Roman Prostitute

There was a big exhibit that I wanted to miss,
the Corot Exhibit. When I was in Rome
I took a bus out of town. I was looking for
Corot’s views of Rome, I was looking for
Inness’ views of ruins. I saw prostitutes
with chairs, standing by fires along the
side of the road. But what could I do? I
was on the bus. I didn’t have money to
rent a car. I thought to myself, “How much
does talk cost?”

Painting: 8” x 10”
Acrylic on stretched canvas, painted sides, stapled in the back
Signature: signed on the back, Richard Britell August 14, 2001

His Hat was as big as the Colosseum

The strangest thing happened in an outdoor coffee shop in Rome about two blocks from the Colosseum. It was my first day in Rome and I was in a hurry to get to the Colosseum before it got dark but at the last instant, with the Colosseum in sight I decided to have a cup of coffee at an outdoor cafe.

I sat down and ordered some coffee and immediately noticed that there was a man sitting with his back to me at the next table, and just like at a movie, his hat completely blocked my view of the Colosseum. I was going to ask him to move but then I found that by moving my table a little I could see around him.

I became fascinated by this simple fact, from where I sat his hat was exactly the same size as the Colosseum. It seemed so strange to me that this little insignificant hat, perhaps only one year old was able to completely block my view of a two thousand year old building. I kept looking back and forth from the building to the hat, and then he leaned back in his chair.

When he leaned back in his chair his hat became almost twice as big as the building, as a matter of fact it began to be possible to make a comparison of the Colosseum to just the hat band. Leaning back, his hat band was one third the size of the Colosseum. I posed this question to myself, “at what point away from my eye will the hat band be the same size as, and line up top and bottom with the Colosseum?” To answer this question I stood up from my chair went quietly over behind him and discovered that if I put my head just behind his head, about ten inches from his shirt collar, that his hat band at that point was exactly the same height as the Colosseum.

To line up my eye perfectly with his hat band it was necessary to support myself, and as I was bending over I unconsciously put my hands onto the back of his chair, and as ill luck would have it he suddenly leaned back, trapping my hands between the chair and his back.

I stood there, or rather crouched there for the longest moment, frozen in time. The waiter came and went giving me the strangest look. Finally he leaned forward releasing my fingers, and I fled.

This drawing measures 4.5” x 6.25”. It is drawn on tinted cold press watercolor paper with a black wax pencil. It is signed and dated on the border along the bottom, Richard Britell, August 13, 2001.

I was Born in Utica

I was born in Utica, you’ve probably heard of it. It’s not a well known place but it’s an important place to me. You might hink that a city like Rome is an important city, but I’m telling you you’re wrong. I grew up in Utica so I know. Also, I’ve been to Rome several times in my life, it’s just a little suburb about ten miles from Utica. It used to have an Air Force Base there but they closed it.

Drawing of Utica as seen from the thruway exit number 31, but from my imagination. Oil paint on prepared paper. The drawing measures 6” x 8” and is signed with an R on the bottom front and a full signature and date on the back, Richard Britell, July 3, 2001.

Corelli, Opus Six Number 8

Atget, "Organ Grinder"

My last night in Rome I was able to attend a performance of Archangelo Corelli in a church on the Via Del Corso. You cannot imagine with what pleasure I anticipated the event. Corelli has always been my favorite composer since childhood. He was a Roman, his body has the strange honor of being buried in the Pantheon. This then, to me was to be the quintessential experience of my trip to Rome.

I can hardly listen to certain passages of Corelli, when played correctly, and in the proper tempo, without weeping. My friends know this and are willing to forgive me my tears, if his music catches me unawares in a store or an elevator it can be very embarrassing. It was even worse when Pachabel’s Cannon was so popular, but fortunately, you do not hear that so much anymore.

I began to save up my tears for the occasion, and I debated with myself if I would indulge in muffled sobs, with an occasional gasp, or if I was going to go all out, and wail out loud. Obviously I would never do that, but I must admit, there have been times when I have been sorely tempted.

When we arrived at the church however I became suspicious. I felt something was amiss. It was an English Anglican Church, and Corelli was decidedly not an Anglican. He was a priest in the church of Rome. I ignored this however, as best I could. The English build great churches, and certainly Handel, and Purcell make me cry also, so all was not lost.

But the chairs were terrible and uncomfortable, in the worst way. They had an enormous overstuffed cushions on them, so that it was impossible to sit comfortably. My wife noticed this also, and commented on it.

The music began, the performance was perfect in every way. They were playing the Opus Six, Number Eight, the “Christmas Concerto.” I glanced at the program and saw that it was being performed on period instruments. My excitement began to build, and I looked forward to sobbing any instant. But my wife interrupted me to mention again that the chairs were impossible to sit on. I looked around and noticed that in sections of the church the cushions were on the floor rather than the chairs. They were not cushions for sitting on, they were for kneeling on. This broke my concentration, and I began to think about the prayer cushion. I must admit that often in a concert I start to daydream, and lose my concentration. I began to imagine that I would drop down on my knees and begin praying, instead of listening to the music. I began to debate with myself whether I would pray silently, or if I would cry out in despair to God as a voice echoing in a wilderness.

But the Corelli performance was a failure in every way. I sat on the edge of my seat, I rocked slightly back and forth, but the tears, they just wouldn’t come.

After that we rode home on the subway, and I sat next to my wife in a rather depressed state of mind. We sat across from the doors, and at a stop two people got on the train and they captured my interest at once. The two of them reminded me of some characters in “Crime and Punishment” which I just happened to be reading at the time. They were beggars, a very old man, and what must have been his daughter, an intensely beautiful black eyed, thin girl of about fourteen, with a face of sad abstraction. He had a violin, which he began to play, and a moment later she began to sing in a soft, slightly tremulous untrained voice. From the very first instant, when that bow began to scratch across a string I began to feel my heart ache, and when the child’s voice emerged, as if it had been hidden in the sound of the violin string, I suddenly felt as if I was going to pass out, so intensely did I feel the sound of her voice in the center of my heart, unexpectedly. She sang that sad American song about the leaves being brown, and the sky being gray, with those words, “It I didn’t tell him, I could leave today.”

It seemed to me that it was not a song at all, and that I could see in her sad distracted eyes, that this girl was singing about her decision to leave her old father, and cease their begging. As if she knew that he was soon to simply die of grief, and that there was not a thing that she could do about it. And in his face I though I could also see his certain knowledge of his coming abandonment and certain death. And his even more certain awareness that he could play the violin, but that she could not sing. And in that perfect balance, was the charm and substance their existence.

But that was all perhaps just a story telling daydream, and of no consequence, but the upshot of it was that, right there on the train I began to cry, and not muffled sobs, no, not by any means, but hysterics, and cries of anguish, right there in public, in front of a lot of strangers.

Imagine my embarrassment. I was convulsed with sobs. It was hysterics. Everyone in the car eyed us with mounting alarm, as if something very untoward and frightening was about to happen. I took a firm grip on my wife's arm, and indicated that we had to get off at the next stop. And what was it all about. I don’t even care for that song, and she wasn’t even singing it very well.

She was just singing those lines, “And I began to Pray”, as I rushed by her and put a bill in her cup . She broke off her singing at the very instant she saw the note, and went off to another car, without even bothering to finish the line of the song they were on.

Several people came up to me on the station platform to see if I was all right. I calmed down. I said, “My mother has recently died, that is why I am crying like this, but never mind". People seemed to accept my explanation with sympathy, and a few minutes later we boarded another train.

Later, in the hotel, I looked up the passage in "Crime and Punishment," that this incident had reminded me of. Here is what I found, on the first page of Part 2, chapter 6:

From old habit he took his usual walk in the direction of the Hay Market. A dark-haired young man with a barrel organ was standing in the road in front of a little general shop and was grinding out a very sentimental song. He was accompanying a girl of fifteen, who stood on the pavement in front of him. she was dressed up in a crinoline, a mantle and a straw hat with a flame-coloured feather in it, all very old and shabby. In a strong and rather agreeable voice, cracked and coarsened by street singing, she sang in hope of getting a copper from the shop. Raskolnikov jointed two or three listeners, took out a five copeck piece and put it in the girl’s hand. She broke off abruptly on a sentimental high note, shouted sharply to the organ grinder “Come on,” and both moved on to the next shop.

I felt strangely elated that I had seen something, for a moment, through Fyodor Mikhailovich's eye.

Richard Britell, Rome, late November 1996

Art is Capable of Redeeming the Soul of a Nation, We Need a Beuys or a Keiffer, We Have Neither

The walls of the Palazzo are painted a flat white and are equipped with a great many electrical outlet plugs of all different types which are very interesting. The old buildings are solid masonry and so it has been necessary to run a lot of the wiring on the surface of the walls. Assortments of various sorts of plugs in large flat boxes affixed to the walls were connected to each other by wiring that ran on the surface of the wall, in narrow white rectangular conduit connected along the floor mouldings. Here and there in the middle of walls at about eye-level were plastic emergency phones whose wiring entered the same type of tubing. Rome is a city absolutely full of unfinished electrical and plumbing projects. If one looks carefully at these things and also at the infinite number of masonry projects inside and outside of every building in Rome where plumbing is being worked on, one begins to understand why it has been so difficult for Italy truly to enter the 20th century, even now when it is almost over.

The finest elements of the works on the walls were fire hoses with copper nozzles in glass vitrines, looking for all the world like ancient reliquaries. Above each vitrine of a hose there was a red metal plaque with a white image of a hose. On each plaque there was a number indicating which hose one was looking at. The first hose I came across was number 24, and I began to retrace my steps in an attempt to locate all 24 of them. I was frustrated, however, in my attempt to locate them all because the search led into places which were restricted to use by the museum staff and I soon found that I was being asked in Italian if I needed any "help." But rather than attempt to explain what I was doing I said I was lost, and the guards kindly escorted me back to the exhibition space.

Just before leaving the Palazzo, I discovered there was another floor where the exhibition continued. I went down a broad flight of stairs and at the bottom encountered many more rooms full of works of art. Here also I found emergency phones, strange electric plugs, fire extinguishers and more firemen. Now I began to understand that the firemen were not there by coincidence. It was obvious by the way they were seated, sprawled out and bored, that they had been assigned to that floor and spent their entire days there. Along with the fire hoses they were, to me, the most interesting thing in the Palazzo. Looking at them and listening to their conversation, realizing to what lengths everyone was going to prevent a fire, I suddenly felt that next to me stood Nero with his violin saying, "Yes, there must never be a fire like that one again." It was as if he was standing right there, but he disappeared before I was able to ask him a question I have always wanted to ask, "Were there violins back then?"

However by now it was time to go to Termini, that famous building of ill repute, immense and repulsive, but full of life like one of the huge whores in a Fellini film. Stranger things awaited me there.

I have never seen a space quite like the third floor of the Termini building, where the exhibition was. The proportions of everything were huge. The construction was done under Mussolini and the style of the furnishings remind one of a Marks brothers film, in that they are as modern as things could be in the forties. There were endless corridors, dusty and quiet, in which one found enormous bathrooms, small libraries, and waiting rooms obviously no longer in use. These places force one to imagine important dignitaries from foreign countries coming on state visits. Yes, here they would have freshened up, and there in the paneled library they may have read a journal while they waited. A fascist daydream completely realized in stone. And so, being in the grip of my malady, I was unable to look at the art but just staggered around looking at door casings, heat vents, ashtrays, countertops and also out of windows, where one could see a panorama of yet another wing of Termini filling up the entire skyline.

I soon found myself outside the exhibition hall walking down a long corridor, but no one stopped me or turned me back. Along the corridor ran an outside covered portico. I went out on to it and found that it was a great porch of travertine marble stretching into the distance as far as I could see. I walked along this porch for a while and then I came across a man having a caffe' at a little table. It was Benito Mussolini.
As soon as I saw him sitting there I knew that it was an aberration of my illness, just a hallucination, but he seemed so real, not like an apparition at all, and his manner was so hypnotic and compelling that I walked up to him and said, "Buon giorno."
"Have you been looking at the art?" he asked me.
"Yes," I replied.
"And what did you think," he inquired.
"Well, I thought there were a few good things in the Palazzo and..." He cut me off abruptly by raising his hand up as if he did not have time to listen to half-hearted praise.
"You're from New York aren't you? Sit down and have some coffee."
The Italians always know if you are from New York. I don't know why. A chair appeared and also a cup of coffee, or perhaps they had been there all along, I don't know.

I sat down, sipped my coffee and after a moment he launched into a bit of a dissertation, which I thought he might. He said, "You New Yorkers are always disappointed by the modern art that you see here in Rome. And I know why. We have good artists; I'm sure that you can see that. But here in Rome, there is no section of the city devoted to the important art of contemporary life. We have a gallery in this part, and a gallery in that part, but it is impossible to go from one to another and "see" shows as you say.

We have no SoHo here in Rome as you do in New York. So we have no pot to cook our art in. I was pleased when they chose my Termini building for this exhibit. This building is a city in itself and you could put ten SoHo's in it with room to spare. If I were still alive it would only be a short while and then by decree you would see something really important happening here in Termini. This is what Rome needs; Rome needs a SoHo more than anything."
Here he stopped and looked at me as if he wondered what I thought of his idea, and when I didn't respond he continued.
" You know, I've heard that SoHo is becoming just shops and boutiques now, like our Spanish Steps. You think that nothing will happen here, that we Italians cannot get anything done, It takes a dictator....." all of a sudden he stopped again and looked away into the distance.

"Ah," he exclaimed, "To have been like Franco and to have just gotten through that wretched time."
"And why is it so important to you that Rome have a SoHo?" I asked. "Everyone here seems too busy to look at art."
"Because we need a Joseph Beuys, and we need an Anselm Keiffer and we have neither. Modern art in Rome is used only as the frivolous backdrop of aristocratic society events, and we have to understand that it is an activity that is capable of redeeming the soul of a nation."

"But Beuys and Keiffer did not come out of SoHo," I said.

A confused, troubled look spread across his face, but then the preposterousness of the idea that Mussolini would have such thoughts caused his image to fade gradually into nothingness. I am quite sure that if he thinks about anything, it is about mushrooms, just like the firemen. I continued sitting at the table sipping my coffee, but then a policeman came out and asked me if I needed any help. After that he escorted me back to the exhibition hall. As I was leaving, I noticed that there were a lot of those little rooms in the exhibit with the black curtains over the doors behind which you find video installations. I can never get myself to draw back those curtains. What I usually see in those little rooms is always so much less than what I imagine I am going to see. Whenever I see one of those little black curtains, I just imagine something that might be behind it, and then walk by without disturbing it.

Richard Britell, Rome, late November, 1996

Stendhal's Syndrome

Giuseppe Arcimboldo circa 1550

I so much wanted to write about the Quadriennale in Rome. It is a huge show which claims to survey all the important work going on in Italy at this time, and other related movements elsewhere in the world. It is an important international exhibition. I was unable to do so, however, to the extent that I desired due to the return of a malady I've had for several years now. This illness I have is a variation of Stendhal's syndrome, that condition he described when he became delirious from looking at too much art in Florence.

I still recall the day I was exposed to this illness and the appearance of its first symptoms after a short incubation. It was ten years ago and I was assisting with the installation of a show in a gallery. A young girl came in, about ten years old; it was her habit to stop by the gallery on the way home from school. She was acquainted with every one in the gallery since she was the daughter of a well known painter. Although young, she was nevertheless very familiar with the ways of galleries and often entertained us with her art knowledgeable banter.

I was standing next to a long wooden extension ladder that was lying flat on the floor when she came up to me and asked very matter- of-factly, "Whose piece is this?" She was asking about the ladder on the floor and it immediately struck me that it was very much like a work of art in every way. It lay on the floor at just the right angle to the walls, but even more, it expressed in metaphor, my feelings about my life at that time.
She was not serious of course. She did not really think that the ladder was a piece in a show, but children of artists have a remarkable amount of disrespect for art. Sometimes they have no interest in art at all. I think it aggravates them, but they are drawn into it none the less. Who can resist such banter? She continued, "It's like something I've seen by Kounellis." I was thinking of some way to reply but she went off to talk to some one else.

This then was the beginning of my illness, a confusion of perception. It expressed itself at first as an inability to distinguish what is and what is not art: an inability to separate the art from its immediate surroundings, and everything becomes elevated to the same exact degree of importance.