Some Victorian Steel Engraving

Victorian printing technology steadily advanced through the 19th. century towards the ultimate goal of mass production of photographic imagery.  Along the way the process of printing from engraved imagery on steel plates was constantly refined and improved.  Engraving specialists were kept busy by the demands of mass circulation magazines (The Graphic, Illustrated London News, The Sketch, Punch) for new material to entertain the readers. Pictorial representations of current events, portraits of the great and the good, celebrity portraits and cartoons were especially in demand. Another army of engravers were preparing print versions of critically approved paintings  as shown in Royal Academy exhibitions to enable the rising middle classes to display their taste for the visual arts on the walls of their own homes.  Even more were engaged on topographical subjects - scarcely a manor house, ruined abbey or castle, riverbank, forest, lake, moorland or mountain went unrecorded. There was an affordable prospect for every affluent customer.  The finest of these practitioners achieved spectacular effects in terms of describing detail and creating subtle and dramatic tonal effects through the precision of their mark making.  Reproducing engineering drawings was a highly specialist skill requiring perfect clarity of visual description - this is a section of examples taken from the plates of various encyclopaedias.  They offer impressively analytical images of new applications of steam power and increasingly complex machine technology. Starting with the printing industry, the application of steam in shipping and railways, the selection is completed with a variety of mechanical wood saws. Admire the delicate subtleties of tone, the impersonal drawing and the complete absence of visual rhetoric. 

 

John Hassall - Poster King

John Hassall is having a moment.  There’s a comprehensive exhibition of his work at the Heath Robinson Museum in Pinner (ending on August 29) accompanied by a new book, The Life and Art of the Poster King by Lucinda Gosling (Unicorn, 2021).  This recognition is long overdue - there has been a persistent reluctance on the part of museums to exhibit the work of graphic artists whose output fell, for the most part into the category of what used to be called commercial art.  The sense that the association of art and advertising is unworthy of close study never quite goes away, along with the gulf in status between Fine Art (engages the higher faculties) and Advertising Art (vaguely disreputable, appeals to the coarser instincts). Curiously as state patronage of the arts declines the art world has been forced into an ever closer funding relationship with the world of business and finance whose tolerance for sponsoring work that questions their activities often wears thin resulting in hidden pressures to focus on work that more closely aligns with corporate interests.  In this context the straightforwardly transactional nature of the work of artists like Hassall can seem less compromised.

The book is superb - the author has unearthed some rarely seen items and chosen to display in depth rather than showcase prime (and often over-familiar) examples. The selection of thumbnail images is generous and judicious and gives a much better impression of the range of Hassall’s output than I’ve ever seen before. Two column text blocks and visual material are well balanced and make for clarity of design. Pictorial boards, illustrated endpapers and a stitched-in bookmark make an excellent package and the absence of a dust-wrapper is something to celebrate.  Hassall’s productivity was a match for Tom Purvis and some of his drawing has the toughness and muscularity of that of Purvis.

Hassall produced all the artwork for this colouring book for children in support of the Belgian Relief Fund in 1914.  The Belgian nation has never been so popular with the British public as it was in the first year of the Great War.  An intensive propaganda campaign in the popular press, demonising the German invaders for the ruthless cruelty inflicted on the civilian population created a great wave of public sympathy, of which this publication was one manifestation.  It is striking to see the extent to which it combined philanthropy with commercial interests - every page had a business sponsor whose consumer products were publicised in Hassall’s drawings in the hope that their virtues would be embedded in young minds as their clumsy brushwork stuttered across the page.  It was presented as an alphabetic sequence with accompanying versification.  Allusions to military campaigns can be found but for the most part the patriotic note is one of restraint.  Given the audience, images of children predominate and the war is very much off stage. None are especially memorable with the possible exception of the sturdy British youth who poses defiantly in his Pesco underwear with hairbrush at the ready, fully prepared to die for King and Country.

 

Der Pott, Industriekultur im Ruhrgebiet

A massive block of a book - 640 pages of colour photographs of heavy industry in the Ruhr, mostly relics of the past but a few from the present.  Deindustrialisation wiped out an enormous amount of industrial structures in the region. Some of the more viable plant was exported to China but much of what remained was repurposed as spectacular heritage visitor attractions. More than 70 sites have been combined into a 400 kilometre heritage trail that reaches from Duisburg in the east to Hamm in the west.  Co-ordinating the scheme depended on a level of regional organisation that seems to be impossible in Britain where such sites are numerous but rarely work together.  Another factor that is less common in Germany is the British tendency to eliminate all traces of defunct industrial activity at the earliest opportunity. In part this reflects the shortage of development land in Britain and a pattern of land ownership that is always looking to extract maximum value from land assets. The same forces are at work in Germany but they are subject to stronger regulation in terms of public interest.

There’s long been a sense in Britain that industrial relics are intrinsically unsightly and unworthy of preservation and often the best examples get swept away with the worst.  In the north-east of England an enormous amount of industrial heritage was lost after the deindustrialisation of the region in the 60s and 70s as the ship yards, coal mines and steel works disappeared - it was left to Beamish Museum to salvage what it could but a regionally planned scheme would have been much more comprehensive.  It sometimes felt as if a Ground Zero policy was unofficially sanctioned as if removing the visual evidence of past industry would smooth the transition to a post-industrial future of low-wage insecure employment by breaking the links with lost occupations and the cultural traditions that sustained them.  It’s a process that still goes on - the Mayor of Tees Valley recently posed with indecent pride in front of the closed steelworks at Redcar and proudly announced its total demolition, having rejected all proposals for preservation as a visitor attraction.  The need for regeneration land is held to be paramount despite the vast amount that already exists.

Back to the book - each section has a map or plan, some historic images and explanatory text in English (as well as German and French). Stylistically the photography is primarily intended to record but without the studied neutrality of tone and compositional uniformity found in the work of Bernd and Hilla Becher.  There’s a sense of frontality emphasised by rigorous perspective correction. An interesting comparison is with the photographs of Albert Renger-Patzsch who recorded several of these sites soon after construction in pristine condition before the stresses of intensive operation and the ravages of fire, water, steam and oxidisation brought them to their present state.  Photographs make clear the tension that exists between the architecture of industrial buildings (admin blocks, pit-head enclosures, turbine halls) and the anti-architecture of industrial structures (blast furnaces, smelters, coke ovens, gas tanks, overhead conveyors, cooling towers).  While the buildings are often sensitively proportioned and detailed to incorporate contemporary idioms (Jugendstil, Gründerzeit, Brick Gothic), the industrial plant, despite being meticulously planned in terms of operational requirements, often has an improvisational, bricolage-like appearance, as if random forms have been welded together, as much in hope as expectation.  Functionality is the only consideration whereas architects like to set their sights on higher things in the pursuit of artistic expression. 

So what’s the appeal of the industrial landscape - why is it endlessly fascinating for some while others respond with indifference or outright hostility? Mine is the last generation to be born and raised in a world where the industrial landscape was commonplace, especially so in the north-east where I lived.  Every journey to and from school would pass collieries, shipyards and factories - an unceasing spectacle where welding torches flashed in smoke filled gloom while overhead cranes and hoists propelled massive components in a display of perpetual motion. Pit-head winding gear could be seen spinning at speed, hauling cage-loads of coal to the surface where it was washed, graded and tipped into railway wagons around the clock.  All this industrial activity was so deeply embedded into the locality that to the eyes of a child it seemed it would continue unchanged, for ever.  This is the power of the industrial sublime - to induce nostalgia for jobs that were massively physically demanding and ruinous to health in an environment where water courses were lethally polluted, where the sea was stained charcoal grey from colliery waste and the air quality was laden with toxic fumes. Despite this, displaced industrial workers can often be heard waxing lyrical on the lost camaraderie of the workplace where unions enjoyed 100% support and stood together to resist management’s unreasonable demands. They often recall taking pride in the finished article as the embodiment of their skills and expertise. The continuing appeal of the industrial landscape has cultural, social and aesthetic elements of which the last may prove the most enduring - there’s nothing else in the man-made environment that’s left behind so many extraordinary physical structures enhanced by the patina of ageing and replete with formal repetition wrapped in complex networks of contrasting forms (tubes, cones, pipes, cylinders, grids, filters) on such a vast scale.

See also:

Gelsenkirchen 1914

Past and Present No. 10: Henrichenburg Schiffshebewerk

Ruhrgebiet in Close-up

Margaretenhöhe - refuge from dystopia

Essen Zollverein

 

Motor Wonders

This Thomas Nelson gift book for children dates from 1924 and has a remarkably vibrant set of colour illustrations. The definition of a motor is extended to include any form of transport from motor cycles to zeppelins or battleships to fire appliances, that involves internal combustion.  They are pictures from a perfect world from which all the random untidiness of the streetscene has been removed.  While the sun shines on every scene the technology on display is the most advanced of its time.  It was a time when there was a much less complicated relationship with the idea of progress and continuous improvement.  Calculating the full environmental costs of new technologies has undermined public expectations of a future of endless advance to the frontiers of science.  On the cover is an illustration signed by Hugh Williams and some of those inside are signed by T W Holmes (1872-1929) - an illustrator of children’s annuals and magazines for boys, specialising in transport subjects.

 

Delectaland and the Havindens

There was a time when every town of a certain size would have its own brewery, lemonade factory, biscuit maker and confectionery producer.  Watford was large enough to have most of these businesses - confectionery was represented by Delectaland.  Judging by its publicity it was a business with its roots firmly planted in Fairyland in the belief that repeated exposure to diaphanous flutterings would develop a growing market for their exotically packaged sugary offerings.  This ad is from 1919, less than 12 months after the end of the Great War during which the factory served the nation by turning out thousands of explosive shells.  Eliminating the flavour of cordite from the Delecta range would have been a formidable task.  The Chairman of the company was Gustavus Havinden, who, inspired by the example of Lord Leverhulme’s paternalistic philanthropy, made plans to build housing and welfare facilities for his workforce.  Details of this scheme are hard to come by and it can be safely assumed that it didn’t amount to much. There are indications online that worker housing was built in Neston Road, North Watford but there’s nothing to confirm it.

Another reason for taking an interest in Mr. Havinden is his son Ashley, born in 1903 who would become one of the most versatile and influential designers in Britain.  The family link also explains why the young Havinden spent 18 months absorbing the technical side of the printing industry while employed in various print works in Watford.  This detailed understanding of the principles of typesetting, layout, photogravure and block making led to his first job at the newly established W S Crawford advertising agency where he would remain for his entire working life.  The lack of an art college background was no deterrent and may have been an advantage in allowing his natural instinct to range far and wide in search of visual ideas while rejecting the narrow categorisations of the ‘trained specialist’.  Crawford gave him the chance to live and work in Germany where he came to appreciate the superior power of German graphic design and illustration under the influence of Modernism and the infant Bauhaus. 

Having swerved the perils of art education where ‘commercial art’ was regarded as a second class activity, Ashley had no inhibitions about exploring any aspect of the visual arts that engaged his interests and he happily tried his hand at textile and rug design, interior design, and abstract painting.  Henry Moore, Ben Nicholson and John Piper were in his friendship group and he developed a keen interest in contemporary architecture to the extent that he moved his family into an apartment at Highpoint II, designed by Lubetkin in 1938.  This placed him at the heart of the North London friends of European Modernism where he continued his tireless promotion of Modernist values, working with European emigrés such as Herbert Bayer, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, and Walter Gropius and instrumental in organising Mondrian’s stay in London.  All of which was accomplished in a deeply conservative visual culture in which the prevailing advertising setting was dominated by a blend of Merrie England and  Imperial Victoriana with a dash of Regency Dandies plus Francis Drake and Walter Raleigh.

The illustrations are, in descending order: an ad for Delectaland from Colour magazine, 1919 - a self-portrait included as a plate in Ashley Havinden’s Line Drawing for Reproduction (published in 1933) - Ashley’s best known design for Eno’s Fruit Salt from 1927 - a post-war ad for Martini (1953), typical of Ashley’s mid-century phase - an illustrated magazine insert promoting the Delecta range for Christmas 1928 (by which time the business was less than 2 years away from closure in 1930) and the book cover for Line Drawing for Reproduction.  The key text is Ashley Havinden, Advertising & the Artist, Michael Havinden et al, Edinburgh 2003.

 

In the Dime Stores and Bus Stations

My love she speaks like silence

Without ideals or violence

She doesn’t have to say she’s faithful

Yet she’s true, like ice, like fire

People carry roses

Make promises by the hours

My love she laughs like the flowers

Valentines can’t buy her

In the dime stores and bus stations

People talk of situations

Read books, repeat quotations

Draw conclusions on the wall

Some speak of the future

My love she speaks softly

She knows there’s no success like failure

And that failure’s no success at all

The cloak and dagger dangles

Madams light the candles

In ceremonies of the horsemen

Even the pawn must hold a grudge

Statues made of matchsticks

Crumble into one another

My love winks, she does not bother

She knows too much to argue or to judge

The bridge at midnight trembles

The country doctor rambles

Bankers’ nieces seek perfection

Expecting all the gifts that wise men bring

The wind howls like a hammer

 

The night blows cold and rainy

My love she’s like some raven

At my window with a broken wing

Love Minus Zero/No Limit