Minefield of Memory

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)

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!

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

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

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

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

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.