Questions Of Creation

Craft becomes art, as reality fails to live up to an artistic vision and Abstraction is rejected at Frieze Masters

A PIECE of contemporary art to be offered at Frieze Masters will, at the same time, be one of the older exhibits. Sam Fogg of Clifford Street, the dealer in medieval, Indian and Islamic art, has a fragment from the principal stonework of the great south-transept window at Canterbury Cathedral, which dates from about 1430 (Fig 1). To modern thinking, this transom head, finely carved as it is, was undoubtedly craft rather than art, until it was extracted as part of the 2009–13 restoration programme of the cathedral. At that point, cleaned and carefully mounted, it became a work of art, much like Duchamp’s (or ‘R. Mutt’s’) Fountain, because it was presented as such.

The fragment measures 21¼in by 41in by 12½in and is Caen limestone with some 18th-century Portland stone repairs. From Tim Tatton Brown’s delvings into the documentary evidence, it is known that the architect who rebuilt Canterbury’s nave and transepts in the early Perpendicular style was Henry Yevele (1320–1400), but work continued after his death and the master mason responsible for the south transept window was Thomas Middleton (d. 1438). Presumably, one side of the fragment will have been exposed to wind and rain more than the other.

Artists also cannot always command the elements, although, like film editors, they can later adapt them. In August 1928, Sir John Lavery stayed for a few days at St Patrick’s Purgatory, to paint the pilgrimage site in Lough Derg, Co Donegal. He was allowed to keep his boots on, unlike the pilgrims, but he was disappointed at how unpicturesque and respectable his subjects looked, even barefooted. Furthermore, because the weather was unexpectedly good, they were not ‘plodding through mud and rain’, he complained in a letter, and ‘my picture, I fear, will look like a crowded summer resort, making Purgatory a thing to long for’.