Transcript
Speaker: Hello, and welcome to Curious Objects.
Speaker: I'm Ben Miller.
Speaker: The years following World War I were turbulent ones for the evolution of British art.
Speaker: The chaos and horror of the war drove some artists toward absurdist movements like surrealism and Dada, while others abandoned the lionization of industry and progress that had characterized the pre-war years.
Speaker: Then the Great Depression only brought further anxiety and drove some artists toward escapism and a return to classical and representational painting.
Speaker: But at the same time, important social and cultural changes were happening across the UK.
Speaker: The war had brought huge numbers of women into the workforce.
Speaker: Women won the right to vote beginning in 1918 and including all women by 1928.
Speaker: Gender and sexual norms were under fresh examination and also fascist sentiment was on the rise across Europe at the same time.
Speaker: It was in this context right around 1930 that two women artists, Jessica Dismore and Agnes Miller Parker,
Speaker: set to work on the paintings that we'll be discussing today.
Speaker: These two paintings are featured at the Fine Arts Society, which is celebrating the reopening of their London Gallery with a double exhibition occurring simultaneously in their spaces in London and Edinburgh.
Speaker: Here with me to figure out what these paintings are all about are Emily Walsh, Group Managing Director of the Fine Arts Society in Edinburgh, and Rowena Morgan-Cox, Managing Director of the Fine Arts Society London.
Speaker: Hello, Emily and Rowena.
Speaker: Hello.
Speaker: Hello.
Speaker: So, Emily, I want to start with the painting by Agnes Miller Parker, which is at the Edinburgh Gallery and which bears the curious title, The Uncivilized Cat.
Speaker: And listeners, you can see pictures of both of these paintings online at themagazineantiques.com and also at thefineartsociety.com.
Speaker: But Emily, can you just start off by telling us what exactly is depicted in this painting?
Speaker: Of course, there's a cat who is making quite a ruckus.
Speaker: Yes, so at first appearance is quite an innocent looking still life.
Speaker: A black cat with very green eyes has landed upon an open book.
Speaker: The book on closer inspection is by Marie Stopes and is Love's Creation, which was published in 1928, two years before this painting was made.
Speaker: Love's Creation was a book that explored the debates around females changing lives.
Speaker: sexuality and independence and a lot of the conversations that Marie Stopes had had over the previous decade.
Speaker: Behind this book is a green spine of a book that's just visible, can be seen.
Speaker: The book Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves, which was an autobiography that described the passing of an old order following the First World War.
Speaker: And then to the right of the cat is a toppled over vase of colour lilies and a maquette of the goddess Venus.
Speaker: And the story goes that when Venus saw colour lilies, she was so overwrought with jealousy that she bestowed a yellow pistol upon the lily.
Speaker: And within the context of this picture, it suggests this lust and sexuality that women were not allowed to display or indeed possibly feel.
Speaker: Behind it, there is a bunch of daffodils and beyond that, a fast car zooming off into the distance.
Speaker: And how would you describe the style and manner of painting?
Speaker: Well, when Agnes Miller Parker moved to London in 1920 with her husband, William McCants, and they became involved with the Vorticist movement, which is a London group active throughout the 1920s, and it displays some of the technique and styles of that group.
Speaker: The artist William Roberts lived with them briefly in their Earl's Court flat, and he was a great influence over her paintings in this decade.
Speaker: And that sort of sculptor volumetric stylization of everything in the picture, it comes from him.
Speaker: Yeah, so what do you say are the characteristics of that method of painting?
Speaker: What's sort of distinctive and recognizable about it?
Speaker: It's highly stylised, quite schematic in a way.
Speaker: She painted in tempera, which is quite unusual, and in fact there are very few examples of her work from this decade.
Speaker: She went on to be better known as a wood engraver in subsequent years.
Speaker: But it's very stylistic.
Speaker: I mean, it has also hints of the sort of art deco movement.
Speaker: So it's quite sort of flattened and perfect in its presentation.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And the cat, which is really quite a visually interesting figure in this picture in terms of the way it's posed and shaped, it occupies maybe a quarter of the frame.
Speaker: So it really does dominate the picture.
Speaker: Why a cat?
Speaker: Why did she decide to paint essentially a portrait of a cat?
Speaker: Agnes and her husband, William McCants, were very keen cat lovers and owned many cats.
Speaker: And you'll see in the work that she did subsequently that they often feature either as part of a tale that she's retelling or one of her best-known wood engravings is a picture of a cat called The Challenge.
Speaker: Cats seem to be very much a part of their life.
Speaker: And so there are, you know, you've described a number of the sort of objects featured in the scene.
Speaker: There's also a pair of eyeglasses.
Speaker: There's a water glass that's been tipped over.
Speaker: You know, the cat is clearly just making a nuisance of itself, sort of tearing the whole scene apart.
Speaker: But
Speaker: But it seems that a number of these objects are quite concretely symbolic, and many of them symbolic around, as you've described it, ideas having to do with sexuality, femininity.
Speaker: Is this a primarily symbolic painting?
Speaker: Or how would you describe Miller Parker's sort of intentions as best as you can derive them?
Speaker: Well, I suppose the interwar period was a period of great change and shift anyway.
Speaker: I think looking at Miller Parker as an individual, she made a very remarkable decision in 1918 to marry William McCants, who was a conscientious objector.
Speaker: And in fact, they married a year before he was released from his work camp.
Speaker: This would have come with
Speaker: a high level of social opprobrium, but it also suggests that she was on side with his decision to do that and to go along with it.
Speaker: Later on in their marriage, she, in personal correspondence, describes how sick of his laziness and selfishness she is.
Speaker: And she decides in 1955 to leave him, not the other way around, and then goes on to divorce in the 60s.
Speaker: And again, this is a time when...
Speaker: the housewife still very much existed and this picture for me is a rejection of all the Victorian housewife tropes of being the angel of the house which although the Victorian existed right into the 20th century and to some level today so she's making in my opinion it's a decision to stand away from all of that and to show her independence both personally and professionally
Speaker: You mentioned the motor car in the background.
Speaker: You can sort of see it in the upper left corner of the painting through an open window.
Speaker: What do you make of that?
Speaker: It sort of reminds me of the Italian futurists of some years earlier.
Speaker: Why do you think that's included?
Speaker: I suppose the vortices were interested in industry and the machine age, and maybe it's a reference to that.
Speaker: Perhaps one could also read something more phallic into it.
Speaker: It also has the look of a toy car, as well as perhaps possibly a racing car of the time.
Speaker: All right, I want to bring in our second painting.
Speaker: And this one is at the London Gallery.
Speaker: The title is Mother and Child.
Speaker: It was made by Jessica Dismore.
Speaker: You've dated it circa 1932.
Speaker: So Rowena, can you tell us, what does this painting show?
Speaker: So the painting is called Mother and Child, as you say, and it's painted at a similar date to the Parker painting.
Speaker: But even though Jessica Dismore was very involved with the Vortices movement as well, and in fact she was one of only two women artists who signed the Vortices manifesto,
Speaker: This painting is from a period kind of much after that.
Speaker: Really, again, as you'd mentioned earlier, she, because of, as a reaction to the war, she's moving towards figuration, away from the abstraction of her kind of earlier work.
Speaker: And this is really, she goes back to abstraction, but this is really her kind of figurative period.
Speaker: Unlike the painting that Emily was describing, there isn't a lot of kind of symbols to unpick in this image, but I think it's definitely worth a second look.
Speaker: Obviously, there are expectations of the mother and child image of something very sentimental and kind of verging on the kind of twee, but this image is...
Speaker: On second, look is very different from that.
Speaker: You've got an incredibly strong-looking mother here.
Speaker: She's got a very kind of defined jaw and you can even see the musculature in her arm and her kind of solid chest as she kind of holds the baby towards her.
Speaker: And equally, on the other side, you've got a child that...
Speaker: kind of seems realistic and to have an agency of its own.
Speaker: So she's really kind of scrapping all of the classic virgin and baby Jesus imagery that one might expect in a picture of a mother and child.
Speaker: She's doing something different, right?
Speaker: and new, I think, with this work, in a similar way to kind of Parker reinventing, reinventing is still life.
Speaker: And that's why we had wanted to kind of
Speaker: draw a comparison between these two artists not only because of their associations say with the vortices but also as women artists I guess creating a new visual language that is specifically female or at least coming from a kind of female perspective and that is
Speaker: recognizing a woman and her child to kind of work outside of...
Speaker: and stereotypes as Dismore herself did.
Speaker: In fact, it's interesting that Dismore didn't want children from a very early age.
Speaker: She was quite definitive about that and also didn't get married.
Speaker: And aside from a kind of speculative relationship with Wyndham Lewis,
Speaker: that there's slight disagreement on from friends and various sources, didn't have any other kind of romantic or sexual relationship that was really significant.
Speaker: Interesting.
Speaker: So just for a moment to go back to the style of the painting, you've drawn some comparisons with the Miller Parker picture, but visually, they're quite different.
Speaker: In this case, the mother and the child fill the entire frame
Speaker: There really is very little else to look at aside from the two of them.
Speaker: There's no field full of symbolic objects.
Speaker: But they're also just painted in a very different manner.
Speaker: There's none of the flattening, the sort of angularity.
Speaker: They're much more organic sort of creatures.
Speaker: So it's differences from the uncivilised cat, predominantly, as you say, in the style of the painting.
Speaker: In the uncivilised cat, there's a very slick stylisation that Emily was talking about that kind of...
Speaker: seems close to the Art Deco movement as well as the kind of vortices influences that Miller Parker had.
Speaker: But with Jessica Dismore, hers is slightly more kind of impressionistic.
Speaker: She's quite...
Speaker: clearly looked at pontilism.
Speaker: The surface of the picture is made up with lots of kind of small stabbing brushstrokes, which you can see obviously even in an image online, but definitely in the flesh.
Speaker: Each brushstroke is very much defined.
Speaker: It's very muted colours, which she actually really painted with muted colours all the way through her career, including in her kind of abstract earlier period and later period.
Speaker: I think that they're the colours that...
Speaker: she uses, which I guess makes it more, not subtle is probably the wrong word, but it's definitely understated as compared with Minaparka's painting.
Speaker: There's something soft and gentle about it, which maybe works with the theme of mother and child.
Speaker: And that's why it needs
Speaker: you to think about it more carefully to kind of unravel I think what it's actually saying about the relationship between the two figures you mentioned also that very tight cropping around the figures there's there's kind of nothing else there's a sense of
Speaker: maybe a curtain in the background, they might be standing in front of a window, for instance.
Speaker: But it kind of could be verging on slightly claustrophobic in its kind of structure, which I hope I'm not reading too much into it.
Speaker: It's interesting because Dismore had...
Speaker: a slightly frustrated relationship with her mother, who for a very long time was unwell and an invalid, and who dismal complained of being kind of suffocatingly loving.
Speaker: And you could, and it might be too much, read something of that into this work, partly because...
Speaker: because of that very tight focus on the two figures.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And well, and the figures aren't identified, correct?
Speaker: In other words, we don't know who this mother and child might have been or whether they might even have existed at all.
Speaker: As far as we know, they hadn't been identified.
Speaker: I mean, there may well be kind of guesses as to who they were, but I think even the title of the painting suggests...
Speaker: trying to say something generic, but actually rather than the predictable imagery of a mother and child, she's actually saying something much more modern.
Speaker: In some way, it kind of anticipates the strong woman figure that we start to see in kind of wartime propaganda as we get into the
Speaker: to the Second World War.
Speaker: But actually, unfortunately, Jessica Dismore didn't kind of live that long to see that.
Speaker: But it has a sense of that.
Speaker: You can imagine the muscular arm of the We Can Do It girls poster from America in the 1940s.
Speaker: in this image.
Speaker: But I think really she's just being realistic about womanhood rather than, as I say, kind of predictable.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So with respect to both of these pictures, what can you tell me about how they were received in their time?
Speaker: I think Emily might say something similar about the Miller Parker, but we have very little information specifically about how this picture was received at the time.
Speaker: I wish that I could...
Speaker: I could say more to that.
Speaker: But just more generally about Des Moores in this period, so between 1929 and 1934, she contributed 26 of these more figurative paintings to the London group exhibition circle that she was a member of.
Speaker: And I think it's probable that this work was part of that group of pictures.
Speaker: And then more recently, it both has been exhibited at the Fine Arts Society and also at Pallant House Gallery.
Speaker: It was included in the Radical Women exhibition, which was Jessica Dismore and her contemporaries.
Speaker: And that was...
Speaker: at the end of last year and earlier this year.
Speaker: And Emily, what about the Miller Parker picture?
Speaker: Do we know anything about how it was received?
Speaker: We don't.
Speaker: In fact, it's a picture that we acquired recently from Provincial Auction House in the UK.
Speaker: And there was no, apart from an attribution, it didn't have a title with it.
Speaker: And the investigation of the picture really has taken place since we received it.
Speaker: So
Speaker: We have nothing to know about.
Speaker: It's history, I'm afraid.
Speaker: I think in general of Miller Parker's work and how he's received, there is very little known.
Speaker: And this may be in part due to the fact that she continued to work throughout the time.
Speaker: From the time she was in, after she'd moved to London from Scotland,
Speaker: She was teaching in schools and although her husband did a little bit of work in terms of lecturing and he was an art critic at The Spectator, she was the breadwinner and her painting would have taken place at night and therefore being very part-time and he was able to
Speaker: fulfill his requirements as an artist much better and really explore his style and what he was doing.
Speaker: And then from 1930, when her and her husband moved to Wales to the Gregona Press in Paris,
Speaker: He was the instructor, as it were, and coordinated what she did.
Speaker: And she worked very much then to commissioned work to illustrate books.
Speaker: So although they were highly praised at the time, but there's probably more record of how her work as a book illustrator and wood engraver than as a painter during the 1920s.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Well, so we've talked a little about the changing circumstances of women around this period.
Speaker: But flesh this out a little more for me.
Speaker: What really was it like to be a woman artist and to be working as a woman artist in the UK at this time?
Speaker: Well, I think if I can jump into this one, because it's interesting what Emily just said about Parker being the breadwinner in her relationship with her husband.
Speaker: And in Jessica Dismore's case, she was one of five girls and her father was a businessman.
Speaker: And they were afforded, I think, an incredible amount of money
Speaker: space and kind of flexibility to really work on their creative talents, I think a lot more than would be afforded other women at this time.
Speaker: And the other advantage or disadvantage for Dismore is that she, whilst her father was alive and she was working as an artist, actually lived off her
Speaker: kind of money that he gave her.
Speaker: And then after his death, she inherited money from him, although it was not as much as she was hoping for.
Speaker: So she was actually kind of...
Speaker: wealthy enough, independently of her artwork and having to sell her artwork, although I know that there have been in letters her mentioning in the later years her kind of
Speaker: efforts to actually make work to sell.
Speaker: But really, she was, as well as an artist, a supporter of the arts.
Speaker: I know that part of her troubled relationship with Wyndham Lewis is because he would often push her to purchase
Speaker: pictures from him for her own collection as a way of supporting him and I think that she would have put money into I think potentially blast the magazine The Vortices Publish and I guess some of the other exhibiting circles that she was involved in I also slightly think it was a disadvantage for her
Speaker: Because although she had the freedom to work on her creative pursuits and develop her art, it also means that, I guess you're slightly...
Speaker: taken less seriously as an artist because she hasn't had to suffer in that kind of, again, a stereotype of artistic identity for her art.
Speaker: You know, it's
Speaker: it's kind of come to her more easily because she's been able to afford to live anyway without being reliant on the artwork.
Speaker: And I think that kind of image of the struggling artist is actually really important and that she cannot ever identify as that kind of traditional struggling modern artist.
Speaker: And I think the other thing is that although she was involved in just about every interesting exhibiting circle, from the Rebel Arts Centre to the Board to CIS, to the London Group and the Seven and Five Society later on, she's just been slightly written out of history.
Speaker: And I think that's the case for lots of reasons.
Speaker: not least because of the male historian's take on British art history over the years.
Speaker: We'll be back with the Fine Arts Society in just a moment.
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Speaker: Well, so tell me more about this.
Speaker: In the case of both these pictures, we don't know exactly how people reacted to them at the time, but you are showing both of them now.
Speaker: They're both known at this point.
Speaker: They both clearly belong in the canon of British art.
Speaker: How did that come to be?
Speaker: How did they earn their place?
Speaker: These paintings particularly, but also these two artists, when did they sort of break onto the stage of recognition?
Speaker: I think Miller Parker, because of her work as a book illustrator, it was an acceptable female profession, possibly even one that you might have been allowed to do married and children.
Speaker: Miller Parker and McCanns didn't have children, and I don't know whether that was a choice or because they couldn't.
Speaker: But in most female artists' cases, upon having children, they needed to stop, either stop teaching, they were required to step down from their posts, or they just simply didn't have the time in the day to raise a family, keep a house and paint as well.
Speaker: But this wasn't the case for Miller Parker.
Speaker: She was able to, but as I said, she continued to be the breadwinner.
Speaker: in her relationship.
Speaker: But I think she has always, because of the wood engraving and the book illustration, has always been well known.
Speaker: And I think latterly her oils, or tempera even, have been admired, partly because they have struck a sort of accord with the fashions of the time, I think, for the last 20 years, that this very stylised 1920s look is
Speaker: become increasingly fashionable.
Speaker: And of course, in recent years, female painters have started to rise up and have a higher value because they're by a woman.
Speaker: But I think Parker has always had some sort of a name because of the book illustration.
Speaker: I think I'll just jump in here.
Speaker: In Dismore's case, it's slightly different and I think it's made difficult because she committed suicide a few days before Germany, I think, invaded Poland and war was declared in Britain.
Speaker: I think because of her, she was 54, but because I think her life was cut short and because of the circumstances of her death, there seems to be less interest in the years following her death to pull together a retrospective, which is often a kind of traditional way of...
Speaker: either the executors of the will, the family, or I guess artist circles in celebrating the life of an artist.
Speaker: And really, she slightly falls out of art history from that point onwards.
Speaker: And actually, I think in this case, having this work in our opening exhibition is actually because of the work that the Fine Arts Society has done in its history to help kind of resurrect the interest in artists who have often been overlooked.
Speaker: And it's been a theme, at the very least,
Speaker: since the late 1960s that we have done work and particularly well with women artists to gather interest around them again by holding exhibitions.
Speaker: Some of the artists we had shown in their lifetime, for instance, another one of the pictures in the show is a picture by Doris Zinkhuizen, again from around the same period, 1934,
Speaker: And actually the Fine Arts Society did an exhibition of her works in 1949 and then continued to show her work in the second half of the 20th century and we still do today.
Speaker: In Dismore's case, it wasn't until around an exhibition that we did in 2000 that
Speaker: we kind of, that rediscovery started.
Speaker: And then, as I mentioned earlier, more recently, this picture was shown at the Pallon House Gallery exhibition in Chichester, which was, it had Jessica Dismore as
Speaker: as the kind of central thread running throughout the exhibition but actually it was kind of commenting more widely on radical women artists and trying to either to
Speaker: rehabilitate these people's careers and works in the eyes of the general public, or to just cement interest that was already there and gathering slowly, as had been the case with Jessica Dismore.
Speaker: And I think hence why she was the central person in that exhibition.
Speaker: But again, as I'd mentioned earlier,
Speaker: It's very surprising, aside, the kind of suicide aside, that...
Speaker: that she isn't kind of recognised more compared with her male counterparts, because actually, even in the later years of her life, she was still really involved with some key artists of the period.
Speaker: I mean, being elected to both the London Group and the Seven and Five Society, you know, the Seven and Five Society was...
Speaker: started by Paul Nash, it involved artists including Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth.
Speaker: So, you know, she was always in the centre, in a sense, of the British art movements of the time, and yet she's still been sidelined since her death, and I think that's quite sad.
Speaker: Yeah, well, so how does that translate into the sort of state of the market for her works?
Speaker: Are there interested and dedicated collectors specifically focused on her works or works of the type that she is creating?
Speaker: I think there are lots more people who are generally interested in women artists of this period.
Speaker: This is one picture that's sold in the exhibition.
Speaker: It's sold very quickly.
Speaker: It's sold before the show opened.
Speaker: So I think that's a good sign.
Speaker: But it also might be a sign of its relative affordability compared to some of the other artworks.
Speaker: in the show by male artists working in the 20th century in Britain.
Speaker: It's, yes, it's kind of, it's more, it's had a more accessible price point.
Speaker: And,
Speaker: I hope that, you know, if we continue to do work on her and we continue to support the market, that that can grow.
Speaker: But the other, obviously, issue is, and particularly because of her kind of early death,
Speaker: It means that there are fewer artworks available.
Speaker: Actually, I'm not entirely sure whether it's because she destroyed them or because they have just been lost.
Speaker: due to disinterest even of the family and people around her, that actually it means that the kind of pool of works there to deal in is relatively small compared to other people.
Speaker: I guess Emily said the same of Miller Parker, actually, and I think that can be damaging to the legacy of an artist after their death, particularly in terms of the art market.
Speaker: It's an issue that arises with many women artists and was illustrated very clearly in a very good exhibition in the National Gallery Scotland a couple of years ago of 20th century female artists.
Speaker: And there were several rooms of them, but there were maybe only one or two examples per artist.
Speaker: And when the curator was asked why there weren't more, because it would have been nicer to have seen a room of paintings by one artist or a whole wall of them, there simply weren't the numbers to pull enough, good enough work together.
Speaker: So even if some women artists would have stopped painting, but some may have continued, but the quality wasn't there either.
Speaker: So I think that, I echo what Romina says, that in most cases there are very few examples to draw on.
Speaker: And you do need a critical mass if you're going to create a market, if you're talking about the commercial value of pictures.
Speaker: And although there is a far greater interest in women painters now than there ever has been, there's a huge amount to catch up in terms of their value.
Speaker: They still lag quite a long way behind their male counterparts.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Well, and is that also true for Miller Parker?
Speaker: I mean, Emily, earlier you suggested that her sort of flattened and angular style is possibly a bit more in vogue or a bit more stylish, I guess, for a modern consumer.
Speaker: Does that lend sort of more collectability to her works?
Speaker: Or are there even enough of hers to make a market?
Speaker: Yes, I think there are very few to draw on to create a market.
Speaker: But actually I do think that it is true, I think, of all artists that they will have their high points and their low points that are entirely dictated by fashion.
Speaker: And it doesn't matter whether you're a woman or a man in that case.
Speaker: people's interior decor will change over the decades and you're either in or you're out and this is a style that is in so if listeners are interested in seeing these paintings in person how can they do that
Speaker: Both galleries are open.
Speaker: Obviously there are restrictions in place in the UK at the moment and slightly differing restrictions in Scotland to England.
Speaker: But they are both available to be seen Monday to Friday in our galleries, Saturdays as well in Edinburgh.
Speaker: And you can look on our website, which is w.thefineartsociety.com for some high resolution images, which you can zoom into and some further information on
Speaker: both these pictures and all the other pictures that are in the exhibitions.
Speaker: Excellent.
Speaker: Well, I hope that this helps to draw some attention to these artists, I have to say.
Speaker: I mean, both pictures are quite thought-provoking.
Speaker: Have we missed anything?
Speaker: I think something, I mean, it's suggested with the Dismore exhibition
Speaker: It's suggested in my mentioning her suicide, but obviously she kind of suffered with her mental health throughout her lifetime.
Speaker: I wonder if that is particularly important.
Speaker: But on the other hand, you know, it's...
Speaker: You want to kind of avoid reading that into every work because actually I think this picture represents a period when she really is working quite hard.
Speaker: It follows shortly after both...
Speaker: the death of her mother and her sister in the same year.
Speaker: But actually she recovered from that and started a period of kind of real
Speaker: furious energy and this is one of those paintings and I guess there could be something in these very fast drying short brushstrokes that are very thinly applied to a gesso board which
Speaker: which is kind of reflective of that moment of excitement in her work again.
Speaker: And she has another one later on where she returns to abstract painting and kind of works on those very dedicatedly.
Speaker: And then equally she has periods where that little...
Speaker: little survived from that period, either because she wasn't working, because she was unwell, or because she may well have even destroyed the works, or as I said before, the works might have been neglected and lost.
Speaker: But I think that's it, really.
Speaker: Gosh, I mean, yeah, I have to say, hearing about artists destroying their work is always a bit heart wrenching.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It is, isn't it?
Speaker: Although you've got the slightly more cynical view nowadays with contemporary artists reducing the amount of pictures that go on to the market.
Speaker: That's a different argument.
Speaker: Artificial scarcity.
Speaker: Something else for another day.
Speaker: There's a balance, isn't there, between having too few pictures on the market and too many.
Speaker: I think, sadly, our artists are on the too few side.
Speaker: Yeah, too few.
Speaker: I was just the other day reading a bit about this period in Brahms' life when he felt eternally insignificant next to Beethoven, who was his absolute idol.
Speaker: And this inferiority complex grew to such an extent that at a certain point, he decided that nothing he had ever written or could write would ever be worthy of Beethoven's example.
Speaker: And so he started throwing his manuscripts in the fire.
Speaker: Oh, no.
Speaker: Oh, it's terrible.
Speaker: And it was...
Speaker: his wife actually stepped in and intervened and managed to save quite a bit of his work.
Speaker: But of course, you know, there are some unknown number of compositions of his that were lost forever.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's very sad.
Speaker: Statistic temperament.
Speaker: What is it?
Speaker: I guess it's Harold Bloom who calls that the anxiety of influence.
Speaker: Anyway.
Speaker: It's not something.
Speaker: It's not something.
Speaker: Well, thank you both so much.
Speaker: I really had a lot of fun with this.
Speaker: I hope you got a little enjoyment out of it too.
Speaker: Well, thank you.
Speaker: I hope you've got something good in there.
Speaker: I think so.
Speaker: This episode was edited and produced by Sammy Delati.
Speaker: Our music is by Trap Rabbit and I'm Ben Miller.
