HEINRICH WÖLFFLIN

Photo: Johannes Rottmeyer

When we were in Puglia in September, I noticed that high baroque churches and palazzi were placed in narrow streets, making it impossible to get a proper view of them. The grand duomo in Gallipoli was a case in point, so were the houses in Martina Franca.

Now, reading Wölfflin’s Principles of Art History, I found that in his view this was not a mistake and was wholly characteristic of the baroque style. His concept of the “painterly style” in baroque denoted movement, indefiniteness and impermanence in the visual arts and applied to sculpture and buildings as well as painting.

The creation of views in architecture, in which buildings were designed to be seen in different ways and from different perspectives, was one aspect of the painterly style and explains why it was unimportant for a façade to be viewed square on or from the front:

Although the full front view will always claim for itself a certain exclusivity, we now find compositions which clearly set out to reduce the significance of this view. This is very clear, for instance, in the Carlo Borromeo church in Vienna [the Karlskirche, above], with its two columns placed in front of the façade, the true value of which is revealed in the non-frontal views, where the columns lose their equality  and the central dome is cut across.

For the same reason it was regarded as no misfortune if a baroque façade was so placed in a street that it was almost impossible to obtain a front view of it.

WILLIAM DE MORGAN’S NOVELS (4)

How was de Morgan viewed by his contemporaries? I looked at Harmsworth’s Universal Encyclopedia, published in 1922, five years after he died. As you might expect, he was described as a “British novelist” and his pottery was treated as a detour.

“After studying at the Royal Academy, he devoted himself to working in pottery and glass. It was not until he reached his 66th year that his first novel, Joseph Vance, appeared.”

It concluded, “De Morgan is weak in plot construction, but his characterisation is good, and his depictions are true to life,” a fair summary.

WILLIAM DE MORGAN’S NOVELS (3)

William de Morgan’s A Likely Story has long passages in which pictures talk.

The main subject, Reginald Aiken, ekes out a living as a painter by picture restoration. One of his jobs, a seicento portrait, talks to old Mr Pelly about its subject and her adventures in Italy. Mrs Euphemia Aiken later hears a photo of the portrait telling her that Reginald isn’t such a bad fellow after all.

These occult narratives are hedged about with scepticism and qualifications: were they dreams, or the voice of the unconscious, or perhaps just a sort of self-hypnotism? A young friend of Mr Pelly’s ponders on the meaning of his experiences.

“It was the action of his brain, my dear, not his own doing at all ! Let me see — what’s it called ? — something ending in ism.”

“Hypnotism?”

“No ! Oh dear, I shall remember directly …”

“Mesmerism?”

“No, no! — do be quiet and let me think. …”

“Vegetarianism?”

“You silly girl! I had just got it, and you put it out of my head . . . There ! . . . Stop ! . . . No ! . . . Yes — I’ve got it. Unconscious Cerebration!”

The Psychomorphic, a psychic investigation society, investigate Mrs Aiken’s narrative and sagely conclude that, “failing further evidence, we are justified in placing this story in section M 103, as a Pseudo-real Hyper-mnemonism.”

William and Evelyn de Morgan were both associated with Spiritualism. William’s mother Sophia was a medium his sister Mary claimed to communicate with the dead. Lois Drawmer has analysed the Spiritualist content of Evelyn’s paintings, which intensified as she got older (above).

Contemporary with the Arts and Crafts Movement, the Spiritualist craze was associated with progressive politics of the sort that the de Morgans supported, like women’s suffrage and pacifism.  Spiritualism was not thought to be inconsistent with science, not least with the theory of evolution, which was extended to the evolution of spirits after death and which explained the superiority of their knowledge to that of the living. Even the evolutionary biologist Alfred Russel Wallace was a Spiritualist. A Likely Story is dedicated to The Scientific Enquirer.

WILLIAM DE MORGAN’S NOVELS (2)

William de Morgan’s novel A Likely Tale has jocular passages and passages of medievalising romance.

His principal character, Reginald Aiken, has to fend for himself after his wife leaves him and he lives in artistic squalor. Aiken takes on a housekeeper, Mrs Gapp, who spends too much time at The William IV, and upon whose return a glance convinced Aiken that “her register of sobriety would stand at zero on any maker’s sobrimeter.” This facetious humour was characteristic of de Morgan.

She said that a vaguely defined community, called The Boys, had been tampering with the lock. Mr. Aiken, from long experience of her class at this stage, was able to infer this from what sounded like “Boysh been ’tlocksh—keylocksh—inchfearunsh.” This pronounced exactly phonetically will be clear to the student of Alcoholism; be so good as to read it absolutely literally.

“Lock’s all right enough!” said Mr. Aiken, after turning it freely both ways. “Nobody’s been interfering with it. You’re drunk, Mrs. Gapp.”

Mrs. Gapp stood steady, visibly. Now, you can’t stand steady, visibly, without a suspicion of a lurch to show how splendidly you are maintaining your balance. Without it your immobility might be mere passionless inertia. Mrs. Gapp’s eyes seemed as little under her control as her voice, and each had a strange, inherent power of convincing the observer that the other was looking the wrong way.

“Me ?” said Mrs. Gapp.

“Yes—you!” said Mr. Aiken.

Mrs. Gapp collected herself, which—if we include in it her burden, consisting of some bundles of firewood and one pound four ounces of beefsteak wrapped in a serial—seemed in some danger of redistributing itself when collected. She then spoke, with a mien as indignant as if she were Boadicea seeking counsel of her country’s gods, and said, “Me r-r-runk ! Shober!”

WILLIAM DE MORGAN’S NOVELS (1)

A Likely Story, William de Morgan’s fifth novel, published in 1911 when he was seventy-two, reveals his wit, nice observation and capacity for satire. The theme is appropriately artistic.

The story opens in the studio of the unsuccessful painter Reginald Aiken and his discontented wife Euphemia. Following a misunderstanding with their servant Sairah, in which she is heard to tell Aiken to take his hands off her, Mrs Aiken flounces out and moves in with her aunt. There she falls in with people of advanced views who take her to a meeting whose purpose is not entirely clear. One of their company is Adolphus Groob, who is too shy to sit next to a woman.

He must needs go and stick himself four seats off Mrs. Aiken, in the two-shilling places, the intervening three seats being vacant.

Now, if only lean men, operating edgewise, had attempted to pass into these seats, things might have gone otherwise. Fate sent a lady over three feet thick all the way down, and apparently quite solid, to wedge her way into one or more of these seats. Mr. Adolphus shrank, for all he was worth, but it was a trying moment. The lady was just that sort the Inquisition once employed so successfully; one with spikes, that drew blood from anyone that got agglutinated with her costume. She might, however, have got through without accident – you never can tell! – if the trial had been carried out. It was suspended by a suggestion from Mrs. Aiken that Mr. Adolphus Groob should come a little farther along and make room; and when he complied, to the extent of going one seat nearer to her, a second suggestion that he should come nearer still, to which he assented with trepidation. Resistance was useless. A galaxy of daughters had already filled in the whole row behind the stout lady, and were forcing her on like the air-tight piece of potato in a quill popgun, only larger. So in the end Mr. Adolphus Groob found himself wedged securely between the stout lady and Mrs. Euphemia Aiken, quite unable to speak to the former, for though they had certainly met – with a vengeance – they had never been introduced.
…
“Do you know what the lecture is about?” said Mrs. Aiken.

“Couldn’t say,” was the reply. “Never know what lectures are about! I’m an Artist, don’t you know! My brother Bob could tell you. He’s a scientific chap — knows about Telephones and things that go round and burst.”

“Is there anything that goes round and bursts in the lecture, I wonder?”

“Shouldn’t be much surprised. Here’s the Syllabub – I mean Syllabus.” Mr. Adolphus handed his information to his neighbour. Caution made him uncommunicative. Naturally, he was of a more talkative disposition.

Mrs. Aiken studied the heads of the lecture. “What is meant, I wonder, by the Radio-Activity of Space?” said she. Now in asking this question she was deferring to the widespread idea that Man understands Science, and can tell Woman all about it. He doesn’t, and can’t.

He accepted the position of instructor his sex conferred on him.

“It’s got somethin’ to do with Four Dimensions,” he said. “Can’t say I’ve gone much into the subject myself, but I’ve talked to a very intelligent feller about it. Did you ever see any Radium?”

“Me? No. My husband saw some, though. He looked through a hole.”

“That’s it. It destroys your eyesight, I believe, and loses decimal point something of its volume in a hundred thousand years. There is no doubt we are on the brink of great discoveries.”

“How very interesting! I wish the lecturer would begin. Oh – here he is !”

The novel is 99p on Kindle, but I like books so I bought the copy illustrated above for £6.50.

WILLIAM AND EVELYN DE MORGAN

I’ve been reading William de Morgan’s lively and enjoyable novel A Likely Story (1911), which justifies the occasional comparison with Dickens.

After a trade recession forced him to close his pottery business he made more from writing than he had ever made from art. His first novel, Joseph Vance, is probably his most read – Oxford University Press reissued it in the 1960s – and between 1906 and his death in 1917 he wrote eight more. His reputation waxed and waned. His books were popular in the USA. After his death his wonderful lustre pottery faded from view. The studio potters were sniffy about it and it was only in the 1960s that it was re-evaluated. Now no-one reads his books.

His sister-in-law Wilhelmina Stirling wrote a biography shortly after his death. The William de Morgan Foundation say she is the first source for information about the de Morgans and their Arts and Crafts circle, even if she is not always a reliable one. She treasured their work and kept their memory green for fifty years until her own death, when de Morgans’s pottery was coming back into fashion. Her collection then passed to the De Morgan Foundation.

The image above is one of William’s illustrations to his sister Mary’s fairy tales, which, says the de Morgan Foundation, “challenge the prevalent ideologies by subverting the traditional fairytale conventions and therefore also societal ones.”

There is one rather odd de Morgan publication, The Result of an Experiment (1909), a record of their exploration of automatic writing. William’s mother was a spiritualist and his sister Mary was said to have spirit communications with a dead sister, though she claimed her mother’s seances were staged. Although William and Evelyn were associated with progressive social causes they toyed with the occult and Jane Drawmer argues that Evelyn’s paintings combined ideas about evolutionary science with spiritualist notions.

MODERNISM IN ART SCHOOLS

I have been trying to find out more about British art schools between the wars to see to what extent they were permeated by modernist ideas and to what extent they remained in thrall to the Arts and Crafts, which I talked about in my last post.

Stuart MacDonald, in The History and Philosophy of Art Education, says little about the art schools in the 1920s and 1930s, turning in those decades to theories of child art, but he does comment that the Arts and Crafts approach persisted until the Second World War, which I think is generally agreed.

The plate above, from Charles Holmes’s Arts & Crafts: A Review of the Work Executed by Students in the Leading Art Schools in Great Britain and Ireland, is typical of the work that was being done in 1916. The tiles were made by Reco Capey at Burslem Art School. This talented pupil did similar work for Doulton’s at the same time as he was a student there. Capey, who is perhaps best known for his designs for Yardley, was appointed chief instructor in design at the RCA in 1925, where he worked under the traditionalist E. W. Tristram for ten years.

These items by Capey (above), sold at Christie’s in 2014 , show how decidedly he had left behind the Arts and Crafts in his professional life and how enthusiastically he embraced Art Deco. In an article “Design in Everyday Life”, which he wrote for the Journal of the Royal Society of Arts (23 February 1940), he expressed a firm commitment to modernist design (below). He was undoubtedly a modernist influence at the RCA, where he worked with Paul Nash. Capey’s and Nash’s appointments look very much like an attempt by Rothenstein to counterbalance Tristram’s medievalism.

William Johnstone, a key figure in the modernisation of British art schools, says in his memoir, Points in Time, that, when he took over the Central School of Arts and Crafts after the war, the crafts were in his opinion too geared towards the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society “and not enough towards present day living”. He decided that John Farleigh, head of book production, was blocking change, got rid of him and appointed Jesse Collins in his place. Collins had taught book production part-time at the Central in the 1930s, where he was one of the few teachers aware of the Bauhaus. He helped Johnstone to introduce Bauhaus methods at Camberwell and also did so at the Central after the war.

Between the wars, pottery at the Central had been taught by Maggie Hindshaw and her strong-minded assistant Dora Billington, who was actually the driving force behind the course. Hindshaw had worked in Alfred and Louise Powell’s London studio and her work never strayed far from their their orbit. Billington had worked in a similar style, but when she encountered the pottery of William Staite Murray and Bernard Leach in the 1920s, she appears to have undergone a Damascene conversion and by the early 1930s decorated earthenware at the Central had been replaced by bold, simple forms whose appeal derived from glazes and kiln accidents rather than brush work. Studio pottery’s relationship to modernism is complex and ambivalent and although it can be described in modernist terms – functional, unornamented and anti-historicist – its ideology, largely the creation of Bernard Leach, was anti-modern, anti-industrial and anti-intellectual.

The complexities of the period are illustrated by the fact that many of the figures in this narrative were at once modernist and associated with the backward-looking Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society. Capey, Farleigh and Billington were all its presidents in their time, and Johnstone, despite his disparagement of the Society, collaborated with it and was made an honorary member. Ideologists of modernism, of the stripe of Adolf Loos, Wells Coates and Herbert Read, might be inclined to declare modernism to be not a style but a principle (to adapt a phrase of Pugin’s), but for most artists the opposite was the case. Change in style comes from the accumulation of innumerable influences, adaptations, imitations and alliances. It is unsurprising that artists and teachers in the 1920s and 1930s changed their styles and their way of working, but the change in art schools was slow and gradual.

CHERYL BUCKLEY

“Gloria Lustre” designed by Gordon Forsyth, c.1925.

Cheryl Buckley’s Designing Modern Britain advances the persuasive idea, now well established in design history, that there were several modernisms and not merely the modernism of the International Style and the Bauhaus. Among these modernisms were the Georgian revival and the modern labour-saving home with its Tudorbethan exterior. But Buckley, I think, overstates the degree to which the different strands of design moved in parallel and in the same direction, especially in the art schools.

She describes the Stoke-on-Trent schools, which were led in the 1930s by the successful designer Gordon Forsyth, as one of the strands of this diverse modernism, and also Alfred and Louise Powell’s designs for Wedgwood. But unless you apply the term “modernism” to every contemporary happening, and minimise differences of style and appearance, these trends were far from modernist.

The Powells were in the long tail of the Arts and Crafts movement, which continued until 1945, and they were connected to it both through their designs and their social philosophy. Describing their work for Wedgwood as “mass-produced”, as Buckley does, is wide of the mark. Their designs were traditional, they revived the dying craft techniques of hand-decoration and they shunned the mass-produced method of transfer printing that was used by the makers of cheap pottery like A & G Meakin.

Forsyth is more difficult to classify. His designs for pottery were similar to the Powells, even down to the successful use of lustre (above), and they were very much in the Arts and Crafts tradition. But he was sympathetic to modern production methods. In his review of 20th Century Ceramics (1936) he asserted, “A wholly artificial gulf has been created between the studio potter and the large-scale manufacturer. Sometimes studio pottery is dismissed as being ineffective ‘Art and Crafty’ productions, technically defective. This is in the main wholly erroneous and unjust criticism of studio potters, but it is equally erroneous for studio potters to think that all manufacturers are Philistines and only concerned with commercial and technical success.” Nevertheless his survey is heavy on art pottery and and light on mass production.

Buckley says that there were art schools in Britain in the 1920s that were modernist in approach if not in name. This is an interesting assertion, but if there were such schools I haven’t come across them yet. The Arts and Crafts influence came to bear on the art schools from the 1880s and it wasn’t fully felt until the early 1900s. Charles Holmes’s illustrated review of art schools in 1916 showed them to be totally Arts and Crafts in their approach – the title of his book is actually Arts and Crafts. In the 1920s William Rothenstein at the RCA hired E. W. Tristram, a deep-dyed medievalist, to replace the Arts and Crafts practitioner Anning Bell as head of design. Admittedly he also hired William Staite Murray as pottery instructor, and Staite Murray’s ceramics were praised by arch-modernist Herbert Read; but Staite Murray was wedded to craft techniques and opposed the admission to the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society of designers for industry. The Stoke-on-Trent art schools were certainly, as Buckley says, keen to cement their links with modern manufacturers, but they were not modernist in outlook, and in 1919 government inspectors had judged their efforts to provide technical instruction to be “feeble and inadequate”.

In the 1920s and 1930s design was still broadly conceived as surface decoration, and the main focus of design reformers was improving the appearance and tastefulness of consumer goods. The design profession was in its infancy and it didn’t grow up until the 1950s. The recognition of “other modernisms” is a useful corrective to the self-serving narrative of modernists, but the art schools before the war were not modernist in any meaningful sense

ROGER FRY AND STUDIO POTTERY

Cheryl Buckley’s Designing Modern Britain throws, what is to me, new light on Roger Fry’s contribution to the development of studio pottery in Britain.

I knew that Fry had personally tried his hand at pottery (not very successfully), and that his formalist art theories helped to shape the studio pottery aesthetic. Fry’s importance to studio pottery is increasingly recognised: Jeffrey Jones mentions him in Studio Pottery (2005) and Julian Stair devotes several pages to him in Things of Beauty Growing (2017). But Buckley has very interesting information about the way that Fry’s coverage of ceramics in The Burlington Magazine, which he edited from 1910 -1919, foreshadowed the new ceramics.

Fry published articles on Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Peruvian and African pottery. He wrote that the art of the East “presents the hope of discovering a more spiritual, more expressive idea of design.” The image above is from “Ancient Peruvian Pottery”, an article by C.H.Read of the British Museum (April 1910). Other significant contributors were George Eumorphopolos, whose exhibition of T’ang and Sung pottery in 1910 increased interest in oriental ceramics in Britain, and Bernard Rackham, keeper of ceramics at the V&A, an early connoisseur of studio pottery. Buckley reports that, during Fry’s tenure, early Chinese ceramics were often written about and that the journal had covered them from as early as 1903.

PSEUDO-GEORGIAN LONDON

After reading my post on Suburban Modernism, someone drew my attention to Pablo Bronstein’s 2017 RIBA exhibition on Pseudo-Georgian architecture. There was a book (above) to accompany it.

“The reality is,” said Bronstein, “that we have created much more pseudo-Georgian architecture over the last 30 years than any other kind of building. For most of us, it seems, a cheap yellow-brick facade evokes almost effortlessly a rosy everlasting British prosperity.”

Oliver Wainwright wrote a haughty review of Bronstein in The Guardian: “His pen and ink drawings, drafted in a quaint style reminiscent of postcards from National Trust gift shops, depict a world oozing with aspiration. There are humble homes gussied up with pediments and plastic porches, as well as banal commercial apartment blocks with facades arranged in vaguely Georgian proportions.”

Bronstein noticed a connection between pseudo-Georgian and the Conservative right-to-buy-policy, which encouraged council tenants to purchase their own flats. In their own homes they turned from modernism to nostalgia. The parallel with Tudorbethan is inescapable: between the wars, when home ownership was rapidly expanding, there was a similar turn to designs that evoked the past.

A few years ago I organised public consultations in Hatfield and met people who had been asked by officials about the design of the new town in the 1950s. They recalled that they were listened to and then ignored. They may not have wanted Tudorbethan or Pseudo-Georgian, but the leaders of good taste and good design had already decided what they should have.