Blood Memories: Alvin Ailey’s Emotional Embrace

Alvin Ailey. Photo: Norman Maxon, New York Public Library

'I’m Alvin Ailey. I’m a choreographer. I create movement and I’m searching for truth in movement.'

I recently watched a fine film documenting the life and work of choreographer Alvin Ailey. (‘Ailey’ directed by Jamila Wignot, 2021)

'I wanted to explore Black culture, and I wanted that culture to be a revelation.’

Ailey was an innovative dance maker who channelled his own experience onto the stage. He founded a company that celebrated African American culture and produced performances that resonated with audiences all over the world. His work was heartfelt, dramatic and supremely lyrical. Where the traditional ballet world could be cold, cerebral and rarefied, here was dance that was warm, physical and sensual - created around what most of us today would recognise as dance music. 

‘As choreographers we start with an empty space and a body or two, and we say ‘Carve this space.’ I love creating something where there was nothing before.’

There’s a great deal we can learn from this visionary man.

1. ‘Justify Your Steps’

Born in Rogers, Texas in 1931, Ailey was raised by his mother, who moved from town to town looking for work in the cotton fields or in domestic service. 

‘Texas was a tough place to be. I mean if you were Black you were nothing.’

When Ailey was 12 they moved to Los Angeles where he had his first taste of dance on stage, seeing performances by the Ballet Russe of Monte Carlo and by the African American pioneer Katherine Dunham. 

Ailey studied dance under Lester Horton whose company was one of the first racially integrated troupes in the United States.

‘Lester taught us to justify movement. Not just to do a step, but to feel something about the step. Not just to do a plie, but to give it some kind of emotion.’

After Horton’s death in 1953, Ailey took on the role of company director and began to choreograph his own work. He also performed in a number of Broadway shows. 

2. Find ‘Release’

At that time opportunities for Black dancers and artists were occasional and marginal.

‘You were very specially a guest artist there. You could move into this neighbourhood for a minute. But after you’ve finished doing your gig, please move out.’
Judith Jamison, Dancer

Ailey resolved to establish his own company, one that would celebrate the African-American experience and at the same time provide secure work for Black performers. 

'I always felt that that dance was a natural part of what I wanted to express, that what I can do with my body was a part, a very important part, of me, and a way to release some of those things in myself that I had been looking for.’

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in a 2018 performance of "Revelations," at New York City Center.
Photo: Andrea Mohin/The New York Times

3. Draw on Your ‘Blood Memories’

In 1958 Ailey founded the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and set about creating dance to the music of spirituals, gospel and blues; conveying movement and imagery recollected from church, house parties and roadside honky-tonks. Two years later these ‘blood memories’ formed the basis of his most iconic work: ‘Revelations.’

'I came up with a piece. A saga to the Black experience. I would call it ‘Revelations’. . . My blood memories. The memories of my parents, uncles and aunts. Blues and gospel songs that I knew from Texas.’

Spinning, striding, swooning and swaying; hands outstretched, lowered to the soil and reaching for the sky. The dancers are torn between joy and pain, suffering and salvation. In long white robes they process to church, holding their parasols up high. Hands on hips, backs arched, heads to heaven. They wade in the water; run to save their souls; settle down on stools to talk at sunset, in canary coloured gowns and hats, fans fluttering.

'I've been 'buked and I've been scorned
Tryin' to make this journey all alone.
You may talk about me sure as you please.
Your talk will never drive me down to my knees.’
Mahalia Jackson, ‘I’ve Been Buked’ 

4. Dramatise Universal Themes

While Ailey articulated his community’s values and experiences in his work, he also sought to explore universal themes and to be broadly entertaining. His ballets addressed love and loss, the trials of being an artist, the tribulations of being a mother, the death of a friend.

'I wanted to do the kind of dance that could be done for the man on the streets, the people. I wanted to show Black people that they could come down to these concert halls. That it was part of their culture being done there. And that it was universal.'

A still from Ailey. ‘He’s a public figure, who can’t live out all of himself in public.’ Photograph: Neon

5. If You Want to Say Something, You’ve First Got To Get the Audience’s Attention

In the 1960s the US State Department sponsored AAADT's international tours to Asia, Africa, Europe and Russia. Performances broadcast on Moscow television were seen by over 22 million viewers. By the start of the 1970s the troupe had established a reputation at home and abroad. And in 1972 it became a resident company of New York City Center.

Ailey was keen to convey his concerns about civil rights and social injustice. He believed that a message first needs an audience.

‘In order to say something to an audience you’ve got to get them to look at you and listen to you. So if I’m trying to make a protest statement, the audience is much more likely to get that message if they can hear something like ‘House of the Rising Sun.''

Ailey’s 1969 piece ‘Masekela Language’ was prompted by the assassination of Black Panther activist Fred Hampton. In one scene a group of dancers cradle a dead man, as a voice addresses the audience, repeating over and over: ‘Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen.’

6. Wrap Your Colleagues in an ‘Emotional Embrace’

Ailey had a robust commitment to excellence and a fierce passion to realise his vision. He could be a hard taskmaster. But he also established a deep supportive rapport with his dancers. He wrapped them in an emotional embrace.

‘If he was talking to you from 50 feet away you would feel that embrace. You would feel that comfort in knowing you could make an absolute fool of yourself. You would feel safe to extend yourself enough so that you felt free.’
Judith Jamison, Dancer

7. ‘You Have to Be Possessed’

Ailey regarded dance as a vocation and he was well aware that it came at a price. 

‘Dance, it’s an enormous sacrifice. I mean, it’s a physical sacrifice, dancing hurts. You don’t make that much money. . .  It’s a tough thing, you know, you have to be possessed to do dance.'

Ailey was a private man. He felt unable to speak publicly about being gay and he had trouble developing relationships. He also put himself under intense pressure to sustain the company’s finances and to keep producing new and innovative work.

'We still spend more time chasing funds than we do in the studio in creative work.'

'No matter what you write or choreograph, you feel it's not enough.’

'Sometimes you feel bad about yourself when there's no reason to.’

In 1980, isolated and exhausted, Ailey suffered a breakdown. He was later found to have been suffering from bipolar disorder. 

‘The agony of coming from where I came from and then dancing on the Champs Elysee. The contrast of all that. On one hand, the darkness where you feel like you are just nobody, nothing. And the other hand, you are the king, you’re on top of the world.'

Alvin Ailey Dance Theater in the "Move, Members, Move" section of Revelations, in 2011.Earl Gibson/AP

8. ‘Don’t Be Put in a Bag’

Ailey recovered and returned to the company, transferring day-to-day management to his protégé Judith Jamison. He carried on producing work and sought increasingly to break from the constraints imposed on him by the expectations of critics and audiences.

'The problem is, if you’re a Black anything in this country, people want to put you into a bag. People sometimes say, ‘Well, you know, why is he doing that now, why can’t he stick to the blues and the spirituals?’ And I’m also a 20th century American, and I respond to Bach, and Ellington, and Benjamin Britten, and Samuel Barber, and why shouldn’t I?’

9. Make It Easier for the Next Generation

'I wanna be ready.
I wanna be ready.
Ready to put on my long, white robe.'
‘I Wanna Be Ready’

In 1989 Ailey died from an AIDS-related illness. He was 58. 

Ailey was a pioneer who had his eyes on the horizon. As well as creating more than 100 ballets, he ensured that his company performed pieces by other choreographers so that its future would be secure without him. Following his death, Jamison took over as artistic director and the AAADT went from strength to strength. Ailey had always wanted to make it easier for the next generation. His aim was true.

‘To provide a place of beauty and excitement, a place for other choreographers to experiment. To provide a place where people can come and feel like they can add themselves and then reap the benefits of what they put in. I want it to be easier than it was for me.’

'I wanna go where the north wind blows.
I wanna know what the falcon knows.
I wanna go where the wild goose goes.
High flying bird, high flying bird, fly on...
I want the clouds over my head.
I don't want no store bought bed.
I'm gonna live until I'm dead.
Mother, mother, mother, mother save your child.
Right on, be free.’
Voices of East Harlem, ‘Right On, Be Free’ (C Griffin)

No. 375

Joanna Hiffernan, Whistler’s ‘Woman in White’: Writing Our Own Stories

James McNeill Whistler - Symphony in White, No. 1: The White Girl

‘My painting simply represents a girl dressed in white standing in front of a white curtain.’
James McNeill Whistler 

A little while ago I attended a small exhibition focusing on James McNeill Whistler’s paintings, prints and sketches of one particular woman: Joanna Hiffernan. (‘Whistler’s Woman in White’ was at the Royal Academy, London.)

Most famously Hiffernan featured in Whistler’s 1862 painting ‘The Woman in White.’ But as his friend, model, lover and executive assistant over two decades, she appeared in many of his other works.

Whistler’s paintings of Hiffernan are radiant and beautiful. Combining realism with aestheticism, they introduced a new chapter in modern painting. And they prompt reflections on our ability to tell our own stories.

Hiffernan was born in Limerick, Ireland in 1839, one of five daughters to a teacher. Along with thousands of other poor Irish immigrants at the time, the family moved to London when she was about 5.

Born in Lowell, Massachusetts in 1834, the son of a railway engineer, Whistler left America aged 21 to study art in Paris, before settling in London in 1859. The following year he met Hiffernan, who was earning money as an artist’s model. 

‘She has the most beautiful hair that you have ever seen! a red not golden but copper – as Venetian as a dream!’
James McNeill Whistler in a letter to Henri Fantin-Latour

The couple moved into lodgings in Rotherhithe and were soon at the heart of London’s creative scene, attending parties, gallery openings and seances together. 

Whistler meanwhile worked on his definitive painting of Hiffernan and submitted it, under its original title ‘The White Girl,’ to the Royal Academy annual exhibition in 1862.

‘The White Girl has made a great sensation – for and against.’
Joanna Hiffernan 

Wearing a white muslin dress, Hiffernan stands against a white damask curtain and on top of a bearskin rug. She has long, loose, copper-coloured hair, big green eyes and full lips. Composed and thoughtful, she holds her arms by her sides and a white lily in one hand.

The picture is enigmatic. Viewers are left to interpret her dreamy expression, her casual posture, the lightly held lily and the vanquished bear.

‘Some stupid painters don’t understand it at all, while Millais for instance thinks it splendid, more like Titian and those old swells than anything he has seen – but Jim says that, for all that, the old duffers may refuse it altogether.’
Joanna Hiffernan 

James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Symphony in White, No. 2: The Little White Girl, 1864.

Hiffernan was right. ‘The White Girl’ was rejected, first by the Royal Academy, and then by the Paris Salon. These institutions were perhaps confused by its understated colours, muted mood and lack of narrative.

‘The picture should have its own merit, and not depend on dramatic, or legendary, or local interest… As music is the poetry of sound, so is painting the poetry of sight.’
James McNeill Whistler

Now living with Hiffernan in Chelsea, Whistler painted her in white again – first standing by the fireplace, holding a Japanese fan, glancing at her reflection in the mirror; and then accompanied by another woman, reclining on a sofa and staring straight out at us. 

When these three ‘Symphonies in White’ were eventually exhibited, they benefitted from an association with the recent Wilkie Collins bestseller ‘The Woman in White’ (which Whistler claimed never to have read). They created a popular sensation, marking a turning point in the artist’s career.

Whistler went on to paint and sketch Hiffernan repeatedly. Here she is in a bustling dockside bar in Wapping; staring wistfully out at the countryside from a doorway; dressed in a fashionable silk kimono and holding a Chinese vase. Here we see her relaxing in the studio; having her hair brushed; sitting back wearily in an armchair, her long copper locks spread out around her.

In 1865 Hiffernan and Whistler joined Gustave Courbet for a working holiday on the Normandy coast. Both artists produced a series of atmospheric seascapes, and Courbet painted Hiffernan. In later life the Frenchman wrote nostalgically to Whistler about their time together.

‘Do you remember Trouville and Jo who played the clown to amuse us? In the evening she sang Irish songs so well because she had the spirit and distinction of art.’
Gustave Courbet

Wapping, 1860–64. National Gallery of Art, Washington, John Hay Whitney Collection

In 1866 Whistler’s mother (who looks so formidable in his famous portrait), disapproving of his relationship with Hiffernan, urged him ‘to promote a return to virtue in her.’ He subsequently gave his partner power of attorney to manage his affairs while he travelled, and wrote a will leaving her his whole estate.

In time Whistler moved on to another mistress. But he and Hiffernan remained on good terms, and she cared for his son by another woman. In the end she died before him, in 1886, at the age of 47. She had been suffering from bronchitis. 

The recent exhibition collected some 70 works. I was struck by the fact that it comprised nearly all of the known images of Hiffernan.

Weary 1863

It’s strange to think that, with the exception of a few letters, the records of Hiffernan were refracted through the eyes of others. We understand that she was beautiful, intelligent and had a vibrant personality. But we cannot really grasp what she felt about herself and her world.

Of course, nowadays it’s hard to imagine that all the pictures of oneself could be assembled physically in one place. There are so many of them. And through social media platforms we can create our own images and write our own narratives. We have agency. We can take back control.

But that is less the case with work. It being a team exercise, we often suppress the self in seeking collective objectives. There is an ever-present pressure to conform and fit in.

Nonetheless I feel it’s important to maintain something of one’s own identity in a professional context. We should be able to define the terms by which we engage with our employers – setting the boundaries of who we are and why we’re here - and, optimally, those terms should align with the company’s values and vision. At BBH, while applying myself to its commercial goals and creative ambitions, I insisted on pursuing my own projects, writing in my own style, presenting in my own way. I’m confident it benefitted the business. And it certainly helped me. 

We should strive to write our own stories, even when we’re at work.

'I am not in love
But I'm open to persuasion.
East or West,
Where's the best
For romancing?
With a friend
I can smile.
But with a lover
I could hold my head back,
I could really laugh,
Really laugh.
Now if I can feel the sun
In my eyes
And the rain on my face,
Why can't I
Feel love?’

Joan Armatrading,’Love and Affection'

No. 374

Designing the Beautiful Game: Play Better, Look Better, Earn Better

Photo credit: Puma archive

'Behind every kick of a ball, there has to be a thought.’
Denis Bergkamp

I recently visited an excellent exhibition exploring the role of design in the development of football. (‘Football: Designing the Beautiful Game’ is at the Design Museum, London until 29 August.)

On entering the gallery you encounter a Zambian ball made from a maize meal sack tied with string. It serves to reinforce the simplicity of the game that has made it so broadly popular.

'One of the reasons football is the most popular sport in the world is because the weak can beat the powerful.’
Marcelo Bielsa

You can see displays of historic balls, boots, banners and badges; archaic shinpads, pumps and goalkeepers’ gloves; the Acme Thunderer, the world’s original sport whistle, invented by a Birmingham toolmaker in 1884.

You can admire George Best’s first pair of boots – on the sides, in neat white painted letters, he recorded the games in which he scored. You can marvel at number 10 shirts worn by Platini, Messi, Zico and Maradonna.

'It’s true I don’t know much about the players here, but they definitely know who I am.’
Zlatan Ibrahimovic (on joining PSG in 2012.)

You can learn that the iconic Brazilian strip, incorporating the four colours of the national flag, was designed by an 18 year old newspaper illustrator. He was responding to a competition after the humiliating loss to Uruguay in the 1950 World Cup Final, when the team wore an all-white kit.

You can observe design’s impact beyond the pitch: from a rudimentary rattle to the reviled vuvuzela horn; from promotional posters to match day programmes and fanzines. There’s Coventry’s splendid Sky Blue programme, which won a D&AD prize in 1972. There are displays about innovative stadium architecture: the San Siro, the Allianz Arena, Tottenham Hotspur and Forest Green Rovers. 

I noted with a pang of melancholy that Spurs’ sophisticated acoustic modelling has not been applied at West Ham’s London Stadium. Indeed, as far as I could see, the Hammers’ main contribution to the exhibition was a hooligan calling card…

One of the two match balls used in the 1930 World Cup final, supplied by Argentina and used in the first half. Credit: Neville Evans Collection

'Before you can coach others, you must learn to coach yourself.’
Johan Cruyff

Football has been so popular that from the early days there were games based on the game. The oldest version of table football was manufactured in Preston in 1884. Then came blow football, Subbuteo and on through to today’s videogames. I enjoyed spotting a couple of photographs, by Julian Germain, of Superhero Subbuteo figures that were painted by BBH’s magnificent copywriter Nick Kidney. 

'Football is the ballet of the masses.’
Dmitri Shostakovich

I was particularly struck by the way that, over the years, design has moved football forward in small increments.

You can trace the development of shirt construction from collared flannelette to crewneck cotton to high tech elastane  - lightweight, breathable and sweat-wicking.

'In football everything is complicated by the presence of the opposite team.'
Jean-Paul Sartre

You can see how the design of footballs progressed: from heavy spheres made with an animal bladder wrapped in thick leather, to panelled balls with large seams. In 1931 the Argentine Superball, inflated using an air valve, dispensed with the leather lace, thus making it easier to head. 1974’s adidas Telstar, comprising 32 panels of white hexagons and black pentagons, was conceived to be more visible on TV. Subsequent balls, made with thermally bonded synthetic panels, have sought to deliver better boot contact and ‘truer flight.’

Note how new technology has changed the game itself, making it faster, more fluid and more skilful. Note too how in recent years marketing has moved the focus onto commercial optimisation. 

'I wouldn’t say I was the top manager in the business, but I would say I was in the top one.’
Brian Clough

Designing the new Brazilian kit. Courtesy of Felix Speller

Consider the evolution of the boot. 

The first footballers wore high-cut, leather work-shoes. By the 1880s players were nailing studs onto their soles to give secure footing on soft ground. Soon the footwear had reinforced toes and ankles. Manufacturers recognised the power of player endorsement to sell boots to a broader public. In the early 1900s MJ Rice & Son launched Steve Bloomer’s Lucky Goal Scorers. In the 1930s a lower cut, lighter boot, more suited to drier conditions and dribbling, was developed in southern Europe and South America. This ‘Continental’ style was adopted by Stanley Matthews, who in the early ‘50s promoted a pair for the mass market in collaboration with the Coop.

'We don’t want our players to be monks. We want them to be better football players, because a monk does not play football at this level.’
Bobby Robson

In 1952 the Puma Super Atom became the first boot with screw-in studs. West Germany were losing the 1954 World Cup Final 2-0 at half-time to favourites Hungary. Adi Dasler (the founder of adidas and brother of Puma founder Rudolf) suggested fitting the team’s boots with longer studs more appropriate to the rain-soaked conditions. West Germany went on to win 3-2 and the match was dubbed the ‘Miracle of Bern.’

'Football is a simple game. Twenty-two men chase a ball for 90 minutes and at the end the Germans always win.'
Gary Lineker

No. 2 Captain America aka Steve Rogers, Full Back. Figure by Nick Kidney / photo by Julian Germain

The 1968 Puma King featured a flexible sole and lightweight nylon screw studs. In 1970 Alan Ball wore boots painted white by Hummell, the first soccer footwear to be neither black nor brown. Subsequently, as pitch conditions improved and the need for protection diminished, boots were given lightweight kangaroo and textile uppers. There are now laceless models to enable a cleaner strike.

'Everything I know about morality and the obligations of men, I owe it to football.’
Albert Camus

It seems clear that football’s progress was driven by a combination of performance enhancement, scientific invention and commercial ingenuity. Marketing expanded the focus beyond the elite players on the pitch, to the broader playing community and indeed to non-playing spectators.

Design helped football and footballers play better, look better, earn better.

'Aim for the sky and you’ll hit the ceiling. Aim for the ceiling and you’ll stay on the floor.’
Bill Shankly

Of course, sometimes design and marketing have gone too far. Their voices have become too powerful. Too many unnecessary strips, unconvincing endorsements and uncalled for innovations have tested fans’ loyalty.

When the adidas Jabulani was introduced at the 2010 World Cup to a corporate fanfare, players complained that it had unpredictable movement. In 1995 the majority of Premier League club sponsors came from the technology and telecom sectors. In 2010 they came from financial services. By 2021 it was mostly betting. And when in 2013 Hull City's owners proposed changing the club's name to Hull City Tigers, supporters staged a protest with a banner proclaiming 'a club, not a brand.'

Designers and marketers need to remind themselves that, as Jock Stein said:

‘Football without fans is nothing.’

'In the marble halls of the charm school
How flair is punished.
Under marble Millichip, the FA broods
On how flair can be punished.
Their guest is a Euro-state magnate
Corporate-ulent.
How flair is punished.
Kicker, kicker conspiracy.
Kicker, kicker conspiracy.’

The Fall, ‘Kicker Conspiracy’ (M Smith)

No. 373

MC Escher: 'Only Those Who Attempt the Absurd will Achieve the Impossible’

'We adore chaos because we love to produce order.'
MC Escher

I recently watched a film documenting the life and work of Dutch graphic artist MC Escher (2018’s ‘Journey to Infinity’ by Robin Lutz).

‘I don’t belong anywhere any more…I hover between mathematics and art.’

Through his drawings, lithographs and woodcuts, Escher prompted us to reflect on perspective and perception; dreams and reality; order and chaos. Through his mesmerising tessellations and fantastical landscapes; impossible objects and implausible architecture, he bridged the divide between art and mathematics. His was a playful world of visual paradox, magical metamorphoses and infinite possibility. He cultivated a sense of wonder.

'Wonder is the salt of the earth. Originality is merely an illusion.’

M. C. Escher tessellation

1. ‘Enjoy the Tiniest Details’.

In 1898 Maurits Escher was born into a wealthy family in Leeuwarden, the Netherlands. He was a sickly child and struggled at school. But he was always good at drawing. 

‘The only bright spots are the drawing lessons. Not because I am any good at it, but because it’s my only comfort during this awful time.’

Escher attended the Haarlem School of Architecture and Decorative Arts. Still suffering from weak health, in 1922 he set off on a recuperative trip through Italy, visiting Tuscany and the Amalfi Coast. It seemed to do him some good.

‘I cannot describe the curious feeling this lovely beauty gives me. My poor eyes are straining and my poor brain is trying to comprehend the incomprehensible. Rarely if ever have I felt so calm, pleasant and comfortable than lately.’

In Italy Escher created richly detailed drawings of hilltop towns and seaside communities; houses clustering around imposing churches; monasteries nestling alongside monumental mountain rocks.

On his travels Escher also met Jetta Umiker, whom he married in 1924. 

‘She exerts an influence on me similar to that of an electromagnet on a scrappy piece of cast iron.’

The young couple settled in Rome from where Escher continued to make study trips. He was beguiled by the beautiful intricacies of nature.

‘I want to learn to look and see better whilst I am drawing. I want to enjoy the tiniest details…With your nose right on top of [a small plant] you see all of its beauty and all of its simplicity. But when you start drawing only then do you realise how terribly complicated and shapeless that beauty really is.’

2. Be Open to Inspiration

Escher travelled to Spain where he was particularly inspired by the fourteenth-century Alhambra palace in Granada. He was fascinated by the Moorish architecture, the intricate decorative designs on the walls and ceilings, the coloured tiles with their infinite variety of geometric patterns.

‘What fascinates me in the tiles of the Alhambra is the discovery of a motif that repeats itself according to a certain system.’

Escher determined that Moorish tessellation could provide the basis for a new direction for his art. But, in contrast with the designs he had studied at the Alhambra, his would accommodate wildlife.

‘What a pity the Moors didn’t use figures derived from nature.’

Starting with a series of geometric grids, Escher created complex configurations of interlocking birds and butterflies; intertwining fish and reptiles; intersecting lizards in red, green and white. His work explored the mesmeric effects of pattern and repetition, the relationship between space and time. 

‘I began to see the possibilities offered by the regular division of the plane. For the first time I dared to create compositions based on the problem of expressing endlessness within a limited plane.’

3. Follow your Passion No Matter What Others May Think

Escher was increasingly drawn to think of his art in mathematical terms. In this respect he felt a fellowship with Bach.

‘I am smitten by Bach’s music. A short motif that repeats itself in various ways – identically in a different key, back to front or upside down. They’re almost mathematical figures.’

Escher pressed on in pursuit of his passion, even though he was unsure whether what he was creating was art at all.

‘The mathematical interest is becoming so dominant that I am wondering whether it is still trying to be art and whether it even belongs in an art exhibition.’

Escher’s colleagues and companions were not impressed with his new direction.

‘Deeply saddening and hangover-inducing remains the fact that I’m starting to speak a language that is understood by very few people.’

4. Cultivate a Sense of Wonder

Gradually the political climate in Italy under Mussolini became more toxic. In 1935, when his nine-year-old son was obliged to wear a military uniform to school, Escher moved his family to Switzerland. Later they decamped to Brussels and finally, in 1941, they settled in Baarn, the Netherlands.

'What I give form to in daylight is only one per cent of what I have seen in darkness.'

As the Second World War closed in around them, Escher focused single-mindedly on his work. His designs became more and more inventive. Drawing on childhood games of word association, he let his imagination run free.

'My work is a game, a very serious game.'

A river flows from day to night. A flock of black birds emerge magically from white fields, while white birds flying in the opposite direction appear mysteriously from dark farmland. Reptiles rise up from a two-dimensional picture, crawling across a series of three-dimensional objects before re-entering the picture once more. A waterfall is in perpetual motion. Two faces are formed from one continuous ribbon. A hand draws itself. An endless series of faceless figures rush downstairs, passing a continuous stream of characters running upstairs at different angles.

Day and Night (1938)

'Are you really sure that a floor can't also be a ceiling?'

Escher created magical, slightly disturbing worlds that prompt us to question our notions of reality and illusion, order and chaos. He was driven by a sense of wonder.

'He who wonders discovers that this in itself is wonderful.'

5. Be Your Hardest Taskmaster and Your Harshest Critic

Of course, although Escher’s work was playful and imaginative, it required an innate gift for mathematics and a phenomenal eye for detail.

‘It is really only a matter of dogged persistence and continuous pitiless self criticism.’

Escher was motivated by a fierce desire to attempt the impossible.

‘Any schoolboy with a little aptitude will perhaps be better at drawing than I am. But what he most often lacks is the tough yearning for realisation, the teeth-grinding stubbornness, and saying: even though I know I cannot do it, I want to do it anyway.’

6. Pursue a Vision that Cannot Be Realised

In the 1960s Escher was surprised to find his work enthusiastically adopted by the counterculture in the west coast of the United States.

‘What on earth does this young generation see in my work? Doesn’t it lack all the qualities that are hip these days? It is cerebral and rationalised instead of wild and sexy. And how can they reconcile it with their addiction to narcotics?’

So Escher wasn’t impressed when Mick Jagger asked for an image to use on an album cover.

‘Please tell Mr Jagger that I am not Maurits to him, but, very sincerely, MC Escher.’

In 1969 Escher finished his last woodcut, ‘Snakes’, in which three serpents wind through a pattern of linked rings that shrink to infinity. He died in a hospital in Hilversum in 1972, aged 73.

Portrait of M.C. Escher by Nikki Arai

'Only those who attempt the absurd will achieve the impossible…. I think it's in my basement... Let me go upstairs and check.’

Escher’s designs should resonate with people in the business of brands and communication. We too work with pattern, rhythm and repetition, bridging the fields of art and mathematics, endeavouring to create a sense of wonder in our audiences. We would do well to embrace something of Escher’s dogged persistence, his childlike playfulness and his relentless quest for the impossible. 

‘I always pursue a vision that cannot be realised.’

'As around the sun the earth knows she's revolving,
And the rosebuds know to bloom in early May.
Just as hate knows love's the cure,
You can rest your mind assure,
That I'll be loving you always.’
Stevie Wonder, ‘As'

No. 372

Gentle Grip Socks: Answering the Questions That Haven’t Been Asked

'I see my path, but I don't know where it leads. Not knowing where I'm going is what inspires me to travel it.’
Rosalia de Castro

On a dull Tuesday afternoon I was wandering around the sock department of my local Marks & Spencer - with a view to stocking up, so to speak.

It was all rather confusing.

Did I want Egyptian cotton, organic cotton or just cotton-rich? Merino wool or lambswool perhaps? Did I need thermal socks, sport socks or slipper socks? Would I like dots or stripes or sea-life emblems? Would I prefer them long or cushioned? Maybe a special finish? Freshfeet TM or Cool and Fresh TM? The latter, I discovered, ‘draws moisture away from the skin, while a peppermint oil-based finish fights bacteria to prevent odours.’ Blimey.

Then suddenly I spotted a small section dedicated to Gentle Grip socks. 

I had not heard of this category before. And yet, as I inspected the explanatory literature, I sensed a sharp pain in my ankles. The elastic in my incumbent, rather run-of-the-mill, socks was squeezing my flesh like a tourniquet. I could feel the blood struggling to flow properly. My calves were bursting. 

At that particular moment there was nothing I wanted more in the world than Gentle Grip socks. 

In a wave of enthusiasm I invested in a number of pairs, in sober shades of blue and grey (no sea-life emblems). And I rushed back home to try them on. 

My Gentle Grip socks seemed instantly considerate and calming. As I carefully pulled them over my heels and up, they gave my ankles a firm caress, a reassuring embrace. And they were secure - sufficient to stay in place, but not so tight as to cause any discomfort or leave a mark.

This was a revolution in my sock drawer.

'Knowing what you want is the first step toward getting it.'
Mae West

Perhaps there is a lesson for us all here.

My Marks & Spencer Gentle Grip socks solved a problem I didn’t know I had. They answered a question I wasn’t asking.

Too often in business we take a literal and linear approach to innovation. We commission research and ask consumers their needs and desires; their nagging problems, their hopes and aspirations. And then we set about addressing them.

But sometimes the public don’t know what they need and can’t articulate what they want. They don’t envisage a superior product or improved service. And this can set limits on innovation.

'If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.’
Henry Ford

Category leading brands anticipate change. They have an expert understanding of what technology makes possible, and an instinctive feel for where tastes and preferences are heading. Predicting tomorrow’s demands and passions, they surprise and delight. By inventing Gentle Grip socks, for instance.

The best brands imagine the future, rather than delivering it to order.

'A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them.'
Steve Jobs

'I like the dimple in your chin.
I like the tricky way you grin.
Still you ain't no kind of cat.
(You know why, don't you?)
Boy, your socks don't match!’
Louis Jordan and Bing Crosby, ‘Your Socks Don’t Match' (L Corday / L Carr)

No. 371

The Aftermath: How Postwar Artists in Britain Responded to Collective Experience

Full Stop (1961) The Estate of John Latham/Tate 

‘Am I standing on my head, or is the world upside down?’
Franciszka Themerson

I recently visited an excellent exhibition of art created in Britain in the wake of the Second World War. (‘Postwar Modern’ is at the Barbican, London until 26 June.)

The show features the work of 48 artists: paintings, sculpture, photography, collage and installations. We witness how, over a twenty-year period, a creative community responded to the world around it - initially with shock and horror at the recent past, and then with growing confidence about future possibilities.

On entering the first gallery, we are greeted by a sombre symphony in black. There’s an agonised Christ on the cross by Francis Newton Souza. There are the vaporized heads of Eduardo Paolozzi. And there’s a big bleak ‘Full Stop’ by John Latham – like a bullet wound or an eclipsed planet or a black hole. 

It’s grim stuff.

Perhaps that’s entirely understandable, given the upheaval and destruction that people had witnessed. The war had blitzed cities and blown away certainties, leaving an anxious world under a nuclear cloud. Britain had become a home for refugees from Nazism and migrants from its now crumbling empire.

‘The 1950s found most of us in London, each of us independently examining the images left in our minds and souls in the aftermath of World War II. In some sense we felt that new images might help us to prevent the repetition of the inhuman and unseemly past. It was with some excitement, then, that we approached the new and tried to erase the old.’
Magda Cordell

Artists depicted the dereliction, damage and decay that they saw all around them. William Turnbull, who had been a fighter pilot, created desolate relief landscapes in bronze. Bill Hardy photographed kids playing in urban bombsites. Elizabeth Frink sculpted strange, monstrous, menacing birds. 

‘They actually became something else…They became like bits of shrapnel and flying things…with very sharp beaks.’
Elizabeth Frink

There are not many portraits of people here. Rather artists reconfigured the human body from abstract shapes and machine parts. Magda Cordell painted pulsating internal organs in bold crimson. Inspired by television and science fiction, John McHale imagined a family of wired cyborgs. 

‘We extend out psychic mobility. We can telescope time, move through history, span the world through visual and aural means.’
John McHale

First Contact, 1958 by John McHale

Some sought a completely new visual language, experimenting with industrial materials like sheet metal, Perspex and household paint. Mary Martin created pure white reliefs, austere, abstract geometric forms. Victor Pasmore abandoned figurative painting and threw himself into work prompted by science, geometry and mathematics. 

‘Today the whole world is shaken by the spirit of reconstruction… In painting and sculpture, as also in architecture, an entirely new language has been formed.’
Victor Pasmore

In time artists began to document the budding new society that was rising from the rubble. Jewish refugees Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff presented the city under construction, in thick layers of earth-toned paint. Eva Frankfurther portrayed ordinary workers at the Lyons Corner House, weary and pensive. Shirley Baker photographed the street life of multicultural Manchester and Roger Mayne celebrated London’s emergent youth culture – poor, but cool and fun-loving. 

‘West Indian Waitresses’ by Eva Frankfurther c1955. Photo Courtesy of the Ben Uri Gallery.

And there was a spirit of righteous rebellion in the air. Francis Bacon and David Hockney referenced their homosexuality in their work, despite the fact that it was still illegal.

‘What one must remember about some of these pictures is that they were partly propaganda of something that I felt hadn’t been propagandised… homosexuality. I felt it should be done.’
David Hockney

Gradually colours became brighter and bolder. Patrick Heron painted radiant abstract landscapes. Gillian Ayres produced intense organic shapes, full of feeling and possibility.

‘A shape – a relationship – a body – oddness – shock – mood – cramped – isolated – acid – sweet – encroaching – pivoting – fading – bruised.’
Gillian Ayres

Detail of Gillian Ayres, Break-off

And so we arrive in the ‘60s, a decade of fearless innovation and wild experimentation; of mobiles, installations, auto-creation and rotating sculptures. The shadows of the war have for the most part departed.

We often characterise artists as solitary individuals, ploughing their own furrows, expressing their own unique perspectives. But what struck me about this exhibition was the extent to which the creative community was responding, together, to the times in which they were working. These artists were challenging social norms and being challenged by collective experience. They were fully immersed in their environment.

In the sphere of commerce, brands sometimes seem to exist in their own secluded space; articulating their own particular point of view, untouched by cultural or competitive forces. This show suggests to me that brands must breathe the same air as their consumers; they must feel their anxieties, share their enthusiasms. Brands must participate in society, not stand aloof from it. 

‘Postwar Modern’ deals in the aftermath of war. Aftermath is an appropriate word. It was originally an agricultural term: ‘a second crop or new growth of grass (or occas. another plant used as feed) after the first has been mown or harvested.’(OED).

Aftermath suggests rebirth and renewal. Even in the darkest times, there is hope.

'Yes, we're different, worlds apart.
We're not the same.
We laughed it away
At the start, like in a game.
You could have stayed
Outside my heart,
But in you came.
And here you'll stay,
Until it's time for you to go.’
Buffy Sainte-Marie, 'Until It's Time for You to Go'

No. 370

Robert Moses, ‘Trapped in a Dream’: How a Leader Can Go from Hero to Villain

Robert Moses, urban planner. Roosevelt Island, New York, 1959.Credit...Arnold Newman/Courtesy of Howard Greenberg Gallery

Moses: The dynamo of capitalism is restlessness. Nothing is ever enough. For us, nothing is ever settled. We are always on the move.

I recently watched ‘Straight Line Crazy,’ a fine new David Hare play about the urban planner Robert Moses. (The Bridge Theatre, London until 18 June)

Moses: Once Americans cease to believe they can remake America better, then it ceases to be America.

Though he was never elected to any public office, Moses was often described as the most powerful man in New York. As head of the New York City and Long Island State Parks Commissions between 1924 and 1963 (along with holding many other official roles), he built a system of 627 miles of expressway, connecting the city to the great outdoors. He created bridges, parks and swimming pools.He led the construction of the 1939 and 1964 World's Fairs in New York and helped persuade the United Nations to locate its headquarters in Manhattan. 

Moses: A leader makes the mood, he’s not a victim of it.

Moses began his career with an avowed intent to improve the lives of ordinary city dwellers. But he ended it a pariah - criticised for the destruction of communities to make way for his road schemes; for his unwavering commitment to the car; for his refusal to embrace mass transit; for his disregard for public opinion.

Moses: Your principal error is this: to imagine that the people’s views are of any importance at all…We must advance their fortunes without having any respect for their opinions.

Moses provides a case study in how a leader’s resolute commitment to a vision can evolve into intransigence and anachronism; how a hero can over time become a villain.

Moses: People may not like me, but they need me… I’d rather be right and alone, than be soft and with other people.

Robert Moses with a model lower end of Manhattan and the bridge with which it is proposed to connect Battery Park with Brooklyn, March 1939. Photograph: Bettmann/Corbis

The play focuses on two significant years in Moses’ life: 1926 and 1955.

We begin with a young Moses planning a scheme to build two big expressways across Long Island. Alert to changing social needs and aspirations, he wants to give New Yorkers access to the region’s woods, open spaces and beaches.

Moses: The people have discovered a new occupation. It’s called leisure. And one day it will be as popular as work.

Long Island is peaceful, sparsely populated and controlled by a few aristocratic families who are united in their opposition to his scheme. Moses has learnt that in order to get any project off the ground, he needs to be comfortable with confrontation and conflict.

Moses: People characteristically revolt against any innovation…Nothing worthwhile has ever been achieved without initial resistance.

Indeed Moses is prepared to press ahead with road construction ahead of attaining final sign-off.

Moses: Once you sink that first stake, they’ll never make you pull it up. Public work relies on one thing. Impetus… Anyone can argue about where a freeway ought to be. But it’s pretty damn hard to argue about where it is.

Moses is highly intelligent, hard working, rational and uncompromising. He has fixed views, and is particularly convinced of the liberating power of the motor car.

Moses: People like cars. You own something and you’re in control. That’s a nice feeling. When I was young, America was sitting there, like a tin can. The car was the can opener. Still is.

Though Moses is reserved, socially awkward and wary of the public stage, he is driven by a fundamentally democratic urge. 

Moses: I’m in a hurry, and I’m in a hurry to help – to help the millions out there who have no access to a good life. And if a few fences get kicked over in the process, does that really matter?

At length Moses achieves his objective on Long Island with the help of a supportive Governor, a sympathetic New York Times and an amenable judge. 

The play then leaps ahead to 1955. Moses is proposing to put a four-lane highway through Washington Square in Manhattan. The scheme will alleviate traffic congestion in the area and create horizontal routes to match the existing vertical expressways.

Moses: What kind of city have we created where roads run up and down, but nothing runs across? …It’s an offence against logic and against reason.

Moses has little regard for the impact the development will have on the local neighbourhoods.

Moses: Things must exist for a purpose. SoHo has no purpose. Vitality is dependent on function. And when function decays, so does life.

However, Moses comes up against a group of community activists, foremost amongst whom is architectural journalist and writer Jane Jacobs. She challenges his view that the automobile should drive decisions about urban development. And she thinks he is ‘straight line crazy.’

Jacobs: Mr Moses is a man under hypnosis. He got hypnotized at the age of twenty-five by two ideas and they’re both delusions. First, he has this insane idea that the answer to the problem of too many cars is more cars. And second, he’s convinced the answer to the problem of congestion on our roads is more roads.

Jacobs believes cities are vibrant, organic ecosystems that should be planned from the bottom-up. 

Jacobs as chair of a Greenwich Village civic group at a 1961 press conference

Jacobs: Cities grow up. They just happen. Bit by bit. Hand a city to the planners and they’ll make it a desert. Hand it to the people and they’ll make it habitable. Robert Moses looks at the West Village and he sees a slum. I look at the West Village and I see a healthy neighbourhood. I see life.

We realise that Moses’ forceful, top-down style of leadership, which once made him so successful, now represents an impediment. He has lost touch with public sentiment. He’s a man out of time.

Moses: The people lack imagination. The job of the leader is to provide it.

Ultimately Moses is defeated by an alliance of middle-class campaigners, political progressives and broader public opinion. In the play his long-time colleague Finnuala Connell (a fictional character) summarises the cause of his demise.

Finnuala: Once you believed in cars because you thought they would liberate people. Now you force people into cars and you force cars onto roads because you want to be vindicated. It’s no longer about the people. It’s about you…You’re stuck. You’re stuck with an idea you had thirty years ago. And you can’t move on. Is there anything worse than being trapped in a dream?

Robert Moses provides a lesson for us all. Leaders need insight into cultural change, a vision that addresses that change, a strategy to deliver and the iron will to see things through. Moses had all these capabilities. But as the world evolved, his views remained the same. What once was self-confidence became arrogance; what once was resolve became intransigence. He loved progress, but only in the direction he envisaged. He liked to regard the city from a distance, from above: all grand schemes, expansive concepts and logical systems. But the broader his perspective, the less room it had for empathy and community. And in the end he was wrong.

This does not mean however that Moses’ opponents were entirely right. At the close of the play Jacobs reflects on the fact that theirs was a hollow victory.

Jacobs: Our efforts to preserve Greenwich Village and SoHo succeeded in transforming it into the most expensive piece of real estate in the world. What was once a community was cleansed of everyone but the rich. The Village was saved, but it was also destroyed.

[If you’re interested in learning more about this subject, I’d recommend the 2016 documentary about Jane Jacobs, ‘Citizen Jane: Battle for the City’.]

'Oh, can't anybody see,
We've got a war to fight?
Never found our way,
Regardless of what they say.
How can it feel this wrong?
From this moment,
How can it feel, this wrong?’’

Portishead, ‘Roads’ (B Gibbons / A Utley / G Barrow)

No. 369

A Studio of One’s Own: Designing an Environment for Ideas

Helen Frankenthaler in 1957, photographed by Gordon Parks. © The Gordon Parks Foundation

'No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself.’
Virginia Woolf, ‘A Room of One’s Own’

I recently attended an excellent exhibition examining the artist’s studio over the last one hundred years. (‘A Century of the Artist’s Studio’, curated by Iwona Blazwick, runs at the Whitechapel Gallery until 5 June.) 

Through a selection of paintings, sculptures, photographs, films and reconstructions, the show considers the diverse characteristics of a successful creative workspace.

A studio can be an attic, a loft apartment or a spare room; a shed, a farmhouse or a disused factory. It is a place for escape, reflection, experimentation and creation; a location for catalysts and stimulus, for intimate exchange; a scene for collaboration and collective effort. 

No surprise perhaps that studios often feature in artists’ work. Wheelchair-bound Frida Kahlo painted herself painting her doctor. Mequitta Ahuja depicted herself bent over her desk, deep in thought. Lucien Freud’s portraits often included his own furniture. Bruce Nauman filmed a man dancing on the perimeter of a square marked out on his workshop floor. 

Kerry James Marshall, Untitled (Painter), 2008, Acrylic on PVC panel in artist’s frame, 73 x 62.9 cm. Collection of Charlotte and Herbert S. Wagner III. © Kerry James Marshall.

'I think of my studio as a vegetable garden, where things follow their natural course. They grow, they ripen. You have to graft. You have to water.’
Joan Miro

A painting by Wilhelmina Barns-Graham presents us with an image of a clean, well-lit studio, a blank canvas waiting at the easel. But the norm for most artists seems to have been much more chaotic. The walls of Francis Bacon’s workspace were daubed in paint, the floor strewn with passport photographs and Polaroids of lovers; with old newspapers and pages torn from magazines and medical textbooks. 

Studios are often expressions of an artist’s personality and creative style. Robert Rauschenberg’s looked like a tip, Jackson Pollock splattered paint everywhere. Here’s half-naked Picasso surrounded by his canvases, revelling in his genius.

Studios often include props and prompts for inspiration. Matisse liked to work alongside the same jugs, ornaments and textiles. Sculptor Kim Lim carefully pinned images that interested him to a board. 

'I think 99 times and find nothing. I stop thinking, swim in silence, and the truth comes to me.’
Albert Einstein

Mequitta Ahuja, Notation, 2017 (detail). Oil on canvas, 213.4 x 182.9 cm. Courtesy the artist and Tiwani Contemporary.

Studios can be a hub for exchanging ideas, a centre for a creative scene. Andy Warhol’s silver walled Factory played host to parties and Velvet Underground gigs. Wolfgang Tillmans photographed his loft space after a late night event - a mess of Malboro packs, Peroni bottles and Stella cans.

But studios are also a retreat, where the artist can process thought and work things out in private. Alberto Giacometti sketched ideas on the walls. Alexander Calder’s workshop looked like a garage where he could tinker away endlessly at his mobiles.  

'When you start working, everybody is in your studio - the past, your friends, enemies, the art world, and above all, your own ideas - all are there. But as you continue painting, they start leaving, one by one, and you are left completely alone. Then, if you are lucky, even you leave.’
John Cage

The studio of Francis Bacon, ‘luminous dabs blossoming across the walls’. Photograph: Perry Ogden © The Estate of Francis Bacon All rights reserved, DACS/Artimage 2021

For Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant the studio was their home. They painted their fireplaces, walls and screens, filled the space with their own furniture, pictures and pottery, blurring the lines between art and craft, between figurative and abstract. Kurt Schwitter turned his house in Hanover into an art installation: a magical white wooden cave of stalagmites and stalagtites. 

Kurt Schwitters’ Hanover Merzbau

'Room service? Send up a larger room.’ 
Groucho Marx

I left the exhibition reflecting that our offices are rather bland, anodyne, corporate affairs - all polite modern furniture, brightly coloured walls, ping pong tables and witty atrium displays. Not that different from our Clients’ workspaces. 

A properly creative business should be a place for stimulus and inspiration, for experimentation and discovery; a place that enables privacy and seclusion, but also congregation and exchange. Surely a creative business should have a creative environment.

At the exhibition there’s a fabulous 1957 photo of Helen Frankenthaler by Gordon Parks. Sitting on her studio floor, her head resting on one hand, she regards us with quiet confidence. She is surrounded on all sides by her paintings – big, soft and colourful; fluid, organic and abstract. Her studio seems to have become her art. It projects and protects her. It just seems to be her.

'I've really got to use my imagination
To think of good reasons
To keep on keepin’ on. 
Got to make the best of a bad situation,
Ever since that day I woke up and found
That you were gone.’
Gladys Knight & the Pips, 'I’ve Got to Use My Imagination’ (B Goldberg / G Goffin)

No.368

The Fertile Metaphor: Louise Bourgeois and ‘The Woven Child’

Louise Bourgeois: The Good Mother (detail), 2003 © The Easton Foundation/VAGA at ARS, NY and DACS, London 2021. Photography by Christopher Burke

'I always had the fear of being separated and abandoned. The sewing is my attempt to keep things together and make things whole.'
Louise Bourgeois

I recently attended a fine exhibition of the fabric art of Louise Bourgeois. (‘The Woven Child’ is at the Hayward Gallery, London until 15 May.)

The show collects the textile-based work Bourgeois created in the last two decades of her life: a multiplicity of sculptures, installations, collages and embroidery that revisit the traumas of her childhood and her complex feelings about her family. It is all the more powerful given the age of the artist and the distinctiveness of her chosen media.

‘My subject is the rawness of the emotions, the devastating effect of the emotions you go though.’

Bourgeois, born in 1911, grew up in the Parisian suburb of Choisy-le Roi, where her parents ran a workshop that repaired antique tapestries.

‘My mother would sit out in the sun and repair a tapestry or a petit point. She really loved it. This sense of reparation is very deep within me.’

Louise Bourgeois: Cell XXV (The View of the World of the Jealous Wife), 2001

In her eighties and living in New York (which had been her home since 1938), Bourgeois took her mother’s old clothes and some of her own, and redeployed them in her art. Delicate white camisoles, underwear and nightgowns; a pale pink blouse, a red apron and a little black dress were suspended from hangers, hooks and bones, in oppressive constructed rooms and cages, accompanied by two large white marble spheres, a small model of her childhood home and lurking spiders. 

‘You can retell your life and remember your life by the shape, weight, the color, the smell of the clothes in your closet.’

These are rather disturbing domestic pieces - claustrophobic, soaked in secrets and lies; memory and loss. Bourgeois was haunted by her childhood: by her father’s brazen infidelities with a string of women, including her governess; by her sick mother’s quiet acceptance; by her own sense of impotence and confinement.

‘Sewing implies repairing. There is a hole…you have to hide the damage…you have to hide the urge to do damage. There is a background of drama here… that something bad you must have done must be undone. I sew… I do what I can.’

Bourgeois repeatedly returned to the metaphor of fabric and weaving. Throughout her work she included scissors, bobbins, threads and needles; scraps of fading tapestry. Sewing implies mending. Seams are like scars. Clothes suggest second skins. Stuffed fabric prompts associations with soft flesh and fragile emotions. 

‘The needle is used to repair the damage. It’s a claim to forgiveness. It’s never aggressive, it’s not a pin.’

And though her spiders seem at first sinister and threatening, for Bourgeois they represented creation, restoration and motherhood.

'The spider is a repairer. If you bash the web of a spider, she doesn’t get mad. She weaves and repairs it.’

Bourgeois made stuffed heads covered in bright, colourful material: wincing, screaming, kissing; sometimes seeming masked and gagged. The pained head of her brother Pierre, who was institutionalized with mental illness, is loosely stitched - as if to suggest he is coming apart at the seams. 

‘I had a flashback of something that never existed.’

Louise Bourgeois: Pierre

There are twisted torsos hanging limp, copulating couples, body parts sagging with age. There are embroideries of flowers and clocks, collages of abstract patterns and spider’s webs. Bourgeois arranged cushion-like shapes in neat columns, perhaps trying to impose order on a chaotic world.

‘It is a world that is not going to disappoint me because I am building it myself. I am the author of my own world with its internal logic and with its value that no one can deny.’

What particularly struck me about the exhibition was that Bourgeois had been inspired to such variety of thought and depth of feeling by one broad theme. Weaving is a fertile metaphor. 

This may resonate with those of us working in the fields of commercial creativity. When we invent brand worlds and campaign ideas, we should fully explore the opportunity for texture and nuance. A well-chosen metaphor contains layers of meaning. It suggests a diversity of interpretations. It offers rich rewards.

Louise Bourgeois

‘My childhood has never lost its magic, it has never lost its mystery and it has never lost its drama. I refuse to let go of that period because, painful as it was, it was life itself.’

In the late 1930s Bourgeois ran her own gallery in Paris. In 1945 she had her first solo show. In the 1950s she exhibited with the Abstract Expressionists in New York. And yet she was marginalised by the art establishment. Only gradually through the 1970s did she receive recognition, and only in 1982 was she given her first retrospective - at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. 

'You learn for yourself, not for others, not to show off, not to put the other one down. Learning is your secret, it is all you have, it is the only thing you can call your own. Nobody can take it away.'

Bourgeois died in 2010, aged 98. She finished her last pieces the week before. Although her work had explored pain, anxiety and loss, she consistently returned to a message of repair and restoration. We all deserve a second chance.

‘The repair of a tapestry or a costume is precisely a plea in favor of a second chance, it is a plea in favor of x and against y.’

'Back through the years
I go wonderin' once again
Back to the seasons of my youth.
I recall a box of rags that someone gave us,
And how my momma put the rags to use.
There were rags of many colors,
Every piece was small.
And I didn't have a coat,
And it was way down in the fall.
Momma sewed the rags together,
Sewin' every piece with love.
She made my coat of many colors
That I was so proud of.’

Dolly Parton, ‘Coat of Many Colors'

No. 367

Changing the Conversation: William Forsythe, Kinetic Energy and Intense Emotion

Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

'I don't care so much about choreography, I care about dancing.'
William Forsythe

I recently watched a splendid double bill of William Forsythe’s dance works performed by the English National Ballet (at the Sadler’s Wells Theatre, London).

The American choreographer has taken the vocabulary of traditional classical ballet steps, cut it up and reconfigured it around contemporary music. In so doing, he has created dance of radiant beauty and unconfined joy.

‘You have to remember that the origins of classical ballet lie in fetes, in social celebrations. I wanted to make a celebration for today.’

Blake Works 1 is set to the mournful melodies of James Blake. Bleak romantic sentiments, articulated in luminous fragments through a fog of electronic effects. Playlist (EP) is danced with elegant precision, to the disco, house and neo-soul of Barry White, Peven Everett, Natalie Cole and others. 

'I don't live here anymore.
Put that away, and talk to me.
I'm not the only one with a fantasy.
As lonely as you feel right now,
Put that away, and talk to me.’
James Blake, 'Put That Away, and Talk To Me'

Precious Adams and James Streeter in Playlist by William Forsythe. Photograph: Laurent Liotardo

Twenty, and then more than thirty, dancers of extraordinary athleticism occupy the stage, the women in fuchsia pink, the men in claret and blue. They are together as one, relishing their own technique, all high kicks and long extensions, carefree and yet in crisp time - and with the occasional playful flourish. It’s completely dazzling, entirely exhilarating.

‘All these dancers are Olympic-level athletes, truly Olympian.’

Some years ago I attended a party where there was a group of ballet dancers on their night off. As the sounds of Evelyn ‘Champagne’ King and Shalamar boomed out from the stereo, they took to the floor. They were, of course, nimble and refined. But they were also deliberate, accurate, controlled. No mindless swaying or primal boogie for them. They were not lost in music; they were consciously inhabiting it. And this is what made them so compelling to watch. 

'It’s intellectual and it’s physical. In other words, you use your body to solve problems, and these problems are basically physics problems.’

In an interview with Sarah Crompton of The Times, Forsythe, now 72, explained how he approached his iconic 1987 work, ‘In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated.’

‘The ballet steps were the alphabet. What I did was put them in novel arrangements, taking them out of their usual sequences. Basically, I was surprising the expert reader. That’s how I changed the conversation.’

I like the analogy of changing the conversation. We all sometimes find ourselves, at work and play, trapped in discussions that are tedious, familiar, irrelevant. Often we sit passively in silence, feeling frustrated, constrained by a sense of impotence and inertia. But it is possible to shift the direction of a discourse: by bridging to another theme, by raising a seductive subject, by proposing an amusing gambit. It just takes skill, timing and courage.

Brands too should recognise that they don’t have to accept the codes and customs of their sector. If they are innovative and seditious - if they have a genuinely fresh perspective - then they can rewrite the language, reframe the dialogue and create a new set of conventions. Bold brands change the conversation.

As Forsythe suggests, we experience more intense emotions when we move.

'As human beings we're a little bit more inclined to feel an intensity when we’re involved in any kind of kinesis.’

‘You can suffer me to lay it on the line,
How I feel, though you can see it in my eyes.
Think about you when I see you stuck in time.
Freeze on the mind, neon devotion.
I never ever try to hide the way I feel.
You know I can’t resist that private sex appeal,
All that you reveal for me.
Surely, surely, surely you know,
You’re what I want.’
Peven Everett, ‘Surely Shorty’

No. 366