Phil Beard

Hotel Excelsior, Berlin

2012-01-20T13:25:00.012Z

This is a follow-up to a post from last March on the subject of the Anhalter Bahnhof and the Hotel Excelsior, Berlin bei Nacht. Europe’s largest station and Europe’s largest hotel were connected by a pedestrian tunnel that ran underneath Askanischer Platz. Today we have some artist’s impressions of the underground connection found in a publicity brochure from the Hotel Excelsior. The tunnel opened in 1929 and sealed the Excelsior’s reputation as the most modern hotel in Berlin. The convenience of a seamless transition from train to hotel transformed the fortunes of what had been an ailing facility. The illustrations present an exciting subterranean world in which the great and the good could insulate themselves from the great unwashed, untroubled by the need to queue for a ticket having made use of the rail ticket desk in the hotel foyer. The end came in April 1945 when Allied bombs destroyed the Excelsior – it never re-opened and was finally demolished in 1954. The fate of the tunnel is unknown – perhaps it remains intact, awaiting rediscovery at some point in the future.

Van Gogh the Salesman

2012-01-17T16:08:00.006Z

Separating the work of Van Gogh from the acres of verbiage devoted to the tragic legend of unappreciated genius is no easy task. Critics, journalists and film-makers have created a romanticised and mostly invented picture of a solitary artist mentally wrestling with demons through which all Van Gogh’s drawings and paintings are filtered. This crude characterisation leaves little room for consideration of Van Gogh’s many artistic subtleties and exposes the work to popular exploitation. Advertisers have noted that Van Gogh has just about the highest level of public recognition of any artist with two key facts, the saga of the missing ear and the suicide in the fields. This trio of examples is not especially tasteless despite an attempt to comment on the artist’s self-inflicted lack of stereo hearing. Gentle parody is as far as it goes but equally, none are especially inventive in their use of the artist’s image. There’s a school of thought that any use of Fine Art imagery in advertising is a desecration but that seems excessively narrow minded given the free use that artists have made of advertising imagery over the past half-century.

Modern Wonderland with L Ashwell Wood

2012-01-09T14:06:00.007Z

Today we revisit the pages of Modern Wonder magazine in 1938-39 and focus on the work of Leslie Ashwell Wood. The editors of Modern Wonder had a team of highly skilled illustrators at their disposal but nobody brought such a stunning exactitude to the cutaway drawing as the man who signed himself L Ashwell Wood. The brilliance of his graphic eviscerations made him the first choice as cover artist in 1938-39 as this selection shows. When he delved beneath the surface of everyday reality, as in the petrol station drawing the results were every bit as fascinating as his responses to the great engineering wonders of the age. A sure and certain indicator of a mid-century middle class childhood was a subscription to the high-minded Eagle comic. This was the respectable face of comics but one of its greatest features was the weekly cutaway drawing from L Ashwell Wood that formed a double spread across the centre pages. Like many of my peers I was absorbed in these infinitely detailed images while elsewhere in the town others of my contemporaries sharpened their invective skills via the scurrilous humour to be found in the pages of The Topper, Beezer, Dandy or Beano. Many of the Eagle drawings have been anthologised and republished in recent decades but the Modern Wonder drawings, the very best he ever produced, remain unpublished as yet.

Mr. Peanut in Postcards

2012-01-03T13:43:00.006Z

Mr. Peanut took the fight for market share to the very heart of New York City with a dedicated store and gigantic neon sign on Broadway near Times Square. A twenty-foot likeness in neon lights greatly enhanced his powers of persuasion with the sophisticates of Manhattan’s theater district. He even caught the eye of quintessentially Parisian photographer, Brassaï, on a visit to New York in 1957. The consumer on vacation was not forgotten and easy access was offered to the delights of Mr. Peanut’s portfolio of products in another Planters emporium in Atlantic City. A conscientious brand-character never rests and Mr. P conducted himself with exemplary dignity and decorum in all his assignments as product ambassador. With his cheery disposition and raffish air he won a special place in the affections of the American public that seems to endure to the present. He has yet to become the subject of a Broadway musical or have his spindly form carved into the slopes of Mount Rushmore but it may be only a matter of time. For now, follow his progress in the upcoming Republican Primaries – he has the makings of a fine President.

Mr Peanut presents........ Dead Presidents

2011-12-28T16:06:00.008Z

The young American in 1953 with a thirst for knowledge, after consuming fifteen peanut-related products from Planters, could exchange the fifteen outer wrappers for this scholarly collection of words and images, free of charge. Each president is honoured with a portrait, a brief biography and an illustration to record the most dramatic feature of their term in office. This is usually a foreign war or the acquisition of more territory – in the case of Truman, it’s a nuclear explosion, in the case of Eisenhower, it’s a forest of placards proclaiming their undying affection for the dear leader. Some of the less distinguished occupants of the White House need no more than half a page to record their achievements – it’s comforting to note that Harding and Coolidge come into this category.

Mr Peanut, the noble impresario of all things peanut has preached the gospel of healthy and nutritious snacking since 1916 when the foppish accessories of monocle, top hat and cane were first attached to his peanut incarnation. With this publication he steps up to the task of improving young minds without entirely giving up on influencing their choice of snack in favour of his patron, Planters Nut and Chocolate Company.

Christmas 1941

2011-12-24T15:45:00.005Z

Seventy years ago Christmas was a grim wartime affair occurring just 3 weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor. The comforting, sugary pleasures of Bird’s Custard were in short supply and the three birds are marching off to war with a jaunty but resolute air, wearing their service caps with pride. The three birds were first conscripted by Bird’s Custard in 1929 and in times of peace were tireless in serenading the product as shown below. To this day their chubby well-fed likenesses can be seen, gracing the pack in any supermarket – the McKnight Kauffer-like angularity of their early years has long since departed.

Johnny-one-note

2011-12-22T15:16:00.006Z

Today’s seasonal offering comes from the Wurlitzer Company, the only manufacturer of jukeboxes to advertise directly to the American public in mass-circulation magazines. Someone had the bright idea of employing the services of illustrator, Albert Dorne, the poet of the Frigidaire. Dorne transformed the jukebox into the high altar of the American Dream at the centre of a manic throng in advanced stages of rapture. Joy was unconfined yet all was clean and wholesome, although out in the real America, the jukebox was rapidly acquiring a darker reputation as an emblem of the emerging counter-culture in the form of the Beat Generation. The model featured here was the 1015 and by virtue of its styling excellence and ubiquity it would become the most fondly remembered of all jukeboxes. Robin Benson has posted a fine selection of Dorne’s Wurlitzer ads on his blog, Past Print. As for Johnny-one-note, he enjoyed a long life as the Wurlitzer brand character, promising musical excitement and sociability to the post-war pleasure-seeker.

C W Bacon – another selection

2011-12-15T13:15:00.007Z

This is the third instalment of Cecil Bacon illustrations. As previously noted, Bacon was the consummate professional whatever the task for more than forty years. The work may sometimes seem a little pedestrian and uninspired but when he was on form he could adapt to current idioms and equal most of his contemporaries. These examples show how he endeavoured to update his practice especially in the poster for Post Office Savings where he captures the mid-century preference for spiky, flattened forms, hard edges and strong colour and surface pattern. Bacon’s contribution was recognised by his fellow professionals in the pages reproduced below from Art and Industry magazine dated March 1937.

Great Railway Stations Number 6: Gent Sint Pieters

2011-12-13T14:54:00.010Z

The Belgian city of Ghent (to Francophones it is Gand, to the Flemish it is Gent but for Anglophones it requires the addition of an ‘h’) has a fine railway station of remarkably eccentric appearance. Next year will be its centenary year, having opened for traffic in 1912 to a design by architect, Louis Cloquet. The main station building with its circular clock tower displays an eclectic stylistic mix of Moorish and medieval influences and results in a complex profile topped off with extravagant battlements. Inside the entrance hall there are carved lattice screens, colonnaded clerestories with columns and arches in two tone polished granite. The upper walls are embellished with painted murals of prominent Belgian towns and cities and the ceilings feature ornate painted decoration. Access to the train platforms is via twin tunnels of medieval design and limited capacity.

A massive redevelopment programme is underway and when completed in 2016 the area around and beneath the station will have been transformed into a state-of-the-art transport hub and interchange. Bus, tram, cycles and private cars will each have their designated zone and new access roads will be constructed. The original buildings have been renovated since 2007 and will be unchanged by all this activity with the exception of the platform access tunnels which will be replaced by something more spacious. A video presentation describing the project in great detail can be seen here.

For many architects, the chance to design a train station was an opportunity to indulge in some architectural fantasy or some spectacular engineering. While some combine both features, Ghent Sint-Pieters falls into the former category and there is much to enjoy and admire, especially in the concourse and in particular the splendid murals, restored to their original splendour in 2010.

Métro Parisien 1905

2011-12-11T14:19:00.006Z

The postcard above shows the stupendous engineering works underway in Place Saint-Michel in 1904-5 when Métro line 4 was under construction. This is the point where the tunnel passes beneath the Seine en-route for Porte d’Orleans in the south of the city. Construction techniques had greatly advanced in the decades since London built its first underground lines and the new line was described in detail in the pages of The Sphere magazine from December 1905 reproduced below. The subterranean gloom on the postcards has vanished from today’s Métro where the system runs with a level of reliability and efficiency that Londoners can only dream of. The network continues to expand – an extension of line 4 from Porte d’Orleans to Montrouge will open next year and other schemes exist elsewhere in the city. The French find ways to finance their infrastructure projects from public funds without resorting to the ruinous public-private partnerships that stifle progress in the neo-liberal capital of Babylon on Thames. The state-owned RATP that has responsibility for all public transport in the Paris region has recently acquired London United Busways and operates 80 routes across London. Presumably the profits they make can be applied toward the cost of developing new projects for the benefit of Parisians.

Modern Wonderland

2011-12-10T13:38:00.007Z

The town of Watford has been sparing in its cultural legacy but for the single exception of Modern Wonder magazine that rolled off the presses at Odhams each week with inspirational visions of the future rendered in full colour and described in breathless prose. For 4 glorious years (1937 - 41) every Wednesday, exciting news from the frontiers of knowledge was presented to an audience of impressionable schoolboys of all ages. The cover artists portrayed a universe of technological superlatives where everything was the highest, fastest, deepest or most versatile, most lethal or most advanced. Two artists stood out – Bryan de Grineau for his dashing images positively glowing with patriotic fervour and at the other extreme, Leslie Ashwell Wood with his precise and forensic exposures of the inner workings of engineering excellence through the medium of the cutaway. The long slow descent into global warfare was increasingly reflected in the magazine content with a parade of deadly weaponry from land, sea and air.

Past and Present No. 5: Houlgate

2011-12-09T12:53:00.004Z

Today’s comparison comes from the genteel resort of Houlgate in Normandy. A casino and an imposing Grand Hôtel were the centrepieces of the town when it flourished in the 19th. century. The casino survives but the hotel is divided into apartments and the days when exalted Parisian sophisticates, such as Zola and Proust, graced it with their patronage are long gone. My photograph from 2007 shows how little has changed in the century since the postcard (courtesy of Chris Mullen) was issued. The line of substantial seaside villas that front directly on to the beach is a showpiece of flamboyantly inventive domestic architecture. Dormers and turrets and gables and pinnacles and finials proliferate without restraint. Medievalism, Art Nouveau, Beaux-Arts and Norman vernacular traditions are combined and re-combined in a stylistic free-for-all. Note that the villa on the extreme left of the photograph has acquired a half-timbered makeover since it was last seen in the postcard. Houlgate has a unique atmosphere and we may return in future for a more detailed observation – meanwhile the photo below shows your first sight of the town when you approach from Dives-sur-Mer – a railway line half submerged by drifting sand, a level crossing and an architectural sampler of the eccentric delights to be found a little further down the road. A single glimpse of this spectacular visual clutter was enough to convince me that this must be an exceptional place.

America on a Plate

2011-12-06T12:32:00.007Z

Mercifully this TV documentary on BBC4 was not a programme about gastronomy. On the menu instead was a cultural study of the all-American Diner, an institution that came into being at around the same time as the motor car and developed a unique significance in the American collective consciousness. Offering massive portions of high-calorie food from roadside premises to the working man and the weary traveller alike, diners became a theatre where all levels of American society could rub shoulders, where Hank Williams might have found himself next to Raymond Chandler. The solitary itinerant could preserve his anonymity while the sociable could share each other’s company in garrulous badinage each according to their particular behavioural code.

Attention became focused on the diner as the rapid expansion of fast-food chains in the 60s and 70s forced many of them out of business. As an endangered species they suddenly ceased to be taken for granted and, in the early 70s acquired an official historian (Richard C Guttman) and a court painter (John Baeder). Both took part in this programme in contrasting fashion. Guttman displayed the spritely enthusiasm of the born conservator while Baeder, who has a wider interest in all aspects of the American roadside, presented himself as a man on a mission to record the vanishing glories and architectural eccentricities before they are swept away by the triumphal advance of corporate monotony. Baeder’s participation was a special treat. Enveloped in his studio by a dazzling assortment of model vehicles, ephemera and memorabilia, he sat at his easel dispassionately applying minute and precise brushstrokes to his photorealist paintings.

Later, Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks came under discussion. Over the last three decades Hopper’s painting has rapidly expanded in the American popular imagination as a defining emblem of the deep existential isolation to be found in the shadow of the American Dream. It’s a fine painting but when it’s suggested that it might be the greatest American painting of the last century it seems like too much weight for it to carry. Adam Gopnik of the New Yorker and author of an excellent book on Wayne Thiebaud, was on hand to offer a roadmap of America’s “melancholic underside”. Later still, photographer Stephen Shore joined the party, commenting on his images of a personal pilgrimage along the American highway in search of the overlooked and ignored aspects of daily life. For me, Shore’s most brilliant photographs were taken out on the street, usually at intersections, at the very instant when the banal and quotidian is suddenly and momentarily transformed into a tableau of heroic magnificence. The programme presenter, Stephen Smith, tested the legendary tolerance and good humour of New Yorkers almost to destruction by interrogating passers-by on the location of Hopper’s Nighthawks but this was the only moment of tedium in what was otherwise an absorbing sixty minutes of television. Finally I would have liked to accompany this with a selection of postcard images of the finest in diners but, lacking the income of a Russian oligarch makes them unaffordable. So we must make do with some lesser American eating places and some examples of exquisite interior decoration.

To the Zoo – with Edward Bawden and Clifford Webb

2011-12-04T15:20:00.007Z

The map drawn by Edward Bawden appeared in a guide to London Zoo published in the 1930s. Bawden succeeded in reducing the complex layout to a clear and simple diagram and decorated it with a characteristic flamingo drawing. Two other vignettes from the guide are below. Underneath them are some lively colour illustrations on the same subject from another much admired illustrator, Clifford Webb, better known for his work in woodcut.

Powder Monkey

2011-11-27T15:38:00.004Z

Today we welcome back an old friend – Victorian England’s most industrious brand character, this time in living colour. Watch the way he nimbly balances on the border between man and primate – a discomforting presence for both supporters and detractors of Darwinism. Impeccably turned out in evening dress with white gloves to conceal unsightly hair, he springs from one set piece to another, indifferent to the limp and feeble Victorian puns that accompany his image. Admire the energy with which he bursts forth from the box to bring us the news that Monkey Brand is now available in powder form and can still be relied upon to not wash clothes. Follow this link for a previous post on this subject.

You have notifications pending

2011-11-23T14:48:00.002Z

Like many of my generation I was persuaded to sign up to Faceb**k by younger family members to admire their photographic likenesses engaged in a wide range of activities, some of them legal. It soon became apparent that my digital metabolic rate is far too slow for the high level interactivity that Faceb**k offers to its users. But, by making use of a facility of Faceb**k’s own devising that enabled my blogposts to feed to my Faceb**k page, I could create the illusion of a more substantial presence. This will not be happening after November 22 as Faceb**k has announced in its high-handed way that the option of importing a blog to Facebook notes will no longer be available after that date. They have given no reason and although greater minds than mine have researched all sorts of complicated ways to get round this, I don’t think I can be bothered. It will be no great loss to the world and a gradual accumulation of digital dust and cobwebs can be expected to grace my Faceb**k page. As an act of ultimate indignity, Faceb**k has begun to display targeted advertising on my page expressing dire warnings of the perils of dementia, urging me to contact my doctor, presumably before I lose the ability to read.

Postcard of the Day No. 52, Leipzig

2011-11-18T14:29:00.003Z

This is a puzzling postcard – it appears to be a festival of advertising placards held aloft by men in hats and overcoats. Competing messages are everywhere and in the centre an insignificant figure (labelled DRGM - Deutsches Reich Gebrauchsmuster - German Registered Design – is this satirical?) brandishes an under-nourished Christmas tree. We seem to be present at a giant carnival of commerce, a parade of publicity. This may be a complete misreading of the situation and comments and corrections would be more than welcome. The city of Leipzig is noted as a major centre of trade and its reputation is further confirmed by the two cards shown below. One presents another busy street scene in the centre of which an oversized cigarette mounted on cartwheels is manoeuvred along the highway – an artfully disguised super-gun or an inducement to take up smoking. The second card shows a Constructivist tower adapted for displaying posters for consumer products. Absurdly tall and out-of-scale, it totally disrupts the architectural harmony of its immediate surroundings but the fact that it was selected as a postcard subject suggests it was the object of some local pride. It’s an impressively brazen concept that makes no concessions to civic values.

Tintin in Hollywood

2011-11-16T14:31:00.005Z

Tintin’s first trip to America took him to Chicago in 1931. In recognition of his heroic efforts in vanquishing the city’s criminal gangs, the boy reporter was offered a starring role in a billion dollar movie production by Paranoid Pictures. Eighty years on and the juvenile newshound has finally appeared on the Hollywood screen courtesy of Steven Spielberg. Despite the expensive motion capture technology, Tintinologists have not been impressed and many have denounced the film as a travesty and an annihilation of the authentic spirit of Tintin. Hergé’s wonderfully economic and expressive ligne claire was the first casualty of motion capture, discarded in favour of photorealism. Instead of being contained within the comfort of Hergé’s hand-drawn contours Tintin has been ejected into a supremely uncomfortable three-dimensional universe. To add to his troubles, his adventures, always improbable, have been launched into a new zone of special effects and percussive explosions. The problem seems to lie in the US where Tintin has never been more than a minority taste. To overcome this lack of enthusiasm the film-makers have employed the full and formulaic arsenal of shock and awe implausibility to drive the narrative at neutrino-like velocity – it remains to be seen whether the enormous sacrifice of subtlety was worthwhile when the film opens in the US in December.

Whatever the critical reception the Tintin industry will continue to expand and fortunes will be made from the sale of mountains of memorabilia and merchandise. European collectors seem happy to pay premium prices for Tintin products – if Americans can be persuaded to do likewise, the Hergé Foundation and its commercial arm, Moulinsart, will soon be adding millions of dollars to their vast stash of euros.

Genius loci: Draakplaats

2011-11-12T12:12:00.008Z

Most large cities have a location like this one in Antwerp where transport arteries intersect and dominate the sense of place. Six roads converge on this point and pass under the railway arches that carry freight traffic between Brussels, Antwerp and Rotterdam. The sepulchral gloom below the arches provides shelter for passengers waiting for the number 11 tram that links the city centre with the south eastern suburbs. Immediately to the south of Draakplaats is the up-market residential district of Zurenborg and an extensive city bus depot of absolutely zero architectural merit. On the north side, to east and west, are two older buildings into which tramlines run and in the centre, a substantial ornate bar and restaurant. There’s also a private access road leading to the freight yards with two vintage water towers adjacent. All this curious infrastructure adds up to a very strange sense of dislocation from the normal rhythms of the city. Road traffic is unnaturally light and the soundtrack is supplied by the thunderous rumble of trains overhead and the metallic squeal of tram wheels. A small selection of photographs follows below – there will be a future posting on the fantastical architecture of nearby Zurenborg.

Palladium House

2011-11-09T13:06:00.009Z

A left turn off Regent Street, just south of Oxford Circus, leads into Great Marlborough Street where there stands a large shiny black box of a building all dressed up with some discreet golden trim on the cornices and sherbet-coloured jazz-moderne motifs in enamel over the showroom windows. It’s diagonally opposite the pseudo-Tudor, half-timbered gables of Liberty’s store and in such noisy company, easily overlooked. For over 80 years it has occupied the corner site at the junction of Argyll Street as a modest outpost of a Manhattan aesthetic that is otherwise unrepresented in London. Widely regarded as central London's best Art Deco building, it was designed by US architect, Raymond Hood (1881-1934) and built in 1928-9 as a showroom and office block for the UK subsidiary of the American Radiator Company for whom he had previously designed a building in Manhattan.

For the New York building in 1924 Hood employed polished black granite cladding to symbolise the blessings of coal as an energy source and embellished it with flame-inspired motifs to symbolise the warm air circulating around the American home. A modified version of this scheme was applied to the much smaller London building known as Ideal House when it opened in 1928. Hood’s relatively brief but influential career began in 1922 when his design (in collaboration with John Mead Howells) won the competition for a prestige skyscraper to house the Chicago Tribune newspaper. The Tribune Tower embodied an anachronistic neo-Gothic style and derived its impact from the massive flying buttresses that supported the top of the 36 storey tower. It was a long journey, in less than a decade, for Hood from this decorative complexity to the relative austerity of Palladium House. Seven more bays were added to the Argyll Street frontage in 1935 and although the original proportions of the building were seriously compromised it remains a rare example of a London building of distinguished North American ancestry.

Four Seasons

2011-10-28T14:40:00.005+01:00

These four substantial townhouses are positioned at each point of a crossroads at the corner of Van Merlen Straat and Waterloo Straat in the Antwerp suburb of Zurenborg. Designed as a group in 1904 by architect Joseph Bascourt, they differ only in detail and each is faced in white glazed brick and displays a pictorial mosaic panel relating to one of the four seasons of the year. The mosaics and wrought iron work are heavily Art Nouveau influenced but the buildings themselves have a more restrained and rectilinear character suggesting the influence of the Vienna Secession, with horizontal bands of coloured brickwork to relieve the monotony. Each house has two tall and eccentrically ornamented oriel windows that also serve to break up the façades. I was informed by a passing local resident that the group had been recently renovated and restored to their original condition.

Postcard of the Day No. 51, Palm Beach Chariot

2011-10-27T12:54:00.004+01:00

Two people have their images forever imprisoned in this postcard, condemned to an eternity of circulation through the broad boulevards of mid-century Palm Beach. On the left is a man whose face bears some resemblance to that of the great Chicago bluesman, Howlin’ Wolf. Impassive and dignified with just a flash of the defiance that was ever present in the voice of Howlin’ Wolf. On the right is a female face that gives away virtually nothing – the eyes squint against the sunlight, the lips slightly parted in an unreadable smile. The story is that when the oilman and railroad tycoon, Henry Flagler, developed Palm Beach as a resort, he autocratically banned the use of horse-drawn or motor vehicles, giving rise to these cycle-mounted wicker chairs that were propelled by employees of the local hotels. In another cultural context this might look like a colourful image of a novel method of transport devised for the entertainment of tourists and as a source of income for the locals. But in the context of the United States in the pre-Civil Rights era it expresses some deeply insensitive attitudes to race and ethnicity. It may be less abhorrent than the postcard genre of demeaning and patronising ‘picaninny’ imagery but it remains a distinctly unsettling picture even after the passage of more than 50 years.

Rietveld Schröder House

2011-10-22T13:18:00.006+01:00

If there was such a thing as a long-service medal for Modernism it would surely go to Truus Schröder who lived in the Rietveld Schröder House in the Dutch city of Utrecht for 60 years from its completion in 1925 to her death in 1985. When she moved into the house that Gerrit Rietveld designed for her, she was a single parent with three young children to care for. Rietveld had for more than a decade been a designer-maker of avant-garde furniture. Although closely associated with the De Stijl group and Theo van Doesburg, this was the first building he designed. From design to realisation was a rapid process of less than 12 months with architect and client more than usually closely involved. It was Truus Schröder who pressed for the flexible division of space on the first floor and her relationship with Rietveld seems to have been exceptionally productive and harmonious.

First impressions – the house has only three façades, being essentially an end of terrace and it’s unexpectedly compact. The façades, with their recessions and projections are wonderfully animated by light and shade in accordance with one of architecture’s first principles. The compositional balance of primary colours and rectilinear forms is perfect. Inside, the ground floor is relatively conventional with enclosed rooms of modest dimensions apart from the deployment of colour to demarcate areas with separate functions and the purpose built furniture, often designed to fold away. The first floor accommodation can be configured as a single undivided space within which bedrooms and a living/dining area (again equipped with fold-down, stow-away furnishings) can be defined by sliding moveable partitions around. Long horizontal bands of glazing flood the unified space with daylight – all the windows open to ninety degrees and some smart engineering enables the southeast corner to disappear when the two windows, normally at right angles, are fully opened. The effect is to break the barrier between internal and external space and take full advantage of the panoramic rural views (now emphatically lost since the construction of an elevated motorway in 1963) that existed in 1924.

In the Sixties the Schröder House (by then some 40 years old) was explained to students like myself as a crucial point in the long march of Modernism – a popular fallacious academic narrative in which conceptual rationalism, purity of form and functionalism distilled from a fusion of Cubism and Constructivism would converge in triumph over lingering Victorian decadence, the insidious ornamentation of Art Nouveau and Art Deco, and the sordid dream world of the Surrealists. But matters would become much more complicated as a new narrative emerged in which Modernism was the godfather of alienation and the servant of Totalitarianism. The story went that new urban environments, planned and constructed according to Modernist principles de-humanised the populations for whom they were designed, leading to widespread social breakdown. At the same time the Modernist tendency towards grandiose scale achieved by means of unitary construction techniques provided a blueprint for the high command of business and finance when it came to developing corporate flagship projects. Post-Modern architects would address this by rejecting the stylistic tyranny of Modernism in favour of a non-prescriptive idiom where historical styles could be borrowed and combined at will while new materials and technologies expanded formal possibilities, permitting designers to explore a new vocabulary of free-form structures and gravity defying configurations. Since Post-Modernism seems to have expired in a flourish of empty stylistic gestures and off-the-peg irony the smoke has cleared enabling a new assessment of the pioneering Modernist buildings. The Schröder House now has the protection of Unesco World Heritage Status and exists as a carefully conserved relic that will never be lived in again. Its fascination lies in its dual function as a critical point of departure in the development of Modernist architecture and its role as a modest family home for Truus Schröder where in 1925 she turned her back on traditional domestic comforts and boldly stepped into a new future, a place that to many of us, even 90 years later, seems as far away as ever.

Hands of the Martyrs

2011-10-16T16:32:00.003+01:00

Charlotte Corday's fateful letter of introduction gripped by the hand of the dying Marat - a detail from Jacques-Louis David's saintly portrayal of the assassinated citoyen Marat. The painting is a star attraction in the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Brussels and retains its power and fascination as a brilliantly calculated image of political martyrdom. According to Wikipedia the original letter still exists as the property of the Earl of Crawford. The marble hands below are a likeness of those belonging to Bishop Marius Ambrosius Capello (1597-1676) seen on his tomb in Antwerp Cathedral. While the hands of Marat would be deeply stained with ink from decades of subversive journalism, we would expect the hands of the Bishop to be more accustomed to the delivery of blessings and the splashing of holy water. What distinguished Bishop Capello from all his fellow Bishops of Antwerp was his generosity to the poor of the city to whom he bequeathed all his worldly wealth.

Ramblin’ Man

2011-10-04T13:45:00.007+01:00

Hank Williams travelled his Lost Highway and Chuck Berry searched for The Promised Land but only Lemon Jelly captured an Englishman’s passage through the wider world in the sublime Ramblin’ Man. It’s the loose-footed Psycho-geographer’s Anthem with a litany of place-names, famous and obscure, in sober tones redolent of Wilfred Thesiger or Patrick Leigh Fermor. Later this week I shall visit two locations from Lemon Jelly’s list. Last month we added another verse to our own list:

Chorleywood
Sheffield
Kingston upon Hull
Chalfont St Giles
Youlgreave

The task is to match each photo to a location – the only prize is a sense of self-satisfaction.

Vélodrome d'hiver

2011-09-12T15:52:00.005+01:00

In Eric Hazan’s fascinating book, The Invention of Paris, he observes that the Vélodrome d'hiver is a classic example of a place that was very good, in the sense that as an indoor venue for cycle racing it provided entertainment for millions of Parisians, that later became very bad, as the site of immense human suffering and a staging post along the road to mass murder and genocide. In an era when unremarkable human beings, some of them otherwise decent, were induced to develop a capacity for callous brutality, the events at the Vélodrome d'hiver were exceptional. More than 13,000 Jewish arrests were made by the Paris police on July 16th. 1942 following detailed plans prepared with the enthusiastic cooperation of the Vichy regime, prominent among them the grotesque figure of Louis Darquier de Pellepoix who featured here in an earlier post. Up to 7,500 Jewish men, women and children were interned in stifling summer heat in a covered arena that allowed for little more than standing room and deliberately denied access to any toilet facilities with a single tap to provide water. After 8 days the survivors were transferred to Drancy in the outer north-eastern suburbs before being conveyed by train to concentration camps. This inglorious episode was the ultimate achievement of the cagoulard tendency, ensuring that henceforth their reputation for inhuman cruelty would stand comparison with any Nazi war criminal.

On the perimeter of the former site on boulevard de Grenelle there is a memorial in the form of a small garden and a wall mounted plaque. It is wedged between the entrance to an underground car park and a barrier-controlled vehicle entrance to the Ministry of the Interior building (that replaced the Vélodrome d'hiver after its demolition in 1959), the implacable façades of which form an unforgiving backdrop to the memorial. Some municipal bedding plants and a ragged sward of grass have a depressing perfunctory air and undermine the good intentions that inspired it. Understatement in these features can be a positive but in this instance the installation is catastrophically overwhelmed by its unsightly surroundings. It was a long journey for the French to recognise the enormity of this event and the extent of their complicity, making it all the more disappointing that this monument seems so inadequate. If the intention was to provide a single point of calm amid the clamour of city life for quiet reflection it was doomed to fail in the absence of any tangible or dramatic representation of the tragedy being commemorated that would hold an audience. There is a more substantial memorial featuring a sculpted group of internees at Quai de Grenelle, commissioned by the Mitterand administration in 1993. The figures, carved by Walter Spitzer (himself a survivor of deportation) are naturalistic, deliberately non-rhetorical, and in a quiet way, emotionally convincing. Yet another memorial, Mémorial des Martyrs de la Déportation (photographs below) can be seen at the eastern tip of Île de la Cité. It dates back to 1962 and was designed in what might be called a considered Brutalist idiom by Georges-Henri Pingusson – the harsh geometry and unyielding surfaces are surprisingly effective in conveying a sense of the enormity of the crime.

Split Levels

2011-09-09T13:46:00.006+01:00

Enthusiasts for urban planning get very excited about creating multi-level locations. The idea of elevating transport and services into the infinity of the atmosphere seems like an excellent recipe for maximising efficiency in the use of space. In these postcard examples we see three or even four levels intersecting like spatial vectors. They are not as popular with the general public who have an aversion to endless flights of steps or a simple dislike of vertigo. For myself, the sensation of vertigo is something to be savoured and I find these locations immensely satisfying despite the widely held view that they disfigure the landscape. These cards are all from Germany or the USA and support my contention that the great 19th. century American cities of the North-East and Mid-West were primarily built upon a Teutonic template.

Sidecar Psychology

2011-08-30T17:51:00.004+01:00

It has always been the dream of every free-born Englishman to provide everything in the way of comfort, convenience and mobility for his family. Something in this proud father’s expression suggests the dawning realisation that this project may have fatally compromised his amour propre and exposed his loved ones to ridicule. All those hours of concentrated effort cutting cross braces and vertical members and profiling aero-grade plywood were only made bearable by the thought of the advance in status that would follow when he first took to the road in his new sidecar. But already doubts were creeping in with the contemptuous laughter of the village youths. Mr Clarkson’s concern was less for his loyal and unperturbed wife but more for young Jeremy in the back whose confidence and self-esteem was rather fragile at the best of times. Those teacher training lectures in Child Psychology had left Mr Clarkson with an anxious awareness of how easily a child could be damaged by undermining his self-worth. How appalling it would be if sensitive young Jeremy grew up to become a swaggering, self-important bully with a desperate obsession with speed and reckless conduct. Nothing could be worse than that.

Mosselprom

2011-08-27T14:07:00.010+01:00

This is the end elevation of the Mosselprom (The Moscow Association of Enterprises Processing Agro-Industrial Products) headquarters in central Moscow. When completed in 1924, to a design by David Kogan, at ten storeys it was one of the tallest buildings in the city. The painted advertisement was the work of Alexander Rodchenko and Vladimir Mayakovsky in the Soviet commercial Constructivist idiom. Mosselprom consumer products featured included cigarettes, beer, mineral water, biscuits, sweets and chocolate. Mayakovsky’s repeated slogan, “Nowhere else but in Mosselprom” rapidly assumed catch-phrase status among the Moscow public. The building is still in existence and the façade was renovated to its 1924 condition in 1997.

The image of Mosselprom was found in what appeared at first sight to be a conventional book, published in 1987, of tourist views of Moscow but closer examination revealed was an eclectic selection of paintings by Soviet artists of Moscow street scenes. Stylistically the paintings make few concessions to Modernism, often favouring a sub-Impressionist approach but despite this there are some fascinating images, a few of which are displayed here. Especially impressive is the painting of the pioneering female motorist taking on the city traffic in her open-top car but equally intriguing are the enigmatic images of a young woman carrying a large pane of glass and a bride and groom stepping forward into married life through the clutter of a city construction site.

La Petite Ceinture: a Cultural History

2011-08-25T17:17:00.008+01:00

On Friday, September 16th. 1870, Edmond de Goncourt recorded in his Journal:

Today, I amused myself by travelling right round Paris on the ring railway. It is an amusing sight, that vision, swift as speed, afforded as one emerges from the darkness of a tunnel, of rows of white tents, of guns rolling along country lanes, of river banks lined with little crenellated paprapets of olden times, of canteens with their tables and glasses set out in the sunshine and their waitresses with braid sewn along the hems of their jackets and skirts – a vision constantly interrupted and blocked by a high embankment, at the end of which there reappears the familiar horizon of the yellow ramparts dotted with the little silhouettes of National Guards.

It was a turbulent time for a pleasure trip. As de Goncourt encircled Paris, Prussian forces were doing the same thing, just a few miles further out. Paris was protected by a continuous line of fortification but by the following Monday (19th.) the city was completely cut off and a four month nightmare had commenced.

More than half a century passed before we hear from our next witness, Mr. J E N Heygate who writes with a brief account of a similar circular trip to the Railway Magazine who published it in the issue dated March 1925. Mr. Heygate’s observations suggest a service in sharp decline – passengers few and far between and an average speed of 15 miles per hour. It would be intriguing to confirm whether Mr. Heygate and Sir John Edward Nourse Heygate, 4th Baronet are one and the same person. The 4th Baronet had a colourful career, among other things, achieving some notoriety as the man who cuckolded Evelyn Waugh in his first marriage to Evelyn Gardner. Heygate (1903-1976) was educated at Balliol College – the combination of the initials and an Oxford address suggest a good match.

I was lead to the Goncourt quotation by Eric Hazan in his superb book, The Invention of Paris. Hazan (of whom more in a future posting) is fascinated by the Petite Ceinture (PC) and tracked down two more literary recollections of travel on the Ceinture from Paul Fargue and Eugène Dabit. The lingering presence of the Ceinture more than 70 years after its demise, particularly in north-east Paris is especially intriguing to Hazan as a chronicler of a version of Paris that is now lost. Today’s postcard shows a clockwise PC train racing through the cutting towards the tunnel on the east of the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont – the next stop will be Belleville – Villette. The spectators on the footbridge are a fraction of a second away from total immersion in a cloud of steam and smoke. Some previous posts on this subject can be reached from here and here.

Stranger on a Train

2011-08-24T15:51:00.009+01:00

I’ve read many accounts of trans-continental rail travel in the US but I’ve never read one quite so odd as Jenny Diski’s book, Stranger on a Train: Daydreaming and Smoking Around America (2003). The fun starts when the author makes no secret of her discomfort in the company of strangers while voluntarily placing herself in a position where such company is unavoidable. After crossing the Atlantic as a passenger on a freighter she follows up with a series of extended train trips across the Amtrak universe with a gallery of America’s lost souls. The guiding principle seems to be the curiously English expectation that if we cause no distress or disturbance to anyone else, the compliment will be automatically returned. As she soon discovers, nothing provokes a certain type of American extrovert more than a sniff of old world English reserve and self-effacement. Breaking down resistance to uncover the ill-tempered bigot concealed in every English heart is a challenge that can’t be resisted. An addiction to nicotine is her unlikely saviour, bringing her into the segregated company of polite America’s smoking outcasts. Under a dense cloud of blue tobacco smoke the cigarette comrades gather, united in their pariah status, in the comfortless accommodation that Amtrak has grudgingly allocated to them. Social, racial and cultural divisions melt away in the shared experience of exclusion from the bright and shiny world of health awareness and fitness regimes.

The craving for nicotine is only equalled by a craving for solitude that multiplies in proportion to the sudden surrender of personal space that a train journey entails. Our weary traveller carries a lot of baggage including a personal history of substance abuse and periods of psychiatric treatment. Under stress some of this baggage spills out, giving rise to painful reflections and additional anxieties. More disappointment follows when the train is left behind and the author gets to stay with friends in the endless tracts of suburbia. She quickly becomes uncomfortable with the prevailing political culture where a shared acceptance of primitive right-wing opinions is taken for granted. Compelled to disclose her liberal sentiments to her hosts, she becomes the recipient of some edgy banter – “the English lady Commie writer”. One can speculate as to which of these four descriptors gave the greatest offence. The culture clash reaches a farcical conclusion when she cannot rid herself of the ridiculous but plausible notion that her host plans to kidnap her for the purpose of injecting some moral certainties into her wobbly sensibility.

The views through the window struggle to compete with the interior landscapes although there are some fine descriptive passages, usually inspired by the majestic desolation on display. The romance of the railroad is in very short supply, which is no bad thing. The Great American Songbook is stuffed with anthems in praise of railroad romance for those who have need of it. I enjoyed the cool and measured tone of the authorial voice in this book but what I really admired was the absolute refusal to win favour with the reader. In an era when ingratiation and flattery of the reader are the keys to success it’s refreshing to find such indifference to the reader’s estimation. The accompanying images come from the last days of railroad supremacy when air travel was becoming increasingly competitive. The Santa Fe was one of the great trans-continental carriers and energetically promoted itself via magazine advertising. The focus of the offer shifts between the on-board comforts and the romance of travel. In a supreme irony, the flagship service, The Super Chief, was named to evoke the same Native Americans whose territories could not have been seized without the existence of the railroad. The final indignity was to co-opt their images to add glamour and distinction to the product.

Postcard of the Day No. 50, Paris rue Saint-Lazare

2011-08-17T10:59:00.007+01:00

A horse-drawn omnibus has stopped in Place Gabriel Péri on the corner of rue Saint-Lazare. Passengers tumble off and set a course for the great railway terminal across the road. The upper deck appears to be almost fully occupied – the prospective passengers, adults and small children in summer finery, await a female straggler making a slow descent of the winding staircase. Pedestrians amble casually through the busy traffic, some with heads bowed, trusting to providence. The bus has travelled south from Batignolles down rue de Rome and will continue towards the Grands Boulevards. Thanks to Google Streetview (below) we can see that many of the buildings remain broadly unchanged and this location remains in use as a bus terminal although a century has passed since the card was posted in 1908. Finally we have a card that shows the view the bus passengers would have seen as they approached the station in the form in which it was rebuilt in the 1880s.

Urban Pastoral

2011-08-16T15:07:00.002+01:00

This illustration is taken from a 1950s book for children designed to excite their interest in the wonders of the new post-war world. There’s a didactic tone – take note, idle child, of the complexity of our modern environment. Despite being a picture of a busy urban scene the deep-frozen presentation evokes an almost rustic calm. It’s the work of Cecil Bacon and despite a certain charm, the artist’s limitations in respect of the human figure are rather cruelly exposed. There’s a game to be played imagining how this scene might look today. The labourers would be wearing hard hats and Hi-Vis workwear and ‘improving the image of construction’, in the service of Serco or May Gurney instead of the local authority. The hole in the road would be protected by safety barriers and traffic signals with vehicles compelled to travel in convoy behind a quad bike. The passing constable will today be word processing reports in a back office – his place taken by another yellow jacket, a Police and Community Support Officer. Refuse disposal has become waste management and the dustbin has been succeeded by the wheelie-bin - the contractor will be Viridor or Veolia. The gent on the left (with a passing resemblance to Marcel Duchamp) would now require an ‘enhanced disclosure’ from the CRB before accompanying the small child on an expedition to the post-box. The Royal Mail clings to existence as a state-owned company but its days are numbered and private sector vultures are preparing to feast on the corpse. The K6 telephone box is highly unlikely to have survived into the mobile phone era. The corporation bus will have long since disappeared, services now operated by the likes of Stagecoach or Worst Bus. The orgy of outsourcing has probably had more impact on the scene than new architecture. Many buildings of this type and age are still in use but almost every activity on view has been transformed by the destruction of the public sector.

Cabaret du Néant

2011-08-04T14:41:00.004+01:00

The sight of this lugubrious group of Parisian thrill-seekers seriously threatens the reputation the French have for a reckless pursuit of pleasure. They pose grimly for the camera, surrounded by the paraphernalia of death, adjusting their eyes to the nocturnal gloom and preparing for the serious business of inebriation. Parisian nightlife catered handsomely to the fin-de-siècle passion for morbidity with cabarets celebrating the criminal underworld and heaven and hell. The most extreme example of this trend was the Cabaret du Néant (Nothingness) where the clientele was served by staff dressed as funeral directors at tables made from coffins – the decor was all shrouds and skulls, bones and skeletons and the entertainment was a succession of tableaux satirising the world of the occult. For a blasé and chronically jaded public it offered a welcome escape from the endless parades of dancing girls exposing their under-garments for the gratification of sex-starved visitors from the prudish Anglo-Saxon regions. The visual clichés of death and extinction have lost none of their power to both shock and amuse and continue to thrive in the iconography of tattoos and body decoration, in video games and comic books, in thrash, death and heavy metal music and in Gothic fashion styles.

Minefield of Memory

2011-07-28T16:14:00.008+01:00

There are those who have little regard for books as objects but place a high value on the activity of reading. The attitude to books in the home I grew up in was just this. Reading was greatly encouraged in the interests of both moral and material improvement but there was little in the way of illustrated literature – staring at pictures was construed as time wasted that could have been better employed with a text. I recall only two books of predominantly visual material - the first was a book of Fougasse wartime cartoons and the second was this item, a copy of which I recently rediscovered in a box-full of literary detritus at a local car-boot sale. It’s a 1940 mass-produced portfolio of contemporary photography, mainly taken in pursuit of technical excellence in the form of the perfect exposure or the widest possible tonal range. Photographic societies existed to promote these arid values in the sadly mistaken belief that their work would be thus elevated to the status of fine art.

My best estimate is that I was 7 years old when I first browsed in this book – the first glimpse of it after at least five decades was a classic shock of recognition followed by a series of detonations as I leafed through the contents. There were landscapes, seascapes, still lives, portraits and un-erotic nude studies, many of which I remembered but there was a small group of four that I recalled very powerfully – the act of looking at them reopened a channel that led directly back to my 7 year old self. The image that most engaged my infant eye was this aerial view of a lakeside car park in Baton Rouge by Clarence John Laughlin. It is an untypical Laughlin photograph, most of whose work reflects a Romantic/Surrealist sensibility – a Joseph Cornell of the Deep South – and if I’m right about its influence on my own visual preferences it took me in an entirely different direction. There’s an awareness of abstraction, an oblique geometry, repetition of forms and a sense of a world encapsulated in miniature. It could explain why I later fell instantly for the formal detachment of Gustave Caillebotte’s birds’ eye views of les Grands Boulevards, Ed Ruscha’s deadpan Thirtyfour Parking Lots, the vertiginous photographs of Rodchenko and Moholy-Nagy and the dizzy excitement of Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera.

The other three images took the infant eye through the wonders of massive Soviet industrial structures, atmospheric night scenes and mighty North American locomotives, imprinting a machine aesthetic on the developing brain that has endured to the present day. If there’s any other common theme, it’s a sense of visual dramatics that was in short supply in the monochrome world of North East England where the infant eyes resided. This is troubling territory – we like to imagine that our aesthetic preferences are the result of a continuing principled interior dialogue involving countless discriminating judgements and exercises in taste, all of which lead to a clearly defined and defensible position. The reality is more like a patchwork of prejudices combined with a cluster of predictable responses – a place where most of us feel more comfortable. And sometimes we just have to own up to the profound impact that trivial and banal experiences can have upon our visual receptors.

Lucian Freud (1922 - 2011)

2011-07-26T18:05:00.004+01:00

On an autumn day in 1976 I was riding a motorcycle along Holland Park Avenue in the direction of Shepherds Bush Green when a middle-aged man and an elderly, neatly dressed female of Middle European appearance stepped off the pavement in front of me. As I applied the brakes they registered the threat to life and limb and smartly stepped back from the road to the safety of the pavement. When I rode past I recognised the sharp and compact features of Lucian Freud and for a microsecond sensed the famous penetrating gaze that so many have been writing about in the last few days since he died. I’ve always suspected that Freud’s companion was his mother – I vaguely recall she wore a fox fur or something similar – but I could well be wrong on both counts. Freud made productive use of the next 35 years as he transformed himself from a somewhat marginal figurative painter in an age of abstraction and conceptualism into a major star of the international art market, entirely on his own terms.

It seemed to me that Freud steadily migrated from a modified Surrealism to a Neue Sachlichkeit vision of the world. The preoccupation with human tissue and the tribulations of the flesh was perfectly proper but for me it was hard work looking at his paintings despite my admiration for the brilliance with which he manipulated paint into an disconcertingly brutal facsimile of the human form in all its imperfections without compromising the autonomy of each highly charged brush stroke. In the 1970s he briefly turned a cool and beady eye on to the urban scene with paintings of the backs of factories and Victorian terraces. His gaze seemed to linger longest on the most banal and displeasing forms and his brush paid its respects in full to the majestic squalor on display. Freud’s minute examination of all that is most decrepit and debilitated in the human condition seems many times more interesting than Francis Bacon’s soap opera of human cruelty and dissipation. A final thought – perhaps instead of wasting valuable painting time on a vacuous nitwit like Kate Moss, Freud might have been better occupied painting Amy Winehouse.

Say McVitie’s!

2011-07-22T16:19:00.004+01:00

As an airless image of 1930s upper middle class cosy domestic bliss, it’s hard to improve on. An absent father toils away with his fountain-pen in a City office – perhaps a barrister, stock broker or a senior actuary – to support this comfortable lifestyle of unlimited digestive biscuits and Mickey Mouse bendy toys from Gamages. Home might be a Blunden Shadbolt Tudor Revival house in Redhill. Mother perches on the edge of a deco-print day bed, wearing a puce satin dress from Marshall & Snelgrove with a necklace of cornelian and jade, a birthday present from an attentive husband, bought at Mappin & Webb in Moorgate. Like the day bed, the swirly deco-styled rug and bookends came from Heal’s. The daughter, Hermione (or Constance), proudly wears her new Shirley Temple outfit, her brother, Hugh (or Guy), is clad in a curious truncated velvet jump-suit. Hugh would be well advised to go no further in Hermione’s “let’s pretend you’re a puppy” game if he wants to avoid a life of deviant behaviour. The shadow of the Great Depression has not disturbed this happy home but the outbreak of war in four years time will not be so easily escaped. As Hugh and Hermione look back from the age of 80, they will find at least one thing unchanged in modern Britain – the unpretentious digestive biscuit remains one of Britain’s best sellers.

C W Bacon book jackets

2011-07-21T10:27:00.007+01:00

Designs for book jackets formed a significant part of Cecil Bacon’s workload and he put a great deal of effort into something that about 90% of book-buyers threw away at the first opportunity. These examples came direct from the artist on the same occasion as the Radio Times scraperboards featured recently. I chose these for their stylistic range and for their association with hard-boiled fiction and science fiction. Bacon varied his approach for each commission, opting for an Alajalov New Yorker-style drawing for The Little Sister, a light touch of Cubism for Mildred Pierce, a streamline look for Red Gardenias and magic realism for The Lost Planet. All the title information appears to be hand-lettered. It would be interesting to know more about the commissioning process and to what extent the approach was prescribed by the publisher. How many ideas were rejected or returned for re-drafting? We may never know the answers to these questions but we can be certain that publishers placed a high value on Bacon’s reputation for conscientious effort, for reliability and for delivering on time.

Barnett Freedman, illustrator for industry

2011-07-20T14:04:00.008+01:00

In an era when a romanticised image of the rural idyll was defining the English sensibility there were a few contrarians who preferred to explore the enigmatic poetry hidden deep within the damp and chilled drabness of the inter-war British urban environment. Freedman’s command of a light chalk technique produced granular images of great tonal subtlety. Adding a crisp drawn line to define forms completed the effect. Smudgy, hunched figures hidden beneath umbrellas, pools of light reflected on rain-swept tarmac, and the welcoming glow of light from the windows of the tram, all part of the intrinsically British urban experience, are vividly recalled. Freedman was working for Shell when he produced these images – other clients included the Post Office and the Brewers’ Society. In his 1948 monograph (published by Art and Technics) Jonathan Mayne was unimpressed by examples of Freedman’s commercial work, declaring them to be “calculated, somewhat inhuman performances”. This seems an unduly harsh verdict on work that, looking back, seems to embody all the fine qualities that made Freedman’s Curwen Press published work so highly regarded.

Graphis Magazine Covers

2011-07-19T19:06:00.005+01:00

Graphis magazine was an immensely influential Swiss publication founded by Walter Herdeg that showcased the best in graphic design and illustration from its first issue in 1944. An Helvetican air of cool sobriety distinguished its pages and the editorial material was truly international and included tri-lingual texts. Most issues featured at least one digression into the world of fine and applied arts with features on such arcane topics as carved pulpits in Bulgaria, apothecarys’ signs in medieval Salamanca or the corporate graphics of the Hanseatic League. The cover artists had complete freedom to adapt the magazine’s masthead to their own designs and we present six examples from the early years of Graphis when it was virtually unchallenged as the pre-eminent house magazine for graphic designers everywhere. Details of the artists follow below.

Graphis 20 Piero Fornasetti (1913-1988)
Graphis 17 Hans Erni (b. 1909)
Graphis 31 Tom Eckersley (1914-1997)
Graphis 22 Jacques Nathan (1910-2001)
Graphis 26 George Giusti (1908-1990)
Graphis 27 Jean Picart le Doux (1902-1982)

Peter Brookes in Radio Times

2011-07-16T12:45:00.009+01:00

For many decades, Radio Times was the most generous and enlightened patron of illustration of any mass-circulation British magazine. From its inception in 1923 a succession of art editors commissioned the finest of British illustrators to enliven the broadcasting schedules with visual wit in a wide variety of idioms. The tradition persisted into the 1980s before finally succumbing to the remorseless advance of technically competent but frequently boring editorial photography. Prior to the death of illustration there was a brief golden age from the mid 1970s to the mid 1980s when a generation of 1960s art college graduates brought new sophistication with imagery that simultaneously referred back to previous decades while being stylistically adventurous. Nobody better exemplifies this era than Peter Brookes. Now better known as political cartoonist for The Times (behind a paywall), it was entirely appropriate that Brookes was commissioned to illustrate the cover of The Art of Radio Times when it was published to accompany an exhibition at the V & A some thirty years ago in 1981. A love of pastiche and visual puns, pointed but never savage satire and an enthusiasm for inverting ancient visual clichés distinguished his work for over a decade in Radio Times. Above is Brookes’s first cover design for Radio Times from September 1974 – a melancholy reminder of the eternal circularity of British political debate. Below is a group of four covers from the period 1975 to 1978 and finally – seasonal illustrations from a calendar for 1989 issued as a supplement to Radio Times that play games with the initial letters.

C W Bacon illustrates Radio Times

2011-07-15T17:02:00.007+01:00

Cecil Bacon (1905-92) was a commercial illustrator active from the late 1920s up to the 1970s. He could turn a hand to any task in the advertising industry but the mainstay of his work was editorial – for magazines such as the Listener and Radio Times for whom he produced spot illustrations, mostly executed in scraperboard for over thirty years (1935-1968). These examples of original artwork for Radio Times were acquired direct from the artist in 1982. When Chris Mullen and I visited him at his home in Sussex, near Fairlight, he proved to be a delightful host, modest and self-effacing. He was remarkably generous with his time, gave a conducted tour of his studio and archive and seemed genuinely surprised that anyone should be taking a serious interest in his work. Scraperboard drawing was his preferred technique and in 1951 he published a book on the subject. He may not have been the equal of the likes of Fraser or Bawden but he brought precision and verve to a somewhat neglected medium. The images posted here are as follows:

In Town Tonight (above) from Radio Times dated November 11th 1940
Mystery of the Seven Cafés from Radio Times dated September 6th 1935
Black-outs for the Black-out from Radio Times dated May 3rd 1940
Easter Day border from Radio Times dated April 15th 1949
Summer Showtime from Radio Times, July 1951
The Fleet’s All Lit Up from Radio Times dated June 12th 1953

Sèvres-Babylone

2011-07-07T15:02:00.006+01:00

A Sunday morning in Paris is one of the best times to find a deserted Métro station – especially if two trains cross and the handful of passengers speedily drains into the exits. These platforms display the distinctive tiling of the former Nord-Sud railway (now line 12), tastefully restored in recent years and pleasingly devoid of human presence. The sign of a Nord-Sud station is the directional information lettered on the tunnel headwalls. The deployment of white bevel-edged tiling over the tunnel lining creates a beguiling fantasia of reflected colour and light with minimal means.

Sèvres-Babylone is the station for Bon Marché and an example of the compound names favoured for Métro stations formed in this instance from the names of two stations combined into one. Road intersections provide another source of similar names. These names are valued for their unintended poetry – in this instance the association with fine porcelain (Sévres) and Orientalism (Babylone) blends into an exotic note.

Since they were downloaded more than a year ago these images have languished, unexamined in the iPhoto library in the form of intractable black rectangles, evidence of the limits to my photographic competence. Thanks to the sorcery of Photoshop they have been extracted from the darkness to tell their own penumbral story.

Musée Horta

2011-07-01T14:07:00.008+01:00

Victor Horta designed and built his own home and studio at 25 rue Américaine in the commune of Saint-Gilles, about 2 miles south of the centre of Brussels. Construction took place between 1898 and 1901 and the house was extended in 1906 and 1908. Positioned on a double width plot, Horta divided the space vertically to separate living accommodation and studio and business space. Horta’s talent for exuberant decoration was more than equalled by his command of spatial organisation, seen at its best in the separation of rooms around the central staircase by minor but defining changes in levels of two, three or four steps. These subtleties enable the spatial flow to match the flowing forms that coil and twist throughout the house. The visual language of Art Nouveau perished instantly in the mechanised slaughter of the Great War and when Horta moved out in 1919 to a town-house on avenue Louise, he left behind what was already an extraordinary anachronism. He adapted to the times and developed an architecture of geometric sobriety that brought some prestigious projects (Palais des Beaux-Arts and Brussels-Central railway station) that resulted in worthy but unmemorable buildings. With the ascendancy of Modernism, the rising execration of the style of his early maturity was something Horta had to endure until his death in 1947, some two decades before the rehabilitation of Art Nouveau as part of a new narrative of architectural and design history.

Horta’s house is now a national monument and a significant part of it is curated and open to the public. Visiting is a strange experience. Modern museums are not unreasonably, generally unwelcoming to backpacks and large bags, requiring them to be deposited in cloakrooms. But the Musée Horta has extended this to include virtually all hand held bags including handbags of purse-like dimensions. The result is an enormous cloakroom queue held up by protesting visitors, mainly female, angrily transferring cash, cards and valuables to their person before consigning their handbags into the custody of museum staff in whom they have absolutely no trust. Admission tickets are sold by a functionary perched halfway up the stairs at a tiny table while members of staff self-importantly bustle around continually creating unwanted turbulence in the confined spaces. A ban on photography is rigorously enforced which does induce caution on the part of those unwilling to comply.

None of this makes for a contemplative experience but nevertheless it is fascinating to explore a space that offers such a total design experience where almost every feature has been subordinated to the designer’s brief. Movement around the stairwell and through the rooms is a genuine visual and physical pleasure, greatly enhanced by the flow of forms that gather and surge throughout the building. Almost every feature bears examination for its formal ingenuity and visitors can be seen staring intently at banisters, tie-rods, light pendants, matchbox holders and keyholes, all specially designed and custom-built. Horta’s vision was unusually intense and triggered an explosion of Art Nouveau architectural exuberance across Europe and North America and in doing so boosted the first 20th. century art movement to explode into life and expire in little more than a decade, pioneering a tradition of rapid transience that shows no sign of changing.

Particles in Transit

2011-06-30T14:56:00.006+01:00

A busy railway station is a wonderful place for a disengaged observer of human activity. I visit to experience the architectural spaces but the human element cannot be ignored and I find my photographs incidentally record the transient presence of a minor multitude of human types. In the random flow of human particles, patterns emerge and disperse, compositions are formed and dissolved. This is the raw material for these much processed images. The initial photographs were taken in the dramatic internal spaces of Milano Centrale where the grandiose scale diminishes the human presence to sub-molecular proportions. The building resembles a stage set for a totalitarian operatic production in which the travellers form the chorus as they transmigrate across the arena.

Postcard of the Day No. 49, Rotterdam Lusthofstraat

2011-06-25T13:47:00.004+01:00

This is a joy to behold – a postcard view of a group of gasholders. The installation looks rather new - young saplings tethered to supports growing alongside the street and a pristine roadway suggest that novelty may have played a part in selecting this sublimely banal subject. A century ago, a new gas storage facility may well have been cause for celebration, a symbol of an emerging technology and the promise of hot water supplies on demand. Artists have generally resisted the charms of the gas works with the honourable exception of Paul Signac whose painting Les Gazomètres, Clichy (1886, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne) bravely confronted the subject in the Parisian banlieue. The same gasholders appeared on the extreme left of Van Gogh’s Bridge at Asnières (1887, Menil Collection, Houston) but the greatest enthusiast for the subject was Carl Grossberg, a minor master of die Neue Sachlichkeit, who could always find space for a gas works in his unsparing explorations of the industrial margins of the modern city. Grossberg’s vision of hydraulic lifting bridges, overhead pipelines, furnaces, boilers, lifting gear, storage tanks and loading bays took him to a place that most avoid and revealed a world of Machine Age forms and profoundly unsettling atmosphere. This postcard has something of the faintly sinister emptiness that’s typical of Grossberg’s paintings. Below is a card featuring the much celebrated triplet gasholders located at the entrance to St. Pancras Station as a Midland Railway red liveried train departs for the north.

Window Shopping in Brussels

2011-06-24T16:21:00.005+01:00

Every city reveals its character in its shop window displays. In Brussels, gluttonous mountains of chocolate and multiple replicas of an incontinent manneken pis keep the tourism economy afloat and the unwary visitor can amass an unrivalled collection of kitsch in return for their hard earned euros. The national obsession with Tintin translates into a range of models of every vehicle to appear in a Tintin story, offered at a price most of us would find easy to resist. It may just be conceivable that a hat could be a holiday souvenir but the price range here (57–410€) makes it unlikely. A comprehensive selection of sharpened blades for every occasion would be a specialist purchase. Which would equally apply to the tempting range of female leisure-wear designed with the latex-fetishist in mind. An unusual gift for that special person in your life.

Avenue Louise

2011-06-22T16:07:00.008+01:00

Avenue Louise is a super-wide boulevard that leads south-east from the centre of Brussels. Wide enough to accommodate four lanes of traffic, two reserved tram tracks and two service roads, it was established by Léopold II and named for his unfortunate eldest daughter. Appropriately, given Louise’s reputation for compulsive shopping, the avenue that bears her name became home to the haute bourgeoisie and associated luxury retail business. By the end of the 19th. century developers were building substantial three or four storey residences for the mercantile class to the west of avenue Louise and north of rue du Bailli. The tram service could deliver the hard-pressed businessman along the leafy avenue to the city centre office with all due speed. Most residents were content with pattern-book designs that provided large double doorways, spacious rooms with high ceilings, big bay windows and Classical details but a discriminating minority purchased the services of a new generation of architects to produce individual designs that would stand out from the common herd. These clients became patrons of an emerging and challenging artistic style (Art Nouveau) while the flamboyant façades of their new homes spoke to the world about their daring taste for aesthetic innovation. Internally their new homes had a unique ornamental grandeur and spatial flow.

The most prominent Art Nouveau architect was Victor Horta and his network of friends and clients revolved around his links with the Freemasons (whom he joined in 1888) and the Socialists. Masonic contacts produced commissions from industrialists such as Solvay and Tassell and Socialism brought commissions from Max Hallet and for the Maison du Peuple (demolished in 1965). Modern industrial building techniques were employed and ironwork was revealed and treated to decorative effect. The decorative linear qualities of contemporary graphics and illustration were adapted in three dimensions. Wrought iron forms were persuaded to twist and turn in space with an intensity bordering on the neurotic. Where stone and metal met the transition was marked by some lively metallic gymnastics and curvilinear ferrous forms would strap themselves around stone staircases, arches and plinths with limpet-like pressure. Mosaics on the floor, stained glass, painted walls, light fittings and custom-built furniture echo and repeat the ornamental forms and motifs. New forms and new materials were the mark of the discriminating client.

One of Horta’s clients was the Minister for the Congo, Baron van Eetveldte, a man who could hardly be more implicated in Léopold II’s murderous exploitation of his colonial territory. Some of the ill-gotten spoils would find their way into the Art Nouveau home in the form of exotic African hardwoods, much prized for the beauty of their colour and grain. Several Art Nouveau architects were offered Congo-related commissions for the 1900 Paris Exhibition and for the Congolese section of the 1897 Brussels Exhibition. Léopold’s colonial monstrosity would cast a shadow over Belgian public life that, to this day, has not entirely dispersed.

Two other architects are represented here – Albert Roosenboom (83 rue Faider) and Octave van Rysselberghe (Hôtel Otlet, rue de Florence). Rooseboom’s design included a prominent central bay and sgraffito decoration in a Symbolist idiom by Armand Van Waesberghe. Hôtel Otlet sits on a corner site and displays a more sculptural sensibility with alternating bays and recesses. It is defiantly assymetric with conventional dormers and external decoration limited to a single line of floral tiling at the top of the building. The economics of owning an Art Nouveau house in contemporary Brussels are explored in a Financial Times article that makes some interesting points about their price, availability and desirability. Despite their exclusivity it’s not always easy to find a buyer among the ranks of the super-rich who are generally deterred by the conservation issues and prefer homes that can be adapted to display their wealth and soi-disant good taste.

Giants of the Rails

2011-06-21T17:06:00.008+01:00

These images of all-American railroads come from a 1944 picture book, Giants of the Rails, illustrated with spirit by Glen Thomas (a name that seems to have evaded the historical record). Images of steam, diesel and electric power from an era when all three were to be seen hard at work in the war effort. Similar trains could often be seen thundering across the pages of National Geographic and the Saturday Evening Post. The passenger trains seem to be all distant relatives of the jukebox in both colour and form while the freight locomotives are designed to convey muscularity and brute force.

Postcard of the Night No. 7, Keith’s Theatre, Boston

2011-06-17T10:48:00.004+01:00

This luminous façade, glowing in the darkness of the city by night is the B F Keith Theatre in Boston. No living presence intrudes on the scene except the ominous silhouette of a carnivore to be seen at a window. Keith’s background was in the circus and variety programmes but in 1896 he opened the Union Square Theatre in New York and began showing moving pictures licensed from the Lumière Brothers. The business expanded rapidly with theatres in Philadelphia and this one in Boston. Fourteen years after his death in 1914 his name would live on as the K in RKO pictures.

Edward Bawden

2011-06-16T12:48:00.007+01:00

A tiny selection from the compendious output of Edward Bawden – a superbly versatile English illustrator with the lightest of touches. Curiously weightless but never superficial, Bawden’s drawings revealed his delight in the visual world and his immense skill in reducing scenes of great complexity into just a few well chosen lines. A delicate hint of gentle malice and a quality of linear bite were just enough to immunise him from the fatal English affliction of whimsy. For my money he is, by some distance, the greatest of a very talented generation that includes Barnett Freedman, Eric Fraser, Harold Jones, Clifford Webb, Gwen Raverat, Clarke Hutton, Clare Leighton, John Farleigh and John Nash.

Bridges of France

2011-06-13T13:49:00.005+01:00

Postcards with their horizontal format might have been invented for images of bridges. Today’s offering is a selection of Bridges of France in postcard form. There are viaducts, footbridges, turning bridges, lifting bridges, bridges of stone and bridges of iron and steel. Hardcore postcard collectors take bridges very seriously. Geoffrey Goldberg has over 6,000 examples of which a few can be seen here. And, if you want even more then over on flickr, bridgepix is displaying a fine collection.

Union Pacific Overland Route

2011-06-10T14:31:00.004+01:00

This is a fold-out card of the type dismissed by postcard collectors as beyond the pale. But, when they’re good, like this one, they are little packets of visual delight. The ones to avoid are devoted to the dubious pleasures of such places as the Bunga-Bunga Apple Blossom Parkway or the Coypu National Memorial. Until 1963 the Overland Route ran from Omaha to San Francisco and the folder offers portraits of some of the stations encountered en route and some rather dull generic views of outdoor activities, not shown here. Union Pacific is a monster among railroads. Passenger trains ceased in 1971 but as a carrier of freight it remains the largest railroad in the US. Alone among major railroads it has employed the same colour scheme for locomotives since 1934. The favoured colour is known as Armour Yellow having been pioneered by the Armour Meat Company on refrigerated cars. Finally we have two examples of corporate advertising showing some confusion about the demographic.

Paul Hankar (1859-1901)

2011-06-09T16:52:00.007+01:00

This house is best seen in afternoon sunshine when it looks truly resplendent with its imposing height and breadth, enormous twin horseshoe-arched first floor windows and, above all, its startling colour imagery on the façade. It was built on a double plot in 1897 for the artist, Albert Ciamberlani, at 48 rue Defacqz off avenue Louise. Ciamberlani designed the spectacular Symbolist imagery and it was executed in sgraffito (a technique of incising designs in coloured plaster) by artist and poster designer, Adolphe Crespin. The medallions on the entablature represent the Labours of Hercules, set in a frame of decorative urns and sunflower blooms. The circular floral motif is repeated for a third time in the cast-iron balcony rail. The architect was Paul Hankar, a close friend and associate of the better known Victor Horta. Four years later, Hankar’s premature death in 1901 would end his promising career his and only a few examples from his relatively small output survive.

Four years earlier in 1893, Hankar designed and built his own house and studio at 71 rue Defacqz. At the same time, on the next street, the Hôtel Tassel was being constructed to a design by Victor Horta and these two events are often described as the birth of the Art Nouveau house. Hankar’s plan prefigured Horta’s design for his home by dividing the building vertically into a studio and working area on the left and living accommodation on the right. The studio section was formed from rustic stonework on the ground floor with mostly ironwork and glass above. The accommodation section was mainly brick with polychrome window surrounds. Sgraffito decoration, again by Crespin, is present on both sections and the two are unified by sharing common brickwork. Art Nouveau was notable for its brevity but Hankar was spared the painful task of adjusting to a post-Art Nouveau world and never experienced the critical odium that would descend upon the style.

Face in the Crowd

2011-06-08T17:57:00.007+01:00

Chris Mullen has written at Visual Telling of Stories of the travelling band of assorted players and extras that seem to accompany the itinerant postcard photographer. Right on cue they assemble a facsimile of street life in front of the photographer’s tripod, carrying ladders, pushing handcarts, engaging total strangers in animated conversation, admiring their reflections in shop windows, addressing remarks to a wayward child. The contrived effect is often ruined by a passing bonehead who insists on staring directly into the camera lens with feet planted apart and rooted to the spot. This small selection of cards come from occasions when the photographer had no need of this repertory company and feature crowds, posed and unposed – the vastness of the crowd is, in effect, the subject of the picture.

Great Railway Stations Number 5 (Part 2): Antwerpen-Centraal

2011-06-07T12:47:00.007+01:00

The reconstruction of Antwerpen-Centraal station began in 1998 and the extended and enhanced station opened at the end of 2007. The central platforms were removed (leaving six platforms at ground level) and deep excavation left a void large enough to accommodate two new levels of underground platforms, each level having four platforms. The lowest platforms enabled through trains to continue their journey via a newly constructed 2.36 mile rail tunnel under the city from Berchem to the south and Luchtbal to the north where it regains the surface. This epic remodelling of the station has created some thrilling and vertiginous spatial sensations. The subterranean levels are supported by uncluttered geometry that rests comfortably with the Baroque extravagance of the original station. More about the project can be read at the Railway Technology website.

Comparisons with the transformation of St. Pancras are interesting. Both projects involved creating new levels but while Antwerp has preserved clear sightlines of its architectural magnificence, this did not happen at St. Pancras where security and passenger segregation priorities were placed much higher and resulted in more enclosed spaces. The carefully preserved symmetry and open aspect of Antwerp allows a spectator on the concourse to stare down to the very depths of the station. Likewise, even at the lowest level, the concourse façade can be glimpsed in its distant and dizzying splendour. No such experience is available at St. Pancras where an asymmetrical plan was imposed with the Eurostar platforms pushed to the east. Spatial clarity and integration were also sacrificed at St. Pancras by banishing the Midland Mainline services to a basic box bolted on to the north west of the station. The result is that St. Pancras is a fragmented and discontinuous experience that will always lack the brilliant sense of coherence that Antwerp offers.

Cultural contrasts are also on display. St. Pancras reflects two British obsessions – retail and national security. Entering the station, the initial sensation is one of emerging into a glitzy shopping mall, overshadowed by the gruesome Champagne Bar. Locating the Ticket Sales is a serious challenge in an environment of colossal visual confusion. In Antwerp, a city where trading runs as deep in the collective DNA as anywhere, almost all the retail activity is confined to the arcades that run down the flanks of the station. This sort of discretion would once have been typically British – now we must travel abroad to escape the insolent vulgarity of commercial triumphalism.

Each station offers something unique. Extreme Gothic Revival at St. Pancras and the cavernous space of the foyer in Antwerp are rich and unique experiences. But Antwerp would be my preference, not least because it offers easy ground-level access to the city of which it is part via many exits and entrances while St. Pancras seems to exist in a bubble with hideously constrained access via unnecessarily mean spirited entranceways. A new feature length semi-documentary film Antwerpen-Centraal (2011), directed by Belgian film-maker Peter Krüger celebrates the station taking W G Sebald’s book, Austerlitz as a starting point. Follow this link to read more and to view a fascinating piece of time-lapse photography based on the station.

Monkey Brand Redux

2011-06-06T11:16:00.008+01:00

It would be a wonderful thing if Monkey Brand were to reappear on the supermarket shelves if only for the pleasure of watching our mighty brand character shoulder aside today’s feeble examples. When times were good for Monkey Brand our simian friend missed no opportunity to remind the public of his extraordinary powers – full page magazine advertisements and inserts were accompanied by trade cards, of which these are typical examples. He’s a jester, a juggler and the Ancient of Days, all in the service of The World’s Most Marvellous Cleanser and Polisher. Victorian advertisers were notorious for embracing bizarre concepts and one of the most troubling to the present day observer is the use of the unclothed infant form. In this instance the child, in all its chubby innocence, is surrounded by an admiring flock of winged and disembodied monkey heads, introducing us to another singular peculiarity – the hairy angel. The Monkey Brand soap opera has been extensively explored in these pages, most recently, here.

Going Global in Swanage

2011-06-05T15:48:00.005+01:00

The Great Globe can be found perched near the cliff edge in Durlston Country Park near the Dorset resort of Swanage. It was carved in sections out of Portland Stone in 1887 in Greenwich and transported to Dorset by sea. Weighing over 40 tons it is described as one of the largest stone spheres in the world. In 1891 a group of stone slabs were placed around the globe and inscribed with some handy facts about the natural world. Geopolitically it is frozen in the late Victorian era and likely to remain so. It makes an unusual visitor attraction – it possesses no associations with the great and good, it commemorates no historic event, there are no religious or spiritual connotations – all it has is curiosity value. Publishers of postcards found a ready demand for images of the globe and this little group was assembled very quickly with no great effort involved. I went to see it about twenty years ago and will post some photographs when I locate them. It may be time for a return trip – the globe was restored last year.

High Shoals: a Postcard Portrait

2011-05-31T14:47:00.003+01:00

Buying old postcards in bulk lots is an inexpensive way to acquire rubbish but every so often a batch of cards will emerge that sheds light on a place of surpassing obscurity, except for the 729 people who, according to Wikipedia, live in High Shoals, North Carolina. The cards paint a picture of a neat, orderly, pious community with fine vernacular buildings of the type at which Walker Evans directed his camera in the 1930s when on assignment for the WPA. The Baptist and Methodist churches display a pleasing simplicity of design and some expert carpentry. The only significant human presence is at the Cotton Mill where hired hands transfer cotton bales from the horse-drawn vehicles into the mill. High Shoals today seen from Google Earth still looks neat and orderly and surrounded by forest. A little exploration, courtesy of Street View, located an apparently abandoned building on Dallas Road of the same proportions and profile (though with bricked up windows) as the cotton mill on the postcards.

Tour et Taxis

2011-05-27T16:38:00.009+01:00

A favourite book of mine is Industria: Industrial Architecture in Belgium from 1986. It’s mainly a book of superb documentary photographs by Christine Bastin and Jacques Evrard that prioritise the need to record with absolute clarity over personal expression - somewhere between Bernd and Hilla Becher and Walker Evans. There are pit-heads, pumping stations, forges, boat-lifts, paper mills, sugar refineries, tanneries, maltings, kilns and blast furnaces – almost all out of use and unrestored. Prominent among them were photos of a vast complex of canal and rail served bonded warehouse (Entrepôt Royal) and storage facilities in Brussels known as Tour et Taxis (being the Gallicised form of Thurn und Taxis, a German dynasty of entrepreneurs that played a leading role in establishing European postal services) and built mainly between 1903 and 1906. After being finally abandoned in 1987 it presented a serious challenge to conservationists and it was more than a decade before work began to restore and convert the main building for a new use.

The main building, designed by architect, E Van Humbeek, was constructed with a concrete structure on the Hennebiq system to provide 100 storage chambers over four levels with a single rail track to move goods in and out. In its enormous scale it was a perfect expression of Belgian economic power (Belgium was Europe’s fifth largest economy in 1900) and ambition and externally the warehouse was finished to a very high standard and clad in fine brick-work. We must imagine wave after wave of colonial plunder arriving by rail or canal on which excise duty would be levied prior to onward shipment. Additional building were constructed on the site and included a customs office (Hôtel des Douanes) and other substantial warehouses (Halles aux Poissons et Huiles and la Gare Maritime). By 1922 when the entire complex was finally completed there was a power station (Centrale Électrique), an exotic copper domed water tower (Château d’Eau) and a railway station for the exclusive use of employees (la Gare de Service – la Chapelle). At its peak almost 3,000 workers were employed on the site.

The refurbished Entrepôt Royal opened in 2007 and houses fashion and media businesses on the upper levels (to which there is no public access) and celebrity-chef restaurants and bars on the ground floor. There is exhibition and conference space on the lower ground floor. It all looked rather forlorn and relatively deserted on my recent visit – a small number of suits attempting to stride around purposefully and a handful of latte drinkers staring at their iPads. There are probably busier times than a damp Wednesday morning but despite the splendour of the restoration work, a wonderful glazed roof and an invigorating sense of scale, it all seemed lacking in dynamism. If this is, as stated, the vanguard of regeneration then much work needs to be done. The rest of the site still awaits its fate – the master-plan provides for waterfront residential and retail developments on a large scale and a public park but at present it is still possible to wander around and view the other buildings and structures. The station is a semi-ruin after a fire in 1998 but the Gare Maritime is an enormous structure with great potential and does see occasional use for major performances and exhibition. The water tower and power station are buildings of distinction, eclectically styled and finished in Flemish brick and blue Belgian limestone. The regeneration project may turn out to be a future triumph but at present there is a vaguely depressing provisional air about the place that gives little cause for optimism.

Sheet-Metal Memories

2011-05-24T14:49:00.003+01:00

Each time that Bob Dylan, 70 today, passes a milestone there’s a tidal wave of commentary and hagiography. The ten best tracks, the ten worst tracks, the five worst movies, the ten best concerts, the five worst interviews, the ten best cover versions, the five worst put-downs, send him a birthday present, buy him a book, send him a recipe, choose him a tie, boil him an egg, shine his shoes, tell him a joke, paint him a picture, peg out his clothes, wash his car, crawl out of his window. Despite all this I must confess that I’ve been a dedicated follower of the Bob Dylan route-map along the Great American Highway of Song for more than 40 years. The trip passes some familiar landmarks such as Woody Guthrie, the Harry Smith Anthology, the Delta Blues and the world of Gospel, Doo-wop, Bluegrass, Country and Vaudeville and some that are less familiar such as Western Swing, Honkers and Shouters, Brother Bands, Minstrel Shows and Hellfire Preachers. All these threads and more are woven together in his recordings before being taken apart and presented to us in the sublime Theme Time Radio Hour. Railroad trains run through the Dylan songbook on an intensive timetable – if you miss the “D” train the “Double E” or the Danville train won’t be far behind. Or you can take a ride on board the unique “D for Dylan” subway line from the cool clear air of Bear Mountain to the lost souls and insomniacs on Desolation Row.

Postcard of the Day No. 48, Paris, les Guichets du Louvre

2011-05-20T10:13:00.004+01:00

Today we have two postcards based on photographs taken on virtually the same spot, just a few years apart. The location is the great arches through which road traffic passes enroute from place du Carrousel on to the Quai François Mitterand. Two open-top vehicles pass – one with four wheels and eight legs, the other with four wheels and twelve legs. The vehicle on the right has trundled up from Porte de Versailles on the southern fringe of the 15th. arrondissement via rue de Sèvres and passing Saint-Germain des Près on the way. An elegant touch is the provision of colour-co-ordinated teams of horses. In the second card, the stench of dung gives way to the smell of petrol as one of Paris’s first double-decker motor buses heads south through the archway. The bus is a Brillié-Schneider P2 introduced in 1906 and probably travelling from Montmartre to Saint-Germain des Près. These new buses were built by recycling the coachwork from redundant horse-drawn vehicles. The interest in these cards is due to the photographer waiting for the buses to enter the viewfinder before taking the photo – without the buses we would be left with a dull and undistinguished view. Even today there are five RATP bus routes that pass through the arches.

Eric Fraser in Art and Industry

2011-05-19T17:59:00.006+01:00

It’s over three years since my last post on the subject of Eric Fraser. In that time several more relevant items have surfaced including this feature from the magazine, Art and Industry dated May 1937 (Vol. 22, No. 131) written by R Haughton James. Interestingly the writer presents Fraser as a satirist and subversive reminding us that what appears in hindsight to be stylisation might have taken on a very different meaning for the contemporary audience. What is also striking is how an artist, notable for exquisite elegance of line and composition could occasionally produce an image of disturbing crudity. The cover design for Olaf Stapledon’s science-fiction novel of the übermensch, Odd John (1935) falls into that category for me. The latter plus three other examples of Fraser’s work in colour have been gleaned from the pages of various Penrose Annuals.

Old England

2011-05-18T17:36:00.004+01:00

The glass and steel tower of the Old England department store in Brussels is an extraordinary sight with a wealth of intricate decorative detail heavily influenced by Art Nouveau. Occupying an imposing position above the heights of the Mont des Arts, close to the place Royale, it was completed in 1899 to a design by architect Paul Saintenoy (1862-1952). For Saintenoy it represented an astonishing stylistic leap into the future when compared with the Pharmacie Delacre that he designed only a year earlier. The Pharmacie Delacre (below) is a fantasia of Flemish architecture in which traditional forms are given a Gothic twist and piled high in a Romantic accumulation of arches, turrets, spires and dormers – a world away from the assertive modernity of the Old England store. The chain of Old England department stores was founded by a Paris-based Scotsman, James Reid and included branches in Paris, Bordeaux, Geneva and Rome before arriving in Brussels in 1886. Tailoring for gentlemen and supplies of provisions and stationery were the specialities. Business must have been good – within 10 years new, much larger, premises were commissioned and Saintenoy’s shiny new Art Nouveau extravaganza opened in 1900. This was annus mirabilis for Saintenoy who was quick to abandon Art Nouveau in favour of more classical styles. In 1910 he took up a teaching appointment in the Académie Royale des Beaux Arts and his career as a practising architect dwindled to the occasional restoration project and never again approached the achievements of 1898-1900.

The store ceased trading in 1973 by which time local planning laws had obliged the owners to remove much of the decorative ironwork and paint the superstructure in white to conform to the colour code of the place Royale district. After decades of decay the building was purchased by the State to re-house the Musée des Instruments de Musique. Restoration began in 1989 and over the next 10 years the façade was returned to its original condition while internally it was adapted to function as a museum. The Musée des Instruments de Musique finally opened in 2000, the only addition to the façade being the strips of musical notation attached to the balconies.

Saintenoy’s design was basically that of an industrial building with a steel frame, glazing on the front to maximise daylight throughout the store and concrete floors. The seven floors were needed to replace selling space lost when city planners seized part of the site to widen the road. The profile is greatly enhanced by the central cupola flanked by an obelisk and a six-sided turret topped with an extraordinary lantern in wrought iron. Wrapping the steel on the front with sprays and tendrils of organic ironwork, brass and copper detailing and large ceramic panels spelling out the store name made the building stand out from anything else in the area. Compared with Horta’s À l’Innovation store on rue Neuve (1900), that exists only in photographs, having burned down in 1967, Old England appears determined to impress even at the cost of being considered unrestrained and flashy. It is curious that the pre-eminent Art Nouveau building in central Brussels should be the work, not of Victor Horta, acknowledged master of the style or even a lesser light, such as Paul Hankar, but of an architect who experimented in the idiom just once and quickly moved on.

Paris 1937 again

2011-05-16T15:30:00.002+01:00

The Paris exhibition of 1937 has appeared here in the past and today we offer two contemporary graphic efforts to visualise the great event. For Paris this would be the last in a long sequence of international exhibitions going back to 1855 and would conclude on a sour note with the major participants locked in sullen competition while the spirit of international friendship and co-operation lay mortally wounded. It closed in November 1937; in less than two years most of Europe would be at war. These examples understandably attempt to strike an optimistic note employing graphic idioms from the previous decade. The new graphics of the late Thirties reflected the new totalitarianism in harsher, heavier and more rectilinear forms not on show here.

Great Railway Stations Number 5 (Part 1): Antwerpen-Centraal: a Postcard Tour

2011-05-07T15:57:00.003+01:00

In W G Sebald’s book, Austerlitz, the eponymous hero is first encountered in the precincts of this fabulous railway station. The narrator and his new acquaintance, Austerlitz discuss the grandiloquent architecture and recall its origin as an outward expression of the newly emerging colonial power of Belgium at the turn of the twentieth century. There was a pressing need to create a national sense of identity and Léopold II saw the solution in colonial adventures. Wealth extracted from the heart of Africa was lavishly deployed on a number of extravagant imperial projects of which this station was one. The postcard below shows the station building in the final stage of construction – the all-important clock has yet to be installed. Advertising hoardings surround the construction site. Among them is one promoting Lord Lever’s flagship product, Sunlight Soap. In 1911 Lever would visit the Belgian Congo and establish a palm oil processing plant dependant on the easy availability of forced labour, seriously undermining his reputation for philanthropy.

The cast-iron and glass train shed was first to be built between 1895 and 1898 to a design by engineer, Clement van Bogaert. The concourse and foyer were designed by Louis de la Censerie, begun in 1900 and finished in 1905. The prevailing architectural style is idiosyncratic Baroque while the twin design priorities seem to have been scale and decoration. Stone carved scrolls and ribbons, bosses, lions’ heads and swags of fruit and flowers compete for attention, framing the central clock that looks down on the concourse. Beneath the clock is an opulent gilded assemblage of tridents, swords with coiled serpents and cornucopia, overflowing with bounty and treasure. It’s a triumphal statement of wealth and prosperity. In his design de la Censerie took advantage of the elevated position of the train tracks and platforms to create a breathtaking theatrical transition from the concourse to the foyer far below at ground level via massive flights of steps. Standing on the polished marble floor in the foyer the eye can travel upwards, past the four great lantern windows to the full height of the cupola. Physically overwhelmed, the humble traveller is reduced to miniscule proportions by this overarching display of architectural and mercantile power.

The sense of occasion begins as the train approaches the station. For about half a mile the tracks run on a viaduct, flanked by defensive stone walls, punctuated every 10-15 metres by turreted sentry boxes – the impression is that we are arriving at a medieval citadel of power. The postcard supplies a glimpse – the water tower sadly only survives in a stripped down form. Viewed from the city centre and neighbouring streets the station building is a dominant presence and climbs high over its surroundings. Since 2007 the station has no longer been a terminus and passengers on through trains are denied the pleasures of the viaduct as their approach is via a tunnel. Rebuilding the station began in 1998 and the new extended and enhanced station will be the subject of a later post.

Past and Present No. 4: Boerentoren, Antwerp

2011-05-06T16:46:00.004+01:00

When built in 1924 this was Europe’s tallest building and the first to exhibit a classic Manhattan profile. Twenty four floors and a steel frame crowned with an advert for De Beukelaer chicory. Completed less than two decades after the Neo-Baroque extravaganza Station-Centraal it seems to belong to a new era while sharing the same ambition and sense of local pride. Embedded in Antwerp’s eclectic cityscape any initial sense of incongruity has faded as the tower, now named for the KBC bank, has taken on a period air with cuboid caryatids over the main entrance. Shells and a V2 rocket struck the tower during the last war and in 1976 it was extended by an additional two floors. There are more details to be found at emporis.com.

Postcard of the Day No. 47, Adolf Salberg

2011-05-05T12:56:00.004+01:00

Today we have an attractive advertising postcard to publicise the Adolf Salberg chain of shops selling leather and fancy goods to the early 20th. century German consumer. The jewel-like complexity of the display is a fine example of the lost art of window-dressing. Not for the first time, a melancholy note can be detected in the background. In the late 1930s, as the Nazi’s economic war against Germany’s Jews gathered pace, the process of Aryanisation intensified to the point where in 1938-39 Jews were legally compelled to hand over their businesses in return for derisory sums to pure-born members of the master-race. The Salberg business is only one of many hundreds listed by the University of Hamburg that succumbed to Aryanisation in 1938-39.

Pickles Ascendant

2011-05-04T13:42:00.005+01:00

This post is for my old friend and fellow graduate of le Lycée de Métroland, Chris Mullen, who confessed since seeing this to being haunted by a disturbing vision in which the image of the moon in a Japanese wood-block print was replaced by the sinister features of Comrade Pickles. We stand ready to translate nightmares into reality and present a small selection of scenes from the Floating World where an inflated likeness of Comrade Pickles reigns in the heavens and transmits his message of austerity, “Demand of the Shogunate that they desist from unnecessary spending and always pursue value for money. Beware of welfare dependency and welcome the universal credit.” Comrade Pickles has disclosed his adolescent infatuation with the writings of Marx and Trotsky and if there is no more than the most remote chance of him rejoining the revolutionary struggle in his senior years, it is still something to be prayed for.

At Home With Magritte

2011-04-28T16:34:00.003+01:00

This is the staircase that would have confronted René Magritte whenever he entered his Brussels home at 135, rue Esseghem. The Magrittes occupied the ground level rooms and the need to climb the staircase would have been confined to the infrequent occasions when they had cause to visit the attic where they rented storage space. Magritte and his wife, Georgette lived in this house in the unremarkable dormitory suburb of Jette from 1930 to 1954. After 3 years in Paris, navigating, not too successfully, the Surrealist snake-pit presided over by André Breton, it must have been a relief to the Magrittes to sink into the relative anonymity of bourgeois Brussels. Magritte was unmoved by the bohemian charms of a Parisian atelier and preferred to paint in the privacy of his own home. What we are offered here is a curated re-presentation of the Magritte home assembled some 45 years after he had moved out of it. A living room, a tiny bedroom, a studio and a kitchen – all contrived like a set-design to convey an impression of the stuffy middle class conformist lifestyle that the Magrittes preferred.

There is always something odd about prowling around the homes of the famous but long departed. It’s embarrassing to find oneself speculating as to whether those bracers were really responsible for holding Magritte’s trousers up, was that his egg-timer, were those his toe-nail clippers? Authenticity and provenance are all-important in the art world and we struggle in their absence. The two upper floors display a few original artworks and a mass of photographs and memorabilia. The rooms in the apartment give a sense of the claustrophobic conditions in which Magritte lived, worked and entertained. The question that preoccupies so many commentators as to how to resolve the contradiction between the suburban lifestyle and the subversive imagery really seems quite pointless. The contradiction is what defines the artist as much as the pedestrian paint handling by which his vision was realised. Magritte had a parallel career as an unenthusiastic commercial artist and the uncomplicated technique that worked in advertising seemed to work equally well when applied to the bizarre or enigmatic subject matter in his personal artwork. As for painting at the easel while wearing a suit, what better way to express contempt for the absurd Romantic caricature of the picturesquely dishevelled artist immersed in the frantic expression of his genius.

Looking back to the 1960s and those hazy golden days of youth in the ivy-clad quadrangles of the Lycée de Métroland, it was the paintings of Dali and Magritte that captured this schoolboy’s imagination. Cultivating an interest in Surrealism supplied some immunity from the prevailing ethos of militarism exemplified in the strutting and preening of uniformed buffoons, the tin soldiers, cardboard sailors and plastic airmen – decorated heroes of the school Cadet Corps. The last laugh was theirs as they graduated to become merchant bankers and captains of industry. Surrealism as a vital force had by this time expired and was collapsing into the arms of art historians for ritual embalming. The major players were still active – Dali was pioneering the celebrity lifestyle and Magritte, in response to demand from the US, was as productive as ever right up to his death in 1967. In his homeland, the journey to national treasure status had already begun in 1966 when the Belgian airline, Sabena co-opted Magritte’s sky-bird for its publicity. The process of assimilation has gathered pace over the decades up to 2009 when the Musée Magritte opened over three floors in a dedicated wing of the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique at Place Royale. The place of the museum on the tourist trail demonstrates the extent to which Magritte is now a vital element in Belgium’s visitor economy – a curious fate for an enigmatic and contrarian personality.

Great Railway Stations Number 4: Schaerbeek – Schaarbeek

2011-04-22T13:58:00.005+01:00

One of the great unsung architectural treasures in the city of Brussels is the grandiose railway station in the northern suburb of Schaerbeek. The buildings were conceived on a monumental scale in anticipation of passenger traffic that never materialised. Thirteen platforms, ten sales positions in the ticket office and a truly grand building were all completed by 1913 to a design by Franz Seulen. A massive central bay is flanked by two smaller bays, topped with a flared mansard roof surmounted by a bulbous spire inset with oculi. Alongside is another large tower that was first to be constructed. The exotic air is only intensified by the alternating courses of red brick and cream stonework. Traditional Flemish styles appear to be the starting point in design terms and there is, for the period, a notable absence of Beaux-Arts or Neo-Classical detail.

The booking hall interior is restrained with varnished wooden ticket office and a tiled floor with simple geometric decoration. The internal space is cavernous and so little used that in the interests of economy it only opens to the public on weekday mornings. It would seem that the municipal planners were seized by inordinate ambition and commissioned a station on a scale that was totally disproportionate, bequeathing an enormous headache to future generations in terms of conservation. Meanwhile the thirteen platforms and ten ticket positions slumber on, patiently awaiting the phantom travellers of Schaerbeek.

Barnett Freedman and the GPO

2011-04-19T16:13:00.004+01:00

One of the few collecting vices that have not tempted me is the collection of postage stamps. The graphic quality of stamps often display great merit but the general flim-flam that surrounds the activity of stamp collecting could hardly be more off-putting. But I found these the other day and realised they are the work of Barnett Freedman, designed for a royal event in 1935 and apparently rather controversial in their day. The rich and subtle tonal contrasts that Freedman deployed were unappreciated by many commentators to whose eyes they appeared unnecessarily brash and crude. Freedman had a reputation as a perfectionist and was unsparing in his efforts to get everything right and this unenthusiastic reception must have been a disappointment.

Broadcasting House

2011-04-08T14:29:00.004+01:00

When Edward Bawden was invited to design a cover for the BBC Yearbook he populated Portland Place with an orchestra of winged musicians gently descending from the airwaves above bringing joy and enlightenment to the masses gathered below, neatly encapsulating the mission of the BBC as it existed in 1947. Bawden’s slender pen line reduced the monolithic presence of Broadcasting House to a skeletal vestige. The postcard supplies a more substantial vision of the BBC’s great flagship towering over Upper Regent Street complete with Eric Gill sculptures. The building was completed in 1932, only 10 years after the first regular broadcasts and expressed the massive sense of self-confidence typical of the early years of radio. George Val Myer was the architect and brought considerable experience of designing for business and commerce to the project. The Radio Times cover is from 1982 and celebrates 60 years of radio by wittily transforming Broadcasting House into a facsimile of a pre-war Bakelite receiver on the left and a contemporary mixing deck on the right, subtly airbrushed by an unidentified artist.

Barnett Freedman (1901-1958)

2011-04-07T16:51:00.002+01:00

I have always been a great admirer of Barnett Freedman’s graphic work. He developed a very individual approach to the art of the poster and book jacket and he possessed a rare subtlety of touch that enabled him to employ the art of auto-lithography to maximum advantage. Lettering was a passion that inspired highly decorative hand-drawn fonts of his own invention. Much influenced by the teaching of Paul Nash at the Royal College of Art and a later association with the Curwen Press, he had the confidence and ability to tackle a remarkably wide range of graphic assignments from Private Press book illustrations to postage stamps, from biscuit wrappers to London Transport posters. He had the instincts of a master craftsman and was famous for involving himself at every stage of the lithographic process. Unlike most of his contemporaries at Curwen, he drew his own poster designs directly on to the stone. Cheerfully switching between fine art and commercial art, he made no great distinctions between the two activities, being much more concerned to distinguish the good from the bad. Many of his book jacket designs were commissioned by Faber and Faber and must have made fabulous displays in an era when most book buyers couldn’t wait to discard the wrappers in the interests of a homogenous bookshelf. These few examples come from sundry Penrose Annuals and the pages of Signature. The Barnett Freedman Archive can be found at Manchester Metropolitan University.

Two Tins

2011-04-05T16:26:00.003+01:00

Collecting vintage printed tins is an expensive business but these two examples are not among the most sought after despite their decorative character. Each is typical of the decade to which it belongs. The musical still-life is brought to life by an oft-repeated mid-century pictorial device – the swirl of the ticker tape with musical notation. There are ribbons and bows, and crisply contoured instruments making their own music with unstoppable energy. The Carnival Assortment tin is home to a harlequin and partner, stock characters in the repertoire of poster designers of the inter-war decades. French poster artist, Jean d’Ylen introduced these characters in the service of Mackintosh’s in a 1926 poster. A pleasing touch here is the inclusion of a tin within a tin held aloft by the harlequin as he tempts his feminine muse with the delights of Carnival Assortment.

Sacré-Coeur – the architecture of reprisal

2011-03-31T17:55:00.006+01:00

Julian Barnes wrote about Paris in the Guardian last Saturday. Barnes has written extensively on France but sparingly on Paris (preface to Richard Cobb’s Paris and Elsewhere) so this was something for Paris-obsessives to look forward to, despite a lingering impression that Barnes is not a great fan of the city. He correctly advises avoidance of the great pomp and circumstance Parisian monuments and directs the visitor to seek lesser known but more rewarding alternatives. The tiny Montmartre vineyard in rue des Saules is recommended as an alternative to the overbearing religiosity of Sacré-Coeur – a little disappointing – I had hoped that he might divert to somewhere like Barbès-Rochechouart if only for the pleasure of reading this restless and raucous neighbourhood described in Barnes’s supple and felicitous prose.

I share Barnes’s aversion to Paris monumentale (with the single exception of the Tour Eiffel that still works for me as a demented memorial to the Early Machine Age) and the Basilique du Sacré-Coeur is the most obnoxious of them all. In order to escape the magnetic field of this vindictive Romano-Byzantine confection, like Barnes, I would sneak round the back, but my destination would be the water tower in rue du Mont-Cenis. It’s an unpretentious structure, honest and restrained in terms of ornamentation and quietly performing a rather more essential function than its vulgar neighbour.

The tide of visitors that arises from the Métro at Anvers into boulevard de Rochechouart swarms up the steps or funicular primarily to enjoy the panoramic views across the city and get a close-up sight of one of the most prominent features of the Parisian skyline. High visibility, especially in the north-eastern arrondissements (18 – 20) where the roots of the Communard insurrection of 1871 were to be found, was a prime purpose. It was planned to serve as a permanent reminder to the city’s working-class inhabitants of the debt of penitence they owed to the Catholic Church and the property owning class for the events of the Commune. Another theme, one that would be repeated in 1940, was the allocation of blame for defeat at the hands of Prussia in 1870 to the moral permissiveness of the Second Empire. This climate of excess came to be personified in the eyes of moralists in the flamboyant and gilded Charles Garnier Opéra. The Opéra was still under construction when the Commune was crushed in 1871 and one proposal was to demolish the part built structure and replace it with a new cathedral as an act of contrition for the sins of the past. The troubled origins of Sacré-Coeur are of no importance to the crowds who come to stare and this monument to ecclesiastical vengeance has steadily ingratiated itself into Parisian iconography over the decades following its completion in 1914.

Downland Walk

2011-03-28T18:33:00.002+01:00

Farewell to the egregious Comrade Pickles and a change of tone to English pastoral. The western half of the Isle of Wight is thinly populated and especially scenic without ever being spectacular. This is the line of a Downland walk in spring sunshine from west to east along the chalk spine of the Isle of Wight, beginning at Strawberry Lane (near Mottistone Down) and finishing at Snowdrop Lane (near the village of Gatcombe) where we found a Victorian post box in which to deposit our postcards.

Vichy-on-Thames

2011-03-18T12:31:00.005Z

When Britain’s coalition government came to power in May last year its intentions were rather fuzzy apart from the priority it would be giving to eliminating the deficit by imposing draconian cuts on public expenditure. What has since been revealed is that the real project is to bring about the final triumph of organised capital over public provision of services. Substitute organised capital for the Wehrmacht and the parallels with Vichy France are rather striking. Two nations in crisis, each with an untested form of government. Our coalition government, like the Vichy administration, is composed of politicians with a broad spectrum of views, many of whom have unhesitatingly abandoned their most cherished principles. The coalition claims that it has no choice but to follow its austerity policy because of the unprecedented incompetence and irresponsibility of its predecessors. (Mr Clegg, the leading collabo, in a recent interview with Channel 4 News, referred to the “appalling inheritance from Labour” no less than 7 times.) In the same way, Vichy blamed the failure of France to resist the German military advance exclusively on the moral laxity and cowardice of the Third Republic, especially the Popular Front, and claimed that they had no choice but to come to an accommodation with the occupying power. Thus we see how easily and effectively the banks and financial institutions in Britain and the armed forces and military leadership in wartime France were officially absolved of any responsibility for the crises facing their respective countries.

The coalition has embarked upon a cultural assault on the public sector - not simply held up as an example of chronic inefficiency and waste where employees allegedly enjoy higher wages and better working conditions (with gold-plated pensions) than their private sector equivalents but, even more damagingly, as enemies of private enterprise dedicated to obstructing entrepreneurship with red tape of their own devising and by extension, responsible for any failings on the part of British business. The success of this propaganda campaign can be measured by a recent opinion survey finding that 70 per cent of private sector employers would not consider employing a candidate who had previously worked in the public sector. There is, as yet, no proposal to draft former public sector employees into labour camps but it wouldn’t be inconsistent with this narrative.

In Vichy France a similar culture war was underway with the object of undermining any lingering pride in French cultural achievements and inducing a state of mind where the only realistic position was to acknowledge the cultural superiority of the invader. In Britain, business, in the form of any willing provider, is preparing for the ultimate assault on what remains of the public sector after three decades of looting the most profitable elements. The jewel in the crown is the NHS and legislation is on the way to insinuate private enterprise into the service wherever it can abstract value for redistribution into private hands. The most unequal country in Europe in terms of income distribution, social mobility, education, physical and mental health and trust has a government that has turned its back on these problems to pursue policies that are certain to intensify inequality.

How far can we push this analogy with Vichy? Mr Cameron lacks the distinguished military service to make a convincing Marshal Pétain and Mr Clegg is, physically at least, no Pierre Laval. Mr Pickles however, with his glorious history of defending the city of Bradford from the tyranny of Socialism, is an ideal candidate for the role of Pétain. Whether he possesses the vanity to commission 200,000 busts of his remarkable figure (Le Vainquer de Bradford) for display in public buildings, as Pétain did, is something I hope we never find out. It would be interesting to know if even the Vichy régime had a philosopher in its ranks who could match the perverse brilliance of Mr Duncan-Smith when he recently remarked that placing extra cash in the hands of the poor often had the effect of making their lives worse. I suppose that we shouldn’t be surprised that he has not been heard to deploy this argument in the vexed matter of bankers and their bonuses where it might make some sense. It would take the proverbial heart of stone not to be moved by the tortuous utterances of the Quiet Man as he struggles to reconcile an over-sensitive social conscience with a fundamentalist adherence to the sacred principles of free market economics.

Postcard of the Day No. 46, Café d’Harcourt

2011-03-17T12:01:00.006Z

The café at the heart of the Latin Quarter, at Place Sorbonne (47, boulevard Saint-Michel) – it was said to be the first choice with students from the nearby Sorbonne. Café d’Harcourt would come to a sudden end in 1940 soon after the Nazi occupation of Paris. On Armistice Day, 1940 there was an easily suppressed minor revolt by students at the university to which the occupying authorities responded thus – if you’re going to make us feel unwelcome after all we’ve done for you, we will force your favourite café to close and it will reopen as a bookshop specialising in Nazi and collaborationist literature. The new bookshop, opened in 1941 as Librairie Rive-Gauche, had the largest and most palatial premises of any in Paris. It was intended to be on the front-line of the German master-plan for following up their military victory with a cultural blitzkrieg at the end of which a demoralised French intelligentsia would have no choice but to acknowledge the cultural superiority of the occupying power. The project was not a great success – the store quickly gained the reputation of being the most deserted in Paris and it was reported that the only customers ever seen to enter the shop were German officers in uniform. The café never reopened and 47, boulevard Saint-Michel is today a Gap store.

Reference: Frederic Spotts, The Shameful Peace, New Haven, 2008

La Défense, ways of escape

2011-03-16T15:10:00.003Z

La Défense is a fifty year continuing experiment in appeasing Parisian developers who, denied the opportunity to build high rise blocks in the arrondissements, have had the chance to indulge their wildest architectural fantasies on an enormous plot of land carved out of the communes of Puteaux, Courbevoie and Nanterre. Walking through the plazas at La Défense bounded by regiments of tower blocks is an uncomfortable experience. These are bombastic buildings that compete for attention. They express the expansionist and controlling ambitions of their corporate masters and diminish their occupants to microbial proportions. As for the public whose misfortune it is to circulate in the surrounding spaces, their fate is to be battered by aerial turbulence and blinded by dust storms. For myself, thoughts of escape preoccupy the mind. It’s not so easy to achieve – directional signs are calculated to dispatch pedestrians along pre-ordained paths but by wandering off-piste there are some avenues of escape to be found. Search for the under-used back road out of Faubourg de l’Arche to the hinterland of Nanterre and you’ll find a quiet space of deserted roadways and little used railway tracks bounded by rampant invasive plant growth. From here you can enjoy the views they don’t want you to see. The carefully planned vistas, designed to impress and intimidate are nowhere to be seen. In their place is a gloriously untidy, uncoordinated patchwork of structures wedged together like a clumsy exercise in assemblage.

Postcard of the Night No. 6, Berlin bei Nacht

2011-03-15T12:57:00.003Z

Echoes of Berlin’s dark past are never far from the surface of these images. This is the Askanischer Platz with the Anhalter-Bahnhof on the right and Hotel Excelsior on the left. There’s a newspaper kiosk and illuminated advertising columns and a solitary shadowy figure – the best estimate is that we are looking at the late 1920s, the last years of the Weimar Republic. The Anhalter was then Europe’s largest station and the Excelsior was Europe’s largest hotel – the two were connected by a pedestrian tunnel that must have run beneath this scene. There’s an air of desolation tinged with menace, an island of lost souls. Worse, much worse days would follow. A decade later almost 10,000 Jewish deportees began their dreadful final journey to Theresienstadt and almost certain death from the Anhalter-Bahnhof between 1941 and 1945. The Anhalter was all but destroyed in the battle for Berlin but continued in patched-up form to serve destinations in Soviet-controlled East Germany until final closure in 1952 followed by demolition in 1960. Only the central portion of the station façade remains in place while nearby there is a display dedicated to the memory of the Jewish victims of the Third Reich. Finally we have a link to an interesting 1927 film of a train approaching and arriving in the cavernous space of the Anhalter-Bahnhof.

Postcard of the Day No. 45, Luna Park, Porte Maillot

2011-03-14T18:29:00.004Z

Paris had its very own Luna Park with a wide range of bizarre attractions for more than twenty years until its demise in 1931. It was to be found at Porte Maillot on the voie triomphale between l’Étoile and the Pont de Neuilly. In Raymond Queneau’s novel, Loin de Reuil (1944) the hero exits the Métro at Porte Maillot and bumps into an ex-girlfriend outside Luna Park before dashing off to catch a tram to Reuil. Queneau’s fiction is often deliberately vague about timing and this suggests that Loin de Reuil was set in an era more than a decade before it appeared in print. The card below shows a steam tram at Porte Maillot of the type that might have transported Queneau’s character to Reuil. Porte Maillot today would be an unrewarding destination for anyone in search of distraction. Angry streams of vehicles scream up the exit ramps from the Périphérique and do mortal combat with the traffic on the voie triomphale in the shadow of the massive and depressing Palais des Congrès and a towering hotel behind it.

State Lines

2011-03-11T10:13:00.005Z

Two postcards that feature communities divided by state lines. Above is a classic main street view with a difference. In the city of Bristol the line between Virginia and Tennessee runs down the middle of the main shopping street creating two Bristols that coexist side by side in their separate domains. A symbolic elevated sign spans the street in the distance and celebrates the anomaly. It was on this very street in 1927 that Ralph Peer rented rooms and made pioneering recordings featuring little known Appalachian performers (including the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers) that would catapult country music into the commercial mainstream. A 5 disc box set of the entire Bristol Sessions will be available soon in a luxurious Bear Family package at a very serious price. Texarkana (below) is likewise divided into twin cities but if you want to stay in Texas, you’ll have to take your chances at the Hotel Grim. R.E.M. recorded a song titled Texarkana on their 1991 album, Out of Time – any connection between the lyrics and the city of the same name remains a mystery. In the imagination of science-fiction writer, Walter M Miller, Texarkana was elevated in status to one of the two most important centres of population on planet Earth in the third millennium – sadly, in a blow to local pride, Miller later arranged for the city to be obliterated in a fictional nuclear attack (A Canticle for Leibowitz, 1960).

To the Frontier

2011-03-10T10:38:00.004Z

Today’s postcard exploration of lines drawn on maps looks at the United States and its neighbours to north and south. The first postcard is a view from the Mexican side in the era of Prohibition and has been helpfully annotated by the sender to indicate the availability of alcohol. In 1940s film noir, the Mexican border was the first destination of many an anti-hero looking to keep one step ahead of the law. An image of a fugitive Robert Mitchum springs to mind, hat tipped down over his eyes, hands gripping the steering wheel, scattering flocks of sheep on the dirt roads leading south to yet another seedy hotel room and a femme fatale with an exotic Latin flavour. Two further cards show border crossings between El Paso, Texas and Juarez as they appeared in less contentious times, decades before Juarez would acquire the infamy that inspired Roberto Bolaño’s fictional re-creation in the dark and dreadful pages of 2666.

The last card is a masterpiece of vagueness and anonymity. The US – Canada border runs for 5525 miles making it the longest in the world. There are 122 controlled border crossings of which this card shows just one. The image is an epic of passivity and given the generic and featureless quality of both landscape and buildings there seems little possibility of identification. In the universe of linen postcards where reality is never less than two steps removed, it all makes perfect sense.

With Eric Rohmer in Parc des Buttes-Chaumont

2011-03-08T16:40:00.005Z

Eric Rohmer’s films sharply divide critical opinion. Those with a taste for leisurely exposition, extended dialogues and philosophical complexity find much to commend. Others find them to be without equal when it comes to pretentious tedium. I can see both sides of this but the visual quality is the one I most appreciate - the sense of place and the curious intensity of observation in the way the camera is directed to record and scrutinise the surface of reality.

When filming La femme de l’aviateur in 1982, Rohmer selected the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont as the scene for the central encounter between the naive and emotionally confused twenty-something François and the precociously self-assured, articulate and animated fifteen year-old Lucie. François follows the aviator (with whom he suspects his girlfriend is deceiving him) and his female companion from Gare de l’Est to rue La Fayette where the three of them board an eastbound 26 bus. Unnoticed by François, Lucie also got on the bus and in order to keep the aviator under observation he moves to a seat opposite her. All four leave the bus at the Botzaris entrance to the park where Lucie and François collide with one another and strike up a conversation. What follows is a comedy of errors in which François, desperate not to disclose the secret object of his pursuit, tells his new companion an elaborate sequence of contradictory untruths.

The orbital meandering pathways in the park mirror the convoluted dialogue that results from François’s obfuscations. As his subterfuges unravel under Lucie’s spirited cross-examination she becomes his accomplice and takes the lead after they exit the park on to the rue Armand-Carrel and follow their target to the nearby office of a lawyer. Lucie weaves a web of deceit that in terms of invention easily surpasses the modest efforts of François. They sit at a café table in an attempt to maintain observation on their target where Lucie continues to baffle and befuddle the increasingly exhausted François to the point where he simply falls asleep. The film concludes with an interminable exchange between François and his neurotic girlfriend, Anne, that feels like the very worst of Rohmer and comes as a serious disappointment.

Rohmer’s fascination with Buttes-Chaumont began in 1964 when he made a short film of 13 minutes, Nadja à Paris in which the camera of Nestor Almendros follows a young overseas student across Paris as she exchanges the superficial pretensions of Saint-Germain des Près for the dependable working-class values of Belleville and the peace of the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont. The brief scene in the park is soon after the start of the second section of the film. There’s a melancholy epilogue of tragedy and unfulfilled promise to La femme de l’aviateur. Of the two young actors at the centre of the drama, Philippe Marlaud (François) would be killed in a campsite fire less than 6 months after the premiere and Anne-Laure Meury (Lucie) would go on to appear in no more than handful of movies (including another for Rohmer) before virtually disappearing from view in 1989.

Finally, my thanks go to Chris Mullen who brought this to my attention.

Parc Monceau

2011-03-06T12:55:00.006Z

Despite the genteel air of the haute bourgeoisie that hovers over the sunlit lawns, the dark shadow of hidden history falls across the Parc Monceau, one of many Parisian open spaces drenched in the blood of slaughtered Communards when the dream of a workers’ republic disintegrated in la semaine sanglante in late May 1871. For Claude Monet it was a short walk north along boulevard Malesherbes from Gare Saint-Lazare in search of a new subject. Monet would paint about 5 canvases in Parc Monceau between 1876 and 1878 at a time when he was relocating from the suburban tranquility of Argenteuil to the Quartier de l’Europe. The verdant acres of Monceau made a pastoral counterpoint to the smoke and steam that preoccupied the artist at nearby Gare Saint-Lazare.

The main entrance to Parc Monceau is on boulevard Courcelles and notable for the classical rotunda designed by Claude Nicolas Ledoux (1736-1806). Originally built around 1785 as the Rotonde de Chartres for the collection of taxes, it formed part of the infamous and much resented Wall of the Farmers-General constructed between 1784 and 1791. The Wall was the brainchild of Louis XIV and encircled Paris to enable taxes to be collected on goods and produce as they entered the city. Prior to the Revolution the park had been the plaything of Philippe d’Orleans (Duc de Chartres) for whom it was constructed in an informal English-style complete with a Masonic pyramid and ruined Corinthian pillars.

In the aftermath of the Revolution the park passed into public ownership in 1793 but was only incorporated into the City of Paris in 1860 at the instigation of Haussmann. Half of the park was sold off for redevelopment and the remainder was remodelled by Jean-Charles Alphand (1817-91) in 1860-61 before opening to the public. The surrounding streets have a quiet aura of privilege and there remains a touch of grace and favour – six private residences bordering on the park retain their own access.

For all this the park is a fascinating place to explore with its gilded gates, sculptures of Chopin, de Musset, Gounod and de Maupassant, and Corinthian colonnade artfully distressed and reflected in the waters of the Naumachie pool. This item began with an episode of political violence and concludes with an episode of cinematic violence. The climactic rendezvous in the 2006 French film, Ne le dis à personne (Tell no one) was filmed in Parc Monceau in accordance with the Hitchcock doctrine that nothing increases dramatic tension as much as an unremarkable and unthreatening setting. The camera pans back and forth across a scene of unexceptional normality as the hapless hero prepares to meet the wife he has believed to be dead for ten years. The film clip happily ends before the violence turns truly nasty.

Paris Past and Present: Boulevard Raspail

2011-02-28T17:22:00.002Z

It was a long walk up boulevard Raspail from Montparnasse in search of this rather anonymous street corner. With few landmarks to go by, it was located more by good fortune than skill. The balconies and cornices confirm where we are – the intersection with rue de Grenelle. The shop premises of D Coute have been replaced by a Renault boutique car showroom and over the years the street level building has been homogenised by the elimination of architectural details. Several trees appear to have survived since the card was posted in 1926.

Buttes-Chaumont – the Permanent Way

2011-02-17T15:55:00.004Z

This postcard view has been taken from the southern heights of the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont. Today these slopes are densely wooded and this view is unobtainable. The railway is the Petite Ceinture, the long defunct Parisian orbital railway that runs through the eastern flank of the park enabling us to unite two obsessions in a single posting. The photographer is standing on top of the Tunnel de Belleville from which the tracks run north and leave the park at the point where the road bridge carrying the rue de Crimée travels overhead. The eastern boundary fence in the park has been breached and offers one of the easiest access points on to the trackbed of the Petite Ceinture. This writer is routinely mocked by friends and family for an aversion to any activity that might be construed, however remotely, as unauthorised so this was a major step in more ways than one. Which is how these photographs came to be taken.

La promenade est interdite sur la Petite Ceinture, comme pour toute voie ferrée appartenant au réseau national. L’alinéa 5 de l’article 73 du décret n° 730 du 22 mars 1942, modifié par le décret n° 69-601 du 10 juin 1969, portant règlement d’administration publique sur la police la sûreté et l’exploitation des voies ferrées d’intérêt général et d’intérêt local (J.O du 23 août 1942) stipule qu’ "il est défendu à toute personne de pénétrer, circuler ou stationner, sans autorisation régulière, dans les parties de la voie ferrée, ou de ses dépendances qui ne sont pas affectées à la circulation publique, d’y introduire des animaux ou d’y laisser introduire ceux dont elle est responsable, d’y faire circuler ou stationner aucun véhicule étranger au service, d’y jeter ou déposer des matériaux ou objets quelconques, d’entrer dans l’enceinte du chemin de fer ou d’en sortir par d’autres issues que celles affectées à cet usage.

Down on the hallowed ground of the Petite Ceinture, having transgressed line 5 of article 73 of decree 730 of March 22nd 1942, modified by decree 69-601 of June 10th 1969, it all looks very well cared for. The ballast has been renewed and is free of weeds while the tracks themselves show little evidence of rust formation. The railway emerges from the tunnel to the south into a cutting, the west side of which is buttressed by a brick built wall with alcoves adapted by rough sleepers using outsize plastic groundsheets to provide shelter and privacy. To the north where the tracks run underneath rue de Crimée, a branch that formerly served the abattoirs at La Villette diverges to the right. Some hardcore urban explorers were already present at the mouth of the tunnel engaged on a project of their own. Ignoring them in time-honoured fashion I walked north for a few hundred yards taking photographs before a deep seated fear of authority warned me the time to retreat was at hand.

Lost Berliners

2011-02-15T18:52:00.003Z

Yesterday’s postcard makes a second appearance in a remixed form. Chance placed these Berliners in front of the camera lens and preserved the lightest of reflections of their individual identities. Their lives have been and gone while their refracted images persist with no link or connection to the historical record. They converged, they dispersed and scattered but for an instant they combined in this heroic tribute to the urban experience.

Postcard of the Day No. 44, Unter den Linden

2011-02-14T11:41:00.003Z

A gathering of servants and nursemaids has taken possession of the seating under the shade of the lime trees that line the centre strip - a tiny fragment from the lost details of daily life miraculously preserved. An image of maternal domesticity from the postcard universe.

An implacable uniformed chauffeur pilots a gleaming automobile, the squished-up features of his passenger can be seen in the window behind. The polished brass-work catches the sun. A limousine passes in the opposite direction and the camera records top hat turning to speak to bowler hat.

Astonishingly the two images coexist in the same postcard space in a masterpiece of street photography. Two worlds that almost collide – the world of baby milk and talcum powder and the world of gasoline, carbon monoxide, pressed steel and solid rubber tyres. The sound and fury of the modern metropolis invades every millimetre of the card with stunning immediacy.

H M Brock goes Deutsch

2011-02-13T16:57:00.003Z

Today we revisit the work of prolific English illustrator Henry Brock, once again in instructional mode. Three examples of German Picture Cards with German language questions on the reverse to test comprehension. Brock has great fun with the rustic costumes, paramilitary uniforms and bulging stomachs of Prussian stereotypes. His drawings are so lively and effortlessly precise – boots and shoes are described to perfection and every figure firmly located in its own space.

Across the Borderline

2011-02-11T14:19:00.002Z

For the postcard publisher it often seems that no location is too mundane – for which we should all give thanks. This border post between France and Italy has no great notoriety and has been here at Pont Saint-Louis since 1860. In the world of fiction the border crossing is a regular standby – a place of intrigue where forged documents are presented and contraband is smuggled. Romantic separations, fugitives from justice, espionage artists – there’s room for all here. Inside the EU (and away from the British Isles where frontier paranoia runs at a high level) crossings are, like this one is now, often unstaffed and vehicle movements are completely unchecked. Curiously when travelling by train between France and Italy, passports are inspected with cold-eyed scrutiny by stone-faced officials from both countries. Presumably research into terrorist profiles has unearthed a preference for rail travel on the part of subversives and insurgents.