November 2008

Explore the Apollo archive

Look back over two vibrant years of Apollo: browse every issue from January 2006 to the present day.

This month apollo has launched its blog, ‘Muse’. If you go to www.apollo-magazine.com/muse you can read views and news posted by the magazine’s writers, and add your own comments. You can also post comments on articles in this issue. This innovation may seem a world away from the chief theme of this issue, Chatsworth, but in fact we have been pipped to the post by the Duke of Devonshire – the house’s excellent website has a blog (www.chatsworthblog.org) where you can read all the estate’s latest news, posted by the Duke and his team.

We had a lot of discussion about a name for our blog. Given the magazine’s title, something classical seemed appropriate: Mercury, perhaps, or Parnassus? In the end we opted for a disguised pun: our site is, we hope, somewhere where not only the Muses reign, but where you can muse at your leisure (or mock, rage or fume, of course). Our sister magazine The Spectator has a very successful blog, Coffee House (www.spectator.co.uk/coffeehouse), a name that evokes the title’s origins in the political intrigue and gossip of 18th-century London. I could think of no precise equivalent for apollo, which perhaps reflects the relative paucity of a tradition of diaries or journals in the world of the visual arts.

Artists do not of course work principally with words, and so perhaps this is not surprising. Yet there is, from Benvenuto Cellini onwards, a strong tradition of artists’ auto-biographies. Most have an exculpatory function – the writer wants to put the record straight. That partly explains poor Benjamin Haydon’s autobiography, one of the classics of the genre. But few artists have published diaries. That does not mean that few have kept them: think, for example, of Keith Vaughan’s chronicle of his sexual life, a document that could not have been published without heavy censorship until recently.

Some artist’s diaries are only loosely connected with the genre: Frida Kahlo’s, published after a long embargo, is really a sketchbook annotated with thoughts and ideas – indeed a sketchbook is for most artists the only diary they ever need.
A great exception is Andy Warhol, whose diaries were written out over a decade by his secretary, Pat Hackett, on the basis of daily telephone conversations in which Warhol reported on his previous day’s activities. As so often with Warhol, he was intriguingly ahead of his time: his ‘diary’ really was a blog before the internet had been invented.

Most artists’ diaries seem to emerge out of a culture in which literature and art are more than usually intertwined. Take the Pre-Raphaelites, for example: our knowledge of them depends to an unusual degree on diaries, some by literary associates, such as W.M. Rossetti, others by artists, notably Ford Madox Brown and George Price Boyce. But the greatest diary to have emerged out of such a culture is surely that kept by the brothers Edmond and Jules de Goncourt from 1851 to 1896, an account of French literary and artistic life that is unparalleled in its scope, detail and frankness.

The brothers worked with facility across media – they began as artists, produced art history of the first rank and wrote novels that rival their journals for vividness. I have little doubt that they would have thought the internet a wonderful invention. Could any blog today achieve even part of what their journals accomplished? Artists do have blogs (see the Saatchi Gallery’s website, www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk), but they are usually just vehicles for self-promotion. Just as it is curious that no contemporary novelist has yet produced a rival to the Goncourts’ 1867 depiction of Parisian avant-garde artistic life, Manette Salomon, so it is surprising that there is no art blogger whose gossip and inside information can match theirs. The platforms exist: who will take up the challenge?

Print this article   |  Email to a friend |  Subscription offers | Comment