Mantex

Tutorials, Study Guides & More

  • HOME
  • REVIEWS
  • TUTORIALS
  • HOW-TO
  • CONTACT
>> Home / Biography

Biography

writers, artists, designers, and bohemians

writers, artists, designers, and bohemians

writers, artists, designers, and bohemians

A Crisis of Brilliance

October 11, 2015 by Roy Johnson

biographical studies of five early English modernist painters

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

A Crisis of Brilliance

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

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

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

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

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

Stanley Spencer - self portrait

Stanley Spencer – self-portrait 1923

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

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

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

Dora Carrington biography

Yes – that’s Dora Carrington

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Richard Nevinson - La Mitrailleuse

Richard Nevinson – La Mitrailleuse (1915)

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

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

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

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

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

Paul Nash - Wood on the Downs

Paul Nash – Wood on the Downs (1929)

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

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

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

Richard Nevinson Buy the book at Amazon UK

Richard Nevinson Buy the book at Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2015


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


More on art
More on media
More on design


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

Alma Mahler

July 27, 2012 by Roy Johnson

wife, mistress, muse, and  hostess to the arts

Alma Mahler was one of the most famous (some would say infamous) grandes dames of the first part of the twentieth century. She was rich, famous, gifted, and very glamorous in her younger years. And she had a penchant for artists, writers, and men of power that led to a succession of husbands and lovers. She was born in 1879 to a father who was a rather feckless painter and a mother who was an ex-singer. The family eventually became successful via some royal patronage that was common in the Hapsburg Empire at that time. But their rise in fortunes was cut short when the patron shot himself and her father died when she was quite young.

Alma MahlerAlma was not close to her mother, and had no time at all for her younger sister. The remainder of her life seems to have been a search for powerful authority-figure substitutes for the father she had lost. As a young woman, obviously aware of her physical attractiveness, she had a series of chaste but coquettish relationships with older men. Her widowed mother married one of her father’s artistic colleagues, and Alma mixed at her social ease in the Secessionist artistic circles that were established in Vienna towards the end of the nineteenth century.

One of her first serious connections was with Gustav Klimt, but the relationship was nipped in the bud by her mother, who disapproved of the liaison. When she began to develop her own interests in music in the form of song composition, she engaged the services of Alexander von Zemlinsky. She thought he was hideously ugly, but in order to become his student she flattered him by saying that he was ‘becoming too attractive to her’.

This characteristic flirting would persist throughout her life. Nevertheless, she was on the point of giving herself to Zemlinsky when she met Gustav Mahler, a composer who was just on the point of becoming great. He proposed to her on their fourth meeting – on the condition that she give up all thought of her own musical ambitions for herself. There was only to be room for one musician in the Mahler household.

She submitted to this egoism, produced two children, yet kept her musical friendships with Zemlinsky and Pfitzner alive in order to maintain her self-respect. It’s perhaps understandable that passages in this excellent biography dealing with her marriage to Mahler are dominated by the husband’s professional difficulties and triumphs rather than her own development.

Gustav Mahler achieved great success in Europe and even America where the family lived for the part of each year. But Alma characteristically developed a sense of restless disaffection from her husband, and ended up having a nervous breakdown which called for a sanitorium ‘cure’. [This is the era Thomas Mann deals with in his novel The Magic Mountain.]

Whilst taking the cure she met the architect Walter Gropius and started an affair with him. On return to Vienna she was prepared to equivocate between these two attachments, but Gropius upped the ante by writing to Mahler, saying that he wanted to marry his wife. Mahler was devastated, and suddenly found it in himself to support Alma’s musical interests – but it was too late. He died shortly after this.

Gropius perhaps wisely, put his relationship with Alma on hold – and she meanwhile temporised with relationships with musician Franz Schrecker and biologist Paul Kammerer – then in 1912 met the artist Oskar Kokoshka.

Their’s was a stormy love affair that lasted three years. Kokoshka wanted to marry her, but she resisted shackling herself to a poor and (then) unknown artist. They quarrelled a lot, and he was terribly jealous of her previous attachments, but he produced lots of important work, including his masterpiece The Bride of the Wind which gives this biography its title.

The Bride of the Wind

The Bride of the Wind

Kokoshka enlisted in the first world war, almost as a gesture of despair about their relationship; he was badly wounded, and whilst he was convalescing she married Gropius.

If the Gustav Mahler episode was not sufficient proof, her relationship with Kokoshka certainly demonstrates to power of Alma Mahler as an inspiring muse to great artists. It’s interesting to note just how many of Kokoshka’s great paintings were produced around this time.

However, with Gropius she seemed to have found a partner with whom she could find some semblance of emotional tranquillity. She was even eager to start another family with him, which they did in 1915, after a secret marriage. The outcome was her daughter Manon, who proved to be a tragic child who died of poliomyelitis whilst still young.

Gropius was himself called back into the war, leaving Alma to fall in love with the poet Franz Werfel who was ten years younger than her, and just at the start of his career. In 1918 Alma suffered the premature birth (with complications) of her fourth child Martin. Gropius was summoned from military duty on the assumption that the child was his. He discovered fairly rapidly that it was not.

There was a showdown between Gropius, Werfel, and Alma – but she refused to choose between them as husband a lover. Eventually, Gropius agreed to a divorce. He went on to establish the Bauhaus project: Werfel gradually abandoned poetry and wrote instead a series of commercially successful novels, all of which are now completely forgotten.

Alma now had everything she wanted, yet her life continued to be full of restlessness, distress, and antagonism with her daughter Anna, who was married several times, and had an affair with the writer Elias Canetti.

Alma eventually married Werfel, despite their political differences. He was a leftist with non-partisan sympathies for both the communists and the social-democrats: she was an arch conservative who admired Mussolini and was so anti-Semitic she even thought her own children were tainted by ‘miscegenation’.

She rejoined the Catholic Church in 1932 and almost immediately started an affair with Father Johannes Hollnsteiner, a professor of theology – an affair that Werfel knew about and tolerated in exchange for a quiet life.

Fortunately, all these dubious goings on are surrounded in this biography by some first rate political mise en scene. There’s a very readable account of the collapse of Austria and Vienna in particular amidst the competing factions of fascists, social-democrats, monarchists, and communists.

Despite her right-wing sympathies, when Austria was threatened by Germany in 1938 Alma had the good sense to transfer her money to Zurich, and she escaped with Werfel, ending up in the south of France along with many other European refugees at that time. Their escape route was the now familiar one of Marseilles to Perpignan on the Spanish border; over the Pyrenees in secret; then from Spain to Portugal, and a boat journey to freedom. It was a route travelled by many others, including Victor Serge, Walter Benjamin (who did not survive the suicide capsule he shared with Arthur Koestler), André Breton, Max Ernst, and Marcel Duchamp.

After a rapturous reception in New York Alma settled in California. As her fellow refugee Arnold Schoenberg put it she was ‘exiled to paradise’. A comfortable home with a strictly Ayrian butler was established, from which she deemed the Allied forces fighting in Europe were ‘weaklings and degenerates’. She thought Hitler was a ‘superman’ and claimed that the Red Cross facilities in the concentration camps were ‘excellent’. When her husband died in 1945 she didn’t even go to his funeral.

Yet after Werfel’s death she seems to have lost her sense of purpose and direction. She sorted out his papers and wrote her own self-justifying autobiography And the Bridge is Love, and went to live in New York. There were some attempts to retrieve her property in post-war Austria, but when she visited her old home in Vienna it was in ruins. Even the marble had been ripped out to furnish nearby houses.

There was a quasi-reconciliation with her daughter Anna, who was so disoriented she didn’t even know who had won the war. They were like characters at the end of Thomas Mann’s novel Doktor Faustus. She lived until 1964, still drinking a bottle of Benedictine a day, then at the age of eighty-six the light went out on her life – and on the end of an era.

Alma Mahler - The Bride of the Wind Buy the book at Amazon UK

Alma Mahler - The Bride of the Wind Buy the book at Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2012


Susan Keegan, The Bride of the Wind: The Life of Alma Mahler, London: Secker and Warburg, 1991, pp. 346, ISBN: 0670805130


More on biography
More on the Bloomsbury Group
More on literary studies
More on the arts


Filed Under: Biography Tagged With: Alma Mahler, Biography, Cultural history, Modernism, Music

Artie Shaw: his life and music

July 25, 2009 by Roy Johnson

critical and illustrated biography – plus discography

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Roy Johnson 2004

artie shaw Buy the book at Amazon UK

artie shaw Buy the book at Amazon US


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


More on music
More on biography
More on digital media


Filed Under: Biography, Music Tagged With: Artie Shaw, Biography, Cultural history, Jazz, Music

Carrington: A Life of Dora Carrington

June 19, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Art, love, and Bohemian life in Bloomsbury

Dora Carrington was a painter, an early feminist, and a figure who flits in and out of the lives of several members of the Bloomsbury Group, of which she was a significant member. This is the (so far) definitive biography of her troubled existence, which covers her day-to-day life in great detail – much of it based upon her voluminous correspondence. She grew up in a stiflingly conventional home in Bedford, loving her father and hating her mother.

Carrington: A Life of Dora Carrington With a talent for art, she was glad to get away from home at seventeen and spread her wings at the Slade, living in Gordon Square, right in the heart of Bloomsbury. Her style of painting and drawing was firmly traditional, and it fitted with the aesthetic of the Slade.

She was unaffected by the craze for Post-Impressionism which followed Roger Fry’s famous 1910 exhibition at the Grafton Galleries which Virginia Woolf claimed changed human nature that year. She cut her hair short in a style which became famous (‘crop head’) and two of her fellow students, ‘Chips’ Nevinson and Mark Gertler, promptly fell in love with her. This resulted in the first of her many love triangles, plus a form of unhappiness for all concerned. Although she behaved in a provocative manner, she refused to choose between them, or to have a sexual relationship with either of them.

In 1914 she met D.H. Lawrence and David Garnett, joined Roger Fry’s Omega Workshop, and was moderately successful in her decorative art work. Then in 1915 she spent a weekend amongst the Bloomsbury Group at Asheham which was to change her life. Lytton Strachey (who was in love with Mark Gertler) made a sexual pass at her, and she immediately fell in love with him.

Although she had kept Gertler at bay for five years, she gave herself to Strachey from the outset – then ended up having a sexual relationship with both men at the same time, even though Strachey was really a homosexual. [Remember – this is Bloomsbury.] Eventually she set up home with Strachey at Tidmarch Mill House and found her first sustained period of happiness.

Dora Carrington nude

Yes – that’s Dora Carrington

However, with a twist which typifies relationships in the Bloomsbury Group, they moved Ralph Partridge in to live with them. Carrington shared his bed, and Strachey fell in love with him. She then moved to live with Partridge in Gordon Square when he was given a job at the Hogarth Press, and then married him in 1921, even though she claimed she was still in love with Strachey – who with characteristic generosity paid for their honeymoon, and even joined them on it.

Not long afterwards she started an affair with her husband’s best friend, Gerald Brenan – around the same time that Partridge moved his new lover Valentine (actually Gladys) Dobree into their family home at Tidmarsh.

It is commonly assumed that Carrington sacrificed her artistic possibilities to the effort of looking after Strachey and Partridge, but Gretchen Gerzina argues that on the contrary, she was at her most productive when her domestic and personal life were settled and untroubled by romantic entanglements.

But the level of emotional masochism in her life is remarkable. Whilst her husband took his new lover Frances Marshall on holiday to Paris, he forbade her to even write to Gerald Brenan. She distracted herself from this humiliating position by starting an affair with Henrietta Bingham, the daughter of the American ambassador, a foray into Sapphism which made her regret she hadn’t started earlier. And this didn’t stop her sleeping with Gerald Brenan as well – so by this time she had certainly got rid of her earlier sexual reluctance.

Almost all the evidence for this personal narrative comes from letters. These people were super-communicative on paper. But the correspondence needs to be carefully interpreted – because they often wrote knowing that third parties might read what they said. Partridge not only banned Carrington from writing to Brenan, but insisted on reading all her correspondence. So she developed the strategy of inserting personal messages into secret addenda – which were nevertheless sometimes intercepted. And she was much given to reading other people’s private mail too.

As the menage she helped to create with Strachey and Partridge began to fall apart, she consoled herself with Bernard (Beakus) Penrose [brother of Sir Roland] in one last romance. But it was Strachey who remained her most lasting affection, and when he died (of undiagnosed stomach cancer) in 1932 she felt that she could not live without him. So she shot herself – aged just thirty-nine.

© Roy Johnnson 2012

Dora Carrington Buy the book at Amazon UK

Dora Carrington Buy the book at Amazon US


Gretchen Gerzina, Carrington: A Life of Dora Carrington 1893-1932, London: Pimlico, 1995, pp.342, ISBN 0712674209


More on art
More on biography
More on the Bloomsbury Group
Twentieth century literature


Filed Under: Art, Biography, Bloomsbury Group, Individual designers Tagged With: Art, Biography, Bloomsbury Group, Cultural history, Dora Carrington

Coltrane: The Story of a Sound

March 20, 2011 by Roy Johnson

biographical outline of a musical Odyssey

This is not a conventional biography but a study of the development of John Coltrane as a major figure in American musical culture in the two decades of major creativity that embraced his tragically short life. Ben Ratliff bases his study on a combination of interviews and his analyses of the recorded legacy – and he does this in a non-hagiographic manner. Indeed he seems almost over-critical of some of Coltrane’s early performances with Miles Davis, such as the Prestige sessions which were not under his control but part of the contractual obligations that Davis knocked out as quickly as possible (no planning, no rehearsals) in order to fulfil and escape his contract for the more lucrative one he had signed with Columbia.

John ColtraneRatliff takes the story from the early recordings Coltrane made whilst he was still in the navy through his work in rhythm and blues bands to his seminal work with Miles Davis and Thelonius Monk, and then to his own quartet which made such an impact with Giant Steps – which turns out to be in this account the ne plus ultra of harmonically-based jazz music.

Ratliff is very good at explaining just why Coltrane’s music was so exceptional – his profound sense of musical structure, his grasp of harmonic sequences, his compositional imagination, and his ability to completely transform musical sequences into something nobody had ever heard before. Think of how he re-shaped a banal show tune such as My Favourite Things into a thundering anthem of black cultural affirmation.

There’s quite a bit of musical theorizing, and the weakness of basing judgements on interviews is that asking any artists what they think they are doing is that first of all they might not know themselves, and even if they say they do, they might not be able to articulate it properly. Their claims might not even be true. Music is an abstract art form. It doesn’t actually mean anything, even though it is a very powerful emotional force.

The two common approaches to musical analysis point in opposite directions. The formal approach says ‘Eb7 modulates into C#6’ which might be accurate and true, but tells us nothing about the nature or effect of such transitions. The other essentially romantic approach says ‘the heart-stopping modulations in the final eight bars resolve themselves into a majestic finale which express a surge of joy’. One approach seems dry as dust, the other is just subjective and emotional. Ratliff bravely attempts to combine the two.

The late 1950s and early 1960s were the high point in Coltrane’s creative life – and it might be significant that this was a period when he seemed to be free of drug addiction. After that, though Ratliff tries his best to make a case for the discordant, non-harmonic and unstructured music Coltrane produced towards the end of his career, it’s rather uncomfortable reading to be reminded of the descent into chaos that this ‘development’ represents (and I speak as someone who saw some of these concerts on his European tour with Eric Dolphy).

In the second part of the book he turns from biography to an essay on Coltrane’s influence on other musicians and a study of the development of his style. Placing this very firmly in a cultural and historical context, he reminds us that many other lesser names were more popular at the time. In the same year that Coltrane released My Favourite Things (30,000 copies sold), Atlantic’s best-selling jazz albumn was Les McCann and Eddie Harris’s Swiss Movement (500,000 copies). There are some excellent gems about the economics of night clubs and how much musicians were paid for their performances.

Coltrane’s influence is traced in the work of other jazz musicians, in the music of rock and pop groups, and in the social influence drawn from his music in the writings of jazz critics – most of whom were themselves understandably baffled by the ‘developments’ of the early 1960s onwards. Ratliff doesn’t shirk the fact that Coltrane lost a big percentage of his audience when he embraced the ‘free jazz’ movement which was so obviously both then and now a dead end. It’s also sadly possible that Miles Davis’s claim that Coltrane died from taking too much LSD might be true.

In fact the loss occurred at a time when the material ground in which jazz took root began to disappear. Night clubs, jazz clubs, and dance halls closed as popular culture in America changed in the late 1960s, and most jazz musicians found themselves out of work. Superstars made occasional rock-concert-like appearances, but many regular musicians either took up teaching or went back to jobs in the factory.

What makes this study much more than a conventional biography or appreciation is that Ben Ratliff takes his subject even beyond Coltrane’s death to examine both the continuation of his influence and the state of jazz in the last few decades. The prospects are fairly bleak, but he sees a small glimmer of hope in Coltrane’s influence as a successful leader of bands. Let’s hope it turns out to be the classic quartet or quintet at most – and not the noisy conglomerates in which he finished his career.

There’s an excellent bibliography to the book, and a full range of notes on all his sources, but no discography. However, he does make reference to a work in progress which has since been issued as surely the most authoritative account of Coltrane’s recorded work – Yasuhiro Fujioka and Lewis Porter’s monumental The John Coltrane Reference Work.

John Coltrane Buy the book at Amazon UK

John Coltrane Buy the book at Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2011


Ben Ratliff, Coltrane: The Story of a Sound, London: Faber and Faber, 2007, pp.250, ISBN: 0571232744


More on music
More on media
More on lifestyle


Filed Under: Biography, Music Tagged With: Biography, Jazz, John Coltrane, Music

Dora Carrington biography

September 17, 2009 by Roy Johnson

painter, designer, bohemian, bisexual

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dora Carrington biography

Yes – that’s Dora Carrington

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

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

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

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

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

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


Bloomsbury Group – web links

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


More on art
More on design
More on biography
More on the Bloomsbury Group
Twentieth century literature



Filed Under: Art, Biography, Bloomsbury Group Tagged With: Art, Biography, Bloomsbury Group, Cultural history, Dora Carrington

Down Below

October 19, 2018 by Roy Johnson

Down Below is a psychiatric memoir by the surrealist painter Leonora Carrington. She was the headstrong, rebellious daughter of an upper middle-class English family. At nineteen she ran away to Paris with the German artist Max Ernst who was married at the time. They lived together in the south of France and had dreams of a glorious future together. But at the outbreak of the Second World War he was arrested by the Gestapo as a ‘decadent aesthete’ and was lucky to escape to America. Left alone, Carrington was utterly devastated. She was forced to move to Spain, where she had a complete mental breakdown and was sent to a lunatic asylum. That is the background to this gruelling first-person account of her experiences.

Down Below

Her narrative takes the form of a diary which purports to be written over a few days in the summer of 1943: (in fact it was written and re-written later). She describes her departure from the Ardeche in a hallucinatory manner in which her mind seems detached from her body, and that body is only obliquely related to the material world through which she moves.

She escaped via Andorra to Madrid where she lapsed into a delusional and even paranoid state. She compulsively gave away her belongings, claimed that she was gang raped, and imagined herself merging with the animal world. Perhaps as an understandable reaction she began bathing compulsively. She believed that the citizens of Madrid were being hypnotised, and reported to the British Embassy her plans to bring about world peace by ‘metaphysical forces’.

The plans included liberating General Franco from his ‘political somnambulism’, all of which she transmitted even to the offices of ICI, where her father was a director. She was eventually tranquilised and taken to a sanatorium in Santander for the dangerously and incurably insane.

There she became violent, behaved like a wild animal, and was restrained with leather straps. None of the treatment improved her condition, and she was reduced to a naked, animal-like state, living in her own excrement. She imagined she had visitors – Prince Rainier of Monaco and the Marquis of Silva, both of whom (she claimed) had been hypnotised by an evil German called Van Ghent. Her family never visited her whilst she was incarcerated: they sent a governess instead.

All the furniture was removed from her room and she was given injections of Cardiazol, which induced epileptic fits of an appalling severity. This eventually seems to have improved her condition, for she was transferred to a less severe recuperation unit. However, she continued to suffer from quasi-religious delusions. She imagined that she was Jesus Christ, and she would soon become the reincarnation of Queen Elizabeth I.

Gradually, she was allowed more liberty and went to stay in an open ward which she called ‘Down Below’. From there she was eventually released and taken back to Madrid – but only to be threatened with another sanatorium in South Africa. A ship bound for Africa was ready and waiting in Lisbon. But when she was taken there she gave everyone the slip and threw herself on the mercy of the Mexican Embassy where she had a contact.

The stratagem worked. She formed a marriage of convenience with the Portugese diplomat Renato Leduc, and they sailed for New York, then to Mexico City, where she lived for the rest of her life. It’s a harrowing story – but one with a reasonably happy ending. She feared a relapse into lunacy, but was mercifully spared. She became celebrated in Mexico and established a reputation as a painter that has been growing ever since.

© Roy Johnson 2018

Buy the book at Amazon UK

Buy the book at Amazon US


Leonora Carrington, Down Below, New York: NYRB, 2017, pp.69, ISBN: 1681370603


Filed Under: Biography Tagged With: Art, Biography, Cultural history, Leonora Carrington

Edith Sitwell

January 1, 2018 by Roy Johnson

modernist poet and English eccentric

Edith Sitwell (1887-1964) was an English poet, and an upper-class eccentric renowned for her exotic clothing and over-sized jewellery. She was prolific as a writer, and in the 1920s and 1930s was classed as an avant-garde modernist. Her work was praised by critics and fellow poets, but she is now known almost exclusively for her poems Parade which were set for music-theatre performance by the composer William Walton.

Edith Sitwell

She was born into an aristocratic family at Renishaw Hall in Derbyshire, the eldest of three children who remained close throughout their adult lives. She disliked both her parents, never married, and spent much of her life living with her childhood governess.

Her remote and snobbish parents would only issue instructions to a butler and private servant. Other staff in the household were not permitted to speak to the masters. She developed a youthful love for Chopin, Brahms, and Swinburne- and when asked what she wanted to be when she grew up answered “A genius”.

Her father disapproved of education for women, so Edith was largely self-taught. However, her governess Helen Rootham was a powerful influence and provided an introduction to the world of modern art – Rimbaud in particular.

When Edith was twenty her famously beautiful mother was put on trial for fraud, and having been convicted, served a short jail sentence. The family never spoke about this incident – even to each other.

In 1913 at the age of twenty-five Edith was given her freedom and moved to live at Pembridge Mansions in Bayswater, London. By upper-class standards, this was quite a Bohemian location. It was at this point that she began writing poetry. The rooms at Pembroke Mansions became a cultural salon that attracted figures such as Aldous Huxley, Virginia Woolf, and Cecil Beaton.

Like many other artists and intellectuals of the modernist period she was opposed to the First World War. In 1916 she established a magazine Wheels that published the work of young unknown poets, including in its 1919 edition six pieces by Wilfred Owen, who had been killed in action the year before.

She fell in love with a handsome young Chilean painter called Alvaro Guevara. He however was infatuated with the heiress and left-wing activist Nancy Cunard. Edith consoled herself with the fame which followed her early success. It is assumed by her biographers that she remained a virgin for the rest of her life.

In 1923 her poems Facade were set to music by the young William Walton who Sitwell and her brothers had decided to champion. The result was a surrealist entertainment in which the poems were declaimed through a megaphone from behind a decorated curtain, accompanied by jagged and heavily syncopated music. It caused public outrage at the time, yet ironically it is the work by which she is now best known.

Her controversial social success, eccentric costume, and poetic experiments also generated a great deal of rivalry and animosity. Noel Coward lampooned Edith and her brothers as The Swiss Family Whittlebot, and F.R. Leavis observed that the Sitwells ‘belonged to the history of publicity’ – which in retrospect seems largely true.

She went to live in Paris with Helen Rootham, where she was introduced by Gertrude Stein to the second great love of her life – the Russian painter Pavel Tchelitchew. She devoted herself to him, became his muse and patroness, and travelled extensively with him, all the time seemingly unaware that he was a homosexual.

In 1930 Helen Rootham was diagnosed with cancer, which suddenly transposed Edith into the role of carer. She was living on a modest allowance from her father, and supplemented this by turning to journalism. She wrote articles for the newspapers in which she articulated her controversial views on issues of the day.

But on Helen Rootham’s death she also suffered another blow – Pavel Tchelitchew decided to emigrate to America. This was an emotional low point for Edith, and she was persuaded to return to the family’s ancestral home by her brother Osbert. (Her father had gone to live in a castle in Tuscany he spent thirty years restoring.)

1959 Interview with John Freeman

This move brought on a fresh lease of poetic life and further critical acclamation from the likes of Kenneth Clark and Cyril Connolly, who predicted that her work would outlive that of T. S. Eliot and W.H. Auden (in which he has so far been proven wrong). There was also an invitation to make a celebrity lecture tour in the United States. Further public accolades were heaped upon her, and even though she was regarded as something of a professional eccentric, she was made a Dame of the British Empire in 1954.

But fame did not bring her happiness. She became financially dependent on her brother, and she felt herself the poor relation. She imagined herself to be a ‘working woman’ but in fact ran up enormous debts in the family name.

Osbert was able to offer her summer residence in the Derbyshire stately home and winters in the Tuscan castle he inherited from his father – so she was not exactly slumming it. There was also the ‘season’ in London, when she lived at the Sesame Club in Mayfair, driven around in a chauffeur-driven Daimler of gigantic proportions. In her later years she became infirm and was confined to a wheelchair. She died in 1964, suffering from alcoholism and paranoia.

© Roy Johnson 2018

Facade – Buy the book at Amazon UK
Facade – Buy the book at Amazon US


More on biography
More on the Bloomsbury Group
More on literary studies
More on the arts


Filed Under: Biography Tagged With: Cultural history, Edith Sitwell, English literature, Literary studies, Modernism

Edith Wharton: An Extraordinary Life

July 6, 2011 by Roy Johnson

writer, traveller, socialite, gardener, interior designer

Edith Wharton is a writer whose life and work spans the nineteenth and twentieth centuries – rather like Joseph Conrad, Henry James, and even Thomas Hardy. Most of her published output was produced after 1900, yet she represents the mores and values of ‘old money’ upper class America confronted by the economic and social challenges of the New Century. Not that she had to endure any of its hardships and uncertainties. She was born into a very rich family and when the dollar lost value after the end of the Civil War she spent much of her childhood living in France and Italy .She learned foreign languages, inherited a keen visual memory and an appreciation of sense of place from her father, whose private library of classics provided the materials of her education.

Edith Wharton Most of her younger life was spent oscillating between lavish homes in New York and fashionable retreats on the Eastern seaboard in summer months. She was a precocious youngster, and had poetry and stories published whilst still in her teens. As a popular Young Thing of her very privileged set, she was quickly successful in acquiring a rich and handsome husband. However, Teddy Wharton was an outdoor pursuits type who did not share her intellectual aspirations. They set up home in New York, but when she came into a very generous inheritance she immediately bought a huge ‘summer house’ at Land’s End, Newport. She commissioned architect Ogden Codman to refurbish the house, then co-wrote with him what became the first of her many best-sellers – The Decoration of Houses.

She lived a rather independent life and had friendships with a number of men and women. However, when she met the London Times journalist W. Morton Fullerton in Paris, she felt for the first time in her life she had located a soul mate. They became lovers, even though he was bisexual and had a rather disreputable past. The affair lasted three years, after which she divorced her husband and began to travel regularly in Europe with her friend Henry James, who was an admirer of her writing. She published her first major novel The House of Mirth in 1905, and thereafter produced a healthy output of travel writing, novels, and short stories.

Edith Wharton's house - The Mount

Edith Wharton’s house – The Mount

She established an American expatriate salon in Paris and mixed with a cosmopolitan selection of artists and intellectuals, including Jean Cocteau, Serge Diaghilev, Andre Gide, and Walter Sickert. When the first world War broke out she quickly threw herself into providing employment for working-class French women whose husbands had been conscripted. She toured the front lines of battle in her chauffeur driven limousine and wrote accounts supporting the French war effort – for which she was awarded the Legion of Honour in 1916.

After the war she established two houses and their gardens – one on the outskirts of Paris, and the other at Hyéres, in southern Provence. These properties were used as bases from which she continued to tour Europe and the Mediterranean. She became an expert on garden design (rather like Vita Sackville-West) although she never did any of the actual gardening herself. She continued to publish novels, novellas, and her memoirs right up to her death in 1937.

Eleanor Dwight’s account of Wharton’s life isn’t a biography in the conventional sense of tracing her movements in chronological order. Instead, it takes main issues and places – New York, Italy, the motor car, and the war – as a framework on which to build the larger picture. Indeed, Wharton’s affair with Fullerton is mentioned in three brief lines between several pages of rapture about her garden designs.

Dwight also takes the common liberty of paraphrasing and interpreting Wharton’s fiction as a guide to understanding the conflicts in her life – a very dubious practice which also omits to point out how funny her writing can be. But on balance it makes for a very readable narrative, and as a lavishly illustrated study, the period photographs add both charm and depth to her study.

Edith Wharton Buy the book at Amazon UK

Edith Wharton Buy the book at Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2011


Eleanor Dwight, Edith Wharton: An Extraordinary Life, New York: Harry N Abrams, new edition, 1999, pp.296, ISBN: 0810927950


More on Edith Wharton
More on the novella
More on literary studies
More on short stories


Filed Under: Biography, Edith Wharton Tagged With: 20C Literature, American literature, Biography, Edith Wharton, Literary studies, The novel

Eric Gill

August 29, 2015 by Roy Johnson

artist, engraver, typographist, stone carver, and more

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

Eric Gill

Early years

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

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

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

Apprenticeship

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

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

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

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

The move left

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

Eric Gill

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

Family fun

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

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

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

Religion

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

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

Eric Gill

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

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

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

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

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

Animal farm

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Roy Johnson 2015

Eric Gill Buy the book at Amazon UK

Eric Gill Buy the book at Amazon US


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


More on typography
More on art
More on media
More on design


Filed Under: Art, Biography, Lifestyle, Typography Tagged With: Art, Bloomsbury Group, Cultural history, Eric Gill, Typography

  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • …
  • 7
  • Next Page »

Reviews

  • Arts
  • Biography
  • Creative Writing
  • Design
  • e-Commerce
  • Journalism
  • Language
  • Lifestyle
  • Literature
  • Media
  • Publishing
  • Study skills
  • Technology
  • Theory
  • Typography
  • Web design
  • Writing Skills

Get in touch

info@mantex.co.uk

Content © Mantex 2016
  • About Us
  • Advertising
  • Clients
  • Contact
  • FAQ
  • Links
  • Services
  • Reviews
  • Sitemap
  • T & C’s
  • Testimonials
  • Privacy

Copyright © 2025 · Mantex

Copyright © 2025 · News Pro Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in