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architecture, painting, lifestyle, music, society, theory

architecture, painting, lifestyle, music, society, theory

A Crisis of Brilliance

October 11, 2015 by Roy Johnson

biographical studies of five early English modernist painters

A Crisis of Brilliance is a study of five talented British painters in the early modernist period who were contemporaries at the Slade School of Art – Dora Carrington, Mark Gertler, Stanley Spencer, Richard Nevinson, and Paul Nash – a generation which their Professor of Drawing Henry Tonks described in the phrase which gives the book its title.

A Crisis of Brilliance

Author David Boyd Haycock’s approach is to present the biographical sketches like a relay race. With one artist profile under way, he passes on to the next, until they are all at work simultaneously. This makes the book eminently readable and it also reinforces the fact that the members of this group, though from very different backgrounds, were all developing their talents in the same artistic environment, and at the same time.

Stanley Spencer was from a small village in Berkshire on the Thames. He had virtually no formal education, and was introduced to the world of art via the patronage of a local landowner’s wife. His drawing skills were so developed that he was allowed to skip the Slade’s formal entrance requirements of a written exam.

Mark (Max) Gertler was the youngest son of poor Jewish immigrants who settled in London’s East End. He left school early and worked in a stained glass studio to pay his tuition fees at Regent Street Polytechnic. Via social connections he was fortunate enough to meet fellow painter Isaac Rosenberg and the gallery owner William Rothenstein, through whose influence he was admitted to the Slade.

The students of this generation graduated from sketching plaster casts in the Antiques Room to the Life Class where they were allowed to draw nude models (women) for the first time. It is interesting to note that conversation between male and female students was frowned upon by the School, and any discussion with the models strictly forbidden.

Stanley Spenser missed out on these late afternoon life classes because he had to catch the train back home. His fellow student Richard ‘Chips’ Nevinson satirised this provincialism by calling Spenser ‘Cookham’ – the name of his home village. It was a nickname which stuck with him throughout the rest of his time at the Slade.

Stanley Spencer - self portrait

Stanley Spencer – self-portrait 1923

The next arrivals in 1910 included Paul Nash, and Dora Carrington. Nash was another educational tragedy whose only talent was drawing. He paid his own fees for the one year he spent at the Slade, and made rapid progress despite the caustic tutorial method of Henry Tonks.

Carrington too was someone whose background almost inhibited any form of intellectual development, but her skill at portraiture gave her access to the premier art college in England and the bohemian life in Bloomsbury that she craved. She had her hair cropped, wore men’s clothes, and became quite avant garde in her behaviour if not in her style of painting.

One interesting feature (which might be worth further exploration) is that none of these people were particularly gifted in an academic sense. Spencer had almost no formal education, Nevinson went to a public school, from which he emerged with nothing but contempt for its values, Paul Nash was an educational duffer, Gertler left school at fourteen, and Carrington’s education didn’t begin until she arrived at the Slade.

Dora Carrington biography

Yes – that’s Dora Carrington

Nineteen hundred and ten was a good year to be there, because as Virginia Woolf later observed ‘On or about December 1910, human character changed’. The occasion to which she referred was the exhibition of post-Impressionist paintings organised at the Grafton Galleries in Mayfair by her friend Roger Fry, the newly appointed Professor of Art History at the Slade.

The exhibition was enormously controversial. Henry Tonks actually pleaded with students to stay away from the Galleries altogether lest they be ‘contaminated’. However, although the Slade group were enthusiastically modern in their behaviour, the post-Impressionists did not greatly affect their style of painting – with the exception of Carrington, who felt that her whole life had been changed at this point. Stanley Spencer carried on painting as before and was more enthusiastic about the early Italian masters than ever.

Nevinson and Gertler became involved in a triangular relationship with Carrington – one that continued long after they had all left the Slade. Paul Nash discovered his visionary appreciation of the English countryside, Spencer retired to Cookham to produce allegorical works such as John Donne Arriving in Heaven and Gertler was the envy of his colleagues, earning £1,000 a year painting society portraits.

In addition to the painters, Haycock also includes studies of the patrons who bought and collected their works. The most outstanding amongst these was Eddie Marsh, personal secretary to Winston Churchill (at that time First Lord of the Admiralty) who inherited money paid in compensation to the family of his relative Spencer Percival, the only British prime minister to be assassinated. Marsh called it ‘the murder money’ and used it to buy paintings.

When war broke out in 1914 the responses of the Slade group varied from Paul Nash immediately enlisting (for Home Guard duties) to Gertler’s absolute refusal to countenance the conflict in any way. Gertler escaped into the countryside with fellow refusenik D.H.Lawrence, later moving to Hampstead where he became friendly with Lytton Strachey and other members of the Bloomsbury Group.

Dora Carrington followed suit via a different route, and ended up falling in love with Lytton Strachey in a famous incident when she crept into his bedroom at night to cut off his long beard with a pair of scissors. Strachey was completely homosexual, but that did not prevent them going on to have a lifelong relationship, living together.

As the mass slaughter of the war continued unabated into 1916, more bodies were required to fill the trenches. The Conscription Acts meant that any male between eighteen and forty-one was obliged to enlist for service. This led to people registering as conscientious objectors, and their reactions to the war were summed up by Gertler in what was to become his most famous painting, Merry-Go-Round. Nevinson had a similar success with his painting La Mitrailleuse.

Richard Nevinson - La Mitrailleuse

Richard Nevinson – La Mitrailleuse (1915)

After leaving the war as invalids, both Nevinson and Nash were recalled to military service, and only with great difficulty managed to secure positions as war artists, but this helped them both to stay away from the slaughter in the front lines. Meanwhile Carrington finally gave in to Gertler’s sexual demands, yet at the same time established her curious sexless menage with Lytton Strachey. They moved into a large mill house at Tidmarsh in Berkshire.

Stanley Spencer was pinned down in the Balkans whilst suffering from the irony that he had been asked to contribute to a war memorial. When the war finally ended he was given rapid transit back home – only to find that plans for the memorial had meanwhile been scrapped. However, he threw himself into the completion of one of his masterpieces, Swan Upping at Cookham which had been left unfinished at his conscription.

After the war Carrington managed to complicate her life even further by marrying Ralph Partridge, with whom her partner Lytton Strachey was in love. It was her way of keeping them all together. She also went on to have an affair with her new husband’s best friend, Gerald Brenan, then passed on to relationships with women. She continued painting but did not exhibit, and was generally depressed. Her suffering came to an end when Strachey died of stomach cancer in 1932 and she shot herself, unwilling to go on living without him.

Gertler’s life after the war (or in his case, after Carrington) was a series of ups and downs. He was penniless one minute, successful the next. He married a former Slade student and they had a son, but the marriage was not a success. By the late nineteen-thirties, feeling that his personal and his professional life were failures, and learning that Hitler was persecuting Jews, he gassed himself in his studio.

Nevinson and Nash became ‘war artists without a war’. Nevinson’s post-war years were tortured – mainly by his rancour at not being celebrated, and he died embittered in 1946. Nash on the other hand emerged from the war with what we now call post-traumatic stress disorder. He was unsure how to develop any further sense of modernism and reverted to traditional landscape painting. There was a brief flirtation with the surrealists, but that came to nothing. Unlike Nevinson, he did become a war artist again during 1939-45, but his health gave out and he died of heart failure in 1946.

Paul Nash - Wood on the Downs

Paul Nash – Wood on the Downs (1929)

Stanley Spencer was the longest-lived of this group. In 1925 he suddenly married a fellow Slade student Hilda Carline and he discovered a new subject for some of his later works – conjugal sex. The sudden change to his normally puritanical lifestyle presaged major disruptions. First he moved back to Cookham trying to recapture (unsuccessfully) some of his earlier feelings and artistic inspiration. Then he met Patricia Preece, a former Slade student who was living in the village with her lover Dorothy Hepworth.

Spencer proposed a menage a trois with Patricia, but his wife refused and divorced him. He immediately married Patricia who equally refused to cohabit or to have any sexual relations with him. So he ended up with a wife, an ex-wife, and two children to support. When he signed over the deeds of his own home to her, his wife forced him out, and perhaps not surprisingly he had a nervous breakdown. He was commissioned as a war artist during 1939-45 and completed paintings of shipbuilding on the Clyde. But his main creative impetus was spent, and he died in 1956, the same year as he received a knighthood.

Haycock’s elegant study quite rightly got rave reviews when it was first published. It is well structured and written, beautifully illustrated, and like all successful studies of this kind leaves you with a desire to know more about this cultural period and these quasi-tragic figures who contributed so much to English visual culture.

Richard Nevinson Buy the book at Amazon UK

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© Roy Johnson 2015


David Boyd Haycock, A Crisis of Brilliance, London: Old Street Publishing, pp.386, ISBN: 1906964327


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Filed Under: Art, Biography Tagged With: Art, Biography, Cultural history, English painting

A New History of Jazz

July 17, 2009 by Roy Johnson

encylopedia of jazz and its history to the present

Do we really need yet another weighty ‘history of jazz’ in what is already a crowded field? When the author (also a bass player) has already produced excellent biographies of (among others) Dizzy Gillespie and Fats Waller, and regularly presents ‘Jazz Profiles’ on Radio 3, the answer must be in the affirmative. In this expanded version of his award-winning study, Alyn Shipton offers an encyclopaedic account of ‘a music created mainly by black Americans in the early twentieth-century through an amalgamation of elements drawn from European-American and tribal African musics.’ Throughout, he contends that up-the-river-from-New Orleans ‘histories’ of jazz distort and oversimplify what was a complex series of accidents, interactions, borrowings and innovations.

A New History of JazzPart One contains an extended consideration of the ‘Precursors’ of jazz – including the blues and vaudeville, the classic jazz of New Orleans and Chicago, stride and boogie woogie piano, the advent of big bands (Bennie Moten, Fletcher Henderson and early Ellington) – and bands and combos of the Swing Era. Some readers will consider that Paul Whiteman and Cab Calloway receive more than their fair share of attention. There is also a survey of developments in jazz in the UK, France and Germany up to World War II.

Part Two, ‘From Swing to Bop’ covers Dizzy Gillespie’s early orchestra, the West Coast scene and a (very good) summary of jazz on film. Among other topics treated are impresario Norman Granz and the Jazz at the Philharmonic (JATP) phenomenon. Granz is properly commended for presenting and recording such disparate players as Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, J. J. Johnson, Lester Young and Coleman Hawkins together in concert and on record (where they also backed Sarah Vaughan, Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald), helping to popularise jazz and ‘heal some of the more damaging aspects of the modern versus trad split of the 1940s.’

Elsewhere, Shipton discusses the early work of Miles Davis, the emergence of Hard Bop and Soul Jazz, the contributions of John Coltrane, Charles Mingus and Ornette Coleman, Miles Davis’s crossover into Jazz Rock, and ‘Jazz as World Music’ – in Latin America, India, Africa and Europe.

One of the many strengths of the book is an extensive use of oral histories and personal interviews with such luminaries as Ahmad Jamal, Oscar Peterson, Michel Petrucciani, Sam Rivers and Cassandra Wilson. Shipton discusses little-known (but pioneering) performers, and displays an enviable familiarity with the lesser-known records of Louis Armstrong, Coleman Hawkins, Erroll Garner, Woody Herman, Gerald Wilson and Miles Davis.

He is particularly well informed and incisive on jazz pianists. The late Michel Petrucciani ‘overcame his lack of stature and strength to become one of the most ferociously talented pianists in jazz,’ with ‘a touch as delicately forceful as that of either [Bill] Evans or [Keith] Jarrett.’ Brad Mehldau and Martial Solal also receive honourable mention, but Jessica Williams is absent from the roster of ‘cutting edge’ pianists (a cliché Shipton overuses).

Jazz singers such as Sarah Vaughan, Helen Merrill, Betty Carter, Carmen McCrae and Abbey Lincoln receive more extended coverage than in the first edition. Lincoln is identified as ‘the most accomplished social and political commentator in the history of vocal jazz.’ Yet despite his refreshing catholicity of taste, not all jazz singers receive the Shipton seal of approval. He is underwhelmed by Nina Simone who ‘lacked the jazz improviser’s spontaneous ability to play off her musical colleagues.’ The currently ubiquitous Norah Jones is dismissed as a purveyor of ‘jazz-inflected pop, with no improvisational edge and no profound exploration of emotion or meaning.’

In a concluding section on Postmodern Jazz Shipton argues that up to the 1970s, ‘the story of jazz is a straightforward narrative.’ But thanks [sic] to advances in technology, aspiring jazz musicians no longer sit at the feet of their idols, engage in informal jam sessions or serve apprenticeships in big bands – although college orchestras in the UK and the US serve a similar function.

Jazz artists in the twenty-first-century, Shipton suggests, are either forward or backward looking. Two popular singers resident in Britain illustrate the point: Claire Martin performs mainly original compositions, while Stacey Kent sticks to ‘the standard repertoire.’ In America, Wynton Marsalis and the Lincoln Centre Jazz Orchestra perpetuate the Ken Burns approach to jazz with recreations of the work of Ellington, whereas saxophonists Sam Rivers, and Joshua Redman hone and polish the ‘cutting edge’ of the jazz tradition.

A New History of Jazz is a massively detailed and well-documented interpretation of a musical form ‘inextricably bound up with the development of popular music as a whole.’ It can also be consulted as a series of discrete essays on its major (and minor) forms and practitioners. A good selection of photographs, a list of recommended CDs, and an extensive bibliography (which surprisingly does not include the late Whitney Balliett or Gary Giddins) add to the authority of a magisterial if over-weight volume. And a more attentive editor might have pruned Shipton’s always engaging but sometimes repetitive prose.

© John White 2007

A New History of Jazz Buy the book at Amazon UK

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Alyn Shipton, A New History of Jazz: Revised and Updated Edition, New York & London: Continuum, 2007, pp.804, ISBN: 0826417892


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Alexander Rodchenko Design

June 21, 2010 by Roy Johnson

design, modernism, and constructivism

Alexander Rodchenko (1891-1956) was one of the most influential artists to emerge from the explosion of Russian modernism which took place between 1915 and 1923. Initially working as a painter, he stripped bare the canvas and worked with ruler and compasses to devise minimalist pictures which he described as ‘subjectless’. But then given the opportunities presented by the early years of the revolution, he went on to become a designer in furniture and fabrics, ceramics, posters, typography, stage and film design, exhibition display, and radical innovations in photography. He was a central figure in the movement of Russian constructivism, a radical activist, a theorist, teacher, and a pioneer of photo-montage. Alexander Rodchenko Design is an elegantly illustrated introduction to the full range of his work.

Alexander RodchenkoAfter the early abstract designs he moved on to public artworks – kiosks, posters, and theatre designs which you could say provided him with a subject – yet he continued to create what he called ‘spatial compositions’, many of which look like bicycle wheels distorted into three dimensional sculptural arrangements.

He worked alongside and sometimes in collaboration with Malevich, Kandinsky, and Tatlin, developing his abstract work into three-dimensional paintings, product designs, and constructions that were half way between art works and domestic objects. It was in the spirit of the new communism to produce an art that aimed to be useful, classless, and practical. This was the aim of what came to be called ‘Constructivism’, even if its results were what we would now call modernist art.

Alexander Rodchenko - poster design

In the early 1920s he produced the work for which he is best known – the combinations of collage images, new typography, and asymmetric graphic design which created the hallmark of Russian modernism. It is this brief period of state-sponsored radical designs that still have an influence today – as you can see in the work of Neville Brody and his many imitators.

His work in the late 1920s and 1930s centred largely on photography, much of it featuring objects shot from unusual angles – street scenes from overhead, trees and chimneys from ground level, all objects highlighted wherever possible by dark expressive shadows.

The illustrations are very well chosen to avoid some of the better-known images. Instead, they draw on quite rare materials from the Rodchenko and Stepanova archive in Moscow, the Burman Collection in New York, and the David King collection in London.

It’s amazing that such an original and gifted artist survived the Stalinist purges (unlike so many others) but then he did produce propaganda work which glorified the regime – including even such projects as the construction of the White Sea Canal in 1933 which cost the lives of 100,000 GULAG prisoners.

Alexander Rodchenko - magazine coverIn fact the depictions of his subjects become more and more heroic, almost in inverse proportion to the degree of social and political misery in the Soviet Union under Stalin. There is very little evidence (anywhere) of his work beyond 1940, even though he lived until 1956 – although there is one astonishing image in this collection dated 1943-44 which you would swear was a Jackson Pollock painting. But it seems quite obvious that the creative highpoint of his career is the 1920s, when he was free to experiment and theorise with his fellow pioneers, and even (dare one say it) when the state encouraged and supported such experimentation.

The series of design monographs of which this volume is part feature very high design and production values. They are slim but beautifully stylish productions, each with an introductory essay, and all the illustrative material is fully referenced. Even the cover design is taken from Rochenko’s work. It’s from a 1923 poster advertising Zebra biscuits.

Alexander Rodchenko Buy the book at Amazon UK

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© Roy Johnson 2010


John Milner, Rodchenko: Design, Suffolk: Antique Collectors Club, 2009, pp.98, ISBN: 1851495916


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Filed Under: Art, Design, Graphic design, Individual designers Tagged With: Alexander Rodchenko, Design, Graphic design, Modernism, Russian modernism

Architecture Now! 4

June 30, 2009 by Roy Johnson

illustrated review of contemporary architectural design

The previous edition of this series, Architecture Now!, was the winner of the prestigious Saint-Etienne Prize for the Best Architecture and Design Book of 2004. Now volume four brings an even more spectacular portfolio of contemporary architecture and design to a general readership via Taschen’s policy of high quality publications at budget prices. The selection here is quite breathtaking. Projects range from multi-million pound buildings to humble constructions such as a tree house, a loft extension, and a prototype for sheltered housing made out of sandbags.

Architecture Now! 4 There’s an exhibition centre built out of old shipping containers, a water purification plant, and one spectacular private commission for a house built on a cliff top with a suspended swimming pool which looks as if it is floating in mid-air.

Each entry presents full contact details for the featured architects, including their web sites, many of which are works of art in their own right. The text is in three languages – English, French, and German – but the emphasis is emphatically upon visual presentation. Beautiful high-quality photographs bring out in full the contrasting textures of materials such as plate glass, brick and natural stone, water, concrete, and polished copper.

You’ve got to be on your visual toes, because some of the projects only exist as models and mock-ups; but they are rendered using digital techniques which blend natural landscapes with computer-generated images in such a way that you’d swear you were looking at a finished construction.

jodidio-2

The selection includes all the well known names you would expect to find in a survey of this kind – Frank O Gehry, Rem Koolhaas, and Saha Hadid. But I was surprised the editor Philipe Jodidio did not include Richard Rogers, Norman Forster, Nicholas Grimshawe, or Renzo Piano. Yet strangely enough he does include work by the video installation artist Bill Viola and the painter Frank Stella, who has recently produced some sculpture with architectural forms.

I was pleased to note that Jodidio does not shy away from discussing the costs of some of these projects – many of which have notoriously run many times over budget. You get the feeling that he has not put his critical faculties on hold whilst he celebrates the obvious creativity on show. And he introduces some interesting concepts and techniques – such as ‘topographic insertion’, in which a construction is merged with its surrounding landscape.

This is a marvelously stimulating production which will appeal to anybody interested in modern building and design, and in particular those who are concerned with the integration of man-made environments into the natural world.

© Roy Johnson 2006

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Philipe Jodidio (ed), Architecture Now! V.4, London: Taschen, 2006, pp.576, ISBN 3822839892


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Filed Under: Architecture Tagged With: Architecture, Interior design, Lifestyle, Modernism

Art Nouveau

April 21, 2010 by Roy Johnson

short-lived but influential design from the Belle Epoque

Alastair Duncan points out in his introduction to this beautifully illustrated study, that Art Nouveau was not a style but a movement which was a reaction against the stuffy over-decoration of the nineteenth century. It took its early inspiration from the work of William Morris, Arthur Mackmurdo, and Walter Crane, and fused these with an enthusiam for Chinoiserie and Japonisme. And as a movement it errupted very suddenly in the 1890s, spread throughout Europe and even top the USA – and then ended just as abruptly in the first decade of the new century.

Art NouveauIt was known by a variety of names in different countries – Jugendstil in Germany, Art Nouveau in English-speaking countries, Stile Liberty in Italy (after the famous London store) Modernista in Spain, and Style Metro in France, after Guimard’s Underground entrances.

The main features of Art Nouveau were the adoption of flowing, organic forms and the use of floral or vegetable decorative motifs. Even those who followed the severely vertical forms of a designer such as Mackintosh nevertheless chose tulips, poppies, and dragonflies as their embellishments.

After a general introduction, separate chapters of this study are devoted to the manifestation of Art Nouveau in architecture, furniture, graphics, ceramics, jewellery, and sculpture. In architecture, many of the commissions gained by Guimard, Van der Velde, Mucha, and Gaudi are still visible in the Parisian storefronts, the Metro entrances, and of course Gaudi’s buildings in Barcelona – plus the enormous Sagrada Familia which is still under construction (and currently giving town planners headaches).

The furniture that was created at the same time was supposed to be matched in its decorative detail with the buildings for which it was designed – to demonstrate an organic and integrated aesthetic. But most of the tables, cabinets, armoires, and sideboards tend to be illustrated in isolation from their surrounds. Too much ornamentation in a room tends to take it back into the Victorian excess from which Art Nouveau was supposed to be an escape.

Mucha posterStrangely enough, there was no Art Nouveau school of painting, mainly because it constituted an approach to design. It was in the realm of posters, woodcuts, illustrated books, and typography that it made its greatest impact, and there are excellent examples of posters by Lautrec, Mucha, and Bonnard. These were works which gave birth to the figure that came to symbolise fin de siecle Paris and la Belle Epoque – a young woman with serpentine hair, clad fashionably in jewelled or feathered headgear and wearing immense sweeping skirts, all of which flowed abundantly to fill the frame of the picture. It’s amazing to realise that these romantically stylised images were being used to advertise such mundane objects as bicycles, wine, household soap, and cigarette papers.

The field of decorative glassware was dominated by two figures – Gallé in France and Louis Comfort Tiffany in the USA. The American developed new techniques from his foundry on Long Island:

By mixing up to seven colours, trown together from different ladles, his staff could produce a giddy range of blended hues, many mottled or deeply veined to simulate nature’s ever-changing moods and palette. The sheets obtained were often treated with an iridescent surface finish created in a heating chamber, where an atomised solution of metallic vapours was sprayed onto the final piece. The process gave a kaleidoscopic lustre to the glass, which became a principal characteristic of the firm’s domestic wares.

In ceramics the the novelty elelment was in the application of subtle and complex glazes, but the vases, plates, and jugs are still recognisable Art Nouveau from the curvilnear plant forms and decorative leaves and tendrils cast into their surfaces.

The jewellery section is dominated by the French master of jouillerie, Lalique. He brought the setting of precious stones to a high art by the intricacy of his decorations and the inventiveness of his symbols.

There’s a good bibliography and index, but a future edition might usefully include a glossary of terms for the general reader. It’s not always easy to work out the differences between a selette, a guéridon, and an étagère.

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© Roy Johnson 2010


Alastair Duncan, Art Nouveau, London: Thames and Hudson, 2010, pp.236, ISBN 0500202737


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Filed Under: Architecture, Art, Design history, Product design Tagged With: Art Nouveau, Cultural history, Design, Modernism

Art of the Digital Age

July 22, 2009 by Roy Johnson

pictures, sculpture, installations, and web-art

Art of the Digital Age is a beautifully illustrated survey of the latest developments in art which has been generated digitally. Well, for ‘latest’ read ‘in the last ten or fifteen years’, because people were attempting to use IT for art even before the arrival of the Web. Bruce Wands very sensibly begins by defining ‘digital art’ – pointing out that many artists may use computers and digitisation in the preparation of works which are then executed by conventional means.

Art of the Digital Age His first section on digital imaging illustrates that perfectly. Many of the artists combine photography, painting, and scanned imagery – to produce data files which can then be projected into other media. He then moves on to show works which are categorised as ‘virtual sculpture’. In this genre, 3-D modelling software is used to produce wireframe shapes which can then be clad in a variety of skins or surfaces. The results can be sent as a file to a rendering studio which creates the object in a substances of the artist’s choice.

There is also 3-D printing, in which layer upon layer of a plastic coating can be applied to a surface until the result is a three dimensional shape. This can be the desired sculpture or a mould from which the finished work is cast. there are some slightly gruesome-looking organic forms here, but the constructivist work of sculptor Bruce Beasley (www.brucebeasley.com) stands out as possibly the most impressive work in the book.

On installation art I remained unconvinced. Much of it seemed like 3-D objects with light shows thrown in – though it is hard to judge an environment when it is only captured in a 2-D photograph. The problem here and elsewhere is that the term ‘art’ has been taken to mean ‘arty’. If the pages had been thrown open to the truly popular users of new technology, we could have had the work of those people whose works are viewed by up to ten million at a time on YouTube.

The same is even more true of digital music – though he ‘cheats’ by going back into performance and installation art which also happens to feature music. Video (which is now called ‘time-based media’) is another example where current commercial practice far outstrips the arty experimentalists

I followed up lots of the sources, and was amazed how few of the artists featured had their work available for view on their web sites – though the spectacular animations of Dennis H. Miller were an honourable and very worthwhile exception here (www.dennismiller.neu.edu). But when I arrived in the ‘Net Art’ section at work which allows you to connect interactively with snakes, I felt I could give that one a miss.

It’s a visually rich publication, marred only by the use of a sans-serif font for the body text which sits rather unsympathetically with the pictures; but this is offset by a richer-than-usual scholarly apparatus which includes a 1450—2006 IT timeline, a glossary, lists of further reading, a list of digital art resources, and a webliography of the artists featured.

© Roy Johnson 2007

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Bruce Wands, Art of the Digital Age, London: Thames and Hudson, new edition 2007, pp.224, ISBN 0500286299


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Art Theory: a short introduction

August 4, 2009 by Roy Johnson

brief critical guide to study of art and art theories

This introductory to art theory guide comes from a new series by Oxford University Press. They are written by specialists, aimed at the common reader, and offer an introduction to the main cultural and philosophical ideas which have shaped the western world. Cynthia Freeland takes a very lively and un-stuffy approach to explaining a wide variety of theories of art. She chooses topics – her first is the use of blood in art – then shows possible theoretical responses to it.

Art Theory Her range of examples is wide and impressive. She sweeps without pause from ancient and classical art to modern performance and digital arts, from Christian to Inca rituals, and on to Park Avenue auction prices. She is very well informed. En route she explains theories of art, from Kant, Hume, and Nietzsche, to Walter Benjamin, Marshall McLuhan, and Jean Baudrillard. Her prime intention seems to be to force us to think more flexibly about what constitutes a work of art. It’s an approach which consciously raises questions rather than delivering answers.

For instance there is an interesting chapter on art museums – who creates and owns them, what they exhibit, and what function they serve. Links with big business and even international politics are explored, but at the end we are no closer to knowing what makes good art. It is less an explanation of art theories and more an introduction to themes and topics in the study of art, with particular emphasis on contemporary art from a largely American perspective.

But finally she does get round to two theories for the interpretation of art – what she calls expressionist and cognitive theories. She argues, quite reasonably, that there can never be a ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ interpretation of a work of art – only ones which are more insightful, well-informed, and ultimately more persuasive than others. This is more or less the same conclusion as Jonathan Culler’s in his very short introduction to Literary Theory.

One very good feature of her presentation is that whilst clearly rooted in visual arts (painting and sculpture) it ranges widely over others: architecture, music, performance and video art, and even Japanese Zen gardening get a mention.

Despite my reservations, I think this is a book which will encourage readers to think more widely about questions of what is or is not art; the possible relevance of an artist’s gender; and the changing social significance of an art work according to the context into which it is placed.

These are interesting as well as cheap and cheerful introductions – and they come complete with a full critical apparatus plus suggestions for further reading.

© Roy Johnson 2005

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Cynthia Freeland, Art Theory : a very short introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, pp.158. ISBN: 0192804634


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Artie Shaw: his life and music

July 25, 2009 by Roy Johnson

critical and illustrated biography – plus discography

As the handsome (and much-married) leader of a series of big bands and small groups in the 1930s and 1940s, clarinetist Artie Shaw achieved measures of fame and fortune that temporarily eclipsed those of his great rival, Benny Goodman. Shaw’s five top single recordings had sold over 65 million copies by 1965; by 1990 his total sales exceeded 100 million records. John White’s critical biographical study starts with an outline of Swing as a phenomenon of the 1930s and 1940s, then traces Shaw’s rise through countless small bands to fame as a leader in his own right. It takes in the jobbing years of the 1930s and the rise to stardom in the 1940s. And then at the height of his fame, suddenly feeling uncomfortable in the modernist phase of the 1950s, Shaw retired to Spain.

Artie Shaw: his life and musicAfter five years he returned to the USA, and made a series of come-backs, then started writing fiction. It’s lucidly written account, fully annotated and referenced, and I particularly liked the fact that White puts the life of the musician into a socio-economic context – so we see what shaped the world of a professional musician. It’s a rich antidote to the romantic approach to jazz music criticism, which tends to be based on anecdotes and uncritical enthusiasm.

The narrative is punctuated by well-documented quotations from Shaw himself and other musicians. These often reinforce the precarious life of the professional jazz musician:

‘A cop in Boston arrested our Negro driver and tossed him into the can … We left our driver in jail, the truck in the police yard, and went on to our next stand by bus.’

What emerges is portrait of a complex, thoughtful man. He was obviously intellectually ambitious; he frequently dropped out of the music business altogether to pursue other interests; and he did finally achieve a moderate success as a writer. His autobiographical The Trouble with Cinderella is worth reading despite its often pretentious style.

Shaw was good on the race issue (first white band to have a black singer – Billie Holiday) not so good on the political issue (compromising with the Committee of Un-American Activities) and his personal life – well, let’s leave that to his eight ex-wives. These included women as glamorous as Lana Turner and Ava Gardner, despite the fact that he suffered from bad breath.

After the life, the book ends with two essays – an appreciation of his style and a study of his recordings. All of this made me want to hear more , and sure enough I did, when I put on a Mel Torme recording I bought recently. There, rising between choruses from The Velvet Fog, were fluid arpeggios from the master himself. He had technique, he had taste – and amazingly enough, he survived to the age of 95. In the world of jazz, that’s quite an achievement.

© Roy Johnson 2004

artie shaw Buy the book at Amazon UK

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John White, Artie Shaw: his life and music, London: Continuum, 2004, pp.223, ISBN: 0826469159


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At Home with Books

June 17, 2009 by Roy Johnson

the libraries of book lovers and book collectors

I once lived in a twelve-room Victorian house filled from top to bottom with a book collection which represented forty years of reading, studying, and loving acquisition. Then a few years ago, a change in life style led me to auction off my libraries – the whole lot – a decision about which I have felt ambivalent ever since. This book helped to remove every last trace of that ambivalence. I now feel like cutting my own throat.

At Home with BooksIt’s a superbly illustrated tour of private libraries and book collections, showing how people have integrated books into their homes. Of course, not many of them are stuck for space: but even those people who live in flats and who have to carve out space from relatively modest surroundings are revealed as book lovers who respect books as objects and who wish to display their collections in a way which combines practicality with a love of good design.

But it’s also about a lot more than that: it covers all aspects of bibliographic enthusiasm. How to store your books so that you can get at them; how to organise your library; how to start a collection (and what to look for); how books should be bound; and even details such as bookplates, library ladders, and how the lighting of a library should be arranged.

The examples illustrated come from the homes of people whose entire lives revolve around the purchase, collection and love of books. People such as Seymour Durst whose five-storey house is devoted to books about the history of New York; Paul Getty who has his collection housed in a small castle; people such as the translator Richard Howard and the biographer John Richardson who actually live in the libraries they have created; and there are also some surprises such as the inclusion of Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards.

The one masterpiece of book storage I expected to find but didn’t was that of Sir John Soane’s house (now a museum) in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, but that is perhaps because most of the examples shown are located in the USA.

There are all sorts of beautiful oddities: a collector who recovers all his books with cream paper so that they blend in with his furniture; bookspaces arranged by interior designers such as Bill Blass and David Hicks, who has most of his book bound in red to match his trademark colour scheme.

These people take their bibliophilic really seriously. Mitchell Wolfson Jr, who lives in Miami, where the climate is inimical to book life, has both climate control and insect-free environments in his home and his museum.

The advice also includes such curiosities as how to protect books against attack by bookworms and other vermin by putting them into plastic bags and freezing them overnight; plus how to best to design private libraries, and if you are stuck for the details, where to find bookdealers, book fairs, and makers of library furnishings.

This is a beautifully produced book which will appeal to both bibliophiles and lovers of interior design. It is elegantly designed, lavishly illustrated, and it makes me realise I made a terrible mistake.

© Roy Johnson 2007

At Home with Books Buy the book at Amazon UK

At Home with Books Buy the book at Amazon US


Estelle Ellis, At Home with Books, London: Thames & Hudson, 2006, pp.248, ISBN 0500286116


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Bauhaus

June 16, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Design history: Weimar, Dessau, Berlin 1919-1933

The Bauhaus was a major landmark in the development of modernism in the early years of the last century. In concept it grew out of the German desire to form its own version of the English Arts and Crafts movement, but it quickly became influenced by constructivism and expressionism. As a movement it grew rapidly in Weimar, despite the economic recession in Germany in the 1920s – and it embraced all forms of design – typography, ceramics, furniture, architecture.

Bauhaus Its principal teachers and movers are now household names in their respective disciplines – painters Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, and Lionel Feininger; architects Walter Gropius and Mies van der Rohe; designers Joseph Albers and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. What made them different to earlier design movements was that they wished to make their products available for industrial production.

This is the first full-length study of the movement and its participants to be based on the papers of the Bauhaus archive – many of which are reproduced in this elegantly designed book which does its subject proud in terms of page layout and typographic design. Magdalene Droste traces both the artistic policies which were constantly changing as key personnel came and went, as well as the political and economic difficulties of keeping the institution afloat – most of which was achieved in its first phase by Walter Gropius.

The structure of the book follows the policies under its three directors – Gropius, Mayer, and van der Rohe on its three sites, Weimar, Dessau, and Berlin.

I hadn’t realised before that the curriculum also included drama, which produced mechanical ballet and abstract theatre which still seems quite avant garde now, eighty-odd years later. There are some wonderful pictures of the products of the institute: the first really modern furniture; stained glass, pottery, and rugs; plus some exquisite tableware by Marianne Brandt, who for me is the outstanding discovery of this collection.

brandt_02
Gropius presciently observed: “Much of what we today consider luxury will tomorrow be the norm” – and its true that looking at the (for then) ultra-modern chairs, tables, and kitchen cabinets is hardly any different to thumbing through a contemporary IKEA catalogue. Some of their designs were commercially successful, particularly their best-selling wallpaper designs, many of which are still in production today.

The Bauhaus is perhaps known best for its influence on modern architecture, and yet strangely enough that subject was not taught there until a demand for it was made by students and then implemented by Mies van der Rohe. Droste’s detailed accounts of the classes taught there and the examples of work produced make you wish you could sign up as a student.

The latter part of her story deals with the intense battles which went on between left and right-wing political forces over the future of the Bauhaus. These ended in 1933 with the victory of the Nazis and the closure of the institution.

If there is a weakness in this scholarly piece of work, it’s that the story is not taken beyond there. For we know that many of the principal figures involved emigrated to America and continued their work in the New World . But you have to stop somewhere, and any shortfall is made up for by the quality of the illustrations,

I spotted this book in a display on modernism at Waterstone’s, selected it as the best on offer, and was amazed when I saw the price. It’s another in the astonishingly cheap and high quality publications from Taschen

© Roy Johnson 2007

Bauhaus Buy the book at Amazon UK

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Magdalene Droste, Bauhaus, London: Taschen, 2006, pp.256, ISBN 3822821055


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Filed Under: Architecture, Design history, Graphic design, Product design Tagged With: Architecture, Bauhaus, Design, Product design

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