers. Another adult shows up and hands the painting to him.

 

He is J.Cat, a famous artist, who painted “The One of the Sea” when he was 14. He has just sold all that he owns to  buy it back. He says to his accomplice, “She’s one of us,” and hands Louisa the painting. She is shocked and tries to give it back because she is homeless. J. Cat is dying, though. Louisa lurks around his burial service. When the second man startles her, she accidentally spray paints him, which is how she formally meets Ted, J.Cat’s live-in caretaker for several years. He too needs a new home as the apartment was one of the things the artist sold.

 

My Friends is a multi-layered and laugh-out-loud funny novel, but its core is a summer 25 years earlier when the artist hung out with three other poor kids the summer each was 14: Ted, Joar, and a girl nicknamed Ali (for her willingness to fight). Each considered that summer the peak experience of their lives, though it was filled with trauma and all the crap that goes with being 14. What they do? They left their homes daily, yelled “HERE!,” sprinted to the pier, dove into the ocean, and yelled “HERE!” again when they surfaced. They snuck into movies, shoplifted food and drink, rode stolen bicycles, insulted each other, and loved each other dearly. Ted was the smallest and the “good” kid of the bunch.

 

We learn about those adventures and Louisa’s through an improbable long train journey to spread the artist’s ashes that Louisa finagles from Ted by trying to give back the painting. He has become a fearful young(ish) fuddy duddy and Louisa doesn’t have a polite bone in her body, nor does she have much worldly experience.  Surprises of all sort await readers. If some things seem unlikely, remember that Backman’s stories are shaped by other things–self-discovery, friendship, believing in each other, recovery from trauma, memory, kindness, and loyalty. Good formula and a terrific book!

 

Rob Weir

 

 

 

 

 

 

Atmosphere: What a Ride!

 

 

 

 

Atmosphere (2025)

By Taylor Jenkins Reid

Penguin Random Books, 352 pages.

★★★★★

 

In sections of recent U.S. history I used to hold up my cellphone and remind students that said phones have more far computing power than NASA had when it first sent astronauts into space. That remained so throughout the space shuttle program, which ended in 2011. Erstwhile astronauts were aware that theirs was an inherently dangerous profession. In essence, one had to be willing to die to advance science.

 

Novelist Taylor Jenkins Reid wanted her ninth novel to be different from the other eight. I’m a huge fan and never felt she was repeating herself, but Reid certainly took a big detour in Atmosphere, a novel about the early days on NASA. She did all the expected background work and even lived in Houston to get a firsthand feel of how astronauts train. Novels like Orbital and Atmosphere  remind me that I have the “wrong stuff” to go into space.

 

In 1983, Sally Ride became the first American woman to leave earth’s atmosphere. Reid mentions Ride in passing in Atmosphere, but her character Joan Goodwin is loosely based on Ride. If you can recall the 1980s, you might remember that it was a period in which NASA was caught up in social change and sought a number of “firsts,” as in first African American, first Asian, first teacher …. There over 8,000 applications for NASA’s 1977 class of recruits, just 208 were chosen, and a mere six were women. Reid’s novel follows the discrimination women faced through Goodwin’s eyes as she narrates her inner fears, her struggles with shyness, frustration, and a work/life balance.

 

Joan is a brilliant Stanford grad training to be a mission specialist. Those who might go up in the space shuttle lived semi-cloistered existences in assigned (and spartan) apartments on the NASA Mission Control campus. They could leave the campus when they had days off, a good thing in Joan’s case as her sister Barbara is an irresponsible single mom who sees Joan as someone who should be at her beck and call to babysit her 9-year-old. Joan tries her best as there is no one in the world she loves as much as her niece Frances (and vice versa).

 

Joan, a former astronomy professor, and her female colleagues compete in a macho world of “Top Guns” (as one reviewer pegged them), who think women have no place in space. The women on Joan’s team include Donna Fitzgerald, who harbors a secret, mission specialist Vanesa Ford, and Lydia Danes who can’t figure out why no one can see that she the smartest person in every room she enters. The men on the team are commander Steve Hagen, space cowboy Hank Redmond, and John “Griff” Griffin, who is an open ally for the women.

 

The narrative opens and (mostly) closes with a crisis. Joan, to the shock of some colleagues, became the first woman in space. She didn’t like it as much as she hoped, as she was sick to her stomach a lot. For the next flight she’s at Mission Control serving as CAPCOM, the voice on the ground communicating with the shuttle in flight. Call her stint, “Houston we have problems.” She must handle a crisis that’s analogous to a mash of the 1986 Challenger and the 2003 Columbia disasters, (though not entirely like either of them).  An explosion aboard leaves several astronauts dead and the shuttle so seriously damaged that NASA doubts it can survive reentry.

 

The novel has been a huge hit, understandable as it touches numerous target audiences. It’s a thriller, a work that looks at the price of ambition, a marvel, a paean to teamwork, and a lesbian love story. The latter are in the closet (though not as deeply as they wished) because in the 1980s anyone engaged in “immoral” behavior would have been dismissed NASA. Some readers have found the relationship unrealistic and/or syrupy. It does tiptoe to the edge of the latter but, in my view, backed off before it crossed the line of unbelievability. Unbeknownst to many Americans until recently, Sally Ride married a fellow astronaut, divorced him after five years, and then lived with her female lover for the last 27 years of her life.* Atmosphere doesn’t leave too many meanings of the word unexamined.

 

Rob Weir

 

*Ride died of pancreatic cancer in 2012. Before she did so, she asked her partner, a former pro tennis player, to reveal their relationship.

 

The Book of Longings: Sue Monk Kidd's Alt Look at Jesus

 

 

The Book of Longings  (2020/2024)

By Sue Monk Kidd

Viking Pres, 448 pages

★★★★★

 

This week features five-star novels, beginning with Sue Monk Kidd and a work that reappeared in 2024. Rightly so, as it’s stunner.

 

I recall a massive protest in front of Northampton’s Pleasant Street Theatre in 1988, when it booked Martin Scorsese’s film The Last Temptation of Christ. It was based on a 1955 novel from Nikos Kazantzakis, but I guess the diocesan Catholic bishop didn’t read translated Greek novels. He did, though, whip  up fervor among local Catholics to object to a movie none of them had seen. In the film Jesus marries Mary Magdalene (though it was perhaps a dream sequence). It was too much to contemplate Jesus in naked passion with Magdalene, even if she was played by Barara Hershey!

 

How far we’ve come. Recent scholars have pondered a fragment of an ancient Coptic scroll that seems to mention Jesus’s wife. Praise has been heaped upon the novel The Book of Longings by Sue Monk Kidd. It takes a look at the life and crucifixion of Jesus from the perspective of a willful and intelligent girl named Ana, Jesus’s 15-year-old bride. Kidd deserves kudos for the reverent manner in which she handled her subjects and the brilliance with which she shows what it was like to be a first century A.D. Jewish woman. Hers is a Passion play seen through proto-feminist eyes.

 

Some of you may know songwriter John Prine’s whimsical talking blues “Jesus: The Missing Years.” Prine was a man of faith, but the song deals with the truism that the Bible says very little about Jesus’s life between his childhood and age 30 when he began his public ministry.  Kidd’s novel places Jesus in the context of the powerful Roman Empire of Caesar Augustus. Judea was a relative backwater of the Roman Empire, but one troubled by rebellions against Roman authority, including the terrorism of Zealots. (Yes, we got the word from the Bible.)  Th first century Levant was a whirl of competing religious faiths, philosophical views, politics, and social customs. Concerning the latter, it would have been unusual for the Jewish Jesus to be unmarried into his 20s.

 

Ana is the daughter of Matthias, a scribe to Herod Antipas. The household also includes Ana’s aunt Yaltha, who was exiled from Alexandria, and the orphan Judas Iscariot, who is protective of his half-sister Ana, though he’s already cast his lot with the  anti-Roman Zealots. Precocious Ana learned to read and write several languages, practically unheard of for Jewish girls. Matthias pampers Ana–until it’s time to consider a lucrative marriage. She is promised to an ugly, elderly man named Nathaniel and when she rebels, her parents blame her writing. For her defiance, Ana is offered to Herod as a concubine. Oddly, her refusal makes her a whore.

 

As Ana buries some of her scrolls in cave to save them, she meets Jesus, who is enamored of her fieriness and dubs her “Little Thunder.” In this narrative, Ana is the woman Jesus saves from being stoned to death, and insists he is engaged to her. They marry, move to Nazareth, and live with Mary, Jesus, and extended family, including a jealous sister-in-law. From this point on, Monk follows the Gospels fairly closely, except for Ana and Jesus’s stillborn daughter and Ana’s presence at key moments after Jesus meets John “the Immerser” and pursues the ministry that leads to his crucifixion.

 

Monk fashions narratives for Ana, Tabitha, Yaltha, Mary, and others after the “cult of Jesus” emerges. The Resurrection gets short shrift though an escape by Ana prefigures it. Ana eventually becomes the head of a community of female scholars and devotees of Sophia, a Platonic personification of Wisdom, a female aspect of God, with Jesus the male personification. 

 

Monk’s work is certainly not orthodox, nor is it intended to be. She retells the Gospels from a female point of view, places individuals in different roles than the synoptic Gospels, and situates characters within the polyglot realm of 1^st century AD.  Does she subvert Christian faith? Given what we don’t know, you could make the case that she makes Jesus more historical. An axiom of history is that the meaning of past events looks different depending upon the perspectives of those who lived them. Note that Monk’s title is The Book of Longings. Do we know what women longed for 2,500 years ago? How fascinating to speculate what might be written on as-yet-undiscovered sheets of parchment.

 

Rob Weir

 

Only Angels Have Wings Entertaining, Though Dated

 

 

 

Only Angels Have Wings (1939)

Directed by Howard Hawks

Columbia Pictures, 121 minutes, Not-rated

★★★ ½

 

The Wright Brothers took off in 1903, an above-the ground journey that lasted 56 seconds. There is a very American quirk of assuming that once something is proved possible, progress occurs at the snap of the fingers. When Howard Hawks directed Only Angels Have Wings three decades later, air flight was still in a state of infancy. Many airplanes were still built of fabric stretched across a light frame, all were propeller- driven, and crashes were so prevalent they ceased being newsworthy. This is the era of flight under analysis in Only Angels Have Wings, a good film though decidedly dated.

 

Another thing to bear in mind is that the film starred Cary Grant and Jean Arthur as its principals. Rita Hayworth was included, but this was her first major role and Arthur was then much more famous. The best way to watch Only Angels Have Wings is to keep these things in mind. The other is not to burst out laughing when you first see Geoff Carter (Grant) looking like a cowboy in drag in his oversized hat, flight jacket, and gun holster.

 

This film is set in an unnamed South American country, probably Chile as a port city and the Andes figure into the plot. A cargo boat enters a harbor to unload and refuel. Among those going ashore is Bonnie Lee (Arthur), who is totally comfortable with the wolf whistles, cat-calls, and swarming young men offering to buy her a drink. She heads off with two flyers vying to take her to dinner; one, Joe, loses out when he is called to fly cargo and mail for Barranca Airways, which only flies when their spotter in the Andes wires that the mountain pass is safe. Bonnie is in the bar with others, including airline manager Geoff and bar owner/Barranca backer “Dutchy” Van Ruyster (Sig Ruman*), when Joe returns in a gale, crashes, and dies. Geoff is practically the only person not in mourning for Joe, which outrages Bonnie Lee. She soon learns that sudden death isn’t unusual in the air freight business and that Geoff isn’t impressed by her histrionics or the shape of her legs. He and Dutchy are running a seat-of-the-pants operation and Geoff is more interested in being a flyer short.

 

What are these Americans even doing in such a remote place? In keeping with numerous films of the 1930s/40s–think cowboy movies or (later) Casablanca–most of them are running from something: the Depression, alcoholism, restlessness, broken hearts…. Quite a few simply love the thrill and danger of flying. Geoff falls into the bad romance category and has sworn off of (sorry!) “dames.” He’s a man of habits so particular you suspect OCD, though nobody then knew that term. His family are the boys in the airline and at the bar. Bonnie Lee thinks he’s a heartless creep, but she’s  definitely physically attracted  to him and wants to know his story. He finds her a noisy pain in the old runway, but Dutchy spills the beans on his past.

 

Five years earlier, the screwball comedy It Happened One Night won so many Oscars they almost had to order an emergency run of little golden castrati. It set the standard for plots involving two people who can’t stand each other as a prelude to romance, but let’s add few other things. One is the trope of the old guy, beloved by all, who has been hiding his failing eyesight, before Geoff grounds him.

 

The only serious applicant for the new flyer is “Bat” Mac Pherson (Richard Barthelmess),  a former bombastic hotshot involved in an incident in which he bailed out of a plane and left his partner to die. The circumstances didn’t matter; to Geoff and the rest of the boys, Bat is a rat and no one wants him. He arrives to shoulders colder than the Antarctica swim team. He also shows up with his new wife, Judy (Hayworth), who just happens to be the gal that done Geoff wrong. Judy begs Geoff to give Bat a chance. How? One of the cleverest uses of a Chekov’s gun places Geoff and Bat in the same plane during a howling snowstorm in the Alps. And with that, I’ll leave you hanging in midair!

 

Rob Weir

 

 

 

Alice Adams Has Lost its Charm

 

 

 

 

Alice Adams (1935)

Directed by George Stevens

RKO Pictures, 99 minutes, Not-rated

★★

 

In her lifetime (1919-2001) critic Pauline Kael had the power to make or break a film. She hailed Katharine Hepburn’s lead in Alice Adams as one of her two or three greatest performances. Just goes to show you that even a known hardboiled cynic like Kael could be hopelessly sentimental and champion a film and role that were antiques even by the standards of their day.

 

It was based on a novel by Booth Tarkington that had a downbeat ending far more realistic than the sugary ending RKO forced director George Stevens to substitute. Alice (Hepburn) is a working-class daughter who dreams above her station. Her father, Virgil, (Fred Stone) is a near invalid who has long been on medical leave from Mr. Lamb’s drugstore, though he magnanimously keeps Virgil on payroll. Alice’s mother (Ann Shoemaker) is a scoldwife who thinks Virgil is lazy and that Lamb cheated her family out of a fortune for a glue formula. She encourages Alice’s magazine-induced fantasies, though Alice finds herself humiliated every time she tries to fit in with a crowd whose money and lifestyle the Adams’s can’t begin to duplicate. To make matters worse, her brother Walter (Frank Albertson) is a classic n’er-do-well who tries to rise via gambling. At a fancy ball hosted by the Palmers, local elites, Alice motor mouths her way into the affections of dashing Arthur Russell (Fred MacMurray). He’s loaded, but he’s also rather bored with society and Mildred Palmer’s relentless efforts to ensnare him as a love match for one of her daughters.

 

The more Arthur sits with Alice on her front porch, the more he finds her refreshing and the more Alice ups the charade that her family also has wealth. She makes certain that Arthur never enters the home to see its modest furnishings. In essence, Alice is a Cinderella wannabe who heaps lie upon lie, though Arthur shows little interest in speaking of money. The crisis arrives when it’s time to invite Arthur and his family to dine Chez Adams. Welcome to the screwball comedy portion of the film, if you can keep it down. Alice frets over everything and tries to cover worn parts of the sofa with strategic swaths of fabric. (Walter humorously spoils that dodge.)

 

Alice also attempts to put forth an “elegant” dinner after claiming that her family eats caviar every night. Naturally, it’s one the menu, though no one in her family has the slightest idea how to eat it. She hires a fake maid (Hatie McDaniel), who has even less idea how to prepare the food. The dinner is held on the hottest day of the year, but Alice insists on a soup course, a fish course, a meat course, and bananas Foster for dessert with hot coffee. In particularly painful bits of minstrelsy, McDaniel sweats her way through the evening looking like a soggy Aunt Jemima with the manners of a barn owl. Can it get worse? Yes. Arthur quit his job and “told off” old man Lamb as his wife insisted, just in time for the revelation that the Adams family are social outcasts because Arthur stole money from Lamb to cover gambling debts.

The hopes of becoming a glue baron fail to stick because good-natured Virgil intends to sell everything to make things right. Yet, as noted, the producers forced Stevens to jettison Tarkington’s ending in which  Alice gave up her big shot dreams to go to secretarial school and become a typist. In the movie, Arthur laughs off Alice’s follies and Cinderella is back in the prince’s good graces. 

 

If all of this sounds painful and labored, that’s because it is. Hepburn often played a ditz, but I’ve never bought her as a hopeless and stupid one. Some have called Alice Adams a screwball comedy, but it’s too broad even to fit within that expansive genre. Put another way, it’s more akin to an out-of-control I Love Lucy sketch than anything resembling Bringing Up Baby or Adam’s Rib.

 

Hepburn and the film actually garnered Oscar nominations, but sometimes so-called “classic films” are rusted and irreparable Model T’s best left to molder.

 

Rob Weir

 

 

 

Dropkick Murphys Meet Woody Guthrie Documentary

 

 

This Machine Rising (2024)

Directed by Dave Stauble and Shawn Howard

https://dropkickmurphys.com , 56 minutes

★★★★

 

What first pops into your mind when someone says, “punk rock?” The Sex Pistols and the nihilism of John Lyndon (aka/ Johnny Rotten)? I hope not; they were a manufactured band, the invention of producer Malcolm McLaren seeking to cash in on a moment in musical history when mainstream rock had gone soft, disco was the rage, corporate music became dominant, protest music was marginalized, and hip-hop hadn’t quite arrived. In the late 70’s, I listened to a lot of punk and sub rosa protest folk because disco made me want to vomit mirror balls. I liked The Ramones, Talking Heads, Velvet Underground, and some edgy UK and German stuff a friend in London routinely challenged me to sample. I never cared for punk culture; guess I was raised to be polite! Not to mention that I’m a pacifist whose idea of a good fight is one at least ten miles from me.

 

The more important point, though, is that punk (and some heavy metal) was/is working-class music. Originally punk espoused a DYI ethos. In an odd way that resonated with folk music, the sort that Pete Seeger used to exhort audiences to “just sing out!” In the 1990s I began to hear Celtic punk rock (Pogues, Flogging Molly, Oi Polloi, early Wolfstone….) A move to Massachusetts made me a Dropkick Murphys fan. If you have negative preconceptions about  punk, the DKMs will destroy many of them. Put simply, the Dropkick Murphys are thoughtful people. You may have seen the name Ken Casey in the news. He’s the booming lead vocalist of Dropkick Murphys who recently visited Ukraine as a part of an aid convoy, has actively heaped opprobrium on Donald Trump, called out a fan wearing a MAGA shirt (and gave him a DKM shirt to wear instead!), raised money for former GOP governor Charlie Baker rather than endorse a Democratic machine candidate, and won a Mass Humanities storyteller award. He and his Dropkick pals (Matt Kelly, Al Barr, James Lynch, Jeff DaRosa, Tim Brennan, and Kevin Rheault, plus producer Ted Hut and manager Jeff Castelaz raise money for the Claddagh Fund to help organizations supporting kids, veterans, and families in crisis. And, if you don’t already know it, the band is Boston-born and bred.

 

You can learn about some of this stuff from their recent documentary that’s free on Dropkick’s YouTube Channel. It’s titled This Machine Rising and its very title confirms a punk/folk connection; it’s a play on the slogan Woody Guthrie had on his guitar: This Machine Kills Fascists. Guthrie wrote so many songs in his lifetime (1912-67) that new ones turn up all the time. Earlier, Dropkick Murphys had its first monster hit, “I’m Shipping Up to Boston,” a 7-line scribbling from Guthrie. Another popular BKM song, “Gonna Be a Blackout Tonight” also used Woody Guthrie’s lyrics. Nora’s son heard it and approached his mother about collaborating with BKM. Billy Bragg, Wilco, Dylan, Springsteen, and others have written music for some of the estimated thousands of unpublished Guthrie lyrics. In 2022, Woody’s sister Nora asked Dropkick Murphys to take a swing at them. What was supposed to be one album–This Machine Still Kills Fascists–organically spawned a second, Okemah Rising.  A national tour began in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in September, and ended in Boston on St. Patrick’s Day 2024.

 

This short document shows Casey’s meticulous approach to going through the Guthrie archives. At times it feels as if the DKMs are more like Ph.D. students than punk rockers. The other thing that will strike viewers is the reverence the band paid to the material; Casey spoke of literally trembling while holding one of Woody’s original songs. Likewise, band members easily discourse on the careful approach they took to developing appropriate tunes to unscored lyrics. In other words, the Murphys interjected serious musicianship into the project, something that alerts us that if punk began as DYI music, it has evolved beyond that ethos. I’ll confess that it thrills me to hear punk raucousness filtered through bagpipes, squeeze boxes, and penny whistle. It’s equally a thrill to hear DKM unplugged as it were. Sometimes they do Guthrie acoustically; at others, Woody’s ghost plugs in with the band.

 

Hardcore DKM fans probably saw this documentary when it debuted last year. If you’ve not seen it, do so to see what good dude punk looks and sounds like.

 

Rob Weir

 

 

 

A Room of Her Own at the Clark

  

 

 

A Room of Her Own: Women Artist-Activists In Britain, 1875-1945
Clark Museum of Art lower level

Williamstown, Ma

Through September 14, 2025.

 

It’s no secret that women have historically gotten short shrift in art galleries. This is especially the case for women married to a renowned artist. Revisionist art historians now believe that numerous masterpieces attributed to men were actually done by wives and daughters. There is no doubt whatsoever that many female artists were limited in subjects to domestic scenes that struck many critics of the day as treacle. That’s because social norms restricted women to sentimental subjects (flowers, children, domestic duties) lest their “delicate natures” be ruined.

 

At first glance, there’s not much radical or shocking material in the Clark exhibit. The real radical act was the very act of painting, drawing, or sculpting. In the period between 1875-1945 British women weren’t supposes to do that. The exhibition title A Room of Her Own takes its cue from a 1929 essay from Virginia Woolf that argued that women needed personal physical space in which to unleash their creativity. Of course, female writers had long known about discrimination. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was originally released with her husband’s name on the cover, Mary Ann Evans published as George Eliot, the Bronte sisters as Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell, Elizabeth Gaskell was Cotton Mather Mills, Louise May Alcott was A M Barnard, and Amandine Lucie Aurore Dupin became George Sand. Even today that practice endures. Or did you think Joanne Rowling wanted to be known as J.K. or Robert Galbraith?

 

One of the painters shown is Vanessa Bell,  sister of Virginia Woolf. Here’s Bell’s modernist  painting of her sister. Here also is Anna’s self-portrait, gripping her brushes.Another quietly subversive painting is Nina Hammnett’s, Portrait of a Woman (1917) showing a woman deep in study. Vanessa Bell also worked in ceramics and did a series on admirable women. There are ten plates on display (of 48 ) that once belonged to Kenneth Clark. Duncan Grant and Clark’s wife, Lady Jane Clark, helped  paint them. 

 

Vanessa Bell of Virginia Woolf

 

Nina Hammnett Portrait of a Woman

Anna Alma-Tadema

One of the more striking works on display is Wilfred Knight’s The Deluge. It’s a depiction of the Biblical flood with six figures leaning forward to imbue the canvass with drama. In the late 19^th century the Pre-Raphaelites were in vogue. Although Lawrence Alma-Tadema was considered a realist, he influenced them, as did his wife Alma with The Garden Studio, which became her room of her own. Mary Lowndes did a take on Pre-Raphaelite William Holman Hunt in The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple. Evelyn De Morgan took a more gloomy look on her 1915 painting The Field of the Slain, her protest against the bloodshed of World War One. Marie Spartali Stillman’s Love’s Messenger (1885), though, is a classic Pre-Raphaelite work. 

Knight The Deluge

De Morgan Field of the Slain

Stillman, Love's Messenger

We get more war images when Britain entered the Second World War. Dame Laura Knight did Take Off in 1943 showing a crew preparing for a bombing mission in Germany. This Stirling Mk III bomber was shortly after decommissioned.  She also did Balloon Site, Coventry in which women are in charge and using their muscles on an equal basis with men. 

 

Knight, Take-Off

 

Balloon Site, Coventry

My three favorites, though, are Annie Louisa Swynnerton’s The Sense of Sight (1895) , an angel’s stunned look at the visible world, Swynnerton’s Mater Triumphalis (1892), a very rare nude done by a female artist, and Elizabeth Adela Armstrong’s Will o’ the Wisp (1900). Okay, so I like the Pre-Raphaelites, so sue me!

A Sense of Sight

Mater Triumphalis 

 

 

 

 

Will of the Wisp

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Rob Weir