There seems to be a bigger buzz about this exhibition at the Royal Academy than any other art exhibition in the past few years. The picture that’s been grabbing the headlines is Matisse’s powerful and enormous ‘Dance II’, painted in 1912.

Frankly, it ‘s a bit modern for my conventional taste, which tends more towards the Pierre Bonnard ‘Summer Dance’ facing it. But if that’s what drags you into the exhibition, get dragged by all means, because the place is a treasure trove, and the Matisse is unquestionably a masterpiece. Masters of French post-impressionism, rarely if ever seen out of Russia before, are combined with contemporary Russian paintings which I found enchanting. Critics have dismissed the Russian canvases as derivative daubs, but they were bursting with life and fascination. Contrast Valantin Serov’s monochrome ‘Ida Rubinstein’ next to Alexandr Golovin’s Klimtian ‘Chaliapin as Boris Godunov’. Marvellous stuff.

Aforesaid critics hurried past the Russian cabbages to get at the French charcuterie, but I’m a meat and two veg man. It’s like eternally watching Rugby Sevens, or drinking nothing but champagne; all very pleasant, but I need the roughage of a scrum, or a pint of bitter. The excellent Russian artists provide the necessary fare.

For me the highlight of the show was completely unexpected; I had no idea it was going to be there. It was a large model of Tatlin’s unbuilt ‘Monument to the Third International’, a gigantic project which would have erected a helical steel and glass tower a third as tall again as the Eiffel Tower in the middle of St. Petersburg. Breathtaking; a magnificent folly, even if it was never built. There’s a great 3D model of it on Google SketchUp., but it doesn’t hint at the enormity of the planned structure.
Credit:

From Russia: French and Russian Master Paintings 1870-1925 from Moscow and St Petersburg
26 January 2008 to 18 April 2008
Key. 58 / Cat. 0
Henri Matisse
The Dance, 1910
Oil on canvas
260 x 391 cm
The State Hermitage Museum, St Peterburg
Photo Archives Matisse, Paris
© Succession H. Matisse/DACS 2007

When we spotted this among the uploads to fotoLibra we all roared with laughter. It’s a blessedly cheerful sight, and it’s so obviously faked we just admired the imagination and cleverness of Mike Lester, the fotoLibra member who uploaded it.

The only issue I had was that he had misspelled the word “fascinated”. He’d left the N out, spelling it “fasciated” instead. So I checked with him, and learned two things:

1. It’s a genuine photograph — not a hint of Photoshop
2. Fasciation is a rare plant mutation, causing plant tissue (in this case the flower head of the daisy) to grow in a ribbon or ‘fascia’ (think of the long board above a shop front) instead of cylindrically

There are two normal daisies at the top, and the fasciated daisy below. It was growing in Mike’s garden in Oxfordshire, and he ingeniously photographed it from the angle that made it look like a smiley face.

We showed it to all the greetings cards companies. They all thought it was faked, and turned it down. So we sold it to the Daily Mail, where it should have appeared last Saturday.

If it didn’t, we can’t bill them.

Many people have been put off reading Marcel Proust because they thought he was impenetrable. Well, I’ve just been reading a no-holds-barred biography of him, and I can assure you that that was far from the case.

While I was working my way through the Scott Moncrieff translation I made notes of several agreeable passages which I shared with Yvonne. She had had difficulty sleeping, but not after that. However I was pleased to see that a fair number of the passages I particularly admired featured in the Painter biography of Proust.

So stand by your pillows; here come three Proustian gems to enthral you. And more will follow at (reasonably) regular intervals.

“One hungry man has no need of another to keep him company.” — The Guermantes Way, part II

(The writer Bergotte looking at Vermeer’s painting of a street in Delft)
“—a little patch of yellow wall was so well painted that if looked at by itself it was like some priceless specimen of Chinese art or of a beauty that was sufficient in itself. “That is how I ought to have written,” he said. “My last books were too dry, I ought to have gone over them with several coats of paint; it would have made my language exquisite in itself, like this little patch of yellow wall.” — The Captive, part I

“Mme. de Villeparisis preserved, for some minutes, the silence of an old woman who in the exhaustion of age finds it difficult to rise from memories of the past to consideration of the present.” —The Sweet Cheat Gone

I rather like the concept of Proust Lite. I bet I could render Du côté de chez Swann in fewer than 1000 words.

I know this is supposed to be my personal blog, but the support team are working so hard on the admin back end to fotoLibra Version 4.0 that I feel diffident about hurrying them up to provide the fotoLibra Pro Blog when it’s just as easy to post stuff here. It will come soon, I am sure, but meanwhile here’s some good indigestible material to demonstrate that getting your pictures seen and sold isn’t simply about laying out huge bucks for a massive great lens and then pressing the button.

I’m going to a conference tomorrow about Metadata Image Library Exploitation. The speakers include Monika Hagedorn-Saupe and Axel Ermert discussing Current Activities for Networking Museum Information in Germany and the Development of “museumdat”, so listening to German academics discussing recondite subjects AND making sense of it and reporting back is just one of the many services we provide our members. To be fair, the new Germany knows how to put on a show, and I secretly expect it will be riveting, but convention and English prejudice forces me to make the public assumption that it will be as dull as Grabenwasser.

The point is — and I shall never tire of drumming this home — is that the finest picture in the world is of no use or interest to anybody if it remains locked up and unseen. It’s our job at fotoLibra to make sure our members’ images stand the best possible chance of being seen and sold, and to that end we need

• precise, concise, clinical captions
• accurate, relevant, correctly spelled keywords
• binomial names where required
• dates
• compatability with current metadata standards
• source data
• copyright assertion

fotoLibra supplies the framework to prepare the image for sale, but in our rôle as an open access picture library, we have to rely on the members to provide the data in the captions and keywords. Our automatic TypoChecker runs a crude spell check on what you’ve typed, but will get thrown by numbers, binomial names, foreign words, place names and much else. We also can’t customise it to accept common words like Harlech or Rhosllanerchrugog for some reason. fotoLibra v4.0 is pretty damn good, but we are aware there is still room for improvement.

Enough. I haven’t even been to the conference yet. A report will appear next week.

The Apple store was shut yesterday afternoon, always the prelude to some new announcement. I wanted to buy Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard for our huge rack of XServes but paused when I was told it was £329. I wonder how much it costs in the States?

Anyway, the new announcement is the MacBook Air, the thinnest computer ever launched. As you would expect, it looks fabulous, a really desirable object. But is it a Must Have?

Not yet.The launch model has a 13″screen. My MacBook Pro has a 15.5″screen and I have to supplement it with the 23″Apple Cinema Display. So not enough screen real estate for me.

It has only one USB port, and a new type of DVI connector which means I’d have to buy more new cables and connectors. The door to my darkroom is draped — nay, festooned — with past cables and bygone connectors. One day there may be another use for them.

It doesn’t have a CD/DVD drive. How do you load programs? Simple, says Apple. You buy a PC, put your application disk in the PC, find the PC wirelessly (never quite as easy as Apple makes out), highlight the disc and upload it from there. Neat. But I haven’t got a PC. I suppose another Mac will work the same.

There was a hoo-ha when Apple first launched the iMac and it didn’t have a floppy disk drive. Now they’ve done the same for optical drives. Now instead of renting movies from LOVEFiLM, we can download them wirelessly from Apple’s own iTunes store. That’s kind of them.

The MacBook Air is lovely. I want one. But this time I can wait.

We’re told one of the reasons people flood into this country is because the English language is so easy to learn. I wonder how surprised they would be if they pitched up in Harlech, where out of season the language in the street is predominantly Welsh. I was on a train which passed through Harlech at the moment Ysgol Ardudwy, the local high school, was let out. 500 screaming teenagers rampaged through the train. The only English word to be heard was ‘Fuck’ and its present participle. Philip Pullman, author of the ‘His Dark Materials’ trilogy and the current hit movie ‘The Golden Compass’, went to school at Ysgol Ardudwy. Thank heavens his English teacher knew some other English words.

It doesn’t matter what language you speak, as long as your intended audience understands you. English is regarded as simple, and indeed you can be understood in basic English with a far smaller grasp of the language than almost any other European tongue. But good English — now there’s another bouilloire de poissons.

Take the humble adverb. It has one and only one meaning, but its presence colours the meaning of the rest of the sentence it appears in, according to its position in the phrase. It cam amplify, intensify and modify the meaning. Look at these eight sentences:

Only the bishop gave the gorilla the bun.
The only bishop gave the gorilla the bun.
The bishop only gave the gorilla the bun.
The bishop gave only the gorilla the bun.
The bishop gave the only gorilla the bun.
The bishop gave the gorilla only the bun.
The bishop gave the gorilla the only bun.
The bishop gave the gorilla the bun only.

I don’t know who created this example, but it is perfect. Every sentence has a different meaning, dependent on the position of the adverb. So clever! It shows how important it is in English to know where to put the right word.

I read a sad blog today by someone who had lost all his photographs on Flickr as a result of a malicious hack: http://www.portigal.com/blog/stories-lost-forever/

Flickr can’t reinstate his photographs. fotoLibra could have done.

I’m often asked by people who don’t know about picture libraries what the difference between fotoLibra and Flickr is.

Putting aside comparisons between Heathrow and Little Gransden Airfield, the obvious difference is that we sell our members’ hi-res photographs and make money for them, whereas Flickr lets people share lo-res images.

But the core difference is the business model. We want to sell your photographs for you, whereas Flickr wants your consumer profile and contact details.

Epiphany is my favourite date on the Church calendar. I know I should have posted this last Sunday, but work got in the way, and when work calls, I must answer.

A lovely word, Epiphany. It’s from the Greek, epiphaneia, meaning manifestation or striking appearance, and of course refers to the revelation of the Christ Child to the shepherds and the wise men. I always found the hymns at this time of year particularly moving; Brightest and best of the sons of the morning; As with gladness men of old; The people that in darkness sat; and so on.

When they eventually ask me to go on Desert Island Discs, there is one piece of music that has remained on my 8 record list since I first compiled it 40 years ago. It is the Epiphany carol Three Kings, by Peter Cornelius, above the chorale How brightly shines the morning star, based on Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern by Philip Nicolai. I cannot hear it without crying. When the trebles hit “Praise, o praise such love o’erflowing” at the end the tears burst out of my eyes. They are tears of joy, not sadness. I cannot believe the human voice has created anything more beautiful.

Anyway, I was going to write about my own personal epiphanies. Thomas de Quincy, in Confessions of an English Opium Eater, is credited with the first secular use of the word to describe his discovery of opium, and I have dragged the standard further down by coining the new word epifantastic (or perhaps epiphantastic) to describe ecstatic moments of revelation in my life, almost all of which, I’m sorry to admit, concern food and drink.

Apricots, bought from a stall at the side of the road in the Auvergne, in July 1986. Never have I tasted such stunning and subtle flavour.

Cheddar cheese, bought from Camisa in Old Compton Street and eaten with my Dutch friend Wim in the round window in Harlech. Flaky, crumbly, salty, tangy.

Filthy dirty carrots bought from the run down greengrocers in Chapel Street, Porthmadog. Nothing but sublime taste and texture.

Me in a foul mood, and a late night bottle of white wine in a restaurant in Condrieu. It was a bottle of Chateau Grillet at the Hostellerie du Beau Rivage. We booked the room two weeks earlier, turned up tired and hungry, cleaned up and went down to dinner, to be told the restaurant was full — “Mais M’sieur ‘as not berked a table!” They finally fed us at 10:30 after I’d planned to torch the place, but one sip of the Ch. Grillet and all my cares flew away. Astounding — and never ever as good since, but now Viognier is as common as muck.

A few, but not many, other moments. Too many, and they wouldn’t be epiphantastic.

And of course the sherry I had on Christmas Day — see my earlier blog posting.

Won, won, wonderful!