Bridges of 2022

Another modest year for recording bridges.  Two railway bridges to begin with, the first is on London Overground where it crosses Leytonstone High Road. Next is a Great Western Railway bridge in the Wiltshire town of Chippenham, part of a nine arch viaduct designed by Brunel, completed in 1841 and Grade II* listed. Below is the nine arch Town Bridge that spans the River Avon at Bedford on Avon. It’s a 13th. century former packhorse bridge with the addition of a lock-up in the 17th. century and listed at Grade I. It still carries a heavy flow of traffic.  Another bridge of similar vintage is the Monnow Bridge in Monmouth, the last surviving combined bridge and fortified gatehouse. Listed at Grade 1, it dates from the 1270s and remained in use as a road bridge until 2004 after decades of damage inflicted by careless drivers, when a replacement was built downstream enabling it to be pedestrianised. Finally we have Keadby Bridge over the River Trent in the Lincolnshire village of Althorpe- a road and rail combined Scherzer rolling lift bridge constructed in 1916. The bridge is Grade II listed and has been fixed in place since it was last lifted in 1956.

 

New York City Landmarks No. 4 - USS Recruit

This was a New York landmark that came and went within the space of 30 months but in its brief existence it made a major statement. Constructed from timber by the US Navy, it was a full size replica of a Dreadnought Battleship located in Union Square on the boundary between Lower and Midtown Manhattan.  Commissioned into the Navy in September 1917 with a captain and 30 crew members its function was to serve as a central recruiting station for the entire city. On board was crew accommodation, officers’ quarters and a suite of offices.  Fully armed with a complement of wooden replica guns, the ship stood ready to bombard the neighbouring real estate.  Visitors were dwarfed by its great mass but turned up in great numbers, attracted by an ever changing programme of patriotic and social events, including concerts and dances.  Over the next 2 years, more than 25,000 volunteers were recruited for service in the Great War.  When the end finally arrived in March 1920, the ship was dismantled with the intention of moving it to Coney Island - a plan that was abandoned when it was calculated that the cost of reassembly greatly exceeded the value of the salvaged materials.

The postcard view includes two prominent buildings that are now landmarks in their own right - in the centre is the Germania Life Insurance building (now a hotel) and to the left, the Everett Building of 1908. The headquarters of the US Communist Party was elsewhere in the square and it was a popular place for organised labour demonstrations.  Frank Dobias wrote a few helpful facts on the reverse and posted it (presumably inside an envelope) to an address in New Zealand, suggesting that it might have been an example of postcard exchange, a popular pastime in the early decades of the last century. This was a part of the general mania for postcards (that died away after the Great War) and involved collectors making contact with total strangers in far off countries in the hope that their collections could be mutually enhanced by swapping examples from their respective home towns. Something like it still happens, even into the digital age.  The post concludes with postcard images of real battleships and an overview of Union Square without a wooden ship.

 

Kasmin and his postcards

From 1963 onwards, John Kasmin’s  Bond Street gallery was a place of pilgrimage for London art students and aspiring abstract painters.  Accessed via a long narrow corridor between shop premises, the pristine gallery space was tall, top lit, and painted in Brilliant White.  Exceptionally well bred young women sat at the reception desk, barely concealing their distaste for the uncouth, disheveled art students who attempted to engage them in conversation. On the walls hung enormous abstract paintings by American painters such as Frank Stella, Kenneth Noland, Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis and Jules Olitski - most of them were colour-field painters operating with the approval of Clement Greenberg.  Polychromed metal constructions by Anthony Caro were regularly on display.  Figurative paintings by David Hockney made an appearance as well as a contingent of British abstract painters - Richard Smith, Robyn Denny, Bernard and Harold Cohen among them.  The gallery closed in 1972 and while Kasmin remained an active participant in the art world his star never again burned so brightly.  However, in the last decade he has re-emerged as an impresario of the vintage postcard and self-published a series of themed volumes (Trivia Press) reproducing some of the highlights of his collection.  Almost all the books bear a single word title (Want, Kids, Perform, Fish, Burden) although a few more recent have two word titles (News & Shoes, Music & Dance). Each card is described at the back of the book in a few well chosen words in a deadpan style. A long journey from the contemplation of the vast floating, disembodied colour clouds of Louis and Frankenthaler to the intense scrutiny of the visual compressions of the picture postcard.

As a collector, Kasmin operates at the top end of the market - not for him the pleasure of rummaging through mountains of boxes of mixed unsorted cards at four for a pound.  Examples with bumped or missing corners, unsightly postal cancellations, sinister stains, or misaligned printing have been passed over - only the most pristine and perfect have made it into the collection.  Deep pockets must have helped but most dealers whose stock I’m familiar with have no more than a few examples of this quality.  The impression from looking at the published examples is of a collection much closer to that of Leonard A Lauder (joint heir to the Estée Lauder cosmetics fortune) than to Tom Phillips’ demotic selection as seen in the Postcard Century.  New volumes continue to be added and thus far the focus has been on documentary or curiosity value, monochrome printing and a cut-off date around 1925.  It seems the collection extends to early illustrated cards and advertising but the full scope remains a mystery.  There are now more than twenty volumes in circulation, the latest of which were published in 2021.

Tom Phillips (1937-2022)

 I can’t let the death of Tom Phillips pass without a tribute to his magnum opus, The Postcard Century, published in 2000 and still widely available.  More than any other anthologiser of postcards, Tom Phillips dived deep into the mysteries of his subject. This survey is like a geologist’s core sample retrieved from a century’s accumulation of ephemera. The Postcard Century is a heroic compilation of all the finest qualities that postcards possess and evidence of a massive commitment in terms of time and resources, put together by a collector with a passion for postcards that extended beyond periods and subjects. The book displays a year-by-year selection that crosses virtually all genres and categories and is enriched by the correspondence that the author has transcribed from the reverse, thus adding greatly to the social documentary feel of the enterprise.  It is quite simply a humane and fascinating book that can be opened at any page, instantly immersing the reader in a chronicle of lost voices and lost times.  The visual images and the transcribed text are mutually enhancing and add up to a lot more than the sum of their parts.  If he had produced nothing else in his life this book would remain a great achievement. As it is, Tom Phillips had a long and industrious career across a great variety of visual media in the course of which he never settled for second best. The range of his activities made him difficult to categorise which goes a long way to explain his absence from the Great Narrative of Artists of Substance. All the better for that, I would say.

William Burges - Knockback at Knightshayes

William Burges pulled out all the stops for his Devon client, Sir John Heathcoat Amory, and in 1873 he presented Sir John with a magnificent folio of 57 pages of watercolour drawings of his detailed plans for the interior decor of Knightshayes Court.  Burges’ relatively restrained plans for the exterior and internal partitioning had been approved in 1869 and by 1873, construction was well underway. Sadly for Burges, Sir John would prove to be a lot less indulgent than his regular patron, the Marquess of Bute whose financial commitment to Burges’ extravagantly ornate visions had no limits. While Bute’s coal mines and ports delivered an endless stream of cash, the Heathcoat Amory business (lace and textiles) was more exposed to economic downturns and the money simply wasn’t there to pay for Burges’ lavish scheme.  Sir John occupied himself with hunting foxes and stags on Exmoor, shooting on his Scottish estate or fishing in Norway where he owned a lodge.  It’s easy to imagine that Burges’ bejewelled medievalist fantasies would have held little appeal for such a tweedy character and in 1874 he sacked Burges from the project. 

J D Crace inherited the Burges design scheme and diluted it to suit the family purse and taste.  Crace was a remarkably versatile and successful interior designer and produced a modified version that retained some of Burges’ ideas (such as the jelly mould ceiling decor), discarded the wilder fantasies and came up with a scheme that had a little of Burges about it while being much easier on the eye.  Even this would prove too much for the family who in a few years had contractors in to conceal the ornate coffered ceilings (largely the work of Crace). Fireplaces and other features would follow until what remained was a conventional country house Georgian interior. For Burges, this was another deep frustration, in a career marked by false starts, unrealised projects, and rejected competition entries. Compounded in 1854 when Burgess won the competition for a cathedral in Lille fair and square, only to be laid low by a change in the rules that handed the commission to a French team of architects.

Even without the tower that Burges designed for the west wing, Knightshayes remains an imposing presence thanks to its subtly detailed physical mass.  From the Drawing Room the parkland gently descends, offering a distant view of the family factory and its pair of chimneys. Sir John found running  a business got in the way of the pleasures of the chase and left the task to his younger brother, but without those profits his fine country house would never have been built.  In their growing aversion to all things High Victorian, the family were ahead of the times - several decades would pass before popular taste would finally condemn it to obscurity.  When its rehabilitation came to pass, the National Trust was left with an enormous task to return the house to its as-built original condition.  The photos were taken in mid-November on a day of exceptional warm sunshine.  Regrettably there was no access to the first floor rooms due to a post-Covid shortage of volunteers.

 

Italian Posters - Irony, Imagination and Eroticism

     Silvana Editoriale, 2011, ISBN 9788836622528

This is just one of a series of volumes published by Milan based Silvana Editoriale that cover a variety of advertising topics including food and drink, motor cars, fashion and travel.  Inside images of posters are arranged by subject and placed on the page to let them speak for themselves in the absence of designer conceits. The selection is brilliant - most of the images were things I saw for the first time.  The archive of Italian graphics must run very deep. Consumer society may have been late in arriving in Italy but once established the originality and ingenuity of the local advertising art was quickly apparent.  This was accompanied by a wave of industrial and product design, from typewriters to cars, from fashion to luxury goods that established a global reputation for formal elegance, innovation and attention to detail.  Swiss and German designers searched for perfection of form via a rigorous reductive process to eliminate the superfluous with impressive, if sometimes impersonal results. In Italy, design traditions were less rigid with results that made space for character and personality without sacrificing refinement. Olivetti and Fiat were pioneers of this approach.

When drawing upon familiar stylistic genres, Italian graphic artists seemed more alert than any other nationality to the humorous potential in their source of inspiration.  Even the geometric proprieties of Modernism were subverted in Italy thanks to the national passion for visual wit deployed with a lightness of touch rarely achieved elsewhere. Likewise the seductive rhythms of Art Nouveau lent themselves to a playful jollity that would have been heretical in Munich or Vienna. This involved a high degree of graphic absurdity, of inventive formal repurposing as much as setting up a comic situation. A favourite strategy of Italian illustrators was to personalise the product with characteristics drawn from the natural world. These excesses of the imagination include an owl with searchlight eyes, a tiger clawing its way into a jar of meat extract, a cockerel in evening dress, a weeping pig, an infant suspended from a clothes line, and irradiated infant buttocks.  What might look coarse and vulgar elsewhere is made acceptable thanks to the Italian lightness of touch and (mostly) gentle humour. This book is a treasure box of the most wonderful delights for the eye and a tribute to the imaginative powers of generations of Italian poster artists.

Previous posts on Italian Graphics can be seen here and here.

 

Meet the Striding Man

History records that the Striding Man was first sketched in 1908 by the illustrator and cartoonist, Tom Browne. Since then, he has marched with single-minded vigour across Johnnie Walker whisky publicity and packaging, sometimes taking centre stage, at others, lurking in the margins in trade mark form. His anachronistic outfit, polished riding boots, narrow white trousers and scarlet frock coat embodied the longevity of the spirit (first introduced in 1820) and an unstoppable forward momentum.  A knob-handled cane, a monocle and a stovepipe top hat complete the ensemble and the association with a man of substance. A rosbif complexion and a bleary-eyed grin suggest some familiarity with the product. He has the air of a partially reformed school bully.

These vintage examples are from both sides of the Atlantic at the height of his powers, dominating all around him and making his presence impossible to ignore. In Britain the illustrator of choice was Clive Uptton (who also worked for Cadbury and Brooke Bond Tea).  In America a wide range of prominent illustrators were enlisted for their personal responses to the product (a subject for another time) while the distinctive square section bottle shared the focus with the Striding Man. A low point came in the 1930s with a racist tableau in which the Striding Man was pictured extending his monocle to a painfully servile, dungaree-clad small boy, for the privilege of giving it a polish.

Of all brand mascots, the Striding Man is one of my least favourite.  His spiritual home is the world of Vanity Fair via Quality Street, an age of affluent idleness much favoured by unimaginative British advertisers as a nostalgic setting for product placement.  Striding Man, full of confidence and entitlement, is designed to appeal to high earners offering well earned respite from the task of wealth creation and makes no effort to endear himself to drinkers of more modest means. Which enables him and his masters to sidestep any responsibility for alcohol abusers.