Cecil Beaton goes to war with his camera. (The IWM London )

photo by Mark Rapley

The Imperial War Museum is what it used to be called, but ‘Imperial’ and ‘War’ are powerful but almost embarrassing words for modern British sensibility, so it is now called ‘IWM’.

Which is ridiculous, insulting and patronising, but it’s too late to do anything about it, so I’ll let it go, except to wonder if visitors to this otherwise wonderful museum were ever to ask the staff what the ‘I’ stands for, are the staff permitted to tell them?

The unfortunate fact of British history is that Britain was a great imperial power which used its power to wage war. As Charles Tilley said, ‘War made the state and the state made war’, and Britain was such a state, and in these terms, a successful one.

Nothing to do with me, or you, I wasn’t there and neither were you, so why should we feel embarrassed by those who were. As The Beatles sang, ‘We all doing what we can’, and who can say that they would have done any different or any better?

This assumption that the sins of the fathers should be visited upon the children seems to apply everywhere as we watch the absurd spectacle of Americans denying that they slaughtered their indigenous peoples, the Japanese denying The Rape of Nanking or The Turks denying the Armenian genocide. We all know these things happened, but because we feel responsible we dare not admit them, and this is obviously dangerous, but I digress.

Elena and I went to IWM to see the exhibition of WW2 photographs taken by Cecil Beaton, who achieved fame before the war, and after it, as a society photographer and theatrical costume and set designer.

He belonged to a different Britain that was nothing to do with me - he was born in 1904 and died in 1980, and so was, for most of his active life, a kind of courtier in a society in which Royalty and aristocratic values and culture dominated Britain.

He managed to leave Cambridge University without a degree and began his career as a photographer making excessively flattering portraits of Dukes and Duchesses and Kings and Queens and hangers on. These are included in the exhibition, just to set the scene, and they are mostly very dull to contemporary eyes which have no fascination with these hopeless characters elevated by the lottery of birth alone to pedestals below which others fawn.

But then something great happens to Beaton - the war. It makes him feel helpless and useless, but he does what he can, to get back to The Beatles, and he can take a portrait which flatters, but now he has decided to flatter people who probably deserve some flattery - the civilians, soldiers, sailors and airmen of the British war effort.

Now Beaton’s eye is properly and perfectly deployed behind the lens.

A photograph of a young girl injured by a bomb during the blitz found its way onto the front cover of Life magazine - deservedly so, for even at this distance, it nearly brought me to tears.

Beaton worked hard throughout the war, risking his neck and suffering some close shaves along the way. His work reveals a profound respect for the so-called ordinary people of Britain during their finest hours. He reveals the fear, courage, vulnerability, sense of humour and dogged determination that were necessary to get through the nightmare of WW2 - whose idea was that, by the way?

It wasn’t just old Adolf’s, a lot of other people thought wars were a good idea at that time, and they still do.

There always seems to be someone who thinks its a good idea to make a war, doesn’t there?

Well let me say here and now, and I hope you will join me here, - No, No, No, not a good idea, never start a war, whoever you are and however good you think you are versus your imagined enemy. They are easy to start, hard to finish, and you never know which way they will go.

 Don’t take my word for it, read Robert Mcnamara’s memoirs if you don’t believe me, (he was Kennedy’s Secretary of State during the Viet-Nam war and the Cuba Crisis ) or see the movie made about him called ‘The Fog of War’. 

I wish Tony Blair had seen it.

Non-violence is the new sex, in fact, and you don’t get much sex when violence is about, which can’t be good, because everybody is too busy dodging bullets and bombs to feel like loving up.

I leave you with the news that the IWM will be closed for 6 months from January 1st, so you better get down there quickly to catch Beaton, but I also leave you with these lines from Edwin Morgan’s poem, which are just so true :

‘The Pope sent a letter to the Great Khan, saying

‘We do not understand you. Why do you not obey?

We are under the direct command of Heaven.’

The Great Khan replied to the Pope, saying

‘We do mot understand you. Why do you not obey?

We are under the direct command of Heaven.’

(The Mongols

From his cycle of poems called Planet Wave)

London on Sale in Oxford Street

‘I had not thought death had undone so many’, said TS Eliot in his poem "The Wasteland", talking of the crowds that flowed over London Bridge, and Shakespeare had ‘The sheeted dead did squeak and gibber in the Roman Streets’

I was reminded of both these disturbing and vivid images as Elena and I dodged and wove our way up Oxford Street on the first day of the big ‘Sale’. We were looking for bargains and late presents and heading up from Tottenham Court Road to Oxford Circus and John Lewis department store. 

Shopping is an unpleasant chore for both of us at the best of times, but the gloomy half - dead river of corpses that flowed against us provoked reflections on the state of the times, here in London and the consumer world at large.

What could be more human and natural than to trade, to shop, to watch others buy and sell and to buy ourselves?  

source: Internet

So why is shopping at Christmas or during the sales, nowadays, such a depressing experience?

There are some obvious reasons for Londoners to be depressed - there is a recession and people are fearful of their debt carrying capacity. The credit cards are used more hesitantly, and the Closing Down sales are a reminder that what was once thriving may not be there tomorrow. 

It is, perhaps, more than coincidence that a popular WW2 Government slogan, designed to keep up flagging civilian morale during the dark days of the Blitz, is popular again on T-Shirts and crockery : -

But there is, I speculate, a profound unhappiness at the heart of our consumer culture which distorts and disfigures what should be a pleasant and necessary ritual of attendance at the market to buy and sell.

The root of this is that we are buying and selling what we are sick to death of, things which we all know we not only don’t need ( a little luxury is a necessary break from  the daily round and we accept this happily enough ), but which we are secretly appalled by precisely  because we have gorged ourselves on them.

It doesn't matter that the trinkets we buy look different, on the surface, to the ones we bought last week, or that we do get at least a momentary rush of comfort and joy when we pick up the store bag with our new piece of kit or clothing safely stashed, anticipating the satisfaction of tearing open the packaging like an infant at it’s first Christmas, it doesn't matter much because deep down we can feel our soul tissue rejecting the notion that we need any more of anything.

We are full, stuffed, replete, gorged, we've had enough, but we just don’t know what else to do so we keep calm and carry on shopping.

And our clothes give us away - we are all dressed in mourning, black, we are all grieving over something we've lost.

We've lost our souls, our taste buds for life are no longer sensitive, we can’t hear the birds sing in the trees because our i pods are switched on always, we can’t hear the chatter of those different from us because of the elevator muzak everywhere and we can’t see the stars shine in the night sky because there is too much electric light down here.

We are always on, and always off, dead and depressed, only laughing if someone presses a button or shows us a smiling emoton on a screen.

With these sombre thoughts drifting through our heads we pushed in to John Lewis, the Department Store that once represented a fusty middle class of accountants and solicitors, worthy but dull and reliable, never knowingly undersold, but which has given itself a makeover with the Selfridges painting set, turning itself into a theatre of brand experience, with all the flash labels and fake luxury of the so called luxury brands and their representatives, who don’t know anything about the rest of the store but everything about their ‘brand values’. But John Lewis have hung on to their fusty but pleasant past in their cafes which they operate themselves and from which they have banned piped muzak- you can actually overhear the chatter of the other customers and get a glimpse into their lives thereby, which must be good for all of us.

 And there is a perfect view of Oxford street. 

Actually, John Lewis was as pleasant an experience as it was possible for it to be, given everything I have said earlier.

If you are going to stuff yourself, you may as well do it somewhere that keeps the cutlery clean and where the staff pretend to like you.

Unless otherwise stated all photographs by Elena Bruce

Rainy Day London, the buses and the Blues

Elena's Mum is wheelchair bound for distances over 25 yards.

We set out on a damp, cold and rain sodden day to get her to Kensington on foot and by bus.

The experience reminded me of the connections between climate, landscape, flora and fauna and national character.

A more comprehensive assessment of the reasons for British tolerance - for there is no doubt that Britain has become a very tolerant place to be, and that this is one of its charms, if you are a tolerant soul yourself - would have to include the influence of a more spacious form of urban development which incorporates the countryside in the town, and the moderating influence of greenery on the temper.

However it arose, the buses of London and the way that they cater to the wheelchair bound and their carers are a heart warming illustration of the friendly thoughtfulness with which the overall tolerance of difference manifests itself.

We waved down the bus and pointed to Elena's Mum, Emma, in her wheelchair.

The driver, a woman, gives us the thumbs up sign.

The bus stops, and reverses a little to find a clear space for the automatic ramp to hiss and push itself down from the middle doors of the bus, which open for me to push her up.

Elena tells the bus driver where we will be getting off and the driver acknowledges this news gratefully.

We are able to sit behind Emma on the seat in the space reserved for wheelchairs and prams.

The process is reversed when we arrive at our destination stop, and once again the driver carefully maneouvres the bus into a position that will permit the ramp to bridge the gap between the bus and the pavement.

We cannot but be impressed by the expense and effort that Transport for London have put into making it easier for wheelchair users and their carers to get around - and by the consideration shown by the bus drivers. It is not perfect, but it surely reflects the effort made across whole swathes of national life to include the formerly excluded.

Not every British citizen approves of all of this, and many will agree with some efforts and not others, but overall it makes the Great in Great Britain more significant to us than its historic signifier of empire and dominion.

The rain rained on throughout the day, and the sky hung dark blue and low like a lid over london, as it often does in winter. Someone told me that the British climate has been officially re-designated from comprising four seasons to one of three months of winter followed by nine months bad weather - this might explain why the blues are so popular in the UK, despite being a musical form from the southern states of the USA.

Elena and I found ourselves sheltering from the continuous downpour in a small pub in Barnes called The Halfway House.
It was packed out, mostly with folk over fifty, men with long white hair and pony tails, plenty of facial hair of all sorts, women in denim and hippy coats and floppy hats, and the feint odour of those strong cigarettes that make you feel happy. Much promise hung in the air.

Through the crowd, which parted as before a prophet of the people, came a diminutive yet powerful figure carrying a guitar - it was Papa George, blues artist of Barnes and locale, a man whom I had heard before, a man who should be a world figure of the Blues, a man whom the drummer of The Kinks had come out on a rainy London night to see and hear, a man who had been overlooked by the lottery of life but who deserved a place, if any of us got our just deserts, among the aristocracy of music, a man who could make your blues disappear by playing the Blues, a healer, a shaman, a priest and a preacher of the way and the truth.

Papa and the band kicked off and the sonorous wailing of Papa's voice and slide guitar and the taught backing seared into our hearts all the pain and suffering of the world and by the alchemy of music made us all feel glad to be alive - in London, on a rainy night, at a free concert in The Halfway House pub, Barnes, halfway to heaven!

The last time we saw Papa George was at The Bulls Head pub, just around the corner in Barnes, a year ago, with a bigger and jazzier line up.

This was great, tonight, what with the rain and London gloom, we needed the pure distilled spirit of the Blues without the Jazz mixer, and this is what we got.
Perfect.
Thanks Papa.

Unless otherwise stated all photographs by Elena Bruce

Class, consumption and London life

We are back in London.

And today we clambered over and around the British class structure.

Now I know that there are many who doubt the usefulness of class as a way of analysing society today - surely we are all middle class now, they say.

I retort that the definitions of working, middle and upper class have changed and it is harder to identify members of each by clothes, accents or even occupation, but it is still possible to classify people in terms will suggest the opportunities and advantages or otherwise that they will get out of life - class can make you or it can break you.

Yesterday Elena and I began our day with a trip on the Hammersmith and City underground line from Baker Street.

At Ladbroke Grove, a young man threw himself into our carriage and spead himself out on the seat opposite us. To our right were a couple of young men and their companion, a young woman, sat opposite them and therefore found herself next to our sudden interloper.

Now all of these were roughly the same age, and all wore roughly the same kinds of casual clothes, and all had roughly the same kind of accents.

Let me relay the dialogue that ensued :

Interloper : Ullo there, is she with you?

Young Men : Yea.

Interloper : Do you mind if I chat her up?

Young Men : It won’t do you any good.

Interloper : Have you got a boyfriend,.....oh good, more of a challenge, what’s your name?

Young Woman : Sarah.

Interloper brings a can of strong lager out from his coat pocket.

Interloper : What about your second name........

Young Woman : What, why shoiuld I..........

Interloper : It will help me to find out something about you.......your antecedants ( sic )

Do you know Harry?........Prince Harry?

Young Woman : Yes

Interloper : What personally....I do....he’s well known to me....( taps his nose, knowingly ) but ee can’t acknowledge it, ees a boy I can tell you.

The young men and woman get up and leave at Latimer Road and everyone is laughing.

Interloper to us : Are you married?

He takes a swig from his lager - his mobile rings...Ello Tom mate.....know I’m fine, I’m not drunk no, I’ve got probation at 3pm....I was all over the place yesterday, I was scorchin, squiffed out mate, but no, I’m fine mate, I’ll see you soon, be there in 10 minutes.

Elena asks him if we can take his picture.

Interloper : I’m wanted by the Police, what will you do with it?

Elena : We will publish it on our blog, very few people will see it, but it might make you famous.

Interloper : Yea, people tell me I could be an actor, but I say no, fuck it, I want it to be real, I wanna be real, pah, acting, who wants to act?

Same with girls though. They all fancy me, its true.

I was going to be married, but I packed my bird in....what she did in bed, it was disgustin...I kept thinking about her doing that with other blokes, no, I thought, out, so that was that.

The train pulled into Hammersmith station and Interloper asked me if he could slip through the gate behind me because he didn’t have a ticket.

As long as you don’t get me arrested, I said.

Don’t worry mate, I’m an expert, trust me.

As we went through the barrier, a guard noticed him and call ed to him.

I’ve got a Freedom Pass mate! was his brilliant reply, and he ran off.

Is he a member of the working class, the benefits class, or what the Victorians’ called the Residuum?

He is a character, a comedian, a charmer and good company in a tube carriage on a wet day.

We wanted the picture to remind ourselves that some people add to the sum of human happiness with wit and warmth alone, no more. This man had his demons. Better this than a miserable success of a bourgeoise. And I’m still wondering what that disgusting thing was that she did to cut herself off from him? There are, after all, only so many things a girl can do to a man in bed....ah well.

We were off to The River Cafe, to treat ourselves and to watch the middle class, or the moneyed class, at play. It is a beautiful restaurant, classless in a way, not stuffy or snooty, relaxed, the food is superb - and expensive.

The photographs say it all, but the food was superb, and the entire experience was a pleasure, despite the price. The diners again were mostly casually dressed, but if they wore jeans, their jeans were the kind that cost over £200 and the intricate designs on the pockets show others that this is so.

Class designators are more subtle these days, and British Toffs no longer wear top hats and tails, except when they get married, but restaurant locations are not subtle - they indicate money at least,but you might have, like us, saved up all year to treat yourself. The Ivy, an expensive and good restaurant in central London, is filled with the happy sounds of Essex and Cockney accents that don’t usually belong to lawyers and bankers, but they might to Traders in the City of London’s financial district. But perhaps because of this, the hard core middle class have moved on, or out here to Hammersmith and the River Cafe.

Elena maintains that the concept of class has no value at all today - maybe she is right, not because there are’nt people with different life chances, but just because these now defy classification at all.

A good London pub will attract all classes - a pub is more of a temperamental thing, if you are happy to stand and share space at a bar, interject in other drinkers banter, drink, as it were, from a common well, then you will be happy in a pub.

I know Toffs who are happy in pubs, but they are probably a minority.

A pub is a communal idea, like a municipal swimming pool or golf course, or a park.

The world is moving towards private space, private clubs.

But we like pubs, and parks, and London has a lot of both, which is one of its many charms.

Unless otherwise stated all photographs by Elena Bruce

The drumbeats of war?

The most important event of 2012 may well have been something that did not happen - Mitt Romney was not elected as US president.

Romney made a series of statements that revealed a reckless approach to international affairs that would have exacerbated tensions already straining the capacity of statesmen to control events.

We expect US presidents to be inexperienced on the international stage, but we expect them to choose wise and experienced advisors and the tough guy talk of Romney showed a lack of grasp of even recent history - I am thinking here of Kennedy's acceptance speech in which he said that America would ' ..bear any burden, fight any foe....in the cause of freedom' 

It was later revealed that these words led almost straight to the Cuba Crisis, convincing as they did Khrushchev that Kennedy was both green and dangerous.

But there are two really frightening developments in international affairs. They lie, as so often, at the crossroads between the middle east and US policy.

Five thousand years ago Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt and into the Promised Land - the only trouble being that the Palestinians lived there too and there has been conflict ever since.

This conflict has flared up again recently and the real reason it has is the first of my two really frightening developments : Iran and its nuclear ambition.

The Israelis want to attack Iran because they think this is the only way to avoid what they describe as 'an existential threat' to their survival.

Before they do that, they must occupy Gaza to neutralise the threat of Iranian supplied missiles fired by Hamas.

The US has succeeded in stalling this ambition so far, but it won't last because of the other really frightening event of 2012 : The oil embargo on Iran.

History buffs will remember that it was the US imposed oil embargo on Japan which led to Pearl Harbour.

The US led embargo on Iran is providing further justification for the Iranian regime in developing nuclear power and is harming ordinary Iranians, but more importantly, it is increasing the power of the hard line Revolutionary Guard in Iran ( just as the same policy did for the military fanatics in Japan in 1940 )

The Iranian regime must find a way to distract its people from the economic turmoil that their policy has brought down upon their people and an aggressive move in response to Israeli threats is a likely contender.

This combination of Israeli belligerence and the economic collapse brought about by the oil embargo in Iran will be difficult to control, especially as relations are not cordial between the two sponsoring powers of Russia and the USA.

The collapsing regime in Syria is only adding fuel to the fire, lining up the US against Russia and Iran, both of whom support Assad and the status quo.

These manoeuvres are taking place on a wider field of conflict which is seeing an increasing willingness to resort to force or the threat of force without recourse to any legal sanction.

In Pakistan and Afghanistan, the USA is conducting illegal assassinations using Drones or unmanned aircraft.

This sets a bad example which is likely to be followed, and is creating another generation of martyrs.

In a world of increasing fragmentation and technological virtuosity, we need international law as a codification of co-operation and compromise between state actors.

From this stable platform, the world can keep an eye out  for all the ‘black swans’ that are bound to be out there, armed to their teeth and nursing a grievance.

It is time to look again at the UN and give it some teeth so that it is not sidelined and humiliated as it has been in 2012.

If I was one of the scientists in charge of the doomsday clock, I would be moving the hands a little closer to midnight in 2013.

Fortunately it is not about London and not about Moscow.

But this news just out. "The United States expanded anti-nuclear sanctions against Iran on Thursday, blacklisting seven Iranian companies and five individuals including Fereydoon Abbasi, Iran’s top nuclear official and the target of a failed assassination attempt in Tehran two years ago, which Iran said was the work of Israeli operatives."

Unfortunately I'm sure I'm right about the US throttling Iran into aggression

Theatre, improvisation and Superstition all in a Moscow Night

At the Metro station Ploshad Revolutsy we were staggered to find, as we left the carriage, an array of statuary on every available corner of the platform and in every available recess from its main thoroughfare, depicting the revolutionary proletariat working, resting and multiplying whilst building the socialist paradise on earth.

The figures were carved from bronze, and each carried a beatific and hagiographic expression as he, she or their dog stared with glistening and wet eyes towards the collectively built future. Their labour was hard - no matter; the future would reward them and each gave according to their ability and each received according to their needs.

Each being frozen in an attitude of sublime satisfaction or confident longing, I could only think of Keats, but sorry John, I've tampered with two lines from your brilliant ' Ode on a Grecian Urn':

Thou still unravished bride of quietness!

Thou foster child of silence and slow time

Soviet sculptor, who canst thus express

A labouring tale more sweetly than our rhyme!

The station was busy, people surged back and forth from the central corridor to the platforms on each side. It seemed even more crowded because there were so many of these frozen figures from the past, busy building the future or resting from it and raising the next generation for whom the state will have withered away and the only remaining task that of ‘ the administration of things’.

Stopping to photograph a handsome worker with his dog, I found myself, whilst posing beside it, in the way of people who wanted to pat it.

 But no, it wasn’t a pat, it was a rub, and it was its nose which they rubbed. Every other person rubbed the happy dog’s nose as they passed.

Its nose shone with a century of affectionate rubbing. Yes, despite the best efforts of the Bolsheviks to suppress religion and superstition, a custom had emerged from the impenetrable mystery of the human soul, of rubbing a bronze dog’s nose for good luck.

How happy this charming irrationality made us feel. We rubbed its nose too, and we had some good luck as a result - there is no smoke without fire after all and which of us knowingly walks under a ladder if we can avoid it?


Though cowards flinch and traitors snigger,

We cannot help but stand and stare

Before each touching, crouching figure

Deep down Revolution Square.

Who could not love such noble creatures?

Their kindly but heroic features

Suggest a race of Myrmidons,

The rational Future cast in bronze.

For luck - or else to ward off failure -

Commuters rub the guard-dog's nose,

Till you could even say it glows;

They also stroked its genitalia

But higher organs disapproved 

And now he's has his balls removed.

(by Andy Croft  'The Dog's Bollocks' from "Three Men on Metro", 2009)

We were transfixed by the range of statuary in the station - young mothers with children on their laps, young fathers helping young sons to play with model aircraft. It was Raphael like in its attempt to show the divine at work in the human vessel, the divine light of socialist love, finally revealed and made incarnate here on earth.

But it was time to move on - we were due at the theatre to watch an improv actor perform a piece at a small theatre on the Arbat street.

Of course, there was no signage and the number of the block was not visible - there was 45 and there was 49, but we needed 47 and it was not there.

We asked in the big theatre opposite where it should have been.

It’s opposite, she said.

It’s not, said Elena.

It is, go away, she said.

It was opposite, but around the corner. How were we to know?

The theatre was packed with people from 5 to 60 years old. Most seemed to be young teenagers, the girls painfully self-conscious, looking for looks, the boys equally so but hiding it, and looking to give the looks and hold them, but the girls looked away quickly.

The remainder must have been parents, but there were some student age kids too and a few sad stragglers like us, friends of friends of the performer.

It reminded me of a Niel Young concert from the 70’s.

A man around 30 sat on the stage, strumming his acoustic guitar.

The girl next to me - not Elena - was singing the song he was strumming.

It was a Happening!

He eventually introduced himself, his back-pack and his boots.

He had hitch-hiked to Moscow from small town Mariinsk in Siberia and he was going to introduce us to the gallery of characters who had been kind enough to give him a lift.

I hope none of them were in the audience, or it will take him a long time to get home.

No, many of the portraits were affectionate, but they mostly came from the strange position that I remember I had when, many years ago, I hitch-hiked my way across the USA - the position of moral superiority to the car-owning and square bourgeoise who had given you a lift.

It was, though, a happy atmosphere, pleasant, mild and congenial, and a lot of laughter and cheerfulness was created by the itinerant artist and his tales of the road. 

It is refreshing here the way that so many genres and periods seem able to co-exist without the slightest self-consciousness or snobbery.

London or New York have splintered their cultural life into thousands of shards of sub-cultural niches, but they are generally very intense, almost Masonic, and the correct clothes must be worn and verbs and nouns employed.

Here it’s all jumbled up like a car-boot sale and it’s very relaxed as a result and usually a bargain too. And mum and Dad come too.

Now that is weird.

PS. By the way, Elena said me that the actor's name  was Petr Zubarev and the performance was in the Dom Aktera at Arbat street. 

Unless otherwise stated all photographs by Elena Bruce

Marc Chagall returns to Russia and we challenge the law of the land!

Elena and I set out on the Metro on a Sunday afternoon to visit an exhibition of Bible etchings by Marc Chagall at the International University of Moscow.

We had still not learned that Moscow is virtually without signage and that one wrong turn could catapult us into the equivalent of the Gobi desert without a compass at night-time.

The policemen and women of Moscow look like irregular soldiers - they are in uniforms but the uniforms are more like fatigues and camouflage than police uniforms. In Britain, we enjoy the myth that the police are servants of the public. Try telling that to anyone who has been ‘kettled’ whilst trying to get through a supposedly legal demonstration. It’s been a long time since a British ‘Bobby’ - how quaint that title now seems- addressed me as sir and asked me politely to move along.

Here in Moscow, however, there is very little attempt to pretend that the police are here to do anything other than crack your skull if you step out of line.

Baffled as usual by the complete absence of any signage indicating the address we sought, we spotted two short and rotund men in the vaguely desert combat uniform that some of the police seem to favour.

Elena asked them for directions to the address we had - street name and number and the name of the university.

It is common for policemen to smoke on duty and both of these were smoking off what looked, as given away by bloodshot eyes and dry, flaked and pasty skin, a massive hangover.

Aggressively stabbing in one particular direction, one of them expressed his irritation at such a stupid question by reminding Elena that even numbers were on this side of the road so we should travel in the direction he pointed in but that we should have stayed on the metro for one more stop. Elena retorted that the university was very clear about the nearest metro but this was a mistake as the soldier - policeman began to get angry.

Timidly, perhaps following in the footsteps of the infamous Stanford experiments wherein ordinary people blindly follow white coated authority figures to the point of torturing their peers, we did as we were told - a big mistake!

A mile along the eight lanes of motorway that bulldozed through the street that the university sat on, we were obviously going nowhere. Factory buildings not faculty buildings were all around.

At last, a kindly samaritan took us in hand and turned us around - we were going in the wrong direction on the wrong side of the road. It would have been impossible to give us more misleading, erroneous and irritaingly wrong directions other than to tell us that the university had closed and Marc Chagall had never existed.

A strange irony that the authoritarian tendency of the Russian Federation should tolerate such a sloppy manifestation of its power over the public. A simple measure like banning the police from smoking on duty whilst outdoors would make a huge difference to public perceptions of their efficiency, surely? And how difficult would it be to smarten them up a little and give them an A to Z of the city?

Perhaps the objective is control and the strategy intimidation and the tactic unpredictability and general unattractiveness - if so, it works.

But our hearts lifted as at last, exhausted but pleased that we had made it at all, we arrived at the university.

It was a moment to capture, so we took some photographs of ourselves outside the entrance.  

Inside, the security guard proved again the eternal verity that if you have nothing to do you probably can’t be bothered to do it. We asked where we should go in the very large building we had entered to find the exhibition. Without moving his lips some incomprehensible sounds came forth, just, only two, I think.

We pressed on and got lost. I climbed some stairs which went up then down again. 

Another security guard shouted at us in what seemed to be an empty building except for security guards. Perhaps it was a security convention?

We were called over to face some sort of dressing down by a blue clad guard - did we not know that it is against the law to photograph the outside of the university?

Elena turned to me and translated this, asking me if it could possibly be true.

Of course not, I replied with certain ignorance.

Of course not, said Elena to the guard in English, then corrected herself (almost like the great scene in The Great Escape! ).

The guard said it was against the law.

Elena said she wanted to ask the Rector of the university.

But it is Sunday, said he.

The laws delays took on another dimension, but eventually Elena promised to obliterate the photographs if it did turn out to be illegal to have them, and our legal guardian and security guard showed us the way to Chagall.

Good things only come to those who struggle, and the way is steep and narrow, and the prize of this exhibition endorsed these gloomy truths.

Some thirty odd small coloured etchings showed the genius of Chagall’s idiosyncratic attachment to his Jewish - Russian roots and how these influenced his understanding of the old Testament as stories which tell us how life is and always will be. 

Simple lines and smudges of colour miraculously pump blood and emotion around the figure of a reclining Eve as God, bearded and angry, jabs his finger at her in reproval for eating the apple - she looks incredibly achingly vulnerable, almost erotically so, and we are on her side against God, but this can’t be how Chagall sees it. Or can it. artists can be notoriously vague or inconsistent on why they do what they do and what it means.

In the background flickered footage of the Nazi forces destruction of the small village in Byelorussia that Chagall had grown up in.

Despite this, God still seemed to exist for Chagall.

And so did Russia - despite the kindness they showed to him, Chagall later excoriated the USA for failing to fight Nazism full bloodedly and he praised Stalin as Fascism’s only true destroyer.

Chagall, along with a number of other prominent artists in Europe, too busy with art and work to understand the horror that was enveloping Europe, left it late to leave Paris with his wife. They got to Marseilles but had no documents so were forbidden to leave for the United States. The local US consulate was staffed by a brave and imaginitive diplomat who forged the necessary documents for the Chagalls and many others, thereby saving for posterity some of the most brilliant art and artists of the 20th century.

This exhibition, however, built bridges between cultures and people.

It presented in a pleasant setting that complemented the small scale of the work itself a reflective and profound example of a complex and brilliant man: a Russian, a Jew, a man who loved France and who settled not entirely comfortably in the USA and returned to Russia with his work.

A great individual and humanitarian who loved a jealous God.

He and Walt Whitman might have been very good mates.( I contradict myself........)

Thank You the International University of Moscow.

By the way, is it against the law to photograph the exterior of your building?

Unless otherwise stated all photographs by Elena Bruce