Graham Ward

Claire de Rouen

2012-01-17T10:03:00.000-08:00

Claire de Rouen, the doyenne of fashion and photography books, has died after a long illness. I first met Claire in the late seventies at the Photographer's Gallery, where she was an eternal presence behind the counter that served as the diminutive bookshop in their Newport Street premises. To this day, I regret the non-purchase of a Minor White monograph which Claire predicted 'would become extremely sought after in years to come, darling'.

During the eighties and for most of the nineties, she was the force behind the photography and fashion department at the original Zwemmer bookshop in Charing Cross Road. Her breathtaking knowledge of the subjects made her the icon of fashion students and famous photographers alike. I had the pleasure of working with her during her short-lived tenure with Shipley Art Booksellers. It is however, for the shop that proceeded this period that she will best be remembered. She was afforded the governance of a small premises on the first floor of a sex shop at the Tottenham Court Road end of Charing Cross Road, and it soon became a mecca for the faithful as well as the neophite to the world of photography and fashion. The shop was easy to miss, but a discreet neon sign in the window directed the determined to their destination like a beacon. It flourished as much by word of mouth as any website, and garnered a reputation among a dedicated cognoscenti for whom Claire's advice was paramount. With her trademark bob and a fringe that skimmed those smokey, intriguing eyes, Claire's dress-sense was immaculate; her look was timeless and never disappointed. Usually sat by the till, her faithful pug Otis curled beneath the desk, she would direct customers to whatever newly-published book she thought might suit their needs and tastes, but often, she simply delighted at your own discoveries amidst the stock. Seldom resorting to the shop's database, she knew her books by heart, with rarities temptingly encased in a vitrine which were never priced but which she would be more than happy to let you examine. Collectors were legion, and giants of the photography world sought her out when they were in town. Bruce Weber was a regular visitor, and Claire was an early advocate and seller of his monographs. David Bailey was a huge fan, stating that Claire's was 'probably the best photography bookshop in the world' and it was Bob Carlos Clark who persuaded her to open premises under her own name.

Born Claire Alphandri in Alexandria in the early thirties, her age was always a notoriously-guarded secret. She attended art school in London and married Reid de Rouen in the 1950s. She met John Nichol in the mid 1980's, and they lived and worked together until her death this week. Claire was passionate about the things she loved, and kept her manicured finger firmly on the fashion pulse of her time. Her mystery and allure added greatly to the shop's atmosphere. She was a tireless champion of young photographers and fashion students (the newly-graduated Alexander McQueen adored her) and she often displayed their work in the stairwell gallery adjacent to the shop. Her stock of fashion and photography magazines from around the world was unrivalled.

Claire de Rouen books will continue without her, but her legacy will live on there for as long as it remains open, as I trust it will for many years to come. The world will be poorer without her, and her throne within the pantheon of fashion and photography will remain unoccupied. It was a privilege to have known her.

The Lion Roars in Rye

2012-01-12T08:05:00.000-08:00

William Morris's epithet of having nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful has never seemed more apposite than in the case of The Lion Street Store in Rye, East Sussex. Owned and operated by former milliner Sarah Benton, the shop has been open only a few short months, but it has clearly already attracted a huge following which spreads far beyond the ancient Cinque Port town. Situated just down from the historic St Mary's church which crowns the Rye skyline, Sarah has created a light and airy space and stocked it with objects of desire which are a feast for the eyes and the senses. The best in contemporary-designed items effortlessly blend with carefully-chosen vintage pieces, all of them bought together with an assured sensibility which makes the shop such a mecca for all who hanker for the unique and the unusual in their home. With all the panache of a Bawden vignette for Fortnum and Mason, Nicholas Frith's masterful logo of the sailors and the friendly lion perfectly captures the mood of the shop, as elsewhere, fabric dolls by Jane Foster and textiles by Lisa Stickley sit alongside one-off toy theatres by Emily Warren. Knitted creatures by Donna Wilson become the outriders in a vintage Triang truck, whilst distressed children's desks open to reveal their treasures. Sarah shares with her customers a passion for the miraculous images of the likes of Robert Taverner and Edwin La Dell, and the card racks overspill with the cream of British 20th-century printmakers. Wire baskets are packed with handwoven Irish blankets, fashioned from recycled wool, whilst elsewhere are screen-printed boy and girl-shaped cushions that somehow evoke the days of 'Look and Learn' and the Ladybird series of books so beloved of our childhoods. In the coming months, Sarah hopes that the store will become a regular venue for literary and musical events, and is keen to organise one-off specialist exhibitions of artists and craftspeople. With a contemporary eye fixed firmly on the sensibilities of similar institutions such as St Jude's Gallery, Loop in Islington and Old Town in Holt, Sarah's conviction that people deserve to have the very best in British art and craft is everywhere evinced at the Lion Street Store. The ancient town of Rye has never seemed so fortunate to have this newcomer in her midst; I urge you to beat a path to its' lovely painted portal.

The Lion Street Store. 6 Lion Street, Rye, East Sussex TN31 7LB
www.lionstreetstore.com

Drella does Rainer: Warhol's poster for Fassbinder's 'Querelle'

2011-11-15T12:11:00.000-08:00

Andy Warhol's poster for Rainer Werner Fassbinder's 1982 film adaptation of Genet's 'Querelle of Brest' uses an original photograph culled from a 1977 series of screenprints entitled Sex Parts, and remains one of his most potent and memorable images. Now highly desirable by collectors, the original poster was issued in a number of colours (pictured is the grey version), and despite Warhol's interpretation bearing no direct reference to the film itself, somehow retrospectively at least, succeeds in being thoroughly synonymous with Fassbinder's vision of Genet's 1946 novel. The film was Fassbinder's last, and European distributors in particular, released a plethora of promotional material, from giant 7-sheet billboard images to artfully-airbrushed portraits of Brad Davies, who played Genet's eponymous murdering sailor-hero. Warhol's photographic image of two boys is overdrawn in his customary style with off-register lines and blocks of colour, and possibly recalls the characters of Querelle's brother Robert, and Gil, his fellow matelot and murderer. Frank Episale, in his riveting review 'Genet meets Fassbinder' in Bright Lights Film Journal, states that 'Genet's Querelle bought Melville's Billy Budd out of the closet and exposed the coded homoeroticism of the all-male naval vessel inhabited by men and boys in tight white pants to a wider, largely heterosexual audience'. Fassbinder's film pays visual homage to James Bidgood's 1971 American underground arthouse classic Pink Narcissus, in which a handsome male hustler fantasizes about a kitsch universe where he is the central character in a number of set-piece encounters. By extension, the gay French photographic duo Pierre and Gilles owe a debt to Bidgood's fantasy-world by placing their protagonists in a number of highly-wrought and glitteringly-enchanted settings where there is more than a nod to Genet's muscular matelots in all their campy eroticism. Fassbinder's set for Querelle is highly stylized and uses overly-wrought lighting techniques reminiscent of those which he employed in Lola a year earlier. Frames are shot within frames, and the misty murk of Brest is re-imagined with phallic towers and dark culverts where lurk and lean the denizens of Genet's twilight world. Episale concludes his review by reminding us that by the time the film was released, 'Susan Sontag had already published Notes on Camp, Stonewall had come and gone', and that '[The Village People's] YMCA had been appropriated by wedding DJ's'.

Pryde of Place: The Beggarstaff Brothers and 'Don Quixote'

2011-10-25T10:49:00.000-07:00

Arguably the finest of all the poster designs created by William Nicholson and James Pryde, working under the aegis of the Beggarstaff Brothers, was for a play entitled A Chapter from Don Quixote which opened at the Lyceum Theatre on 4th May 1895 with Sir Henry Irving in the title role. The production, based on an incident in Cervante's novella, consisted of two scenes contrived out of an adaption by W.G.Wills, but as it was not deemed sufficient for a night's entertainment, it formed part of a triple-bill. Convinced that Cervantes was worthy of more serious treatment than that conceived by Irving for the play (in attempt to divert the audience's attention from the poverty in Cervantes' text, Irving included extravagantly comic antics and slapstick elements in the narrative), the Beggarstaffs introduced the dramatic graphic device of the windmill in place of the village pump, around which the main action of the play took place in the second scene. Their authentic depiction of Rosinante, Quixote's horse, replaced a more robust creature (a veteran of the London stage) that Irving attempted to make more pathetic by the use of make-up to replicate the fictional creature's emaciated look. The Beggarstaffs made three separate versions of the Don Quixote poster. The first, dating from 1895, was a collage that lay for many years in Nicholson's studio before being acquired by the Victoria and Albert Museum. The second version was then superceded by one that was later published in the 1896 edition of The Idler, and the third- a simplified version of the first two- was presented to Irving, whom, it was said, thought it too bold a design for use on London theatre hoardings. Pryde later claimed in his autobiography that not only did Irving commission him and Nicholson to design the poster, he paid them a hundred pounds for the result.

The Beggarstaff design for Don Quixote poster remains one of the most iconic images in British graphic history. Colin Campbell, the leading authority on the graphic work of Nicholson and the Beggarstaff Brothers, refers to the poster as the earliest large-scale work in which 'the lettering was conceived as part of the composition from the very beginning'. The poster design also shows the full impact on Pryde and Nicholson of Toulouse-Lautrec, for whom their admiration was boundless at the time. Pryde was quoted in The Idler as saying that Lautrec was 'one of the few artists who understand what a poster is and should be'. The French artist's design for La Goulue at the Moulin Rouge of 1891 was of particular significance to Pryde and Nicholson, and showed how flat, ungradated masses of colour could artfully be combined with line, and how light and dark forms could be contrasted as a key component of the overall design. Lautrec had also demonstrated the decorative potential of a simple black mass as a means of enhancing the pictorial interest in the work, and in turn, the Beggarstaff poster for Don Quixote displays this to stunning effect, particularly in the contrasting form of the horse's head juxtaposed against the dark hulk of the windmill, and the way in which the liminality of the sails are cut off by the extremities of the design.

I Was a Boy Dalek

2011-01-10T09:58:00.000-08:00

The Dalek Playsuit is an enduring memory and, given the plethora of Dr. Who-related merchandise that has resulted from the programme's phenomenal rebranding and re-invention, it seems that this particular item of early Dalek merchandise is one that tends to remain in the minds of those of us who are of a certain vintage, and for whom Saturday evenings were spent cowering behind the couch with delight and terror in equal measure. I was particularly struck to see this advertisement from an old Marshall Ward mail order catalogue, as doubtless, it was the very same one that caught my childhood eye and possessed my every waking hour all those many years ago, so much so that my beleaguered mother was driven to distraction by my constant badgering until it was sent away for (and at the outrageous cost of 66/6. it must have been intended to be a gift for several birthdays and Christmases combined). Let's face it, in the light perhaps of today's more finely-tuned aesthetic sensibilities, the Dalek Playsuit was, by anyone's standards, a superannuated bin bag, through which a sink plunger was thrust through one hole, a plastic potato-peeler through the other. It came down to just below the knees (despite the floor-length apparition we see in this somewhat overstated illustration) and lent the wearer the appearance of being clad in a futuristic mini-dress such as Courreges might have dreamt up for the catwalk. The head-piece was fashioned from stout cardboard, silvered on the outside, and with a series of die-cut slits through which one just about saw the direction of travel; the 'skirt' hung down from its base, whilst that dome was a sort of inverted saucer that sat on your head like a coolie-hat. The eye-piece was fixed, and was basically a large ping-pong ball on a stick. The colour of the skirt was red, and the trademark 'balls' on the Dalek's skirt were printed in white. I more or less lived in it (again, much to the frustration of my poor mother, who later decreed its fate) and when I decided to leave home, aged probably about eight or nine, it was my going-away outfit. I would like to imagine that to this day, there might be some soul who retains a glimmer of recollection that, whilst driving in Sussex in the sixties, they glimpsed the apparition of a Dalek wandering down the central reservation of the A22 like a revenant from a dream. Miraculously, I got as far as the pig-farm (the marmalade sandwiches having by then run out by then, thus posing something of a dilemma as regards supplies for any ongoing journey), whereupon I was duly returned on the back of the farmer's tractor (again, this must have been something of a sight to an unwitting onlooker). The days were numbered for the Dalek playsuit: my mother, at her wit's end, finally consigned it to the flames of our kitchen Raeburn on the very night of the Royal Variety Performance when the Beatles were blazing their own trail before the Queen of England. This act of iconoclasm on her part proved a step too far, as it set fire to the chimney at the exact moment the Fab Four took to the stage. A postscript. I am reliably informed that any Dalek playsuit that has survived (either flood or fire) commands huge prices on the vintage market; six to eight hundred of anyone's money, and that no one I know has ever seen one offered for sale, nor as a collector, possessed one in adulthood.

A Child's Christmas in Wales

2011-01-06T10:44:00.000-08:00

As Christmas tails away for another year, here are two spreads and the cover from a charming little edition of 'A Child's Christmas in Wales' by Dylan Thomas. Printed by the Belmont Press, Northampton for J.M. Dent and Sons, the book was first published in the United Kingdom in 1968, an earlier edition being issued in the U.S. in 1954. It features beautiful woodcut vignettes by Ellen Raskin, which perfectly compliment Dylan's evocative account of a Welsh childhood Christmas. The image of the town with its cloud/constellation- the heavens above it and the sea beneath- is wonderful, as is the laterr vignette of toy soldiers standing guard by a towering glass epergne of sweets, and elswhere, a roaring fire with flaggons and mistletoe. This classic work for children ends with the following stanza:

'Looking through my bedroom window, out into
the moonlight and the unending smoke-coloured snow,
I could see the lights in the windows
of all the other homes on our hill and hear
the music rising from them up the long, steadily
falling night. I turned the gas down, I got into bed. I said some words to the close and
holy darkness, and then I slept'

Pet Shop Puginesque

2011-01-05T14:20:00.000-08:00

This Gothic psalm-board was made for me by Russell Thomas, and hangs in the stairwell of my house. The quotation is from 'West End Girls' by the Pet Shop Boys, and it is a line that has always intrigued me. My initial thought was to have it embroidered on a sampler in the Victorian style. I then considered a more oblique treatment, with aircraft carriers and spitfires on a cushion cover, the stanza perhaps picked out in Trajan a la Ian Hamilton Finlay. It was Russell who came up with the notion of a psalm-board such as would display hymn numbers to a congregation of church-goers. Fittingly, the frame is fashioned from an old pew-end, the gold-leaf lettering laid on a granite ground. The typeface is Sirona, which lends the piece its pleasing quality, particularly the kerning on the R and the K, as well as the caps on the A and N, and the G is as Gothic as it comes. I adore the enigma of this couplet, coming as it does at the end of this classic eighties electro ballad with its haunting 'How far have you been?' vocal rejoinder. I once glimpsed the Finland Station from the window of a coach bound for Leningrad, and to this day, wonder just what motivated Messrs. Tennant and Lowe to fashion such a wonderful lyric as this.

Saracinesco

2010-12-30T03:42:00.000-08:00

Painted in 1961, Saracinesco is among a series of works made by the Cornish artist Peter Lanyon as a result of a trip he made to the hillside region of Italy situated some forty miles to the east of Rome. Lanyon, whose work is forever associated with the landscape of West Cornwall, had found himself increasingly at odds with certain elements of the St Ives school of the period; a small, fractious community which Lanyon perceived had been infiltrated by 'foreigners' who in no small measure had contributed to the battles for governance being played out between the Penwith Society and the St Ives Society of Artists. As a result, he published an essay The Face of Penwith in the Cornish Review, an article that owed, he claimed, much to the ethics of the artist and critic Adrian Stokes, whose concept of 'outwardness' chimed with Lanyon's own, very Cornish sensibilities. Having known Stokes since the late 1930s, he described himself in a letter to the editor of the Cornish Review as 'an artist whose debt to Stokes may never be paid', and quoted the following passage from Stokes's The Quattro Cento of 1932:

'The process of living is an externalisation, a turning outward into definite form or inner ferment. Hence the mirror to living which art is; hence the significance of art and especially as a crown to other and preliminary arts of the truly visual arts in which time is transposed into forms of space as something instant and revealed. Hence the positive significance to man (as opposed to use) of stone and stone building.'

In The Face of Penwith, Lanyon applied Stokes's ideas of revelation, particularly in terms of the landscape of West Penwith, and what, in his terms, he defined as being essentially Cornish. In mining, for instance (a subject which found a rich, continuing seam in Lanyon's work), as well as in in fishing and farming, the industry of Cornwall are construed as a commerce between the Cornishman and what lies beneath; ie, the tin, the fish and the nutrients. This process of delving and drawing to the surface is manifestly apparent in Lanyon's major works of the late 40s and 50's, particularly Botallack of 1952 and St. Just, his masterpiece of 1953. The continuous process of drawing these buried and occluded elements to the surface of the land and sea are aptly mirrored in the works of a painter who knew the form and nature of landscape as intimately, in Tacita Dean's words, as he knew 'his own skin'.

Shortly after the article in the Cornish Review was published, Lanyon and his wife travelled to Italy, where they spent a month visiting the places Stokes had mentioned in The Quattro Cento.'One must follow the Master' he said to Patrick Heron in relation to Stokes and Italy. Whether Lanyon recognised in these very particular landscapes, the process of externalisation that Stokes had identified in his writings is not known, but a series of paintings and drawings were produced by Lanyon as a consequence of his time spent in the hill villages outside Rome. At Anticoli, Lanyon saw an ancient settlement still steeped in a bucolic way of life, where animals and people co-existed side by side, and where the natural cycle of life, death and renewal was mediated by myth and tradition. This cycle was memorialised in Primavera, the largest of the group of paintings made at Anticoli. Painted as Spring came to this mountain region where the villages, and those living in nearby Saracinesco, celebrated its arrival with festivities, reflected by Lanyon in hot, bright colours that vibrate with an energy so consonant with the resurgence of the new season and its cycle.

Lanyon visited Italy for the last time in 1957, arriving in Rome at the end of February. He visited Lake Nemi and Albano, and returned to Anticoli and Saracinesco. Over the next year, he made pictures related to these specific places. In 1961, after an affair had ended, he returned to the subject of Saracinesco, and began work on the last and perhaps greatest of his Italian series, writing of it as:

'A celebration of a high place and beyond where not only fireworks but moon rockets search for things beyond the primitive proportion of an Italian hill town. The fiesta and the sacrifice are still a part of our behaviour...'

The Lost Domain of Alain-Fournier

2010-12-02T10:53:00.000-08:00

in progress

Crossing the Snowline

2010-11-16T09:12:00.000-08:00

'Crossing the Snowline' is the evocative poem from Pauline Stainer's same-titled anthology of 2008. Recreated here in Photoshop by me, it was an attempt to lend extra emphasis to the words by re-rendering them typographically. Stainer's reference to 'the Sculptors of Kilpeck' relates to the church of Saints Mary and David's in the village of the same name in Herefordshire. Built around 1190, the church is notable for its extraordinary corbel carvings of human faces, animals, fish and mythological creatures. Eighty five of the original ninety one corbels astonishingly survive, including a spectacular example of a sheela-na-gig. The visual impact of Stainer's stanza 'the jubilation of wolves spilling into the cloister' is equally spectacular, as is the notion of a statue of 'the sleeping Christ' 'chiseled from the living tree'. Stainer opined that the collection of poems was 'the record of [a] journey out of a long fallow following the death of [her] daughter'. In a contemporaneous review of the book, it is said that the poems 'cast a blue light, the light of mourning, and that the collection is 'poised between these insistent blues and the yellows of the sun prayers with which it closes, enacting the long journey from death to rebirth, grief to hope, out of the 'solstice on its hinge/of salt and fire' and back into the light'.

Broadstairs Gothick

2010-11-16T08:53:00.000-08:00

All Saints

2010-10-06T12:57:00.000-07:00

This beautiful book was given to me by my friend and former colleague Rowland Thomas. Whilst the beautiful cloth binding is striking of itself, the contents are equally wonderful. Published in 1946 by the Department of Anthropology, Santa Fe, New Mexico, the text is by one E. Boyd, and the book was designed by Merle Armitage. Fine collotype plates illustrate 24 examples of bultos, santos and retablos of the principal holy figures of the New Mexican religious canon, and include the Holy Child of Atocha, Our Lady of Guadalupe, San Ramon Nonato and San Isidro. Such depictions of religious figures, be they carved from wood or depicted on skin or gesso panels, were considered at the time that the book was written as purely folk-art; 'at one end of the a scale of church art', yet the author mentions at the opposite extreme, the magnificent retablos of the high Spanish Baroque, by way of stressing the powerfully primitive nature of their creation. The book cites principal santeros (the makers of such religious art), and there is a comprehensive appendix of holy figures and their locations throughout New Mexico. This is an ex-library copy, and retains the stamps of London University and the American Library in London. It also contains the original acccession card, still attached to the rear endpaper; it is interesting to note that the date of its last borrowing was December 4th, 1959 - the day I became four years old. With one and two-colour line drawings on the title and end colophon by P.G. Napolitano, this is a wonderful example of a very particular type of American book; one which retains its appeal for its subject-matter and its period of publication, yet also somehow succeeds in feeling as modern as tomorrow.

Ravilious and the Wilmington Giant

2010-05-06T14:15:00.000-07:00

Of all his enduring images, Eric Ravilious' 'Wilmington Giant' of 1939 remains perhaps my favourite of the series of watercolours he executed during the decade before the outbreak of the Second World war. The giant figure, reputed to be the largest representation of the human form on earth, is one of a series of prehistoric chalk figures cut into the turf of chalk hillsides in Southern England, notable in Dorset and, in this instance, on Windover Hill near Eastbourne in Sussex. The image of the Long Man of Wilmington first appeared in Ravilious; work in a 1929 engraving, and initially conceived it as a female figure opening the doors of death. In later works on the Wilmington Giant, it has been suggested rather that the male figure is a representation of Saturn opening the Gates of Day, the uprights that we popularly construe as twin staffs, originally intended by his creators to represent the perimeters of the doors of Heaven.

Ravilious initially intended his series to form the basis of a children's book on Chalk FIgures for the Puffin series; once can only imagine how striking an addition such a book would have proved. The painted series also included The Cerne Giant, the Wiltshire Westbury Horse (which he painted on two occasions, one where it is glimpsed through the window of an expertly-rendered train carriage, the other from the top of Westbury Hill, immediately below the Iron Age hill fort of Bratton Camp, a diminutive train in the distance) and also the Weymouth and Osmington horses, all three of 18th-century in origin. He he also undertook a hugely atmospheric depiction of the Uffington Horse in Berkshire, where the figure is depicted at a distance through fields of waving grassland, which somehow renders the reality of its true scale as almost illusionary, yet no less powerful.

Having been brought up in Eastbourne, and so closely associated with the town, Ravilious remains perhaps the most consumate portrayer of the surrounding Downland landscape, and- in the twentieth century at least- is the artist most closely associated with it. Instinctively-attuned to its contours, his dry, economical brushwork tangibly rendered the enormity of the Sussex landscape in a manner in which no other artist has successfully achieved, and solely devoid of humanity (one is at odds to discover any signs of population in these images), the very paucity of paint, and the relative expanse of visible paper on which the work was made, gives Ravilious; downland series the quality that Christopher Neve terms as 'irrisistable dryness'. In his essay 'Ravilious and Lightheartedness', which appears in his masterful collection of essays 'The Unquiet Landscape (Faber & Faber, 1990), Neve particularly cites Ravilious' image of the Wilmington Giant, and suggests that there are elements within the painting which cold be construed as a presaging of the conflict to come, particularly in terms of the heavy cumulus clouds that swirl around the apex of Windover Hill, the dark and shadowy rendering of the dip in which the figure is situated and- perhaps most of all in the string of barbed wire which cuts dramatically across the picture plane as a portent of the oncoming war. Given this, there is somehow a strong sense of defiance present in Ravilious' entire series of Hill Figure paintings, whilst elements contained within them serve to remind us all-too acutely of the artist's own eventual fate, disappearing as he did over the storm-laden skies of Iceland in his role of Official War Artist. Let it be noted, however, that there is a patch of hopeful blue in the sky above the Long Man, and undoubtedly, Ravilious would have intended this to be understood and interpreted as such.

Jones the Word

2010-01-29T10:58:00.000-08:00

Of all his prodigious artistic and literary output, the painted inscriptions of David Jones (1895-1974) remain my most favourite. One of the most significant first-generation of British modernist poets, his work was informed by his Welsh heritage and by his Catholicism. T.S. Eliot considered Jones to be a poet of major importance, and Anathemata (1952) was said by W.H. Auden to be the most important poem to have been written in English in the 20th century.

Model Behaviour

2009-12-19T05:06:00.000-08:00

Released in 1991, 'Behaviour', the fourth studio album by the Pet Shop Boys somehow became an instant elegy for a generation. The collection of songs were deemed by Entertainment Weekly to be 'heartfelt expressions of romantic distress, plus their best tunes yet'. Elsewhere, epithets such as 'sublime', 'unforgettable' and 'magnificent' were bandied about the popular music press of the time. In his blog 'A Film Canon', Billy Stevenson echoes the sentiments of all for whom the album remains firmly lodged within the heart and mind as ' pop music's answer to Proust's madeleine', and so it proves (and continues so to do) with the passing of the years, despite what has continued to be the PSBs burgeoning pop canon. The video for 'Being Boring'. the album's opening salvo (and arguably, it's most unforgettable song) was shot by Bruce Weber and, watching again with the sober benefit of experience, it appears somehow akin to a Golden Age before the Deluge, with it's seductive images of sublimely beautiful young people at play in a perfect world; somehow, as though the Jeunesse D'ore of Alain-Fournier's 'Le Grand Meaulnes' have been beamed to the suns of California, and suffused with the perceived perfection of an Abercrombie and Fitch universe. Stevenson continues that 'Behaviour' 'deals more with mnemosexuality than homosexuality; that is, sexuality as a search for sexuality, a journey limited by its own vocabulary, and so only accessible in terms of more general, ostensibly asexual, expressions of yearning. It feels as though the Boys only invoke betrayal- and more generally, the confessional mode- as a pretext for wider reflections on the passage of betrayal and time', and so it proves for me, all these years later, a bringing to mind (as it specifically did with Tennant) all of those who have been swept away by the ravages of time and circumstance- yet remain in memory as sharply as do these songs. As 'Court and Spark', Joni Mitchell's sublime, LA-infused album of 1974 similarly attests, there are collections of songs which simply fuse us irrevocably to our time, and can never set us free. 'Behaviour', therefore, is the touchstone for a generation of gay men, in particular- which fixes us to period when our world was less grave, but which still somehow allows us that breath of memory, the joys of love and friendship- and a recollection of a time before the Fall.

When Tennant was interviewed for the South Bank Show in 1991, he spoke eloquently about 'Being Boring'. 'A lot of our songs come about through personal experience. 'Being Boring, which I think is one of our best songs,..I was reminded of a party we had when I was living in Newcastle as a teenager' - and where the invitation purportedly contained a quote from Zelda Fitzgerald; 'She was never bored, mainly because she was never boring'.

Tennant went on to say that 'a very good friend of mine from that era had died of AIDS, so [the song] was a kind of an elegy for him, for the part of myself in Newcastle, all my friends in Newcastle, when I went to London, what I was doing then, but he wasn't there. And so it became a really elegiac song'. He also states that 'Being Boring' was 'also an attempt to do a Stock, Aitken and Waterman thing, believe it or not'. At it's essence, 'Being Boring' describes three distinct forms of remembrance; personal, familial and communal and, to quote Billy Stevenson once again 'conflates them in such a way as to characterize Neil Tennant's subjectivity as a mere function of his inescapable memory, and love as a mere memory in the making'. Elsewhere on the album, is the sweeping, magnificent 'This must be the Place I Waited Years to Leave', a song-testimony to the rigors of a Catholic school upbringing, and which, if memory serves, during the concert performances of their second tour, saw Chris Lowe in short trousers and a school cap. It could equally be the clarion for all of us who endured the bullying and privations of a Secondary education. 'My October Symphony' continued Tennant's fascination with Russian history, but also succeeded (as do so many other PSB songs- witness 'Go West' on 1993's 'Very', in referencing a sub-text way beyond the Village People original, a love-lament for all of those who leave their home to seek a fabled 'promised land' elsewhere). Stevenson speaks of 'Jealousy', the album's ultimate track, as set in a London apartment 'in which the past is almost architectural, so concrete is its presence'.

For me, 'Behaviour' is forever the windswept majesty of Dungeness, and the animated trips into Rye with Derek Jarman, It is also the rooms of Streatham Hill, and of my dear friend David Kirkup, and my seventh-floor flat on the Old Kent Road. Listening again from the vantage-point of some twenty years, I am immediately transported back to these places and these people, and am more than glad to linger there for the duration; 'Behaviour' then, as a threnody for all that has gone before -and just maybe- for a domain now lost to us forever. A small photograph on the rear page of the CD boooklet shows the empty Arts and Crafts chair that Lowe has occupied on its front cover, the roses they cradle now strewn on the floor. If ever there was a metaphor for loss, the remembrance of time past (to plunder the Proustian epithet once more) this is it. One thing is for certain; it is with 'Behaviour' that the fabled chance-meeting of Tennant and Lowe in a King's Road hi-fi store truly reaches its apotheosis, and we, for all our gratitude, will never be the same again.

Heaven and Earth; A Eulogy for William Dyce's 'Pegwell Bay'

2009-10-26T10:46:00.000-07:00

Pegwell Bay, situated on the estuary of the River Stour between Ramsgate and Sandwich, is the setting for one of the most evocative images of the Pre-Raphaelite era. Subtitled 'A Recollection of October 5th 1858', William Dyce's painting was the result of a trip made in the autumn of that year, and depicts members of his family searching for shells and fossils on the beach of the then-popular holiday resort. The meticulous rendering of the cliff-face reflected Dyce's keen interest in geology, as did his careful treatment of the flint-encrusted strata of the beach below them. The barely-visible tail of Donati's comet in the sky above places the activities of the human figures below within the broader scheme of time and space, and its inclusion as a fundamental facet of Dyce's composition, mirrored his fascination with astronomy and with the workings of the heavens. The plein air feel to the painting is due the fact that, following Ruskin's precepts, Dyce made his initial studies in-situ, and the entire mood of the image is charged with questions about man and his place in nature. The location is also significant, as it was believed to be the first site of early Christian activity in the British Isles and was also a famous location for fossil hunters, particularly during the Victorian era, when the fascination for all things paleontological reached its zenith.

So expertly rendered, the chalk-cliffs of Dyce's painting are still clearly discernible to the contemporary onlooker. The car-park that overlooks the painting's viewpoint now lays in the vast shadow of 'Hugin', a viking longboat which was a gift from the people of Denmark to the population of the region in 1949 and which underwent extensive restoration in 2004. Hoverlloyd's 1960's cross-chanel port was located here, the vestiges of which have been almost entirely reclaimed by nature, particularly the concrete launch ramp that now trails off amid swathes of sedge and salt-flats now home to wading birds and willow warblers. Dominating the skyline is the mad, jugenstijl tower of the Belle Vue hotel which dwarfs the Victorian flint-built cottages that surround it, whilst in the sky, a continuous stream of freight aircraft fly low over the beach into Manston airport, forever replacing the mysterious comet which, like Breugel's 'Icarus', goes unnoticed by Dyce's crinolined subjects as they search the beach for their geological treasures.

Quiet Witnesses

2009-10-17T12:17:00.000-07:00

These simple chairs line the walls of the small North chapel of St. Clement, Old Romney in Kent. One of the most-visited of all the Marsh churches, it was built on an artificial mound to protect it from floodwaters. Old Romney churches have a sensibility that is unique, and in common say, with Fairfield and St. Mary-in-the-Marsh, St. Clement leaves a lasting impression on the visitor. Norman in origin, the nave was enlarged in the 13th century, when the aisles were added. Aside from this, it remains virtually unrestored, with an uneven floor, and a gallery which is reached by means of the narrow, somewhat vertiginous wooden staircase. Elsewhere, the rood-loft staircase, discovered in the 1920s retains its medieval door-frame. In the North chapel where these chairs reside is the mensa of the original medieval altar, with rails that date from the 18th century. The striking box pews also date from the late 18th century and retain the strawberry ice-cream pink that they were painted by the Rank film company for their film of 'Dr. Syn', based on Russell Thorndyke's novel 'A Tale of the Romney Marsh', written in 1915 and based on the exploits of the infamous 18th century smuggler in the region. The Royal Coat of Arms of George III also date back to the 18th century, which includes a lion with a benign yet smug expression. The capitals of the font are embellished with different figures and date back to the 14th century. Despite much depreciation, it is still possible to discern the characteristics of the individual grotesque creatures that they represent. Derek Jarman is buried in the churchyard, and his simple grave, marked by a solid piece of slate bearing his distinctive signature, often has flowers, messages and small votives that have been left by admirers as he lays in the shadow of the great yew near the church's perimeter fence.

Cowboy Small still rides the Range

2009-10-17T09:02:00.000-07:00

Originally published in 1949, Lois Lenski's 'Cowboy Small' remains a delightful tale beloved of children worldwide. With his horse Cactus, the diminutive Wild West character greets his readers under the Bar S Ranch sign. Cowboy takes good care of Cactus, who helps him get work done around the ranch, rounding up cattle for branding, and generally they live the good life. At night, Cowboy sleeps in the chuck wagon, sings with his friends, and sleeps under the stars. In short, easily-read stanzas, accompanied by Lenski's captivating illustrations, the daily life of the ranch is made clear to her readers. The book also includes a section which explains the equipment used by horse and cowboy, which features images of attire and equine gear. Lenski wrote and illustrated more than ninety books for children, and won many awards during her long career. This edition, with its cloth cover and charming image of Cowboy Small and Cactus dates from the 1950's.

The Dark Monarch's Door: Sven Berlin's studio in St Ives

2009-10-16T09:32:00.000-07:00

This ghostly indicator is to be found on the door of a two-storey building in Porthmeor Road, near the Island in St. Ives, Cornwall. Possibly rendered in his hand, the inscription denotes the studio of sculptor, painter and writer Sven Berlin, one of the last surviving members of the St Ives School. The son of a Swedish timber merchant from Sydenham, Berlin never received formal art school training, and was mainly self-taught. His previous career was as a music hall dancer, which bought him into contact with such luminaries of the profession as Bud Flanagan and Nervo and Knox. He came to Cornwall in 1938, and received some training in watercolour from Arthur Hamley, an artist based in nearby Redruth. He spent some time as a gardener in 'Little Park Owles', the large house belonging to painters Adrian Stokes and Margaret Mellis which overlooked St Ives Bay. It was through Mellis and Stokes that he came into contact with Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth and their coterie, and was later affiliated to the infuential 'Crypt' group, which also included artists such as Bryan Wynter and Patrick Heron. Beginning World War Two as a conscientious objector, he changed his opinion of the conflict after becoming deeply affected by some naval bombing in the Channel, subsequently serving in the Army in France. During his tour of duty, he sent back a series of diary-like letters to Stokes, and these formed the basis of 'I am Lazarus', which was published in 1961. It was during the war that he also spent time working on the first (and some would say definitive) monograph on Alfred Wallis, the primitive painter first 'discovered' by Nicholson and Christopher Wood, who began painting in his eighties 'for company', and who died in Madron Workhouse in 1942. First published in 1948, Berlin portrayed Wallis as an 'exploited genius'- to quote Peter Davies in Berlin's obituary from 1999. Berlin's verdict of Wallis' fate angered Nicholson, and as a result, he became estranged from what he perceived as the Nicholson stranglehold in the dealings of the Penwith Society, which largely dominated the St Ives movement.

Berlin's graphic style most resembles that of Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, particularly in those images that accompany his own books, According to Davies; 'his subjects were "folky', concentrating on harbour life, on the fishermen and on labourers. Such motifs were no more mundane than they were polemical or political; a flamboyant, expressionistic use of colour imparted a mood of almost mythical intensity'.

Berlin left Cornwall in 1953, profoundly disillusioned with the abstract formalism of the St Ives movement and, encouraged by Augustus John, moved to the New Forest, and became fascinated with the gypsy communities residing there. Romany culture became the pivotal component in his novel 'Dromengro; Man of the Road'. published in 1971. His continued interest in fishing and the fishing community also produced the 1964 book 'Jonah's Dream'. Berlin ran a small zoo in the 1960s with his second wife Helga, and it was during this period that he produced 'The Dark Monarch', a barely-fictionalised sort of roman-a-clef, based on his experiences in St Ives. It was withdrawn from sale after four successful libel actions by the extended families of some of the original St Ives painters. He returned to canvas painting in the 1970s, living on the Isle of Wight with his third wife, and his final years were lived in Wimbourne in Dorset, where he continued to write. He produced an autobiography, entitled 'Coat of Many Colours' was published in 1994 and followed by a second volume in 1996, entitled 'Virgo in Exile'.

Strange Fascination Fascinating me: Thirty Eight years of 'Hunky Dory'

2009-10-01T09:26:00.000-07:00

in preparation

Macabre Simulacrum: the Burgos Christ

2009-09-30T12:36:00.000-07:00

A veritable legend of the Pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela is the so-called 'Master of Burgos', this fourteenth-century effigy of the crucified Christ was once reputed to have been fashioned from human skin, and so lifelike that its hair and fingernails were at one time claimed to be in need of frequent trimming and paring by those charged with its care. Further evidence of the Spanish taste for what author Edwin Mullins termed as farouche led to the legend that the face of the statue also required a shave every eight days or so. Whilst it is more than likely that the matted hair beneath the crown of thorns is of human origin, later examination revealed that the skin of the statue is, in actual fact, fashioned from buffalo hide from a beast slain for the purpose some 1,300 years after Christ's own crucifixion. Said to have been originally discovered by a merchant from Flanders in a crate adrift on the ocean, the effigy was entrusted to the care of an Augustinian order and subsequently displayed in their monastery at Burgos. It drew every pious pilgrim on the way to Compostela, and remained in-situ until a fire destroyed the building in 1836. By some miracle, the effigy was saved from the flames and moved to its present location within the confines of the cathedral. So revered is the statue by the faithful of the Castillian nation, the Capillo del Santo Cristo which contains it is reserved for private contemplation only, and therefore off-limits to all but a select few. A postcard for sale in the cathedral shop does only scant justice to the effigy's shocking realism, scourged and pierced in a verisimilitude of agony and ecstasy, and very much fashioned in the manner by which similar statues by the early Spanish School are chiefly identified. The effigy's air of livid fantasmagoria is further heightened by the addition of a mauve backdrop of heavy velvet, and its arresting appearance is leavened only marginally by the addition of a long skirt that girdles the statue's waist and reaches to its knees, a feature shared by many such representations of the crucified Christ, in particular to those found in this region of Spain. There are purportedly two other such statues which share characteristics with the Burgos Christ; one is in the church at Ourense, the other near the Galician coast at Muxia- the latter which is said to drip with perspiration on Holy days. One imagines that, as is common with such other revered effigies such as the Holy Infant of Prague, there is a wardrobe of garments with which the statue is arraigned on the religious days of the Spanish calendar, particularly as the week of Semana Santa reaches its climax. Given the fate of similar statues during the dark days of the Inquisition and later under Franco's regime, whereupon many such effigies were destroyed entirely, it is something of a testament to the so-called 'Master of Burgos, and the iconic status invested in him by the faithful of Castile that he has survived at all. It is said that when Degas first conceived The Litttle Dancer, it was in the direction of the Burgos Christ that the artist's thoughts bizarrely turned. Determined to represent Marie von Goethem, the diminutive fourteen-year old who posed for the sculpture, as a living entity rather than as a doll, the completed statue appeared at the Impressionist Exhibition of 1881 with her tiny waist encircled by the layers of gauze by which she is now universally recognized, and with a head of horsehair covered by a fine layer of wax that forms her coiffure; audacious additions which, for the period, constituted an unprecedented act of sculptural verisimilitude. The little statue caused a sensation, and duly moved Joris-Karl Huysmanns to opine that Degas had succeeded in bringing about 'the only real modern attempt in current sculpture'. In parenthesis, it is tempting to imagine that Burgos' most famous effigy would doubtless have appealed to Huysmanns' own particular sensibilities, and what a fittting addition it would have made to the unorthodox cabinet of curiosities that comprise the fabled lair of Des Essientes, the decadent and reclusive anti-hero of A Rebours, the book with which Huysmanns is forever associated, given its protagonist's over-arching propensity for artifice and illusion.

'Roberta' - DESERTED!

2009-09-29T14:11:00.000-07:00

The Museum of British Folklore in Rye

2009-09-29T13:37:00.000-07:00

Simon Costin's Grand Tour of the Folk Festivals of The British Isles has come to a close with a guest appearance of the caravan at this weekend's Rye Festival. Adjacently pitched by the Ypres Tower Museum, and with the iconic church of St Mary's as a backdrop, 'Roberta' received many visitors through her painted portal. The tour itself has been a great success, but not without its down-sides, notably a disaster in the Scottish Isles when the towbar of the four by four sheared from its moorings, and Costin was forced to abandon the caravan and her contents by a loch until help could be given by a local garage (see photo above). Despite providing a dramatic photo-opportunity, sadly, the festival in question was missed, but thankfully, there have been many compensations elsewhere. The caravan was well-received at festivals in Yorkshire, Devon, Kent and Dorset, and welcomed many visitors and fans along the way. Plans for a permanent site for the Museum continue, and there seems to be a very favourable response to the project the length and breadth of the UK, with well-wishers and supporters wherever 'Roberta' and her contents have appeared. I joined the caravan for her appearance during Broadstairs Folk Week, and also this weekend in Rye, and the weather was glorious in both locations. A book of photographs by Henry Bourne, working in collaboration with Simon himself, is in preparation, with images of participants at the various regional festivals that the tour has visited, and which promises to be stunning. See the Museum's website for continuing details of the project, and look out for details of Costin's Christmas celebration for the Museum at a venue to be announced shortly.

The Museum of British Folklore at Tate Modern

2009-05-27T03:14:00.000-07:00

Over the hot Bank Holiday weekend, Tate Modern hosted 'The House of Fairytales'. In the looming shadow of the former power station, a number of events were staged, and the Museum's caravan (not to mention its charismatic curator) proved a popular attraction amongst the puppet shows and performance artists. We went down in the afternoon of the very hot Sunday to find Simon, as-ever resplendent in his new coat, sporting the now-famous Stephen Jones stovepipe, talking to visitors and taking them through the delights of the caravan's magical interior. Viewed at a distance from the Turbine Hall, the caravan looked resplendent with its fluttering bunting and its fantasmagorical fairground livery and, as ever, Costin cut a dash as he moved through the animated crowds at the event. See the Museum of British Folklore website for details of Simon's upcoming appearances around the country, or my earlier post for the full tour itinerary.

Simon Costin's Museum of British Folklore: the Launch Party

2009-05-01T14:24:00.000-07:00

2009-05-01T14:02:00.000-07:00

2009-05-01T09:40:00.000-07:00

2009-05-01T09:31:00.000-07:00

2009-05-01T09:29:00.000-07:00

2009-05-01T09:26:00.000-07:00

From 'The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket' by Robert Lowell (1917-1977)

2009-04-24T11:12:00.001-07:00

There once the penitents took off their shoes
and then walked barefoot the remaining mile,
And the small trees, a stream and hedgerows file
Slowly along the munching English lane.

Like cows to the old shrine, until you lose
Track of your dragging pain.
The stream flows down under the druid tree.
Shiloah's whirlpools gurgle and make you glad
And whistled Sion by that stream. But see:

Our Lady, too small for her canopy,
Sits near the altar. There's no comeliness
At all or charm in that expressionless
Face with its heavy eyelids. As before,
This face, for centuries a memory.
Non est species, neque decor
Expressionless expresses God: it goes
Past castled Sion. She knows what God knows,
Not Calvary's Cross nor crib at Bethlehem
Now, and the world shall come to Walsingham.

Birdman of Delamere Terrace: Clifford Coffin's portraits of Lucian Freud

2009-04-21T11:01:00.000-07:00

Clifford Coffin established his reputation as a fashion photographer, and his work was regularly featured in the pages of Vogue throughout the late forties and fifties. He was commissioned by the magazine to photograph the young Lucian Freud, and the resulting session took place on March 18th, 1947, immediately after the artist's five-month sojourn on Poros at the invitation of John Craxton. The pair had taken two upstairs rooms in a lodging house on the island, and they lived on virtually nothing, save for occasional handouts from Freud's parents. It was an excellent location in which to paint, and to escape the rigors of a Britain still in immediate post-war austerity. Greece, however, was experiencing the horrors of a civil war, and extreme privation amongst its own citizens, and there remained guerrilla activity close by. His stay on Poros was the longest time that Freud had been away from London since arriving there as a ten-year old in 1933. Back in London, Freud experienced the coldest winter in living memory, but had a handful of small paintings to show for his time in the Greek sunshine- sufficient for a show at ELT Messens's gallery the following year. The Studio was to comment of the resulting show- which he shared with the then-more saleable Craxton- that [Freud] 'Continues to display a curious mind'. By then, he had found a muse in Jacob Epstein's daughter Kitty Garman, and his early portraits of her, particularly in the infamous Girl with Kitten display an powerful sense of attraction and desire. However, when the session with Coffin was mooted, the show, and a subsequent trip to the South of France with Graham and Kathleen Sutherland were in the future. Rather, he was still settling back into the routine of London and contending with the privations of a cold first-floor room in Delamere Terrace in Paddington. The north light from the canal made it a good painting studio, and he had lived there since 1943. It was the setting for 'The Painter's Room', begun in 1943 and still wet on the easel when the area was hit by a buzzbomb, and was also the room in which Freud painted Harry Diamond for Interior in Paddington, the iconic image commissioned by the Arts Council for the 1951 Festival of Britain.

For Coffin's session, however, there are two iconic elements common to the entire series of images which the photographer captured of the young, arrogant painter that March afternoon. The sparrowhawk, of course, and the beflagged Merchant Navy sweater which he sports in each photograph. There had, in fact been two birds in the care of the young painter, and before them, a kestrel which was lost near Lord's cricket ground. Freud shot rats with an old German Luger on the canal bank (which he had acquired as a swap for a painting) in order to keep the birds fed. One of the birds died; the other- featured in the photographs- would swoop around the room and settle on Freud's wrist and accept mice as a reward. It is rumored that he even took the bird on the underground. William Feaver, writing about the photographs in a 2002 edition of World of Interiors that [the birds] 'suited Freud's image of the fierce, not to say predatory man about town. In the company of Francis Bacon, who he admired enormously, Freud was the hawkish one'.

Feaver goes on to state that the Coffin session coincided with a turning point in Freud's career, and the young painter 'began to realise that his future as a painter would have to involve greater risk. Bacon inspired and provoked this in him'. Now, however, before the lens, fresh from his Greek idyll, we can see his latest works in some of the photographs, and wearing the sweater (Feaver says 'calculatingly' so) in which he had fitted himself out for a spell on a North Atlantic convoy in 1941 and where he had sailed to Nova Scotia and back. A severe bout of tonsillitis meant a discharge for him, and a resulting painting Hospital Ward was made during his convalescence. Feaver states that the Greek paintings proved to be the culmination of what may be identified as Freud's early manner style. The famous zebra head was dumped unceremoniously on the landing of Delamere Terrace, and the sparrowhawk was taken to Essex one weekend and left with friends near Chelmsford.

I am fortunate to have been given a contemporary print of one of these iconic photographs, which includes in the shot, Freud's Portrait of a Young Man prominently displayed on the easel. Freud looks out towards Coffin's lens and cradles the sparrowhawk with an air of studied ease, whilst surrounded by the paraphanalia of his painting equipment. The William Feaver article of 2002 published a series of the Coffin photographs for the first time, and it is worth investigating a back issue of the publication in order to gain an impression of power of the photographs and the subject's presence in them. Coffin's photographs of the young Freud are also cited by contemporary photographer Tim Walker as being among his all-time favourite images from the history of modern photogaphy.

I am indebted to Robin Muir, archivist at Conde Naste and curator and author of the 1997 exhibition and catalogue of the photographic work of Clifford Coffin for his kind assistance in the preparation of this article.

(Dis)honest Indian: Grey Owl, my Mother and Me

2009-04-17T11:07:00.000-07:00

This flimsy 14-page souvenir booklet was published in 1937 to mark the occasion of Grey Owl's second tour of the United Kingdom. Its discovery was the result of a long, hard search on my part, and was snatched from the hands of another, equally anxious bidder on Ebay at the last second or two of its auctioning. Doubtless, I paid well over the odds for it, but with reasonable justification. Subsequent searches, with no result, must attest to its rarity, despite the fact that they were probably printed in their hundreds, if not thousands. Grey Owl's published books, however, are still relatively easy to obtain, and with several subsequent biographies on the market, it is clear that interest in this rather charismatic early pioneer of nature conservation and education remains strong.

The reason why I wanted it so badly was because, as a child, I grew up with another copy that had once belonged to my mother. It was kept in the bottom drawer of my parents' heavy dark-wood sideboard, along with a button box and a souvenir brochure for the 1951 Festival of Britain. The booklet became something of a talisman for me, and I grew up with a keen interest in anything and everything to do with Red Indians (the term 'Native American' not being a concept we fully understood the meaning of back then). The black and white Westerns of my fifties childhood never seemed to give the poor Indians anything remotely like an even break, and no one, but no one seemed to speak up for them. I naturally gravitated toward their teepees, their eagle feathers and their buckskins, and images from the National Geographic, that staple of the dentist's waiting room of the day, also fuelled my passion, somehow painting a far more reasoned existence for the people of the Plains than any John Ford movie could. It would be fair to say that, until the Beatles were invented, my pin-ups consisted largely of those wondrous Edward Curtis photographs, or else beautifully rendered watercolour images of 'Indian' encampments, with companions in the form of those Indian brave and squaw dolls that were a staple of the Woolworth's toy departments of my childhood. I lost count of how many I had; sufficient certainly for a tribe. Their eyes closed when you laid them to sleep, and the squaw had a tiny papoose strapped to her chamois-covered back. Of course, they were all identical, but this was a detail I overlooked by extra embellishments to their headgear from the family budgie and, if I recall, providing them with a teepee made from old dusters with sweet-pea stakes for tent poles. An over-zealous Golden Retriever puppy probably saw many of them off to the Great Beyond (they were, as I recall, relatively fragile; manufactured, one would imagine, in Japan or China and from that brittle kind of plastic) but as long as Woolworths continued to sell them, I would badger my poor aunt and mother for replacements.

The copy of the booklet that I grew up with was probably issued in 1935, two years before the one I hold in my hand. Not recognising it then, as I do now, that the portrait of Grey Owl that comprises the front image was painted by Sir John Lavery, I loved it simply for the powerful presence of its sitter, gazing out towards the viewer with heavily fringed buckskin sleeves folded across his chest and eagle feathers in his coal-black hair. Of interest (especially when I recall how long I must have gazed at the booklet's cover as a child), is the way in which I hadn't remembered it completely as it appeared when I saw it again, all those years later. However, when I opened the envelope that contained the booklet, it bought back a flood of recollection; about the place where I grew up, my obsession with all things Indian, but most of all, it bought a sense of sadness, as it was the one thing amidst the debris and confusion that my father had failed to find for me when my parent's house had to be cleared quickly. Of all the clutter that could cheerfully have been foregone, this, the flimsiest of ephemeral items, had vanished forever, and with it, perhaps for good and all, my childhood. Amazingly, the ticket for Grey Owl's appearance at Shire Hall that my recently-discovered copy included, is in excellent condition, and was an unexpected bonus.

What my mother's copy contained, however, was a black and white photograph of herself, aged I would guess, around fourteen (given that Grey Owl's first UK tour was in 1935), pictured with Grey Owl himself. Subsequently of course, I have questioned my mother about the time that he visited the school she attended in Tottenham. She could recall the booklet and even the visit itself, but not the existence of the photograph. I can only imagine that it was a bold step on the part of the school authorities to have a photographer present for the occasion which must have been a rather magical occurance, given the everyday-nature of a mid-thirties childhood. I think that it was the loss of this photograph that affected me the most, and whilst I am very fortunate to have found another copy, it makes the foregoing of the other (and the thing it contained) the more poignant. What is perhaps interesting, but merely in terms of spooky synchronicity, is that the date on the ticket for Grey Owl's appearance at Shire Hall- December 11th- is my mother's birthday.

We now know much more about the life and works of Grey Owl. History has rather rewritten the story of the pioneer Canadian naturalist, whose mission it was to tour the world in order to bring a greater understanding of the animal kingdom and its workings. He was born Archibald Stansfield Belaney, in 1888- not of Native American parentage, but in Hastings, East Sussex, and into a family of farmers. His father drank away what fortune there was, and some sources suggest that Belaney's mother was little more than a child herself when she became pregnant with him. Raised by his grandmother and two maiden aunts, he expressed a keen interest in nature and in native cultures from an early age. He attended Hastings Grammar School until he was sixteen, beginning his working life in the local timber-yard, but, according to an early biographer Lovat Dickenson in 'Wilderness Man' (1974), was dismissed for dropping a bomb down his employer's chimney. Belaney emigrated to Canada in 1906 in order, it was said, to study agriculture. After a spell in Toronto, he moved to Temagami, Northern Ontario and adopted a native American identity and the name for which he would become best-known. Marrying a member of the Anishinaabe tribe, Angele Egwuna, he then worked as a fur-trapper, a wilderness guide and a forest ranger. He fabricated his past, stating that he had been the child of a Scottish father and an Apache mother, and had emigrated from the U.S. in order to join the Ojibwa people. In World War One, Grey Owl joined the 13th Montreal Battalion of the Black Watch. The unit was shipped to France, where he served as a sniper. His associates always regarded him as having come from Native American stock. He was wounded twice in 1916, and the latter incident resulted in the onset of gangrene, whereafter he was shipped to England in order to receive proper treatment for his injuries. Having been moved from one Infirmary to another whilst doctors attempted to heal him, he was finally shipped home to Canada in 1917 with an honourable discharge from the army and a disability pension. It was during his time in England that he re-met and subsequently married his childhood friend Constance Holmes, but the marriage was not to last. In 1925, he met Gertrude Bernard, a native of the Iroquois tribe, who encouraged him to stop his fur-trapping-which. on his return to Canada, he had resumed- and to publish his writings about wilderness issues and the lives of animals. As a result, he attracted the attention of the Dominion Parks Service, and he began to work for them as a naturalist . In 1928, the Parks Service made him the subject of a documentary film entitled 'Beaver People', which featured Grey Owl and his wife playing with their pets.

In all aspects of his books and subsequent documentary films, he actively promoted the concept of environmentalism and nature conservation. His two extensive tours of the United Kingdom -which included a return to his native Hastings- he wore the familiar Ojibwa costume to promote his books and lectures. Still alive, his aunts recognised the prodigal, but remained silent about his origins and upbringing until the end of 1937, when they effectively aided and abbetted his unmasking to the media. On the latter tour, he met the young princesses Elizabeth and Margaret at Buckingham Palace. Exhausted from his journeys up and down the UK, he returned to Canada, and to his cabin at Ajawaan Lake, dying the following year of pneumonia on April 13th. He is buried in the grounds of his lakeside retreat. After his death, questions began to arise as to his true identity, and a local newspaper 'The North Bay Nugget' ran an expose. The story was soon taken up by national, and then international organisations, including the London 'Times'. Lovat Dickenson, his publisher, attempted to maintain Grey Owl's chosen identity, but was forced to admit that his friend had lied to him also. 'Grey Owl' was indeed a fabrication; an invented Indian like so many others. Consequences of the revelations were dramatic; an immediate cessation of his book publications, and in some instances, with extant copies being withdrawn from sale. As a result, donations for conservation causes that Grey Owl had been so anxious to promote were very badly affected.

Richard Attenborough (who recalled meeting Grey Owl as a fifteen-year old boy) released a film of his life in 1999. It received mixed reviews and was not shown in the U.S. On the 100th anniversary of his birth, a Canadian Red Maple tree was planted in the grounds of Hastings Grammar School, and in 1997, the mayor of Hastings unveiled a plaque dedicated to Grey Owl on the house in which he was born. In the town's museum is a full-sized replica of his Canadian lakeside dwelling, with a display of memorabilia (including, I believe, a copy of this brochure) and a selection of his published works.

Romantic Relic: Stephen Tennant and Wilsford Manor

2009-04-15T08:34:00.000-07:00

This articulated wooden lay-hand, and the shell it holds, was amongst a miscellaneous lot from the sale of the contents of Wilsford Manor, the former home of Stephen Tennant. The box which contained it also included a selection of sea-shells, an ammonite and a quantity of dusty pot-pourri which had once sat somewhere in Tennant's crumbling Xanadu of a house on the Wiltshire downlands. The hand was a gift from my friend Lawrence Mynott, who attended the sale in 1987, and was probably included within a lot that he was able to secure, along with a number of other items from the house. I believe he also acquired a substantial portfolio of Tennant's drawings, including sketches for his proposed 'Lascar' book. Most notably was a white Syrie Maughan daybed and the zebra-skin rug that can clearly be seen in the famous Beaton photograph of 1971, where Tennant, abed, entertains David Hockney. The ensemble, which, if I recall rightly, also comprised the side-table which can clearly be seen in Beaton's final photographs of Tennant, became the great focal point of Lawrence's flat in Chepstow Road, where he lived for the two years immediately prior to his departure for Tangier.

In his wonderful biography of Stephen Tennant, author Philip Hoare describes the meeting between Tennant and the painter David Hockney. Already world-famous, Hockney had become a great friend of Beaton's, and was invited to Wilsford by the photographer in order to spend the afternoon with the famous recluse. In 'Serious Pleasures; the Life of Stephen Tennant', Hoare writes of the encounter, and of the series of photographs that were the result (it was also to be Beaton's last-ever photo-session with Tennant);
'As Stephen regaled the painter with tales of the past, Cecil aimed his lens. Hockney sits on the edge of Stephen's bed, as Stephen, 'transformed into a made-up Buddha', lies out full-length. He is completely surrounded by chosen relics; his monkey, his jewelery box, letters, books and papers in profusion. In one frame, Stephen sweeps the still air of his Wilsford bedroom with a huge and ornate Japanese fan; in another, he toasts his friends with a glass of champagne. In this final attempt to capture an elusive butterfly on film, Beaton caught the dark. half-lit world of Wilsford, where this mysterious figure lay like a latter-day magician, or beached ballet dancer, swept up on an island by some tempest long ago, now languishing among the relics of a glamorous past. It was the last enduring image of Stephen Tennant, fittingly abed, corpulent and with a straggle of thining hair-but as charismatic as ever he was'.

Wilsford Manor, Tennant's family seat, achieved nationwide attention when its contents were put up for auction a mere few months after its lone occupant had died at the age of eighty. Newspapers at the time were filled with reports of Tennant's eccentricity and his wasted existence, 'lying half-asleep among his bibelots, jewels and polar bear skins' (Philip Hoare, from his introduction). The sale was conducted under the aegis of Sotheby's and, looking through the now extremely rare catalogue, what seems overwhelming, quite apart from the amount of items destined for disposal, was the sheer variety of the lots, from priceless first editions to bulging boxes of Beaton photographs, a ton of personal correspondence from luminaries that came to define the age and the climate within which Tennant came to prominence in the twenties and thirties, antique furniture and rare paintings by everyone from Pavel Tchelichew to Paul Poiret, not to mention the mountains of garden statuary and the drifts of soft furnishings with which Tennant effectively curtained himself from the outside world, living out the latter years of his life as a shut-in. Lawrence spoke in the immediate aftermath of the sale of his incredulity that simply everything was up for grabs, from the most priceless Chinese lacquer screen to a humdrum tumble-dryer. Needless to say, the Beaton photographs, even bearing in mind the passage of time and the sums of money they now command, were heavily in demand, particularly one would have imagined, a print of the famous 'mackintosh' photograph of 1927/8 (lot 734a) which carried an estimate of £1,500.00. Elsewhere, delighted bidders carried away unique designs for family tombstones by Rex Whistler, and rare Galle glassware in quantity. As humble as this lay-hand may be, I love the fact that it once belonged to Stephen Tennant, whether boxed and totally overlooked in some far-flung anteroom or, surrounded by nautilus shells, displayed on some ormolu table amidst the debris of his Miss Haversham-like existence.

2009-04-14T06:44:00.001-07:00

Simon Costin's Museum of British Folklore: the work continues

2009-04-14T06:31:00.000-07:00

The caravan which will form the touring taster for Simon's Museum of British Folklore begins to get its fantasmagorical livery, courtesy of the skillfull painters at Scena, working in close collaboration with the Museum's founder. Here is Simon at work in their South London workshops, applying paper stencils to the body of the caravan in preparation for the embellished paintwork which will transform the shell of the 1976 Castleton into the beautiful vehicle which will be home to chosen exhibits from the proposed collection, soon to be seen at folk festivals throughout the UK later this year.

Seaside Special: Eric Ravilious and the genius of 'Newhaven Harbour'

2009-04-12T11:14:00.000-07:00

Because of his strong associations with Eastbourne, Eric Ravilious was no stranger to the play of light on water, and with the shifts from sunlight to shadow. It is this sensibility that made his landscape work so unique in the canon of English art between the wars. In what was a relatively short career, cut short by a tragic and untimely death in 1942 whilst on service as Official War Artist, it remains a matter of conjecture as to what impression his work would have made on the emerging generation of the 1950s in Britain, and to what degree his work would have impacted on the new wave of artists and designers of the post-war period.

Despite his short life, the range of Ravilious's work was extraordinarily wide. The dexterity of his watercolour work was equally matched by the skill with with he applied himself to the field of design, be it ceramics, textiles or advertising, and the recent re-interest in all aspects of his work (culminating perhaps in 'Eric Ravilious-Imagined Realities' under the masterful curatorship of Alan Powers, and staged at London's Imperial War Museum in 2006) attests to the enduring power of this quintessential British artist.

Growing up in Eastbourne, Ravilious was very familiar with the surrounding landscape of the South Downs and adjacent coastline. Works such as 'The Downs in Winter' from 1934 and 'The Wilmington Giant' of 1939 are firmly lodged within the English psyche, and immediately transport the viewer to this very particular part of the English countryside.

This lithograph of Newhaven Harbour was one of the first produced under the aegis of the 'Contemporary Lithographs' series, and remains possibly the most elusive of the artist's printed works. The scheme was devised by Robert Wellington of the Zwemmer gallery, in collaboration with the artist John Piper as a way to introduce the work of living artists to school children, much in the manner in which, later, Brenda Rawnsley's School Prints' series did (see earlier post). Many schools had modern reproductions of Old Masters on their premises, but Wellington felt strongly that children should have the opportunity to become familiar with the artists of their own day. In consultation with Henry Morris, and with Marion Richardson, a pioneer in the field of children's art, it was thought that initially the chosen artists would paint murals in the schools, but the notion was rapidly abandoned, as the costs would, understandably have been prohibitive. Therefore, it was decided that each artist would be invited to produce a four-colour lithograph, the subject matter to be chosen by themselves, and the work would be carried out at the Curwen Press. Along with Ravilious, nine other contemporary artists were chosen for the first series; these included Edward Bawden and Barnett Freedman, Clive Gardiner and Graham Sutherland. The abiding stipulation by the publishers was that the prints should measure twenty by thirty inches. Thus, 'Newhaven Harbour' remains the largest of Ravilious's printed works, and the rarest. Devoid of all humanity, with the ghostly, almost transparent steamer silently approaching the lighthouse on the strand, the artist referred to the image as his 'Homage to Seurat'. The delicacy of his technique renders the scene dreamlike, and his skillful choice of colours, from the pea-green surrounds of the lighthouse windows to the rich red of the railway track, seems to lend a seaside sensibility to the serene sense of the surreal with which Ravilious's image is imbued. Look, too, at the scudding clouds, fashioned from the very glow of the paper beneath his familiar cross-hatched sky; they appear almost heavier than the air itself. Its clarity and luminosity is astonishing, especially when one considers that this was the artist's first introduction to the lithographic process. Reporting on the newly-published prints, the 'New Statesman' wrote that 'the first series of ten is extremely promising. There is something, in fact for every sort of taste except bad taste...'

The lithographs were also offered for sale to the general public, at a slightly higher price of £1, 11s 6d. The series was slow to emerge, due to the time and care afforded to their production, finally being published in 1937. The lithographic process was a revelation to Ravilious, opening the door to a world of colour after the black and white landscapes of his wood engravings. The experience gained from his work for the 'Newhaven Harbour' print paved the way for the production of perhaps his most widely-recognised series of lithographs for 'High Street'. Initially, Ravilious had pitched his idea for a book of shops, aimed ostensibly at children, to the Golden Cockerel Press. However, it was Noel Carrington, then the publisher of Country Life Books, who eventually commissioned the book, which finally saw publication in 1938. Ravilioous's friend J.M. Richards was invited to write a short linking text to the lithographic images, which comprised a factual account of each of the chosen shops, and also incorporated information gleaned from the shopkeepers and owners themselves. Of interest, Paxton and Whitfield, the renowned Jermyn Street cheese-shop, retains virtually the same fascia as when Ravilious pictured it for the 'High Street' series; other emporiums are sadly no more. What, we wonder, was the fate of the wondrous 'Submarine &...' establishment, replete with the deep-sea diver's outfit, that he and Bawden first noticed in 1930 whilst on their way to and from Morley College when they were working on the murals for the refreshment room there? The Firework Shop, perhaps one of the most successful in the series, is described as 'an extraordinary newspaper shop and tobacconists, but for a few weeks before November 5th every year, it fills its windows with fireworks'. Complete, 'unbroken' copies of 'High Street' remain elusive and expensive, due to the fact that the pages are now more familiar as framed prints, and therefore sold by dealers as such. It is rumoured, however, that a facsimile reprint version of the complete book is soon to be made available, no doubt to satisfy the clamor for the work of an artist that continues to attract such a committed following.

Simon Costin's Museum of British Folklore: The Adventure Begins

2009-04-08T04:47:00.000-07:00

Preparations are now well underway for Simon's national tour of UK folk festivals (see earlier post for tour dates). These ghostly images show the designs for Costin's 1976 Castleton caravan being applied in advance of the paintwork which will transform the bodywork into the fantasmagorical roadster that will be appearing at a town near you from May to September. The work is being skillfully undertaken by Scena, the renowned production company based in South London, and the end result promises to be as unique as the creator of the Museum itself. The interior of this splendid vehicle will be custom-fitted out as a mobile taster for the delights to come, with specially commissioned artefacts, objects from established folk collections and items from Costin's own extensive collection, as well as work from contemporary artists such as Jonny Hannah (responsible for the museum's logo and corporate look), Mark Hearld and others. Simon himself will be especially kitted-out for the tour, with hats by internationally-respected milliner Stephen Jones-currently enjoying success with his wonderful exhibition at London's Victoria and Albert Museum, and with outfits by Jenna Rossi-Camus (see right). Watch for regular updates on the progress of Simon's tour, and for news of a permanent home for the Museum of British Folklore.

Suits you, Sir!: Bowie's power-dressing for 'Pin-ups'

2009-03-30T13:45:00.000-07:00

During the relative lull that followed the furore of Ziggy's retirement, and before his creator's descent into the drug-induced paranoia that was to usher in the year of the 'Diamond Dogs', Bowie fled to the sanctity of France's famous Chateau d'Herouville recording studio to put together a nostalgic portfolio of favoured tracks from the sixties. 'Pin-ups' was to mark the end of a very personal era for Bowie, chiefly bringing to a conclusion the fecund collaboration between himself and Mick Ronson and, by extension, the parting of the ways for him and the Spiders from Mars. His hand-penned liner-notes acknowledge a personal debt to the bands and the songs featured on this, his fan-album par-excellence, with tracks made famous by the Yardbirds, Them, The Pretty Things, the Pink Floyd of Syd Barrett and the Who, as well as many other giants of the London club-circuit of the 1960s. With Bowie's own exposure to such decade-defining sounds, and his nascence within a London freighted with renewal and shifts within its cultural climate, it is little wonder that his versions of these classics, whilst suffused with a reverential gravitas, are simultaneously made somehow entirely his own. 'Sorrow'. the track originally made famous by the Merseys, was the hit single from the album, and, whilst it has never attained the loftiest of poll-positions within Bowie's colossal body of work, it is nevertheless, an album that his fans recall with a great sense of nostalgia; it is also one which has somehow (perhaps somewhat ironically) stood the test of time, sounding as fresh now as it did over four decades ago.

With its iconic, airbrushed front cover art which featured Twiggy in full Biba-pierrot mode, and with Bowie's piebald eyes staring earnestly out towards the viewer, the mask make-up was created by Pierre Laroche, responsible for the equally iconic 'Aladdin Sane' cover style. To me, the image always seemed slightly at odds with the rear cover and inner liner photographs. For it was they that captivated me the most, and in particular, the images of Bowie dressed in the chocolate brown suit created for him by Freddi Burretti. It is the back cover photograph of Bowie, complete with glittering gold saxophone held in almost regimental fashion, that makes the cover of 'Pin-ups' unforgettable. The inner sleeve featured a black and white image of Bowie in the same outfit, hand on hip and bent sideways at the knee, the rumour of a pout about his lips. I recall a record shop in Eastbourne that had a virtually life-sized cut-out of Bowie in his 'Pin-ups' suit, provided, no doubt by RCA for the purposes of advertising the album. It was, if I remember correctly, attached to a drainpipe by means of those bungee clips and, needless to say, I was desperate to possess it, so much so that I spent an inordinate amount of time wondering how its liberation was to be effected. In the end, I lost my nerve, and doubtless, if it and any of its counterparts have survived the ravages of the intervening decades, it is a prize beyond price for some old Bowie fan somewhere or other.

Bowie's formative years were spent chasing, then assimilating a plethora of trends, adding his own personal touches to what had previously gone before. In transcending the style of the street and the clubland of his youth, he then re-invented it into a one-man spectacular that was, in turn copied by die-hard fans the world over. The cultural and sociological whirlwinds created by his alter-egos changed the way in which we came to regard style and fashion, revolutionizing the way in which we considered rock should look. It was a style that would galvanize and influence an entire generation. Accepted tenets of 'high' and 'low' art were blurred by him, prompting debates about the nature of authorship, sexuality and identity, and for this reason, amongst a plethora of others, why Bowie remains the most consistently -influential figure in the history of twentieth century music.

Shedding the kabuki-inspired costumes and the quilted jumpsuits of the 'Aladdin Sane' period, Bowie's look for -Pin-ups' is, and remains pin-sharp. Bowie returns to his Mod-beginnings with an outfit that, whilst looking back, manages to be utterly contemporary to his own style period. Despite the intervening decades, it remains the suit we ALL wanted to wear. The vestiges of Sue Fussey's most famous tonsorial creation, the Ziggy-cut, now grown longer and with the hint of a side-parting, the style once endlessly in demand in regional salons the length and breadth of these islands. Long gone, the apricot Judy Garland-inspired feather-cut of the early Ziggy period: the tango-orange do of 'Pin-ups' definitely means business. But the suit; four-button, double-breasted, bum-freezer length; the trousers; 28-inch baggies with two-inch turn-ups, cut specifically to be worn over platform boots (electric blue, and probably from Derbers in Kensington High Street). Accessories too; the wide aqua-blue tie, Windsor-knotted tight to the neck, and the shirt collar, possibly button-down or, most likely pinned through, a red hankie in a sharply angled top pocket. Burretti, responsible for this and many other iconic Bowie outfits, was born Frederick Burrett. He became a close friend of Bowie and his then-wife Angle in 1971, when the trio were regular fixtures at the Sombrero, one of London's erstwhile most infamous gay disco-clubs. The creator of many of Ziggy's most enduring creations, he also fronted the short-lived but legendary Arnold Corns band, a project overseen and masterminded by Bowie, singing under the name of Rudi Valentino. Bowie's plan at the time was to make him the 'next Mick Jagger', but the project was soon abandoned with a mere handful of tracks laid down, the most famous of which is the blistering, mixed-back rendition of 'Hang onto Yourself'. Sounding for all the world like cheaply-recorded song-publisher's demos, the Arnold Corns sessions were effectively dry-runs for 'Ziggy Stardust', and by this token, set important precedents for one of the most influential and enduring rock and roll albums of all time. Burretti became personal tailor to the Bowies, defining the 'look' of the Ziggy and post-Ziggy era, and responsible for the iconic styling of this groundbreaking period of Bowie's career. With the creation of the 'Pin-ups' suit, Freddi Burretti elevated Bowie's already-stratospheric style to a new universe. Burretti died in 2001 in Paris at the age of forty one, having lived and worked in the city since 1991.

From 'Ballad of a Small Plaza' by Federico Garcia Lorca (1919)

2009-03-11T14:27:00.000-07:00

It's filled with light, is
my heart of silk, and
with bells that are lost
with bees and lillies,
and I will go far off,
behind those hills there,
close to the starlight,
to ask of the Christ,
Lord, return to me
My child's soul, ancient,
ripened with legends,
With a cap of feathers,
and a sword of wood.

'Hamnavoe' by George Mackay Brown

2009-02-03T06:03:00.000-08:00

My father passed with his penny letters
Through closes opening and shutting like legends
When barbarous with gulls
Hamnavoe's morning broke

On the salt and tar steps. Herring boats,
Puffing red sails, the tillers
Of cold horizons, leaned
Down the gull-gaunt tide

And threw dark nets on sudden silver harvests.
A stallion at the sweet fountain
Dredged water, and touched
Fire from steel-kissed cobbles.

Hard on noon four bearded merchants
Past the pipe-spitting pier-head strolled,
Holy with greed, chanting
Their slow grave jargon.

A tinker keen like a tartan gull
At cuithe-hung doors. A crofter lass
Trudged through the lavish dung
In a dream of corn-stalks and milk.

In the Arctic Whaler three blue elbows fell,
Regular as waves, from beards spumy with porter,
Till the amber day ebbed out
To its black dregs.

The boats drove furrows homeward, like ploughmen
In blizzards of gulls. Gaelic fisher-girls
Flashed knife and dirge
Over drifts of herring.

And boys with penny wands lured gleams
From tangled veins of the flood. Houses went blind
Up one steep close, for a
Grief by the shrouded nets.

The kirk, in a gale of psalms, went heaving through
A tumult of roofs, freighted for heaven. And lovers
Unblessed by steeples lay under
The buttered bannock of the moon.

He quenched his lantern, leaving the last door.
Because of his gay poverty that kept
my seapink innocence
From the worm and black wind;

And because, under equality's sun,
All things wear now to a common soiling,
In the fire of images
Gladly I put my hand
To save that day for him.

Sophisticated Lady: Barbara Jones and the Vernacular arts in England

2009-02-02T02:29:00.000-08:00

in preparation

Ballad of a Preacher-Man: Hazel Motes, Flannery O'Connor, and the genius of 'Wise Blood'

2009-01-20T16:00:00.000-08:00

First published in 1952, Flannery O'Connor's blackly allegorical novel 'Wise Blood' is considered to be a masterpiece of the Southern Gothic genre. The grotesquely comic reality of its themes, conflated with elements of the truly absurd, and with over-arching tragedy of the central character at its dark heart were bought to the screen in 1979 by the veteran director John Huston, after having been sent a copy of O'Connor's novel by the son of her literary executor Robert Fitzgerald. Then his mid-seventies, and with a string of illustrious movies behind him, Huston (who, after 'Wise Blood', was to make two further feature films adapted from major novels; Malcolm Lowry's 'Under the Volcano' in 1984 and - in 1987, 'The Dead'- the final, magnificent story of love and loss in Joyce's 'The Dubliners') must have considered the task of bringing O'Connor's novel to the screen a daunting prospect, but the result is a haunting, cinematic triumph that once witnessed, remains forever in the heart and mind of the viewer. Huston had always considered O'Connor to be a major voice in American literature, and his faithful rendering of 'Wise Blood' remains to date, the only major feature film based on her writings.

Shot almost entirely in and around the town of Macon, Georgia, in a period of forty-eight days, Huston employed a scant technical crew that he backed up with assistance from the city's fire and police departments. With a screenplay closely adapted by Fitzgerald that stuck largely to the sequences of events as they unfold in O'Connor's narrative, the novel's themes of false redemption, heartbreak, marginalisation and displacement are closely adhered to, and the plot loses little or nothing of O'Connor's unsettling, fractured narrative. Originally set in the 1950's when, we assume it was period immediately following the Korean war that O'Connor had in mind, Huston chose instead to update the action to the mid-seventies, where presumably it is as a Vietnam vet that Hazel Motes returns to his childhood home, only to find it eerily derelict, with little or no trace of his past to attest to his identity, his relatives dead or missing. Despite his stated hatred of the established church and of preachers in particular, he travels by train to the city of Taulkinham and decides to establish a new order -'The Church of Truth Without Jesus Christ Crucified', which advocates a humanistic reliance on self, rather than on God. Presumably as a result of his experiences in the army, Hazel has reached the conclusion that the only way to escape sin is to be devoid of soul. Immediately on his arrival in the new town, he takes a taxi to an address that he has found in the station washroom, which in truth is the calling-card of one Leonora Watts, a homely, part-time prostitute who, upon his avowed insistence that he is not a man of the cloth, reassuringly tells him ' Mamma don't mind if you ain't a preacher', and promptly provides him with her services. 'I'm obliged', he drawls to the bemused cab driver, who is seemingly at odds to equivocate Hazel's newly-acquired priestly vestments with the profession of the addressee to whose house he has taken him.

The following day, he encounters a street vendor who is selling potato peelers to a crowd that have gathered around him, and also the disillusioned eighteen-year old character of Enoch Emery, whose semi-itinerant status has been bought about by his abandonment at the hands of an uncaring father. With a nothing-job in the local zoo, Enoch is cynical and impatient with his unfortunate simian charges, and seemingly, none of his efforts endear him to Hazel, who is impatient to be rid of the pestering boy. Seeing another lost soul in Hazel Motes, Enoch tells his that he has the gift of 'Wise Blood' inherited from his estranged father-which affords him the ability to 'know things'. The huckster's patter is interrupted by the arrival of a 'blind' preacher. Asa Hawks, who is accompanied by his daughter Sabbath Lily. Motes immediately senses an indefinable charisma in the character of Asa, yet seizes his moment, testily diverting the crowd's attention from the other's ministry with a sermon about his own newly-formed church. Motes is strangely attracted to Sabbath; Asa in turn, is drawn to the interloper. Having ostensibly blinded himself with quicklime, his affliction turns out to be a conceit, but he continues to prey on the sympathies of the multitude, fiscally-assuaged by the faith they stake in his mission. Enoch shows Hazel a shrunken, dessicated corpse that lies in a vitrine in the local museum, but Motes is unimpressed. The weeks intervene, and Hazel's 'Church of Truth' staggers along with himself as both preacher and sole-disciple. He has bought a clapped-out car from a rogue dealer, and convinces himself that it will provide him with shelter and get him form place to place so that he can spread the word of his mission. 'No one with a good car needs to be justified' he tells the feckless dealer, as the vehicle wheeezes and lurches off the lot.

Enter self-confessed Christian evangelist Hoover Shoats. aka Onnie J.Holy (played magnificently in Huston's film by Ned Beatty), who sees a money-making opportunity in Hazel's new religion, and attempts to hijack it for his own ends, hiring a feckless individual whom he picks up on the street, dressing him in Hazel's trademark black suit and wide-brimmed fedora, and sending him out as a stalking horse for the 'new' faith. Later, Motes runs the pretender out of town, sides his car into the ditch, and then runs over him with his own, killing him. Meanwhile, Hazel has sought out the house where Hawks and his daughter are living, and has taken an upstairs room so that he can plague the pair and unmask Asa for the fraudster that he knows him to be. Enoch, having heard Motes' plea for the need of a 'new Jesus' in his ministry, steals the strange, mummified corpse from the museum, convinced that it is the messiah that the newly-converted will crave, once it is in Hazel's possession, taking it to Mote's apartment, where Sabbath is now also living. Furious to discover that Sabbath somehow adopted the creature as a sort of divine progeny, he hurls it out of the window. In a later scene we see Sabbath, who has managed somehow to reclaim the mummy's head, sleeping with it in their communal bed. In absurd counterpoint, a van with loudspeakers is announcing the arrival of 'The Mighty Gonga' to town, a King-Kong like creature who appears before a crowd at a downtown movie theatre. In reality, of course, it is a man in an ape suit, and with whom Enoch becomes obsessed, believing that there is some affinity between his charges at the zoo and this 'wild' creature. In the film, a tracking shot of the van leaving the city limits ends with Enoch climbing into the truck, later to emerge in the gorilla suit, in which he proceeds to terrorise townsfolk at night. Motes decides to leave town and move on, but the town's sherif stops apprehends him on the road, and forces him to get out of the by now decrepit car, which he then proceeds to roll down a hill into a lake, Now, with no possessions, no car and no direction, Hazel returns to the house and proceeds to blind himself with quicklime in the belief that asceticism and suffering will be the key to his new existence. Investing a passionate belief in suffering and pain, he binds his bare torso with barbed wire and walks with shoes full of rocks. Mrs Flood, his lonely, long-suffering landlady (played magnificently in Huston's film by Atlanta-born stage actress Mary Nell Santacroce, whose quietly-powerful performance is a fine counterpoint to Brad Dourif's tortured Motes) sees that now, Hazel is utterly reliant on her for his care, eventually proposing that she marries him in order to keep him with her. Mrs Flood's suggestion that he gets a 'seeing dog' and returns to preaching is met with rebuttal; Hazel tells her that he 'doesn't have the time'. Her preoccupation with his well-being drives him to distraction, and after telling him that she wants him for a husband, he wanders off in the torrential downpour. Huston's clever use of the rain in that scene in the film is a hugely-effective juxtaposition to Mrs Flood's quietly- uttered proposal, and is both haunting and unforgettable. Discovered three days later in a ditch, the policeman deliver the semi-conscious Hazel back to Mrs. Flood's house, where he then dies.

Premiered at the New York Film Festival in 1979, 'Wise Blood' was rapturously received by critics and audience alike. Vincent Canby, film critic for The New York Times; declared in to be 'one of John Huston's most original, most stunning movies. It is so funny, so surprising and so haunting that it is difficult to believe it is not the first film of some enfant terrible instead of the thirty-third feature by a man who is now in his seventies'. Canby opined that the film was 'lyrically mad and absolutely compelling even when we don't fully comprehend it'. Another review concluded that 'it was the best realised religious movie of the decade'.

At the heart of Huston's film lies the powerhouse performance of Brad Dourif as Motes. In retrospect, it is difficult to imagine any other actor of his generation in the role. Previously most noteably known to a generation of cinema-goers as Billy Bibbit in Milos Forman's masterly adaptation of Ken Kesey's 'One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest' (1975), Dourif's portrayal of the redemption-seeking outsider is unforgettable from the opening sequence when he becomes the passenger in a passing pickup truck to the moment of his demise. Treading a fine line between huckster and fallen angel, Dourif embodies the role of what O'Connor herself termed Motes' 'malgre lui'- the personage of a king in spite of himself. She states that '[his] integrity lies in his trying with such vigor to get rid of the ragged figure who moves from tree to tree in the back of his mind. For the author, Hazel's integrity lies in his not being able to'.

Out of the Strong Came Forth Sweetness

2009-01-19T15:13:00.000-08:00

Passion Playback

2009-01-13T12:16:00.000-08:00

In 1981, one of the most miraculous discoveries in film history was made. A virtually-perfect print of Carl Dreyer's 1928 masterpiece 'The Passion of Joan of Arc' was found intact in a janitor's cupboard in an Oslo mental asylum. The original version of the film was understood to have been lost for decades, as Dreyer's master-negative of 1928 was destroyed in a fire. For the remainder of his life, the Danish-born director attempted to piece together an alternative version from out-takes and what few surviving prints he was able to find, but he died convinced that his original cut had been consigned to the flames of oblivion. The great film-writer Pauline Kael wrote that Falconetti's portrayal of the 19-year old Joan 'may be the the finest performance ever recorded on film'. Banned from being screened in Britain as it depicts the brutal treatment of Joan at the hands of the British soldiers, it was also criticised in it's native France, when the-then bishop of Paris demanded that cuts be made to lessen the impact of Dreyer's depiction of her ordeal at the hands of her accusers.

Dreyer's intent was that the film be experienced in complete silence, with no musical accompaniment to divert the viewer's attention from the astonishing power of his narrative. In 1994, however, composer Richard Einhorn devised an oratorio based directly on the film, entitled 'Voices of Light', and it now forms the soundtrack of the film's restored DVD release. In 1999, U.S. singer-songwriter Cat Power provided live accompaniment to a season of screenings of the film in New York to great acclaim.

With 'The Passion of Joan of Arc', Dreyer convinced the world that film- a medium still in relative infancy- could indeed be art. His startling use of the close-up and the tightly-cropped frame renders each shot an electrifying experience to watch, in particular, his unwavering concentration on the face of Renee Falconetti, from whom he wrenched one of the greatest performances in film history. Herman Warm's cool, expressionistic sets are in stark counter-balance to the clamor and claustrophobia of the courtroom scenes, but also succeed in drawing the viewer's attention to the frailty and isolation of Joan in prison. Implements of torture somehow a prefigure a modern-day art-installation as they hang, black and ominous against the stark, white walls of the dungeon, the relentless momentum of a spiked drum that the camera returns to again and again lending a hitherto-unseen degree of tension and pathos to a narrative already brimming with fear and unease. The shocking, final sequences at the stake do not shy away from the horror of what is being asked of the viewer to witness. Lingering, close-up shots of a human body in flames are contrasted with the equally alarming depiction of the crowd's shameful indifference as they are being entertained by the freaks and circus-grotesques who have arrived to make a side-show spectacle of the tragedy unfolding before them. With a battle raging all around them, the results of their actions begin to dawn upon Joan's executioners and, as mute witnesses, on us also as the final credits roll.

A Piper at the Gates of War

2009-01-11T10:31:00.000-08:00

In 1915, the most celebrated fairy painting of the Edwardian era was first exhibited at the Royal Academy. 'The Piper of Dreams' immediately caught the collective imagination of a generation. In terms of the reproductions that soon followed, the image rivalled Holman Hunt's 'The Light of the World' in popularity, with over a quarter of a million copies sold in the first year of its appearance. The artist, Estella Louisa Michaela Canziani (1887 - 1964) enjoyed a long and successful career, and created a body of work which earned her great acclaim, but it was for the diminutive figure of the child piper, a robin perched on his boot, and the swirl of ephemeral creatures from the fairy realm circling about him that she is best known. It is no surprise that Canziani's painting offered escape from the drudgery of the everyday, and specifically, from the horrors of the Great War. It was the image most frequently sent to soldiers in the trenches from their loved ones at home, and as a consequence it was claimed that sales of 'The Piper of Dreams' single-handedly saved the Medici Society, the reproduction's publisher, from bankruptcy during the war years.

Festival!

2009-01-11T06:02:00.001-08:00

This little cut-out was given to me some years ago by Abram Games, designer of the 1951 Festival of Britain logo. Having just rediscovered it between the pages of my copy of 'A Tonic to the Nation', the catalogue of the exhibition staged by the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1976 to mark the Festival's 25th anniversary, I thought it was high time that the little ballerinas danced once more. Also shown is the original invitation for 'Black Eyes and Lemonade', the exhibition of British popular art organised by the Whitechapel Art Gallery under the direction of Barbara Jones. Bringing up the rear, a copy of the general catalogue for the Festival, also featuring Games' iconic design of Britannia's head with compass points. He once told me that he added the string of bunting as an afterthought when the organizers decided it would lend the design a more festive touch.

Edwin la Dell's 'Tower of London'

2009-01-10T13:03:00.000-08:00

This charming image is one of a series of lithographs which were produced towards the end of the Second World War under the direction of Brenda Rawnsley and her husband Derek. The series was named 'School Prints', and the idea behind the project was to introduce 'contemporary' art to children of school age who otherwise would not have had the opportunity to experience 'good quality work' in the average course of their day. Within a relatively short space of time, Rawnsley set up School Prints Ltd to produce and sell original artists' lithographs to schools throughout the United Kingdom, commissioning several of the most important image-makers of the period. She sought the advice of eminent art historian and collector Herbert Read, and together they chose the roster of artists that would take part in the scheme. The printing was undertaken at the Bayard Press using stones or zinc plates that had been directly worked on by the artists, and the main proviso was that they used no more than six colours in their designs. Amongst those whose work was chosen for the project were Felix Topolski, John Nash, Tom Gentleman, Kenneth Rowntree, Michael Rothenstein, Hans Tisdell and Barbara Jones. In all, over twenty artists participated in the scheme, and Rawnsley even succeeded in enlisting lithographs from Braque and Picasso, though these are now understandably extremely rare. Fundamentally, it was a very English exercise, and the prints proved hugely popular with children and adults alike. The patterned borders that were a fundamental part of the design of each image were intended to be seen as integral 'frames' to the lithographs, as the usual procedure would have been to pin them directly to a board or the schoolroom wall. The ephemeral nature of the print, specifically the flimsy quality of war-issue paper would have been a major factor in their short-lived existence; more often than not, one print would be replaced when another was received from the company. That so many of them continue to exist in mint condition is a testament both to their survival and to their enduring appeal. La Dell's captivating image of a pleasure steamer passing the Tower of London is possibly my favorite of the entire series, and is now one of the less common images to have survived from the series. For more information on School Prints, seek out Ruth Artmonsky's excellent book on the subject, which features the la Dell image as its cover.

The Shell Ladies of Margate

2009-01-10T09:00:00.001-08:00

Margate's famous seafront has seen a clutch of new and glamorous visitors this Summer. Broadstairs-based artist Ann Carrington has created a bevy of conchological beauties that have set the town alight with their magical arrival. Based on the miniature shell figures so familiar to our collective childhoods, and still available in some seaside shops, Ann took their old-world charm and ran with it, all the way, it would seem, into the hearts of Margate's residents. The project has recently culminated in the grand unveiling (by Ann's son Isaac) of a nine-foot high bronze figure based on Turner's mistress Mrs. Booth. She stands on the Harbour Arm and gazes longingly out to sea, whilst her retinue of twelve other ladies are painstakingly fashioned from hundreds of real scallop shells collected from local fishermen in the area. Gliding mysteriously from place to place by means of hidden castors, these striking figures are based on the town's famous former residents, amongst them Baroness Orczy, author of 'The Scarlet Pimpernel' and Phyllis Broughton, the renowned Gaiety Girl from the 1890s. Walls and windows on Margate's seafront have recently been embellished with eye-catching signs, which enquire of the casual onlooker; 'Have you seen the Shell Ladies of Margate?' with the traditional Victorian device of the pointing hand that leads the way to their seaside lair. At once utterly contemporary, yet also possessed of an elegiac yearning for things of a bygone era, Carrington's Shell Ladies look set to lead the town towards its proposed reinvention as the jewel of the Kentish coast, dazzling all in their wake. To see more of the Shell Ladies of Margate, and to read about their creation, see www.anncarrington.co.uk

The Museum of British Folklore

2009-01-10T05:00:00.000-08:00

The long-intentioned ambition of international designer and artist Simon Costin to open a museum dedicated to British Folklore seems likely to become a reality. Fascinated by the history of British Folk customs, and dedicated to promoting their preservation in a society increasingly obsessed with the present, Simon is currently looking for premises in which to bring together a wide-ranging collection of objects and artifacts, housed within an exciting and fully-contextual setting that his years of experience as a designer and stylist would bring about. Having recently purchased a vintage 1976 Castleton caravan, he intends to kit it out as a travelling taster of what is to come, and will be touring this year's folk festivals the length and breadth of the United Kingdom to raise interest in, and awareness of the project. You will be able to meet Simon at the following events, and be part of this exciting venture as it unfolds.

Hastings Jack-in-the-Green, East Sussex; 4th May
Shepley Folk Festival, West Yorkshire; 15th-17th May
Fishguard Folk Festival, Wales; 22nd-25th May
Wessex Folk Festival, Weymouth, Dorset: 5th-6th June
Leigh Folk Festival, Essex: 24th-25th June
Crawley Folk Festival, West Sussex: 26th-28th June
Hebridean Celtic Festival: 15th-16th July
Festival on the Edge, Shropshire: 18th-19th July
Cambridge Folk Festival: 31st July- 3rd August
Broadstairs Folk Festival, Kent: 9th-12th August
Green Man Festival, Glanusk, Wales: 21st-23rd August
Towersley Festival, Oxfordshire: 27th-31st August

'Dalek' by Charlie Butler

2009-01-10T04:43:00.001-08:00

The Dream of the Magi

2009-01-09T16:28:00.000-08:00

Despite having passed the 6th of January, traditionally recognised as the Feast of the Epiphany, the saga of the Wise Men continues to fascinate me. This astonishing image of the Magi being visited by an angel is to be found on a column at Autun Cathedral in Burgundy. It is perhaps one of the most unique and pervasive interpretations of their story, showing as it does, the recumbent forms of the Magi in their collective bed, an annunciating angel raising a finger to the star that hovers above them. Whilst one is awakened by the sight, the other two slumber on, the bed linen that covers them so finely-wrought from the cold stone that it almost appears soft and warm. One of four major capitals at Autun cathedral, the image of the sleeping Magi was carved by Gislebertus, and as merely one among hundreds of scenes from of the life of Christ, the carvings represent the sculptor's life's work. Emerging from centuries of neglect, a brilliant piece of combined Anglo-French research rescued Gislebertus from historical obscurity and re-instated him as one of the greatest artists of the mediaeval period in Europe. The four primary capitals which Gislebertus carved at Autun relate to scenes from the infancy of Christ-chiefly the arrival of the Magi from the East, their adoration, and the subsequent dream in which they were warned to go home by another route. It is the dream of the Magi that this haunting image represents, and it captivates me greatly. There is also a depiction of the Flight into Egypt, the sequel in stone to the carving of the Magi's visitation and their resulting dream. Gislebertus of Autun lived and worked in an age of faith; no artist has equalled the sense of wonder with which these images of the Holy Family and their mysterious visitors from the east were invested. It is believed that the remains of the Magi are preserved in an elaborate catafalque in Cologne cathedral, thus making the city the primary focus of Epiphany celebrations, and drawing pilgrims from the world over to their shrine. The Orcadian poet George Mackay Brown (1921-1996) gave his unique and contemporary slant to the story of the Magi;

'They endured a season
of ice and winter swans.
Delicately the horses
Grazed among the snowdrops
they traded for fish, wind
fell upon crested waters.
Along their track
daffodils lit a thousand tapers.
They slept among dews.
A dawn lark broke their dream.
For them, at solstice
The chalice of the sun spilled over.
The star was lost.
They rode between burnished hills.
A fiddle at a fair
Compelled the feet of harvesters.
A glim on their darkling road.
The star!
It was their star.
In a sea village
Children brought apples to the horses
They lit fires
By the carved stones of the dead,
A midwinter inn.

Here they unloaded their treasures.

R.I.P. Ian Shipley Books

2009-01-09T07:20:00.000-08:00

London's famous street of books, though for some years in steady decline, has finally lost its one remaining jewel. After almost thirty years of trading at number 70 Charing Cross Road, Shipley Specialist art booksellers finally closed its doors on Christmas eve. I began my art book apprenticeship there, in the early weeks of Ian's relocation from the tiny shop in Floral Street where the story began. Always ahead of the game, Ian had anticipated the renaissance flowering of Covent Garden, but wisely got out before it withered on the vine, opting instead to occupy the one remaining old-world establishment on the street once renown for its bookshops. It was to become a mecca for art- book lovers the world over and, adored by art directors and bibliophiles from Osaka to Ostend, Shipley's chaotic interior became as famous an image as the fireplace at Charleston farmhouse; indeed the shop's own fire was a welcome respite on cold winter mornings for all who came through the door. It was to be the model for the bookshop in the big-screen adaptations of the Harry Potter sagas, as well as the backdrop for innumerable fashion shoots the world over. Advertising agencies sent their raw recruits to scour the shelves for new ideas; cynically, we knew there were none, as gleefully, we anticipated the outcome of a hundred and one potential campaigns that would have had their nascence there, a certain degree of schadenfreude gained from their absurd enquiries for images of 'Art Deco water' or 'Fifties' food photography. In truth, no request surprised or fazed us, and if it was a slow day in the shop, we might even take a small pinch of delight in their resultant incredulity, were we finally able to pull the inevitable rabbit from the proverbial top hat. Here it was that we heard of Derek Jarman's initial plans for Prospect Cottage and the excitement when he began to wrest his magician's garden from the Dungeness shingle. Later also, his joy at meeting Keith Collins, who was to become not merely the centre of Derek's personal universe, but soon became a regular visitor and constant supporter of the shop in his own right, particularly after Derek's death, when his role as companion was all-too sadly exchanged for that of executor. It was a dull day on Charing Cross Road if Derek did not grace us with a visit. I well recall his furious pacing up and down the floor, regaling us with some shaggy-dog story or other, some tale of bad behavior either witnessed (or, more often than not, participated in) that would invariably end with his infectious laughter ricocheting about the walls. The first outing for his black tar and gold leaf paintings was in Shipley's windows, and in the week after relocating to Charing Cross Road, the staging of an exhibition of original costumes for his film 'Carravaggio'; the as-then still shuttered windows providing that extra theatrical flourish to the baroque n' roll grandeur of Sandy Powell's stunning creations. Bruce Weber would sometimes arrive with his retinue of pretty boys and a myriad of assorted stylists and courtiers in tow; Gilbert and George signed their books by the fireplace; Peter Blake brought people to visit. The great John Berger was either recognised or not, in typical modesty caring neither one way or the other. Susan Sontag might drop by with Annie Liebowitz. A generation of American tourists would enquire as to whether we were the shop in '84 Charing Cross Road', Helene Hampf's engaging love-letter to London's street of books; crestfallen to learn we weren't, they stayed on nevertheless for the atmosphere. Whilst more than happy to promote the homespun hokeyness of the fixtures and fittings, Ian far-anticipated the online revolution; indeed, he could be said to have originated Internet bookbuying, seeking out the advice of those techno-wizards who too, had seen the future, often enlisting their help into the bargain. Other booksellers, wrested out of their fusty, Dickensian atrophy, sought his advice as to the brave new world of antiquarian bookselling as he was to envision it.

Of primary consideration, however was Shipley's pride in the ability to find for its customers, items that they would surely discover nowhere else. An obscure Festival of Britain brochure from the shires might easily sit side by side with a flimsy onionskin broadsheet for some long-forgotten Stephen Tennant exhibition. Andy Warhol collectors would happen across something so ephemeral that even completists would marvel in ignorance of its existence. Anoracks for snippets of a fad long-departed, would very often leave the premises dumfounded at the discovery of the unseen or the hitherto-unconsidered in their particular field of whimsy. In short, we sought out the unique and the uncommon, and delighted in dealing it, and for this, was our reputation for the rarified rightfully gained. Apres la Deluge, the lookalike establishments in Japan, with fixtures and fitttings all-too eerily familiar. Closer, much closer to home, the generations of wannabe establishments, but with the soft chairs; the latte-whilst-you-browse culture that we could not have dreamt of anticipating in our experience of the specialist book trade. Now, alas, the fire is extinguished for the final time, and the dizzying amount of stock, garnered over a thirty-year tenure lies forlorn in storage. Where now, the papier-mache cherub that, hoisted aloft for the Christmas of a decade or so ago, but somehow never consigned to the basement as twelfth night came around, to glitter instead in perpetuity behind the fanlight for all the seasons to come? And where, too, the little Eiffel Tower souvenir, unnoticed by all put the sharpest-eyed, that perched surreally atop the fireplace shelf? At Shipley, it must be remembered, the devil was always in the detail. Trends burst forth and were quickly extinguished in the clamor of the moment. Fads and fancies came and went - and more often than not, we would have stocked a book on the vast majority of them. Neo-Romantic hairstyles? No problem. Russian Prison tattooes? - We'll just pop downstairs and look for you, sir...

Generations of staff have come and gone, friendships forged and careers kept afloat. Lest we forget the roll-call of stalwarts; Amanda King, Lindy Usher, Clem Crosby, Nancy Campbell, Laura Massino, Felix Cromey, Stephen Conrad, Steven Hemmens, Andrew Lee, Zoe Taylor, to name but a few as well as the 'youngblood' generation who saw it through until the finish; Rowland Thomas, Phoebe Blatten, Sue Findlay and the lovely Tristram. Simon Costin swears that he came in to say hello on the basis of a bet: a thirty year friendship is the result of such reckless behavior. Lawrence Mynott still recalls the 'incident with the cheque'- with understandable pique. Mention, too for the angel of the accounts department, Ms. Sandra Rose, and the countless others who have served their tenure at number 70. We remember also, those members of the old Zwemmer crew that were flung into the melting-pot when that once-august establishment came into Ian's hands. Then it was that the flagship shop at number 70 gained a flotilla of the erstwhile photography and graphic design shops. Old rivals-turned new colleagues, Clare de Rouen (that doyenne of the photography monograph) and Johnny, her consort, who continued to hold his post at the counter of 72. Hats off, then and hurl them high, for with its passing, an era is well and truly over.

2009-01-08T07:51:00.000-08:00

From: 'On Christmas Day' (1-11) by Thomas Traherne (1652-1674)

Shake off thy Sloth, my drowsy Soul, awake;

With Angels sing

Unto thy King,

And pleasant Music make;

Thy Lute, thy Harp, or else thy Heart-strings take,

And with thy Music let thy sense awake.

See how each one the other calls

To fix his Ivy on the walls.

Transplanted there it seems to grow

As if it rooted were below:

Thus He, who is thy King,

Makes Winter, Spring.