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architecture, painting, lifestyle, music, society, theory

architecture, painting, lifestyle, music, society, theory

Modern Architecture: a critical history

August 12, 2010 by Roy Johnson

an illustrated history of architecture 1900-2000

This is a scholarly history of modern architecture which has gone through a number of editions and has been kept up to date with obvious enthusiasm from the author, who is an authority on the subject. Peter Frampton starts with three short chapters that give the historical background to the modern era. That is, the architectural thinking, urban planning, and the technological developments after 1750 that led to the twentieth century, when what we call modern began.

Modern ArchitectureThe narrative proper begins with the Arts and Crafts movement in England, then moves on to the Americans Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright. Both of them started their careers in Chicago, which was rebuilding itself as a city following the Great Fire of 1871. Next comes Gaudi, who I had not realized was influenced by Ruskin, Richard Wagner, and the French architectural theorist Viollet-le-Duc.

I rather like Frampton’s approach of devoting one short chapter to each style or designer, because there is just enough to assimilate without being over faced, and the succinct form encourages comprehension of the subject.

The celebrated James Rennie McIntosh went from spectacular early success to a very sad late career decline and an end in near obscurity. This is surprising, given the enduring popularity of his work. It would seem that even architecture has its shooting stars.

There are chapters on the Vienna Secession and Italian futurism, and in addition to these movements he includes studies of individual designers such as Adolf Loos, Henry van der Velde, Tony Garnier, and Auguste Perret. Some of these movements produced more designs than finished buildings, but Frampton includes their plans on the grounds that some were more influential than completed projects.

It is interesting to note that almost all the architectural visionaries he discusses were politically radical and leftist of one stripe or another. But none of them was able to reconcile the fact that their most celebrated products as artists were beautifully luxurious homes for rich bourgeois patrons.

The Bauhaus and Neue Sachlichkeit movements generated some amazingly innovative designs and buildings, until the Stock Market collapse of 1929 and the political swing to the right caused many of its stars to flee both east and west (only the latter survived). It’s quite surprising that many of their buildings look remarkably similar to those being built in major western cities today, almost one hundred years later.

Frampton sees Le Corbusier as the most important figure of mid century modern architecture, though it should be kept in mind that many of the high-rise social housing projects built under his influence (with their disastrous elevated walkways, vandalized lifts, and rubbish-strewn communal areas) have since been demolished, not long after they were first built.

A chapter on Soviet architecture does its best to show radical ideas emerging from the early years of the Proletkult, but finally has to admit that all creativity was crushed by the dead hand of Stalinism from 1930 onwards.

The latter part of the book plots the development of those people he sees as seminal influences – Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Phillip Johnson, and Buckminster Fuller. And although he includes a chapter called ‘The New Brutalism’ which largely features the work of Alison and Peter Smithson in the UK, it’s fairly clear that this is precisely the sort of work which has given architecture and publicly commissioned work a bad name in the latter part of the last century.

For this fourth edition Kenneth Frampton has added a major new chapter that explores the effects of globalization on architecture in recent years, the rise of the celebrity architect, and the way in which practices worldwide have addressed such issues as sustainability and habitat. The bibliography has also been updated and expanded, making this volume more complete and indispensable than ever.

The book has a comprehensive critical apparatus and huge bibliography, but it would also benefit from a glossary of architectural jargon. I had to look up the meaning of terms such as trabeated. atectonic, entasis, celerestory, oneric, lithic and phalantsery. Be warned: it’s not an easy read, but it’s excellent value.

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© Roy Johnson 2010


Kenneth Frampton, Modern Architecture: a critical history, London: Thames and Hudson, 4th revised edn, 2000, pp.424, ISBN: 0500203954


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Modernism – a very short introduction

September 1, 2010 by Roy Johnson

radical developments in the arts 1900-1930

As a critical term ‘modernism’ needs careful use and understanding. For it refers not to things that are modern, but to the general movement of experiment in the arts that took place in the period 1900-1930. Modernism is the loose term we use for discussing Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, and Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. Christopher Butler offers as background reasons for these radical artistic developments the loss of religious belief, the growth of science and technology, the spread of mass culture, and radical changes in gender roles and relationships.

ModernismHe starts his survey of the period very wisely by presenting and analysing three iconic modernist works – James Joyce’s Ulysses, Fernand Leger’s La Ville, and Berthold Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera, explaining how they ‘work’ in terms of their use of new techniques including fragmentation, collage, strange juxtapositions, abstraction, parody, allusions, and referentiality.

Then he looks at the theories that were advanced as attempts to underpin these developments. This is a tricky area, because what artists say or claim about their own work is not necessarily to be taken at face value. There are other problems too. Picasso and Braque for instance invented cubism without writing a single word explaining the process.. Many other artists on the other hand wrote manifestos full of complex notions and theories that turn out to be entirely unconnected with the works of art they produced.

Schoenberg thought his twelve tone system would assure the dominance of world music by Germany for the next one hundred years [sounds familiar?] but within a short time most listeners had tired of atonality. Writers such as Joyce, Woolf, and Eliot fared better in explaining their methods because literature is a medium which must faux de mieux be articulated via language.

The range of Butler’s references and examples discussed is enormous – though I was not persuaded by his attempts to recruit Wallace Stephens and William Faulkner into the Pantheon of Significance. It’s surprising how quickly some artistic reputations fade or in some cases are revealed as completely bogus – Wyndham Lewis, Aldous Huxley, Herman Broch, Andre Gide, and Gertrude Stein spring to mind as candidates.

He devotes an entire chapter to the creation of a subjective point of view and its counterpart in modern fiction, the Epiphany. Literature naturally dominates here, but he compensates for this by including a section on surrealism, in which painting is the main art form. Interestingly enough, even though it was a short-lived phenomenon, it still lives on in occasional appearances in the visual arts, whereas in literary forms it is as dead as the dodo.

He brings all his arguments together with a quite refreshing examination of modernism and politics. This starts with the surrealists who half-heartedly tried to ally themselves to the Communist Party, then passes on to show how the communist orthodoxy of Socialist Realism chimed exactly with the Nazi policy on the arts. He also includes a lively critique of Berthold Brecht, who often escapes censure for his Stalinist propaganda, disguised as it often is beneath historical allegory.

He concludes with arguments that are quite contemporary in their scepticism. No matter which critical approach we take for instance, it is simply not possible to say which parts of Women in Love, The Firebird, or Guernica are ‘progressive’ or contribute to social development or enrichment. But what is more interesting is that these great modernist works still speak to us as vibrant examples of artistic achievement long after the historical and political events that provide their context have passed.

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© Roy Johnson 2010


Christopher Butler, Modernism: a very short introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010, pp.117, ISBN: 0192804413


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Filed Under: Art, Literary Studies, Theory Tagged With: Christopher Butler, Critical theory, Cultural history, Modernism

Natalia Goncharova

June 24, 2011 by Roy Johnson

paintings, theatre costumes, graphic design, and fabrics

Natalia Goncharova was one of the many talented artists to emerge from the Silver Age of Russia’s cultural development in the first two decades of the twentieth century. She went on to become a major figure in the Russian contribution to modernism that centred on Diaghilev and the Ballet Russes in the period 1913-1918, and in fact she continued to produce art works in a number of genres up to her death in 1962. She emerges from the tradition of Russian realism in the late nineteenth century, and her early paintings are almost indistinguishable from the prevailing orthodoxy set by painters such as Surov, Repin, and Surikov. She was from the upper-class nobility: her great-aunt was Natalia Pushkina, wife of the poet Alexander Pushkin.

Natalia GoncharovaFrom 1910 onwards she began to paint in the style that became known as Russian primitivism. These are paintings that combine fauvist colouring with faux naive drawing in scenes that seek to capture elemental visions of Russian life, populated by peasants, soldiers, dogs, in village settings. Yet she experimented with cubism, Rayonism, and Russian primitivism at the same time as also producing icon-like religious tableaux.

In 1911 she became associated with the Der Blaue Reiter group. Together with her husband and fellow artist Mikhail Larionov she developed the Rayonist style of painting, which was like a fusion of cubism and futurism, not dissimilar to some paintings of the Italian Boccioni and those of her fellow Russian modernist Malevich.

Strangely enough, all the styles for which she became known in her mature period appear ready-configured for development in her early works: fauvist-style landscapes, medieval Russian dress designs, beautiful still lifes and cubist abstractions. She worked in a variety of media and genres – easel painting, book illustration, stage and costume design, portraiture, interior design (wallpapers and fabrics) and icon painting.

video presentation of work by Natalia Goncharova

In 1915 she was commissioned by Diaghilev to design the sets for the ballet Liturgy, with choreography by Leonide Massine and music by Igor Stravinsky. She was one of those Russian modernists (like Stravinsky, Diaghilev, and Rodchenko) who profited from contact with western European art, and like them she wisely emigrated, going to live in Paris in 1921 whilst it was still possible to do so, thereby escaping the Stalinist purges of the 1930s and beyond. In 1939 she became a French citizen and lived on in Paris until her death.

This lavishly illustrated and definitive study of her life and work is a masterful piece of work by Anthony Parton, specialist in the Russian avant garde. It is the largest collection of her paintings and period photographs in a single printed volume, and contains a full scholarly apparatus of bibliography, list of exhibitions and stage works, and notes to the text. The publishers have done him proud with the quality of the full colour illustrations, and he has returned the compliment with a stunning monograph which I am quite sure will remain the definitive study for some time to come.

Natalia Goncharova Buy the book at Amazon UK

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© Roy Johnson 2011


Anthony Parton, Goncharova: The Art and Design of Natalia Goncharova, Suffolk: Antique Collectors Club, 2010, pp.519, ISBN: 185149605X


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Natural Selection

June 19, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Gary Giddins on Comedy, Film, Music, and Books

‘A critic,’ Philip Larkin once declared, ‘is a man who likes some things and dislikes others, and finds reasons for doing so and for trying to persuade other people to do so.’ Gary Giddins has been doing this for many years. In several collections of jazz journalism (including the recent Weather Bird) Gary Giddins has conveyed his enthusiasm for and devotion to the music and its practitioners. This latest book Natural Selection includes pieces on jazz, but also illuminating essays on silent movies, film noir, TV shows, DVD and CD releases, Norman Mailer, Ralph Ellison, Classics Illustrated, Friedrich Durrenmatt and the Jewish novelist Soma Morgenstern.

Gary GiddinsGiddins’ firm conviction is that ‘jazz and film have much in common, beyond parallel births, changing technologies, and competing bids as America’s pre-eminent cultural love child. They are resolutely manipulative arts. Music continuously mines emotional responses; movies are structured around emotional releases, whether musical, comic, tear-jerking, shocking, pornographic, or suspenseful. Musical works and movies usually exist in concise units of time, their effectiveness dependent on tempo, rhythm, contrast, style, and interaction’.

He proceeds to apply this apercu to (among others) Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Jack Benny, Bob Hope, Jerry Lewis and the Marx Brothers. Chaplin he suggests ‘ruined numerous comedians who wanted our tears but didn’t possess his equilibrium (Jerry Lewis, Jackie Gleason, Steve Martin, Robin Williams, and Billy Crystal for starters’). The Marx Brothers ‘were grown-ups pretending to be children, pretending to be grown-ups.’

Jerry Lewis (‘Idiot Semi-Savant’) might be adored by the French, but they are mercifully unaware of ‘the sanctimonious talking head who sapped the affection of a generation with horrific television appearances.’ Bob Hope, a comic movie actor to be taken seriously, became dated as a glib and increasingly unfunny comedian, ‘increasingly sanctified as the rich, conformist, golfing buddy of every White House duffer.’ Jack Benny (not widely known in Europe, but a household name in America) ‘may be the only great comedian in history who isn’t associated with a single witticism’.

Various iconic screen stars receive their succinct dues. Greta Garbo ‘reminds us that the cinema is the ultimate expression of voyeurism: her close-ups are her money shots’. A young Marlon Brando ‘gave American actors new modes of being racked with ambiguities’. Of the latter-day Brando, Giddins asks: ‘Excepting Orson Welles, has any other actor cloistered himself in so much fat?’

Bing Crosby (Giddins is his biographer) ‘is the most conspicuously neglected of the Golden Age of Hollywood stars’. So far, so good, but the critical faculty seems alarmingly absent from Giddins’s claim that Doris Day (‘Blond and Beaming’), was ‘The coolest and sexiest female singer to achieve movie-musical stardom’. Moreover, many of the film/DVD reviews collected here are bogged down in often tedious technical detail.

Not surprisingly, Giddins is at his considerable best in jazz reviews – which include refreshing reassessments of Glenn Miller, and Billie Holiday. Miller has long been dismissed by critics as ‘a humourless purveyor of diluted swing, banal novelties and saccharine vocals’ but is now being celebrated as the creator of ‘a sound that clings remorselessly to the collective memory.’

Both Miller (and Fats Waller) ‘humble critical stereotypes and show ways that jazz and pop once enriched each other, and might still’. But reviewing The New Grove Dictionary of American Music, Giddins finds it almost totally worthless, with entries on jazz – ‘which one might argue is the essence of American music’ – only found after much searching.

Elsewhere, he suggests that ‘there is a correct way to sing Cole Porter, much as there is a correct way to act Shakespeare’ and commends Fred Astaire, Frank Sinatra, Rosemary Clooney and Ella Fitzgerald as ‘accomplished Porterphiles’. Giddins confesses to be a life-long admirer of Duke Ellington. ‘People often describe their first time with Duke Ellington in terms of losing their virginity, and for me it seemed like the next best thing’.

In an excellent piece on ‘Jazz for the Eyes’ (The Sound of Jazz/Jazz on a Summer’s Day), Giddins writes of Lester Young’s single-chorus, 39-second tenor solo on the TV (not studio) version of Fine and Mellow, that it is ‘so sublimely constructed that after you’ve heard it a couple of times, it becomes part of your nervous system, like the motor skills required to ride a bicycle’. As for the vocalist on this number, Billie Holliday: ‘if it is possible for two people to make love while one partner is playing the tenor saxophone 10 feet away from the other, that is what Young and Holliday were doing.’ And ‘Billie’s pantomime of pure pleasure embodied a sensual appreciation of the music in a way no actor has ever succeeded in doing’.

Jazz on a Summer’s Day also had its share of ‘indelible jazz images: Anita O’Day ‘in a feathered hat and black sheath dress with white fringes, thrusting her glottis at Sweet Georgia Brown‘; trombonist Jack Teagarden ‘grinning as though he’d crashed an unexpected party while Chuck Berry rocks Sweet Little Sixteen‘, and Louis Armstrong recounting his unlikely answer to the Pope, when asked if he had children – ‘No, Daddy, but we’re still wailing’.

Giddins is particularly mischievous at posing and then answering questions. One example must suffice. In a review of the movie White Palace, Giddins ponders the prevalence of oral sex in recent films and asks: ‘What’s with all these blowjobs?’ His answer: ‘They represent Hollywood’s latest code for breaking the ice, for reaching out and touching someone, for initiating a sincere and meaningful relationship. No more kissing on the mouth, no more ‘What was your major?’ Just cut to the fly, followed by a shot of an actor faking instantaneous ecstasy.’ Partly autobiographical, Natural Selection is also an artful work of ‘intelligent design’. Giddins persuades us to revisit some of the movies and books, and all of the jazz performances he so obviously enjoyed reviewing – and sharing.

© John White 2006

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Gary Giddins, Natural Selection: Gary Giddins on Comedy, Film, Music, & Books, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006, pp.432 , ISBN: 019517951X


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Filed Under: Music Tagged With: Cultural history, Gary Giddins, Jazz, Music, Natural Selection, Radio

New Media in Late 20th-century Art

July 17, 2009 by Roy Johnson

new forms of multimedia, performance, and digital art

There’s nothing like discussing ‘contemporary’ art forms for making you realise we’re now in the twenty-first century. When you look at developments which seem quite recent (particularly related to the Internet) you suddenly realise that these were in the LAST CENTURY!! – (to sound for a moment a little like Tom Wolfe). The latter half of the nineteen hundreds saw artists breaking up the boundaries of aesthetic genres and introducing all sorts of new technology into their work – as well as mixing disparate activities into one experience. New Media in Late 20th-century Art is a survey of the new media which evolved roughly in the period 1950—2000.

New Media in Late 20th-century Art It covers the mixing of media and performance, video art, video installations, and the new forms of digital art. Starting from the notion that traditional Art has been a painting in two dimensions, Michael Rush looks at the extensions made by the twentieth century. It’s a beautifully illustrated book, with picture captions which explain the significance of each medium.

After an introductory consideration of the inclusion of Time, which is made possible by film, he passes into the early stages of media and performance. This covers the multimedia happenings which started with events organised by the painter Robert Rauschenberg, the composer John Cage, and the choreographer Merce Cunningham organised in the 1960s. These mixed together various combinations of film, acting, music, and dance, and there began the widespread use of video film around the same time.

Performances range from video films of ultra-minimalist events such as hand gestures or people asleep, to live broadcasts of people commenting whilst under local anaesthetic on their own cosmetic surgery operations. Yes, it’s true.

There’s a lot of combining performance art with video recordings of it. Artists put themselves into embarrassing and even dangerous situations and record the consequences as a work of ‘art’. The problem for a lot of the art works created between the 1960s an 1980s is that there is little easily recoverable record of them. On the plus side, there are lots and lots of artists represented here – and their work is illustrated in colour with stills from exhibitions and ‘installations’.

The general problem with the survey is that most of its emphasis is on the content of the so-called art works, rather than the art itself. There is nothing new in an artist putting her adolescent traumas of sexual identity into a work of art just because it’s in the form of a video film.

The older artist to whom most repeated reference is made in the context of cross-boundary works is Marcel Duchamp, and the contemporary names which come up most frequently are Naim June Paik and Bill Viola, both installation artists. Most of these works seem to add up to multiple projections, using TV monitors or giant split screens

Bill Viola – ‘Acceptance’ 2008

A section on digital art attempts to bring things up to date with digitally altered photography and virtual reality programs. But in fact it’s very difficult to keep up with the developments of digital multimedia. I think the publishers will do Michael Rush a favour by publishing a second edition which allows him to add material on the Flash and Shockwave movies which are now sweeping the Web.

© Roy Johnson 2005

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Michael Rush, New Media in Late 20th-Century Art, London: Thames and Hudson, revised edition 2005, pp.248, ISBN: 0500203784


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Nina Hamnett biography

November 30, 2010 by Roy Johnson

artist, modernist, and the Queen of Bohemia

Nina Hamnett (1890-1956) was born in Tenby, south-west Wales. She endured a largely unhappy childhood, but her skill at drawing enabled her to escape her miserable life at home (rather like her near-contemporary Dora Carrington). She studied at the Pelham Art School and the London School of Art between 1906 and 1910.

Nina Hamnett biographyIn 1911 she launched herself into the London art world on the strength of a fifty pound advance on an inheritance from her uncle and a stipend of two shillings and sixpence a week from her aunts. There she socialised in the Cafe Royal with the likes of Augustus John, Walter Sickert, and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. She became very popular as a result of her high spirits, her devil-may-care attitude, and her sexual promiscuity. Like other women at the time revelling in a newfound independence, she had her hair cut short in a ‘crophead’ style (what we would now call a basin cut) and she wore eccentric clothing:

I wore in the daytime a clergyman’s hat, a check coat, and a skirt with red facings … white stockings and men’s dancing pumps and was stared at in the Tottenham Court Road. One had to do something to celebrate one’s freedom and escape from home,

It was said that at this phase in her life Nina Hamnett had the knack of being in the right place at the right time. In 1914 she went to live in Montparnasse, Paris, immediately meeting on her first night there the Italian painter Amedeo Modigliani. He introduced her to Picasso, Serge Dighilev, and Jean Cocteau, and she went to live at the famous artist’s residence of La Ruche which housed many other Bohemian artists and modernist writers. It was there that she met the Norwegian artist Roald Kristian, who became her first husband.

She rapidly established herself as a flamboyant and unconventional figure. She was bisexual, drank heavily, and had liaisons with many other artists in Bohemian society, often modelling for them as a way of earning a (precarious) living. She established her reputation as ‘The Queen of Bohemia’ by such antics as dancing nude on a cafe table amongst her drinking friends.

Her reputation as a Bohemian and an artist eventually filtered back to London, where she returned to join Roger Fry and his circle working on the application of modernist design principles to fabrics, furniture, clothes, and household objects as part of the Omega Workshops. She acted as a model for the clothes along with Mary Hutchinson, Clive Bell‘s mistress, and she mingled with other members of the Bloomsbury Group, such as Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant.

Nina Hamnett in Omega clothes

Nina Hamnett (left) and Winifred Gill (right) in Omega dresses

Her paintings were exhibited at the Royal Academy and the Salon d’Automne in Paris. She also taught at the Westminster Technical Institute in London. Around this time she divorced her first husband and lived with the composer and fellow alcoholic E.J. Moeran. They were part of a circle that included the composer Peter Warlock (Philip Heseltine) who who established a very bohemian circle in Eynsford in Kent, along with other composers such as Constant Lambert and William Walton.

During the 1920s (and for the rest of her life) she made the area in central London known as Fitzrovia her home and stamping ground. This new locale for arty-Bohemia was centred on the Fitzroy Tavern in Charlotte Street which she frequented along with fellow Welsh artists Augustus John and Dylan Thomas, making occasional excursions across Oxford Street to the Gargoyle Club in Soho.

After this glittering debut into the glamorous world of modernism and the artistic avant-garde, the remainder of her life was a no less spectacular descent into poverty, squalor, and alcoholism. She lived in a sleazy bed-sit in Howland Street, which was infested with lice and littered with rat-droppings. The flat was furnished only with a broken-down chair, a piece of string for a clothes line, and newspapers instead of proper bedding.

Dolores Courtney

Dolores Courtney by Nina Hamnett

In 1932 she published a volume of memoirs entitled Laughing Torso, which was a best-seller in both the UK and the USA. Following its publication she was sued by Aleister Crowley, whom she had accused of practising black magic. The ensuing trial caused a sensation which helped sales of the book, and Crowley lost his case.

Her success in this instance only fuelled her downward spiral, and she spent the last three decades of her life propping up the bar of the Fitzroy trading anecdotes of her glory years for free drinks. She took little interest in personal hygiene, was incontinent in public, and vomited into her handbag.

Her ending was as spectacular as had been her previous life. Drunk one night she either fell or jumped from the window of her flat and was impaled on the railing spikes below. She lingered miserably in hospital for three more days, where her last words were “Why don’t they let me die?”


Nina Hamnett


Bloomsbury Group – web links

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.

Bloomsbury Group - web links 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.

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

Bloomsbury Group web links 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 Group - web links 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.

Bloomsbury Group - web links 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

Bloomsbury Group - web links 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.

Bloomsbury Group - web links 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.

Bloomsbury Group - web links 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.

Bloomsbury Group - web links 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.

Bloomsbury Group - web links 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.

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

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

© Roy Johnson 2000-2014


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Filed Under: Art, Biography, Bloomsbury Group Tagged With: Art, Bloomsbury Group, Bohemians, Cultural history, Design, Nina Hamnett

Paul Nash

October 10, 2015 by Roy Johnson

painter, engraver, war artist, and English modernist

Paul Nash (1889-1946) was a British painter and a war artist who was strongly associated with the development of Modernism in the visual arts in the early part of the twentieth century. Although he has always been associated with a bucolic vision of England, he was actually born in Kensington in the heart of London. But his relatives were all from the countryside and the family eventually moved to live in Buckinghamshire – largely because of his mother’s fragile mental health.

Paul Nash - Wood on the Downs

Wood on the Downs (1929)

Nash was generally a failure at formal schooling, but because he had a gift for sketching he enrolled at Chelsea Polytechnic, then went on to the London School of Photo-engraving and Lithography, off Fleet Street. He was advised by his friend, the poet Gordon Bottomley, and by the artist William Rothenstein, that he should attend the Slade School of Art at University College, London.

His early influences were the Pre-Raphaelites and William Blake, and his first paintings were visionary works. These were admired by William Rothenstein, who encouraged him to study formally. Unfortunately, his father had no money, having been ruined by medical expenses for his wife, who died in a mental asylum in 1910. But Nash earned enough that year from his work as an illustrator to pay for twelve months’ tuition.

He enrolled in October 1910, though he later recorded that on his first meeting with the Professor of Drawing, Henry Tonks, ‘It was evident he considered that neither the Slade, nor I, were likely to derive much benefit’. Nash’s fellow students included Ben Nicholson, Stanley Spencer, Mark Gertler, William Roberts, Dora Carrington, Richard Nevinson and Edward Wadsworth. Nash struggled with figure drawing, and spent only one year at the school. Like his contemporary Stanley Spencer he travelled in by train every day to attend classes.

Discouraged at first, he made rapid progress after the first few weeks. His main friendship during the year was with the young Ben Nicholson. He also fell in love (as did so many others) with one of the year’s intake – the raffishly attractive Dora Carrington.

Like a number of his contemporaries, he left the Slade early, feeling it had nothing more to offer him. Paradoxically, he moved away from his home in the home counties to live in London, yet simultaneously discovered his love of the English countryside. He produced a series of works celebrating Nature and had a critically acclaimed show at the Carfax Gallery, near Piccadilly.

The year 1913 was a significant step in Nash’s career. He had a two man show with his brother John at the Darien Leigh Gallery in South Kensington at which several collectors bought his work and he was praised by Roger Fry. Success also came at a personal level. He met Margaret Odeh, an Oxford graduate and a full time worker in the women’s movement. They became engaged almost immediately, although at first they didn’t have enough money between them to get married. By the summer of 1914 Nash was enjoying some success and during that year he worked briefly at the Omega Workshops under Roger Fry.

At the outbreak of war in 1914 he was the first of the Slade students to enlist for military service, albeit reluctantly, observing ‘Personally I am more in favour of mending men than killing them’. He was posted on guard duty at the Tower of London, which allowed him time to continue painting and drawing. Then in 1916 he began officer training. His company was eventually involved in the disastrous Big Push’ of 1917 which was supposed to bring a quick end to the war. He had the ‘good luck’ to break some ribs in a fall a few days before, and was sent back to London as an invalid. Most of the men in his company were slaughtered in the attack.

Nash managed to organise a successful one-man exhibition at the Goupil Gallery in 1917, but as the war ground on towards its horrendous climax, he was recalled to service. Fortunately he managed to secure a commission as a war artist – complete with batman and a chauffeur driven car. However, he was horrified by the spectacle of the war-ravaged battlefields in which Nature had almost been extinguished. He captured what he saw in a series of pen and ink drawings which were later used as the basis for an exhibition of masterful oil paintings he showed at the Leicester Galleries in 1918. They were also used as the basis for his most important work – The Menin Road.

Paul Nash - The Menin Road

The Menin Road (1919)

After the war he emerged with what we now call post-traumatic stress disorder and became ‘a war artist without a war’. He was unsure how to develop his sense of modernism and reverted to traditional landscape painting. He also began producing wood engravings and was for a while a teacher at the Royal College of Art, where his students included Eric Ravilious and Edward Bawden. There was also a brief period in the nineteen-thirties when he produced abstract and surrealist works.

At the onset of World War Two, Nash was appointed to a full-time salaried post as war artist, attached to the Royal Air Force. But the works he produced did not meet with the approval of the Air Ministry, because they wanted heroic portraits of pilots and their air crew. In fact the works he painted managed to combine successfully his interests in landscape, realism, abstraction, and a form of visionary allegorical painting which is now generally recognised as the finest art work to come out of 1939-45.

After the war he suffered from a number of periods of bad health – most notably from asthma – he had difficulties painting, and he turned increasingly to photography, producing some collages. He spent the remaining eighteen months of his life encased in what he himself described as ‘reclusive melancholy’, and he finally died of heart failure in 1946.

Paul Nash Paul Nash paintings and watercolours – Amazon UK
Paul Nash Paul Nash paintings and watercolours – Amazon US

Paul Nash Paul Nash (British Artists series) – Amazon UK
Paul Nash Paul Nash (British Artists series) – Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2015


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Filed Under: Art, Biography Tagged With: Art, Biography, Cultural history, Modernism, Paul Nash

Peggy Guggenheim

October 15, 2009 by Roy Johnson

poor little rich girl

Peggy Guggenheim came from a family of rich Jewish business people who had made fortunes as immigrants in the nineteenth century from trade, mining, and eventually banking. Her father was a womaniser who died aboard the Titanic in 1913 – putting on his dinner clothes to go down in style. When she was nineteen she inherited five million dollars, though as Mary Dearborn points out in this fairly even-handed biography, everybody assumed that she had even more, and couldn’t understand that by Guggenheim standards she came from a ‘poor’ side of the family.

Peggy Guggenheim: Mistress of ModernismThe first thing she spent the money on was an operation to reduce the size of her nose. The procedure went badly wrong and had to be aborted, leaving her worse off than before. In 1921 she married Franco-American Laurence Vail, who introduced her to Bohemian life in the Latin Quarter and in Montmartre. She also met two of his ex-lovers who were to become lifelong friends – Mary Reynolds and Djuna Barnes. Her marriage (the first of many) was a mixture of restless Bohemianism and physical abuse from her husband.

They settled in a house near Toulouse, she had two children, and she sent $10,000 to support the 1926 General Strike in the UK. With Vail she mixed in a fast and arty set: the pages are littered with the names of the now famous – Jean Cocteau, Man Ray, Isodora Duncan, Marcel Duchamp, and Ernest Hemingway – all of whom were happy to share her largesse. She managed to extricate herself from the abusive marriage with the help of her friend and neighbour, Emma Goldmann, the feminist and anarchist. No sooner was this accomplished than she paired off with the Englishman John Holmes who Mary Dearborn describes as “one of the most singularly unproductive men of letters that England may have every known”

There are interesting revelations of the sheer dilettantism which underpins the arty bohemianism of these people. At one point Peggy Guggenheim was trailing across the Atlantic trying to sell decorative lampshades made by her friend Mina Loy.

It’s a life of living in rented houses – in France, England, Switzerland – wherever is fashionable – making visits to America, endless parties, oceans of Champagne, violent rows, fights in restaurants, sexual infidelities – and nobody in sight engaging anything remotely like paid employment.

When John Holmes died unexpectedly (largely of alcohol poisoning) she replaced him with Douglas Garman, another would-be writer, and under his left-wing influence she even joined the Communist Party. A further succession of weekend (and week long) house parties ensued. And rather like the Bloomsbury Group they combined their promiscuity with a curious form of ‘keeping up appearances’ in a bid to preserve social respectability. In common with aristocratic practices, the children produced in these alliances were billeted in outhouses, sent off to boarding schools, raised by paid help, and put unaccompanied on trains to travel half way across Europe at holiday times.

When she got rid of her third abusive husband she began, at forty, what was to become her life vocation. Advised by Marcel Duchamp, she opened a gallery on London devoted to modern art – and surrealism in particular. She began serious collecting, and quickly ammassed a large collection of works by its foremost practicioners, most of whom she knew personally.

In fact many of them either had been or would become her lovers, because free of marriage, she began a mid-life career of sexual emancipation which few would be able to match. Her list of conquests is almost endless: Giorgio Joyce (son of James), Yves Tanguay, Roland Penrose, E.L.T.Mesens, Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, and even Samuel Beckett.

By 1940, living in France, she was under serious threat from the Nazis, even though they didn’t seem to realise that she was Jewish. So like many other people she moved to the south then emigrated to America – cleverly arranging for her collection of art works to be sent as ‘household effects’ to avoid tax. Having assembled the collection as a work of love, she wished to put it on show, and despite all the odds she did so in 1942 in New York.

Her concept was novel: it was not just a museum type exhibition, but a living gallery which promoted the work of new young American artists alongside her examples of European art. The gallery was designed to be interactive, and it was a huge success. New York life suited her: she continued to bed men at a prodigious rate, and at one time she lived with a homosexual man with whom she went out on fishing expeditions to pick up sexual partners who they shared.

She exhibited and established the reputations of Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell, and Jackson Pollock. This was the period in which abstract expressionism swept American modernism into the limelight, propelled by influential critics such as Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg. [See Tom Woolf’s The Painted Word for a sceptical view of the same period.]

And yet almost immediately after the war ended, having established this influential presence in the USA, she closed up shop and decamped to Venice, where she opened the museum that now bears her name. Despite attempts from friends and family alike to deflect her from her purpose, she kept the collection intact, and it now stands as a testament to her personal vision.

In fact last time I visited the gallery it struck me how it encompassed quite a short period of art and a part of the modernist movement which now seems rather tacky – with all the mumbo-jumbo of ‘the unconscious’, the empty posturing of ‘manifestos’, and jejune works by second-rate painters. So the collection is quite an accurate reflection of her life, the later years of which were spent as the grand old lady of the international art scene. But behind the public front of naked sunbathing on the roof of her Grand Canal Palazzo, her gay assistants, and being punted around in the last private gondola in Venice, her real concerns were those of many other elderly ladies the world over – her pet dogs (Lhazo apsos) her wayward children (daughter dead from drugs) and the loneliness of old age.

Peggy Guggenheim Buy the book at Amazon UK

Peggy Guggenheim Buy the book at Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2009


Mary Dearborn, Peggy Guggenheim: Mistress of Modernism, London: Virago, 2004, pp.448, ISBN 1844080609


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Filed Under: 20C Literature, Art, Biography, Lifestyle Tagged With: Art, Biography, Cultural history, Modernism, Peggy Guggenheim, Surrealism

Richard Nevinson

October 11, 2015 by Roy Johnson

English modernist painter and war artist

Richard Nevinson – (1899-1946) was an English artist of the early modernist period, the second child of Suffragette-supporters and Christian Socialists who lived in Hampstead. His mother was a teacher and his father (an Oxford classics graduate) was a war correspondent with the Daily Chronicle and the Manchester Guardian. Nevinson was generally unhappy and often ill as a child, and was particularly undistinguished at school. When he was thirteen his father made the disastrous decision to send him to a low-ranking public school, where he endured three pointless years of learning virtually nothing and which left him emotionally scarred, with an enduring hatred of ‘the national code of snobbery and sport’.

Richard Nevinson - La Mitrailleuse

La Mitrailleuse (1915)

The only thing for which he had any aptitude was art, so in 1907 he was sent to St John’s Wood School of Art. This opened up the world of bohemian culture to him, and although his painting and drawing were still undeveloped he spent time drinking in the Cafe Royal in Regent Street with Arthur Symonds who was a friend of his father.

He was supposed to be preparing for entry into the Royal Academy Schools, but when he saw a publication of drawings by artists at the Slade, he knew that this was where he wanted to be. The Slade School of Art was part of University College, London and his contemporaries included Mark Gertler, Stanley Spencer, Paul Nash, and Dora Carrington.

However, when he got there he felt lonely and isolated, but became close friends with Mark Gertler – both of them ‘outsiders’ and both fond of the music halls. But whilst Gertler progressed rapidly and had some remarkable early success, Nevinson had yet to find his own n distinctive style. He painted scenes of railway sidings, factories, and gasometers in the north London suburbs.

Nevinson and Gertler began exhibiting with some degree of success in 1911. They discussed art together all the time, but their friendship was ended not by theories of art but by Dora Carrington. Both of them were paying court to her at the same time, and she (terrified of any possible sexual contact at that stage of her life) was playing one off against the other. Nevinson was older and more experienced, Gertler was better looking and more successful. In the end she chose Gertler – not that it brought him much satisfaction.

After Nevinson’s first year, and following the Dora Carrington problem, he felt that the Slade had nothing more to offer him, and he moved north to Bradford where he felt better painting pictures of mills, factories, and coal mines. But the triangular struggle with Gertler and Carrington continued nevertheless. He then moved to Paris and studied for a while at the Academie Julien. He copied paintings in the Louvre, shared a studio with Modigliani for a while, and met Lenin who at that time was living in exile.

Returning to London in 1913, Nevinson was plunged back into despair by his jealous obsession with Carrington, and eventually had a complete breakdown. He recovered in a health spa in Buxton, after which he was something of a changed man. He threw in his lot with Wyndham Lewis and the other English futurists who set themselves up as an alternative to Roger Fry’s Omega Workshops.

Unfortunately, this move only cut him off even further from the artistic success he sought. The Vorticists (as they called themselves) became mired in factional disputes, they lost their patron, and disappeared rapidly into obscurity, despite issuing Manifestos and calling for revolutions. Their timing couldn’t have been worse or more ironic, because just across the English Channel real wars and revolutions were going on.

Richard Nevinson - Paths of Glory

Paths of Glory (1917)

Nevinson joined the Ambulance Brigade and worked with his father in the makeshift field hospitals of northern France. The scenes of horror he encountered there were so bad that he returned to England in January 1915 and never went back into combat. He transformed these experiences into what was to become his greatest work, La Mitrailleuse, and the success of this work alone led to a one man show at the Leicester Galleries which was a sell out.

However, his shattered nerves were not bad enough to prevent his being re-conscripted. Various wires were pulled and people of influence contacted, and he was returned to the conflict as a war artist – but with no status and no salary. However, many of the paintings which came out of these experiences were criticised and even censored because they were not considered sufficiently patriotic.

After the war Nevinson (like Paul Nash) became ‘a war artist without a war’. His post-war years were tortured – mainly by his rancour at not being celebrated. He reverted to painting in a realistic style, and produced some dramatic cityscapes of New York, Paris, and London which were well received. During the Second World War he worked as a stretcher-bearer in London throughout the Blitz, in which time his own studio and the family home in Hampstead were hit by bombs. He suffered a stroke which paralysed his right hand, and even though he taught himself to paint with his left hand he died somewhat embittered in 1946.

Richard Nevinson Richard Nevinson: Modern War Paintings – Amazon UK
Richard Nevinson Richard Nevinson: Modern War Paintings – Amazon US

Richard Nevinson A Crisis of Brilliance – Amazon UK
Richard Nevinson A Crisis of Brilliance – Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2015


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Roger Fry a biography

July 25, 2009 by Roy Johnson

portrait of Bloomsbury’s art theorist by premier writer

This is one of the last books Virginia Woolf wrote, and it is a tribute from one artist to another, an account of Fry’s aesthetics, and one of her many excursions into biography. Actually, Roger Fry A Biography is almost a joint production, because much of the text is direct quotations from Fry’s own journals and his letters to friends. It starts with his family background of radical Quakers, a quite strict upbringing, and his interest in science and the natural world.

Roger Fry A Biography He was a studious youth who blossomed when he went to Cambridge and was elected to the semi-secret society of Apostles who were what would be called free-thinkers (and coincidentally formed the basis of what would later be the Bloomsbury Group). He was older than the other members of this group, and always held in high regard by them. Despite getting a first in science, he switched to the study of Art and travelled to Italy and France on a sort of autodidactic Grand Tour to bring himself into contact with the masters.

Apart from her obvious sympathy with his artistic ideas, Woolf’s approach is largely descriptive. There is little attempt at analysis of her material. And we have to put up with her reticence on personal matters to a a degree which is almost infuriating. As a young man Fry forms a relationship with a woman old enough to be his mother, who teaches him ‘the art of love’, and they remain friends to the end of life. Yet this relationship is covered in less than a paragraph, and the woman isn’t even named.

Ever after Cambridge, his problem was how to earn a living from art, and even when he got married to fellow art-lover Helen Coombe, he was still living off an income from his father. But he found work as a lecturer, wrote art criticism, got nowhere as a painter, and was eventually employed by Pierpont Morgan to buy pictures for the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Woolf makes a great deal of his organising the 1910 Post-Impressionist exhibition which caused such a rumpus (and which she claimed changed human nature). She sees this as a turning point in Fry’s life, and yet the strange thing is that at the very point that he joins the Bloomsbury Group (and where she has first-hand knowledge of his relationships with its members) she remains annoyingly coy about his personal life.

You would not know from her account that he had an affair with her sister Vanessa Bell. His life as a human being is replaced by the artistic debates which raged about Post-Impressionism, Fry’s own artistic theories, and the foundation of the Omega workshops.

Lots of well-known figures flit across the pages – George Bernard Shaw, Elgar, Lytton Strachey, André Gide – but we are as remote from his personal life as ever. Even his late life affair with Helen Anrep is mentioned almost parenthetically – though he was to live with her for the rest of his life (whilst his wife died slowly from a brain disease in a Retreat at York).

You can see why Woolf found his critical theory interesting. He was searching for a synthesis which would embrace visual art and literature, and he was modest enough to admit that his aesthetic opinions were subjective and limited:

But agreeing that aesthetic apprehension is a pre-eminently spiritual function does not imply for me any connection with morals. In the first place the contemplation of Truth is` likewise a spiritual function but is I judge entirely a-moral. Indeed I should be inclined to deny to morals (proper) any spiritual quality—they are rather the mechanism of civil life—the rules by which life in groups can be rendered tolerable and are therefore only concerned directly with behaviours.

She writes very appreciatively of his book on Cezanne, his life in London and St Remy de Provence, and his search for an all-embracing critical theory. All his life he had sought official recognition but it was denied him time and time again. Finally, in 1933 he was appointed Slade Professor of Art at Cambridge, but a year later he died.

© Roy Johnson 2005

Roger Fry biography Buy the book at Amazon UK

Roger Fry biography Buy the book at Amazon US


Virginia Woolf, Roger Fry: A Biography, London: Vintage, 2003, pp.314 ISBN: 0099442523


More on Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf – web links
Virginia Woolf – greatest works
Virginia Woolf – criticism
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Filed Under: Art, Biography, Bloomsbury Group, Individual designers, Virginia Woolf Tagged With: Art, Biography, Bloomsbury, Cultural history, Roger Fry, Theory, Virginia Woolf

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