Arts

architecture, painting, lifestyle, music, society, theory

architecture, painting, lifestyle, music, society, theory

architecture, painting, lifestyle, music, society, theory

Dora Carrington biography

September 17, 2009 by Roy Johnson

painter, designer, bohemian, bisexual

Dora Carrington (1893-1932) was an artist and bohemian who loved and was loved by both men and women. She was born Dora de Houghton Carrington in Hereford, the daughter of a Liverpool merchant. As a somewhat wilful youngster, she found her family background quite stifling, adoring her father and loathing her mother. She attended Bedford High School, which emphasized sports, music, and drawing. The teachers encouraged her drawing and her parents paid for her to attend extra art classes in the afternoons. In 1910 she won a scholarship to the Slade School of Art in London and studied there with Henry Tonks.

The Slade at that time was a centre of what we would now call radical chic. She embraced the bohemian opportunity it offered – going to live in Gordon Square in Bloomsbury, and immediately becoming entangled in romantic liaisons with fellow painters Paul and John Nash, Christopher (‘Chips’) Nevinson, and Mark Gertler, who had a very strong influence on this first phase of her life as an artist.

She also teamed up with fellow artists Dorothy Brett and Barbara Bagenal, and they started a new fashion at the school by cutting their hair into the shape of pudding-basins and wearing plain, deeply unfashionable clothes. They were called the ‘crop heads’. She did well at the Slade, winning several prizes and moving quickly through the courses. Despite her bohemianism however, her style of painting and drawing was firmly traditional, and it fitted with the aesthetic of the Slade at that time.

She was unaffected by the craze for Post-Impressionism which followed Roger Fry‘s famous 1910 exhibition at the Grafton Galleries which Virginia Woolf claimed changed human nature that year. Her personal life was dominated by the tempestuous relationship she conducted with Gertler and Nevinson which resulted in a form of unhappiness for all concerned. Although she behaved in a provocative manner, she refused to choose between them, or to have a sexual relationship with either of them.

Gertler introduced her to the society hostess Lady Ottoline Morrell, and thus into the Bloomsbury Group. In 1914 she met D.H. Lawrence and David Garnett, then joined Roger Fry’s new artists’ co-operative, the Omega Workshops, where was moderately successful in her decorative art work. It was while visiting Morrell at Garsington Manor in 1915 that Carrington made a connection that was to change the rest of her life.

She was introduced to the writer Lytton Strachey (who was in love with Mark Gertler at the time). Gertler felt that since Strachey was a confirmed homosexual, he could safely encourage their friendship. When Strachey made a sexual pass at her, she retaliated by going to his room at night with the intention of cutting off his long red beard. He awoke on her approach, and she immediately fell in love with him. It was a love that would last for the rest of her life and would even cause her to follow him from life into death.

Possessed of a remarkable personal fascination, she seemed to cast a spell on those around her. She figures in a number of novels, among them D.H. Lawrence‘s Women in Love (as Minette Darrington); Wyndham Lewis’ The Apes of God (as Betty Blythe); Rosamund Lehmann’s The Weather in the Streets (as Anna Corey); and Aldous Huxley’s Chrome Yellow (as Mary Bracegirdle). However, Carrington’s behaviour was viewed rather critically by another regular visitor to Garsington – D.H.Lawrence:

“She was always hating men, hating all active maleness in a man. She wanted passive maleness.”

She was not well known as a painter during her lifetime as she painted only for her own pleasure, did not sign her works, and rarely exhibited them. She painted and made woodcuts for the Hogarth Press, which was founded by Leonard Woolf as a therapeutic exercise for his wife Virginia.

Although she had kept Gertler at bay for five years, she gave herself to Strachey from the outset – then ended up having a sexual relationship with both men at the same time, even though Strachey was really a homosexual. But in 1917 Carrington ended her relationship with Gertler, and went to live with Strachey in a rented mill house.

Carrington’s father died in 1918 leaving her a small inheritance that allowed her to feel more independent. The following year she met Ralph Partridge, an Oxford friend of her younger brother Noel, who assisted Leonard Woolf at the Hogarth Press. Both Carrington and Lytton Strachey fell in love with Partridge, who accepted that she would not give up her platonic relationship or living arrangements with Strachey. She married Partridge in 1921, and Strachey with characteristic generosity paid for their wedding. All three of them went on the honeymoon to Venice. Strachey wrily observed:

“everything is at sixes and sevens – ladies in love with buggers and buggers in love with womanisers, and the price of coal going up too. Where will it all end?”

However, this somewhat unusual domestic arrangement seemed to work for all three parties. Carrington divided her time between looking after Strachey and her own art work. She painted on almost any medium she could find including glass, tiles, pub signs, and the walls of friends’ homes. Meanwhile, she had an affair with Gerald Brenan, who was an old army friend of Ralph Partridge.

Brenan had moved to southern Spain, where the three of them visited him (a visit he describes in South from Granada). Following this she developed a lengthy correspondence with him. The affair lasted for years, and it was painful for both of them – particularly Brenan. In 1923 she met Henrietta Bingham, the daughter of the American Ambassador to the Court of St. James. Carrington actively pursued Henrietta and they subsequently became lovers. The relationship was also another ménage à trois, since Henrietta had previously been Strachey’s lover.

Yes – that’s Dora Carrington

The following year Strachey purchased the lease to Ham Spray House near Hungerford in Wiltshire. Carrington, Strachey, and Partridge lived there from 1924 until 1932. Her role there was to take care of the domestic chores, care for Strachey, and decorate the house. Her decision is ironic given her early rebellion against traditional roles for women in her day.

The decision might have also robbed her of time for her own art, though by her own account she was only happy when domestically settled. During 1925, Carrington met Julia Strachey, Lytton’s niece and a novelist who had once been a Parisian model and an art student at the Slade. Julia frequently visited Ham Spray, and though she was married to Stephen Tomlin, she briefly became another of Carrington’s lovers.

In 1926 Ralph Partridge started an affair with Frances Marshall, and went to live with her in London. This more or less (but not formally) ended his marriage to Carrington, although he continued to visit her most weekends.

In 1928 Carrington met Bernard (‘Beakus’) Penrose, a friend of Partridge’s and the younger brother of the artist Roland Penrose. She experienced renewed creativity while she had an affair with him, and collaborated with him on the making of three films. However, he wanted Carrington to make an exclusive commitment to him, a demand she refused because she could not end her relationship with Strachey. The affair, her last one with a man, ended badly when Carrington became pregnant and chose to have an abortion.

In November 1931 Strachey became violently ill and in late December he took a turn for the worse. Doctors were unable to correctly diagnose the problem, and in fact he had stomach cancer. Carrington attempted suicide by shutting herself in the garage with the car running, but Partridge rescued her and she recovered enough to spend the last few days of Strachey’s life taking her turn nursing him.

He died in January after seventeen years of living with her. She became depressed, borrowed a gun from a neighbour, and shot herself. She was found before she died and Ralph Partridge, Frances Marshall, and David Garnett arrived at Ham Spray House in time to say good-bye. She was just short of her thirty-ninth birthday.

Bloomsbury Group – web links

Hogarth Press first editions
Annotated gallery of original first edition book jacket covers from the Hogarth Press, featuring designs by Vanessa Bell, Roger Fry, and others.

The Omega Workshops
A brief history of Roger Fry’s experimental Omega Workshops, which had a lasting influence on interior design in post First World War Britain.

The Bloomsbury Group and War
An essay on the largely pacifist and internationalist stance taken by Bloomsbury Group members towards the First World War.

Tate Gallery Archive Journeys: Bloomsbury
Mini web site featuring photos, paintings, a timeline, sub-sections on the Omega Workshops, Roger Fry, and Duncan Grant, and biographical notes.

Bloomsbury: Books, Art and Design
Exhibition of paintings, designs, and ceramics at Toronto University featuring Hogarth Press, Vanessa Bell, Dora Carrington, Quentin Bell, and Stephen Tomlin.

Blogging Woolf
A rich enthusiast site featuring news of events, exhibitions, new book reviews, relevant links, study resources, and anything related to Bloomsbury and Virginia Woolf

Hyper-Concordance to Virginia Woolf
Search the texts of all Woolf’s major works, and track down phrases, quotes, and even individual words in their original context.

A Mrs Dalloway Walk in London
An annotated description of Clarissa Dalloway’s walk from Westminster to Regent’s Park, with historical updates and a bibliography.

Women’s History Walk in Bloomsbury
Annotated tour of literary and political homes in Bloomsbury, including Gordon Square, University College, Bedford Square, Doughty Street, and Tavistock Square.

Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain
News of events, regular bulletins, study materials, publications, and related links. Largely the work of Virginia Woolf specialist Stuart N. Clarke.

BBC Audio Essay – A Eulogy to Words
A charming sound recording of a BBC radio talk broadcast in 1937 – accompanied by a slideshow of photographs of Virginia Woolf.

A Family Photograph Albumn
Leslie Stephens’ collection of family photographs which became known as the Mausoleum Book, collected at Smith College – Massachusetts.

Bloomsbury at Duke University
A collection of book jacket covers, Fry’s Twelve Woodcuts, Strachey’s ‘Elizabeth and Essex’.

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Twentieth century literature

Duncan Grant & the Bloomsbury Group

July 22, 2009 by Roy Johnson

richly illustrated biography and social study

Duncan Grant came from a privileged upper class family in Scotland where he spent childhood holidays with his cousins the Stracheys (including Lytton Strachey who later became his lover) amidst a family whose eccentric behaviour reads like the events of a PG Wodehouse story. He went to Rugby School with Rupert Brooke and then lived with Lytton Strachey at Lancaster Gate. Duncan Grant and the Bloomsbury Group concentrates on his life and work amidst this illustrious collection of aesthetes.

Douglas Turnbaugh’s narrative weaves in an out of his many affaires as a young man – Strachey, Arthur Hobhouse, John Maynard Keynes – but also emphasises his hard work in trying to become a successful artist, studying the old masters, copying them, and attending art schools in London and Paris. Grant’s life merged with that of the Bloomsbury set when he took up residence with the Stephens in Gordon Square. He and Keynes lived on the ground floor; Adrian Stephen on the first floor; Virginia Woolf on the second; and Leonard Woolf on the top floor.

He joined the Omega workshop which was organised by Roger Fry, subsequently replacing him as Vanessa Bell’s lover – despite the fact that he was her brother’s lover at the time. Then during the war he was like most of the Bloomsberries a conscientious objector. He became the father of Vanessa Bell’s daughter Angelica, who was passed off as the daughter of Clive Bell – to whom Vanessa was still married.

In the 1920s Vanessa learned to tolerate his affairs with a succession of younger men. In fact the whole family became involved in this sexual ambiguity when Julian Bell, Vanessa’s son, studying at Cambridge, began sleeping with Anthony Blunt – who later turned out to be simultaneously Keeper of the Queen’s pictures and a Soviet spy.

The cruelty of concealing the true identity of Angelica Bell’s father came home to roost in the late 1930s when she discovered the truth, and reacted to it by marrying another of her father’s ex-lover, David Garnett – which caused a rift in the family. [She gives her own account of these events, plus a picture of her Bloomsbury childhood, in Deceived with Kindness.]

In 1946, at the age of 60, he met the young Paul Roche, who was to be the main love of his late life and a serious threat to Vanessa. His work in the immediate post war period was considered unfashionable, but he continued working, mainly on decorative projects and private commissions. In the 1960s and 70s however, his reputation revived and he continued painting and pursuing young men with a remarkable degree of success until his death at the age of ninety-three.

This is a rather uncritical biography, but it captures the spirit of the ages in which Duncan Grant lived quite well, and it is rich in anecdote. The book is generously illustrated with Grant’s work and portraits of the Bloomsberries, and it has a good bibliography. I bought my copy second hand on Amazon to flesh out my collection of Bloomsbury materials, and although it is a little dated it turned out to be really good value.

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Douglas Turnbaugh, Duncan Grant and the Bloomsbury group, London: Bloomsbury, 1987, pp.192, ISBN 0747501033

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El Lissitzky Design

June 26, 2010 by Roy Johnson

design , modernism, and Russian Suprematism

El Lissitzky (1890-1941) was one of the pioneers of the modernist movement in Russian art which flourished in the period 1915-1925. He was one of the most graphically radical of his era, and yet only a few years earlier he was painting rather conventional landscape paintings in the tradition of Russian realism. El Lissitzky’s earliest creative period was spent at Vitebsk working with Mark Chagall and Kasimir Malevich. With the latter he spearheaded to Suprematist movement. His geometric constructions developed from two to three dimensions and became a sort of theoretical architecture – shapes which float in space. He called the works ‘Proun’ – an invented word which means ‘Project for asserting the New’. El Lissitzky Design is an elegantly illustrated introduction to all this work.

He is best known for his propaganda painting ‘Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge’ of 1919 – a work which very typically for its time was geometric in form, non-representational, and included typographical elements in the same style as his contemporaries Alexander Rodchenko and Malevich. At the same time he also started producing abstract constructions in two and three dimensions which were (like Rodchenko’s) geometrically based, but more mature and developed than any works of this kind that had emerged up to this date.

His finest work seems to have been produced in an amazing creative outburst between 1917 and 1925 – just at the point where unfettered Russian modernist art theory was taking off alongside the political revolution in its positive and expansive phase.

When El Lissitzky crossed the line between art and work after 1917, he became an international social activist promoting a political message. Like the Russian Constructivists that he admired, he sought to use his creative energy to help design a new social structure in which the new engineer-architect-artist could erase old boundaries.

El Lissitzky was fortunate to be at his creative peak at a time when foreign travel was still possible in the USSR. He took exhibitions to Germany and mixed with other modernists such as Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Kurt Schwitters. He had connection with the De Stijl group in Holland, and he taught at the Bahaus.

But it’s amazing to realise in how short a creative lifespan artists like El Lissitzky (and Rodchenko) had when they exerted such a powerful influence on the modernist movement. The images, paintings, typography, and ‘designs for projects’ illustrated in this collection are almost all from the 1920s. By the following decade El Lissitzky had become little more than an exhibition organiser. He was working for the State – but by the 1930s the dead hand of totalitarian control had stifled all originality from the arts, and his interesting designs for the Kremlin were replaced by the sort of drab architecture that became the norm under Stalin.

He lived until 1943, but there is very little that he produced after the mid 1920s that stands up to any degree of scrutiny today. What he produced before then was awe inspiring – and remains so to this day.

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John Milner, El Lissitzky – Design, Suffolk: Antique Collectors Club, 2009, pp.96, ISBN: 185149619X

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Eric Gill

August 29, 2015 by Roy Johnson

artist, engraver, typographist, stone carver, and more

Eric Gill (1882-1930) was a sculptor, a typographist, a wood engraver, and an influential artist-craftsman in the early years of the twentieth century. He is probably best known for his typeface Gill Sans which became ubiquitous from the 1920s onwards, but he was also famous in his own day for his radical views and eccentric appearance.. He took a highly moralistic, quasi- religious attitude to his work in art, but he has become the subject of bemused attention in recent years because of revelations about bizarre practices in his sexual life.

Early years

He was born in Brighton in 1882, the second child of thirteen to a clergyman with a family background of missionary ‘work’ in the South Seas. The cultural atmosphere of Gill’s childhood was a combination of evangelical fervour and what became known as Muscular Christianity. He had a fairly undistinguished education, but he did meet a fellow day boy at school who introduced him to woodworking tools.

The even tenor of his youth was interrupted by the death of his favourite sister Cicely and his father’s conversion to Anglicanism and the family’s subsequent move to Chichester. More importantly for his future development, he discovered what he thought of as ‘the mystical power of the phallus’.

He enrolled at Chichester Art School and started drawing buildings in the town. The cathedral there played a big part in his personal life. It also introduced him to his first serious love affair – with Ethel Moore, the sacristan’s daughter whom he later married. But in 1900 he felt he had outgrown the town and set off to London to find his profession.

Apprenticeship

He entered a practice of church architects as a trainee, but his real intellectual development took flight when he enrolled at the Central School of Arts and Crafts and he encountered a world of radicalism, William Morris-inspired handicrafts, and the company of Edward Johnston, the calligraphist with whom he was to produce Gill Sans.

In London he also had his first sexual encounters (with prostitutes) which he characteristically related in detail to his girlfriend Ethel. By the time he was twenty-one he was sharing Johnston’s lodgings at Lincoln’s Inn Fields and participating in late night bachelor discussions on Truth, Religious Faith, and English hand-lettering. Almost by accident, he established a reputation as someone who could cut letters in stone, and commissions came to him regularly from this time onwards.

He obtained work contracts from Healds and W.H.Smith, the designs for the latter establishing what we would now call a corporate identity. His success led him to get married to Ethel, and they set up home in Battersea, where one of his first important patrons was Count Harry Kessler.

In 1905 he moved with Ethel to Hammersmith and joined a community of radical printers and craftsmen. Gill, plus his friends Johnston and Hilary Pepler were in the habit of writing letters late at night, then meeting at the local post box for the midnight collection, then carrying on their aesthetic debates until two and three o’clock in the morning.

The move left

He joined the Fabians the following year and lost no time on lecturing the Webbs and George Bernard Shaw on the inadequacy of their views on Art. He also joined in their enthusiasm for the idea of the New Woman by starting an open affair with Lillian Meacham, which his wife did her best to tolerate. What Ethel did not know was that at the same time he was also ‘fornicating’ with their domestic help Lizzie.

In 1908 the family moved again to Ditchling, a country village near Lewes in Sussex. Here he advocated a life of rural simplicity – whilst spending much of his working week in London where he had kept on the flat at Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Artistically, he added two skills to his repertoire – wood engraving and sculpture in stone. In London he was mixing with Jacob Epstein, Roger Fry, Ottoline Morrell, and other fringe Bloomsbury Group figures. He also came under the influence of Ananda Coomaraswamy, an Indian aesthete. When he produced an erotic carving of a man and woman copulating (bizarrely entitled Votes for Women) it was bought by Maynard Keynes for five pounds.

Family fun

Around this time Gill began incestuous relationships with his sisters Angela and Gladys, recording the fact in his diary quite casually, with no recognition at all that he was breaking a social taboo. What is even more amazing is the fact that he maintained these relationships throughout the remainder of his adult life.

At the same time he was going through a religious conversion – rather surprisingly to Roman Catholicism. He and his wife were received into the church in Brighton, she changed her name to Mary, and they celebrated the event by having Leonard and Virginia Woolf as house guests for the weekend.

They moved to another house on the outskirts of Ditchling, and he was joined in the area by his old Hammersmith colleagues Johnston and Pepler. He cultivated a Spartan, almost medieval close-to-the-soil existence, and when the war came he more or less ignored it.

Religion

He also threw himself enthusiastically into the rituals and beliefs of the Dominican order of the church, and took to wearing ecclesiastical garments, including the belt of chastity, which he wore with no apparent sense of irony. The guild that he formed with Pepler took itself very seriously and issued propaganda leaflets arguing against birth control and the use of Bird’s Custard Powder.

Ditchling became famous as a place for spiritual retreat, and Gill was celebrated as its presiding religious genius. But beneath the homespun cassock and the stonemason’s paper toque, he had started having sex with his own daughters. He recorded the details of his ‘experiments’ in his diaries, admitted misgivings to his religious confessors, and rationalised his behaviour with a new theory of phallic ‘Godliness’.

In 1924 he felt oppressed by the public attention he had generated at Ditchling and moved to an abandoned abbey in the Welsh Black Mountains. The move resulted in him turning his attention back to engraving and typography. He became the principal designer and illustrator for Robert Gibbings’ Golden Cockerel Press, whose publications now seem the most distinguished of between-the-wars private presses. The relationship with Gibbings was particularly warm – close enough to include weekend threesomes in Berkshire with the publisher and his wife Moira whilst his wife Mary kept the monastic abbey going in the Black Mountains.

Readers who may be thinking there was something homo-erotic (or polymorphous perverse) in all these shenanigans will be confirmed in their suspicions when he records his impressions (and celebrations) of the male member in his diaries::

A man’s penis and balls are very beautiful things and the power to see this beauty is not confined to the opposite sex. The shape of the head of a man’s erect penis is very excellent in the mouth. There is no doubt about this. I have often wondered – now I know.

When he returned to the abbey he busied himself showing his new secretary Elizabeth Bill slides of semen under the microscope and inviting her to measure the size of his own beautiful penis before demonstrating it at work on her. Elizabeth had an ageing fiance, but she also had money, and when she bought a villa in the Basque country Gill was very happy to go and live there.

He was also taken up by Stanley Morison, adviser to the Monotype Corporation, and the typefaces he designed for him – Perpetua (1925), Gill Sans (1927), and Solus (1929) – are probably his greatest claim to fame as a designer. Doing so gave him the urge to move on once again, so he uprooted his entire household from Wales and went to live on an estate called Pigotts, near High Wycombe.

Animal farm

There he had a sculpture workshop, an art studio, and a printing press all in their own buildings. At a private level he started an affair with Beatrice Warde, the glamorous American typographist who was the mistress of his champion (and employer) Stanley Morison. Then suddenly in 1930 he had a mysterious seizure and lost his memory. It took him quite some time to recover, but when back to normal he found new ways of amusing himself. He started having sex with the family dog. This is a man who celebrated holy mass twice a day at an altar in his own home.

But the medical interlude in no way diminished his creative energies. In the early 1930s he composed his famous Joanna typeface and he completed his public commission Prospero and Ariel over the entrance to BBC at Langham Place. It is generally thought that these large scale public carvings were not as successful as his smaller, more domestic works, and he has also been criticised for spreading his talents across so many varied forms of visual art.

As commissions proliferated, so he became more famous at a Daily Express level. People wanted to know if he wore underpants beneath his stonemason’s smock. Domestically he enlarged his entourage by moving his latest mistress May Reeves into a caravan on the site at Pigotts. This gave him the convenience of sex with May and his wife (sometimes on the same night) without as it were leaving the premises.

In the later years of his life two changes came over him, and these were typically contradictory. First of all he became far more bourgeois – accepting physical comforts, employing a chauffeur, installing a black marble bath. But at the same time he became more politically radical, and espoused many of the left wing causes of the late 1930s – including workers control and support for the Republicans in Spain.

He became increasingly frail in the latter years of his life (though he was only in his late fifties) yet he embarked on two large scale projects which consumed all his energies. The first was his debut as an architect. He designed and supervised the building of a simple church in Norfolk in which he radically placed the altar in the centre of the building. The second project was a new and extra intense affair with Daisy Hawkins, a nineteen year old servant at Pigotts. She was unusually attractive, and he both made drawings of her and had sex with her on almost a daily basis for nearly two years.

Not surprisingly, this did not go down well with his two other sexual partners – his wife (in the house) and May Reeves (in the caravan). There was eventually a showdown and Daisy was exiled to Capel in Wales. But Gill simply followed here there, pursuing her from one room to another for sexual couplings, the locations of which were all systematically recorded in his diaries. But this late satyriasis was the last gasp of an exhausted figure. In 1940 he suffered from a number of debilitating ailments and was then diagnosed with cancer of the lung. It was that which killed him – at the age of only fifty eight.

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Fiona MacCarthy, Eric Gill, London: Faber and Faber, 2003. pp.416, ISBN: 0571143024

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Escaping the Delta

July 22, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues

Escaping the Delta isn’t a conventional biography of Robert Johnson, the most influential blues player ever, but a critical study of the blues itself as a social and musical phenomenon. It takes Johnson as a central, crucial figure and looks at the musical traditions out of which he sprang, looks at his recorded legacy in detail, then examines the manner in which his influence spread following his tragically early death. Elijah Wald takes the somewhat controversial view that the early blues players were simply playing what was for them popular music.

“No one involved in the blues world was calling this music art. It was working-class pop music, and its purveyors were looking for immediate sales, with no expectation that their songs would be remembered once the blues vogue had passed.” He also poses difficult questions such as why Robert Johnson was ignored by the core black audience of his time yet is now celebrated as the greatest figure in blues history.

Wald is immensely well-informed on the social, historical, and musical background of his topic. All his claims about the relative popularity of musicians is backed up by statistics of the recordings they made, their record sales (where known), and even the most-played records on jukeboxes. Every page is littered with the names of blues musicians – men and women whose work he obviously knows inside out.

The book is structured in three parts – the first is a contextualisation of blues music in the USA in the years 1900-1930; the second is his account of the life of Robert Johnson and an analysis of his recorded legacy; and the third is his socio-musical account of what happened to the blues after his death.

He argues that commentators have persistently ignored the sophistication of black musicians, and failed to acknowledge that the blues might be only one of a variety of styles in which they played, depending on the occasion.

White urbanites, for obvious reasons, are fascinated by a creation myth in which genius blossomed, wild and untamed, from the delta mud, and are less interested in the unromantic picture of Muddy Waters sitting by the radio listening to Fats Waller, or a sharecropper singing Broadway show tunes as he followed his mule along the levee.

When he comes to Robert Johnson, the romantic, tempestuous life is sketched out in a single chapter; but this is followed by three devoted to a examination of Johnson’s complete oeuvre – a couple of dozen songs recorded at two sessions in 1936. He shows in fine detail where Johnson was following the blues tradition and where he was doing something new.

Following Johnson’s death in 1938, Wald then traces how the blues morphed into rhythm and blues, rock and roll, and soul music in the post war period. The torch was just about kept aflame by figures such as Muddy Waters. But by 1960 this flame was almost on the point of being extinguished when along came white English bands such as the Beatles and the Rolling Stones who re-introduced the blues and its original heroes to the USA – where they had come from in the first place.

It’s a controversial claim, but as usual he backs it up with plenty of evidence – not least from figures such as Muddy Waters himself:

I thinks to myself how these white kids was sitting down and thinking and playing the blues that my black kids was bypassing. That was a hell of a thing, man, to think about.

This is a passionately and intelligently argued study which situates blues music in the social and economic world out of which it grew. But what stands clear most of all is the towering romantic figure of Robert Johnson. Reading this book makes you ache to hear his wonderful music yet again.

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Elijah Wald, Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues, New York: HarperCollins, 2005, pp.342, ISBN: 0060524278

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From Bauhaus to Our House

August 17, 2011 by Roy Johnson

cultural correctness and American designers

As a novelist, Tom Wolfe is something of a mixed blessing, but as an essayist and cultural historian he is invariably witty, entertaining, and amazingly well informed. From Bauhaus to Our House is his study which traces the influence of Bauhaus design on American architecture. His argument is that the USA (‘colonials’ as he calls them) was taken in by the revolutionary fervour and the empty slogans of the European cultural Left. It’s an essentially conservative view that claims native American design has been overwhelmed by a form of cultural correctness and a genuflection to False Gods. (His literary style is a bit infectious.)

What could be a specialist report is made hugely entertaining by his ability as a writer. He pulls out fictional narrative devices and turns of style to take you into the Bauhaus where he gives a satirical account of what it was like to be there – full of tongue-in-cheek mock approval. The weakness of his argument is that he doesn’t take into account the disconnect between the theoretical arguments of artists and the work they produce. Painters, designers, and even architects are well known for making extravagant claims which are not substantiated in their work.

But Wolfe is well aware of the second part of this conundrum – and he pours ladle upon ladle of withering observation onto contradictions such as Mies van der Rohe’s claims to be designing for ‘workers’ – when he was producing the Barcelona chair which only rich patrons could afford.

Every Sunday, in its design section, The New York Times Magazine ran a picture of the same sort of apartment The walls were always pure white and free of moldings, casings, baseboards, and all the rest. In the living room there were about 17,000 watts’ worth of R-40 spotlights encased in white canisters suspended from the ceiling in what is known as track lighting. There was always a set of bentwood chairs, blessed by Corbusier, which no one ever sat in, because they caught you in the back like a karate chop

It’s certainly true that most of the Bauhaus pioneers emigrated to the USA and found influential positions in universities. Wolfe sees this as a baleful influence which squeezed out native talent. The heroes of his account are mavericks Edward Durrell Stone and Frank Lloyd Wright, and the villains are those who maintained the line of architectural orthodoxy – such as Philip Johnson, Louis Kahn, and Robert Venturi.

In fact he goes on to argue that the dead hand of university-based modernism and academic theory also affected the other arts such as painting, music, and literature. His essay also becomes a critique of the obscurantism of structuralist and deconstructionist theory that plagued cultural debate in the 1980s and 1990s (and still has not been dispersed today).

He’s delighted to recount the disaster stories of public housing designs influenced by Le Corbusier (another villain) – the ‘Projects’ such as the famous Pruitt-Igoe complex in St Louis which was so uninhabitable that the people it was built for voted to blow it up. (A similar fate befell the Manchester slum-clearance ‘Crescents’ in the 1990s.)

He doesn’t come to any particular conclusion, partly because these cultural battles are still raging, but he is very astute in pointing to the origins of faux modernism – chairs which are too uncomfortable to sit in (Gerrit Rietveld) room designs based on theories (Corbusier again) and buildings nobody wants to visit (the Millennium Dome).

This is a very entertaining and thought-provoking text. It’s been around for some time now, but the ideas, the history, and the arguments in it are as fresh as the day it was first published.

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Tom Wolfe, From Bauhaus to Our House, New York: Picador, 2009, pp.128, ISBN: 0312429142

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Green Architecture

July 25, 2009 by Roy Johnson

the art of architecture in an age of ecology

This is a general exploration of one of the most complex and important issues of today – how to construct a human habitat in harmony with nature. The chapters in Green Architecture include a review of twentieth-century green architecture, a review of eco-oriented shelter from Neolithic times to the present, and a survey of those practising architects who are currently seeking to change the relationship between buildings and the environment.

James Wines knows his subject inside-out, and he is as committed to the idea of socially responsible architecture as his parallels in product design – Viktor Papanek and Donald Norman. Like them he refuses to be taken in by design which looks good, but which doesn’t work. In fact his study is something of a critique of much modern architecture, with its modish adherence to ‘vast expanses of plate glass and cantilevered, tilted, or skewed steel trusses’

There’s a marvelous chapter on buildings which have been deliberately conceived to blend in with the surrounding terrain – houses which insert themselves into hillsides, with grass roofs and barely detectable doorways.

I was interested to note that he dug out lots of designs from the early twentieth century which we would now call ‘futuristic’ – concepts for cityscapes crafted in the 1920s by designers such as Chernikhov, Sant’ Ella, or even designed and built by people such as Gerrit Rietveld in 1924.

Le Corbusier and his industry-inspired idea of ‘the house as a machine for living in’ comes for a great deal of justified criticism, and he is happy to quote Le Corbusier’s late-in-life mea culpa on the dust jacket: “Life is right, and the architect is wrong”.

His heroes are Frank Lloyd Right, Lewis Mumford, and Rachel Carson – all supporters of ecology long before the term became fashionable.

He’s also a great fan of the natural buildings fashioned from mud and home-made bricks which we admire in Africa and the middle East. Yet he’s not a dewy-eyed sentimentalist, admitting that these places were constructed that way simply because the original builders simply didn’t have access to any other materials.

This is a book which was published ahead of its time, and whose day has now come. It’s a study of architecture on ecological principles – buildings which blend sympathetically with their environmental context. More than that, they also use materials and focus their design principles on the basis of using as few as possible of the earth’s resources.

Don’t be misled by the low price. This is a serious study, and a beautifully illustrated production.

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James Wines, Green Architecture, London: Taschen, 2000, pp.240, ISBN: 3822863033

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Hallelujah Junction

May 18, 2009 by Roy Johnson

John Adams’ personal biography and musical Odyssey

John Adams is probably the best-known American composer of classical music alive today. His operas Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer have played to audiences all over the world, and his orchestral sketch Short Ride in a Fast Machine is such a favourite concert opener that you hear it on the radio almost every day in some setting or other. A post-war baby of musical parents, he was raised on the east coast in New England, and after a childhood as a clarinetist of some distinction he moved to study at Harvard. There he seemed destined for a life as an academic composer. But two things seemed to have worked against this: an adventurous, rebellious spirit, and a love of popular American culture, which as he matured in the 1960s included imported English pop music, dance bands (in which his father played) and television. All of these cultural influences have been reflected in his later work.

Rejecting the conventional route to success, he took another which led him to the west coast, where after a bout of proletarian enthusiasm he gave up the 48 hour week of a warehouse worker to take up a teaching post at the Conservatory of Music in San Francisco. There he threw himself into the cultural experimentalism which was then in vogue. This included the upsurge of jazz and blues music, and the American literary cult of Jack Kerouac, the Beat poets, William Burroughs, and of course drugs of all kinds.

He stuck with the experimental music and the dafter tendencies of modernism for quite some time. I was quite surprised how respectful he is to John Cage, who always strikes me as completely bogus. But he’s very generous in his appreciation of his fellow composers and contemporaries. Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Terry Riley, and Ingram Marshall are all given warm encomiums. There are also, en passant positive sketches of artists such as Dawn Upshaw, Kent Ngano, Peter Sellers, and Conlan Nancarrow.

Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, a work as perfect in its own genre as any that Mozart composed in his, was the product of a supremely confident twenty-four year old who got everything right in one stroke. Its signature motif, the ‘blue note’ flattened seventh, is a rendering on the piano of the keening style of singing from the Negro South. Gershwin threads that motto into a harmonic web of delicious stepwise modulations that take every advantage of the discoveries from fifty or even sixty years earlier. But here, the mood is New World, high energy, with a jubilant lyricism that gives the impression of an irresistible spontaneity. In the hands of Gershwin, the ambiguity and restlessness of those potent Romantic chords is reborn to a new life, not morbidly self-aware and shaded toward the dark end of the emotional spectrum, but full of fresh optimism, busy and brash and thoroughly at ease with itself.

But gradually he began to find his own voice and the techniques which would help him to articulate it. This development was assisted by his moment-of-truth decision to leave atonality behind and embrace tonal harmony as the rockbed for musical expression. It was also accompanied by his determination to stick by his enthusiasm for electronic musical instruments.

Anyone interested in the development of synthesisers, modulators, and multi-track recorders, right up to the computer-programmed methods of sound generation which are now possible will be delighted by the enthusiastic joy in all these gadgets and gizmos that he expresses. At times it’s like reading Popular Mechanics.

He’s also quite prepared to share the downsides of a composer’s life: productions which are badly mauled by critics and audience alike; fallow periods and creative blocks; the political controversies in which he becomes involved because of the contemporary nature of his subject matter.

The central portions of the book describe the genesis and execution of his large scale works – the Harmonielehre, Nixon in China, and The Death of Klinghoffer, yet strangely enough, when it comes to accounts of his more recent works he goes into great detail concerning the religious ideas in El Nino and the scientific and political history behind Doctor Atomic but he says very little about the musical ideas in either opera.

He’s a widely read and cultivated man with a social conscience, and he’s prepared to discuss culture and ideas at a serious level. Just occasionally he skirts dangerously close to a note of self-importance, but this is offset by his willingness to discuss his obvious artistic failures, such as the premiere of The Dharma at Big Sur and his song cycle, the clumsily titled I was Looking at the Ceiling, and Then I Saw the Sky.

Although it’s a personal record, this is an important book on contemporary American classical music – which sits as a useful companion piece to Alex Ross’s recent The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century. John Adams’ official web site is at www.earbox.com

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John Adams, Hallelujah Junction: Composing an American Life, London: Faber, 2008, pp.340, ISBN: 0571231152

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Henri Gaudier-Brzeska

January 4, 2018 by Roy Johnson

young, modernist, Vorticist sculptor

Henri Gaudier-Brzeska (1891-1915) was one of the most dynamic and innovative sculptors of the modernist period. He was French, but produced his most important works in England in an incredibly short space of time – between 1911 and 1915.

Henri Gaudier-Brzeska

He was born Henri Gaudier near Orleans in France – a talented schoolboy who won scholarships that took him to London and University College, Bristol. He was supposed to be engaged with business studies, but spent his time sketching antiques in the Bristol Museum. After this he travelled to Nuremberg, Munich, then Paris, where he met Sophie Brzeska in a library.

This was a decisive turning point in his life. She was Polish, had literary aspirations, and was twice his age. They formed an immediate bond that was to last until the end of his tragically short life – and hers, since she died soon afterwards. Yet it was not a conventional romantic and sexual attachment – more of a mother and son relationship..

They were both in ill health and desperately poor. However, when they travelled into the countryside as an economy measure, even the innocent visits of a young single man to an unmarried woman staying in a rented house were enough to enrage the prurient provincial farmers, who called in the police.

Gaudier became eligible for military service, but passionately wished to avoid it. He described the French as ‘slaughterers of the Arabs’. So they moved to London. At this point they unofficially joined their surnames to form the compound Gaudier-Brzeska as a sign of their commitment to each other.

They plunged into further poverty and ill health. He made a pittance at various menial office jobs. She paid for his visits to prostitutes at five shillings a time – since they had been recommended by a doctor as conducive to his well-being.

She made efforts to establish an independent existence by seeking work, and he started to learn Polish. He was sketching whenever he had the chance, but amazingly he had still produced no sculptures, even though he only had a few years left to live. When Sophie found temporary work as a governess in Felixstowe he wrote enormously long letters (addressed to ‘Adorable Maman’) explaining his ideas about art and reproaching her for having different opinions.

In 1911 they set up home together in Chelsea. She bought a bug-infested bed: he slept in a deck chair. There is conflicting evidence about the exact nature of their relationship. She claimed they were like brother and sister: he claimed they were not. But he also confessed that he often lied.

Henri wrote to the author of an article in the English Review which led to his selling some of his posters. He also began to model in clay and secured his first poorly paid commissions. He was also introduced to Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murry, both of whom were rather irritated by Sophie. Henri contributed sketches to their magazine Rhythm but the relationship eventually foundered on incompatible personalities.

Bird Swallowing a Fish 1913

When Sophie went to work in Bromsgrove it gave him more free time for his art work, but they also spent a lot of time having lovers’ tiffs via letter. He worked on paintings, drawings, plaster busts, and a scheme for producing painted tiles. All of this was what we would now call cottage industry, and the most he was ever paid for a single work was twenty pounds.

It is interesting to note that his most successful commissions around that time were for portrait plaster busts. His fellow immigrant Jacob Epstein was doing the same thing at the same time – and the two men did eventually meet. At one point he was even touting for the job of making decorative mascots on motor car radiators.

In 1913 he established himself in a leaky and cold artist’s studio in the Fulham Road and started working with stone blocks. He made friendships with Frank Harris (author of the notorious My Life and Loves, and Wyndham Lewis, with whose coterie he founded the Vorticist movement.

Living the full Bohemian life in London, it is not surprising that he eventually met Nina Hamnett, who introduced him to Roger Fry. He also sold two statues to Ezra Pound. Yet despite these early signs of success, it was Sophie’s personal savings that that put a roof over their heads and food on the table.

In 1914 when war broke out he rather surprisingly returned to France, where he was immediately jailed for twenty years as a deserter. He managed to escape and return to London. Yet later he went back to France again, serving on the front line, where he was promoted to corporal and then sergeant in recognition of his bravery. In 1915 he was killed during an attack on Neuville Saint Vaast. He was just twenty-four years old.

Henri Gaudier-Brzeska biography – But the book at Amazon UK

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Hip Hotels: New York

July 25, 2009 by Roy Johnson

glamorous, modern, and fashionable locations

Who would have thought that books on architecture and interior design would suddenly become fashionable. But that’s what’s happened with this Hip Hotels series, which made a big impact when it first appeared a couple of years ago. What are Hip Hotels? Well, Herbert Ypma defines them as Highly Individual Places, but I think it’s a bit more than that – because even traditional hotels can be individual. The selection he shows (and he claims to have stayed in them) are all very modern, usually minimalist, and the emphasis throughout is that they are located in very fashionable parts of the city – even if that means you’re in the Meatpacking District.

But he covers other parts of the city too. His survey goes from the Lower East to the Upper West Side, with Tribeca, SoHo, Midtown, and Times Square in between. The common features of most examples are dark brown modernist furniture, exposed brick or granite, soft downlighting, stainless steel bathroom fittings, no pictures, decorations, or knickknacks of any kind, a lot of square, black leather chairs and settees, and of course some stupendous views over the city’s roofscapes.

You get an eight page spread on each location. It goes almost without saying (these days) that the photography is of superb quality, and there are full contact and location details for each hotel – so you can phone in or log onto their web sites and book a room if you wish.

And it’s not just pretty pictures. He’s obviously well informed on the practical issues of architecture: he gives details of the planning permission, zoning regulations, and the acquisition of ‘air rights’ necessary for these largely high-rise buildings. He’s also good on the way in which the districts have changed their nature – turning from manufacturing to arts and fashion centres within a couple of generations.

These publications are normally big expensive coffee table books, but for this series they have been reduced in size to a more easily portable format. You lose some of the visual expansiveness of the originals, but Thames and Hudson call it their ‘travel format’. I suppose the idea is that you could take them along on your cultural pilgrimage. However, I should warn you, before you get too excited, that most of these places charge $300-plus minimum per night. Buy the book instead. It’s twenty-five times cheaper.

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Herbert Ypma, Hip Hotels: New York, London: Thames & Hudson, 2006, pp.192, ISBN: 0500286183

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