Art in Revolution Part 4

4 Picking up the pieces: the thirties and beyond
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The harlequins carnival, Joan Mir (1925). A colourful and surreal party scene in a room uses symbolic and abstracted forms to show a morose moustachioed man with a pipe, a window showing a night sky with any number of animated forms having a wild time.
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A RT I N R E V O L U T I O N
4.1 Art in Paris between the wars
t the beginning of the nineteen thirties Paris was still just about holding on to its century-old reputation as the centre of western art mainly due to the pre-eminence of Surrealism that had its base there. Although Surrealism doesnt have a central role in this story, one cannot deny its importance between the wars or certain aspects of the movement which need to mentioned to give a more rounded picture.
Three dancers (The dance) by Picasso was reproduced in La Revolution Surrealiste. This updated version of Cubism showed his commitment to new movements in art as well as his importance in promoting a visual form of the doctrine.
LIke many of the modern movements mentioned it had a strong literary base; indeed initially it was exclusively a literary group that had grown out of the wreck of Dada from which it took its interest in randomness and chance. Its founder, the writer Andr Breton had explored automatic writing, also a Dada preoccupation, in his Magnetic Fields of 1922. Surrealism as defined in Bretons long-winded manifesto of 1924 entailed pure psychic automatism, which one proposes to express verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner the actual functioning of thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral considerations. As editor of the review, Littrarature Breton had gathered together a group of like-minded people very much under the influence of Dada. The poets Paul luard, Louis Aragon and Phillipe Soupault; Francis Picabia who designed and drew the covers and contributed poems, Max Ernst who had already begun to explore similar themes of incongruity in his collages and paintings and the painter and sculptor Man Ray who made suitably experimental photographs. However until Breton wrote Surrealism and Painting in La Revolution Surrealiste which replaced Littrarature at the beginning of 1925 the movement had remained a predominantly literary one. Its heroes and texts, admired for their irrational literature, included Alfred Jarrys Ubu Roi, Lewis Carrolls Alice books and teenage sensation, poet Arthur Rimbaud whose password was to change life. The 1925 manifesto put a new emphasis on a visual vocabulary and the new journal reproduced paintings, drawings, sculpture and photography. By the time of the first Surrealist exhibition in the same year a number of established artists like Picasso, Arp, Kle, De Chirico and Duchamp were name-checked as being sympathetic or associated with the movement. Although Picasso in the twenties was pursuing Classical themes he contributed abstarct drawings to the second number of La Revolution Surrealiste. In the fourth edition in July 1925 there was an account of Les Desmoiselles DAvignon and a reproduction of his important new painting Three dancers (The dance) which is an update of Cubism and a pointer to future developments in his work. A recent recruit to Surrealism and important in the context of this book was fellow Spaniard Joan Mir. Early in his career Mir had been impressed with the machine forms of Francis Picabia and the fantasy world of Picassos friend Henri Rousseau. In the early twenties he had turned away from these influences while retaining his fascination for the fantastic. He shared an interest with Hans Arp in organic abstract forms and like Paul Klee he was able to invent a new visual language transforming and populating his landscapes and interiors with numerous biomorphic abstractions. Miros interests were also deeply rooted in Spanish folk culture from which he took
P I C K I N G U P T H E P I E C E S T H E T H I RT I E S A N D B E Y O N D
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The armour, (1925) a pen and ink automatic drawing by Andr Masson (below left). Max Ernsts The fishbone forest, (1927) is a surreal landscape which has been transformed by frottage in which textures are taken from rubbing organic material (below right).
symbolic forms. If it wasnt for his evident wit, the nightmarish forms of Hieronymous Bosch might come to mind, as he made vivid the recurring motifs of an unreal world. A nightmarish spectre did in fact appear in the second half of the thirties when monstrous figures appear. Like Picassos Guernica, they were undoubtedly a reaction to the horrors of the Spanish civil war. Initially Surrealist art was expressed by means of automatic drawing, exemplified by one of its earliest recruits, Andr Masson, who was able to doodle with his mind free of preconceptions. As this is difficult to achieve directly in oil paint, he and others used their rational mind to translate these drawn marks into a painted composition. Other techniques that were explored, often had their roots in the Dadaist ideas of chance. Max Ernst for instance invented frottage a technique of rubbing through paper or canvas to achieve a textural impression from which he could develop a finished work, seen in the paintings he made of primeval forests in the mid twenties. In the first world war Breton had worked in a hospital with shell-shocked patients using a Freudian technique of word association. His interest in this explains the roots of automatism and his continuing fascination with the work of Sigmund Freud. In 1900 Freud had published The Interpretation of Dreams with its exploration of the 'unconscious' which was described by fellow psychologist and rival Carl Jung as epoch shattering. Freud asked patients to tell him their dreams, uncovering their mental state or inner life by revealing their drives and desires. By calling on Freuds studies of dreams, Breton was able to give some scientific credibility to his Surrealist manifestos. The outpourings of the unconscious mind was a feature of the movement and used in the paintings of Salvador Dali and Ren Magritte who both came to prominence at the end of the twenties, using realistic dream images and landscapes similar in conception to Giorgio de Chiricos a few years earlier. In all of this there seems to be a speedy return to the tradition of perspective although there are abstract concepts behind these representational works.
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A photographic portrait of Ren Magritte in 1966 by Bill Brandt. He is here shown with one of his emblematic Surrealist paintings, which use familiar and repeated motifs to create visual and poetic incongruity.
De Chirico for instance painted in a neo-Classical style in which familar objects were placed incongruously in dreamlike and unpopulated townscapes. Magritte who dealt in incogruities, took similarly barren alienated spaces and positioned figures in them be they assassins, bowler-hatted men or female nudes. Magritte also borrowed from popular culture. In his Man with newspaper of 1928 there are four near identical frames in two rows as if taken from a comic book. Each shows an identical scene of a drawing room with a window, a table, a chair and a stove. As in a spot the difference puzzle a suited man sits at the table reading a newspaper but only in the first frame. Enigmatic visual ideas are often at the heart of Magrittes work. The treachery of images shows a meticulously drawn briar pipe on a plain background as if taken from a childs ABC; added in script is Ceci, nest pas une pipe This is not a pipe. As in a lot of modernist art, language and art come together, in this instance questioning the nature of truth in representational painting. Magritte used recurring images, almost as ciphers: rocks float in space: a painted image of an outside scene sits on a canvas before the window: an apple fills a room. Surrealism became famous for these strange juxtapositions and this visual poetry would in time be ransacked by the advertising industry. Other well known examples of surreal perversity include Man Rays iron with a row of metal spikes on its base and Meret Oppenheims Object of 1936, a fur lined cup and saucer. Another obsession, eroticism, is well illustrated in Salvador Dalis pink sofa shaped like a full pair of lips a tribute to Mae West. Although Surrealism and in particular Breton flirted with Communism he had Marxs proposals to change the world ringing in his ears their objectives were so far apart that Breton eventually found it impossible to reconcile the two. Founding member and poet Louis Aragon had to renounce Surrealism in 1931 when he joined the Communist party. The Spanish Surrealist film director Louis Bunuel combined with fellow countryman Dali on two highly influential short films Le Chien Andalou and LAge dOr which brought Surrealist imagery to life in a way that transcended painting and poetry. Many years later he considered that the movement had overreached itself. The movement was successful in its details and a failure in its essentials. Surrealism was a cultural and artistic success, but these were the areas of least importance to the Surrealists. Our aim was not to establish a glorious place for ourselves in the annals of art and literature and certainly not in the cinema! but to CHANGE THE WORLD. This was the essential purpose, and we completely failed. This could also be said of much of the pioneering art between the two wars.
Abstract creation in Paris When Mondrian had returned to his studio in Paris after the war, he found an indiffererence to abstract art. A decade later Theo van Doesburg issued a manifesto Art Concret in Paris urging that the term Concrete art replace Abstract art, feeling that the word concrete would signify a physical reality, art with its own merits, not something that was solely an expression of the mind; nothing is more concrete, more real than a line, a colour, a surface. The work of art should receive nothing from nature's formal properties or from sensuality or sentimentality A pictorial element has no other
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Jean Hlion was an important young French abstract artist in Abstraction-Cration. Equilibrium (1933-4) is reminiscent of a mobile by Alexander Calder and shows that there was a move away from pure geometry of De Stijl to something more organic in form, colour and composition.
significance than itself and therefore the picture has no other significance than itself. The construction of the picture, as well as its elements, should be simple and controllable visually. Technique should be mechanical, that is to say exact, anti-impressionistic. Although the label never achieved popularity it was adopted by some, partly in respect to Van Doesburg who died the next year. Arp adapted the term for his organic bronze sculptures of the nineteenthirties, which he described as human concretions, concretion is something that has grown. This emphasised the organic nature of his and much of the sculpture of the time. Out of these reflections in February 1931 came the formation of Abstraction-Cration in Paris, which encouraged a pure form of international abstract art, that had its roots in De Stijl. The prime movers who advocated this approach were Auguste Herbin and Georges Vantongerloo. Over the next three or four years group exhibitions were held and an eponymous magazine published and at its peak it had over 400 members and was boosted by an influx of artists fleeing from the restrictions of countries like Germany and Russia. Kandinsky, Arp, Sophie Taber, Delaunay, Kupka, Gleizes, Albers, Pevsner and Gabo were amongst the established artists who became members. It seems in retrospect that French artists with the exception of Herbin were tempermentally unsuited to geometric abstraction. Jean Hlion, a younger member, proves that there was always likely to be a conflict of interests in the movement as like Jean Arp he pursued a more organic form of abstract art closer in spirit to Surrealism. Hlions abstract paintings of the thirties were an arrangement of non-geometric coloured shapes and with Equilibrium suggestive of the abstract mobiles of Alexander Calder. There were recruits from abroad eighteen different countries were represented including two young British artists, painter Ben Nicholson and and his wife sculptor Barbara Hepworth. One member, ex Bauhaus student Max Bill1, believed that art should have a pure mathematical basis, but this was one opinion amongst many. The group was too large and amorphous to have any central philosophy and included a range of styles from the warmly lyrical through to cool geometric abstraction. Without the guiding figure of Van Doesburg there were disagreements and resignations and when it folded in 1935 the final act of Paris pre-eminence as the art centre of the world that it had enjoyed for more than a century was drawing to its conclusion. By the end of the decade America, in the fortunate position of being remote from the troubles in Europe and helped by an influx of European artists was in an ideal position to take on this particular baton and run with it.
1 Max Bill, helped to keep the concept of Concrete art alive after the Second World War (he lived in neutral Switzerland). With his encouragement several new branches of Concrete art were formed, notably in Italy and in South America and it was later influential on Minimal art and Op art. Bill, who organized international exhibitions of Concrete art in Basle in 1944 and in Zurich in 1960, gave the following definition: Concrete painting eliminates all naturalistic representation; it avails itself exclusively of the fundamental elements of painting, the colour and form of the surface. Its essence is, then, the complete emancipation of every natural model: pure creation.
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4.2 The avantgarde hits the buffers
n 1934 Paul Klee was dismissed without notice from his teaching post at Dusseldorf which speeded his return home to Berne in Switzerland. Unfortunately this was in no way a liberal haven for a modern artist as he had to endure similar problems there from powerful right-wing factions who associated modern art with the left and were intent on suppressing it. The secret police in Berne accused him of making degenerative art and that if his sinister style ever became accepted it would be an insult to true art and mark a decline in the good taste and the sound ideas of the majority. An exhibition at Zurich in 1936 entitled Contemporary problems with Swiss Painting and Sculpture showed works by Klee, Arp, Le Corbusier and others as a defiant response to a very traditional exhibition of Swiss painting at Berne earlier in the year. Klee also encountered problems in regaining Swiss nationality and was still waiting for acceptance when he died in the summer of 1940.
The Engineer Heartfield (1920). Heartfield portrayed by his friend and colleague Georg Grosz as a menacing thug with clenched fists, shaved head and a piece of collaged machinery for his heart. He is ready to take on the evils of the world.
Hitler, the failed water-colour artist, had a particular hatred of modern art and in 1937 opened an exhibition in Munich of so-called degenerate art. He accused the artists on display of eyesight deformation and recommended surgery or sterilisation to ensure these disabilities were not passed on to future generations. Neo-classicism had by now established itself as the overblown symbol of autocratic power in Stalinist Russia, Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany who all promoted the vacuity of realist art and monumental classicism in architecture to bolster a sense of self importance. Although the Paris Exposition Universelle 1937 was meant to be a showpiece for the Modern Movement and the International Style in architecture it clashed heavily with Albert Speers grandiose German pavilion as well as its Russian and Italian counterparts. The most effective protest against the mindless thuggery of Nazism was on shown there; Picassos monochrome painting of the German bombing of the town of Guernica made earlier that year after the Basques had declared their autonomy during the Spanish Civil War. Despite all this Germany was still encouraging certain features of modernism, especially in the fields of technology, engineering and transport design which were seen in the autobahns, and the design and production of Porsche and Volkswagen cars, airships and ocean liners.
Confrontational art Although it was difficult to put across any form of protest, not everybody took the rise of the Nazis with resignation although it took a brave person to show open resistance in their life and in their art. At the First International Dada Fair held in Berlin in 1920 John Heartfield and Georg Grosz had presented a dressmakers dummy dressed in a German uniform topped with a pigs head. Both men were charged for defaming the military and fined 300 marks. So began a decade or more of attacks on German society and German politics. For many yeras Grosz made vicious visual satires on corrupt German society. Although he had joined the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) in 1919 he left the party in 1922 after spending five months in Russia, deciding that he was averse to any form of dictatorial authority. A majority of his work was in the form of ink drawings which were often the basis for water colour paintings. He despised any form of art elitism and his recurring themes were portrayals of war cripples, gross(!) businessmen, grotesque prostitutes, orgies and crime. His accomplished technique was deliberately turned to a crude
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form of caricature of 1920s Berlin as a den of depravity, where everything the individual, the church or the state could be bought for money. Constantly in trouble with the authorities his book Ecce Homo showed bordellos and other forms of debauchery and was seized by the police in 1923. Unfortunately his move to USA in 1932 turned him into a sentimental romanticist although he could still produce savage attacks on the Nazi regime. The liberal-minded German intellectual and collector Count Harry Kessler noted of his twenties work: Grosz considered himself a propagandist of the social revolution. He not only depicted victims of the catastrophe of First World War the disabled, crippled and mutilated he also portrayed the collapse of capitalist society and its values ... In a 1925 portfolio of prints, Grosz ridiculed Hitler by dressing him in a bearskin, a swastika tattooed on his left arm, he also painted a large allegorical painting that focused on the plight of Germany. John Heartfield was able to show the full potential of photomontage to confront the evil of totalitarianism in the years between the wars. He epitomised the left-wing activist artist in the thirties but had been producing left wing art propaganda since the end of the first world war. These came in the form of collages, street posters, book and magazine covers that succeeded in irritating the hell out of the growing right-wing elements in his German homeland. Initially aimed at the reactionary Weimar Republic they then tackled the increasing threat of Hitlers National Socialist party. These stabs in the eye of good taste were thinly-disguised subversive messages which would have been censored or banned if put into words. Carefully constructed witty and sophisticated photomontages could insinuate themselves into the public consciousness much more effectively than any amount of words and were much more difficult to prove as libellous. In 1929 he joined the staff of AIZ (Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung), a left-wing magazine designed for the workers which heralded his most biting and witty satirical photomontages. He had refined his technique to suit photogravure printing so that the subtle tones of his painstaking compositions were reproduced more effectively. In 1931 he went to Moscow where he exhibited his work with members of OKTYABR (October). This latterday grouping of radical Constructivist artists had been founded in1928 to encompass a broad range of the arts. Included were film directors Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov who made Man with a movie camera Meyerkhold in the theatre, writers Mayakovsky and Sergei Tretyakov, architect Alexsandr Vesnin, Rodchenko as a photographer and El Lissitzky and Klutsis in poster and exhibition design. Although these artists were losing favour under Stalin, the officials were positive about Heartfields work as it was thought to relate more to traditional forms of painting and social realist art. His play on words and allegories were seen to be easily assimilated messages identifying the class enemy. V. Kostin, a former member of OKTYABR, in an article Photomontage and the Mechanistic errors of OKTYABR praised the way Heartfield organically correlated the component parts in his montages forming an artistic, living image that had a logical not a schematic construction as in the case of the Constructivists. Leading Constructivist photomontage artists like Klutsis had been criticised for being leftists and denounced as being technical
Two of John Heartfields anti-Hitler satirical swipes from the early nineteen thirties. The top one is the cover of AIZ magazine millions stand behind me ... the meaning of Hitlers salute, a little man begs for a big handout. (Below) a poster with the caption dont worry hes a vegetarian.
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Construction through a Plane (1937) is an early work Naum Gabo made with Perspex a newly invented plastic which he found easy to manipulate. He had recently joined up with like-minded British Constructivists Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson dividing their time between St Ives in Cornwall and Hampstead in London.
formalists and were now considered as decadent artists or bourgeois photographers. Heartfields work didnt entirely escape criticism as he was accused of failing to portray the positive side of the proletarian struggle in accordance with Stalins demands for images that showed a positive and glowing representation of the new Soviet man. Inevitably the Nazis eventually caught up with Heartfield. He fled Germany for Prague on the night of April 16th 1933 by jumping from his first floor apartment building in Berlin while the SS broke down his front door. Here he and AIZ were safe for several years to villify the rise of the Nazis but by 1938 the German authorities were so incensed by his savage attacks on them that they tried to extradite him. He had no choice but leave and settle in London. The Constructivist writer and art critic Sergei Tretiakov wrote a monograph on Heartfield in 1936 pointing out that over a period of years he had refined and simplified his montages, his most perfect work are those which involve no more than two elements. We should not forget that a photomontage is not necessarily a montage of photographs. No it may be a photo and a photo, a photo and text, a photo and a painting, a photo and a drawing. The Surrealist writer Louis Aragon wrote of Heartfields achievements. Here quite simply, with scissors and paste, the artist has surpassed the best that modern art has tried to do with the Cubists on that lost road of the mystery of everyday life. Mayakovsky emerged in Russia and Heartfield in Germany ... and achieved the most brilliant contemporary illustration of what an art for the masses could be, that magnificent and baffingly discredited thing ... Photomontage lived on in the second half of the century when it became a stock-in-trade of the advertising industry, magazine work, book and record covers, posters and exhibition design, and is currently enjoying a revival in a variety of media since the introduction of graphic computer programmes such as Photoshop where it has proved to be an infinitely flexible medium.
Britain in the thirties The inevitable Diaspora of artists from Germany in the nineteen-thirties took many of them, initially at least, to Britain. Bauhaus emigrs Gropius, Breuer and Moholy-Nagy, all moved there as did the Constructivist sculptor Naum Gabo and abstract painter Piet Mondrian who no longer felt at home in France. Gabo had befriended sculptors Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth and linked up with their fledgling abstract art movement at St Ives in Cornwall. Gabo ever interested in exploring the potential of new materials immediately saw that Perspex, then in its experimental stage at British manufacturers ICI, as an ideal material for his light spatial constructions. The new immigrants alongside Hepworth, Moore, Ben Nicholson and Paul Nash formed a modernist enclave in the Hampstead area of North London, which briefly became a centre for the European avant-garde. There was even an Artists Refuge Committee which helped to house artistic refugees like Oscar Koskoschka, John Heartfield and Kurt Schwitters. Marcel Breuer and Walter Gropius went to live in the newly-built Lawn Road Flats in nearby Belsize Park, London. This sleek white modernist building shaped like an ocean liner was built by the Isokon company and had a fashionable lifestyle thrown in, including a bar and restaurant, although its small rooms were little more than pied-a-terres. Its Anglo-Canadian architect was Wells Coates who trained as an engineer and was adept at designing in the relatively new field of
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Ekco AD 65 radio (1934) designed by Welles Coates one of the pioneers of British modern design and made from modern materials, moulded Bakelite with chrome fittings. He was also the architect for the Isokon building Lawn Road flats (top) in North London (far right). One of its residents was Marcel Breuer who designed the furniture. broadcasting. His other design work included BBC radio studios in the early nineteen thirties, an early TV set in 1946 and the futuristic Telekinema for the London Underground Festival of Britain in 1951. His real design classic however was the innovative under the direction of Ekco radio whose round bakelite casing exploited the shape of the speaker as Frank Pick was at the well as saving money on materials. forefront of good Isokon also specialised in innovative styles of furniture which even included modern design between a Donkey bookcase to hold the trendsetting Penguin paperbacks which had the wars. Many fine recently been launched. Breuer was commissioned to design plywood tables stations were designed and chairs, including his much admired Long Chair. A brochure for the by Charles Holden, this Isokon enterprise was designed by Moholy-Nagy, now working as a graphic early one opened in 1925 designer and display director at Simpsons mens store in Piccadilly while at Trinity Road (now creating abstract spatial effects in the construction of a future city for Tooting Bec) on the Alexander Kordas film adaptation of H.G. Wells Shape of things to come. Northern line is neatly Although PEL (Practical Equipment Limited) was also introducing modern fitted into a corner site. furniture into Britain including a range of stacking chairs while manufacturing Posters were commissioned from many and marketing examples of Bauhaus tubular steel furniture under license, home-grown modernism was rare. One exception was Frederick Etchells, a prominent artists; these two are the work of Man member of the Vorticist movement who had contributed drawings to BLAST and turned to architecture after the war. He translated Le Corbusiers Towards Ray who equates the a new architecture and designed one of the earliest modernist buildings in London Underground roundel with Saturn and London for the advertising agency Crawfords in High Holborn. Another Moholy Nagy who shows exception was the engineer architect Owen Williams who built fine factory how the hydraulic train buildings including the Boots factory in Nottingham and The Daily Express doors work. building in London, which boasted a spectacular Art Deco foyer.
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A detail from the extensive Art Deco design at the Daily Express in Fleet street, London.
German emigr Erich Mendelsohn built his influential modernist De la Warr Pavilion in 1933 at Bexhill-on-sea, a few miles west of the white cliffs of Dover. (Right) the central staircase.
Continental modernist architecture also came to Britain in the shape of Berthold Lubetkin, a Russian-born Constuctivist, who designed what is regarded as one of the finest modernist pre-war buildings in London, Highpoint I, a large block of select apartments on the crown of a hill in Highgate. This might have seemed a challenging structure to the conservative British public although another of his designs was unusual for its immediate popularity: the Penguin pool at Regents Park Zoo in London. The experience of working under Lubetkin and Wells Coates helped Denys Lasdun, best known for the National Theatre, to become one of the finest post-war modernist architects in the world. Another top modernist emigre architect from Germany, Erich Mendelsohn, came from an Expressionist background and with assistance from Russian born designer Serge Chermayeff who like Welles Coates had also designed an Ekco radio set won a competition to build the highly regarded De la Warr pavilion in Bexhill-on-sea in 1933. Its organic curved glass exteriors have won favour and are much copied by contemporary architects. The building after many years of neglect has recently had a new lease of life after a successful refurbishment. London Underground under the guidance of its foresighted director Frank Pick were popularising modern art and design by implementing a wide-ranging and imaginative use of corporate identity. The familiar geometric roundel symbol and specially commissioned Johnston lettering for the logos were used ubiquitously. A number of tube stations built between the wars, such as those on the Piccadilly Line and Northern lines designed by Charles Holden, were fine examples of new and elegant architectural forms. Some of the top artists were commissioned to design
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American emigr Edward McKnight Kauffer who had first come to prominence as a member of Wyndham Lewis Group X after the first world war became the greatest artist/designer in Britain between the wars. This, one of his more abstract designs, was a poster he designed for Shell, a company who commissioned some of the best artists of the era for their posters, promoting a progressive attitude to motoring, still in its infancy.
advertising posters which served the dual purposes of advertising interesting places or events that could be reached on the network, as well as brightening up the stations with fine examples of public art. Man Rays Keeps London Going, issued at the outbreak of war, used a three-dimensional version of the familiar LT symbol juxtaposed with Saturn in deepest space. Moholy-Nagy produced a colourful Constructivist composition to explain how the carriage doors open and shut. Jack Beddington at Shell was another enlightened director who disliked the division between art and design so he commisioned modern artists of the calibre of Paul Nash, Edward McKnight Kauffer and Edward Bawden to design sophisticated and witty posters to promote their product. Poster art in Britain, particularly in the form of travel advertising, was at its very best in the 1930s, and rivalled the work in Paris in the latter years of the nineteenth century. In America MOMA had an exhibition in 1936 for poster artist McKnight Kauffer, the most gifted of those working in Britain between the wars as well as one for his French counterpart, Cassandre in 1937. Britains pre-eminence in this field carried on into the war years when progressive graphic artists like Abram Games and F.H.K. Henrion used adventurous graphic forms on their information and propaganda posters. Only the most conservative of critics would disagree that these works were amongst the finest examples of British art of the period. Paul Nash, the progressive landscape artist and British Surrealist proved his commitment to European modernist art when he founded Unit One in 1933. This was an amalgam of progressive painters, printmakers, architects and sculptors and the first serious outbreak of avant-gardism in Britain since Vorticism twenty years before. Its journal along with the publication Circle inaugurated by Hepworth and Gabo in 1937 provided a showcase for European Constructivism and helped Britain to acquire an international flavour with homegrown forms of Constructivism and Surrealism. Victor Pasmore, Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth produced a pastoral version of the former while Edward Wadsworth, Edward Burra, Paul Nash and John Piper an anglicised version of the latter. Hepworth managed to fuse landscape with the
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Barbara Hepworth Three forms (1935). This simple marble sculpture was a departure from her earlier abstractions based on the human figure. Nevertheless they still show her interest in hand carving. Later works are more Constructivist in style when wood or stone is combined with other materials such as strands of wire spanning a central void. Ben Nicholson 1934 relief is one of an innovative series of work which combines painting and relief sculpture.
human form much in the manner of Gabo but by the middle thirties her work had changed to encompass the organic abstract forms of Constantin Brancusi or Jean Arp. Ben Nicholson who later married Hepworth made a personal breakthrough in 1933 when he began to treat painting as a three-dimensional object. In the next year he began a series of purely white reliefs in conjunction with subtly coloured geometric abstract works, the latter an original response to the paintings of De Stijl. Henry Moores sculpture, less abstract on the whole, followed the example of Jacob Epstein especially in respect to the nude female form. These mother and child groupings or reclining figures show the modernist respect for the material but also a return to the tradition of direct carving as opposed to the more favoured techniques of modelling and construction of the time. The editor of the aforementioned Unit One was the writer and art critic Herbert Read, an enthusiastic supporter of the British modernists. He wrote about the current connections between art and design in his highly influential book Art and Industry (1934) which assimilated and popularised the lessons of the Bauhaus and advocated that design should be based on abstract form. He recognised the increasing importance of abstract art which he welcomed as the art of a classless society. He argued that the Bauhaus had revolutionised art teaching by introducing the now accepted idea of a foundation course and had established a broad-based design course which could now serve as a blueprint for the future. Read considered that this was the only time in the modern era that had something of the creative atmosphere of the workshops of the Renaissance. Ben Nicholson reinforced these ideas in the journal Circle, favouring the Constructivist vision of an amalgamation of art, architecture and design. Although abstract forms of art were becoming more familiar and acceptable in the nineteen-thirties, they were still unpopular with the average British gallery-goer. The same could be said of modern architecture as between the wars the country had developed an indiginous style of domestic architecture that was sold to the middle classes with idyllic images of suburban life. In essence this was a watered-down version of the Arts and Crafts styles of Norman Shaws Bedford Park Estate in West London and Edwin Lutyens country houses. Feeling underappreciated, many of the continental pioneers who had initially moved to England decided to move on to the USA.
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4.3 After you MOMA: the establishment of European modernism in art and design in the USA
n Thursday 24th October New York the beginning of the infamous Wall Street crash. More positively two weeks later on Thursday 7th November 1929 the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) first opened its doors. The initial exhibition had loaned paintings by Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cezanne, and Seurat but after the appointment of Alfred Barr as Director it was decided to encourage both modern art and its practical application to the fields of design and architecture.
In 1932 they held an exhibition Modern Architecture, International Exhibition which spawned the generic name The International Style the title of an accompanying book written by the curators Philip Johnson and Henry Russell Hitchcock. This loose label caught on as a sobriquet for the latest trends in technology-based architecture. Some commentators even claimed it was a style without a style. The exhibition then travelled to eleven American cities helping to promote awareness of the Modern Movement about which little was yet known. Three defining principles of the International Style were stated, but were not necessarily common to all. 1 architecture as volume, 2 regularity rather than symmetry in planning and 3 the avoidance of applied decoration. The architecture on show had an anti-historical attitude, a logical use of unadorned functional design, an honest use of materials, and by and large a geometrical regularity of form in the structure. As a rule the skeleton and flooring of the buildings were supported by metal columns or reinforced concrete; the dominant materials were concrete steel and glass. Modernist architecture in a domestic context as well as on a larger scale had several identifiable features. Its rectilinear geometric forms were based on the cube with an obvious basis in the development of abstract art from Cubism. Walls, usually painted white, were made of concrete or rendered brick; horizontality was emphasised by long strip windows often carried around a corner; flat roofs were widespread and projecting balconies had concrete parapets or railings; black and white and natural colours were favoured and a lack of applied decoration was obligatory. Le Corbusiers Villa Savoye (see page 176) built outside Paris in 1928 was seen as the perfect example of a majority of these principles. The book, perhaps naively, considering the climate in Europe where it was nurtured, suggested that political aims in building undermined the aesthetic aims of good architecture. America was suffering severe economic restraints after the Wall Street crash of 1929 although by the middle of the ninteenthirties, partly thanks to Roosevelts New deal, the country had recovered sufficiently for a new cycle of expansion and building. Alas Europe was not so fortunate as the depression ran longer and deeper and four of its major nations were taken over by political despots. More specifically the problems for the modern-minded artist in Germany had run its course after Hitler became the Chancellor at the beginning of 1933. Nazi antagonism to any form of artistic experimentation caused a major diaspora of artists, architects and designers from Germany. The legacy of European modernism of the nineteen twenties and early nineteen thirties The Bauhaus, De Stijl, Purism, Constructivism and Surrealism was the way that its vision and its reputation lived on through
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Mies van der Rohes Seagram building of 1958 is the epitome of the elegant minimalist sky-scraper perfectly proportioned with no expense spared.
the experience gained by its teachers, students, and practitioners. The emigration to the USA of some of Europes most eminent members of the Modern Movement for political reasons was to have a huge influence on American post-war art and architecture. These included Mondrian and Lger, a number of Surrealists including Andr Breton and Max Ernst, as well as many of the leading figures in the Bauhaus. By the outbreak of the second world war New York was becoming the centre of the art world. After three years in England Walter Gropius took up a post at Harvard School of Architecture in 1937 where he was soon joined by Marcel Breuer. Moholy-Nagy helped to found a New Bauhaus in Chicago in 1938 and despite the setback of its closure a year later, he bounced back with the Chicago Institute of Design, which he ran until his death in 1946. The Museum of Modern Art played a crucial role by continuing their policy of promoting applied art with an emphasis on good taste. Its Bauhaus exhibition in 1938 was important in introducing European Modernism to a country which was already thought of as the epitome of modernity. The Bauhaus designer Herbert Bayer organised this exhibition, one of a number he designed for MOMA, and was able to explore his interest in novel viewpoints and arrangements in exhibition design Mies van der Rohe left Germany in 1937 to become the director of the architectural department for the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago and is now considered as one of the giants of twentieth century architecture mainly due to his work in the USA. Building construction had tailed off in the nineteenthirties due to the slump after the Wall Street crash but after the war America had an enormous economic advantage over war-ravaged Europe. Mies found himself in the place, Chicago, that had provided a blank canvas to build a new city after the great fire of 1871 had destroyed large parts of its downtown area. The reconstruction had made it a laboratory for modern architecture and the spiritual home to the skyscraper. Three-quarters of a century later Mies pioneered the building of concrete glass and steel curtain-wall structures, finally managing to realise the models he had sketched out in the early nineteen-twenties. Most famous of all is his Seagram building in New York built in 1958 with dark glass set in a very expensive bronze curtain wall (steel or alluminium would have been cheaper but less stylish). His detractors see his crystalline structures as symbols of the inhuman aspect of big business. Others consider his elegant glass columns in the sky with their geometric simplicity as a new kind of classicism and even as a forerunner to minimalism, exemplifying the Miesian phrase less is more. Unfortunately his deceptively simple style was misunderstood and replicated endlessly as a cheap formula by lesser talents. The dictatorial Mies never allowed compromises on his buildings so as a consequence they were never cheap, but a multitude of bastardized versions came to dominate cut-price high-rise office building for the conceivable future, giving this form of architecture a bad reputation which it still hasnt completely recovered from.
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Early American abstract art Ex Bauhaus painter Joseph Albers was a founder member of the American Abstract Artists formed around the time of the breakthrough MOMA Cubist show of 1936. Its aim was to make New York the world centre for abstract art, with annual exhibitions, lectures and accompanying publications to discuss principles and spread the gospel. His influence on the future direction of American art was secured when he was appointed professor of art at Black Mountain College, North Carolina after teaching at Yale University. In the nineteen-fifties he became a mentor for a new generation of artists such as Ellsworth Kelly and Kenneth Noland who both painted in a colourful hardedged geometric style (named by critic Clement Greenberg as Post-painterly or Hard-edge abstraction). Its aim was to Josef Albers many colour remove all meaning from the work variations to his Homage to a that was not strictly pictorial. square begun in the late 40s Despite the post war European are borne out of a analytical influence there were indigenous discipline to examine how precedents for American abstract art. colours react to one another Several artists had spent time in Paris and how a flat two dimensional including Stanton Macdonald-Wright space can evoke an illusion of and Morgan Russell (see page 68). three dimensions. This one titled Before the first world war Arthur Apparition was painted in 1959. Arthur Dove was an Dove had also worked in Paris in early US abstract artist 1907 and by 1910 was back in America painting extractions from nature who took natural that were abstract works of a personal spiritual nature that were as early as forms as his Kandinskys efforts. In the 1920s he was making collages and assemblages inspiration. This pastel from found objects and natural materials which predate the works of on paper image Joseph Cornell, Klaus Oldenburg and Robert Rauschenberg. Assemblage in Nature Symbolized, which pre-existing elements are brought together, are best known in Joseph No. 2 dates from Cornells work but have their roots in collage and the work of Kurt around 1912. Schwitters. In the fifties collage and assemblage came together in the three dimensional works of Neo-Dada: Rauschenburgs goat and Jasper Johns beer cans. From here it is a short step to Pop Art. Joseph Cornells Untitled (The Malevichs Suprematist work also influenced the post-war Hotel Eden) c.1945 generation. While a student at Black Mountain College, Robert Rauschenberg made his own versions of Malevichs white on white canvases and a series of all black paintings. Geometric abstract painter Ad Reindhardt in the late thirties was working in a style that owed a debt to Mondrian. By the fifties he was painting subtly graduated monochrome geometric paintings, including all black canvases that look back to Malevich as well as forward to Minimalism. The colour-field paintings of Barnett Newman, single colour paintings broken only by a contrasting vertical colour stripe, the large size of the canvas make it both the subject and the object. Kandinsky, was also seen as a kindred spirit by many in the New York School of Abstract Expressionism. Indeed the first
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known use of this defining term was the title of a Kandinsky painting in 1919. The action painter, Jackson Pollock was an admirer and is known to have owned a well thumbed copy of his Concerning the Spiritual in Art. He and Willem De Kooning shared Kandinskys spiritual quest to show 'inner necessity', the internalised world of the mind and feeling expressed in paint. Emotional and spiritual intensity was channelled through the artists spontaneous brushstrokes. Pollock and Frenchman Yves Klein made their egos and anxieties part of the overall conception; the artist personified as rebel film star like Marlon Brando or James Dean. Yet again abstract art seems to reflect music, but this time jazz, as Pollocks spontaneous use of paint had parallels with the bebop improvisations of a Charlie Parker or Dizzie Gillespie. The spirituality that had motivated Kandinsky, Malevich and Mondrian also reappeared in Mark Rothkos colour-field paintings with their blurred floating rectangles which also seem to complement the Cool jazz style of a young Miles Davis. Arshile Gorky was an Armenian who had moved to the USA in 1920. The progression of his painting and drawings helps to explain the development of painting from Cubism through an abstract form of Surrealism through to work with a rougher expressionist edge that undoubtedly influenced the New York school of abstract artists. The 'automatic' or spontaneous act that the Abstract Expressionists adopted had roots in Surrealism not Cubism whose experimentation and escape from traditional form was historically more important than its ability to beget a host of artistic descendants1. The release of internalised or locked-up emotion that Surrealism revealed seems well suited to the American temperament and had a greater influence on Lucky Strike of 1921 modern art there than by Stuart Davis, a rare Arshile Gorkys Untitled painting of 1944 geometric nonexample of an shows the transformation from Surrealisms representational art. American painter automatic painting and Miros symbolic Despite this, abstraction, directly influenced by abstractions through to the New York Cubism. after the second world abstract expressionist paintings of De war, became so central Kooning. to the idea of modern art in the west that the two concepts were almost inseparable. Miro had become one of the most familiar of all European artists in the USA and as an abstract Surrealist, mirrors Gorkys interest in amorphous floating forms. He exerted a considerable influence on many of the abstract painters who were emerging from a plethora of realism and regionalism. Two other European artists enabled American artists to take over the mantle that Europe more or less relinquished in the nineteen-thirties. Before he returned to France to fight in the resistance the French abstract painter
1 The only obvious link between Cubism and American abstract art are in the work of Stuart Davis. He painted contemporary urban culture in a collaged style, anticipating Pop Art three or four decades later. Like Gris he started out as an illustrator and cartoonist but turned to Fine Art when he saw the Armory show in 1913. His 1920s paintings find abstract patterns in urban subjects using iconography from advertis like his Lucky Strike painting of 1921.
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Pompeii by Hans Hofmann (1959). Hofmann had been in Paris before the first world war and later in Munich. By the time he taught art in New York in the nineteen-thirties his understanding of European painting helped to further American abstract expressionism after the second world war. His work is a winning combination of geometric and expressionist art while using a Cubist structure. Jean Hlion wrote and lectured in the USA arguing that abstract art was the best means of expressing the preoccupations of the technological age. As a young man the German born Hans Hofmann worked for ten years in Paris before the outbreak of the first world war. As a friend of Robert Delaunay and an admirer of his scientific investigations into colour he became a tireless experimenter with styles and techniques. When he moved to the United States in the early nineteen-thirties he opened a college in downtown New York which became important to the handful of abstract artists working in the USA at the time. He is credited as the first person to try action painting, that is dripping and pouring paint onto the canvas, a technique later made famous by Jackson Pollock. Many of his paintings were a combination of geometric and abstract expressionist art. He combined the colourful hard-edged geometric shapes of a Mondrian which were laid over a roughly painted expressionist background. His early work was destroyed in a studio fire, so in 1940 at the age of sixty he emerged phoenix-like as a fully-fledged abstract painter, remaining so until his death twenty-six years later.
Post Bauhaus design Rigorous modern design in its Bauhaus or Constructivist mode was still in the nineteen-thirties a minority interest for the cognoscenti and appearing mainly in the design of domestic products such as lamps, furniture, wallpaper and kitchen utensils. The second world war hindered its progress so its eventual pervasiveness had to wait until the mass consumerism of the late nineteenfifties and sixties when the industrial designer had an important role in the design and styling of domestic items. Many Bauhaus graduates used their varied experience to make significant advances in architecture, interior design, furniture, domestic products and graphics. They could combine the analytical and technical skills to transform the craft of the workshop into a well-designed contemporary product with an ability to cooperate with the manufacturers without necessarily compromising their ideals. Marcel Breuer and Herbert Bayer lead the way but there were others who included Wilhelm Wagenfeld who became known for a range of geometric glassware design and Xanti Schawinsky who was commissioned in 1935 to design the Studio 42 Olivetti typewriter which helped to establish Italys importance in the design world after the second world war. MOMA had staged an exhibition of Machine Art in 1934 which sought to value the integrity of carefully selected industrially manufactured objects
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William Waghenfeld was a Bauhaus graduate who made his name with practical modernist designs for mass production particularly in glassware and ceramics. This Kubus range of modular stacking heatresistant glass containers from 1935 was one of his many successful products, which had earlier included his Bauhaus table lamp of 1924 and glass teapot cup and saucer of 1932. He later designed electrical goods for Braun.
Alvar Aaltos cantilevered chair No.31 popularised a more organic approach to modernist design with its use of laminated plywood.
that had been created without artistic intention like a cash register, scientific flasks and petrie dishes, a microscope, a compass, an outboard propeller, pots and pans, etc. Alfred Barr stated in the exhibition catalogue that abstract and geometric beauty, kinetic rhythms, beauty of material and surface, and visual complexity and function were central to the aesthetic of machine art. This was an early attempt in America to promote modern European design values as opposed to what was perceived as the superfluities of Art Deco. Until the late nineteen-thirties one of the few examples of modern furniture to gain popularity in the USA were the bentwood chairs and laminated birch furniture made famous by Finnish designer Alvar Aalto which comfortably modernised traditionally popular homespun styles. Aalto also made tubular steel furniture in the late twenties but decided that metal was a bad heat conductor, was too bright in strong light and that its hard surfaces were bad acoustically. His modernism came with a wish to humanise technology at a time when mechanisation, the prime cause of change in the hands of contemporary architects and designers, threatened to impose an impersonal nature in contradiction to their original objectives. Scandinavia had a tradition of making prefabricated houses in varying historical styles that could be assembled on site. With the advent of modernist architecture the Scandinavians cleverly adapted its concerns so as to exploit its most economic material, the huge abundance of pinewood . Aalto was brought up close to the Finnish forests so he understood the subtleties that nature could contribute to modern design as well as how industrial processes could be used to make affordable products. Bent plywood became a primary material which he first used for the seat of the Paimio chair in 1930 made for the Finnish sanatorium of the same name. For the supports he used a continuous curved birchwood frame. This was modified in his thirties classic, model No.31, made of the same materials but with a cantilevered frame. This gained favour in Britain after an exhibition at Fornum and Masons won over a public usually resistant to Modernism and consequently Alvar and his wife set up a company Artek in 1935 to sell his furniture designs. Aaltos organic designs may appear contrary to the creed of Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier but by the middle 1930s the latter had modified his modernist principles to a more organic form of architecture and design. America like Britain had an embedded conservatism which precluded new materials like tubular steel and chrome. MOMA helped to change this mindset in the early nineteen-forties with a series of competitions. Manufacturers and retailers were invited to stimulate an interest in low-cost functional design for chairs, lamps, glass, textiles etc. One important collaboration was between the engineer/designer Charles Eames and the architect Eero Saarinen which culminated in a prize-winning furniture design for MOMAs 1940 Organic Design in Home Furnishings competition. Eames was one half of the husband and wife team of Charles and Ray Eames. Ray had been a founder member of the American Abstract Artists and had trained under Hans Hofmann. They shared a vision for social change
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Charles Eames storage unit of 1949 is now considered a modern classic alongside many of the pieces of furniture he and his wife Ray designed for the innovative furniture designer Hermann Miller. They used plywood and plastic in standardised designs suited to mass production. Although this particular self assembly design, with an obvious reference to De Stijl, proved difficult to market it and other similar designs proved to be a blue-print for the future. which would include well-designed affordable mass-produced furniture or as Charles put it what works is better than what looks good the looks good can change, but what works, works. Charles had initially trained and practiced as an architect and his Eames House in Pacific Palisades, California built in 1949 is justly famous. Its two steel-framed prefabricated units built from items ordered from a builders catalogue and divided by patio space provided a template for further commissions. During the war Britain and America were able to mass produce moulded plywood shells for the first time for military purposes. Eames designed plywood aeroplane parts and with Saarinen even designed moulded plywood legsplints for wounded soldiers. Later he could apply what he had learnt from his experience to furniture design. Plywood was now moulded into organic shell forms to fit the body although later versions in the nineteen fifties were adaptated for fibre glass and plastic and manufactured in a wide range of different colours. Eames knowledge of engineering enabled him to fit these shells to a range of bases or legs made in a variety of materials including metal. The much copied stacking chairs made of moulded polyester combined with steel tube legs were one of many pieces that were ideal for public buildings or open-plan office interiors. The Eamess made many other pieces of innovative furniture, many ideal for mass production and self assembly, including colourful storage and shelving systems for the adventurous furniture manufacturer Herman Miller, .
A Charles Eames moulded plastic chair made for Herman Miller in 1952.
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4.4 The effect of modernism in European postwar design
here was a feeling in Germany after the war that there was unfinished business after the curtailment of the Bauhaus and the positive influence it was likely to have on industrial design. In 1954 the Hoschule fr Gestaltung was opened in Ulm as a new Bauhaus and continued until 1968. Two significant designers associated with the school were Hans Gugelot who was head of product design and Dieter Rams who was a student there. Both became involved with the progressive electronics company Braun and rationalised the design approach on a wide range of products including transistor radios, record players and shavers. Unlike their American counterparts they applied functionalist principles to these new technological products. They managed to realise a simplification of form with a clean, elegant and workable product. Incidentally the same criterion was concurrently being adopted in Japan by the Sony company for their developing range of electronic goods. The self-effacing Rams was later involved in designing food mixers, pocket calculators and hair dryers for Braun. He summed his role as a silent butler, designing to reduce chaos, .
A cover design from 1944 by modernisms Renaissance man Max Bill. As a son of Switzerland he even designed watches!
The Bauhaus graduate Max Bill who designed the buildings at Ulm was rector there for a few years. He exemplified the versatility of a graduate of the school by working in a wide range of disciplines which included architecture, painting and industrial design. His late nineteen-thirties sculptures anticipated the Minimalist art of the sixties and he was also an early practitioner of the New Typography which dominated the profession in the post-war years when it came to be known as the Swiss Style. This was characterised by a clean and logical approach first seen in the work of Jan Tschichold who had been impressed with the Weimar Bauhaus show in 1923. In his book Die Neue Typographie of 1928 he rationalised and tamed the principles of the New Typography by advocating a functionalist aesthetic with a mix of assymetry, geometry, white space, sans-serif typefaces, photography and photomontage. In 1933, while teaching in Munich he was imprisoned for six weeks for his left wing views and advocating non-German design principles. After his release he moved to Switzerland where he ironically reverted to an elegant refinement of classical symmetrical typography as a reaction to Max Bill and Kurt Schwitters dogmatic insistence on New Typography which reminded him of the singleminded intolerance of the Nazis. Immediately after the war he came to England to restyle Penguin books covers and typography. The New Typography or Swiss Style as it came to be known grew out of the formal arrangements seen in geometric abstract art and the design of De Stijl and the Bauhaus. Its pioneer and theoretician was Jan Tschichold whose 1934 advert for Uhertype is seen on the left. The layouts were based on assymetric grids, using sans serif types like Helvetica. Its primary importance was for clarity of information in tables and text in brochures, timetables, signposts etc.
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Jock Kinneir and Margaret Calverts designs for British motorway signs in the middle sixties are a good example of the Swiss Styles emphasis on legibility.
The Swiss Style favoured sans serif types like Helvetica and Univers, appropriately both designed by Swiss type designers. Its functionality and objective approach was particularly suited to information graphics like timetables, sign systems, technical manuals and company brochures which needed clear and ordered data along with informative photographs. When used on posters and advertising it included ideas learnt from Constructivist and Bauhaus graphics; the use of a single strong image or typeface supported by a minimum amount of lettering. The reverse side of this coin was revealed in 1947 when Paul Rand published Thoughts on Design in the USA. This took up ideas from The New Typography including the aforementioned assymetry, photomontage, sans serif types and motifs taken from artists like Arp, Kle and Miro and appliyng them to what became known as The New Advertising. Unlike the Swiss Style this was meant to be subjective aiming to trigger a response of intrigue and puzzle. His flair lead Moholy-Nagy to describe him as an idealist and a realist using the language of the poet and the businessman an apt description for a great commercial artist. Rand applied himself to corporate identity design which became so important in the 1950s. His broad based designs for IBM presented manuals with design specifications for all products: a Constructivist logo1 combined with cool unfussy design helped to give the company an image appropriate to the new computer technology pulling together the product, the publicity and the buildings. Strands believed in the importance of the recipients participitation and this has become of increasing importance in advertising over the years. Modern design was used in American style magazines like McCalls and Esquire to add the sophistication necessary to engender a desire and a market for new design products. It assumed an integral role in advertising and packaging, the two most important areas in promoting an appetite for the new products that were flooding the American market after the war when due to a healthy economy and the size of the countrys population it took the lead in mass market consumerism . So all these sophisticated new weapons were used to promote a progressive image for companies which were now kitted out with their postBauhaus office furniture in their state of the art steel and glass buildings . There was even likely to be an abstract expressionist painting behind the chairmans Barcelona chair. A long way from the social ideals of the European pioneers of the nineteen-twenties! Two decades after the design innovations of the nineteen-twenties they had become both chic and commonplace.
Paul Rand was applied the design principles of the New Typography to promote an appropriate modern image to advertising and post-war consumerism. Above are his logo designs for the publishers Harcourt Brace and IBM.
Design and architecture in Britain during and after the war To bolster British morale during the war a scheme was raised to manufacture and supply cheap and functional consumer goods including furniture, clothing, crockery etc. to for the forces, newly married couples and people who had been driven out of their homes by bombing. The furniture in particular offered good design and was manufactured to exacting Utility specifications under the direction of the progressive furniture designer Gordon Russell. Usually made of oak or mahogany, its unadorned spirit was modernist
1 Over the next few decades the design of logos showed a similar emphasis on strong and simple geometric forms. In less talented hands it has become a vacuous clich.
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From 1941 this symbol appeared on Utlity furniture, clothing and household goods like sheets and blankets which were mass produced to high design specifications for young married couples and those who had lost their belongings through bombing. CC stands for civilian clothing.
This primary school in Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire, a few miles north of London was one of a number of schools that were built soon after the war from prefabricated parts an idea also used for prefabs or single storey bungalows that had been built at the end of war.
in spirit although its stylistic roots went back fifty years to the Arts and Crafts movement. Utility design lasted ten years, well into the period of post-war austerity but gradually fell out of favour with the general public who were now demanding a greater freedom of choice. After the war the shattered economy of Britain showed that there was a pressing need to build houses, schools and factories. The elected Labour government by introducing a welfare state and the nationalisation of the health service and the railways were determined to meet the social needs in the public sector. Large-scale social housing was needed to replace nineteenth-century slum dwellings and war damaged towns so the New Towns Act was passed in 1946 to provide new and well serviced communities to relieve the congestion in large towns and cities. An approach to social housing was needed that was similar to the pioneering projects implemented by the reforming architects, Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius and J.J.P. Oud, in the latter half of the nineteen-twenties. Some public authorities were now sympathetic to modern architectural methods for social amenities and housing, which before the war had been sparingly used for exclusive private apartments, department stores, factories and offices. A new generation of socially aware architects like those employed by London County Council were given a chance to realise radical schemes for homes, factories, hospitals, schools and offices. Two early schemes for new towns were implemented in Harlow and Stevenage both a few miles north of London. Another much admired social housing development was an extensive estate in Roehampton, south west London, where tower blocks and terraces were artfully arranged in a park environment to allow for as much light and surrounding space as possible. Unfortunately this lead to a formula where the solution for high density housing meant that tower blocks were system-built from cut price materials, with a minimum of architectural input and placed in an unsuitable environment. System building from prefabricated units or prefabs, proved successful for emergency accomodation in Britain at the end of the war. Due to the shortages of building materials like concrete as well as manpower, this formula was also used in Hertfordshire and elsewhere for building schools to meet the demands of the baby boom after the war. These kit of parts had previously been advocated by Gropius and were implemented with consultation from informed and interested parties. Roofs, walls, windows and doors were combined in a flexible grid made in light engineering factories and assembled on site. The rationale behind this resulted in steel framed buildings with bright interiors, a dash of colour that were purely functional without consideration to style. Some towns also provided cultural stimulation for its residents. One example of this was Harlow new town in Essex, where a number of public sculptures were commissioned from prominent artists as an integral part of the towns public spaces. On display were a family grouping by Henry Moore carved in stone and Barbara Hepworths Contrapuntal forms which had originally been commissioned for The Festival of Britain in 1951. There was even a bronze cast of Auguste Rodin's Eve which was sited in the Water Gardens in the town centre.
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This family group in carved stone by Henry Moore, was commissioned by the Harlow Art Trust in 1954 to be shown as an integral part of a new urban setting. It was later removed after it had been vandalised. The Festival of Britain held in 1951 was a highly successful morale raising scheme for a nation which was still suffering from rationing and material shortages six years after the end of the war. It also happened to be the centenary of the 1851 festival held in the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park. An area of the south bank of the Thames in central London was cleared of old industrial buildings and a number of young architects were invited to design modern but temporary structures each of which was devoted to a different aspect of the British way of life. These glass-walled pavilions were grouped around the huge geodesic Dome of Discovery three hundred and sixty five feet across and a structure that anticipated the Millenium Dome, half a century later. The Royal Festival Hall designed by the progressive architectural department of the LCC (London County Council) was the only permanent building on the site and had an innovative structure that soundproofed the auditorium by artfully suspending it within the shell of the building. The pencil-thin convex SKYLON designed by Powell and Moya was the exhibitions Eiffel Tower, that is a spectacular structure that could be seen from a distance and serve as an emblem for the whole enterprise. Made of steel and aluminium, it was 300 foot high and had no visible means of support, rather like the British economy according to an oft-repeated joke. It was certainly a significant moment, the first time that the British public showed its enthusiasm for the potential of modern architecture. In this regard it was an appropriate successor to the Crystal Palace that had performed a similar role one hundred years before.
The Festival of Britain of 1951 was a grand showpiece to brighten up Britain after the war. This shows part of south bank site in London with the futuristic Skylon in the distance, the ultra modern Dome of Discovery on the right and one of the modernistic temporary pavilions on the left.
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A detail of a wallpaper design made for the Festival Pattern group showing a design based on Insulin.
The new look? The Festival Pattern Group was formed as part of the preparations for the Festival of Britain. The intention was to design contemporary looking patterns based on crystal structures and other natural forms that could be only seen with the aid of a powerful microscope. These were supplied in the form of accurate blue prints from scientific establishments as source material for designers to decorate various media including glass, plastics, textiles, wallpapers, furniture, linoneum, and graphics. This concurred with the commercial design in the late nineteen-forties and most of the nineteen-fifties which had a similar role to Art Deco twenty or so years before. Art Deco had popularised artistic styles from many different cultures throughout history by applying it to aspects of modern architecture and design. Its post war equivalent has yet to be blessed with a catch-all title although The New Look, the name given to Christian Diors new style of womens fashion introduced in 1947, was often used as a journalistic sobriquet for just about anything that broke with past styles. Diors much copied look involved a sculptural exaggeration of the female form the hourglass look which was a sexy departure from the square shouldered styles of wartime austerity: even utility dresses in Britain could be modified to fit in with current trends. Over the next few years the hourglass look and tulip forms cropped up in a wide range of designs. The main reference points for the design of this era both in formal and decorative ways were the abstract art styles from Cubism right up to the present day. Fine art and commercial design were more closely linked than ever before due to the suitability of various forms of abstract art to be pastiched, something that had been difficult to achieve with representational art which presented a clear division between art and design. Some abstract art had infiltrated the popular imagination sufficiently to have a profound influence on a range of design applications. In 1947 Picasso had begun to make ceramics and this helped to encourage potters to experiment with a more freeform approach to the medium. Matisse made designs and patterns for scarves and wall-hangings based on flora and fauna
Matisses colourful paintings, prints and material designs of the 1950s, including this wallhanging Polynsie la mer, used semi abstract and natural forms to contribute to the design look of the time.
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Part of a range of tableware California mobile whose pattern design has been based on abstract art.
Antennae with red and blue dots by Alexander Calder (1960) whose mobiles caught the imagination of the publichad a pervasive influence on pattern design in the 1950s.
of Polynesia. Alexander Calders mobiles had achieved popularity through their sense of fun and helped to bring a greater appreciation to modern abstract art forms. Their floating abstract forms resemble those of Miro and Arp painted with Mondrians flat colours. One example of this were the decorations on a popular range of tableware manufactured by Metlox called Californian mobile which as its name suggests was a tribute to Calder but also showed a debt to the likes of Miro and Kandinsky. The Scandinavian countries were highly important in post-war design with the organic forms of Scandinavian modern. The term organic had originally been used in the context of architecture and design by the architect Frank Lloyd Wright early in the century and had its roots in the principles of the `Arts and Crafts Movement of craftsmanship and truth to nature. By the nineteenfifties the term was being used to describe the semi-abstract forms of artists like Jean Arp and Henry Moore in painting and sculpture that had their roots in natural forms and that were which then adopted by architecture and design. Arps abstract forms in particular were a major influence behind the organic tendency in design that took its main inspiration from sculptural forms. An early advocate was Finnish architect Alvar Aalto who had pioneered organic modernism with his pre-war glass and furniture designs. By 1938 he was influential enough in the USA to have an exhibition of his architecture and furniture at MOMA. Organic design was all the rage after the war and in stark contrast to the rigidly geometric Miesian model that was to dominate contemporary architecture in the fifties and sixties. Frank Lloyd Wrights shell-like design for the Guggenheim Museum in New York (1949-59) had an internal spiral viewing platform; Le Corbusiers chapel at Ronchamp (1950-4) a roof that swells like a wave both conform to its new identity. Another architect and designer who employed organic forms was Eero Saarinen. He was the son of Eliel Saarinen an architect who moved to the USA from Finland in the nineteen-twenties and whose work conformed to the International Style. Young Eero went to Paris at the end of the decade to learn sculpture but after a year changed his mind returning to study architecture at Yale University. Curves and cantilevered sculptural forms feature prominently in his architecture, combining Expressionism with the International Style. His designs for the TWA Terminal in New York City, and the Dulles International Airport near Washington, DC are bold expressions of the adventure of flying. They also conform to the fifties mania for imaginatively bizarre designs for gas stations, motels and fast food restaurants which aimed to express their function literally an early flowering of post-modernism? His adeptness in creating unusual and innovative sculptural structures enabled him to develop a remarkable range of furniture which based on colour, form and materials. These included the womb chair for Knoll in 1947 which had a fibreglass shell, upholstered with a latex foam filling and mounted on a tubular steel frame. In 1956 he made another landmark chair the tulip for Knoll which had a polyester shell mounted on an aluminium pedestal base and then coated with white plastic so as to be seen as a single piece.
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Jean Arps bronze cast sculpture Lost in the Forest 1932. Much of his life was taken up with working out organic forms in painting and sculpture which were a big influence on Scandinavian design. Eero Saarinens design for the TWA terminal at John Kennedy Airport, New York. Organic and expressionist sculptural forms made of ferroconcrete convey the adventure of flying.
The American sculptor Harry Bertoia made chairs formed to the shape of the human body from a grid of cross wires which clearly owe a debt to the Constructivist wire sculptures of Gabo and Hepworth. This stringing motif on Hepworths sculptures was seen in many fifties pattern designs as were the sculptural forms of Henry Moore that inspired ceramics, glass and silver work. Joan Miro, Jackson Pollock and Paul Klee had an influence on textile and wallpaper design although the latters obvious influence is more difficult to pin down due to his eclectic style. The semi-abstract sculptural forms of Brancusi that showed a hint of industrial polish proved inspirational for product designers machine-made organic forms. Glass design was one area that was particularly suitable to abstract forms and Finland in particular found inspiration in Brancusis work. His Bird in space, a marble piece depicting a bird soaring into the sky, could well be a direct influence on the Skylon structure built on Londons South Bank for the Festival of Britain in 1951. The sculptor Alberto Giacomettis attenuated bronze figures inspired an Italian penchant for extremely elongated forms in their extreme and uninhibited designs which often broke the boundaries of good taste. Saarinens Womb chair and Ottoman (right) shows his interest in organic modernism as well as his early interest in sculptural forms. His Tulip chair of 1956 (below) was made of moulded polyester with a coated metal base and is seen here in an advertisement for Knoll International.
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A Blue Note jazz album cover which takes its obvious inspiration from geometric abstract art.
American designers also excelled in flamboyant kitsch that were best seen in the burgeoning fins on Buick and Cadillac automobiles. As the fifties progressed pattern design on ceramics, textiles, dresses and wallpapers came to the fore. Lucienne Day in Britain was an outstanding exponent in this area and her Calyx design for Heals is one of her many admired designs. The influence Abstract expressionism, with the drip and swirl of a Pollock painting or the splash of Sam Francis, was an inspiration for many. Abstract art was also a rich source for graphic design. The geometric compartmentalisation of Mondrians paintings was an ideal structure for book jackets, magazine design and record covers such as the jazz LPs issued by the Blue Note label. Graffiti a la Dada was appropriated by Saul Bass and used in the opening and closing titles of the film West Side Story. Collage and Surrealism was also an important influence on nineteen-fifties advertising which used its strange juxtapositions to place the product in a desirable context. Although it had its roots in pre-war modernist art and design, post-war commercial design like art deco before it, compromised its principles and sometimes abandoned them altogether. It was said that the design patterns were a result of the democratisation of the avant-garde. The objectivity of a modernist design ethic, function through purity of form, the correct use of materials and the lack of superfluous decoration often gave way to an overlay of contemporary style the buzz word of the 50s as a means to sell more products by appealing to the lowest common denominator. Whereas 20s Bauhaus now looks classic, the Contemporary look is rooted in a nineteenfifties time capsule and is best seen as an exercise in nostalgia. The seeds sewn by modern art and design in the twenty years between the wars were becoming commonplace by the nineteen-sixties. After the war many countries legislated for design education to help rebuild industry and improve competition in the export market. As Europe gradually emerged from years of austerity modern design was applied to a whole host of new products such as refrigerators and televisions. The Council of Industrial Design opened its Design Centre in London in 1956 and published the influential Design magazine. Its aims were to promote a wellmade stylish product and the catchword good design soon became synonomous with modern design. The most successful exponent of this ethic in Britain was Terence Conrans Habitat which in the nineteen-sixties aimed to bring an inexpensive contemporary style to all domestic products, appealing at least to the middle classes. Post Bauhaus design was became commonplace as many home-owners favoured simple uncluttered environs, with ergonomically efficient kitchens equipped with the very latest consumer products. The genuine item was now available for the more discriminating or at least the wealthier consumer. Knoll for instance was granted rights to manufacture Mies van der Rohes pre-war designs including his Barcelona, Tugendhat and Brno chairs, as well as Marcel Breuers Bauhaus era B32 cantilever chair and tables made of cane and panels of wood. The most successful European countries to sell modern design were those least affected by shortages after the war most notably Sweden, Finland and Denmark. The Scandinavian countries had been particularly receptive to modern architecture and design in the inter-war years but offered an eventempered version more suited to public taste and needs. Bruno Matthson in
Hans Wegners round chair of 1949 is also known as The Chair and epitomises the tasteful organic modernism which the Scandinavians excelled at after the war. Among its claims to fame was its role in the TV debate between Richard Nixon and John Kennedy on the eve of the 1961 presidential elections.
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Arne Jacobsens AJ cutlery from the middle of the 1950s did not look out of place onboard the spaceship in the film 2001: a Space Odyssey.
Sweden, Aalvar Aalto in Finland and Kaare Klint in Denmark were important mentors in this respect. Matthson made bentwood furniture based on his scientific studies of proportions, stresses, bending and laminating techniques. Aalto had commenced his career in the early nineteen-twenties as a neoclassic architect becoming by the early nineteen-thirties an early exponent of the Scandinavian Modern style. He worked in a variety of disciplines including glassware, light fittings and modern furniture which made use of the abundant cheap wood in Finland. Although he never worked outside Finland, his work offered an ageless quality which could be summed up a humanistic approach which combined tradition with modernism. These were the qualities that embody the Scandinavian design ethic of good design that after 1945 were combined with a realisation that this was a route to national prosperity. Danish Modern became a popular brand of distinction around the world in the nineteen-fifties when Denmark successfully promoted furniture, textile and wallpaper design. Their top furniture designer Hans Wegner is reputed to have designed over 500 chairs which conform to the Scandinavian maxim of good taste. The round chair of 1949 looks like the prototype for every tasteful table and desk chair of the last fifty years and indeed became known simply as The Chair. Denmarks pre-eminent all-round designer was architect Arne Jacobsen who as a young man had visited the Paris Exhibition for Industrial and Decorative Arts in 1925. He advocated humanised modernism working hard to make his designs economic and suitable for mass reproduction. He encompassed a wide range of disciplines from designing a bank to designing a spoon; his range of AJ cutlery in the nineteen-fifties was a satisfactory combination of organic and geometric influences and were sufficiently futuristic to be featured in the film 2001. Like many modern architects Jacobsen carried on the Bauhaus ethos of designing the building and all of its fixtures and fittings as seen in his work for Oxford Universitys St Catherines College. Chair design was considered part of his architectural brief and considered as an integral part of the building. Jacobsens range of stacking chairs made for the canteen of a factory in Copenhagen proved popular enough to be manufactured for domestic use and are still in production today. His three-legged stackable Ant chair of 1952 was the biggest selling chair of the 1950s especially after it was manufactured in a wide range of coloured plastics. It became part of British cultural history when in the so-called swinging sixties a naked Christine Keeler was photographed astride one for a glossy magazine. More luxurious were the Swan and the Egg chairs, which conformed to the organic tulip and hour glass forms that had originated from womens fashions in the New Look after the war and had shaped many designs products including ceramic vases and tulip-shaped wine glasses. I started this book with a reference to MOMA director Alfred Barrs diagrammatic flow chart showing how modern art had developed up to his blockbuster show of 1936 Cubism and Abstract Art. Cubism quite naturally occupied the central role in this analysis. I have also given Cubism a central role in this book because by turning art history on its head it altered its future in a more profound way than any other twentieth century art movement. However seventy odd years later there are few direct lines of influence that can be traced from Cubism through to the present day. Barrs chart ended in
Christine Keeler the model at the centre of a British political scandal in 1963 is shown astride jacobsens Ant chair.
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1935 with geometrical abstract art channelled through Mondrian, Malevich, Tatlin and the Bauhaus, but a debt to Cubism was seldom acknowledged by the artists involved in Americas post-war Abstract Expressionism, or the French equivalent the Art Informel or Tachisme. Name any art movement since 1950 and you will find the same result. It must be acknowledged that any art movement which concentrates on geometric form owes a debt to Malevich or Mondrian who were the initial inheritors of Cubism. The Minimalist coloured boxes of Donald Judd, Carl Andrs bricks or the Hardedged abstraction of Ellsworth Kelly can then be seen as part of this legacy. There are also loose links between Robert Rauschebergs combine paintings, including his stuffed goat, and a collage by Picasso with a piece of table cloth attached; a Warhol soup could be a possible ancestor to a mast head from Le Journal from one of Picassos Synthetic Cubist paintings. Could one have existed without the other? Who can say? It certainly shows that it uncovered a whole new world of possibilities. It follows then that the revolutionary social art of the nineteen-twenties couldnt have happened without the implications of Cubisms revolution. It affected reasoning artists like Tatlin, van Doesburg and in a reactive way the painting and architecture of Le Corbusier; so in turn it shaped the future world of architecture and design. And where is there evidence of postBauhaus thinking today? Well some might argue that it a significant part of it has transmogrified into the Scandinavian Modern style whose inheritors nowadays relentlessly market mass-produced flat-packed wares under the name of the largest furniture retailer in the world, IKEA!
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Art in Revolution Part 4

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4 Picking up the pieces: the thirties and beyond

4.1 Art in Paris between the wars

4.2 The avantgarde hits the buffers

4.4 The effect of modernism in European postwar design

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