Masters of manipulation -- seeing backwards

  The Ambassadors   Hans Holbein the Younger 1533  © National Gallery London

I hate being manipulated which is why I tend to avoid internet social media, but fine artists do this all the time, manoeuvring light, colour and perspective, often in a way of which we are not aware, and at other times obviously, creating an unreal optical illusion.  Holbein's painting of The Ambassadors* is one well-known example, with its foreground tilted skull, which changes as the viewer moves position before it.

Rene Magritte's paintings do this, unsettling the boundaries between logical reality and illusion with a visual paradox.  This is a very clear example:

  The Blank Signature   Rene Magritte 1965  © National Gallery of Art, USA

This is an example of a blivet or Schuster's Fork, an optical puzzle written about in engineering and science fiction magazines of the mid-1960s, and named after D. H. Schuster from his article in The American Journal of Psychology in 1964:

How a blivet works

I have always been puzzled by this painting of Walter Sickert's with the bars of the iron bedstead.

La Hollandaise (the Dutch Girl)  W. R. Sickert 1906  © Tate Gallery London

Sickert uses flashes of light contrasting with the dark to manipulate the perspective, as in the right foot, and are they bars or shadows across the womans' head?

This reminds me of some of Lucian Freud's paintings and drawings.  I am sure one of his earlier works shows a clearly drawn birdcage, in which some of the bird's body is outside the bars while the rest is inside the cage.  Frustratingly I cannot find this image, but he also manipulates the viewer's expectations in his choice of  subject:.

Chicken in a bucket  Lucian Freud  1944  (Wikimedia)

 and this beautifully observed back half of a horse:

Horse,  Lucian Freud  (Wikimedia)

Freud shared a love of horses with the subject of this portrait, Brigadier Parker-Bowles, but look how he has angled the obscured front leg of the chair on the line of contrast between dark and light, suggesting an unsettling tilt, and a sense of energy in the sitter:

The Brigadier  Lucian Freud 2003-4  (wikimedia)

And this famous French impressionist painting is not at all as straightforward as it immediately seems:

A bar at the Folies-Bergere, Edouard Manet 1882  © Courtauld Gallery London

We look straight ahead at the barmaid in front of us, as if she and the viewer are standing in front of a large mirror, but is this so?  Her reflection is at such a sharp angle,  as are the bottles of champagne on the marble top,  and where is that gentleman customer? Are these actually reflected, or are we looking at a whole other scene behind her?    

"Yet one of the reasons the picture appeals as much as it does is that the spectator wobbles delightfully between looking forwards and seeing backwards."  Jonathan Miller, On Reflection,  National Gallery 1998

*see the detailed comments at artsy.net

An "entente cordiale" ? The Headless Spook

Whenever I travel on the London Tube

I stare at people, though I know it's rude,

To guess their thoughts, their kind of lives,

So it took me somewhat by surprise

When opposite me sat a pin-striped suit

Apparently worn by a headless spook.

"How careless," I thought, "to lose one's head."

"Try Lost Property," I almost said.

But it's unnerving to address an empty space

With collar and tie, but no actual face.

Was he in banking, insurance or law?

Was this a first visit? Had he been before?

The Pilgrim   Rene Magritte 1966  (Wikimedia Commons)

"Can I offer you dinner?" said a voice on my right.

The seat was empty! -- I turned in fright

And there like Alice and the Cheshire Cat,

Was this handsome face with a bowler hat.

"That would be nice,"  I dubiously said,

"But how can you manage with only a head?

Don't you think it might be better

If you and your body could get together?"

My heart gave lurch as he gave me a smile,

"That's been a problem for quite a while!

The waiters, they really haven't a clue,

For dining alone, I need a table for two!!"

"How did it happen?" I ventured to ask.

"I lost my head while passing through France.

My looks belie my age, my dear,

And time is timeless in my special sphere.

For years I've longed to return to my home

But over water I'm unable to roam,

I'm the very first spirit," he said with pride

"To use the Tunnel from the other side!"

"Your name?" I asked, and turned to him,

"Sidney Carton,"  he said with a disarming grin.

A Tale of Two Cities! I began to drool,

" I fell for you whilst still at school."

The Poet Recompensed   Rene Magritte 1956  (Wikimedia Commons)

Suddenly his features began to fade.

"Don't go yet!" I cried, dismayed.

He murmured gently, "Till another time.

You'd better wake up, it's the end of the line!!"

© Marion Kemp 1996 : from "In Praise of Hugs and other Poems.

February beginnings: "You are my sunshine, when skies are grey"*

Cottesloe Beach, and Indiana Tea rooms, Perth,  Western Australia

"On this blazing February day a hot pungent wind brought aromatic scents to our nostrils after seven weeks at sea.  I struggled over the blistering sands, shod in highly unsuitable English boys' sandals, and felt a calamitous sense of loss.    Where were the white chalk cliffs?  Where were the coarse shingle, the diagonal concrete groynes with their threaded green slime and seaweed, the slippery chalk rocks over which one lurched with a shrimping net?  This had been the prospect from Rottingdean, framed by distant views of the Palace Pier three miles away in Brighton, and broken by an impressive row of cyclopean stone piles from the abandoned Maritime Railway.  This was the only 'seaside' I knew and it had always been backed, befriended, or overhung -- depending on the skittish changeability of damp grey English skies -- by towering chalk cliffs at least eight hundred feet high.
But Cottesloe Beach!
The sun melted the tar on the road and it stuck to the unsuitable sandals.  The sea was a series of deep translucent unbelievable blues.  It was Nile green and sapphire blue…"

The Road to Gundagai  Graham McInnes, 1965

Graham McInnes was eight when he and and his younger brother the novelist Colin MacInnes were uprooted to Australia,  after their mother had remarried, and as Mrs Angela Thirkell moved with her children and their stepfather to Malvern, Melbourne.  Perth was their first point of call  (I too crossed the Indian Ocean decades ago, and still remember how incredibly green and beautiful Perth seemed after weeks at sea) before sailing on to Melbourne. His memoir gives a vivid picture of growing up  there in the 1920s.

  Melbourne :  Flinders Street station and Swanston Road, 1927 

* "You are my sunshine, my only sunshine," Louisiana song lyrics, attributed to Jimmie Davies and Charles Mitchell, c. 1939