Signs of The Times - Celia Rees

I'm lucky enough to live near Compton Verney in Warwickshire. I am a member there and visit often. The Art Gallery's six permanent collections include one of the world's finest collections of Chinese bronzes outside China, a cross section of works from the ‘Golden Age’ of Neapolitan art from 1600 to 1800, an outstanding collection of Northern European art and the largest collection of Folk Art in the U.K. It also puts on great exhibitions, some of which I've blogged about for the History Girls. Recently, I was meeting friend, fellow writer and sometime History Girl guest, Linda Newbery there. We were going to see their present exhibition, Whistler in Nature, but I arrived early, so I went upstairs to the Folk Art Gallery. 

Compton Verney

Folk Art covers many things, from 'primitive' painting to sculpture, metal working and wood carving. What interested me on this visit were the signs that hung outside shops and business to advertise their goods and services in a pre-literate age. People who could not read could see what was on offer by looking at the signs and before street numbers were common, at the sign of... was a common way of giving directions. The signs, often beautifully carved or painted, have gradually acquired recognition as art forms in themselves but what struck me, on this and other visits, is how they are still present in out streets.

Compton Verney Folk Art Gallery

Street in Leamington Spa 

The sign of the locksmith, the lock and key on display in the gallery, is replicated by a large Yale key on the pavement outside a locksmith's shop in the town where I live. 

Compton Verney

Oxford Market

A giant shoe, the sign for a cobbler's, is echoed by an equally large boot suspended outside a cobbler's and shoe repair shop in Oxford Market.

Signs, because they need no language, are international. Model pigs, pig or boars' heads, are universally recognised signs for a butcher's shop, in Ireland, England or Italy.

They are also sometimes inn signs, as in this example from Compton Verney.

Inn sign, Compton Verney

Pub and inn signs are perhaps the most common remaining examples of folk art still to be seen on our streets. Some traditional signs are still there, swinging outside the establishments they name, others, like this beautiful swan on display at Compton Verney, are preserved in folk art collections, while still others have been lost and discarded. 

Pub names change and with them their signs. The replacements are still, in their way, examples of folk art, reflecting new tastes and styles. My local pub has been transformed from the traditional Coventry Arms to the The Fat Pug.  Like it or not, times change and with them, the signs.

At least some do. Others survive, changed perhaps but still recognisable. The same symbol used to signify the same service, even though the function it symbolises is an anachronism. The universal sign for an Apothecary was the pestle and mortar, used to grind the ingredients used to make medicines, as in this example from Compton Verney. Simplified, stripped to it barest outlines, the same sign is currently the logo for Lloyd's Chemist shops.

A similar and universally recognised survivor from a pre-literate age is the striped pole of the barber's shop, the red and white stripes dating back to a time when barbers were barber surgeons, performing surgery and dentistry. This function of the barber's trade is now no longer practised but the vivid blood and bandage image is still there on every High Street. 

While thinking about this blog, I was struck by how signs and symbols are coming back into our lives through the emojis that are helpfully suggested to us to replace words when we are sending texts or messaging people on social media. Are we slipping back into a pre-literate age?  I trust not, but as this is my last blog of 2018, I'd like to wish all our readers...

Celia Rees

www.celiarees.com

Ravilious & Co. The Pattern of Friendship: English Artist Designers 1922 - 1942 - Celia Rees

Eric Ravilious - The Greenhouse:Cyclemen and Tomatoes

This beautifully curated exhibition at Compton Verney Museum and Art Gallery chronicles the collaborations and significant relationships, personal and professional, between Eric Ravilious (1903 – 1942) and various other artist-designers: friends, mentors, wives, lovers. The group included Paul Nash, John Nash, Enid Marx, Barnett Freedman, Eileen ‘Tirzah’ Garwood, Thomas Hennell, Douglas Percy Bliss, Peggy Angus, Helen Binyon, Diana Low and Edward Bawden. Many of them were at the Royal College of Art in the 1920s, a group of exceptional students that Paul Nash termed 'an outbreak of talent'. It's good to see the work of so many women artists exhibited here and given equal space to their male compatriots.The exhibition brings together nearly 500 works (many rarely shown). The paintings, prints, drawings, engravings, books, ceramics, wallpapers, and textiles highlight significant moments in the artists’ lives and work and also demonstrate the deep influence this group of artists had on British Art and their profound impact on Art and Design in the 1930s and 1940s and beyond. A previous exhibition at Compton Verney Britain in the Fifties - Design and Aspiration served to demonstrate just how pervasive their influence was. 

Enid Marx moquette design for London Underground

Eric Ravilious - Wedgwood Pottery Mug

Ravilious and his friends, with their teacher and mentor John Nash, believed that an artist could turn his or her hand to anything and their mission was to bring Art out of the Fine Art Gallery and into the lives of ordinary people through applied design. Quite apart from this lofty ambition, an artist had to earn a living. It made sense, therefore, to seek design work from various sources. The group were very successful. Their patterning, pastel colours and precision of line, their distinctive style of wood and copper engraving and lithography evoke a particular time so exactly that it has become that time. For us, it is the essence of nostalgia but in the 1930s and 40s, it was cutting edge modern. Their influence extended well into the 1950s and 1960s. Through applied design, their work became all pervasive, even ubiquitous. It could be seen at railway and tube stations, on advertising  hoardings and film posters, the walls of people's homes, the fabrics they wore, the furniture they sat on, the plates they ate from, the magazines and books that they read as they travelled, even the seating of their underground train. 

Eric Ravilious - Child's Handkerchief

Wisden - Eric Ravilous 

Eric Ravilious - The Windstorm 1931

Enid Marx - paper design

Everyman Books - Ravilious cover design

Edward Bawden - book cover

Their work is particularly powerfully present in book design. The Bookshop installation in the exhibition demonstrates the wide and far reaching influence these artists had on book production. Their hand can be seen everywhere: in covers and cover design, bookplates, endpapers, lettering, bordering and illustrations. Instantly recognisable, even if we cannot name the artist, and fiercely nostalgic. As my writer friend and companion Linda Newbery pointed out, we grew up with them. Art work so timeless and unequalled that it is still being used today.  

Edward Bawden - Film Poster

It is impossible to do justice to such a wide-ranging and comprehensive exhibition here. These artists concerned themselves with far more than art and design. They were committed to enhancing the lives of ordinary working people, bringing beauty and culture to them, rather than confining it to an art gallery. Many of the artists contributed original lithographs to the School Prints, a scheme designed to bring art into every classroom in the country and a whole section of the exhibition is devoted to the Morley Murals created by Eric Ravilious and Edward Bawden to adorn the walls of the canteen of Waterloo's Morley College for Working Men and Women. Sadly, their work was lost during the war. A grainy, black and white film and their sketches and drawings show us what a loss that was. 

The emphasis is not just on design, there are plenty of paintings on display. Principally those of Ravilious and Bawden, perhaps the best known of the group, but also their friends and associates. The paintings of Eric Ravilious are distinctive and hugely evocative. One can almost smell the tomatoes in The Greenhouse:Cyclemen and Tomatoes, the painting on the poster for the exhibition. Through his unique painting style, his use of pattern, texture, his palette of muted greens, greys and browns he made the landscape of Sussex, 'his own country', as particular and individual as Suerat's Paris or Van Gogh's Provence. To us, his paintings seem nostalgic, pastoral records of a lost rural past. But this is deceptive. This is no rural idyll. A Steam train puffs through the timeless landscape of the Downs. The same view is seen from the interior of a railway carriage, perhaps in the same train that is steaming past. 

Eric Ravilious - Westbury Horse 

Eric Ravilious - Train Landscape

A roller stands in the foreground of the cold, stark beauty of a winter landscape. A reminder that an agricultural labourer would be working in that cold all day.

Eric Ravilious - Downs in Winter

 

Eric Ravilious Hurricane in Flight

Eric Ravilious - Drift Boat

The Second World War cut across all their lives. Like their mentors, the Nash brothers, Ravilious and Bawden became War Artists. The patchwork of the British countryside was now viewed from the inside of a plane. A south coast beach is covered in snarls of barbed wire, the sea cut off from the land by coastal defences. Eric Ravilious was assigned to the Admiralty. In 1940 he was posted to Norway and swapped his muted greens and browns for the blues, whites, greys and black of the Arctic seas.  

H.M.S. Glorious

In 1942, he requested a transfer to the RAF. On 28 August he flew to Iceland to join a base outside Reykjavik. The day he arrived a Hudson aircraft had failed to return from a patrol. The next morning, three planes were despatched to search for the missing plane. Ravilious opted to join one of the crews. His plane failed to return. The log book recording him as missing is on display here, his name poignantly mis-spelt.  Four days later he was declared lost in action. One of the brightest talents in British Art had disappeared into the sea.

Celia Rees

www.celiarees.com

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The Lost Words - Celia Rees

‘Once upon a time, words began to vanish. They disappeared so quietly that almost no-one noticed. The words were those that children used to name the natural world around them: acorn, adder, bluebell, bramble, conkers – gone! Fern, heather, kingfisher, otter raven, willow, wren… all of them gone! The words are becoming lost: no longer vivid in children’s voices, no longer alive in their stories.’

It is this perceived loss that is so eloquently addressed in the current exhibition at Compton Verney by writer, Robert Macfarlane, and artist, Jackie Morris. In this magnificent exhibition and in the wonderful book that they have produced, they draw attention to the danger that these words might be lost to children forever and they endeavour to make good the damage, conjuring back these lost words by the magic of their painting and poetry.

I grew up in the 1950s  and  was lucky enough to be one of the last generation to enjoy a ‘wild childhood’, free to roam woods and parks looking for conkers, pick blackberries in the hedgerows, wade in brooks and ponds looking for newts. I was intensely aware of the passing seasons and what they would bring: the conkers and turning leaves of autumn, bryony beading the hedgerow; the prospect of snow in winter, watching robins and bluetits feed in the garden; snowdrops, celandine and coltsfoot promising spring and the summer to come. We were free to be out all day, only returning when hunger called us home. We were in tune with the world around us: the plants, trees, birds, animals. We took it for granted. I saw ‘the elm tree bole in tiny leaf’ and knew what the poet meant, but that life has gone with the elm trees themselves.

Today’s children rarely go out unsupervised, some rarely go out at all. This exhibition is a response to the shocking research findings that British children are more familiar with Pokemon characters than British wildlife and, as  Robert Macfarlane points out in his article: Guardian - Badger or Bulbasaur - have children lost touch with nature?, all the centuries long associations that native flora and fauna have acquired through legend, myth, folklore and story are lost, too.  

Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris explore The Lost Words from Acorn to Wren. Each bird, plant or animal is shown in the same way. No matter how humble or ordinary, each is reverenced in  an icon: a numinous depiction in gold leaf and exquisite jewellike water colour. It is then  shown within the wider context of its natural world and then, finally, by its absence. This last is particularly powerful and poignant. Starlings are shown by an empty wire,  raven and heron by a fallen feather, the magnificent otter by a line of paw prints. An achingly eloquent expression of loss and impoverishment, both to the world: if this creature had never been, or if we were to lose it, how much poorer would we be? And to the individual: if you don’t know something is there, then it does not exist for you and your world is somehow diminished. 

Jackie Morris’ pictures are accompanied by Robert Macfarlane’s acrostic poems or ‘spells’.

My companion at the exhibition, friend and fellow writer, Linda Newbery , observed that:

'Robert Macfarlane's 'spells' are clever, striking and energetic - not a lazy phrase to be found. As well as being acrostics they also use a formal patterning of repetitions and echoes which makes me think of the Welsh 'cynghanedd' found in Gerard Manley Hopkins. It's especially lovely to hear Robert Macfarlane reading them aloud - they are meant to be spoken, after all.'

Should green-as-moss be mixed with

blue-of-steel be mixed with gleam-of-gold

you'd still fall short by far of the -

Tar-bright oil-slick sheen and

gloss of starling wing.

The two artists make a powerful conjuring.  Not least, because they invite the viewer, child or adult, to go out and do something. To look. To learn.To draw, paint, write what you see. Jackie Morris’ sketch book, watercolours, gold leaf and burnisher are there. As are Robert Macfarlane's pens, pencils, notes and notebooks.

There are drawing and writing materials, paper, crayons and pencils, so young visitors can take inspiration and make their own books. Robert Macfarlane's desk is in the last but one room. When I went in, a child was sitting on a little chair, leaning on this desk, hard at work with crayon and pencil. I'm sure that both the artist and writer would smile to see her there, and consider part of their work done, for the exhibition is an inspiration, an invitation, not just to admire their work, but to go outside and pay attention. 

The Words are not lost, they've gone into  hiding and are still there, waiting to be re-discovered. This exhibition invites us to do just that. Like all great ideas, it is simple.  It contains its own solution. It is no mystery. All you have to do is go out and see what’s there in front of you and around you. To look. Not just down at the ground but up at the sky; not just in the countryside but in every park, garden, on every road, alley, avenue, canal, stream, river and urban wild space. It’s all there. We just have to notice and teach our children to notice. Take a photo. Look it up. There’s bound to be an app...

If you can't get to the exhibition, you can buy the book: The Lost Words by Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris, published by Hamish Hamilton. It is beautiful and would make a handsome Christmas present for anyone. 

Celia Rees

www.celiarees.com

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The Way We Lived Then - Celia Rees

Compton Verney is currently hosting the Exhibition, Britain in the Fifties - Design and Aspiration, looking back to the time when Harold Macmillan announced that 'most of our people had never had it so good'. A time when everything was new. Modern. The exhibition starts with the Festival of Britain and follows through to 1959, the end of the decade and the dawn of the Sixties and Withnail's 'greatest decade in the history of mankind.'

The emphasis is on design, everything from fabric to furniture and household goods. The exhibition allows us to look with new eyes at everyday items easily overlooked or dismissed as 'ordinary'. We are invited to see that things that we might unthinkingly assess as unexceptional, dull, even ugly, were actually different from anything that had gone before. It was the decade when everything was new. Not new exactly, but the design movements of previous decades in furniture, ceramics, fabrics, architecture were no longer exclusive, they were being made available to Macmillan's newly prosperous, aspirational middle classes. 

New, bright, boldly patterned designer materials might be available but women still routinely made their own clothes. Shop bought 'gowns' were for the rich, or for special occasions. Few households were without a sewing machine as this spanking electric machine, array of dress patterns and impressively stocked sewing box illustrates.

New materials, like formica, and a host of mechanical gadgets and appliances from fridges, to washing machines, electric cookers, electric mixers and teasmades were set to make women's lives much easier. 

The display shelves themselves are an example of the new design. The appliances arrayed show what housewives aspired to, or desired: a Kenwood Chef, a teasmade, a portable radio, stainless steel toast rack, an electric kettle. The styling was American or Scandinavian. The aptly named 'Maidsaver' with it's multiple cupboards and counter, replaced the larder, scullery and notional 'maid'. 

The introduction of a television into more and more living rooms was poised to transform everybody's life. The advent of ITV, launched in 1955, and the 'commercial break' were about to make people want the above illustrated innovations and all the household products that went with them: Persil, Flash, Fairy Liquid. Their slogans and jingles would become part of our consciousness and culture.

All this innovation is neatly illustrated in a series of artfully created rooms,  deceptively simple but carefully curated. Meticulous in every detail, each one re-pays close attention.  The television, showing the Coronation on a loop, is twinned with a large radio standing rather forlornly in the opposite corner. The previous source of all home entertainment was about to be eclipsed. Many of the exhibits were loned by local people like my friend, Barbara Crowther, items still in use 'part of the furniture'. This adds to the illusion that these are rooms in real homes rather than artefacts in a museum.

They certainly spark much memory and reflection. The rooms murmur with the chatter of re-discovery:

"We had one of those..."

"My mum made me a dress in that material."

'I had one just like that!"

"I remember..."

'I remember' is repeated over and over again, sometimes as an  exclamation of recognition, sometimes prefacing a deeper memory, a longer anecdote. The display of bathing suits (stout to our eyes, frilled and ruched) seems particularly redolent, sparking memories of trips to the lido, the seaside, family holidays with sisters and brothers, mum and dad. When I visited the exhibition with friend and fellow author Linda Newbery, we were exclaiming at every turn over one thing or another, adding our voices to those around us. 

The lifestyle depicted  is neatly summed up by a series of panels from Ladybird books in their pre-ironic incarnation. 

Mother is dressed to go shopping in a hat, heels and costume, the little boy is in his school uniform, the little girl in a smart red coat and beret. She carries a basket, a miniature of the one her mother carries. They visit different shops to make purchases. I remember such trips with my mother going from shop to shop, to George Mason's (grocer), Dewhurst (butcher), Simpson's (fishmonger), Warden's (draper & haberdasher), Timothy White and Taylor (chemist), Midland Educational and Twig's Toy Shop. This was how my mother shopped. There were no supermarkets in our town until the 1960s. 

My mother went 'up the village' most days, buying little and often. She had to shop like this because we didn't have a fridge. Or most of the shiny gadgets and appliances on display. We were a middle class household but we didn't have a washing machine. My mother made do with a wringer then a spin dryer. An odd fact of British consumerism is that the front loading washing machine, the Bendix as it was known from its manufacturer, was eschewed for the twin tub top loader. Front loading made washing too easy.  As it says in the accompanying notes to the exhibition, 'in practice many of these new, much trumpeted machines failed to liberate women from the kitchen, but instead tended to re-enforce gender stereotypes - resulting in more rigid gendering of domestic spaces.' In some ways they made more work, not less. Ease of cleaning and washing meant these chores were performed more often.

 This exhibition offers a snapshot of a certain kind of life style. It shows a revolution in design that  has one way or another influenced all our lives. The title is Design and Aspiration and, by default, the lifestyle shown is middle class, even upper middle class. Most households, even middle class ones like mine, didn't have all the 'mod cons' on display here and some had nothing at all. The new council houses, much of the design a bargain basement version of what we see here, were not available to all. Slum and back to back housing was still very much with us. Not everybody could aspire to live like this. 

As historical novelists, we are always interested in visiting exhibitions that re-create a particular era and this one does it very well. It is important, however, to remember what is not shown here. I lived through the Fifties, so I could fill in some of the gaps. Remember things that no exhibition can show. The cold in winter when few people had central heating. Coal grates, gas fires and single bar electric heaters didn't heat much of the house. Frost on the inside of the windows as well as the out. 

And smells. Smoke from those coal fires and steam trains, people smoking indoors. I don't specifically remember, but its not hard to imagine the body odour. Baths rather than showers. Some houses still without bathrooms. Talcum powder at best, the use of deodorants was not widespread. Sounds that are lost, like the early morning rattle and whine of the milk float. The noise, or lack of it, in a world with far less traffic, fewer aircraft, ubiquitous machines in cafes, musak in every shop. If we can remember the era, we have to remember hard. If not, we have to imagine if we are to re-create how people really lived then. 

Celia Rees

www.celiarees.com