Scent and the Art of the Pre-Raphaelites: a wafty interactive exhibition at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts

The Blind Girl by John Everett Millais

Back in October, a neighbour kindly tipped me off about an exhibition starting that month at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts in Edgbaston. I recently remembered that it was due to finish on 26th January, so I girded my loins sharpish and bought a train ticket to Birmingham for the following day. I also carefully researched bus stops and timetables, and found the journey surprisingly quick and easy on public transport. As I got off at University North Gate, I noticed the sign on the driver's cab door advertising the different kinds of fare available.

"Oh", I said to him, "I should have bought a day ticket and saved myself a quid."

"Yeah, you should" he replied matter of factly, clearly not feeling an iota of regret that he didn't suggest that option.

From the bus stop it was a quick scurry through the jumble of concrete campus buildings to reach the Barber Institute itself, an elegant Art Deco building with heraldic motifs on the front facade, adding a welcome touch (note that this is a "pop"-free zone!) of colour. 

Source: Wikimedia Commons ~ Gavin Warrins

There are three important things to know about the Barber Institute: firstly, it was founded in 1932 by a woman - Lady Martha Constance Hattie Barber, née Onions - a scion of the Worcestershire Onions family of bellows makers. Yep, not the branch in Dudley, for those who know their Onions. ;) Lady Barber was 63 at the time, which goes to show that it is never to late to embark on new ventures. Sadly though, she died four months later, seven years before the Institute opened its doors to the public.

The second thing to know about the Barber Institute is that it doesn't have a cafe. Instead it has a sort of "cafe nook", such as you might find in the foyer of a budget motel when looking in vain for the breakfast room. There is a hot drinks machine and a fridge with cold drinks and a limited (rather sad looking) selection of sandwiches, plus a couple of racks of crisps, biscuits and chocolate bars, but you'll be disappointed if, like me, you were envisioning a bowl of piping hot pumpkin soup with croutons and a ciabatta roll. No, you go and pay for your items in the gift shop, including an empty cup, and take it back to the machine to make your own beverage. There is a pleasant seating area in the entrance hall, but it still feels a bit makeshift. I mistakenly thought I'd seen a knife and fork symbol on Google maps, but having checked, there is only one of an artist's palette to denote a gallery. There is certainly no food item you can buy there that requires either utensil, even if the gift shop had been able to dispense plates as well as cups. I should stress that the Barber in no way overstates its facilities: the unusual refreshment logistics are clearly stated in the FAQs of its website.

Apologies for that big catering digression! The third thing to know about the Barber is that back packs (even very small ones) are not allowed to be worn on your back, in case you knock over/into any of the exhibits. Backpacks don't have to be left in a secure cloakroom, not that there is one, but must instead be worn on your front, like those baby papooses minus the baby, or a ginormous fanny pack. The museum staff did not seem to entertain the possibility that you might still knock into things front ways on, which I could see happening as I leant over statuary to peer at the explanatory blurb of a painting behind. 

I decided to visit the scent-themed exhibition first, the interactive part of which came with this health warning:

I guess they have to cover themselves in case of hyperallergic visitors, and I hope it didn't deter anyone else who eschews perfume as something a bit "chemically". The scented component of the exhibition - of which more anon - was certainly very localised in a corner of one room. 

Without further ado, here is the background to the exhibition from the Institute's flyer:

"Paintings of the Pre-Raphaelite and Aesthetic movements are rich in references to scent. Linked with concepts of hedonism, beauty, and synaesthesia, fragrance is an often-forgotten aspect of these famously sensual works. Ideas of aroma and smell also intersected with the most heated issues of Victorian society, including sanitation, urban morality, immigration, race, mental health, faith, and the rise in women's independence." 

The exhibition is the brainchild of Dr Christina Bradstreet, author of "Scented Visions: Smell in Art, 1850 - 1914." The paintings she has curated fall into one of three sub-groups, each connoting a different scent experience - whether good or bad(!). In some pictures the scent link is more overt, for example a woman smelling flowers or holding a perfume receptacle of some kind, whereas with others you have to infer the olfactory dimension to the scene, such as the painting of a sex worker at her window, beyond which lies a whiffy sewage-ridden River Thames. (Thoughts of the Past by John Rodham Spencer Stanhope, painted in 1859, shortly after The Great Stink in London.)

Close up from Lilium Auratum by John Frederick Lewis

Spring Awakenings ~ A number of the paintings portray women in garden or pastoral scenes, surrounded by flowers, "lost in reverie" or in varying degrees of transport. There is a freshness and a dreamy quality to these pictures, with rainbows adding a spiritual dimension. As Christina Bradstreet explains in her introduction to the exhibition, the Victorian physiologist Alexander Bain believed that multisensory experiences were the appropriate response to imagery, whereby a picture of flowers "gives an agreeable suggestion of the fragrance", triggering memories of smelling real flowers.

Gentle Spring by Frederick Sandy

All Smell is Disease ~ There is, however, a darker side to scent in the Victorian era, and certain smell memories are ones that you really wouldn't want to invoke, not least because they were thought to be linked to physical or mental decay. Until the discovery of germs, there was a widespread belief that miasma - the stench of decomposing matter - was a direct cause of diseases like cholera or typhoid, and even a cloying, animalic perfume was capable of inducing lethargy and moral turpitude. In the painting below, there is a poisonous potion emitting violet vapours in Medea's hand (about to be deployed on her murderous spree!), and a discarded rose at her feet, possibly symbolising her broken relationship with Jason. Violet perfumes were very much in vogue at that time, making this scented concoction the very essence of toxic femininity.

Medea by Evelyn de Morgan

Bells & Smells ~ There is only one painting in this group, which represents the furore over the use of the liturgical trappings of Roman Catholicism in High Anglican churches - things like bells, altar lights and incense censers. By 1876, incense burning at any point in church services had been banned.

A Saint of the Eastern Church by Simeon Solomon

The AirParfum Experience

This brings me to the immersive aspect of the exhibition: visitors press a button on a machine and release a puff of a particular scent that is associated with a specific painting, thereby enabling them to experience it in a multisensorial way.

There was also the option to sniff the end of a stopper instead if you didn't want a whoosh of scented air in your face, even fleetingly. It was clever how each scent disappeared so quickly after activation, allowing many visitors to use the machine in quick succession.

Christina Bradstreet collaborated with Gregorio Sola, a Senior Perfumer at Puig, which invented the AirParfum technology. He is an expert in the field of developing fragrances for public spaces, and created a similar installation around a single painting at the Prado in Madrid (The Sense of Smell by Jan Brueghel and Rubens), with no fewer than ten scents all conveying different aspects of this work. Here there are three in total, of which two relate to Millais' The Blind Girl. The first of these conjures up the rain soaked meadow / petrichor, clouds, the ditch, and a cotton T-shirt, with added aldehydes to suggest luminosity and brightness, while the second homes in on the blind girl's wool and cotton shawl, which her sister is discreetly sniffing. The third scent evokes the scene in Solomon's A Saint of the Eastern Church (a mix of incense, brass, candles, wooden columns, vestment fabric, and the sprig of myrtle held by the saint). Sadly only this last one worked for me, while the other two were more like air freshener or a rather pungent functional fragrance.

It may be that the team did indeed capture the very things they set out to, but those scents were simply disagreeable to my nose and I couldn't get past that. The incense one, however, was so congenial that I would happily have worn it. It is a shame, because I love the concept behind AirParfum, and welcome any attempt to promote fragrance to the public, as well as the specific aim of bringing these paintings to life through an added sense. Apparently the installation at the Prado increased the dwell time in front of the scented paintings from 32 seconds to a whopping 13 minutes! I know reactions to fragrance are very personal, and the gentleman who stepped  up after me liked the other two and not the incense one ;), plus it isn't even about liking a scent, but rather parsing its elements and making a connection with the corresponding painting. Having read a detailed account of the creative process behind each scent, including which notes were used to convey which aspects of the paintings, it is clear that the fragrances were meticulously and thoughtfully crafted, yet for whatever reason I could only "read" one as a match to its art work. Maybe I should have spent longer, activating as many puffs as it took to fully experience The Blind Girl olfactorily, but I was conscious of people behind waiting to use the machine. Had I chosen to go in the week I could probably have taken my time.

Overall though, I found the exhibition fascinating and well worth a visit: the paintings were glorious, and could be appreciated even by those not interested in perfume. It also made me realise that actually, unless we are talking abstract art, pretty much any scene you cared to paint would have at least an implicit scent component...you just have to let your olfactory memory be jogged. To be honest, I wouldn't have associated fragrance with the painting of The Blind Girl off the bat, which is the main focus of the AirParfum experience, though I know better now. And having been primed to look for scented cues through the prism of Pre-Raphaelite art, I am raring to apply it to other paintings in the gallery, and beyond - whether intentional or not...!

I would love to hear from anyone else who has been to the exhibition - or who catches it on its future travels (eg to the Watts Gallery in Guildford) - and am especially keen to learn people's take on the AirParfum trio of scents.

For more information, there's an interesting podcast with Christina Bradstreet here.

Portraits of a Lady: 'Perfume Stories in Conversation' at Tate Liverpool, 19.12.19

First things first...yesterday's date is pleasingly symmetrical, if not exactly palindromic like the page views tally in my last post. Yet even had it not been symmetrical - never mind palindromic - yesterday was a hugely enjoyable day, for a number of coincidences occurred and paths were crossed, in unexpected ways. And this despite the fact that my day started preternaturally early again - in darkness, no less. Who knew that mornings can be like the middle of the night in December?? Too many years spent around musicians and their unsociable body clocks has given me an aversion - nay, allergy - to any hour earlier than 8.30am.

I got up at this time as I was due to attend a talk on perfume at John Moores University, which strangely doesn't have an apostrophe. I infer that this is because the university is merely named after the distinguished businessman in question who founded the Littlewoods retail chain and football pools, rather than being in any way 'possessed' by him.

I travelled on a pleasingly fast train to Liverpool operated by Avanti, which it took me till mid-afternoon to realise is the company who took over from Virgin the other week. It only stopped at Runcorn, and then sadly at the railway station, not half way across the famous wrought iron bridge so I could have taken a better picture. The bridge has several names, including 'Ethelfleda', which is so good I wish I at least had a chicken to call it after. Next week's (albeit dead) turkey may briefly acquire this moniker instead...

Now don't laugh, but I brought my A-Z of Liverpool with me, which dates from 1990, the year when I stayed at the Adelphi Hotel (of Onedin Line fame) and had the use of a company 'pool' mobile phone the size of a brick. I'll be honest, I navigated in the end using a combination of helpful tourist signage and the blue dot on Google maps, but it felt good to have the A-Z as back up. A bit like shopping with a wicker basket.

I arrived at Albert Dock a little early, and took a quick snap of this doughnut van with its transatlantic spelling and tempting offer of candyfloss and 'slush'. That's what you get I expect if you drop your candyfloss in the Mersey. Parked a little further on was a double decker London bus offering tea and coffee; an old telephone box next to it had been repurposed as a milk and sugar station. You don't get that sort of vintage charm in Starbucks, even if they do offer milk in different fat percentages.

The talk was held upstairs at Tate Liverpool, in a section of a big gallery space screened off by a curtain - not all the way, mind, so at various points during proceedings other visitors threw us a quizzical look as they were passing in their search for Dali's Lobster Telephone. I say 'search', as I am not sure that any of the 11 lobsters Dali made is in Liverpool anymore. My mobile phone from 1990 was not far off in size if not shape, now I think of it.

So, on to the event itself: Perfume Stories in Conversation (Alchemy, Olfaction and Synaesthesia), created and hosted by Michael O'Shaughnessy. Mike is Senior Lecturer in Graphic Design & Illustration at Liverpool School of Art & Design at John Moores University. He began his talk by playing a song by Barry White(!), which proved a good ice breaker, and was at pains to point out that perfume is about so much more than the art of seduction (despite what the glossy, gold-dipped adverts would tell us). He gave us a bit of background on his own academic research and commercial art, including several high profile commissions, such as a billboard featuring his own handwriting that formed the skin of the Everyman building.

Source: moshaughnessy.co.uk

The structure remained in place for 18 months, and miraculously didn't get 'tagged' in all that time by graffiti artists, which Mike attributed to his 'inclusive' use of cursive writing, which looked a bit like graffiti to start with. He adopted a similar approach on a project for Dong Energy, a Danish company which installed 32 wind turbines in Liverpool Bay, and his billboard with the caption "This Beautiful Place" was similarly left intact. Regular readers may recall that I am a big fan of wind farms, having done a project on glue in California, some of which is used to fix rattling nacelles, as the big 'gubbins housings' at the top are called.

To seal his credentials, Mike mentioned that he had in fact swum the Mersey, which impressed us all no end. So by this point I was definitely sold on Mike's handwriting and level of fitness, and we moved onto the key premise of his event, namely a "proposition of multi-sensory experience in Art":

"We experience drawing in the same way that smell can provide a trigger for memory and sensation. Scent invites us to recount and create new stories, sharing and revealing layers of experience." 

After romping through a few surprise facts about our sense of smell, including the one about it remaining when we are asleep (something the ex-firefighter in our group was able to confirm!), Mike presented us with a selection of evocative quotes about perfume from literature. One, from Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, featured bitter almonds reminding a character in the book of the fate of unrequited love. It was a great quote, and reminded me in turn of my happily morbid teenage years engrossed in Agatha Christie novels, where death by the chemically closely related cyanide was a go-to MO. But better still, we also learnt that Mike had been commissioned to do a portrait of Marquez, whom he decided to dress as a fish, in a nod to another work by the author, in case you were wondering(!).

We had already started to discuss what scenes different scents and smells evoke in our minds, and at this point Mike passed around a blotter sprayed with Chanel Cuir de Russie. This was a rather spooky moment for me, as I had so nearly chosen Cuir de Russie as my SOTD - to the point of holding the mini in my hand for a moment or two before putting it back in the drawer - however, I ended up opting for the more public space-appropriate and sadly discontinued Guerlain Plus Que Jamais.

Mike also showed us a book he had had published on Perfume and Drawing: it comprised a series of portraits of ladies - mostly but not exclusively his niece, I think? - juxtaposed with a list of perfumes containing a particular fragrance material, followed by a literary quote. At this point Mike disclosed that A Portrait of a Lady, or PoaL as it is commonly known in the blogosphere, was his all-time favourite perfume! This happens to be the favourite of Val the Cookie Queen, who has kept me supplied with both PoaL and CdR. I have an abiding memory of Val lavishly applying PoaL in an underground car park in Augsburg, before we went into a Monochrome Set gig at a nearby club. So I guess I have a memory link between that fragrance and music and perfume friends. And although I am not sure it works on me, I am a big admirer of PoaL, which I first smelt not on skin, but sprayed on Katie Puckrik's pashmina, which she was using as the garment equivalent of a room diffuser. Another strong memory, this time linking the scent to perfume friends - and fabric!

Mike went on to tell us about workshops he had run with his art students, giving them perfumes to smell blind and seeing how they reacted and what specific associations they had with the scents. (He is a big pusher of perfume / evangelist, and I salute him for it.) We did a bit of that too and the reactions from our group to the perfume Mike had selected were all over the map, and not uniformly positive. One lady was reminded of the dentist, another had no particular associations but didn't care for it, while I could pick up fruity notes, but ones that had been spoilt or muddied by something indeterminate that might have been spices or herbs. I shan't say what the perfume was, or what it was meant to smell like, in case anyone gets the opportunity to attend one of Mike's workshops or talks, but let's just say it was pretty left field in its inspiration!

There was more...Mike mentioned a thought provoking quote by Siri Hustvedt, speaking of the artist Morandi. Oddly, I have just read The Summer Without Men by her - not to be confused with the iPhone application of the same name - and used to have a Morandi print over my bed two houses ago. I think ex-Mr Bonkers must have won custody of it. Mike also referenced Mikhail Bulgarov's Master & Margarita, which is sitting in one of my many tsundokus, as is the Marquez book indeed.

After the talk, which all of us didn't want to end(!), I repaired to the cafe with Mike and a lecturer colleague of his whose speciality is textiles and fashion, to carry on the conversation. I did take a full body photo of Mike during the talk, but he preferred this off-duty one in which he feels he comes across as more jolly. I told him that he looks a bit like my Graphic Design lecturer friend Simon - the one who lives on a narrow boat and finds room in his tiny fridge to store his perfumes - crossed with a more exuberant and charismatic version of Jeremy Corbyn. I added that Mike could give Jeremy lessons in being more animated / genial / zealous /generally 'up'. I don't suppose it would  have helped him win the election if he had also swum the Mersey, but JC definitely has a charm deficit, while Mike has it in spades. Like wind energy - and unlike perfume - charm can't readily be stored for someone else to use...

You may well ask how I came to hear of this event, and the short answer is through my indie singer songwriter friend Jessica - she of the enviably smooth and high forehead, and somewhat protracted but happily successful rose perfume quest. Jessica knows Mike, but the connection is more with a relative of hers from a long time ago. So that was another coincidence.

Anyway, I could have chatted to the pair all afternoon, but suddenly realised the time, and Mike said I would need to get a move on to stand a chance of catching my train. He had not reckoned with my ability to deploy high intensity spurts of scurrying, mind (my own version of HIIT training, if you will), and I made the train with ten minutes to spare, including a stop at a market stall to buy a pair of the cheapest and most badly made pyjamas on the planet. At £6 though you can't go wrong, even if you do end up spending more time snipping off the stray ends of cotton than sleeping.

On my way back I spied this curious sign for a 'Genting Casino'. I had no idea that 'genting' was a verb, and have a strong suspicion it has very little to do with the kind of behaviour I might consider 'gentlemanly'...

PS The concept of scent and synaesthesia took me back to the event hosted by Le Labo which I wrote up in a guest post on Cafleurbon, where they got us to feel different textiles and say which one went with a particular scent. I bet that is an exercise Mike's colleague would have been brilliant at!

A Rembrandt portrait, with bonus tantalising glimpses of M's desktop folders!