I hope that in this space I can elucidate some critical ideas that are relevant to the art that was made by the artists mentioned in the blog and introduce other images.
"It is interesting to contrast what Monet was doing in the mid-sixties in France with what some of the Pre-Raphaelites in England had been doing in the fifties. Once more, the issue is that of the artist to the contemporary reality, rather than a mere choice of techniques: to use the words of Sartre, "une technique implique toujours une metaphysique". For the Pre-Raphaelites, Realism - plein air or otherwise - implied an earnest, painstaking accuracy, a commitment to hard work shared in common with the aspiring middle class of their country, and an insistence on the recording of minute details which tended to congeal or embalm the subject for prosperity and concomitantly, to project a meaningfulness upon it beyond its presence on the canvas here and now..." Linda Nochlin goes on to discuss Pretty Little Baa Lambs by Ford Maddox Brown '... in other words, Pretty Little Baa Lambs was intended merely as a representation of his wife and daughter and a group of sheep out-of-doors. Nevertheless, the tightness of the surface, the rigidity of the poses, the historical costume, the whole sense of time-consuming effort, insistently point beyond the visual facts to some hidden meaning. There may be a lot of sunlight, but there is little of contemporary immediacy in Pretty Little Baa Lambs...Monet, on the other hand, although he painted his Dejeuner in the studio, created a far greater sense of pleinairisme and of all the contemporary immediacy which the term implies, by means of the sophisticated, modern costumes, the casualness of the poses, the informality of the composition and the seeming rapidity of the pictorial notation, with its synoptic, open brushwork...
For some of the Pre-Raphaelites, like Holman Hunt, armed with unshakeable moral earnestness, for whom achievement was the product of effort and effort implied detailed rendering, 'looseness of touch seems almost to have been equated with moral laxity' to use the words of Keith Roberts...
It hardly seems accidental that the Pre-Raphaelites' enthusiasm for the accurate rendering of out-of-doors light and natural colour was accompanied by an equally intense admiration for similar qualities in the art of the past, notably that of the fifteenth century. The English artists' paintings are generally craftsmen's hard-worked tours-de-force, leaning heavily on tradition, rather than brisk, accurate recordings of present day motifs, plein air though they sometimes maybe." (Realism, Nochlin, Linda 1971. Penguin Books, U.S. pp. 142 -144)
It's interesting to contrast the above with the following piece written by George Melly. He makes many patronising assumptions made about culture and in particular about popular culture. But despite this there is a freshness about this account written by an artist who was a participant and consumer in these times.
"Both popular and pop culture are of working-class origin, and both arose out of a given situation both social and economic. The principal difference is that popular culture was unconscious, or perhaps unselfconscious would be more exact, whereas pop culture came about as a result of a deliberate search for objects, clothes, music, heroes and attitudes which could help to define a stance.
From this it can be said that, whereas the older popular culture stood for the spirit of acceptance, pop culture represented a form of protest. Superficially, and given our current prejudices, this would suggest an advance but, initially at any rate, I don't think that this was the case. Popular culture may have had a vacuous sentimental side to it, an easy tendency to respond to stock stimuli with stock responses, but there was a wry toughness, a flamboyant and warm vulgarity which came across as a kind of courage. On the other hand the protest in early pop had neither target nor aim. It was against a great deal, but for nothing. It was parasitic rather than creative, and motivated by material envy. The explanation for this unpromising start lies in another important difference between the two cultures. Popular culture, though naturally subject to regional differences and increasingly corrupted by the early mass media and the spread of gentility, had grown slowly and naturally from a settled if frequently deplorable environment. Early British pop was confined entirely to cosmopolitan working-class adolescents. The soil it sprang from was poor and sour, enclosed on one side by a brief and inadequate education and on the other by conscription into the forces. The seed had been planted during the war when circumstances had broken down the old working-class patterns, and it was fertilized by the big money from dead-end jobs. It is therefore hardly surprising that its first flowering should have seemed rank if vigorous. It was called Rock 'n' Roll.
My own conviction is that pop music has always formed the heart of pop culture, and that the rise of Tommy Steele in the middle 50s is the first British pop event...
...[W]hereas the popular culture altered very slowly and appealed throughout its long history to basically the same class, pop has rapidly permeated all strata of society, and at the same time succeeded in blurring the boundaries between itself and traditional or high culture.
It is of course true that in the past many artists and critics belonging to high culture have taken an interest in popular culture. Lautrec and Sickert painted the music halls, Max Beerbohm and T.S. Elliot have discussed its stars with elaborate if ornate seriousness, George Orwell broke new ground, and incidentally founded a minor industry, by examining the neglected byways of popular culture; the Surrealists too, from their own position, have treated the commercial cinema as a poetic phenomenon, but for these and people like them popular art acted as raw material. The pop intellectual doesn't raid pop culture. He hopes to create pop art, and tries to live the pop life..."
Revolt into Style, Melly, George. Penguin 1970. (p.p. 3-5)
To put the record straight on popular culture being about acceptance and not protest, settled and not dynamic I have a quote from Pandaemonium by Humphrey Jennings from 100 years earlier.
70 The Mob October 9, 1779
I wrote to my dear friend last from Bolton, and I mentioned the mob which had assembled in that neighbourhood; but they had not then done much mischief; they only destroyed a small engine or two near Chowbent. We met them on Saturday morning, but I apprehend what we saw were not the main body; for on the same day, in the afternoon, a capital engine or mill, in the manner of Arcrites, and in which he is a partner, near Chorley, was attacked; but from its peculiar situation they could approach to it by one passage only; and this circumstance enabled the owner, with the assistance of a few neighbours, to repulse the enemy and preserve the mill for that time. Two of the mob were shot dead on the spot, one drowned, and several were wounded. The mob had no fire-arms, and did not expect so warm a reception. They were greatly exasperated and vowed revenge; accordingly they spent all Sunday and Monday morning in collecting fire-arms and ammunition and melting down their pewter dishes into bullets. They were now joined by the Duke of Bridgewater's colliers and others, to the number, we are told, of eight thousand, and marched by the beat of a drum and with colours flying to the mill, where they met with a repulse on Saturday. They found Sir Richard Clayson guarding the place with fifty Invalids armed, but this handful were by no means a match for the enraged thousands; they (the Invalids) therefore contented themselves with looking on, while the mob completely destroyed a set of mills valued at 10,000l.
This was Monday's employment. On Tuesday morning we heard their drum at about two miles distance from Bolton, a little before we left the place, and their professed design was to take Bolton, Manchester, and Stockport in their way to Crumford, and to destroy all the engines, not only in these places, but throughout England. How far they will be able to put their threats into execution time alone can discover.
From a letter of Josiah Wedgewood to Thomas Bentley, published in A Group of Englishmen by Eliza Meteyard, 1871.
Here for the first time among these images there clearly appears the image of 'the mob'. I mention this not because it came into being now but because 'the mob' is one of the principal actors in the great struggles of the next seventy years - and the transformation of the mob into the ordered disciplined demonstration of the 19th Century is one of the clearest signs of increasing political consciousness. It is not too early to note here that the shooting begins on the side of the forces of so-called Law and Order: and that it produces immediate organisation, discipline, drum and colours etc.
Pandaemonium 1660 -1886, The Coming of the Machine as seen by Contemporary Observers. Jennings, Humphrey. [this edition] Icon Books Ltd 2012 (p.p. 76 - 77)
"It is interesting to contrast what Monet was doing in the mid-sixties in France with what some of the Pre-Raphaelites in England had been doing in the fifties. Once more, the issue is that of the artist to the contemporary reality, rather than a mere choice of techniques: to use the words of Sartre, "une technique implique toujours une metaphysique". For the Pre-Raphaelites, Realism - plein air or otherwise - implied an earnest, painstaking accuracy, a commitment to hard work shared in common with the aspiring middle class of their country, and an insistence on the recording of minute details which tended to congeal or embalm the subject for prosperity and concomitantly, to project a meaningfulness upon it beyond its presence on the canvas here and now..." Linda Nochlin goes on to discuss Pretty Little Baa Lambs by Ford Maddox Brown '... in other words, Pretty Little Baa Lambs was intended merely as a representation of his wife and daughter and a group of sheep out-of-doors. Nevertheless, the tightness of the surface, the rigidity of the poses, the historical costume, the whole sense of time-consuming effort, insistently point beyond the visual facts to some hidden meaning. There may be a lot of sunlight, but there is little of contemporary immediacy in Pretty Little Baa Lambs...Monet, on the other hand, although he painted his Dejeuner in the studio, created a far greater sense of pleinairisme and of all the contemporary immediacy which the term implies, by means of the sophisticated, modern costumes, the casualness of the poses, the informality of the composition and the seeming rapidity of the pictorial notation, with its synoptic, open brushwork...
For some of the Pre-Raphaelites, like Holman Hunt, armed with unshakeable moral earnestness, for whom achievement was the product of effort and effort implied detailed rendering, 'looseness of touch seems almost to have been equated with moral laxity' to use the words of Keith Roberts...
It hardly seems accidental that the Pre-Raphaelites' enthusiasm for the accurate rendering of out-of-doors light and natural colour was accompanied by an equally intense admiration for similar qualities in the art of the past, notably that of the fifteenth century. The English artists' paintings are generally craftsmen's hard-worked tours-de-force, leaning heavily on tradition, rather than brisk, accurate recordings of present day motifs, plein air though they sometimes maybe." (Realism, Nochlin, Linda 1971. Penguin Books, U.S. pp. 142 -144)
It's interesting to contrast the above with the following piece written by George Melly. He makes many patronising assumptions made about culture and in particular about popular culture. But despite this there is a freshness about this account written by an artist who was a participant and consumer in these times.
"Both popular and pop culture are of working-class origin, and both arose out of a given situation both social and economic. The principal difference is that popular culture was unconscious, or perhaps unselfconscious would be more exact, whereas pop culture came about as a result of a deliberate search for objects, clothes, music, heroes and attitudes which could help to define a stance.
From this it can be said that, whereas the older popular culture stood for the spirit of acceptance, pop culture represented a form of protest. Superficially, and given our current prejudices, this would suggest an advance but, initially at any rate, I don't think that this was the case. Popular culture may have had a vacuous sentimental side to it, an easy tendency to respond to stock stimuli with stock responses, but there was a wry toughness, a flamboyant and warm vulgarity which came across as a kind of courage. On the other hand the protest in early pop had neither target nor aim. It was against a great deal, but for nothing. It was parasitic rather than creative, and motivated by material envy. The explanation for this unpromising start lies in another important difference between the two cultures. Popular culture, though naturally subject to regional differences and increasingly corrupted by the early mass media and the spread of gentility, had grown slowly and naturally from a settled if frequently deplorable environment. Early British pop was confined entirely to cosmopolitan working-class adolescents. The soil it sprang from was poor and sour, enclosed on one side by a brief and inadequate education and on the other by conscription into the forces. The seed had been planted during the war when circumstances had broken down the old working-class patterns, and it was fertilized by the big money from dead-end jobs. It is therefore hardly surprising that its first flowering should have seemed rank if vigorous. It was called Rock 'n' Roll.
My own conviction is that pop music has always formed the heart of pop culture, and that the rise of Tommy Steele in the middle 50s is the first British pop event...
...[W]hereas the popular culture altered very slowly and appealed throughout its long history to basically the same class, pop has rapidly permeated all strata of society, and at the same time succeeded in blurring the boundaries between itself and traditional or high culture.
It is of course true that in the past many artists and critics belonging to high culture have taken an interest in popular culture. Lautrec and Sickert painted the music halls, Max Beerbohm and T.S. Elliot have discussed its stars with elaborate if ornate seriousness, George Orwell broke new ground, and incidentally founded a minor industry, by examining the neglected byways of popular culture; the Surrealists too, from their own position, have treated the commercial cinema as a poetic phenomenon, but for these and people like them popular art acted as raw material. The pop intellectual doesn't raid pop culture. He hopes to create pop art, and tries to live the pop life..."
Revolt into Style, Melly, George. Penguin 1970. (p.p. 3-5)
To put the record straight on popular culture being about acceptance and not protest, settled and not dynamic I have a quote from Pandaemonium by Humphrey Jennings from 100 years earlier.
70 The Mob October 9, 1779
I wrote to my dear friend last from Bolton, and I mentioned the mob which had assembled in that neighbourhood; but they had not then done much mischief; they only destroyed a small engine or two near Chowbent. We met them on Saturday morning, but I apprehend what we saw were not the main body; for on the same day, in the afternoon, a capital engine or mill, in the manner of Arcrites, and in which he is a partner, near Chorley, was attacked; but from its peculiar situation they could approach to it by one passage only; and this circumstance enabled the owner, with the assistance of a few neighbours, to repulse the enemy and preserve the mill for that time. Two of the mob were shot dead on the spot, one drowned, and several were wounded. The mob had no fire-arms, and did not expect so warm a reception. They were greatly exasperated and vowed revenge; accordingly they spent all Sunday and Monday morning in collecting fire-arms and ammunition and melting down their pewter dishes into bullets. They were now joined by the Duke of Bridgewater's colliers and others, to the number, we are told, of eight thousand, and marched by the beat of a drum and with colours flying to the mill, where they met with a repulse on Saturday. They found Sir Richard Clayson guarding the place with fifty Invalids armed, but this handful were by no means a match for the enraged thousands; they (the Invalids) therefore contented themselves with looking on, while the mob completely destroyed a set of mills valued at 10,000l.
This was Monday's employment. On Tuesday morning we heard their drum at about two miles distance from Bolton, a little before we left the place, and their professed design was to take Bolton, Manchester, and Stockport in their way to Crumford, and to destroy all the engines, not only in these places, but throughout England. How far they will be able to put their threats into execution time alone can discover.
From a letter of Josiah Wedgewood to Thomas Bentley, published in A Group of Englishmen by Eliza Meteyard, 1871.
Here for the first time among these images there clearly appears the image of 'the mob'. I mention this not because it came into being now but because 'the mob' is one of the principal actors in the great struggles of the next seventy years - and the transformation of the mob into the ordered disciplined demonstration of the 19th Century is one of the clearest signs of increasing political consciousness. It is not too early to note here that the shooting begins on the side of the forces of so-called Law and Order: and that it produces immediate organisation, discipline, drum and colours etc.
Pandaemonium 1660 -1886, The Coming of the Machine as seen by Contemporary Observers. Jennings, Humphrey. [this edition] Icon Books Ltd 2012 (p.p. 76 - 77)
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