Page 88 - Studio International - July August 1970

country, late, and the regular additions to the A pain in the eye popular to look at films and the popular
already large Nolde bibliography are equally culture around us as something to be
welcome, although it is a pity that no post-war Counterblast by Marshall McLuhan. Rapp and studied and understood as a "language".
writing on Nolde comes anywhere near the Whiting. 35s library edition, 18s limp edition. Wyndham Lewis did various studies of pop
pioneer essays written by Max Sauerlandt. culture. Leavis has a book called Culture
This includes the latest addition by Martin Obeying McLuhan's injunction 'We must and Environment. There was a similar
Urban, Director of the Nolde Foundation at substitute an interest in the media for the interest in popular speech idioms, lan-
Seebüll which owns the world's largest previous interest in subjects', it is useful to guage, the Wake...In doing the Bride I was
collection of the artist's work and writing. examine how he has used media himself, and merely trailing behind some interesting
His short essay does little more than describe specifically that of print. As he writes in the predecessors.'
Nolde's career and attempt to characterize book under review (in one of its most succinct A certain moral seriousness, such as one
his aims and style in colourful and flamboyant statements) : associates with Cambridge 'English', is overt
language. It might be argued that the intro- `Our obsession with the book as the arche- in The Mechanical Bride and has never quite
ductory essay was never intended to be the type of culture has not even encouraged us deserted McLuhan, I think, despite the
most important part of the book, and to consider the book itself as a peculiar and complications of his very self-aware person-
certainly the plates are of an astonishingly arty way of packaging experience. But ality. He will still, surely, surprise us all.
high quality, some of them looking almost like until the book is seen as a very specialized It is possible that Counterblast will bring
facsimiles. But I should like to question the form of art and technology we cannot today McLuhan's basic thoughts across to a wider
practice of regarding introductory essays to get our bearings among the new arts and public than would read his more sophisticated
large books of plates as some sort of puff, or as the new media.' books. I must admit to a prejudice against
a makeweight, in the belief that no-one will Raymond Williams has written: tricksy graphics. Here and there Mr Parker
really read them anyway, and far too many `...I regard McLuhan as one of the very relaxes his grip and a bit of good McLuhan
monographs now published don't seem to set few men capable of significant contribution appears in straight prose:
any store by the words and concentrate more to the problems of advanced communica- `Oscar Wilde records his amazement at
on the quality of the printing. Certainly Dr tion theory, and The Gutenberg Galaxy as a finding London drawing-rooms overflow-
Urban's reputation as a leading authority on wholly indispensable book. It must also be ing with long-necked, pale, auburn-haired
Nolde leads one to expect something better. said that it is a considerable effect of his own women where, before the paintings of
Nevertheless, the plates almost compensate work that it enables us to criticize him.' Rossetti and Burne-Jones, such women had
for the introduction and illustrate the best of A man with McLuhan's achievement behind never been seen. Today that is normal.
Nolde's watercolours from 1894 onwards. him need not, one would have thought, insist Every movie and every issue of Vogue
Although best-known for his oils, for his on behaving like some infant precocity who breezily sets out to revamp not only our
religious compositions, flower studies and has got into the clutches of cruel promoters. clothes but our physiology ... '
landscapes, Nolde was extremely versatile, a His early book The Mechanical Bride (1951) is and occasionally something which doesn't
brilliant graphic artist, as adept at woodcut stylishly and wittily illustrated with American sound like McLuhan at all:
as at etching and lithography, and he also display advertisements, and a great pleasure ' ...No matter how many walls have fallen,
devoted much time and thought throughout to read. Since then, heavyweight work like the citadel of individual consciousness has
his life to watercolour, a technique which he The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) has been en- not fallen nor is it likely to fall. For it is
enriched in many ways and explored with the livened with unexpected ideas and know- not accessible to the mass media.' q
aid of different kinds of paper, mixtures with ledge, and more popular books like War and JONATHAN BENTHALL
body-colour and the addition of indian ink. Peace in the Global Village (1968) by well-
In watercolours as in oils he reached the researched photos and newspaper cuttings.
greatest heights, in my opinion, in descrip- But the McLuhan newsletter published by Typography ancient and
tions of the landscape, and particularly of the Human Development Corporation (which I modern
North German landscape which ,he under- commented on in this journal last July) was
stood with the intuition and insight of a both a disgrace and extremely amateurish. I Pioneers of Modern Typography by Herbert
peasant living close to the soil. This book have to report that in my view Counterblast—a Spencer. Lund, Humphries & Co. Ltd.
concentrates on the landscapes and the reprise of Wyndham Lewis's title Blast (1911) 84s. The Penrose Annual 1970. Volume 63. Edited
illustrations show the artist's astonishing feel- —is a visual pain and not much trouble seems by Herbert Spencer. Lund, Humphries & Co.
ing for colour and his ability to transform the to have gone into it. Ltd. 90s. Paperback 65s.
most simple motif into the expression of what The graphic designer Harley Parker has
can only be described as religious emotions. taken trouble however, raiding every typeface `...and note, that there are men around in our
It was Nolde's closeness to the soil, his in the printer's repertoire to get McLuhan's time, who have made beauty, simply because things
ambition to paint the German landscape and thoughts across. Criticism is pre-empted by have been put together according to logic, according
to make it embody something of the German an epigraph, attributed to Mr Parker's own to reason, according to the principles of the reasoned
`soul' which makes his affiliation with the authorship and printed in one of those type- essence of these things and according to the exact,
Nazi party so interesting. He saw the Nazis as faces that attempt to simulate a refined necessary and natural laws of the materials used in
anxious to renew German life in the same way longhand: 'Good taste is the first refuge of them.' (Henry Van de Velde, Arts and Crafts
as he was attempting to renew German art, the witless.' Lay Scripture, 1902).
and it would be worthwhile to trace notions The McLuhan-Parker team avoid that refuge
of racial purity and of blood and soil through all right, but one might add that an alternative Unfortunately it can't be said that such tenets
the theories of German artists from the nine- refuge of the witless is a shifting, evasive hold for this presentation of those Pioneers.
teenth century onwards. Nolde would be irony designed to deflect all criticism. Again, Herbert Spencer here sponges up some
among them. the contrast with McLuhan's earlier work illustrations and potted biographies from les
For this we shall have to wait and I dare may be noted. He has said in an interview temps de jadis. In his Introduction he says:
say that when such an investigation comes with G. E. Stearn: `Modern typography does not have its origins
it will not be by a German writer. q `In England, at Cambridge, when I in the conventional printing industry. Its
FRANK WHITFORD arrived there [in the 1930s], it had become roots are entwined with those of twentieth-