Page 53 - Studio International - July August 1975

(Left) Helmar Lerski
version of the New Objectivity, that and political detective, the observer, the Head, from 'Photo' 1932 published by
Bill Brandt rejected so decisively; in man with the camera-eye who must Arts et Métiers graphiques
both cases it was decisive as the witness and report on the vast social crime
contemporary style most heavily invested of economic depression. Front Line 1941
with value for the present and called An increasing number of unorthodox Front cover of Ministry of Information
forth equally extreme responses' populist images filled out the visual booklet
rejection and parody. imagination in the early 'thirties. There
But beyond the novel iconography was a drive towards large, legible portraits, purpose of the British Ministry of
lies the familiar strategy of the artist's exemplified by Wyndham Lewis's Information. Photographs and drawings
Odyssey, which had been established by exhibition of 3o Personalities and a in this style appear in ministry booklets,
the gypsy ramblings of Augustus John Self-Portrait at the Lefevre Gallery in especially Front Line of 1941, in Stephen
and Dickson Innes in search of a rural October 1932. Lewis had for some time Spender's Citizens in Wartime and After
primitivist idyll. For the gypsy camp and been engaged in conjugating both abstract of 1945, and in J. B. Priestley's British
the Celtic mountains Burra substituted and realist ways of seeing: 'I move with Women Go to War of 1943. This was a
Harlem and the nightclub, just as a familiarity . . . among eyeless and culmination under conditions of total war
contemporary writers sought experience hairless abstractions. But I am also of the rediscovery of Britain by the
in the slums and in the demi-monde of interested in human beings'. 20 In this 'thirties intelligentsia: these are portraits
the European capitals. statement and in his drawings Lewis which no longer condemn economic and
The redemptive journey into real seems to be placing himself within the political neglect but which symbolize in
experience could lead to the Balkans or sensibility of the New Objectivity. Here their religious sentimentality the force
to the North of England. Members of the Lewis joins continental photographers of national unity. This kind of
artistic intelligentsia increasingly like Helmar Lerski and Douglas Glass, ascensional tyranny in close-up,
immersed themselves in a new industrial as well as British painters like Stanley emphasizing a giantist image, had long
milieu and established a cultural pattern Spencer in presenting super-realist, been a feature of cinematography
which had a decisive role in the hallucinatory faces. evident in something like Korda's
imagination of the 'thirties and 'forties. In 1931 Helmar Lerski's Kopfe des British production of 1935, The Shape
In the mid 'thirties, for instance, William Alltags was published. It differs from of Things to Come.
Coldstream recovered his social identity Lewis's project in its avowedly populist The fantasy of the giant portrait head
by transferring his labour from painting programme, in fact it tries to turn the of 'a man of the crowd', singled out,
to work in films with the GPO film unit. idea of noble personalities, men of mark idealized, ascensionalized, formed one of
He wrote: 'Being a wage-earner, or women of beauty inside out — the the cornerstones of totalitarian visual
travelling about the country meeting portraits are of 'nobodies', everyday appeal. Kenneth MacPherson, in
people I would not ordinarily have met, people: they are reified objects of the discussing Lerski's photo-portraits,
particularly men at their work, camera- populist style in its conservative prefigured Orwell's delineation of the
men, government officials, electricians' inflection. Kenneth MacPherson fascination of Big Brother: 'we have
clerks and factory hands were all exciting commented in the British magazine access to these personalities only as
experiences and a great change from Close-up in 1931 upon Lerski's populist children have . .. there is something
being shut up in a studio and knowing sentimental inversion of the ennobling almost telescopic, nearness that seems to
only artists'.19 This was also the codes of portraiture as 'finding distinction topple on you'. "
experience of other painters and in the face of a washerwoman'. " Lerski Ideological determinations seem to
photographers, and from it there arose was engaged on the project of have been crucial in the history of British
a new image of the artist. The romantic- heroizing unknown members of the visual culture in the modern period; they
bohemian world of sophisticated pastoral submerged masses, and although this explain many of the apparent
was displaced before a radically new could serve a Communist direction in a consistencies, revivals and returns to the
populist model of the artist as man of magazine such as USSR in Construction style and imagery of earlier periods. It is
action, part newshound, shock-brigader it was adaptable enough to serve the as though the British visual imagination

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