Art and Desire: A Letter from 1858

In 1964, Kenneth Clark (of Civilisation fame) published a book of over 300 fragments of John Ruskin’s copious writing on nature, art, architecture, politics, and economics. Clark hoped that Ruskin Today would make Ruskin’s own publications more accessible and less daunting for modern readers, as he noticed (and this is no less true now) that there are plenty of books about Ruskin but few people that actually seemed to read Ruskin in a sustained and impactful way. With Effie kicking up a bit of fuss in the press and Ruskin’s ideas on beauty and living well no less relevant in 2013 than they were in the 1850s, it’s a refreshing pleasure to read Ruskin through Clark’s selective eye. Each brief excerpt from Ruskin’s books, articles, and letters was titled by Clark, sometimes pretty idiosyncratically. In the titles, we learn as much about Clark as we do about Ruskin. In the text below, Ruskin is playfully petulant, and more than a little serious, in a letter to the Harvard art historian Charles Eliot Norton. Ruskin’s desires in the last days of 1858:

I WANT, I WANT

I rather want good wishes just now, for I am tormented by what I cannot get said, nor done. I want to get all the Titians, Tintorets, Paul Veroneses, Turners, and Sir Joshuas in the world into one great fireproof Gothic gallery of marble and serpentine. I want to get them all perfectly engraved. I want to go and draw all the subjects of Turner’s 19 000 sketches in Switzerland and Italy, elaborated by myself. I want to get everybody a dinner who hasn’t got one. I want to macadamize some new roads to Heaven with broken fools’-heads. I want to hang up some knaves out of the way, not that I’ve any dislike to them, but I think it would be wholesome for them, and for other people, and that they would make good crows’ meat. I want to play all day long and arrange my cabinet of minerals with new white wool. I want somebody to amuse me when I’m tired. I want Turner’s pictures not to fade. I want to be able to draw clouds, and to understand how they go, and I can’t make them stand still, nor understand them – they all go sideways.

- 28 December 1858

The American Architect in the 1930s

This afternoon I sat in the Sterling Memorial Library at Yale in front of an enormous pile of bound volumes of The American Architect. Founded in 1876, the journal merged with the Architectural Record in 1938. In the earlier years of the 30s, with skyscrapers on the rise, European Modernism in the air, the Depression’s consequences ever-palpable, and a seemingly endless parade of new materials and techniques in tension with tradition and debates about craftsmanship, the journal was  a leading voice in architectural criticism and news. Its issues blend the local and the international, as features on historical churches in the Northeast circulated in the same series as essays by Le Corbusier and Gropius.

The covers, which changed texture and design several times in the interwar years, focused on different aspects of architecture each month. The simplest are engaging graphic depictions of architectural sites, new and old. The more complex blend text and image to explore a full range of ideas and objects associated with a given aspect of the built environment as its elements, from metalwork and glass to textiles and concrete.

 

The Quarry and the Throne: Venice and Ruskin

For a few all too short days in March I walked through Venice’s narrow passages and asymmetrical campos, seeking out beauty, knowledge, spritz, and as much great art and architecture as I could wedge into a limited number of hours.

I took Ruskin’s account of Venice with me, eager to gain some firmer grasp of what drew him to the city as a foundation for radically new thinking about the future of British architecture, emanating from the conditions and survivals of distant pasts. Ruskin’s work on Venice opens with ambiguous awe: ’It would be difficult to overrate the value of the lessons which might be derived from a faithful study of the history of this strange and mighty city: a history which, in spite of the labor of countless chroniclers, remains in vague and disputable outline,—barred with brightness and shade, like the far away edge of her own ocean, where the surf and the sand-bank are mingled with the sky.’

It is impossible to overstate the impact that Venice made on John Ruskin, and perhaps it’s equally difficult to fully quantify the extent of the impact that Ruskin’s Stones of Venice had on the development of modern architecture and Victorian culture. To see Venice, even nearly a century later, is to be immersed in a city that shaped British modernity.

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Medievalism, Modernity, and the Sacred

What made medievalism and the Gothic style so compelling for artists and architects working in the twentieth century? How did this historicism connect to contemporary discourse in theology and religious experience? On Saturday 23 February a group of top scholars will meet together at Yale to explore the meanings of medievalism in Britain and America post-1900. Papers include Tim Barringer (Yale) on Edwardian music, Katherine Solomonson (Minnesota) on Chicago’s Tribune Tower, and Jongwoo Kim (Louisville) on modern British art and medieval carnality. Respondents include Jason Rosenfeld (Marymount Manhattan), Robert Nelson (Yale), and Barry Bergdoll (MoMA/Columbia). This event is free and open to all.

Saturday 23 February 2013
Loria Center, room 351
Yale University, New Haven CT
–
1:30-1:45 – Arrival and refreshments

1:45-2:00 – Welcome and introduction: Sally Promey and Ayla Lepine (Yale)

Session I – Edward Cooke (Yale), chair

2:00-2:30 – Tim Barringer (Yale) – Radical Neo: Vaughan Williams, Thomas Tallis and English National Identity in 1910

2:30-3:00 – Margaret Grubiak (Villanova University) – The Neo-Gothic’s Emotional Appeal: Recapturing Student Belief at Princeton University, 1928

3:00-3:30 – Coffee break

Session II – Karla Britton (Yale), chair

3:30-4:00 – Jongwoo Jeremy Kim (University of Louisville) – Medieval Monstrosity and Modernist Carnality

4:00-4.30 – Alan Powers (NYU, London) – Between Medieval and Modern: Architecture and Authenticity in Interwar England

4:30-5:00 – Katherine Solomonson (University of Minnesota) – Tribune Tower: Medievalism and Memory in the Wake of the War

Panel Discussion

5:00-5:30 – Respondents (c.5 minutes each):

Barry Bergdoll (Museum of Modern Art, New York)
Kathleen Curran (Trinity College, Hartford)
Ayla Lepine (Yale)
Robert Nelson (Yale)
Jason Rosenfeld (Marymount Manhattan College)
5:30-6:00 – Discussion

6:00-6:45 – Reception

‘I wish to be useful’ – Harkness Memorial Quadrangle

James Gamble Rogers designed Harkness Memorial Quadrangle following the first World War. It was completed in 1921, and divided into Branford and Saybrook colleges in the early 1930s. I’ve been assigned to Saybrook as a Fellow, so I decided to get to know it this afternoon, camera in hand. Nearly all of the inscriptions above doorways and along string courses commemorate students and faculty from the eighteenth century to the twentieth. In a reworking of medieval traditions that elides patrons with hagiography, the university’s saints are its alumni. Along one of the interior walls of the Branford side of the quadrangle, ‘I wish to be useful’ is carved in shallow relief. The inscription over the main gateway to the quad, adjacent to the soaring tower that – along with Sterling Memorial Library – defines the skyline and style of the core of the modern Gothic campus, reads, of course, ‘For God, for country, and for Yale’. Truthfully, I’m not completely sure if there’s an Oxford comma in there. I’ll check on my way to the Architecture School tomorrow (about which more soon, for there is much to say about the local Modernism…).

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Happy New Year, 1869

I’ve recently moved to New Haven, Connecticut to start a fellowship at Yale’s Institute of Sacred Music. On New Year’s Eve I was tearing it up in Bloomsbury with The Correspondents in a bowling alley, teetering home on the Northern Line hours later. A mere week and a half forward in time, I’ve moved half way around the world and have spent most of my time this week navigating new libraries, the fabulous British Art Center, James Gamble Rogers’ modern Gothic paradise that is Yale campus, and the vagaries of Social Security registration, bus maps, utility companies, enormous malls, and American taxation regulations.

Part of my job (which is an amazing, amazing job) is teaching a multi-disciplinary course between the History of Art department and the Divinity School. The course’s subject is British architecture from c.1851-1951 and the idea of religion. Churches and other consecrated spaces are on the syllabus, but I’m also looking at national celebrations (like the Great Exhibition and the Festival of Britain), the significance of religion in establishing natural history museums and public art collections, and theological perspectives on monuments and memorials. It’s going to be a fun term. Part of the job also includes convening a symposium on medievalism, modernity and the sacred in Britain and America in the twentieth century. If you’re in town on 23 February, come along and take part.

I’m used to living surrounded by books and art. Books are heavy and art is fragile, so when I moved I took a grand total of four small books, ten postcards, and one slightly unusual item.

The weekend before Christmas, I was dashing around Spitalfields searching for quirky presents for my partner. This is no easy task. I went to the market to browse and found precisely one small present for him (minor result), a dress for me (whoops) and the architectural illustration below (score!).

The latter was the product of searching through two huge piles of what looked like two centuries of scrap. ‘Antique illustrations, 50p’. Bargain. My find is an image from a popular series in the architectural press. It’s an illustration of Alfred Waterhouse’s 1869 design for a sinuous Gothic Revival staircase in one of his best and most well-known buildings, Manchester Town Hall. A revolutionary yet simple triangular plan, the complex and enormous structure – befitting of an industrial city rising in status and power – was also innovative in its use of materials and technology for air circulation and fire-proofing. Waterhouse was one of the nineteenth century’s most accomplished architects and he’s particularly known for public and institutional buildings. In London his three most famous ones are the National Liberal Club near Whitehall, the Natural History Museum, and the Prudential Assurance Building (now better known amongst architecture nerds as the HQ for English Heritage).

When I took this scrappy cutting from the Building News out of my suitcase and put it on the wall in New Haven, I noticed that, appropriately enough, it was published on 1 January, 1869. Its presence in my little American apartment, almost exactly 144 years later, is a fitting way to mark the new year and a new job a few timezones from London.

Revival: Utopia, Identity, Memory

Selman Selmanagic, seminar chair, Deutsche Werkstätten, Hellerau, 1947 (V&A). The Hellerau workshop was one of the most important furniture manufacturers in the GDR in the twentieth century. This design is a bold revival of Bauhaus principles, produced in the height of German debate that pitted Bauhaus aesthetics against the emergence of new socialist design.

What does ‘retro’ really mean? Is nostalgia good for us? Why are we so interested in artisanal and hand-made objects? Why is Instagram so popular? When a culture or cluster of people becomes enthusiastic about 50s colours, Gothic architecture, or Islamic ceramics, what motivations do they have for reworking, reviving, and rethinking old styles to make new claims?

On 23-24 November at the Courtauld Institute of Art, 25 international specialists in art, architecture, and design across multiple geographies, media, and approaches will come together to consider the phenomenon of revivalism. The event features keynote lectures from Glenn Adamson (Head of Research, V&A), Deborah Cherry (Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art, University of Amsterdam), and John Harvey (Professor of Art, Aberystwyth University). Topics include Bauhaus revivals, neo-Victoriana in 1930s Britain, Italian modern architecture, Victorian Orientalist utopianism, Central European glassware, Fortuny’s Delphos Gown, social realism and modern murals, contemporary tattoo design, colonialism and landscape, and searching for traces of the French Revolution in the back streets of Paris. The conference will include some of the freshest scholarship and finest minds in the world. Online booking and more details can be found on the Courtauld website. The event is open to all and everyone is welcome.

Controversy and Continuity: S. E. Dykes Bower

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Having spent a busy/geeky August exploring twentieth-century Gothic architecture in Canada and America (with a seaside wedding, a Korean film festival, some ocean kayaking and a few good friends along the way), it was a pleasure to spend a Saturday getting re-acquainted with the English landscape and with Stephen Dykes Bower’s particular – and many would say peculiar – approach to modern Gothic design.

At All Saints, Hockerill an enormous central three-light facade gives way to a surprisingly simple interior. A bright sunburst rose window with glass by Hugh Easton sits above a high altar surrounded by four Corinthian columns. Fusing the heavy classicism of a baldacchino with the restrained delicacy of J. N. Comper’s much-beloved ridel posts, the altar surround carefully sets the sanctuary apart without jarring against the near-minimalism of the rest of the building. With the exception of the east end there is almost no applied colour in the interior. The nave is light, simple, and undeniably modern in its use of Gothic elements. All Saints, Hockerill is vintage 1930s Dykes Bower. The Church of the Good Shepherd at Arbury, however, could only be a mid-century product.

A simple, small church for a parish with limited means, Arbury was finally finished with a west end designed by another architect in the 1970s. Though Pevsner was incredulous (and not in a good way) about the building, and some were outraged by its unapologetic historicism at a time when Modernism’s dominance made any deviation from its fundamental ideologies appear strange and unnatural, it is undeniably valuable in its idiosyncratic use of materials. From bands of structural polychromy to brick patterns adorning two altars and the font, Dykes Bower’s design marshaled the potential of brick in a manner rarely seen since William Butterfield’s High Victorian radicalism. For the roof, exposed concrete arched braces support unpainted wood purlins and rafters. The corbels are, of course, decorative exposed brick. The concrete, the treatment for which approaches a kind of Gothic Brutalism, is neither celebrated nor hidden. It is simply present in a manner that even A. W. N. Pugin might have appreciated, if not enjoyed.

St Edmundsbury became a fledgling cathedral in 1914. Here, Dykes Bower brought new approaches to Gothic architecture to bear on an ancient site, the most prominent feature of which was a chunky Norman tower. After Dykes Bower’s death in 1994, Warwick Pethers took over and formed the Gothic Design Practice with Hugh Mathew to complete a monumental project.  Much of the initial work was paid for by Dykes Bower himself; his will left substantial funds for the project and careful instructions regarding how it should be carried out. For a cathedral, it’s tiny. Height and visibility in Bury St Edmund’s were priorities, and the solution was to erect a bold pinnacled tower at the crossing. It is, as far as I’m aware, the only UK project of its kind to use digital technology to cut Gothic fan vaulting. Though this has attracted criticism as it would have been more delicate and more traditional to do this by hand, the merging of new technology and this medieval building technique is an interesting episode in recent British architecture. The bright (though Dykes Bower complained these weren’t bright enough) painted ceilings throughout are remarkable, Pethers’ treasury is a carefully-conceived display space, and the cloister creates a sense of intimacy without sacrificing light or simplicity. The Watts & Co textiles and Dykes Bower’s somewhat quirky, heavy metalwork add a lush radiance.

For an architectural historian, the building feels strangely risky. Even in its completed state, the sheer scale and gritty determination behind the vast and complex plans resonate with a mixture of ambition and vulnerability. Its unavoidable newness, perhaps, give the site a quality of experimentation rather than permanence. That said, it is there. It is finished. Moreover, Warwick Pethers was clear from the outset that the building materials and techniques had to last at least 1000 years. What other contemporary architect would claim that, and what other project might justifiably warrant it?

Far from being conventional, many of the Gothic strategies employed in this recent newcomer of an ecclesiastical building, completed in the 21st century, are the first of their kind and the only examples in Britain. They are unique to the architects as much as they are a response to medieval and Victorian Gothic traditions. The construction history and delicate cathedral politics over recent decades did not always flow smoothly. The design decisions – from major construction such as the double-arcading in the north transept and the decidedly Spanish-style metalwork behind the high altar to the structural polychromy in the exterior flint cladding – created new forms of eclectic Gothic in an English setting. With all of this in mind, I admittedly found myself on the lookout for pastiche, for poor execution, for awkward colouring or pattern. There are examples of all of these pitfalls at Bury St Edmund’s, but they are few and far between, not generally part of Dykes Bower’s or the Gothic Design Practice’s vision (for that is surely what one has to call it) and they don’t detract from the holistic experience of a new space which sensitively and innovatively combines old forms. St Edmundsbury achieves one great thing: it manifests a simple reality that Gothic is viable and that Gothic continuity – as ‘survival’ rather than ‘revival’ seemed to dictate Dykes Bower’s Gothic thinking – could be as vital and as avant-garde as it was in earlier centuries.

The Dykes Bower tour on 1 September was part of a series of events run by the Twentieth Century Society. It was led by Alan Powers, who is currently working on a major study of British architecture which offered alternatives to Modernist design. In partnership with English Heritage and the RIBA, the C20 Society are also producing a series of monographs on British twentieth-century architects. Anthony Symondson’s book on Stephen Dykes Bower, which was published in November 2011, affectionately demonstrates the breadth and diversity of Dykes Bower’s postwar Gothic designs for the first time.

Toronto Modern Gothic

For the majority of August I’m on research leave in Canada and the US. The main purpose of my visits to New York, Boston and Toronto is to do some thinking about transatlantic architectural networks and the Gothic Revival. Early in my trip I spent time wandering through the colleges at the University of Toronto in glorious sunshine with a couple of knowledgeable friends, plenty of sunscreen, a sharp eye for Gothic detail, my characteristic enthusiasm for said Gothic detail, and a large slurpee (let it be said that the UK would be a better place to live if the latter were freely available…). Though there are numerous examples of neo-Romanesque and Gothic Revival spaces that draw on Frech, Italian and German influences, it was the neo-Perpendicular design that made me most curious to learn more and look closely.

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And the past in a moment won’t hold out anymore

Crossing the Jubilee footbridge between Waterloo and Embankment something miraculous happened. I say miraculous because half an hour before I was in the BFI bar on Southbank with two colleagues having a conversation about art history, the imagination, and the significance of researching objects with a miraculous status. One of us is a medievalist and her work has recently confronted how a sculpture venerated by pilgrims for its particular holy qualities is an object for which research must begin by positing an earthly maker. We talked about the status of language (what do we really mean when we talk about pop art or materiality?), discussed the tenacity, guts and – plainly- money it takes to be a scholar and to share ideas in publications, and the essential quality all academics seem to hold dear in one way or another: being almost chaotically emotionally invested in our subjects. Invested enough, at least, to take serious risks. The best scholarship, perhaps, is that which shows imagination, courage, and the spark of sincere and deep investment in a field.

We parted full of fizzing conversation, and two of us walked towards the north side of the river. At the top of the steps leading to the bridge (and bridges are always no-places, liminal surfaces between there and here), a flutter of thin white cheap paper flew into view. Then another. Flimsy and twirling in the air, I suddenly realised what they might be and grabbed two. They had flown off course, having been dropped from a helicopter over the green scrub next to County Hall. They are poems. A Rain of Poems. 100 000 of them. This event is the latest in a series in cities that have experienced air raids. The poem that I picked up was about Impressionism. It was from Cyprus. Hers was from Chile. A couple asked us what they were and I explained excitedly that they are art, poems released in the sky for a brief minute of literary littering, and that they should go find some.

We decided to cement the chance act by swapping our flimsy poem papers. Now mine was from Chile. We watched a few pages float in the river, unread and evading capture. She mentioned that she liked Frank O’Hara’s ‘Having a Coke with You’ and I agreed. Something about ordinariness and a profound unexpected intimacy at once. It seems fitting to place O’Hara’s celebration of extraordinary ordinary alongside my chance encounter with Chile and the past, which floated from a helicopter and landed in my London path. As art historians, to behold is to think, to see, to write. We take beholding pretty seriously, even when it presses its urgency upon us by chance.

BEHOLD

Behold dread and fear

to lose it all in spite of the non-existence

of either all or nothing or the wager

the jelly cake of life and the memory

of another non-existent and made up

nothingness: the past.

Behold the facade of this house without

a floor

- its walls are sponges that we accept

because they swallow desire a la Hegel.

And the past in a moment won’t hold out

any more.

(Camilo Brodsky, translated by Jessica Pujol)

HAVING A COKE WITH YOU

is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irún, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne
or being sick to my stomach on the Travesera de Gracia in Barcelona
partly because in your orange shirt you look like a better happier St. Sebastian
partly because of my love for you, partly because of your love for yoghurt
partly because of the fluorescent orange tulips around the birches
partly because of the secrecy our smiles take on before people and statuary
it is hard to believe when I’m with you that there can be anything as still
as solemn as unpleasantly definitive as statuary when right in front of it
in the warm New York 4 o’clock light we are drifting back and forth
between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles

and the portrait show seems to have no faces in it at all, just paint
you suddenly wonder why in the world anyone ever did them

I look
at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world
except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyway it’s in the Frick
which thank heavens you haven’t gone to yet so we can go together the first

time
and the fact that you move so beautifully more or less takes care of Futurism
just as at home I never think of the Nude Descending a Staircase or
at a rehearsal a single drawing of Leonardo or Michelangelo that used to wow

me
and what good does all the research of the Impressionists do them
when they never got the right person to stand near the tree when the sun

sank
or for that matter Marino Marini when he didn’t pick the rider as carefully
as the horse

it seems they were all cheated of some marvelous experience
which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I am telling you about it

(Frank O’Hara)