From Deco Cars to Deco Furniture

Streamlining influenced automobile design in the Deco age, and changed the appearance from the old rectangular transporters into sleek vehicles with sweeping lines, symmetry and V-shapes. It didn’t matter that the decorative elements could hardly influence speed and effic­iency; it was enough that these elements suggested speed and effic­iency. Muscular and forceful elements, like high prow hoods, art-deco speed lines for chrome grilles and parallel bar trims were the rage in Deco cars!

Two examples can show us how the exterior and interior of a deco classic appeared Examine the Cadillac Sedanette from the outside, then have a look at the interior. And see the walnut dashboard of the 1938 Bentley. 

desk, Louro Preto and chestnut burl veneer, Brights of Nettlebed. Date?

I liked the car reviewer who acknowledged that more than exciting dials and switches alone, the dashboard was (and is?) also an important statement of personal style. The best dashboards were works of art where engineering met styling, and fact balanced fantasy. In his 1934 MG PA Midget, for example, the Art Deco dashboard made a pronounced play of MG's famous octagon badge: dials and switches were encased in chunky chromed octagons. And the speedo and rev counter were combined in one delicious looking dial. Can we say boys with their toys?

But not just cars. Soon designers were including speed lines and V shapes in other, totally unrelated objects eg clock faces. Monumental architecture and small art objects alike adopted the use of stepped forms, geometric shapes, chevrons, ziggurats and other motifs of the Art Deco era.

Cadillac Sedanette exterior and dashboard, owned by Cars for Films

Brights of Nettlebed has photographed an amazing Louro Preto and chestnut burl veneered pedestal desk, shaped just like a classic car. Coming from Central and South America, especially southern Brasil and Venezuala, Louro Preto veneer was used for interior design, furniture pieces and boat building.

The angled sides encloses a vintage leather inlaid hood with a car clock inset into the dashboard and recesses, above a steel detailed drawer, push action draw­ers with engine turned fronts. Each pedestal has two drawers with steel handles, while the side and front have grille bases. I know the width (212 cm wide) but I wish I knew who the designer was and in which year this amazing desk was made.

If this pedestal desk, by itself, doesn’t inspire memories of the vintage racing era, classical cars and stylish timber dashboards, the collector could simply add a painting of a 1930s car on the nearest wall.

Dashboard of a 1938 Bentley

Family health and the Peckham Experiment: 1926-50

Throughout the history of this blog, I have been interested in a growing medical concern for fresh air, sea-water, sun, beach huts, walking gardens, pavilions, pleasure piers, lidos, healthy food and physical fitness.  The problem was that wealthy families could always afford to pay for holiday time in a spa resort or a vigorous ski holiday in the Alps. But what happened to families with inadequate housing, no paid holidays in the fresh air and little access to lidos and pleasure piers?

Swimming pool and diving platform, designed by architect Owen Williams in 1934.

Pioneer Health Centre was specifically set up by a husband and wife medical team (Dr George Williamson d1953 and Dr Innes Pearse d1978) in Peckham, a working class suburb of South London. Motivated by modern ideas of hygiene and good health, the founders wanted to study how light, air, openness and vigorous exercise could be enjoyed by working families and could influence their health outcomes. They did not want to run an illness service; rather they insisted on promoting conditions for personal, family and social well-being.

From 1926-9, the project was started in a small way in St Mary's Road, to serve families living within walking distance. The initial data were written up by the doctors and funding was sought to build a larger centre. Pioneer Health Centre then re-opened in 1935 in a purpose-built piece of modernist architecture.

I am impressed by how the architect, Owen Williams, used modern techniques so that the architecture could play an active role in the Pioneer Health Centre’s philosophy. For example the walls of glass around the Centre were intended to
a] maximise the natural light and
b] retain a structural transparency, representing informality and a welcoming attitude to the community.

The large swimming pool was covered by a glazed roof; all windows could be fully opened, allowing natural air to circulate inside. A flat roof alongside the pool provided ample space for open-air gym classes, as we can see from the photo. Older children had a covered playground that opened directly onto the lovely gardens.

Drs Williamson and Pearse recruited 950 local families to be part of the health-care experiment. For a shilling a week, the families had access to a range of activities eg physical exercise, swimming, games & workshops. Perhaps locals couldn't afford a shilling a week, but the goal was to make the health centre feel like a club which belonged to the families, not an outside charity.

Members were asked to take part in a formal health check each year, and their health was informally monitored as they participated in activities from week to week. The only traditional health treatment on offer was contraception.

Gym class on flat roof top

The core facilities were accommodated by the architect eg cafeteria, games rooms, pool, nursery and gym. The members were actively encouraged to initiate their own choice of classes and activities, using the facilities offered by the Centre at no extra cost eg dress making, ballroom dancing. Self help was the buzz word.

According to Transition Town Tooting, the doctors also recognised the importance of good nutrition, and had a farm providing the centre with fresh, organic produce.

The Centre closed down during World War Two, but was restored and reopened as soon as the soldiers had been demobilised. Alas the bright and breezy Centre finally closed in 1950. It failed for different reasons: firstly it was concerned exclusively with the study and cultivation of health, not with the treatment of disease; secondly it was based exclusively on a limited suburban locality; thirdly its basis was contributory and not free; and finally it didn’t conform to the newly developed NHS structure. But what an amazing concept it had been between 1926 and 1950.

scalloped-glass bay windows right across the front of the Pioneer Health Centre (Pioneer Health Foundation photo)

The old archives from the Pioneer Health Centre, including the medical data collected during the experimental years, are now in the Wellcome Library for the History and Understanding of Medicine.  And a review document, called The Pioneer Health Centre Peckham London, was published in 1949 by the National Trust for the Promotion and Study of Health. For an excellent analysis of the rather radical politics involved in self help and in cooperative health facilities, see Anarchism and the welfare state: the Peckham Health Centre by David Goodway.

Degenerate Art in Dresden 1933 - I was wrong !

At the Modernity in German Art 1910-1937 Exhibition at the NGV in Melbourne this year, I read an amazing piece of historical information. The huge and popular Munich Degenerate Art Exhibition of 1937 was not the first of its kind, as I had firmly believed. The forerunner of Munich, called Reflections of Decadence, had been held in the inner courtyard of the Dresden Town Hall in Sep-Oct 1933. How amazing!

Jacqueline Strecker noted that Dresden was already a conservative city politically and that the newly appointed director of the Dresden Art Academy was even more conservative. The Lord Mayor of Dresden was dressed in full Nazi uniform when he toured the exhibition in 1933.

But what does it mean when we note that the first decadent art exhibition was put on by the Nazis in 1933 and not in 1937?  Simple... the Nazis had clearly worked out their ideology as soon as they came to power! Thus no one in Germany could say in 1933 that they didn't realise what Nazism was going to mean for the country and its citizens.

The Reflections of Decadence exhibition from Dresden eventually toured to at least eight German cities between 1934 and 1936, before it was finally incorporated into the much larger and more infamous Degenerate Art Exhibition held in Munich. I don't have a catalogue from the Dresden show, so it is difficult to track the individual works of art by name.  But I do know two of Dix's paintings, The Trench (1923) and War Cripples (1920), that appeared in the Dresden exhibition.

Naum Slutzky, Female bust, 1931

Further information about this elusive 1933 exhibition came from a most unlikely source. During archaeological excavations carried out in Berlin in 2010, 11 pieces of modernist art were unexpectedly dug up and revealed. Created between 1918 and 1930, these bronze and ceramic sculptures by Marg Moll, Emy Roeder, Edwin Scharff, Naum Slutzky, Karl Knappe, Gustav Heinrich Wolff, Otto Baum and Otto Freundlich had been declared degenerate and had been put into the Dresden exhibition.

Given that some 21,000 art works produced by Cubist, Expressionist, Dadaist, Fauvist, Surrealist and New Objectivity artists were about to be removed by the Nazis from museums, sold abroad (eg auctioned in Lucerne) to earn foreign exchange or thrown onto a bonfire (1,004 paintings), no-one had expected any of the 1933 art horde to be intact. I would love to know how these works ended up in a Berlin subterranean hidey hole. Was it a fan of modernism, hiding the works from Nazi predators? Or was someone so disgusted by modernist art that he/she buried the pieces to destroy them?

Some of these Dresden exhibits went on to be part of the infamous Nazi propaganda exhibition in Munich eg Marg Moll’s Dancer c1930, Emy Roeder’s Pregnant Woman 1918 and Otto Baum’s Girl Standing 1930. Were the other modernist artists (Käthe Kollwitz, Ernst Barlach, Emil Nolde, Franz Marc, Otto Dix, Ernst, Max Beckmann, Gerhard Marcks, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Paul Klee, Oskar Kokoschka, Otto Nagel, George Grosz and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff) not identified at degenerate as early as 1933? I am sure they were, but so far there is no evidence that their art was included in the Dresden exhibition. Or perhaps sculptures survived underground for 70 years or more, but paintings perished.

Dix, The Trench, 1923. Bought by the Wallraf-Richartz Museum, Cologne.

Bernd Reinhardt and Sybille Fuchs asked what made the Nazis respond so aggressively to modern art? The outlawed artists were accused of having fought on the side of artistic degradation during the years of Russian and Jewish assault on German art. The Nazis developed their hostility to modern art in the shadow of the unstable Weimar society, whose middle classes felt battered by crisis and sensed imminent disaster. This art offered a glimpse of how "international" the world had become, and it reflected the world’s contradictions and fractures. Naum Slutzky, whose 1931 sculpture of a female bust (see photo) was found in the Berlin excavations, worked with the Bauhaus in Weimar. The Nazis thought his bust was ugly, Jewish, anti German, internationalist, modernist and did not reflect well on German women. What was worse for the Nazis, Slutzky was Russian born and educated.

The 11 art works dug up in 2010 offer a glimpse of the cultural wealth and vibrant artistry destroyed by the Nazis. They also point to the gaps that the thefts caused in museum collections. Fortunately some of the lost art objects can be seen in Steven Spielberg Film and Video Archive.

inter-war American landscapes: Grant Wood

Last year I had been examining a series of landscape paintings, from very different countries, that seemed to share nothing but their inter-war timing. Paul Nash, Eric Ravilius and Harry Epworth Allen were British, Reuven Rubin was Israeli, Dorit Black was Australian and Rita Angus was a New Zealander. I concluded that in all these landscapes, the boldly presented hills and roads emphasised their treatment as mass and form. And like cubist painting decades earlier, the mountains became interconnecting planes of varying depth. In fact the simple, strong and bold lines were still quite cubist in feeling.

Grant Wood, Fall Ploughing, 1931. Figge Art Museum

So how did the American artist Grant Wood (1891–1942) compare and was he exposed to landscape art from other countries? In 1913 he enrolled at the prestigious School of the Art Institute of Chicago where he studied the world of contemporary art. And during the 1920s, he made four trips to Europe, where he studied many styles of painting, including post-impressionism.

Since I was unfamiliar with Wood’s work, I will cite the findings of the University of Virginia with confidence. The composition of Wood's landscapes employed modernist tools freely. Trees, hills and people were distinctly streamlined, and the streamlining was employed to the same effect that it was on everything from architecture to automobiles in the 1920s and 30s: it created a sense of vast and easy movement, only in this case it was through an open landscape rather than contained in a piece of machinery.

Grant Wood, Near Sundown, 1933. Uni of Kansas

Further, modernist compositions from Sheeler's American Landscape to the houses of the International Style relied heavily on sharp and linear geometry. Wood also employed this kind of geometry in his paintings, not only in the arrangement of the scene, but in the actual execution itself. The sharply retreating lines of crops or trees, interrupted by an angular farmhouse in Fall Ploughing 1931 and Near Sundown 1933 were indicative of Wood's interest in this, as well as the carefully rectangular layout of such paintings as Spring Turning 1936. The regularity found in many of these compositions was a similarly modernist tool.

Art Deco appeared to have been Grant Wood's modernist niche, one he adopted more readily than any other offshoot of modernism. In evolving a style of artificial geometries, clean surfaces and relentless patterns, he was like the Art Deco decorators of his day. Although he surely would not have admitted it readily, the unlikely pairing of modernism and the regionalist Grant Wood bore unexpected fruit.

Grant Wood, Stone City Iowa, 1930. Joslyn Art Museum Omaha

In my previous post, I thought that bright sunlight and cast shadows in all the landscapes helped to define the natural forms. And importantly, for all the artists, the springy hills left almost no space in the painting for sky. Both these characteristics were equally relevant to Wood.

For a last comparison, look how Grant's British contemporary Paul Nash (1889–1946) remained entranced by the English countryside, recording the hilltops outside Oxford or Swanage in Dorset. He used vivid colours to reflect the heat of summer, or a bouncy tennis ball to display optimism in Event on The Downs 1934.

Paul Nash, Event on the Downs, 1934. Dulwich

Arthur Conan Doyle, Harry Houdini and the Truth

Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930) was obsessed from childhood with the spiritual world. Despite being educated in the rational sciences, his Scottish-Irish heritage gave him a sense of the spiritual, bordering on the superstitious. He attended his first séance at age 20 when he was studying medicine, and not yet thinking of writing fiction.

From 1876-81, Conan Doyle studied medicine at arguably the best medical school in the country - Edinburgh Uni. He practised medicine from the time of his graduation until after he returned from the Boer War in 1900.

Conan Doyle, at first, seemed only interested in Spiritualism for its narrative potential, rather than to change people’s hearts and minds. But after his father died when the author was young, quickly followed by his wife, Conan Doyle fell into a deep depression. Shortly thereafter, in 1893, he applied to join the Society for Psychical Research, a committee of academics aiming to study Spiritualism.

Eventually he gave up his lucrative literary career and dedicated himself wholly to his obsession with Spiritualism with. If anything, Conan Doyle's interest in the paranormal was even MORE intensified after the death of his brother and eldest son in World War I.

Houdini and Doyle met in 1920

Erich Weiss better known as Harry Houdini (1874–1926) was born in Hungary but largely educated in the USA. Houdini was also fascinated by illusion and magic, especially the talent for escapology. In 1904 he toured across Great Britain, the Netherlands, Germany, France and Russia, eventually returning to the USA as a wealthy man. Life was good, allowing Houdini to remain the highest-paid performer in American vaudeville for many years.

In 1920, Houdini was touring Britain, performing scary stunts like climbing out of locked trunks and straitjackets. Or scarier still, breaking out of police lock ups in every city in which Houdini performed. Although Doyle was utterly famous himself, he was besotted with Houdini, going to Portsmouth to see his slightly younger fellow spiritualist. After the show, Doyle couldn’t wait to introduce himself to the magician backstage; apparently the very tall English writer and the very short Hungarian-American magician were happy spending quality time with each other. And their closeness, conducted mainly in letters, continued when Doyle to America to lecture on spiritualism.

Enter Christopher Sandford who wrote a book about these two important men called Masters of Mystery: The Strange Friendship of Arthur Conan Doyle and Harry Houdini, published by Bloomsbury in 2011.

Houdini was not ashamed of his fellow mediums; they had to entertain the crowds and earn a living, just as he had to. But he never for a moment thought the magic was anything more than a stage show. Alas Conan Doyle had a lifetime of believing in fairies and séances, and would not be budged from his faith in these skills.

Why did Houdini acquiesce to Lady Conan Doyle when she suggested that they have a séance? Sandford showed that they were going to contact Houdini’s beloved deceased mother, Mrs Cecelia Weiss; although he knew it was nonsense, Houdini didn’t have the heart to say no. Lady Conan Doyle, in a kind of trance, called for a message from Mother Weiss and wrote the words down on paper, in perfect English. Sir Arthur thought the event a great success but Houdini knew that he had never spoken to his mama in English! When the very religious rabbi’s wife, Mrs Weiss, apparently made the sign of the cross, the game was up.

Houdini was apparently unable to convince Conan Doyle that his feats were simply illusions and tricks. As an experienced magician, Houdini knew all the tricks that his fellow magicians used. But the question remains – why did Houdini spend what was left of his life, rubbishing séances, travelling the world and exposing the trickery? After all, he had himself become both wealthy and famous, using the tricks of the trade! So this was a very strange friendship, and one that was doomed to fail.

Houdini's book, A Magician Among the Spirits, 1924

Note the mention of Conan Doyle on the book cover.

The knife in the back, as far as Doyle was concerned, happened when Houdini chronicled the profession’s trickery in his book, A Magician Among the Spirits, published in 1924. Doyle, who had become an even firmer believer in spiritualism during his later years than he had been earlier, was very angry at Houdini's exposés. Houdini’s book led inevitably to the end of any trust between them.

Doyle’s own explanation was truly bizarre. He felt that Houdini was SUCH a powerful spiritualist that he must have been using his magic to block the magic of other magicians that Houdini had rubbished in his book. Even after Houdini died in 1926, Doyle published more proof about the truth of spiritualism in The Edge of The Unknown 1930.

I totally understand why Doyle would want to defend his own firmly held beliefs. But I have no idea why Doyle would want to vigorously defend his colleague's powerful spiritualism when the American had, for once and for all, exposed the profession’s use of trickery.

So in the end, there were two ironies. Firstly Houdini knew he and his fellow performers had to maintain their spiritual aura, if they were to continue to take advantage of a gullible public. Secondly Doyle had to be a rational and sceptical scientist, but he was so invested in spiritualism that he couldn’t afford to accept the truth from an expert. Although Doyle recognised that some spiritualists might be fraudulent, he believed Houdini's attitude was unfair and irrational, and his condemnation of spiritualism was sacrilegious.

Arthur and Jean Conan Doyle opened their bookshop

in Victoria Street SW London, in 1925.

Conan Doyle's book, The Edge of Unknown, was sold here.

When Sir Arthur Conan Doyle died in 1930, a very large crowd attended the funeral and train loads of floral tributes were sent from across Britain and from other countries. It was a celebratory and colourful occasion, and he was buried in the non-Christian section of the cemetery. His readers either didn't know about his involvement in spiritualism, or they did but they didn't care. 



iconic Sydney Harbour Bridge: 1932-2012

We assume that iconic buildings were always in the site they currently grace. We cannot imagine Pisa without its leaning tower or Paris without its Eiffel Tower. Yet each structure, however iconic now, was once the subject of vigorous council debates, contradictory community input, contested tenders, budgetary problems, technical concerns and finally uncertain public use.

The Sydney Harbour Bridge was no different. This week is the 80th anniversary of its opening in March 1932.

Sydney Harbour Bridge today. Note the Art Deco pylons.

Virtually since the beginning of European settlement in Sydney, transportation links between the north and south shores of Sydney Harbour had been problematic. I am very proud to see that my favourite architect from the colonial period,  Francis Greenway, recommended to Governor Macquarie that the North Shore should be linked to Sydney by a bridge. In letters to The Australian in 1825 ex-convict Greenway wrote that such a bridge would 'give an idea of strength and magnificence that would reflect credit and glory on the colony and the Mother Country'.

Over the next few decades, engineers proposed every possible design type  eg truss bridges, arch bridges or floating bridges.

But it wasn’t until governmental engineer John C Bradfield (1867-1943) took hold of the project that Sydney could  make this long-held fantasy a reality. He favoured building a cantilever overpass, without piers, between Dawes Point and McMahons Point.

In 1916 the Legislative Assembly (lower state house) passed the Bill for the construction of a cantilever bridge. It was going to happen, at last.

Of course we know that projects don't necessarily run smoothly. In this case, the Legislative Council (upper state house) rejected the legislation on the grounds that money would be better used for the war effort. This setback did not deter Bradfield who developed the full specifications and scheme to finance the construction of a cantilever bridge. In 1921 he went on a research tour overseas which convinced him that tenders should be called for both cantilever and arch designs.

Finally, in the post-war period, the necessary Act for the construction of a high-level cantilever or arch bridge across Sydney Harbour was passed; it was to connect Dawes Point with Milson's Point. The 1922 Act provided for both the construction of the bridge and the construction of electric railway lines.

In 1923 tenders were called for a cantilever or arch bridge. Twenty tenders were received from local companies and from abroad. In March 1924 the contract was given to the English firm Dorman Long & Co of Middlesbrough with a design for an arch bridge at a tender price of £4.2 million. The arch design was not only cheaper than the cantilever and suspension proposals, but had the advantage of greater rigidity. This would be important for the heavy traffic that the bridge was going to be carrying.

Thomas Tait was the consulting architect to Dorman Long with responsibility for the design of the purely decorative pylons. Tait drew on the Roman cenotaph form and on the iconography of Egyptian monuments to add a war memorial symbol after the Great War.

Under construction. Photo credit: National Library of Australia

Construction began in 1923 and of course there was great pain for the location population. The first thing that happened was the demolition of 800 solid homes. The owners of these homes received compensation, but their tenant occupants did not. And eventually there was also considerable morbidity and mortality amongst the workers.

The contractors set up two workshops at Milson's Point on the North Shore where the girders were made from steel. Abutments, which supported the ends of the bridge, were contained at the base of the very Art Deco pylons. They prevented the bridge from stretching or compressing due to temperature variations. The steel used for the bridge was largely imported. 80% came from Redcar in the North East of Britain while the rest was locally made. The granite used was quarried in the south coast town of Moruya, and the concrete used was also Australian made. The total weight of the bridge was 52,800 tonnes, and six million hand-driven rivets held the bridge together.

The two arches met at the centre of the span in August 1930. The road, and the two sets of tram and railway tracks, were completed in 1931. Power, lines telephone lines, water, gas and drainage pipes were all added to the bridge in that year. In January 1932, the first test steam locomotive crossed the bridge without incident.

Bradfield on test-train on Sydney Harbour Bridge, 1932. State Records NSW

Premier Jack Lang opened the Harbour Bridge on 19th March 1932. One moment of ugliness occurred with Francis Edward de Groot, a member of a nasty rightwing organisation called the New Guard, disrupted the opening ceremony by slashing the ceremonial ribbon before the Premier was able to officially open the bridge. But in typical Australian fashion, the ribbon was simply stuck back together and the Premier completed his task.

I am amazed that the opening celebrations were an all-singing all-dancing roadshow since we know that Sydney, like most of the world, was suffering terribly from Great Depression in 1932. Yet half a million people participated in the Venetian-type carnival with floats, bands and a procession of passenger ships under the Bridge. It was a very big party!

poster, opening celebrations, 1932

The total financial cost of the bridge was £10 million which was not paid off in full for another 55 years. But the money was well spent. Sydney had a symbol that, from 1932 on, would be instantly recognised around the world.

St Ives School - who says artists must suffer for their art?

St Ives was always a pretty fishing area of Britain, and the Porthmeor studios were opened for business as early as 1815 (probably originally built for something fish-related). This suggests that by the later C19th, keen artists were building their studios on top of the fishermen's cellars.

Nonetheless the town wasn’t a realistic destination for most travellers until the extension of the Great Western Railway in 1877.

St Ives and its beach

As a result, much of the town was built during the later C19th when the permanent population increased marginally and the number of visitors increased substantially. Note the British-American artist James Whistler and his pupil, English impressionist painter Walter Sickert. Note also Australian ex-pat artist Emanuel Phillips Fox who settled at St Ives in 1890 and met the artist Ethel Carrick there in 1901. They soon married each other.

Map locating St Ives, far SW tip of England

Railway poster, advertising Cornwall (what date?)

Even then, it took some time before art critics recognised the area as a centre for creativity. The first event that established the town on the national scene was when an art pottery studio was established in St Ives in 1920 by Bernard Leach. Then in 1928, painters Ben Nicholson (1894–1982) and Christopher Wood (1901–30) visited St Ives and loved what they saw. So I am suggesting that the 1920s was the first important decade in the development of the Cornish fishing port as an artists' colony.

Christopher Wood met and became quite close to Ben Nicholson in 1926 and soon moved to Cornwall to paint and to exhibit together. Wood said he painted coastal scenes because he loved the sea, he loved primitive landscapes and because his family had always messed around in boats. What a tragedy that he died, at his own hand, aged 29.

Formed in 1927, the St Ives Society of Artists flourished during the 1930s and 1940s, attracting manyof the artists who had painted in Cornwall either permanently or as a visitor. Members included some of my favourite C20th artists: Stanhope Forbes, Frank Brangwyn, Laura Knight, Sir Alfred Munnings and Stanley Spencer. Scottish artist Wilhelmina Barns-Graham moved to St Ives in 1940, aged 28, and "went native".

Porthmeor Studios, overlooking St Ives' beach

 
Ben Nicholson married the sculptress Barbara Hepworth (1903–75) in 1938 and with the outbreak of World War 2 in 1939, they decided to settle in St Ives for the long term. They were soon joined by the Russian sculptor Naum Gabo (1890–1977). Gabo had moved from Russia to Munich and Paris (amongst other cities) for many years and didn’t settle in Britain until 1936. Locals looked on in amazement as the artists made sleepy old West Cornwall trendy.

Trewyn Studio, purchased by Nicholson and Hepworth in 1949, was no bigger than many other stone-built houses in the town. The war had ended and a new, younger generation of artists emerged, led by the star couple. This second generation of artists also made the Cornish coast their home and continued using the term The St Ives School. The 1950s were tough years for most Brits but St Ives’ modern artists were doing well.

Hepworth Museum, interior space

After their divorce, Barbara Hepworth continued to live in the St Ives house and died there in 1975, aged 72. Trewyn Studio, now The Barbara Hepworth Museum and Sculpture Garden, was opened the very next year (1976) by her family, following the plan she outlined in her will. The Museum has been run by the Tate, almost since it opened to the public. It displays a representative group of her sculptures, permanently available to the public, both inside the house and outside in the garden she loved.

So St Ives is a stunning beautiful place for an art museum; plus it is totally appropriate for a Hepworth museum ...since she lived and worked in the town.

Hepworth Museum, garden sculptures

The Tate St Ives is a totally separate art gallery and is worth a visit for its architecture and spectacular location on Porthmeor Beach alone. Exhibitions vary throughout the year and may be accompanied by lecture series. The population of St Ives is probably under 12,000 people, so I am assuming that the lectures and exhibitions are held partially to attract outsiders.

The Tate St Ives, facing the beach

Bernard Leach continued potting in St Ives until 1972 with his students and apprentices, and died in 1979. The pottery remained open under the direction of Bernard's wife and then after her death in 1999, it was bought by a local businessman. The Pottery Cottage, next to the Leach pottery, is now open as a museum, focusing on the output of talented potters throughout the 1920-2000 era.

Studio pottery from Bernard Leach, Pottery Cottage St Ives

 

Christopher Wood, St Ives Cornwall, 1928. British Art Fair

First Australian-born governor-general: Sir Isaac Isaacs' homes

Isaac Isaacs (1855–1948) was a talented man. He spoke Russian, Yiddish and English equally fluently and graduated Law in 1880, followed by a Master of Laws degree in 1883. 

In the 1892 Victorian state election, Isaacs was elected to the Legislative Assembly as the member for a rural seat. His political programme was impressive: introduction of income taxation rather than indirect taxes which put the load on low income earners, reform of company law, conciliation machinery to resolution industrial disputes, railway reform and support for Federation.

Inevitably he became a major participant in the framing of the country's constitution at the Constitutional Convention of the late 1890s. So it was not a surprise that Isaacs was elected to the very first federal Parliament in 1901, straight after the declaration of the Commonwealth of Australia.

The Isaacs' Edwardian family home, Hawthorn, 1905

Isaacs was not totally behind Australia’s first prime minister, Edmund Barton, and his protectionist policies. Isaaces was one of a group of backbenchers pushing for more radical policies, but apparently he was difficult to get along with because of his personality, not his politics.

The second prime minister of Australia, Alfred Deakin, appointed Isaacs Attorney-General in 1905, even though Isaacs remained a difficult colleague. But Isaacs did give strong support to his prime minister for the Judicary Act that established the High Court of Australia... and needed to be thanked. Deakin was keen to get him out of politics anyway, so he pushed him upstairs; Isaacs was appointed to the High Court bench.

Isaacs, 1906

Examine Isaac's home in the photo above. Edwardian homes in Melbourne had front verandas with decorative timber features, tiling on the patio floor and entry paths. The brickwork was usually a deep red. The roofs were typically terracotta tiles with decorative gables, motifs, timber features, tall chimneys and fretwork. Decorative leadlight windows were also common. Isaac Isaacs lived in this lovely Edwardian house in Hawthorn throughout the years before and after Federation. When he left politics in 1906 for the High Court, the family continued to live in this home.

He was knighted in 1928.

In 1930 Labour Prime Minister James Scullin appointed a now rather elderly Sir Isaac Isaacs to the position of Chief Justice. But he wasn’t in the position for a year when Scullin radically decided to appoint an Australian citizen, any suitable Australian, into the vice-regal position of Governor-General. A politician could come from any background, but since the GG personally represented the king or queen in Australia,  every Governor-General in our history had to have been British!

Scullin offered the post to Isaacs. Isaacs reflected or promoted the developing nationalism and centralism in Australia; he influenced the balance of power towards the Commonwealth and away from the individual states. It was a wonderful time to be an Australian, but Conservatives were not well pleased with the appointment. Neither was King George V who thought that only a British G-G could represent the crown.

Government House Canberra, 1927

The new Governor-General and his family left Melbourne and moved to the national capital, Canberra.

Only a few years earlier (January 1925), the Federal Cabinet had finally agreed to fit out the existing homestead at Yarralumla as a vice-regal residence in Canberra. The first enlargement consisted of the addition of another three-storey block, which you can see in the photo, behind the one already there. The two parts were connected by a wide hallway and a new entrance was created between the gables of the old south front. The results were decent enough to allow the Duke and Duchess of York to stay there when they came to open the new Houses of Parliament in May 1927.

The interiors of the refurbished house, along with much of their furniture, were designed by Ruth Lane Poole, of the Federal Capital Commission. They were in keeping with the prevailing "stripped-classical style", with more formal interiors provided for the official reception rooms, and a lighter scheme prevailing in the private residential rooms. Although the house was set amid 54 hectares of parkland, the house was still small in comparison to Government House in Melbourne where the governor-generals had lived prior to the move to Canberra.

Lord Stonehaven had been the first governor-general to live for part of his term in Government House Canberra aka Yarralumla, but in January 1931 Sir Isaac Isaacs achieved three important honours. Firstly he became the first Australian-born Governor General. Secondly he was the first governor-general to live at Government House in Canberra for his entire 5-year term (1931-6). Thirdly he was the first Jewish vice-regal representative in the whole British Empire, an empire that covered a third of the globe.

Many vice-regal families mumbled and grumbled about the space available for official entertaining. But plans for a much grander and more permanent home for the governor general didn’t become real until much later, given the terrible economic times during the Great Depression of the 1930s and the even greater threats Australia's security during WW2.

Sir Isaac Isaacs died in 1948 and was buried in the Melbourne General Cemetery.

Elegant consumerism in the 1930s

I reviewed the book The Thirties: an Intimate History by Juliet Gardiner in a post called The 1930s: a tragic, hopeful decade. In it I wrote “Woolworths, reportedly a hopeful emblem of democracy, opened dozens of new shops in 1937 alone. [Why Woolworths represented democracy in the 1930s is not clear to me in 2010].”

Selfridges, London, 1930s.

Now a book has been published that might help answer my question - Department Stores by Claire Masset, published by Shire 2010. The publishers wrote: “The way we shop has undergone many transformations over the years, and a pioneer of one such change was the department store. Selling everything from clothes to cosmetics, furniture to food, the department store is a one-stop shop for consumers. The book charts the history of the department store, innovations in retailing, advertising and technology, and the developments in fashion, design and working practices. Using evocative adverts, prints, memorabilia and photographs, the highs and lows of these retail giants are discussed, including the golden age of department stores in the 1920s and 1930s, and their future in a modern world”.

Fenwick's Newcastle, 1930s

Julia Gardiner, herself the author of my first mentioned book, focused on the inter war years. She wrote that the threadbare 1930s were also the fashionable 1930s.  Gardiner believed that  Department Stores is an important book because it designated the mega-shops as glittering Palaces of Consumption by the 1930s, with their ever-growing variety of goods displayed in equally dazzling displays. The pioneer aviatrix Amy Johnson’s airplane in the window of Selfridges, for example.

The history of department stores mapped changes in wider society: the growth of mass production, rising incomes, increasing home ownership, more leisure, the emancipation and economic independence of women, the role of consumption in definitions of class and of social mobility.

Modern elegance, Marshall Field Chicago, 1930s. Photo credit: Chuckman's

After WW1 the growing population had more money to spend, and big shops began expanding their range of goods. You can see a photograph of Fenwick's in Newcastle from The Telegraph. Ornate carvings and chandeliers created a luxurious atmosphere, designed to put customers in the mood to buy. Another great example was Kendal's Manchester which was and is located in a purpose-built Art Deco building in Deansgate. Its enormous glassed expanse of retail space made it Manchester's second largest department store.

Selfridges is yet another very useful example. Harry Selfridge consciously designed a building with spacious, uncluttered interiors. The inclusion of tea rooms and restaurants, often with live entertainment, created a retail outlet which he saw as a social centre and not a shop. He did much to foster the concept that shopping was a form of leisure, rather than a purely functional pursuit.

Since good department stores cost a fortune to build, maintain and run, the owners must have been very confident that women from across most of the financial and social classes would shop there. So in a very meaningful way, these shops represented domestic democracy in the 1930s.

Department Stores by Claire Masset, book cover

Readers might like to locate Robert Pearce's short history called 1930s Britain, published last year by Shire.

Portmeirion, Wales - a delight for all

Portmeirion is located on a peninsula, just south of Porthmadog in North West Wales. From the hotel, the visitor can see Tremadoc Bay, nestling in the far larger Cardigan Bay. The River Dwyryd passes the village, leaving a wide sandy expanse at low tide. At high tide, the waters reach right up to the coastal paths, changing the cut-off land into an island.

The small settlement that existed on the peninsula was called Aber Iâ. When a mansion was built there in c1840, it took the place's name, Aberia.

Portmeirion from the air

The English-born and educated, Welsh architect Sir Clough Williams-Ellis (1883–1978) bought Aber Iâ from his uncle, Sir Osmond Williams. As a professional architect, Clough’s goal was to take a naturally beautiful location and develop it, without spoiling the landscape, river, sands, coastal paths and views that made the site so special. Inspired by the Mediterranean-like setting, like his favourite Italian resort Portofino, Clough was passionate about the protection of national parks and the preservation of fine old buildings.

The Hotel Portmeirion

Clough started to establish Portmeirion as a Mediterranean coastal hotel resort in 1925. The splendid 19th century mansion was converted into The Hotel Portmeirion which opened in 1926 to Clough's design and has been the focal point of the village ever since. The curvilinear entrance, that housed the reception area, was added in the 1930s.

Clough soon began building or converting some extra cottages, to give additional accommodation. The Mermaid and White Horses cottages were improved and the main building programme continued until WW2. The remains of the semi-derelict harbour structure Fort Henry still exists, having been designed by Clough for bathing, boating, suntanning and socialising.

Castell Deudraeth

After WW2, construction continued for 20 years so today there are many more buildings within the Portmeirion village. There was a fortified Victorian mansion called Castell Deudraeth, near the hotel complex, that Clough would have liked to incorporate into the village. Alas it didn’t happen until after the original dreamer’s death – Castell Deudraeth underwent major renovation in the 1990s and re-opened in 2001 as an 11 bedroom hotel and restaurant. Its architectural heritage has been preserved, including the welsh oak and slate floors, baronial stone fire surrounds, oak panelling and plasterwork cornices.

However Clough did live long enough to be knighted for his services to architecture and the environment, in 1971. Portmeirion’s grounds are now designated a Conservation Area and most of the buildings have been Grade II registered.  The Ship Shop, for example, was originally the stable block for the Aber Iâ estate, built c1850.

But this is no ordinary village. Virtual Tourist says the place was built to a slightly smaller scale than was usual with inter-war developments, and although the self catering cottages are all real and the exquisite little shops and tea rooms are open for business, nobody actually lives there. Employees staff it and tourists throng to it, but residential guests are the only visitors Portmeirion allows overnight. At night the gates are shut and paying guests are free to roam through their own private dreamland. It's wonderfully romantic and is a splendid base from which to explore North Wales.

Portmeirion village and gardens.

I have run into the Williams-Ellis family in my research twice before, in totally different contexts. Firstly Clough’s wife, Amabel Strachey, was a cousin of author and Bloomsbury figure Lytton Strachey. Her parents were friends of other members of the Bloomsbury Group and Rudyard Kipling was godfather to one of the children.

Secondly Clough Williams-Ellis and his wife had a number of children. Their elder daughter, Susan Williams-Ellis, used the name Portmeirion Pottery for a ceramics company that she created with her husband in Stoke-on-Trent in 1961. To tie Susan’s history back to Portmeirion village, visitors will find a shop specialising in Portmeirion Pottery. Susan and her husband Euan also designed and painted the colourful mural of vines and cupids with a fountain and white doves on the courtyard side of one of the village's buildings, the Ship Shop.

I recommend the book Portmeirion, written by Jan Morris, Alwyn Turner, Mark Eastment and Stephen Lacey.  Published by the Antique Collectors' Club in 2006, it aimed to cover the whole story of Clough Williams-Ellis, the village, the extensive gardens both at Portmeirion and at the Williams-Ellis family home and Portmeirion Pottery.
                  

The Ship Shop (above)   Portmeirion beach and tower, by Christine Matthews (below)

*

Frank LLoyd Wright and Ennis House

Ennis House is an impressive home in Los Angeles, designed in 1923 by Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959) for Charles and Mabel Ennis, the owners of a men's clothing chain. Built in 1924, the first thing a viewer notices is that the property is spread over half an acre, along a ridge with awesome views of the Hollywood Hills.

The second thing to notice is the design. The structure is the largest of Wright's Los Angeles-based “textile block designs” i.e using thousands of interlocking, pre-cast and patterned concrete blocks. Concrete was still considered a new material for home construction in the 1920s, so Wright’s materials were certainly cutting edge. But more than that. The detail that immediately stands out is the relief ornamentation on its concrete blocks, inspired by the symmetrical reliefs of ancient Mayan temples.

Ennis House exterior, with amazing views

Wright built four houses with the textile block design – La Miniatura/Millard House, Ennis House, Freeman House and Storer House. But I did not think it was attractive. Even Wright himself said “What about the concrete block? It was the cheapest and ugliest thing in the building world. It lived mostly in the architectural gutter as an imitation of rock-faced stone. Why not see what could be done with that gutter rat? Steel rods cast inside the joints of the blocks themselves and the whole brought into some broad, practical scheme of general treatment, why would it not be fit for a new phase of our modern architecture? It might be permanent, noble beautiful.”

Architectural Digest (October, 1979) agreed, saying: "The Ennis House is one of the first residences constructed from concrete block. Wright transforms cold industrial concrete to a warm decorative material used as a frame for interior features like windows and fireplaces as well as columns. His 16” modular blocks with intriguing geometric repeats invite tactile exploration. The art glass windows and doors, reminiscent of examples from the earlier prairie period, here achieve greater colour suddenly as they graduate in intensity from darker at the top to lighter at the bottom. The metal work based on Mayan imagery is not of Wright's design, and may have been included at Mr Ennis' request. Yet from the very large iron grill at the main entrance to such minute details as light switches and lock plates, there is a unity of conception and materials that complements the entire structure."

I wonder why the house was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, but built and supervised by his son, Lloyd Wright. And I wonder why the early, horizontal Prairie Style was not utilised here. Because California was substantially different, in climate or in taste, from Chicago? Was the Prairie Style too arts and craftsy, and too early C20th for the sophisticated 1920s? It seems that Wright felt typecast as the Prairie house architect so he used the Los Angeles era to broaden his architectural vision.

In any case Mr Ennis was a passionate scholar of Mayan art and architecture, even before he had discussions with the architect.

The house consisted of two buildings, the main house and a smaller staff flat, separated by a paved courtyard. Unlike the vertical orientation of the other three textile block houses, the Ennis House has a long horizontal loggia spine on the northern side connecting public and private rooms to the south.

living room, then steps up to the dining room

In 1940 the house was sold to a new family and then altered by Wright, adding a pool and some rooms. Augustus Brown, who owned the property from 1968 to 1980, was the last private owner of the Ennis house. To ensure its safe keeping, Brown created the Trust for Preservation of Cultural Heritage, now the Ennis House Foundation.

There had been structural problems with the Ennis House since the beginning; the concrete blocks had cracked and the lower sections of the walls had moved. The concrete was a combination of gravel, granite and sand from the site, mixed with water and then hand-cast in aluminium moulds to create the blocks. It took 10 days for each block to dry before it could be stacked into position.Perhaps using decom­posed granite from the site, to colour the textile blocks, introduced impurities to the concrete mix. And combined with Los Angeles’ specific air pollution problems, perhaps this had caused the concrete to moulder.

Nonetheless Wright firmly believed concrete held potential as a material for affordable housing.

More damage occurred due to the 1994 Northridge earthquake and the record rain in 2004-2005. The Ennis House Foundation was very worried about the millions of dollars it would take for the full restoration project.

In 2005 the house was added to the National Trust for Historic Preservation's list of the Most Endangered Historic Places. In 2006 a Federal Emergency Management Agency grant was issued and the restoration work went ahead. The house has since been declared a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument.

dining room

In June 2009 the Ennis House Foundation put the house on the market, with an asking price of USA $15 million. In July 2011, The Ennis House Foundation announced that the sale would ahead, but for only $4.5 million (£2.8 million), as long as the new owner agreed to allow public open days on 12 days of the year. He did.

More recently, Frank Lloyd Wright's La Miniatura/Millard House (1923) in Pasadena has come up for sale. For amazing photos of the patterned concrete blocks inside and out, see the Glamour Drops and Rich of Eve blogs. The Millard House is listed on the USA's National Register of Historic Places.

Leica cameras and its Jewish employees: 1938

In 1849 Carl Kellner had established an optical institute in Wetzlar for the development of lenses and microscopes. Ernst Leitz I (1843-1920) became a partner in the company in 1865 and took over sole management in 1869. Ernst Leitz was a socially aware employer whose humanitarian attitude to his employees was best seen in his whole-hearted acceptance of health insurance, pension and housing schemes, and, by 1899, an eight-hour day. The number of his employees expanded to 120.

The first Leica camera prototypes were built by Oskar Barnack at Ernst Leitz Optische Werke, in Wetzlar (north of Frankfurt) in 1913. Intended as a compact camera for landscape photography, particularly for challenging mountain trips, the Leica was the first practical 35 mm camera. Soon after Ernst Leitz II (1871-1956) became sole owner of the business in 1920, the Leica prototypes had moved to the manufacturing stage. It was very successful.

Leica advertisement, 1938

Ernst Leitz II ran the company with the same humanitarian values his father had held, but in the years just before WW2 erupted in 1939, many companies were moving in the other direction - fostering a close association with the Nazi regime. So although there was still time to help their Jewish employees escape, very few companies bothered. Yet the Leitz family, designer and manufacturer of Germany's most famous photographic product, actually tried to save all its Jewish workers.

As soon as Adolf Hitler became German chancellor in 1933, Ernst Leitz II increasingly got worried calls from Jewish associates, asking for his help in getting them and their families out of the country. As Christians, Leitz and his family were protected from Nazi Germany 's Nuremberg laws, which controlled the work, movement and liberties only of Jews.

To help his Jewish workers and colleagues, Leitz carefully designed a programme that would allow Jews to leave Germany; they were Leitz employees who were simply  being "assigned" overseas. Employees, retailers and family members were each given a Leica camera and were assigned to Leitz sales offices in USA, France, Britain & Hong Kong.

And not just long-standing members of the firm. The Guardian said he began taking on a string of young Jewish apprentices from the town of Wetzlar, to train them from scratch so that they could work abroad. After their training, Leitz personally applied for an exit permit to send the new employees abroad, to assist in generating sales.

Particularly after the Kristallnacht catastrophe of November 1938, German employees travelled on the ocean liner Bremen and made their way to the Manhattan, London or Paris offices of Leitz Inc. Apparently an editor of the Leica Magazine called every Leitz account in Britain, France and the USA, to help place the new employees in local jobs in the photographic industry. Leitz paid full salary for 3 months, and half salary for the next three months! It must have been difficult at first since the recent arrivals couldn’t speak a word of English or French, but out of this migration came some of the best designers, repair technicians, salespeople and writers for the photographic press.

Ernst Leitz II (1871-1956)

The Leica Freedom Train, as the programme came to be called, peaked in 1938 and early 1939, delivering groups of refugees to safety every few weeks. Then, with the invasion of Poland in Sept 1939, Germany sealed off its borders. By that time, hundreds of endangered Jews had already escaped abroad, thanks to Leitz's heroic efforts. The programme saved their lives and the lives of their children.

How did Ernst Leitz II and his staff get away with it? Leitz Inc. was an internationally recognised brand that reflected credit on the powerful Third Reich and Leitz was a man above suspicion. The company produced range-finders and other optical systems for the German military. Also the German government desperately needed hard currency from abroad, and Leitz's single biggest market for optical goods was the USA. To the Nazi government, the programme was transferring skilled salesmen abroad, to generate hard currency sales.

How ironic that, due to the Nazis' dependence on the military optics that Leitz's factory produced, as well as their belief in the importance of the Leica camera for their propaganda purposes, the company was able to get Jewish workers and their families out of Germany! The Guardian said that the government actually DID know what he was doing; that the Gestapo turned a blind eye, so important was it to them that production at the plant continued.

Even so, members of the Leitz family did not get off scot-free. One Leitz executive, Alfred Turk, was gaoled for helping Jews. Ernst Leitz's own daughter, Dr Elsie C. Kühn-Leitz (1903-85), was imprisoned by the Gestapo after she was caught at the border, helping Jewish women cross into Switzerland. Both Turk and Kühn-Leitz were eventually freed, but the risks were clearly very high.

In all, nearly 300 people benefited from the programme, perhaps two thirds in the USA and one third in Britain and other parts of Europe. Yet when Ernest Leitz II died in 1956, his efforts remained unrewarded, as far as I can see. His daughter Dr Kuhn-Leitz, on the other hand, received many honours for her humanitarian efforts. So if the story was known after the war, why has it been forgotten since? And why did the family insist that no story be published until the last member of the Leitz family was dead?

Read the book The Greatest Invention of the Leitz Family: The Leica Freedom Train, written by Rabbi Frank Dabba Smith. And a film is being made about the great courage of the Leitz family/company during the years leading up to WW2. The film, called One Camera, One Life, is being produced by Liz Boeder and Doris Bettencourt, and directed by Mark de Paola.