Arts

architecture, painting, lifestyle, music, society, theory

architecture, painting, lifestyle, music, society, theory

architecture, painting, lifestyle, music, society, theory

Larkin’s Jazz Essays and Reviews

July 14, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Jazz criticism from a major English poet

Larkin’s Jazz is a collection of record and book reviews that has been assembled to flesh out Philip Larkin’s oeuvre of writings on jazz. It also seeks to correct the idea that he was a jazz reactionary — an impression he created himself by his introduction to All What Jazz, the collection of his monthly record reviews for The Daily Telegraph. This also covers a wider time span – starting with a piece he wrote for a school magazine and going up into the early 1980s.

It’s a collection of reviews from the Guardan the Observer and elsewhere. What emerges is a rational, humane view of jazz and related topics, a sincere concern for the plight of African-Americans (who he refers to as Negroes – which was PC at the time) and of course a lustful sense of fun for the music. He writes on Count Basie, Billy Holiday, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, jazz photography, other jazz critics such as Francis Newton and LeRoi Jones. The editors Richard Palmer and John White do everything they can to reclaim the image of Larkin which has been generated by his biographies and published correspondence:

these book reviews give the lie to the charges of misogynist, racist and anti-modernist curmudgeon levelled against Larkin by politically correct critics who also revealed themselves as incapable of detecting irony or wit in the purple prose that vivifies much of his correspondence.

Whether they do that or not depends partly on how much else any reader already knows about Larkin and his – ahem, idiosyncratic views and tastes. But these pieces are certainly well worth reading in their own right. As a reviewer myself, I noticed how well-crafted the reviews are – amazingly short, yet combining an account of the book or the record, a personal opinion, and a neat sliver of readable journalism as well.

Of course much of what he has to say is about very traditional forms of jazz, and even though that’s clearly his own taste it’s not entirely his own fault. He was reviewing at a time when most print publications on the subject of jazz were rather conservative.

He admires the writing of Whitney Balliett, but sees its limitations:

in the end we are left with the impression of brilliant superficiality. Perhaps that is editorial policy: the New Yorker was always strong on polish. But the only thing you can polish is a surface.

This collection has been edited with loving care. Even the smallest items and least-known names are swaddled in supportive endnotes. It’s one for connoisseurs: devotees of jazz music, or those interested in the opinions and occasional writings of a very influential poet.

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Richard Palmer and John White (eds) Larkin’s Jazz: Essays and Reviews 1940-84, London: Continuum, 2001, pp.190, ISBN: 0826453465

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Le Corbusier

August 29, 2018 by Roy Johnson

his life, loves, and works

Le Corbusier was born Charles-Edward Jeanneret in 1887 in the Swiss Alps into a modest middle-class family with a culture of hard work, music, and exploration of the countryside at weekends. Although he was not as academically talented as his older brother Albert, he rapidly developed skills in drawing and painting.

He enrolled at the Ecole d’Art and then, without any formal training, began to practise architecture, designing his first house at the age of seventeen. Influenced by his reading of Ruskin, he travelled to Italy, where he was inspired by the cathedrals of Milan, Pisa, and Florence. His trip ended in Vienna, where he hoped to find work. All of these destinations at the time were within the Hapsburg Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Vienna was a disappointment: ‘if it weren’t for the music, one would commit suicide’. Despite protests from his family and teacher, he then moved to Paris in 1908. There he encountered something that was to change his life – reinforced concrete. He worked in an architect’s office in the afternoon and continued his own self-generated curriculum of study in the museums and art galleries each morning.

Despite this early success he suddenly decided to go to Germany. There he had the good fortune to be commissioned to write a study on contemporary design developments. This resulted in travel to Frankfurt, Dusseldorf, and Weimar, and the publication of two reports. He also managed to talk his way into an internship with the Peter Behrens practice.

This was followed by a period of acute Weltschmerz from which he emerged with a desire for further travel. He sailed from Vienna down the Danube with a friend to Constantinople, then journeyed on to the monasteries of Mount Athos, which had an inspirational effect on him. As did the Parthenon, which he visited every day for almost a fortnight. He was recalled from this orgy of Mediterraneanism by the offer of a job back home.

Feeling depressed at returning to what he regarded as a provincial backwater, he nevertheless threw himself into teaching theoretical and practical design at the Ecole d’Art. This was something like a precursor to the Bauhaus. He also opened an official office as a practising architect, even though he was completely without professional qualifications.

La Maison Blanche 1912

His first major project was the design and construction of a palatial villa for his parents. The house was a triumph of modernist design, even though he almost ruined the family financially by a budget overspend. A few years later the house had to be sold off at a huge loss, which wiped out his parents’ savings.

During the First World War he designed a cheap and modular system of building to re-house homeless people. He travelled to France and met the artist Maillol, who at that time was considered the world’s leading sculptor. He continued to work on small design projects, but as the war ended he decided to make a new beginning for his life. He moved to live in Paris.

He set himself up in a studio apartment in the rue Jacob, visited prostitutes, and was at the notorious first night performance of Parade in 1917. He also entered his first major architectural competition, which was to design a large scale industrial slaughterhouse for Nevers in central France.

At a social level he befriended his neighbour, the artist Amedee Ozenfant. He also rather bizarrley established a business for the manufacture of reinforced concrete bricks. He and Ozenfant collaborated on the publication of their artistic manifesto – After Cubism – and they exhibited paintings together. At this time he regarded his commercial enterprises and design work as merely sources of income to support his ambition to be a painter.

In 1920 he changed his name from Charles-Edouard Jenneret to Le Corbusier, and together with Ozenfant launched the avant gard magazine L’Esprit Nouveau. He designed another form of modular shoebox-shaped housing called Citrohan, using concrete, steel, and glass. His objective was to make buildings of Spartan simplicity that were filled with light.

Villa Guiette 1927

He met and began to live with Yvonne Gallis, an earthy Mediterranean-style woman whom he kept more or less secret from his family. (There are unconfirmed rumours that they met in a brothel.). He built a modernist palace for the banker and art collector Raoul La Roche and in 1923 published a major series of theoretical essays as Towards a New Architecture.

A partnership with his younger cousin Pierre Jenneret flourished and they were forced to employ more and more assistants. Le Corbusier still spent his mornings painting, but from this point onwards kept this side of his life almost secret, so that it didn’t dilute his growing reputation as an architect. He complained about being exhausted by the demands of his profession, but in fact his office hours were in the afternoons between 2.00 and 5.00 pm.

His ideas were mocked by critics and the general public because his designs put functionality before all else. The house of the future was given features we now take for granted: built-in wardrobes and storage, open plan rooms, plain walls, large industrial-sized windows, and furniture which he chose from the manufacturers of hospital equipment. Yet despite the criticisms he was becoming a celebrity architect, with requests from Princess de Polignac and the writer Colette. He also designed a very successful villa for Michael Stein, the brother of the American writer Gertrude Stein.

Corbusier engaged with design at all levels of scope and size. For interiors he designed arm chairs and occasional tables; for social housing he created multi-storey residential blocks; and at city level he wanted to re-shape urban areas – to admit light and space where once there had been narrow, crowded streets. For these ambitions, and because he theorised about them, he was widely (but incorrectly) regarded as a communist.

Nevertheless he did visit Moscow in 1926, where he won a commission to design new offices for the Centrosoyuz. He felt his visit was a big success, though some of his ideas were criticised (quite intelligently) by El Lissitsky. He was also invited to South America, where he lectured on urban planning and designed a house for Victoria Ocampo – a friend of the writer Jorge Luis Borges.

He prepared his lectures in advance, then delivered them without notes, illustrating his arguments with fluidly produced diagrams and sketches whilst speaking. On the lecture tour he met the singer Josephine Baker, for whom he was to design a house in Paris. He also took the opportunity to have an affair with her during their ten day transatlantic journey back to France.

Villa Savoye 1928

In 1930 he made two decisive steps in his public life: he took out French citizenship, and he married Yvonne. Two years later he submitted his plans for the Palace of the Soviets in Moscow, confident that his ideas would be accepted by a regime that had earlier produced the forward-thinking designs of the Constructivists. What he didn’t realise was that Joseph Stalin (like other dictators) had already decreed that all architecture for the proletariat must be Greco-Roman in style. He had more success a year later with the Cite de Refuge – a purpose-built hostel for children and the homeless he built for the Salvation Army in Paris.

When he visited America for a further lecture tour he felt that the skyscrapers were too small and too close together, but he did find a new client – the socialite divorcee Tjader Harris, who also became his lover. However, he was disappointed that no grand schemes in urban projects resulted from his contact with the New World.

When war broke out in Europe he was recruited as advisor to the war ministry (with the rank of colonel). He worked on designing a modular munitions factory, but when the Germans invaded and occupied Paris he fled to Petain’s headquarters in Vichy. It was at this point that his ideas concerning ‘modernity’. ‘The machine age’, and urban planning meshed all too easily with fascist ideology, and he collaborated with people who eventually deported eighty thousand Jews from France to the death camps.

His participation with the regime was in no way passive or accidental. He actively sought the support of Petain himself, and was eventually rewarded with a post on the committee for ‘Habitation and Urbanism’ of Paris. Here he worked alongside racists, eugenicists,and people who advocated euthanasia for ‘cleansing’ the capital’s population. Plagued by bureaucratic indecision and in-fighting, the committee never achieved anything, and Corbusier ended back in Paris running a sort of private college of architecture.

When France was liberated by the Allies in 1944 (and ten thousand collaborators had been executed) Corbusier merely made himself available to the De Gaul government and ever after whitewashed his collaborationist record of the war years. He was given a dream project – to construct a huge modernist apartment block in Marseille..

L’Unite d’Habitation – roof terrace 1952

He was working on several projects simultaneously when invited to join the scheme for a new United Nations headquarters in New York. He jumped at the chance, assuming that he would be its lead architect, even though he did suggest that Alvar Aalto, Walter Gropius, and Mies van der Rohe should join the team. The American venture boosted his already supercharged reputation – and ego. It enabled him to re-establish contact with his lover Tjader Harris; and it left his wife back home sinking deeper and deeper into alcoholism.

From time to time he flew back to check on the Marseille project which was coming under criticism from local bureaucrats for what they considered its outlandish design. They objected to kitchens in the same space as dining areas – something considered revolutionary at the time. As soon as he was absent in France, other people took over his design for the UN building, which was eventually attributed to the American architect Wallace K. Harrison.

But Corbusier had compensations – notably a commission to design a new mini-city in the Colombian capital, Bogota, and a new lover in the shape of journalist Hedwig Lauber. There was also an offer to design a new government headquarters in Chandigarh, India, a project personally endorsed by its leader, Pandit Nehru. This was his dream of total urbanisation come true. He was in his element, travelling first class between three continents.

Le Cabanon 1951

Whilst he was building a city for a government, he constructed for himself a holiday home in the south of France. It was a simple and box-shaped structure that on the outside looked like a log cabin. But the interior was lined with coloured plywood, which created a modernist statement. The single room construction was even made contiguous with the local restaurant whose owner he had befriended. This provided Yvonne with company during his many absences.

His national masterpiece, L’Unite d’Habitation was finished and opened in 1952. It housed three hundred families, had built-in shops and recreational areas, and a roof garden with nursery and swimming pool. A Second version was commissioned for Nantes, and he began work on what was to become one of his signature buildings – the chapel at Ronchamps.

This was a project designed to replace a simple church that had been destroyed by German bombs during the very last days of the war. It has become famous for its stark simplicity and its bizarre roof that has been described as ‘ a mix of partially crushed sombrero, a ram’s horn, and a bell-clapper’.

Notre Dame du Haut 1955

His wife continued to neglect her health, continued drinking, and eventually died in 1957. Shortly afterward Corbusier developed a multi-media installation for the Universal Exhibition at Brussels. This involved projected films and avant gard musical scores by Edward Varese and Iannis Xenakis, who at that time was working in Corbusier’s practice as an architect.

When his mother died at the age of ninety-nine, Corbusier had lost the two women underpinning his emotional life. He soldiered on alone, supported by a plethora of public accolades. He was showered with so many honorary degrees, he started turning them down.

Yet there continued to be professional frustrations and setbacks. Two major developments in Paris and New York came to nothing. In the face of these setbacks he fought back even more cantankerously than he had done before – until he eventually died doing what he had done all his adult life – swimming in the sea at his beloved gite at Roquebrune-cap-Martin.

Since then his longer term reputation as an architectural genius has been somewhat mixed. Open any architectural or interior design magazine today and you will see that his visual style is ubiquitous. The new norm is for minimalist decoration and open plan living. But some of his ideas on urbanisation now seem to smack dangerously of social engineering – and just as a by-the-way, the roofs on many of his buildings leaked.

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Nicholas Fox Weber, Le Corbusier: A Life, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009, pp.848, ISBN: 0375410430

Leonora Carrington

October 8, 2018 by Roy Johnson

Leonora Carrington (1917-2011) was a surrealist painter and writer whose life spanned two centuries and two continents. She was born in Chorley, Lancashire to wealthy parents in textile manufacturing.
Educated by private tutors and nuns, she was a rebellious and disobedient child who was expelled from more than one school. Her father disapproved of her interest in art, but her mother encouraged her cultural ambitions.

As the daughter of an upper-class family she was expected to be a debutante, and was actually presented formally at the court of King George V. But when she continued to rebel, she was sent to study art in Florence, where she was impressed by medieval painting and architecture. On return to London she was enrolled at the Chelsea School of Art and then at the academy run by expatriate cubist painter Amedee Ozenfant.

The year 1936 was something of an annus mirabilis for the nineteen year old student. She attended the International Exhibition of Surrealism at the New Burlington Galleries, and she read Herbert Read’s influential book Surrealism. She was attracted to the blend of realism and fantasy that the new artistic movement promoted. It also allowed her to blend the human with the animal world which is one of the striking features of her work.

Shortly afterwards she met Max Ernst, the German-born leader of both the Dadaism and Surrealism movements. He was forty-seven and married, she was twenty and single. They fell in love immediately, and the following year he dissolved his marriage and took her to Paris. He introduced her to other surrealist artists such as Joan Miro and Andre Breton. Their shared interests were reflected by the presence of birds and animals in their work.

Self-portrait 1936

Following this they moved to a small town in the Ardeche region of southern France, where they supported each other in painting and sculpture. She also experimented with automatic writing, which at that time was an integral part of surrealism. It was thought possible to tap into the unconscious mind by removing the critical, censoring element from the process of composition.

However, tragedy struck their idyll with the outbreak of war. Ernst was arrested by the French government for being a ‘hostile alien’. He was later released following the intercession of friends. But when the Germans occupied France, he was arrested again, this time by the Gestapo who had him on their list of ‘degenerate artists’. He managed to escape to America with the help of Varian Fry and Peggy Guggenheim, whom he later married.

Leonora was devastated by the separation. She was forced to sell everything in France and escaped to Spain, where she suffered from paralysing anxiety attacks and delusional episodes. She was eventually hospitalised and subjected to the barbaric ‘convulsive therapy’ and anti-psychotic drug treatment that was thought necessary at that time for people with mental disorders. She was traumatised by this experience, and eventually sought refuge in the Mexican embassy in Lisbon. The whole of this ghastly period is recorded in her memoir Down Below.

She made the experience of all this distress the source of inspiration for many of her works – both in fiction and graphic art. This was not unlike her contemporary the artist Frieda Kahlo. In 1941 she married the Mexican diplomat Renato Leduc whom she had met at the embassy. Like many marriages contracted around that time, it was one of convenience, enabling them to escape Europe. They went to New York, travelled down to Mexico, and divorced two years later. She remained in Mexico City for the rest of her life.

Her life was one of domestic seclusion – although she did become something of a cultural celebrity in the capital city. She met the Franco-Russian writer Victor Serge who was also living there in exile at the time. Later she married the Hungarian photographer Emeric Weisz with whom she had two sons, Pablo and Gabriel.

In the 1940s and 1950s her work became an interesting blend of her own fantasy and surrealism, Mexican folk lore and myth, and a growing sense of what we would now call ‘women’s liberation’. She wanted to explore the relationship of women’s bodies and sexuality with their psychological experiences of erotic life, of motherhood, and of domesticity.

She was completely unknown in Europe at that time, and remained so until she was ‘discovered’ in the early twenty-first century. But she exhibited in Mexico and had a certain following in New York. She had a close relationship with the Spanish surrealist painter Remedios Varo, who also lived in Mexican exile in the same neighbourhood. They even wrote collaboratively and attended meetings held by the Russian occultists Ouspensky and Gurdjieff.

In the 1960s she collaborated with other members of the Latin-American avant-garde such as the writer Octavio Paz and the film maker Luis Bunuel. She was also honoured with a major retrospective at the Museo Nacional de Arte Moderno in Mexico City. During the latter decades of her life she turned increasingly to three-dimensional works, producing bronze sculptures of humans and animals, as well as figures that combined both. She died in Mexico City in 2011 at the age of ninety-four. Her house in the Roma district has since been turned into a museum.

The Surreal Life of Leonora Carrington – biography – Amazon UK
The Surreal Life of Leonora Carrington – biography – Amazon US

Down Below – Memoir – Amazon UK
Down Below – Memoir – Amazon US

The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington – Amazon UK
The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington – Amazon US

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Listen to This

December 21, 2010 by Roy Johnson

essays on classical and contemporary music

Listen to This is the follow up to Alex Ross’s The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century which was a huge success when it was published last year. His new book is a collection of essays which first appeared in The New Yorker where he is resident music critic. Some readers will be amazed at the wide variety of music he covers. In one sense (to use the language of record producers) he’s monetising his back catalogue, because some of the essays date from as long as nearly twenty years ago.

In the magazine and on his blog at The Rest Is Noise he makes a vigorous effort to document, expand, and proselytise on behalf of contemporary music. And I use the term ‘contemporary’ for two reasons. The first is that although much of his writing is concerned with the traditions of church, concert hall, and chamber music stretching from the early renaissance to the present day, he rejects the term ‘classical’ as inaccurate and restricting. It does not include what we now call ‘early music’ and it excludes music being written and performed by living composers. The second reason is that it also excludes music from other genres, such as jazz, experimental modernism, and rock – some of which attract far more listeners than any ‘classical’ music has ever done.

This collection seeks to redress this narrowness and imbalance by including essays on pop and contemporary art music, alongside pieces on Brahms, Schubert, and Mozart. Not that he is entirely at ease in embracing these apparently contradictory enthusiasms. In his opening essay he wrestles with this seemingly conflicting taste for classical and pop music, and it’s significant that whilst his love of traditional music is rooted in composers such as Beethoven, Mahler, and Wagner, but he can look beyond these to modern symphonic music, his taste in popular genres is far less mature and well-informed. He’s attracted to superficial pop stars, white American rock music, and even talentless wannabes such as Bjork.

He also touches in his introductory essays on a far more interesting and fundamental issue. How is it possible, he asks, to write critically and analytically about music, when it is an abstract form of expression? Because music, despite all its power to move us emotionally, doesn’t actually mean anything. How can this be true, when so many people find such a great deal of satisfaction in listening to it? This is a paradox to which he never really finds a solution.

Ross is an incredibly fluent and entertaining writer, and he can go on for several hundred words describing his reaction to Beethoven’s Eroica. But ultimately, his account of this experience comes down to what he rightly calls the ‘purple’ school of music criticism – ‘Beethoven’s Fifth symphony begins with fate knocking at the door’.

There’s an essay on Mozart in which he examines the composer’s greatness in the process of reviewing a Philips’ issue of the complete works on 180 CDs. This gives him the opportunity to spot evidence of links between dramatic situations and musical motifs in pieces written many years apart – which he offers as evidence for the notion that Mozart had these constructions wired into his inventive DNA.

He is drawn towards biographical interpretation, but has to admit that there is precious little evidence to support it. The fact is that artists can create tragic art works during happy periods of their life – and optimistic upbeat works when they’re in the middle of personal tragedies.

An essay on the pop group Radiohead is not much more than a well-written character sketch of the band members, with some festival rock atmosphere thrown in. It’s the sort of thing which does not help his cause to enlarge the scope of what he calls ‘the music’ at all. The documentary-journalistic approach is much better employed when he gives an account of classical music in contemporary China.

The same is true of his essay on Bob Dylan. There’s plenty of biographical anecdote stressing his eccentric behaviour and amazing productivity, and in-depth consideration of ambiguity in his lyrics – but very little about the music itself. The most interesting detail to emerge from what is obviously a close acquaintance with his live concerts and recorded work is that Dylan constantly reshapes his own material – adding new lyrics to songs, changing their harmonic structures, and even recycling old lyrics with new melodies. Jazz musicians do this all the time, but it is unusual in both pop and ‘classical’ music, and it strikes me as being a topic worthy of further examination.

He has what can only be called a weakness for experimentalism. [I was surprised at his taking John Cage seriously in The Rest is Noise.] Here he creates a touching portrait of John Luther Adams, giving a sympathetic account of compositions for ninety voices that last for six hours, and continuous music that is ‘composed’ by seismic readings and temperature measurements from local meteorological stations. This is music you can ‘live in’, music that never ends – which begs the question of whether it is music at all.

Naturally he is in favour of bolstering more public support for musical education and participation in the arts, but he doesn’t seem to understand that culture in any society is produced with what’s left over after the basic requirements for survival have been met. A nation with half its population living on food stamps and state benefits hasn’t got the resources to spare for violin lessons for underprivileged children – whose parents don’t have the money or the inclination to attend concerts of classical music. In other words, his heart is in the right place, but he doesn’t seem to have thought through the relationship between art and economics. Only societies with large budget surpluses can afford to subsidise nineteenth century sized orchestras.

The best essay in the collection is his most recent – a virtuoso survey of the descending base line which appears throughout western musical history in forms from the chaconne to the twelve bar blues. This manages to combine the technical analysis of music with the ‘purple’ approach to criticism, arguing that there is something fundamental in this progression which illustrates a ‘meaning’ in this seemingly most abstract of art forms. After all, it is no accident that most ‘sad’ music is written in minor keys.

He’s amazingly well informed about the world of music as a profession, and sandwiched within these essays there are some fascinating insights which could easily be expanded into articles in their own right – the history of applause at concerts for instance, or the fact that the average member of the Berlin Philharmonic is a generation younger than the Rolling Stones.

Although it lacks the continuous narrative and the intellectual rigour of The Rest is Noise this is a fascinating collection of studies that brings an infectious enthusiasm to the appreciation of music. He doesn’t solve either of his two main problems, but his exploration of the issues is inspiring and certainly promotes the urge to listen more.

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Alex Ross, Listen to This, London: Fourth Estate, 2010, pp.400, ISBN: 0007319061

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Live/Work

June 15, 2009 by Roy Johnson

working at home: living at work

Home office living isn’t new. It used to be called ‘living above the shop’. That was a vertical separation of living and working space. But many people are now doing the same thing horizontally, with a home office, split-use rooms, or garden shed workshops. Deborah Dietsch has assembled a collection projects where living and working environments have been merged, and the results prove that with imagination you can transform a house, a flat, or even an industrial site so that it becomes a very comfortable and attractive hybrid.

Her examples include the homes of architects, a painter, a photographer, a fashion designer, a dance tutor, a restaurateur, a documentary film maker, a physical trainer, even a priest marrying people out of his own home-church.

The examples are all very well photographed – but don’t just look at the pictures in this book. There are lots of excellent suggestions and topics of design theory in the text. For instance, she argues that you should plan with the future and multi-purpose use in mind. Your work annexe can easily double up as space for occasional guests, and if things go pear-shaped commercially, you might want to let off a room or even an entire floor to compensate for lost income.

One feature I found interesting is that in each case there’s a summary of what lessons can be learned from the project. These could be summarised as follows:

Don’t be afraid of colour
Find beauty in industrial details
Rentals pay the mortgage
Re-use space for different purposes
Maintain a professional atmosphere
Keep living and workspaces separate

This corresponds with my own personal philosophy from hours and hours of studying design magazines and architectural source materials – and it’s this. No matter how outlandish or peculiar a design scheme, no matter how unlike your own taste it might be – there’s always at least one thing you can take away as a positive or a good idea from somebody else’s work.

She even mentions two ideas in her introduction that I’ve done myself recently. You should create some sort of separate entrance so that clients or business visitors don’t have to traipse through your home living space; and it’s useful to have a separate table or conference arrangement so that you can arrange proper business meetings.

I can also confirm from personal experience that it’s a good idea to be near services – the post office, supermarket, restaurants, cafe bars – so that you don’t feel isolated if you are setting up as a sole trader.

Remember too that all these ideas are very green. If you live and work in the same space, you are not driving to work. Your carbon footprint is lower, and you can offset some of your expenditure against tax.

Of course, the success of such projects depends on where you currently live and the size of your budget for setting up a work environment. The budget could actually be zero – but this book will still give you plenty of ideas on how to arrange the space you’ve got to bring your life and work into some form of unified design.

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Deborah K. Dietsch, Live/Work – Working at Home, Living at Work, New York: Abrams, 2008, p.319, ISBN: 0810994003

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Living in Provence

July 19, 2009 by Roy Johnson

beautiful interiors and gardens from le midi

For anybody who knows Provence, the very names of the locations in this book seem like a musical evocation of the place: Roussillon, Eygaliers, Avignon, St Remy, Aix-en-Provence. And if you’ve been there you will know that Provence is a region drenched in warm colours, beautiful vegetation, soft contours, and rich textures – all of which are reflected in the traditional styles of the region. This photographic study of house interiors and gardens beautifully captures the magic of the place. I used to take my summer holidays there every year, and flicking through these pages made me yearn to go back to an almost heartbreaking extent.

There are all sorts of locations featured – everything from chateaux, the Grand Hotel Nord-Pinus at Arles, Paul Cézanne’s atelier in Aix, via elegant town houses, to restored villas which have been transformed into interior spaces of great beauty. Yet for all the rich glamour, there is nothing snobby about the collection. It includes old farmhouses, a hotel in Noves whose walls haven’t been decorated since the seventeenth century, and a troglodytic cave-like lean-to built into the side of a hill.

Having said that, most of these gaffs are of course more expensive than you and I could ever afford – but I have trained myself to curb envy and just pick up design tips from people who can afford to do anything. The rules which emerge here are to use restrained background colours, plus natural textures in stone, wood, and fabrics. The way to create an elegant and calming atmosphere is to remove all the clutter from overcrowded rooms, and let the eye be soothed by just one or two well-chosen pieces.

Every page is rich in images of sun-soaked patios and gardens, swimming pools, marbelled and tiled floors, period furniture, wood panelling, beautiful engravings, and rustic pieces of earthenware.

The colour photography is good, the print production values are excellent, and the commentary is is produced in English, French, and German. As publishers, Taschen don’t provide a lot of text or technical details, but in terms of value-for-money and visual interest you could not go wrong with a book like this.

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Barbara and Rene Stoeltie, Living in Provence, London: Taschen, 2005, pp.199, ISBN: 3822825271

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Maestros, Masterpieces and Madness

July 3, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Secret Life and Shameful Death of the Classical Record

Norman Lebrecht is a writer and pundit specialising in classical music who often appears on Radio 3 taking phone-in commentaries on what the BBC supposes to be very controversial topics such as “Should government subsidise the Arts?” and “Is the Internet taking over from print journalism?”. He comes across in the spoken word as a pushy and self-aggrandising windbag, but I must say that in Maestros, Masterpieces and Madness the same approach makes for lively reading.

What he offers here is a history of recording classical music, from its faltering start at the beginning of the last century, to the present. His main argument is that what was at first perceived as a somewhat impure medium gradually took hold of the public imagination when the technology became affordable in the form of the LP record and then the CD. This led to an explosion of recording the classics which was fuelled by vainglorious recording companies and famous conductors alike. This accelerated until the whole system ground to a point of collapse brought on by their greed, by over-production, and a failure to see changes in mass media.

That’s the story in a nutshell, but it is told via a combination of detailed insider knowledge of how classical music works as a business, with celebrity vignettes, potted biographies, and what might be called lashings of The Higher Gossip.

Many of the principal conductors we think of as cultural icons and household names emerge from these pages as vain, self-seeking, and egotistical monsters – pocketing huge sums in secret deals behind the backs of their employers, and moving from one orchestra and city to another in a relentless search for more prestige.

This starts with figures such as the mercurial and dictatorial conductor Toscanini and the unscrupulous record producer Walter Legge, and then moves into more recent years with company takeovers which seem more motivated by whim and rivalry than any artistic or business logic.

He’s very well informed about all sorts of details. How Decca was a haven for gays (Britten, Tippett, Maxwell Davis) and how Deutsche Grammophon (owned by Siemens) had used slave labour from the death camps to keep its empire going.

The golden years are awash with lucrative record deals, and projects which replicate every popular classic known to man, ten times over. But then in the 1960s things begin to change. That’s because the record companies suddenly realise that they are making more money out of pop music.

By the end of 1956 Elvis had sold $22 million worth of discs and merchandise in the US, half as much as the whole of the classical market.

From this point onwards there was a struggle between pop and classical in the board rooms. One brought in the money, the other wasted it on a prodigious scale. Despite a temporary revival with early music, the end was in sight. And when it came there was lots of grief and pain for everyone. By the time we reach Internet downloads and Peer-2-Peer filesharing, the game is up.

You’ll love this story if you are interested in behind-the-scenes of the music world, and gossip about those people with high reputations but much lower levels of behaviour. It’s got schadenfreude by the bucketload. (Actually, that’s a fair example of Lebrecht’s style rubbing off on me.)

And yet for all his dirt-dishing on the famous, he actually supports a high patrician line of cultural conservatism. You get a strong sense of regret that things have turned out as they have. He doesn’t see the process he describes as one of change, fuelled by one technology after another, which probably has more people listening to classical music than ever before – as I am doing right now, over the Internet.

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Norman Lebrecht, Maestros, Masterpieces and Madness, London: Allen Lane, 2007, pp.324, ISBN: 0713999570

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Mark Gertler biography

September 20, 2009 by Roy Johnson

the only working-class Bloomsbury artist

Mark Gertler (1896—1939) was born in Spitalfields in London’s East End, the youngest son of Jewish immigrant parents. When he was a year old, the family was forced by extreme poverty back to their native Galicia (Poland). His father travelled to America in search of work, but when this plan failed the family returned to London in 1896. As a boy he showed a marked talent for drawing, and on leaving school in 1906 he enrolled in art classes at Regent Street Polytechnic, which was the first institution in the UK to provide post-school education for working people.

Once again, because of his family’s poverty, he was forced to drop out after only a year and take up work as an apprentice in a stained glass company. However, he continued with his interest in art, and after gaining third place in a competition he submitted his drawings to the Slade and was granted a scholarship by Sir William Rothenstein.

His contemporaries during four years at the Slade included David Bomberg, Paul Nash, Edward Wadsworth, Christopher Nevinson and Stanley Spencer. More fatefully for his private life, he also met and fell in love with Dora Carrington. They had a turbulent and anguished relationship which lasted a number of years.

Meanwhile, he won prizes and scholarships, then left the Slade in 1912 to paint full time. He was patronised by Lady Ottoline Morrell who introduced him to Walter Sickert, Augustus John, and the Bloomsbury Group. He became moderately successful as a society portrait painter, but suffered in such company because of his relative poverty, his working-class origins, and his Jewishness.

In 1914 he was also taken up by Edward Marsh an art collector who was later to become secretary to Winston Churchill. Even this relationship became difficult, since Gertler was a pacifist, and he disapproved of the system of patronage. He broke off the relationship, and around this time painted what has become his most famous painting – The Merry-Go-Round.

In 1915 he became the love object of Lytton Strachey, but he continued his own pursuit of Dora Carrington for five years before she finally agreed to have a sexual relationship with him. For a time, he shared her with Strachey, with whom Carrington had meanwhile fallen in love. When she eventually left him to set up home with Strachey, Gertler was crushed and mortified.

As a young man, he projected a personal magnetism which fascinated many of his contemporaries. He is the model for the sinister sculptor Loerke in D.H. Lawrence’s novel Women in Love, the dashing Byronic hero of Aldous Huxley’s Chrome Yellow, and the egotistical painter of Katherine Mansfield’s story Je ne parle pas Francais.

The first symptoms of tuberculosis appeared in 1920, and he was forced to enter a sanatorium. Nevertheless, despite his poor health, he continued to have yearly exhibitions at the Goupil Gallery in Regent Street.

In 1930 Gertler married Marjorie Hodgkinson, and they had a son in 1932. Their marriage was often difficult, and Gertler suffered from the same feelings of ill-ease that undermined relationships with his patrons. Edward Marsh continued to buy Gertler’s paintings, even though he admitted that he no longer liked or understood them. But in order to supplement his intermittent income from painting, Gertler was forced to become a part-time teacher at the Westminster School of Art .

Throughout the 1930s he had difficulty in selling his paintings, even though he had a few loyal supporters such as J.B. Priestly and Aldous Huxley. But depressed by what he saw as his own failure, his ill-health, and the fear of another imminent world war, he committed suicide in June 1939. He is buried in Willesden Jewish Cemetery.

This biography of Mark Gertler reappraises an extraordinary artist. Gertler was admired and encouraged by Walter Sickert, Vanessa Bell, Roger Fry and Henry Moore. His magnificent and haunting pictures were keenly collected by London society and yet at 48, feeling alienated, he killed himself. Sarah MacDougall explores the life of this complex man, whose powerful images, like the “Merry-go-round” or the “Creation of Eve” have lost none of their disturbing eloquence.

Mark Gertler – But the book at Amazon UK

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Sarah McDougall, Mark Gertler, London: John Murray, 2002, pp.413, ISBN: 0719557992

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

Mediterranean Architecture

May 26, 2009 by Roy Johnson

glamorous contemporary European house designs

If you like looking at examples of beautiful mediterranean architecture, designer homes overlooking the sea, and experiments with shapes, materials, and domestic organisation – then this new book from Thames & Hudson is worth your consideration. It’s like A Place in the Sun on steroids. Dominic Bradbury has assembled mini-essays on twenty-five of the best in modern architect-designed houses.

They differ in their styles, but are united by their clean lines, open plan living, and a serious commitment to integration with their surroundings. The overall style, which might reflect the editor’s taste or might represent the movement of the current decade, is for buildings that are minimalist, rectangular, and low-rise. They must also blend sympathetically with their surroundings. Their materials have some relationship to the area in which they’re built, large plate-glass windows feature prominently, if possible reaching to the floor, and an infinity pool is a desirable extra.

A high proportion of the examples come from Spain. There’s quite a lot of cantilevering, flat roofing, sharp-edged, rectilinear profiles, and all the example shown rise to a maximum of three floors. There’s also a recurrent theme of contrasting textures – mahogany against raw concrete, polished steel and plate glass, water features and carefully arranged gravel pathways.

I liked the inclusion of small architectural plans, which help you to gain an overall perspective of the building in its geographical location. And visually, the book is a treat, with excellent photographs – even though their relatively small format made me hanker after something more grand.

Of course, it has to be said that most of these buildings are situated in completely idyllic locations, set amidst rolling pine forests, overlooking sun-drenched harbours, and untroubled by any neighbours or industrial blots on their landscapes. But having said that, they represent what’s possible when an architect is commissioned by a client with enough money and sufficient confidence to allow free imaginative rein.

The locations range from Morocco in the west, via Spain and the Balearics, through Greece, to Turkey in the east. Yet many of the designers of these buildings come from places as far away from the Mediterranean as Paris and Brussels – though I suppose any architects worth their salt must have their practices located in big cities.

This is part way between a coffee table book, the text of which nobody (except design anoraks) will ever read, and a serious review of modern architecture. Dominic Bradbury seeks to point out what the designers are doing that’s original, and he has a sensiitive regard for his subject. Full contact details of the architects are listed, and a trawl through their web sites is like getting a trip through another book for free.

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Dominic Bradbury, Mediterranean Modern, London: Thames & Hudson, 2006, pp.256, ISBN 050034227X

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Milton Glaser: Art is Work

June 19, 2009 by Roy Johnson

graphic design, interiors, objects and illustration

Don’t be put off by the cover design – this is a wonderful book. Milton Glaser is one of the most influential design and illustration gurus of the late 20th century in the USA. He was responsible for the “I love NY” logo and the poster of Bob Dylan with psychedelic hair which became a symbol of the 1980s. This is one of the few design books I have come across where the text is just as interesting as the graphics. Milton Glaser has thought a lot about the fundamentals of good design, and his ideas come through here via a series of interviews, plus his own commentary on the work illustrated.

And there’s a big bonus. He doesn’t just show his finished designs, but includes his preliminary drafts and early attempts which lead up to a successful outcome. So it’s like being invited to sit in his studio whilst he thinks and works out loud. He’s astonishingly versatile. The book contains examples of poster design, record covers, freehand drawings (amazingly similar to David Hockney in style) book illustrations, interior design, product design, typography, and publicity materials.

His observations focus on the aesthetics of creativity – and yet he keeps his eye on the commercial and professional aspects of his work. He’s frank enough to admit that if the client’s budget is not big enough, he is prepared to discriminate between a ‘one hour’ idea and a ‘six hour’ design.

He’s a great believer in the idea that designers must continue to draw to develop their ideas, and he believes in creation as a form of work and process:

When you’re thinking you do a sketch and it’s fuzzy. You have to keep it fuzzy so that the brain looks at it and imagines another iteration that is clearer. Then you do another sketch that advances it again. It may take a number of these intermediate solutions before you arrive.

It’s a very instructive experience to see his rough sketches develop as he stretches and changes an idea until he comes up with what looks a fresh and spontaneous picture. That’s what he means by his book title. These designs do not just happen spontaneously: they are the result of hard work

He is very aware of modern painters – Klee, Mondrian, the much under-rated Sonia Delauney, Klimt, and Max Ernst. There’s also a portrait of Duke Ellington which has elements of Francis Bacon in its colouring and handling of paint, and a series of posters for the Venice Biennale which combine images of the city’s emblematic lion with ink spattering reflecting his appreciation of the work of Jackson Pollock

I found his book illustrations less successful, his restaurant designs inspired in terms of lighting, and his product design superb. There’s a whole page of sketches for a cocktail glass, any one of which you would be pleased to hold. But the finished product – complete with double-sided conical bowl with a vacuum to keep your Martini cold, fluted stem, and Art Deco collar uniting the two – well, my knees went weak when I turned the page, and I would pay substantial money to own a set.

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Milton Glaser, Art is Work, London: Thames and Hudson, 2000, pp.272, ISBN 0500510288

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