Modernists and Mavericks

by Martin Gayford

  He was not alone in taking this view. In the years following 1945, almost all Britons viewed America at a distance, through the glossy pages of magazines or on the cinema screen. In 1950, Britain accounted for ten per cent of the world audience for Hollywood movies. David Hockney remembers how the local Regal or Odeon picture houses ‘showed a marvellous, different world from trudging through dingy Bradford streets to the cinema’. ‘Going to the pictures’ had already been a hugely popular pastime before the war, but now films were in full colour, and those colours were brighter and more saturated than those of the real world. Thanks to CinemaScope and other new technologies, the screen was sometimes larger than life too. It offered a view of another world: a land of plenty.

  ‘Over the Atlantic lay the land of Cockaigne,’ the artist and film-maker Derek Jarman reflected. ‘They had fridges and cars, TVs and supermarkets. All bigger and better than ours. The whole daydream was wrapped up in celluloid … How we yearned for America! And longed to go west.’ In contrast, Britain felt and looked old-fashioned: not ‘Technicolor’ but monochrome. This was a feeling shared not only by the generation of young students, born in the late 1930s, who were to become Pop artists, but also by their contemporaries, the first British pop stars. One of these was Reg Smith, better known as Marty Wilde. He remembered his childhood in chromatic terms: ‘You were brought up with three colours – grey, brown and black. They were all the colours I associate with the war. Almost everything was grey. It wasn’t until the ’50s that all colours started to come: in clothes, colours in cars.’

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  The music that would inspire Marty Wilde – early American rock-and-roll – was apparently first heard in Britain one evening in 1953, in a building on London’s Dover Street. The listeners, however, were not Teddy Boys, singers or dancers, but a small gathering of intellectuals and aesthetes at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. This brash new idiom was then analysed – according to Richard Hamilton, who was present – ‘as a sociological phenomenon’ (though he recalled that the audience rather enjoyed the discs too).

  The occasion was a meeting of the ‘Independent Group’ (originally referred to as the ‘Young Group’), which consisted of a handful of the more radical junior artists and writers connected with the ICA who were allowed to arrange lectures and discussions – partly, it seems, as a way of keeping them quiet and giving them something to do. Hamilton was one of the driving forces, along with the abrasively brilliant critic Lawrence Alloway and Toni del Renzio, an anarchic Russian-Italian artist and agitator who had once unsuccessfully attempted to take over the London branch of the Surrealists.

  At the very first meeting in April 1952, Eduardo Paolozzi – also one of the group’s inner circle – fed images from American magazine advertisements into an epidiascope, which projected them in front of the dozen or so enthusiasts who constituted the audience. The pages were culled from Paolozzi’s large collection of transatlantic publications, and he presented them rather as an anthropologist might slides of life in New Guinea. The effect, according to Hamilton, was ‘startling’. We can get an idea of what it might have looked like from a series of collaged pictures by Paolozzi. The technique of collage had been much favoured by an earlier generation of Surrealists and Dadaists, such as Max Ernst and Kurt Schwitters. However, the effect of Paolozzi’s works was not to create a dreamlike sense of unreality, nor to prompt a revolutionary attack on the conventions of academic art, as his forebears had done.

  Rather, Paolozzi’s collages of the later 1940s and early 1950s offered a kaleidoscopic vision of an imagined future in which swimwear models mingled with cartoon characters, surrounded by automobiles, domestic appliances, soft drinks and packaged food-stuffs. You could argue that this was not surreal at all, but actually quite an accurate prediction of what H. G. Wells had called ‘things to come’. In fact, Paolozzi’s collages were a kind of realism: they showed the new world that was emerging in postwar Europe. If you stepped out of an Independent Group gathering and walked down Dover Street, you would soon encounter, as noted by the architectural critic Reyner Banham, himself a regular attender, such phenomena as ‘hi-fi, CinemaScope, the lights in Piccadilly Circus, curtain-walled office blocks’. Here was the truth of modern existence. A few years later, writing in 1959, Banham would dub the late 1950s as ‘the Jet Age, the Detergent Decade, the Second Industrial Revolution’. However, in the highbrow world of modern art, in which such items as detergent, cookers and cartoon characters never featured, this vision was revolutionary.

  EDUARDO PAOLOZZI Dr Pepper, 1948

  The ICA was the headquarters of what had, by the early 1950s, become the Modernist establishment. It had been founded in 1947 by, among others, Peter Watson, E. L. T. Mesens, the die-hard holder of the Surrealist flame, Roland Penrose, friend and intense admirer of Picasso, and Herbert Read. The last was the most prominent art critic of the 1930s, the author of the influential and ubiquitous Art Now (with its illustration of Francis Bacon’s early Crucifixion). To the Independent Group, it seemed all rather old-fashioned.

  Alloway finally became deputy director of the ICA in 1957, appointed by Penrose. He was a natural dissident, and Read (who was knighted in 1953) was one of his targets. Read supported and spoke for classic Modernism: Picasso, Brancusi, Mondrian, Ben Nicholson, Henry Moore. He advocated formal values and the idea that the pared-down forms of Moore or Brancusi represented an ideal in art and life. Alloway summarized Read’s argument tersely and somewhat sarcastically: ‘geometry is the means to a higher world’. The young critic would, in due course, also part ways with Penrose, as Gillian Ayres remembers: ‘Eventually he and Penrose fell out and he wrote Picasso right down. Penrose was furious. Alloway was very bright, very quick, but he could be savage and catty.’

  The Independent Group members were in revolt too against another, newer, type of orthodoxy articulated by the American critic Clement Greenberg in a celebrated essay of 1939, Avant-Garde and Kitsch. Greenberg’s thesis was that highbrow art was difficult, hard to assimilate and fiercely innovatory, a description that certainly covered the new art by Jackson Pollock and his contemporaries that Greenberg championed in the 1940s and 1950s. Abstract Expressionism – provocatively novel and imported from across the Atlantic – would have gone down well with the Independent Group audience.

  The other part of Greenberg’s thesis, however, would not. According to him, all other forms of art, fiction and drama, as appreciated by the bulk of the population, was just sentimental pap. Greenberg included in this category ‘popular, commercial art and literature, with their chromeotypes, magazine covers, illustrations, advertisements, slick and pulp fiction, comics, Tin Pan Alley music, tap dancing, Hollywood movies, etc.’ This was a concise list of much that the Independent Group found most interesting and inspiring.

  Alloway took the opposite point of view in his 1958 essay The Arts and the Mass Media for the journal Architectural Design. Popular arts, he argued, were fascinating in themselves: indeed, they were ‘one of the most remarkable and characteristic achievements of industrial society’. More than that, they were a better index of what was happening ‘right now’ than the other, more conventional, middle-class variety. In support of his argument, Alloway – who, like many of his Independent Group friends was a sci-fi enthusiast – quoted John W. Campbell, the editor of the magazine Astounding Science Fiction: ‘A man learns a pattern of behaviour – and in five years it doesn’t work.’ In other words, innovation was ever more rapid, and the consequence of this was that things were likely to become outdated with ever increasing speed.

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  Seated in the audience for these talks and events at the ICA was an art student named Peter Blake. He would have taken a more than academic interest in such subjects as Rock and Roll because he was what Alloway, Hamilton, Paolozzi and the rest were not – a true fan. This is, he admits, ‘One of the reasons I paint. It’s to celebrate.’ Blake had, and has, a simple love of popular music, ‘particularly the Everly Brothers, Chuck B
erry, and later the Beach Boys’.

  Such enthusiasm was unusual in the early 1950s, in art schools at any rate. There, Blake remembers, Trad Jazz – as played by Humphrey Lyttelton and danced to enthusiastically by Camberwell students and their tutor John Minton – was more the thing. When he was at the Royal College of Art, Blake recalls, ‘all the dances were always Trad bands, it was George Melly, and Chris Barber’. At that stage Blake himself was keener on Bebop, then a more metropolitan and esoteric taste. But, as rock-and-roll emerged onto the scene, he found he ‘liked the characters – Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis. I painted Elvis, although he might not have been my favourite; if you were painting about icons and celebrity it had to be Elvis, although I preferred Bo Diddley as a musician.’

  PETER BLAKE Got a Girl, 1960–61

  These musical tastes were part of a wider love of the sort of amusements that the general public actually liked – fairgrounds, wrestling matches, boxing booths, Hollywood movies – as distinct from the detached intellectual curiosity of Alloway and the Independent Group. Such enthusiasms were nothing new among artists, as Blake points out: ‘There was fandom before; Sickert was a fan of the music hall, for example. I probably picked up on it, but I brought it forward a lot.’ Blake came to such pastimes in a natural way; they had always been part of his life. When he first began art school, at the age of fourteen in Gravesend, he ‘wouldn’t have known what the phrase popular art meant, but I did like fairground painting and I did like boxing booths’.

  Born in 1932, Blake came from Dartford, by the Thames Estuary, to the south-east of London. Almost by chance, he found himself at art school after the war. It was an opportunity that just presented itself, as it did to Terry Frost when he was released from his POW camp, and to many others.

  Because I was evacuated during the war, I failed the examination for the grammar school. At the interview for the Technical school, they said if you want to go to art school there’s one just round the corner, you just have to take a drawing test. It was more or less presented as a gift.

  To the young Blake, it was the highbrow culture, not the popular sort, that was unfamiliar:

  My teachers were great enthusiasts of Cézanne, so I was being taught about him, about Beethoven, about James Joyce’s Ulysses – things I wouldn’t have known about at all. At the same time I was living the life of a fourteen-year-old boy in Dartford, doing working-class things.

  Blake comes – socially and geographically – from fertile pop-music territory. Marty Wilde’s birthplace, Blackheath, is a few miles to the west. A much longer-lasting rock star was a near neighbour in Dartford Heath. Blake remembers that Mick Jagger, eleven years his junior, was growing up ‘about fifty yards away’.

  From Gravesend Technical College and School of Art, he found himself at the Royal College of Art from 1953 to 1956. His contemporaries included Frank Auerbach, Leon Kossoff and also the abstract painters Robyn Denny and Richard Smith, but Blake took an idiosyncratic course distinct from any of these. At the Tate’s exhibition of contemporary American art in 1956, when almost everybody’s attention was focused on Abstract Expressionism, he was hugely taken by the work of Honoré Sharrer, Ben Shahn and Bernard Perlin: ‘It was a kind of Surrealism but without Dalíesque symbols. I wanted to make the sort of magic they were making.’

  *

  Seen in retrospect, Blake’s work is usually fitted into the wider category known as ‘Pop art’ – a term which, like almost all such stylistic descriptions in art, is broad, vague and often applied after the art in question was created. Contrary to what one might imagine, the phrase ‘Pop art’ originated in London rather than New York. There are a number of versions of how it began, what anthropologists call a ‘foundation myth’. One involves Lawrence Alloway and Peter Blake at a dinner party in London. In the course of conversation, Blake found himself explaining to Alloway what he was trying to do. When he had finished his account Alloway said, ‘Oh, you mean a kind of pop art?’ And that, Blake contends, was how the phrase originated (although Robyn Denny, who was also present, failed to remember this exchange at all).

  Another version has the term originating in a conversation in 1954 between composer Frank Cordell and the artist and collagist John McHale, co-convener with Alloway of Independent Group meetings. When Alloway moved to New York in 1961, his use of the phrase ‘Pop art’ flummoxed local artists Claes Oldenburg and Jim Dine, the former of whom is certainly seen in retrospect as one of the principal figures in the movement. Dine, too, often features in Pop art exhibitions, but vehemently rejects the label. He remembers: ‘Lawrence Alloway kept talking about “pop art”. We were standing there and then I asked Claes, “What’s he speaking about?” Oldenburg and I heard the same thing, we thought he meant “Pop” Hart.’ (George Overbury ‘Pop’ Hart, an American primitive painter.) Dine ‘grew up appreciating popular culture – the popular art of advertising etc. – and it interested me’. However, he didn’t ‘look at it as art’. Rather, it was what the wrestlers, tattooed ladies and rock-and-roll records were to Blake – part of everyday reality.

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  In 1957, Richard Hamilton produced the first written definition of Pop art, formulated in a letter to Alison and Peter Smithson, the architects to whose work Reyner Banham first applied the term ‘Brutalism’. High on Hamilton’s list came ‘transient (short-term solution)’, and ‘expendable (easily forgotten)’. The other characteristics included ‘low-cost, mass-produced, young [aimed at youth], witty, sexy, gimmicky, glamorous’, and ‘Big Business’. Almost all of these – with the exception perhaps of ‘sexy’ – were calculated to appal the left-wing and highbrow arbiters of Modernist taste such as Herbert Read. The critic John Russell saw this new mood as a social, as well as an intellectual and artistic, rebellion: he described ‘Pop’ as a firing squad aimed at those who ‘believed in Loeb classics, holidays in Tuscany, drawings by Augustus John … and very good clothes that lasted for ever’.

  Evenings at the ICA were now spent talking about rather different cultural idols from Piero della Francesca or even Mondrian: one talk was devoted to the styling of American cars, an obsession of Reyner Banham’s; on another occasion Toni del Renzio talked about fashion. Alloway encouraged everyone to read Marshall McLuhan’s The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man (1951), a study of contemporary culture, each chapter analysing an advertisement, magazine article or newspaper story. Another piece of compulsory reading was John von Neumann’s Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (1944). From this Hamilton took away a subversive conclusion: value judgments were irrelevant. ‘We can’t take a moral position anymore because it’s all to do with flipping coins and roulette wheels and chance.’ So the thing to do was to not make judgments, but simply observe what was happening. Be cool, in other words.

  Richard Hamilton’s own contribution to these evenings was a talk on ‘white goods’, such as washing machines, dishwashers and refrigerators. Doubtless their blend of functional design and elegant functionalism appealed to him. Hamilton was an artist whose career had been, like Francis Bacon’s, ‘delayed’. Born in 1922, he was the same age as John Craxton and Lucian Freud, but he emerged – rather slowly – onto the London art scene over a decade later than them. One of the things that held up his progress as a painter was the war. In 1940, Hamilton – a student at the Royal Academy – was too young for conscription when the RA Schools closed, so he went to the Labour Exchange. ‘I was asked, “What can you do?” I told the man I was an art student, and he said, “Can you use a pencil?”’ When Hamilton replied, ‘Yes, that’s what I’ve been taught to do,’ it was decided he should become a technical draughtsman. He came to specialize in jig and tool design.

  Hamilton thus received a lengthy training in a discipline outside the conventional world of art. Unexpectedly he found designing tools enthralling. ‘It’s like making a world: you’re kind of following the processes of nature through mechanical engineering. It’s the human equivalent of controlling the creation of a flower or
a tree, and I found it a very exciting kind of experience.’ Following this, he was ‘dragged screaming’ into the Royal Engineers for eighteen months of National Service before he finally arrived at the Slade School of Fine Art. Here, his experience of the cool objectivity of technical drawing was followed by an encounter with the more fastidious objectivity of William Coldstream’s ‘Euston Road’ school of painting. At the end of this long and unusual apprenticeship, Hamilton had become a unique hybrid – part-pupil of Coldstream, part-engineer, part-disciple of Marcel Duchamp.

  The last, an unfashionable enthusiasm in the 1950s and early 1960s, appealed to Hamilton because of his philosophical detachment. Duchamp was a master of ideas as much as a maker of images and objects: the same could be said of Hamilton. Both men had a predilection for recondite symbolism. Fridges and Hoovers held a hidden eroticism for Hamilton, as coffee-grinders did for Duchamp. This mixture – sex, intellectual cool, the sensuous curves of commercial design – can be seen in paintings such as Hommage à Chrysler Corp. (1957) and Hers is a Lush Situation (1958). These have the detached air of illustrations in an academic treatise or a commercial brochure, but also a lightness of touch reminiscent of Coldstream. These were not pure collages, like Paolozzi’s, but they were closely allied. Hamilton frequently stuck images onto his pictures – which made them partially at least, collages – but he more often painted by hand elements from magazine illustrations or advertisements. The two techniques, collage and painting, are interconnected and have been since the early days of photography; many Victorian painters were, effectively, copying photographs. Blake and Hamilton both used them alternately, or indeed, side by side in the same picture.

  These pictures by Hamilton share with Duchamp the apparent clarity of a technical diagram combined with the free-floating sensuality of a dream. Even the titles are packed with double meanings – Chrysler Corp. being a play on the French word for body – and the paintings themselves abound with visual puns. The voluptuous curves of the Imperial and Plymouth ranges of Chrysler automobiles are rhymed with the shapes of hips and busts. Behind the swelling forms of headlight, bumper and bonnet in Hommage à Chrysler Corp. rises the spectral figure of a woman, reduced like the car to sexualized components: a pair of bright red lips like a butterfly fluttering in the air, and a series of concentric circles, like the contours of a conical hill on a map (which were used in publicity to illustrate the structure of ‘Exquisite Form’ bras). The odd, egg-shaped element on the left, which might be an angry insect eye, is in fact a piece of collage, an enlarged photograph of the air-intake of a truly futuristic jet car.