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architecture, painting, lifestyle, music, society, theory

architecture, painting, lifestyle, music, society, theory

Romantic Moderns

October 14, 2011 by Roy Johnson

writers, artists, and the English sense of place

Romantic Moderns is a major piece of work by a young cultural historian with a free-ranging approach to her subject. It’s a study of a particular strain in English art that Alexandra Harris correctly describes as ‘romantic’, and illustrates as permeating every aspect of cultural life. The period she covers is the late 1930s through to the immediate post-war period. It would be interesting to know if the title of the PhD on which the book is based had a sub-title more specific than the one she provides here – because ‘from Virginia Woolf to John Piper’ is rather wide in scope. After all, Woolf was born in 1882, and Piper lived until 1992 – so that’s a span covering the late Victorian era, two world wars, and the digital age.

Romantic ModernsHer writing is certainly lively and entertaining. She throws off multiple references that explode like fireworks in almost every paragraph. A consideration of architecture leads to books on buildings, then pictures of buildings, and on to novels that feature them. This cultural enthusiasm is both a strength and a weakness, because whilst the names, titles, and references come thick and fast, it’s sometimes difficult to identify the main point of her argument.

She’s fizzing with information, but I was sometimes longing for an overview or a generalization. The nearest I spotted was that the people she discusses were all interested in the relationship between ‘art and place’.

She covers an astonishingly wide range of topics. Subjects include English country houses (of the Brideshead type) seascapes, Victorian revivalism, cuisine and gastronomy, the BBC, literary criticism, watercolour painting, music, travel writing, film, landscape gardening, and even the weather.

The artists whose work she discusses include John Betjemann, Eric Ravilious, Cecil Beaton, Edward Bawden, Paul Nash, Benjamin Britten, and Graham Sutherland – and those are just some of the best known. She also deals with a whole host of lesser figures – architects, film-makers, milliners, and interior designers,

It’s a world of country gardens, southern seascapes, churches, and images of a bucolic past. There are no cities, motor cars, iron foundries, or telephones in the iconography of this view of the world. Almost all topographical references come from below a line drawn between the Severn and the Wash. In fact you could be forgiven for thinking that the whole of English culture had been generated within the boundaries of Sussex.

The other worrying and recurrent problem in her approach is that modern English romantic art began much earlier than the late thirties in which she pitches most of her comment. The Georgian poets, water-colourists, and engravers all got under way in the second decade of the century, as a reaction to the brutality of the first world war and a sense that an idyllic past was being lost.

She makes a brave case for pastoral romanticism being an enduring feature in English culture, but it is based on selective (though widespread) evidence, and a nostalgic enthusiasm for a view of the world based on the village green. This can be seen as embarrassingly conservative at a time of Hitler’s extermination of Jews, Stalin’s show trials, and the onset of a fully mechanised second world war.

Her capacity for detail uncovers some interesting points – such as T.S. Eliot exchanging views on blood and soil with anti-Semitic and eugenics-supporting Viscount Lymington. It was but a small step from this to Eliot’s belief in religious notions of ‘continuity’ and nationhood. But the arguments on inherent (almost genetic) national feeling for pastoralism are somewhat dented when she cites the work of Bill Brandt, who was German, and Eliot himself, who came from St Louis, Missouri – not East Coker.

The latter part of the book deals with an unashamed celebration of the glamour and romance of the large English country house, focusing on its presence in the work of Elizabeth Bowen, Osbert Sitwell, and Evelyn Waugh. This doesn’t add a lot more to what has gone before, except to intensify an overt nostalgia for disappearing aristocratic worlds.

It might seem churlish to dwell on the weaknesses of such an enthusiastic and beautifully written study, but I think it would be patronising to a work pitched at this level not to take its arguments seriously enough to question them. Anyway, the book is already a runaway success, and its rich cream pages and high quality colour illustrations are sure to delight anyone who buys it.

Romantic Moderns Buy the book at Amazon UK

Romantic Moderns Buy the book at Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2012


Alexandra Harris, Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper, London: Thames and Hudson, 2010, pp.320, ISBN: 0500251711


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Filed Under: 20C Literature, Art, Bloomsbury Group, Design history, Literary Studies Tagged With: Art, Bloomsbury Group, Cultural history, English literature, Literary studies, Modernism, Romantic Moderns

Stanley Spencer

October 11, 2015 by Roy Johnson

visionary English modernist painter

Stanley Spencer (1891-1959) was an English painter from the early modernist period. He was the youngest child of a large middle-class artistic family who lived in Cookham, a small village on the Thames. The cultural ambiance in the household was one of music and church-going. Spencer had very little formal education, since his father had snobbish doubts about the local council school, but could not afford the fees for a private education. He ran his own private school in a shed in next door’s garden.

Stanley Spencer - self portrait

Spencer’s talent for drawing was encouraged by the wife of the local landowner. She suggested the Slade School of Art (where she had studied herself) and he was admitted and at his father’s insistence that he should not be subjected to any examinations, was allowed to bypass the written entrance requirements. He studied under Wilson Steer and the formidable Henry Tonks, and he was a contemporary of Mark Gertler, Richard ‘Chips’ Nevinson, Isaac Rosenberg, Dora Carrington, and David Bomberg.

self-portrait 1923

Being small, wearing glasses, and having the general appearance of a young boy, it was not surprising that he became something of a scapegoat and the butt of jokes amongst his fellow students, many of whom developed a life style that combined upper class raffishness with what we now think of as art school bohemianism. Nevinson called him ‘Cookham’, the village to which he travelled home by train every day. It was a nickname which stuck with him for the rest of his days at the Slade.

By the end of his first year Spencer had won a scholarship prize – though it was initially withheld from him on the technical objection that he had not taken the initial written entrance examination. Although he received very little instruction in painting whilst at the Slade, around this time he began to produce his now famous paintings of everyday life in Cookham village that also included religious figures and scenes from the bible (Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem).

Unlike some of his contemporaries at the Slade, he was not touched by the fashionable influences of the post-Impressionists, but continued painting in the same style as he had always done – a combination of realistic depiction with visionary subject matter. He also steered clear of all the intellectualising and theorising about the nature of Art that was rife amongst his fellow artists.

By 1912 he had twice won Slade prizes despite the fact that sometimes he had to work on the kitchen table at home, surrounded by his parents and brothers and sisters. He left the Slade in the same year, but was included in the second Grafton Gallery exhibition of post-Impressionists, alongside works by Picasso, Matisse, and Cezanne. Even though he behaved like a bucolic recluse, his work became sought after by collectors such as Eddie Marsh and Lady Ottoline Morrell, who bought his works both for her own collection and on behalf of the Contemporary Arts Society.

At the outset of war in 1914 he felt ambivalent about enlisting, but eventually joined the medical service and was posted to a recovery unit in an old lunatic asylum just outside Bristol. He hated the long hours, the drudgery, and the military discipline – but whilst there his painting The Centurion’s Servant caused a stir at the London Group exhibition in November 1915. He then volunteered for an overseas expeditionary posting, and was sent to Macedonia, which he found strangely exciting and exotic.

Stanley Spencer - Swan Upping at Cookham

Swan Upping at Cookham (1915)

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

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

Spencer became obsessed with Patricia and eventually proposed a menage a trois with his wife Hilda, but she refused and divorced him. He immediately married Patricia who as a lesbian equally refused to consummate their marriage or even live in the same house. However, since she controlled his finances, when he signed over the deeds of his own home to her, his new wife forced him out, so he ended up with a wife, an ex-wife, and two children to support. Perhaps not surprisingly he had a nervous breakdown.

This period was also the source of one of his most controversial paintings – the Leg of Mutton Nude or to give the work its more correct title Double Nude Portrait: The Artist and His Second Wife (1937). This is an overtly sexual (though not erotic) portrait of Spencer and Patricia, with a joint of lamb in the foreground. It was never exhibited in his lifetime. Later, the outgoing president of the Royal Academy, Sir Alfred Munnings initiated a police prosecution against Spencer for obscenity. The irony in all this is that the portrait shows the bespectacled Stanley looking down longingly on the naked body of Patricia, the wife with whom he never had sex.

He undertook the enormous project of a decorated chapel at the Sandham Memorial Chapel in Burghclere, designing the chapel himself and modelling it on Giotto’s Arena Chapel in Padua. This work consisted of sixteen huge paintings depicting everyday scenes of shell-shocked troops in England and Macedonia, but with an emphasis on everyday events rather than the horrors of war. He was commissioned as a war artist during 1939-45 and completed paintings of shipbuilding on the Clyde which are now in national collections. But his main creative impetus was spent, and he died of cancer in 1956, the same year as he received a knighthood.

Stanley Spencer Stanley Spencer: illustrated biography – Amazon UK
Stanley Spencer Stanley Spencer: illustrated biography – Amazon US

Stanley Spencer Stanley Spencer (British Artists series) – Amazon UK
Stanley Spencer Stanley Spencer (British Artists series) – Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2015


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The Blues – a very short introduction

August 31, 2010 by Roy Johnson

history of blues music 1910 to the present

Most people imagine that ‘the Blues’ is a form of musical expression characterised by mournful lamentations about life’s hardships or expressions of lost love. Ask any musician, and they will tell you that it’s the name of a musical form, moving from the tonic to the sub-dominant fourth, then via a flattened seventh, back to the dominant. And a singer might point out that it is a four-bar ‘call’ or phrase that is repeated then completed by a four-bar ‘answer’. Elijah Wald’s strength is to show that it means all these things – and more besides. The blues is also a thorough mixture of European and African American musical elements that first became popular via very politically incorrect minstrel shows in the early decades of the twentieth century.

The Blues: a very short introductionWald is particularly good at explaining the distinctions between different styles – which are usually the products of different geographical areas – and showing the social and economic context out of which these styles emerged. In terms of structure he first of all covers the classic country-based blues artists of the period 1910-1930, then he looks at the blues as a mainstay of popular bands such as Count Basie, Louis Jordan, and Lionel Hampton. He several times emphasises that the big stars of this period wer almost all women singers – Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Dinah Washington (real name, Ruth Jones).

When it comes to the 1950s and the arrival of blues-based rock-and-roll he explains again the case he makes at length in How the Beatles Destroyed Rock N Roll. This is the argument that the new young white groups, even though inspired by the old blues masters, pushed them out of the record charts. However, it is a mistake to imagine that they universally resented this. Many of them had lost their original black audiences, and were grateful for finding new ones by association with the likes of the Rolling Stones and the Beatles.

The final chapters trace the influence of the blues on American culture – first in its relation with jazz music. It’s really quite difficult to say where the blues ends and jazz begins, as all great jazz performers have have included blues as part of their repertoire from Buddy Bolden’s “Blues” to John Coltrane’s “Cousin Mary”.

It is the penultimate chapter that blues purists will find most controversial, since Wald argues that in the racially segregated world of country and western music, white performers such as Jimmy Rogers and Hank Williams were just as influential on black singers as the other way round – and he has the evidence from black performers themselves to support this idea.

He ends with a chapter on the poetry of the blues – extolling the virtues of its sexual frankness and unsentimental treatment of life’s harsher realities. I thought he missed a good chance to point out the use of amazingly inventive allegories and metaphors (Robert Johnson’s “Terraplane Blues” and Willie Dixon’s “Little Red Rooster”) – but you cannot expect everything in a ‘very short introduction’.

Anyone who wants an introduction to this rich musical genre would do well to start here. I read it with my connection to www.Spotify.com open – and checked all his major recommendations. They were spot on.

The Blues Buy the book at Amazon UK

The Blues Buy the book at Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2010


Elijah Wald, The Blues: a very short introduction, Oxford Oxford University Press, 2010, pp.140, ISBN: 0195398939


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The Life of Jimmy Scott

July 16, 2009 by Roy Johnson

critical biography of major but under-appreciated singer

I have to confess that I only heard of Jimmy Scott quite recently. Understandably so, it turns out. He’s one of the best kept secrets in the world of jazz and ballad singing. I heard his voice on a radio broadcast, was intrigued, bought a couple of CDs from Amazon – and was completely blown away. He’s completely unlike any other male singer you’ve ever heard of – mainly because he sounds like a woman. This is the result of a congenital disease which denied him puberty.

Jimmy Scott But that isn’t all: he has a style which is stripped bare to a minimum and yet very mannered at the same time. Like all good jazz musicians, he pays attention to song lyrics and sings them as if he means them. The most interesting things about him are his voice quality – high falsetto, big vibrato – and his delivery, which is laid back to a point where you think he might fall over. But he never does. The nearest style I can think of is Billie Holliday – one of his early fans and an influence. As David Ritz puts it in this very readable biography:

The rhythms he creates are wholly original. He does more than take his time. He doesn’t worry about time. Time disappears as a restraint or a measure. As a singer, his signatures are idiosyncratic phrasing and radical, behind-the beat syncopation. His career, like his singing, has lagged far behind the beat.

Scott’s life was full of personal heartbreak: from a dysfunctional family; orphaned as a teenager; married four times; duped by record producers; constantly on the move; scorned as an outsider; drink, (soft) drugs. He lived, as David Ritz accurately puts it, the jazz life.

Oddly enough, he claims that his early influences were Paul Robeson and Judy Garland two singers who you would think were at opposite ends of the musical spectrum.

The amazing thing, for someone who is still alive and singing now (I heard him with a German tenor player only a few weeks ago) is that he cut his musical teeth with people such as Lester Young, Charlie Parker, and Tadd Dameron. His working life spans the last half-century.

Much of the racy vivacity of Ritz’s narrative comes from the fact that he transcribes the accounts of people he interviewed in his research. There are also some very entertaining vignettes along the way – such as life on the road in the high-octane Lionel Hampton band in the late 1940s.

His biggest fans were the people who matter musically – Bird, B.B.King, Ray Charles, Quincy Jones, Billie Holiday, and Shirley Horn. Later on he was championed by Lou Reed and Madonna.

And his own musical taste is impeccable – as in his perceptive observation that Stan Getz got better as he got older “Whatever he learned from Lester—and he learned a lot—he expanded on the lessons until he became a master himself”

He started out promisingly enough, but every time he tried to make his breakthrough record albumn, an old producer would surface to block his ambition with a ‘cease and desist’ order straight out of a nineteenth century melodrama. Scott remained unembittered – though it has to be said he took out a lot of his anger on the people closest to him.

The 1970s and 1980s are like waste years, with Scott working as a hotel lift attendant and a shipping clerk to make ends meet. Then there are a succession of failed enterprises which left him living off social security. But then he finally got some recognition and success in the 1990s when largely white audiences began to catch on to him. By then he was sixty-eight years old.

So the story has a reasonably happy ending – but he had to wait almost half a lifetime for it. This is an enthralling account of a real survivor, recounted with genuine but not uncritical admiration, and supported by a scholarly apparatus of bibliography and discography which left me yearning to read and listen to more of this truly remarkable artist.

© Roy Johnson 2002

Jimmy Scott Buy the book at Amazon UK

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David Ritz, Faith in Time: The Life of Jimmy Scott, Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2002, pp.270, ISBN: 0306812290


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The Oxford Companion to Jazz

July 1, 2009 by Roy Johnson

essays on jazz musicians and jazz history

This latest addition to the distinguished Oxford Companion series comes with an encomium from record producer George Avakian: “No book on jazz has ever attempted the scope of this monumental collection of 60 studies by 59 writers. [It] is both a reference work for the scholar and a rewarding book to be dipped into by the casual reader.” Edited by composer, educator, and saxophonist Bill Kirchner, The Oxford Companion to Jazz is both impressive and slightly disappointing.

Companion to Jazz The essays are uneven in quality, there are several typographical errors, some of the black and white photographs are poorly reproduced, there are no ‘Notes on Contributors’, and the eye-straining ‘Selected Bibliography’ and ‘Index of Names and Subjects’ are not accompanied by a discography – although several essays are, in effect, record reviews. But this stout Companion has more strengths than weaknesses, and is a valuable addition to jazz literature. Kirchner’s contributors include such notable critics and musicians as Dan Morgernstern, Gunther Schuller, Patricia Willard, Bill Crow, Digby Fairweather, and Richard M. Sudhalter. There are also essays from Loren Schoenberg, Dick Katz, Mike Zwerin, Lewis Porter, Brian Priestly, Will Friedwall, Scott De Veaux, Max Harrison and Ted Gioia.

The topics covered range from ‘African Roots of Jazz’ (Samuel A. Floyd, Jr.) and ‘European Roots of Jazz’ (William H. Youngren) – which present two opposing views of the same topic. Extended essays also cover such neglected subjects as ‘The Jazz Age, Appearances and Realities’ and ‘Big Bands and Jazz Composing and Arranging after World War II’.

There are chapters dealing with jazz styles – such as ragtime, swing, bop (an excellent piece by De Veaux), third stream, and fusion – and the locations of jazz – New Orleans, New York, California, and Kansas City. Even Europe, Japan, Canada and Australia are exhumed and examined.

Acknowledged jazz masters (and mistresses) receive individual (and sometimes overlapping) evaluations: Bessie Smith, King Oliver, Jelly Roll Morton, Sidney Bechet, Bix Beiderbecke, Duke Ellington, Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young; Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday and Sarah Vaughan (in a perceptive essay by Patricia Willard). There are also chapters on the modern masters Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Charles Mingus, and John Coltrane – though ‘cutting edge’ instrumentalists and vocalists of the past two decades receive short (or no) shrift.

Separate entries on the instruments of jazz offer some revealing insights – Michael Ullman on the clarinet, Gunther Schuller on the trombone, Don Heckman on the saxophone, Randy Sandke on the trumpet, Bill Crow on the bass, Burt Korall on the drums, Neil Tesser on ‘The Electric Guitar and Vibraphone in Jazz: Batteries Not Included’. There are also several essays on pianists.

In one of the best essays, ‘Jazz Improvisation and Concepts of Virtuosity’, David Demsey explains that ‘in a great soloist’s repertoire, every tune is like a familiar subject of conversation: although fresh ideas are always emerging, the language needed to communicate them has a consistency for each individual.’

He then applies this observation to the recorded work of masters ranging from Louis Armstrong to Ornette Coleman. He makes a good point in his suggestion that:

It is in the solitude of the practice room – ‘the woodshed’ – where, for even the most inexperienced student and the legendary jazz master alike, the basic elements of form and harmony are ingrained, new melodies or voice-leading pathways are learned, and experiments are made in rhythmic manipulation.

The Oxford Companion to Jazz, like the music and musicians it celebrates, is hugely enjoyable but best taken in measured doses. Holding this massive tome open takes two hands. If, as the editor hopes, it also sends (or introduces) the serious or casual reader to the recorded performances of the artists discussed, so much the better.

© John White 2005

Companion to Jazz Buy the book at Amazon UK

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Bill Kirchner (ed), The Oxford Companion to Jazz, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, pp.864, ISBN: 019512510X


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The Oxford Dictionary of Music

June 30, 2009 by Roy Johnson

definitions and an encyclopedia of musical matters

Actually this is what should be called (for the want of a better term) a dictionary of classical music, because it does not seek to cover all musical genres. Entries run from the note A to the Polish soprano Teresa Zylis-Gara, and include major (and minor) composers plus their works, famous performers and conductors, characters from operas, musical concepts and genres, musical instruments, and even mini-essays on topics such as ‘Electronic Music’.

The Oxford Dictionary of MusicIt’s as up-to-date as one could expect for a work of reference of this kind. There are 12,500 entries on all aspects of the subject, and topics stretch from music of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries to potted biographies of contemporary composers such as Judith Weir and performers such as Cecilia Bartoli. I checked against (for instance) George Benjamin (b. 1960) and Thomas Adès (b. 1970) – and both of them had entries.

Its one nod towards ‘popular’ music is to include mention of song composers such as Irving Berlin and Cole Porter. For anyone interested in music, whether as a student, concert-goer, record collector or Radio 3 listener, it is a welcoming book – in which the author shares his enthusiasm for the obvious as well as the obscure. To give a very typical illustrative example, the section on American composer John Adams runs as follows:

Adams, John (Coolidge) (b Worcester, Mass, 1947). Amer. composer, conductor, and clarinetist. Studies Harvard Univ. and comp. with Kirchner, Del Tredici, and Sessions. Head, comp. dept. San Francisco Cons. 1972-82. Comp-in-res., San Francisco SO 1979-85. One of minimalists, he has deliberately forged an eclectic idiom which borrows from most of the major 20th cent. composers and from jazz. Comps.:

OPERAS: * Nixon in China (1984-7) ; The * Death of Klinghoffer (1990-1); I was looking at the ceiling and then I saw the sky, mus. th. (1994-5); Doctor Atomic (2003-5).

ORCH.: Common Tones in Simple Time (1980); Shaker Loops, str. (1983); Harmonielehre (1984-5); Tromba lontana (1986); Short ride in a fast machine (1986); The Chairman Dances (1987); Fearful Symetries (1988); Eros Piano, pf, orch. or chamber orch. (1989); Chamber conc. (1991); El Dorado (1991); vn. conc. (1993).

VOICE(S) & ORCH. OR ENS.: Christian Zeal and Activity, spkr. on tape., ens. (1973); Grounding, 3 solo vv., instr., elec. (1975); Harmonium, ch., orch. (1980); Grand Pianola Music, 2 sop., 2 pf., small orch. (1981-2); The Wound Dresser, bar., orch. or chamber orch. (1988).

CHAMBER MUSIC: Pf. quintet (1970); American Standard, unspecified ens. (1973).

PIANO: Ragamarole, (1973); China Gates, (1977); Phrygian Gates, (1977).

TAPE ONLY: Onyx, (1975); Light Over Water, (1983).

The entire body text is set in Times New Roman, which for works of reference is a little unfashionable these days – but which I felt was sympathetic to the subject of classical music.

This latest revised edition has been supplemented with 1,000 new entries; lists of composers works have been brought up to date; and the entries now also include musical directors, critics, producers, and designers. Whether we call it ‘classical’ music or anything else, everything you might wish to know about it is covered here. [It’s also now available in a slightly abridged paperback edition.]

© Roy Johnson 2012

Dictionary of Music Buy the book at Amazon UK

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Michael Kennedy, The Oxford Dictionary of Music, (revised edition) Oxford: Oxford University Press, sith edition, 2012, pp.976, ISBN: 0199578109


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The Painted Word

August 23, 2011 by Roy Johnson

from abstract expressionism to op art and minimalism

The Painted Word is a companion piece to Tom Wolfe’s other book-length critical essay on architecture, From Bauhaus to Our House. This time his target is the world of modern American painting, the way reputations are established, and how the world of art has been turned into a form of commodity investment. His arguments are based upon the observation that the world of contemporary art is based upon two very small elite groups. First the artists themselves, who make radical visual statements scorning bourgeois values. Second  their very rich patrons, who court contemporary chic fashion with a similar purpose. There is in fact an even smaller third group – the critics and theorists – but they are counted along with the first.

The Painted WordHe adds for good measure the fact that as artistic reputations are established by the interactions between these groups, the general public plays no part in the process whatsoever. The focus of his critique is on New York, but he argues that the same forces are at play in any of the world’s (few) centres for modern art – be they London, Paris, or Tokyo.

He sees modern art post second world war as an ever more rapid flight from the tradition of realistic painting towards the ultimate dead end of an art based upon nothing but theory. The first stage of this trajectory is the arrival of abstract expressionism with artists such as Willem de Kooning, Franz Klein, and Jackson Pollock.

They ditched figurative painting and were urged on by critics such as Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg, who spoke of ‘”essences” and “purities” and “opticalities” and “formal factors” and “logics of readjustment”  and God knows what else’. Wolfe reserves some of his most amusing yet scornful remarks for the wilful obscurity of such ‘criticism’.

The influence of this group was quickly replaced by the arrival of Pop Art in the 1960s, fuelled by painters such as Jasper Johns, Robert Rauchenberg, and Roy Lichtenstein

Pop Art was packed with literary associations … It was, from beginning to end an ironic, a camp, a literary-intellectual assertion of the banality, emptiness, silliness, vulgarity, et cetera of American culture, and if the artist said, as Warhol usually did, “But that’s what I like about it” – that only made the irony more profound, more cool.

And before you knew it, Pop  was replaced by Op Art, which reduced the notion of art as nothing more than stripes of colour on a flat surface. This in its turn was displaced by Minimalist Art, which reduced the colours and the shapes.

You can see the direction and the end goal of this argument. The next stage was to remove any painterly skill altogether, and reduce the subject to nothing more than words on paper – which gave us Conceptual Art.

It’s an argument which still holds good today, even if the names have been changed to Jeff Koons, Tracy Emin, and Damien Hirst.

The Painted Word Buy the book at Amazon UK

The Painted Word Buy the book at Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2011


Tom Wolfe, The Painted Word, New York: Picador, 2008, pp.112, ISBN: 0312427581


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Filed Under: Art Tagged With: Art, The Painted Word, Tom Wolfe

The Rest is Noise

July 17, 2009 by Roy Johnson

classical music in the twentieth century

Alex Ross is the music critic for the New Yorker magazine who blogs prolifically at The Rest is Noise. And even though he doesn’t have comments switched on at his site, his postings are required reading for anyone who wants to keep abreast of classical music – especially as seen from New York city. His tastes and references are amazingly eclectic and unstuffy. One minute he’s analysing the latest staging of the Ring Cycle and next he’s reporting on developments in contemporary rock music or a recently discovered private recording of a John Coltrane radio broadcast.

The Rest is Noise This is his long-awaited first book and major oeuvre as a critic, tracing the development of twentieth century classical music from the first night of Strauss’s Salome (no accent) in 1905 to John Adams‘s Nixon in China in 1987. He has an amazingly developed sense of cultural history- reminding us whilst discussing the development of Thomas Mann‘s traditional musical ideas in relation to Schoneberg that Leon Trotsky spent the years 1907 to 1914 in exile in Vienna where these modernist moves were being played out, alongside the work of Karl Kraus, Oskar Kokoshka, and Egon Schiele. He darts back and forth in time in a way which is at first bewildering, but there’s a good reason for doing so – usually to show how far back cultural convergences began.

His narrative is spiced by what might be called the higher musical gossip. He slips in references and anecdotes which sparkle like gems on the page. Schoneberg’s bon mot on his exile in California: ‘I was driven into Paradise’, and Charlie Parker spontaneously quoting from The Firebird when he spotted Igor Stravinsky was in the audience at Birdland one night.

It’s an approach which relies heavily on anecdote and cultural montage – but his juxtapositions are all backed up by scholarly references which are kept wisely at the back of the book, They don’t encumber the narrative.

His descriptions of symphonies and major orchestral works are a mixture of technical analysis and an impressionistic account of what is going on:

In the last bars, the note B aches for six slow beats against the final C-major chord, like a hand outstretched from a figure disappearing into light.

Maybe the mixture is just about right. After all, it’s difficult to write about music, which is essentially abstract. When you think about it, music doesn’t mean anything, even though it can be incredibly moving and beautiful. Though that, of course, is meaning of a kind.

The Spirit of Schoenberg presides over the first part of the book: all other music seems to be measured against his purist ethos and practice. This phase ends with the premiere of Berg’s Lulu in 1937. My only disappointment in this section was his account of Duke Ellington, which concentrated on his not-to-be-performed opera Boola and failed to bring out the element of small-scale symphonies or concertos which characterised much of his sub three-minute compositions for 78 rpm recordings.

In the second part, Shostakovich is let off the hook somewhat. As a way of explaining his capitulation to Stalinism, Ross describes him as having ‘divided selves’ – though to do him credit, Ross doesn’t try to conceal the privileges he enjoyed (spacious Moscow flat with three pianos, for which he thanked Stalin personally) whilst his contemporaries were being led of to the Gulag or despatched with a bullet in the back of the head.

It’s interesting to read of the style wars of the 1940s and 1950s with the benefit of half a century’s hindsight. Major composers such as Stravinsky were being written off by people who are now forgotten – and it’s even more amazing to read that the champions of atonal music and the concerts arranged to promote them were funded by the CIA.

Ross clearly has his heroes – Strauss (despite his Nazi associations) Schoenberg, and Stravinsky. And even though he may not have intended it, Pierre Boulez emerges from the narrative as a distinctly pushy, unpleasant piece of self-aggrandisement.

I was surprised that he took John Cage so seriously – somebody who has always struck me as completely bogus – but he gives a touching account of Aaron Copland, who suffered harassment and criticism in his own country during the McCarthy trials for his leftish sympathies, despite his having written such iconic evocations of America as Appalachian Spring and Fanfare for the Common Man

There’s a whole chapter on Benjamin Britten, where I was glad to see that Ross doesn’t shy away from the much-ignored fact that much of Britten’s work deals with the sexual and emotional violation of young boys. He even reveals that Britten (in a Michael Jackson moment) took the juvenile star of his 1954 The Turn of the Screw (David Hemmings) into his own bed. But Ross’s account of Britten is far from smutty. There’s a several page long account of Peter Grimes which is the most extended musical analysis in the whole book.

He ends his narrative with an account of the American minimalists – the music still apparently split into two camps, but this time ‘uptown’ and ‘downtown’ – and he has a roundup of developments in Europe following the collapse of communism and the Berlin Wall. His story concludes with a part-wish, half-expectation that classical and popular music will somehow embrace each other in a way which will create new forms in the twenty-first century.

This is a very readable, indeed a compelling work which combines love of the subject with a detailed knowledge of its history and cultural context. It’s the sort of book that makes you feel like reading with a piano keyboard to hand in order to follow the formal sequences and chord progressions he describes. Unmissable for anyone interested in twentieth century music.

© Roy Johnson 2007

The Rest is Noise Buy the book at Amazon UK

The Rest is Noise Buy the book at Amazon US


Alex Ross, The Rest is Noise: listening to the twentieth century, New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2007, pp.624, ISBN: 0374249393


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Filed Under: Music Tagged With: Alex Ross, classical music, Cultural criticism, Cultural history, Music, The Rest is Noise

The Russian Experiment in Art

March 8, 2010 by Roy Johnson

the rise of Russian modernism 1863-1922

Camilla Gray was a young and pioneering scholar of Russian modernist art. She was a former ballet dancer, with no academic background. She married Oleg Prokoviev (the composer’s son) and died tragically young at the age of only thirty-five. And yet she established a body of work on Russian art in 1962 which was quickly appreciated in other European countries. Her original impulse, fuelled by admiration for the modernist work of Malevich and Tatlin, was to look into the tradition out of which such revolutionary art had grown. The Russian Experiment in Art was the culmination of her life’s work.

The Russian Experiment in Art There was little information around in the 1960s when she began her research, which is what makes her achievement so remarkable. The first part of the cultural process she documents is the development of a Russian middle class in the late nineteenth century. Mamontov, who made his money builidng the railway from Archangel to Murmansk, established an artists’ colony based in Slavophile Moscow (not europhile St Petersburgh). From this many artistic themes were developed, including the connection between painting and the theatre, and a desire to make aesthetics socialy useful. The standout character she highlights from this period (of whom I had not heard before) is Mikhail Vrubel.

Meanwhile, towards the end of the nineteenth century, a group centred in St Petersburg focussed their desires for a new Russian art around the production of a magazine, called ‘World of Art’. Like most avant gard magazines it was short-lived, but it included work by Leon Bakst, Sergei Diaghilev, and Alexander Benois. They had allowed themselves to be influenced by the latest developments in France, Germany, and Italy and thus represented a cosmopolitanism which was common in much of modernist art.

Following the 1905 revolution there was a vigorous period of art collecting by wealthy patrons which resulted in Russian artists having direct contact with the work of post-impressionists – and Matisse and Picasso in particular made a big impression on the Russian avant garde.

Her study then moves on to two seminal figures who helped to bridge the gap between traditional Russian folk art and modernism – Mikhail Larionov and Natalia Goncharova. They both went on to become stage designers, working for Sergei Diaghilev. It’s interesting to note as an aside that it was quite common for artists to design scale model sets and costumes for stage productions which had not taken place, and often never would.

Natalia Goncharova

Natalia Goncharova 1910

Many of the individual movements in Russian art were taking place at the same time, and being developed at a dizzying pace. Larionov’s experiments in Rayonnism (the Russian equivalent of Italian Futurism) were painted alongside his neo-primitivist pictures of peasant life. When Larionov and Goncharova left to tour Europe with The Ballets Russe, the baton of further developments seemed to be taken up by the next two major figures to emerge – Malevich and Tatlin.

Malevich went from paintings in a Cubo-Futurist style in 1912-1913 to his totally abstract compositions in Suprematism only two years later. And in roughly the same period Vladimir Tatlin progressed from stylised but conventional paintings to the abstract three-dimensional constructions, of which his Monument to the Third International is the most famous. (It should be remembered that this was only ever a model for a building intended to be twice the height of the Empire State building.)

The artistic dynamics which created these many styles didn’t prevent factional disputes between rival tendencies, and at the ‘Last Futurist Painting Exhibition’ Malevich and Tatlin actually held up the opening by having a fist-fight brawl until they were separated by Alexandra Exter.

In 1917 the Revolution gave artists both a political impetus and an opportunity to link their art to socially useful purposes, which many of them did with great enthusiasm – particularly leftists such as Alexander Rodchenko and El Lissitzky.

It is with their pioneering work in typography and photo-montage that the book ends. Too soon, I felt – but perhaps mercifully so, because within a few years of their fresh and optimistic work of the early 1920s, the whole of the heroic phase of Soviet communism was crushed under the stifling diktats of centralist ideology, and all ‘art’ was reduced to the drab banalities of Socialist Realism.

Camilla Gray does her best to persuade us that the Russian versions of Cubism and Futurism were quite different than their French and Italian counterparts. The visual evidence in this richly illustrated volume suggest otherwise. She also has the naive critical habit of taking what artists say about themselves and their work at face value.

However, it’s easy to see why this pioneering study The Russian Experiment in Art is so highly regarded. She gives specific names and dates to artists, individual works of art, and exhibitions almost as if she was present whilst they were taking place. There is a full critical apparatus attached to the work, and this has been updated and expanded by Marion Burleigh-Motley, a specialist in Russian art at New York University. In short, this is a serious update of a major work of art history – available for the price of a couple of drinks.

Russian Experiment in Art Buy the book at Amazon UK

Russian Experiment in Art Buy the book at Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2010


Camilla Gray, The Russian Experiment in Art 1863-1922, London: Thames and Hudson, 2007, pp.324, ISBN 0500202079


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Filed Under: Art, Theory Tagged With: Art, Art history, Cultural history, Design, Modernism

The Tradition of Constructivism

December 2, 2009 by Roy Johnson

documents, manifestos, and artistic policy statements

The tradition of constructivism began in Russia in 1920 following the Bolshevik revolution, as an attempt to define a new art for a new age and New Man. It spread to Germany, attaching itself to the Bauhaus movement, and then moved in the 1930s to France and Switzerland. In theory it continued after the second world war, but it was more evident in practice than in theoretical form, and it now finds modern reflections in the work of designers such as Neville Brody. The Tradition of Constructivism is a study of the entire moevement.

The Tradition of ConstructivismThis collection of manifestos, articles, and agit-prop documents represents the theoretical and propagandist side of the movement – and it must be said that it captures well the exuberance and desire to create something new which erupted from artists such as Naum Gabo, Vladimir Tatlin, El Lissitzsky, and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. Editor Stephen Bann offers a prefatory essay, putting the documents into a historical context, and he supplies biographical notes to introduce each document, tracing the various intersections of the principle figures.

This was a movement which embraced many forms of art – painting, sculpture, typography, architecture, and photography – as well as what we would now call ‘mixed media’. The artists were keen to break with the romantic past, keen to embrace new technologies, new functionalism (useful art) and new abstractions. Many of them also held left-wing political views that harmonised well with the tenor of the early 1920s.

However, their theoretical writings are of a different order than the art works they produced. Many of their artistic manifestos and declarations of intent are couched in terribly abstract generalisations. Naum Gabo and Antoine Pevsner declare quite baldly in The Realistic Manifesto of 1920:

No new artistic system will withstand the pressure of a growing new culture until the very foundation of Art will be erected on the real laws of life.

And Alexei Gann is even more uncompromising in his proclamation Constructivism of 1922:

DEATH TO ART!

It arose NATURALLY

It developed NATURALLY

And disappeared NATURALLY

MARXISTS MUST WORK IN ORDER TO ELUCIDATE ITS DEATH SCIENTIFICALLY AND TO FORMULATE NEW PHENOMENA OF ARTISTIC LABOUR WITHIN THE NEW HISTORIC ENVIRONMENT OF OUR TIME.

Ironically, these radical attitudes gave the artists problems as soon as the official line in the Soviet Union changed abruptly from pro- to anti-modernism only a few years later under the rise of Stalin. It’s interesting to reflect that this form of argument in abstract generalisations, with no detailed examination of concrete examples, is precisely the rhetorical method which was to be used against these modernists by the apparatchicks of the Ministry of Culture from the late 1920s onwards.

The Zhdanhovs of this world didn’t sully their proclamations against ‘formalists’ and ‘decadents’ by anything so simple as the analysis of real works. For them, naming names or even just dropping hints was enough to send typographists, poets, and artists to the Gulag.

Rodchenko - photo designHowever, it should perhaps be remembered that many visual artists, from art-college onwards, come badly unstuck when it comes to expressing their ideas in words. That’s why theories of constructivism and any other movement should be founded on what is produced, not what is said. This is one of the weaknesses of extrapolating aesthetic theories from documents such as those reproduced here. Much huffing and puffing can be expended on whatever artists said about their art, rather than what they produced. But these are theories based on opinions rather than material practice.

This is a publication that is wonderfully rich in scholarly reference and support. There are full attributions for all the illustrations used, notes to the text, a huge bibliography, and full attributions for the sources of all the original documents reproduced. There are also some rather grainy black and white images of constructivist art, typography, and architecture which illustrate the fact that the imaginative products of these artists (irrespective of their sloganeering) was genuinely revolutionary.

Osip Brik - portrait by RodchenkoTaking a sympathetic attitude to the early efforts of these artists to develop a revolutionary approach to art, it’s interesting to note that they thought subjective individual expression ought to be replaced by collective works. They also fondly imagined that the working class would unerringly prefer the most imaginative and original works over traditional offerings. This was a period in which the term ‘easel painting’ was used in a tone of sneering contempt. The fact that they were largely ignored by the class for whom they thought they were fighting this aesthetic war in no way diminishes their achievements.

And occasionally nuggets of genuine insight emerge from all the generalizing dreck – as in Osip Brik’s observation regarding Rodchenko’s approach to constructivism:

The applied artist has nothing to do if he can’t embellish an object; for Rodchenko a complete lack of embellishment is a necessary condition for a proper construction of the object.

The documents span the period from the birth of constructivism in 1920 up to the post-war remnants of the movement. This is something of a special interest publication, but it’s well worth studying to understand the political and theoretical notions that provided the impetus behind an artistic endeavour which is still influential today. The theory might be dated, but constuctivist works of art are certainly not.

Constructivism Buy the book at Amazon UK

Constructivism Buy the book at Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2009


Stephen Bann (ed), The Tradition of Constructivism, Da Capo Press, 1990, pp.334, ISBN 0306803968


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Filed Under: Architecture, Art, Design history Tagged With: Alexander Rodchenko, Constructivism, Cultural history, Design, Modernism, Russian modernism, The Tradition of Constructivism

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