John Luke King-Salter

Classicism has been a basic trend in Western art since the Renaissance. By ‘Classical’ I mean, first and foremost, the art that tries to subordinate disorder to order, reproducing aesthetically the idea of bringing clarity where there is confusion, without losing sight of the underlying complexity. These Classical Variations are a foray into Classicism thus understood and a comment on what it means to pursue an aesthetics of clarified confusion today.

The individual paintings in this set are named after a true Renaissance cliché: the Greco-Roman gods. The eternal life of the gods sometimes seems to be above human tribulations; sometimes it seems to be nothing more than a magnification of these tribulations, which no less than our own is mired in the confusion of worldly affairs. This contradiction is hardly surprising, for it—the whole mythology—is really an imaginative manifestation of that very confusion. People throughout the centuries have reverted to these models, and for good reason: they are a template of the Classicising impulse, for they reflect the much-vaunted capacity of the ancients to assimilate to art what is most monstrous in our shared existence.

The paintings are also an oblique tribute or homage to a piece of music: Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations. It was through studying this music that I formed the idea of a Classical artwork, and began painting the Classical Variations pictures. This is Beethoven’s longest composition for solo piano. Comprising 33 short variations on a blunt, clamorous waltz theme (written by the publisher Anton Diabelli), and lasting around an hour in total, it is often considered ‘difficult’ music, in part because its mosaic construction precludes the broad, sweeping developments that make such long pieces of music easier to understand. All of Beethoven’s music—like that of other Classical composers—is full of surprising contrasts, but here there is a greater than ever variety of expressions, stated as directly and succinctly as possible, and jammed together without any transitions or mediation. The primary effect of this is discombobulation.

Beethoven’s variations are, however, linear in form—like all pieces of music, they have a start and a finish. This inevitably creates a sense of purpose, particularly because, unlike in the case of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, Beethoven doesn’t finish at the same place in which he started: the theme is not restated as a conclusion. Instead we arrive in the end, after many tribulations and a cathartic fugue, to the poignant relief of the closing minuet. Here simplicity is directly reasserted after the extreme complexity of the variations; and, whereas Diabelli’s waltz is simple without being beautiful, Beethoven’s transformation of the waltz into a hard-won minuet—apparently effortless in itself, but hard-won in the context of the variations—is also a direct assertion of the Classical ideal of clarity.

And it isn’t only in the conclusion of the work that Beethoven asserts this ideal. It hovers over the whole composition, in the dialectic of order and disorder that Beethoven hammers out in the course of his variations. Beneath the playfulness of the overall conception there is an undercurrent of deep sadness, erupting repeatedly in displays of anger and instability, which are often (depending to some extent on the way they are performed) quite frenzied and brutal. In and of themselves these outbursts are anything but beautiful. And in context, in the apparent disorder of the variations, jostling for position, it would seem that beauty is altogether excluded. And yet, the ears attest, it isn’t. There is some parallel in the way Picasso repeatedly transformed the masterpieces of the past, like Velasquez’s Las meninas, upon which he painted 44 ‘variations’ in 1957. These vary in size and scope, sometimes focusing on particular characters from the original

painting, sometimes larger parts of it. The variety of expressive moods that Picasso develops out of these components is huge, much as in the case of the Diabelli Variations. Like Picasso, with his grotesque visions of the Spanish Hapsburg court, or like Cezanne, with his bulbous, ungainly bathers, Beethoven attempts the Classical transmutation of disorder into order, pointing towards an ideal of clarity that is always over the horizon, by means of beauty.

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My own ‘variations’ do not take any preexisting visual theme as a starting point; nor do they map directly on to any part of Beethoven’s music. And the extent to which they are variations at all, in any sense analogous to musical variations, is open to question. They are obviously related stylistically, in terms of colour, shape, technique and so on. So it might be fair to say that they are pictorial variations on a set of basic ingredients, or upon one another. As with any body of works, it is in their relations to one another that the defining qualities of each painting become apparent. We tend to perceive things by way of contrast, which is why the ‘variations’ form can be so powerfully expressive.

In any case, I wasn’t so much interested in replicating Beethoven’s variation technique (whatever that might mean in the context of painting) but in thinking pictorially about what he does with that technique, in terms of artistic expression, within the context of Classicism as I have come to understand it in the meantime.

I began each painting with spontaneous arrangements of strident colour, and made no attempt to avoid jarring chromatic combinations or geometrical awkwardness. Then I continued adding to it until I felt that each painting was a well-balanced whole. Sometimes the composition came easily, without the need for painting over my initial steps; other times I found myself needing to revise certain areas again and again. These differences are apparent in the finished pictures and go a long way towards determining their different moods.

Overall, I believe I have obtained a certain vacillation between order and confusion that echoes the hyper-Classical expressiveness of Beethoven’s music and the Greco-Roman religious imagination, reflected, among other things, in a kind of rough delicacy and self-effacing monumentality.

The ‘variations’ are made up of six big gods (on square panels) and one medium-sized minuet (landscape orientation), supported by two sets of six smaller caryatids and telamons (portrait orientation). Caryatids and telamons are the female and male figures that do the work of pillars in Classical architecture. The paintings are abstract, but they all contain landscape, architectural, sculptural or figural associations. There is possibly a sense that they depict parts of visionary ‘temples’ to the various gods, or, in a more futuristic vein, imaginary colonies on the planets and moons named after them. Hopefully it is clear that the paintings are in some way a commentary on the idea of the Classical, in part by virtue of these associations, and in part by being an exercise in Classical aesthetics. I leave to the viewer’s eyes and imagination to decide what they all mean.

Its quaint old figures tenderly I scanned;

age to them gave a beauty rare and strange.

Their colours I renewed with loving hand;

time does not ruin all that he may change.

Some sharper outlines, some more vague I planned,

new stitches in the old web sought to range.

The half-forgotten tale may yet surprise,

and from the chrysalis a night-moth rise.

Busoni, Doktor Faust

Exhibitions

solo
2023 Demeter - Somerville College, Oxford

group
2025 Objective Abstraction - Tacit Act, Melbourne
2023 Coming Back - Red Gallery, Melbourne
2022 Evil, Suffering and Hope - University of Birmingham