Great Railway Stations No. 13: Gare de Lens

Coal mining was the major activity for over a century in the medium sized town of Lens in Northern France but none of it remains today. Like many similar towns and cities in Britain it has struggled to find a new role for itself. In an effort to attract tourism, an annex of the Louvre (Louvre-Lens) opened in 2012. The gallery displays a selection of artworks brought from Paris for a provincial vacation. Visitor numbers have fallen from 900,000 in the first year to 450,000 in 2017 which suggests the Bilbao-effect is fading fast. Some of these visitors will have arrived by train in which case it’s to be hoped they had a good look at the station buildings or they would have missed one of France’s most distinctive and eccentric station buildings.

The present Gare de Lens was designed and built 1926-27 by architect, Urbain Cassan (1890 - 1979). Cassan also designed stations for Senlis, Brest and Saint-Quentin and later was involved in the design for the Tour Montparnasse (1973). For Lens, Cassan came up with a plan said to be inspired by the shape of a steam locomotive boiler in which the rounded arches represent the wheels and a tower to represent the funnel. The concourse and booking hall was decorated on all four walls with mosaic panels that portrayed the local industry, coal mining and the miners who extracted the coal in stylised pictorial form. They were the work of Auguste Labouret (1871-1964). Labouret was principally a stained glass artist with a reputation for the sensitive restoration of church stained glass. But he often worked on railway stations, among others, Saint Quentin (also designed by Cassan), Lyon and Gare Saint-Lazare.

Each decorative panel is about 1.5m in height, extending to almost the full width of the station interior. Over the ticket windows we see colliery winding gear and associated industrial buildings in a modified Cubist idiom. Another panel is flanked by grim-faced miners, shouldering pick-axes and gripping miners’ lamps against a backdrop of pit-heads, slag heaps and smoking chimneys. The third panel is a landscape of bridges and factory buildings with cargo ships and tugs. The final panel (and the one that greets the arriving passenger) continues and develops the communication theme, pipes and tubes, telegraph wires to one side – on the other a massive steam locomotive powers its way into the composition. The installation appears to be made with standard-size tiles, some of which are laid intact, though most are fragmented to a greater or lesser degree. The colour scheme is a muted harmony of blacks, whites, greys and brown.

The station buildings and the tower are all rendered and painted white with decorative patterned concrete mouldings. The Art Deco-inspired window frames are formed of slender, geometric glazing bars, painted in red. A Deco-styled font was used for the original cast iron signage on the platform. To see the resemblance to a steam engine requires a little imaginative effort but it remains a splendid conceit and the only scheme where Cassan attempted anything like it. To their credit, SNCF maintain the building in first class condition.

Postcard of the Day No. 93 – Panorama du Carrefour du Châtelet

Gridlock by the banks of the Seine, conflicting traffic flows observed from above. Horse drawn vehicles and open-top limousines compete for road space while Parisians circulate at will, oblivious to the confusion. Seen from on high, interlocked vehicles form a pleasing abstract composition but there’s little of the extreme visual drama that Soviet photographer, Rodchenko obtained from his vertiginous photos of Moscow trams. Meanwhile in Chicago, below, we have another spectacular vision of traffic mayhem – overloaded trucks and columns of streetcars jostle for position. Mounted police officers observe but don’t intervene – pedestrians cluster on the street corners, few are brave enough to take their chances in the traffic.

Villa Cavrois

Villa Cavrois is what can result when wealth and status consciousness meet invention and ambition. Paul Cavrois had accumulated his fortune in the textile industry and was looking for a family home on a scale that reflected his success in business. Cavrois felt a need to distinguish himself from his fellow plutocrats and was open to a contemporary design. The work of Robert Mallet-Stevens was known to him from seeing his contributions to the 1925 Exposition des Arts Décoratifs and the publicity arising from his designs for ultra-fashionable clients, Paul Poiret (fashion designer) and avant-garde patron, Vicomte de Noailles. Cavrois owned a large vacant plot in an upper class suburb of Roubaix and in 1929 (just months before the Wall Street Crash) commissioned Mallet-Stevens to design a large scale family home in a Modernist idiom.

When the house was completed in 1932 the Cavrois family moved into a remarkably spacious home in which almost every piece of furniture and every aspect of internal decoration was the work of the architect, Mallet-Stevens. The Cavrois fortune comfortably absorbed all the extra cost of purpose-built furnishings in return for a bespoke dwelling in which no detail, from light fitting to door handle or from radiator covers to wall clocks was left to chance. Modernism without excessive formal purity was the result - the harshness and doctrinaire control associated with the movement was neatly sidestepped. For the occupants there was the excitement of living in a home like no other surrounded by elegance and comfort, all wrapped up in sweeping, curving forms influenced by Art Deco. Mallet-Stevens designed a system of stretched yellow bricks, adaptable to concave and convex curves, lintels and corners, and laid exclusively on the stretcher side. The inspiration for this came from Dudok’s recently completed Raadhuis Hilversum.

The Art Deco influence on the exterior can be seen in the cylindrical belvedere tower and the extended sun decks – internally the chromed fixtures and fittings and the proliferation of circular forms continue the theme. The Cavrois appetite for Modernism didn’t run to paintings and sculpture, there are few artworks on the walls in period photos, but Mallet-Stevens themed several of the major rooms around aspects of Modernist painting. In what is described as the Young Man’s Room, the interaction of flat-painted geometric panels and forms resembles the abstract compositions of De Stijl. Unsurprising, given we know that Mallet-Stevens collaborated with Theo Van Doesburg on an earlier project. In the dressing room for the lady of the house, strong curved forms in the chairs, mantelpiece and mirror counterpoint the linear geometry elsewhere to give a Cubist feel to the room. At the centre of the house is a duplex sitting room with double height glass doors on to the sun terrace. The luxurious orange marble fireplace is equivalent to the onyx wall in the contemporary Villa Tugendhat by Mies van der Rohe.

During the war, the Villa Cavrois was requisitioned by the Wehrmacht whose heavy presence caused immense damage. When the family regained possession they commissioned a complete and conservative redesign of the interior which remained in place until the death of the last family member in 1986. At this point it fell into the hands of developers whose intention was to divide the grounds into individual plots. Various attempts to give the building legal protection were frustrated by the developer until a Prime Ministerial decree settled the matter. The developer responded in the time honoured way by allowing the building to deteriorate through vandalism. After a prolonged local campaign, the French state bought the Villa in 2001 – it was opened to the public in 2012 after 10 years of restoration to original condition.

Animal Intelligence

There’s much speculation around about the rise of artificial intelligence and its potential to eclipse the human variety. But we could be looking in the wrong direction if these images are anything to go by. It would be much more alarming if animal intelligence were to make a sudden evolutionary leap, leaving humanity far behind. Perhaps the best we could look forward to is domestication in the service of a new breed of super-dogs, at whose feet we may be permitted to lie for as long as we are able to maintain the necessary level of servile ingratiation. These illustrations for children from a book titled Clever Animals, offer sentimentality and cruelty in equal measure as the subjects are forced into demeaning costumes or made to perform ridiculous tasks. Despite which they contain the occasional sly touch of incongruity inserted by the artist, intentionally or otherwise.

Jacob’s Crackers

The brand name Jacob’s can be seen on every UK supermarket shelves but its independent corporate existence ended as far back as 1960 when it became part of Associated Biscuits. Since then it has tumbled around in the capitalist vortex, forever changing hands as the disciplines of the market dictate. It remains a part of United Biscuits, itself since 2014 part of Pladis, owned by Turkey-based Yildiz Holdings. The story won’t end there – in August it was reported that Pladis was looking for a buyer to take it off its hands.

Eaten on its own, the Cream Cracker will instantly absorb the consumer’s saliva, leaving them with the problem of how to deal with the arid, pulpy mass that occupies the oral cavity. The addition of butter, cheese or spreads makes it palatable and it has its devotees, especially in Britain and some of its former colonies in North America, Southeast Asia and South Africa. The rest of the planet seems unmoved by its charms. Without the Cream Cracker it’s unlikely that the Jacob’s brand would have survived as long as it has.

These examples of Jacob’s advertising are from the 1930s to the 1950s and display a preference for the use of children as diminutive brand ambassadors. Pert and winsome juveniles can always be relied upon to unlock consumer resistance. Since 1910 Chloe Preston had been charming her audience with a series of illustrated books for children, featuring a cast of simpering super-cute infants known as Peek-a-Boos. So she was an obvious choice to produce a pictorial Alphabet for Children in which Peek-a-Boos encourage the junior consumer to sample the entire range of Jacob’s biscuits – each with their merits declaimed in alphabetical order.