Page 50 - Studio International - July August 1975

erections set in the heart of the old chimneys. But the discourse was highbrow and artistic, with lots of
countryside, remains conjectural. Mr crucially updated during the later marvellous modern photographs, ink-pots
Hoppe has seized the period before the 'twenties, given an ethical inflection as and girls' heads upside down — you know
change which is coming; and which the modernist standpoint came to be more the sort of thing . . .'11
some dread and others desire'. clearly identified with the new Photographs were a firmly established
Between them Buchan, Hoppe and architectural idiom of Germany, France part of the modernist rhetoric by 193o.
Holmes represented an attempt to and the United States and associated with They were also used by the traditionalist
mediate the content of the modern world programmes of social reform. The new camp as a means of indicating the
through forms drawn from tradition: in functionalist idiom was at odds with a squalor of England: pictures of the
the process this content was domesticated British tradition which had invested blight of signs and adverts appeared with
and contained, returned to a safe distance heavily in a sentimental mythology from the slogan 'See Britain before it is too
as pictorial material. But even in the Hogarth onwards; the new world could late' in the campaigns of the Council for
mid-twenties it was clear that the be construed as inhuman. Where the Preservation of Rural England."
traditional face of the country was modernist forces had once been But photography was enrolled to a
undergoing irreversible changes. In an characterized by the image of Bolshevism, greater extent on the side which favoured
address of 1925 to the Artists' as something alien and remote, they modern design. The central place which
Benevolent Institution, Stanley Baldwin could now be plainly identified in the it occupied around 193o points to the
recalled a childhood visit to his uncle landscape in the forms of the new close correlation throughout this century
Sir Edward Poynter in Wood Green, architecture. According to Professor between moments of social and economic
London: 'It was a little old-fashioned Silenus, the European architect satirized crisis and recourse to photographic image
country house with a garden where now in Evelyn Waugh's novel of 1928 making. John Heartfield's use of photo-
there is the power station of an electric Decline and Fall, the problem of montage reflected an urgency which
light company, and opposite, where the architecture was 'the problem of the could not be contained within traditional
White City stands, were open fields'.5 elimination of the human element from means of making and reproducing images.
Using such an antithetical device, the consideration of form. Man is never The highly effective work of Farm
setting the image of the country house beautiful, he is never happy except when Security Administration photographers
against that of the electrical power he becomes the channel for the in the United States during the 'thirties
station, compounds Baldwin's nostalgia distribution of mechanical forces'. also matched a social concern too urgent
with a pessimistic sense of loss. Through Mrs Beste-Chetwynde the to work within the traditional arts. There
Growing urbanization deprived artists family seat of the Pastmaster family, a was a similar conjuncture during the
of an idyllic image of the land to which Tudor mansion, was demolished to make period of American involvement in
they had been drawn and with which they way for a building in the modern style : Vietnam during the 'sixties when
had become associated. The incursions `Something clean and square'. In photography was once again
of the world of industry desecrated those imagining this conjunction of foregrounded. A British preoccupation
places sanctified by the privileged values modernist building and an aristocratic with documentary photography has also
of tradition. Established genres in landscape Waugh expresses a specific re-emerged in the 'seventies at a time of
pictorial representation were disturbed. cultural tension of the late 'twenties.' social and economic crisis. Photography
Painters and poets were dispossessed of This tension was later set out in its has been of immense tactical value in
the mental landscape in which they had most elementary terms by Paul Nash, periods of accelerated cultural change
been used to work. This even became the who was aware of the opposition between when its denotational nature, its
overt subject matter of painting when in the two powerful myths of 'modernism' apparent objectivity as a means of
1929 John Keating exhibited a picture at and 'Britishness' when he wrote in 1932 : recording, has pushed it to the forefront
the Royal Academy which he called `Whether it is possible to "go modern" when the problem of the future has
Night's Candles are Burnt Out 6. Against and still "be British" is a question vexing appeared to be written in the social
a background of mountains a massive quite a few people today'.' Nash wrote landscape itself.
hydro-electric dam is under construction: this in circumstances very different from Modernist photographs around 1930
to the left stands an electricity pylon those of Waugh's earlier novel, for he was were used to reflect a confidence in the
and to the right mothers holding their writing in 1932 against the background onset of a technological utopia, heralded
children up to look at the dam. In the of a world economic crisis. But even at in German design and housing projects
foreground a bluff British 'artist', the earlier date the battle lines had been and the clean-cut dynamic lines of the
portfolio of drawings under his arm, drawn up : internationalism versus an skyscraper. Photography was an ideal
has been superimposed on to this indigenous culture; renovation versus means of presenting a sharp prismatic
constructivist-populist scene, a conservation; the industrial versus the view of the future in symbolic form;
disgruntled anachronism in this pastoral; the functional versus the futile. photographic monochrome, particularly
evolving world. A month before the During the late 'twenties it may have in black and white on the coated papers
painting was shown, an article in appeared that society and art were to be characteristic of 1930, was a means to
The Architectural Review criticized the transformed according to the new mode, abstraction, presenting a rarefied,
kind of attitude personified by Keating's that the future was really at issue. crystalline enhancement of modern
conservative artist : 'Ours is an age of Writing in September 1928 the editor of forms. The old photogravure processes
change, advance and achievement. The The Studio identified the controversial of Picturesque Great Britain, for instance,
word progress is on everyone's lips and . . . nature of modernism : 'We have arrived softened form and added atmosphere
its upholders cannot possibly include at a curious state of things when a word where the new processes converted the
those who take up the sentimental which simply denotes "of the present day" world into diagrammatic form, made it a
attitude of Lot's wife, believing that we and nothing more has come to have a subject for action rather than for reverie.
have seen our Golden Age and that no partisan character, and may mean The new movement was especially
good can come out of these degenerate progress or reaction according as to which associated with Germany. William
days'.' side the user is on'. '° There was to be no Gaunt introduced an article titled
During the 'twenties there occurred a involvement with the extremes of this `A Modern Utopia ?' in The Studio of
crucial change in the debate on position but, nevertheless, the magazine December 1929: `If the new movement
`Modernism'. To begin with the did `go modern' for a brief period and one in the arts is going to produce a Utopia,
problem had been construed in terms of the ways in which this was signified that Utopia will be found in Germany and
drawn from the nineteenth century. was through the use of photographs. In the centre of it in Berlin. All the forward-
Masterman referred in 1926 to a division a fashionable sense photographs became looking ideas, ideals, enthusiasms, and
between a Black England and a Green identified with advanced positions and tendencies of the century have found a
England, an industrial and a rural world formed an essential part of vanguard home there'." Photography was deeply
sharply distinguished and established literary magazines. This condition is implicated in this new utopia, not only as
at the time of the industrial revolution. recorded by Christopher Isherwood in the democratic art of the future, which
Charles Holmes's paintings of the Goodbye to Berlin, where Sally Bowles some considered it to be, but as the idiom
industrial landscape refer to this older speaks of 'a man I know who's starting a which gave most complete expression to
Black England of mills and factory magazine. It's going to be most terribly a new analytical world view. The most
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