Thursday 3rd November 2011

Monday we were at Purbeck Crowhurst’s Hallowe’en Party, the Multis and I. Purbeck Crowhurst is an artist: he likes foxes, hares, owls especially, shy night creatures with mysterious powers. Recently he has hurtled from obscurity and now shows and sells at Trenton’s Gallery but still lives in a period council flat in Islington. The Multis have bought his work and got onto visiting terms.

Absolutely astonishing! The flat is encrusted every square inch with kitsch crystals, creepy dolls, boxes of poodle’s ashes, animal skulls; I’ve never seen an interior so done. There’s wallpaper on the ceilings, collages, ecclesiastical remnants, bead curtains, not  a corner not completely intended.

For the party Purbeck was in a black frock, black wig and 8 inch witch’s heels. Other guests were splattered with blood and carrying their hacked off limbs. A woman’s husband, with black head piece on elaborate ladies’ wig circa 1880, quite insisted that Stonehenge is in France although also in Wiltshire and lamented, possibly, the many-centuries absence of Druids from Europe. I didn’t know there’d been a Druid absence. It was very hard to get his drift. Direct questioning as to meaning only produced further mystery. This husband’s wife was rigged as an amazing dead-ringer for a woman in a portrait by Klimt. The resemblance she neither denied nor acknowledged but made sounds, gestures and facial expressions never before known in any human.

The Blond Multi was deep in discussion with a fellow art-buyer about temporary cash-flow probs. £450,000 for a Chris Ofili hard to lay hands on …

So I was reminded of that exhibition in Florence at the Palazzo Strozzi – Money and Beauty.  Medici money paid for Botticelli and seemed to produce a new kind of  more secular if not pagan art.  Of course the Medicis might have been hugely religious but it’s not surprising they weren’t. They wanted bright colours, flowers, Spring Maidens in see-thru frocks and no Virgin Mary.  So money brings gay, joyous pleasures of this kind. What else does it bring? In the end Botticelli went over to Savonarola, the fearsome fanatical monk who led a Puritan back-lash and burned irreligious works in the Piazza Signoria. That was in the January and he was burnt himself in the May. He didn’t last long.

What are we to make of it all? And what of the connection, today, between money and beauty?  The Multis, personally beautiful of course, were there in that council flat with the other art-buyer, as well as, me, Adrian Edge.

Purbeck Crowhurst Hosts a Hallowe'en Party

Final Resting Place of Purbeck Crowhurst's Poodles: Their Ashes are in Those Boxes

Spare Hand at Purbeck Crowhurst's Hallowe'en Party

A Woman's Husband at Purbeck Crowhurst's Hallowe'en Party

Purbeck Crowhurst: The Dressing Table

Purbeck Crowhurst: Self-Made Fox Lampshade

Purbeck Crowhurst: Owl Painting, Self-Done

Charming Toy Poodle