The Plump Roman General: Recognizing the Enduring Power of Show and Tell

Winslow Homer - The Country School
Oil on canvas , 1871

‘Why did the Roman Republic ultimately fall, Mr Carroll?’

My venerable Tutor was a kindly soul, but she had a sharp mind and an intense gaze. I shifted nervously in my seat.

‘Well, I think it was fairly complicated. An ever expanding empire, cheap foreign labour, lack of land reform, increasing social inequality, restless veterans…Erm…’

‘Well, yes, all of those things, Mr Carroll. But what fundamentally was at the heart of the decline?’

‘There was also the in-fighting amongst the ruling elite, crime and corruption, opportunistic populists, private armies…’

With a sigh the Tutor reached for a dusty tome and opened it on a picture of an ancient Roman statue. It was of a rather portly, bald man in uniform, sitting on what I imagined was a resentful horse.

‘I’m sorry. I don’t recognize him,’ I said.

‘It doesn’t matter. He was a little known Consul in the late Republic, who went on to lead the Rhine army. What do you see?’

‘I don’t know. He does look quite plump. Not very military.’

‘Exactly. The Roman Republic and its ruling classes had grown flabby – physically, mentally, functionally, spiritually. They were rotten to the core.’

Of course, today we may regard the Tutor’s remark as somewhat lookist. Nonetheless, the point she was making stayed with me. I think I found it compelling because it was so simple and visual.

'The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts.’
Marcus Aurelius

I read recently (The Guardian, ‘Cool Leaf’, 14 November, 2022) that chimpanzees sometimes present each other with an object with no other reason than to share their interest in it.

Researchers at the University of York studying the Ngogo chimpanzee community in Uganda filmed an adult female grooming a leaf - plucking it, peering at it and stroking it - and then holding it out to her mother to inspect.

‘She’s not offering it for food. She doesn’t want her mum to do anything. She just wants them to look at it together, and be like ‘Oh, cool, nice!’’
Prof Katie Slocombe (co-author) 

In another random perusal of the papers, I came across an article about children’s first words (The Times, ‘Baby’s First Words?’, 2 January, 2023). Researchers at Cornell University have established that, after ‘mama,’ babies’ first meaningful utterances across many different cultures tend to be ‘this’ and ‘that.’ (‘Dad’ comes further down the list.) Early use of such demonstratives indicates that they are eager to share attention. Look at this! Look at that!

To my mind these studies confirm that there is something primal and powerful in the age-old teaching method of Show and Tell: the practice of showing something to an audience and describing it to them. Typically this classroom activity is used to help young children develop presentational and storytelling abilities. The kids describe an item that means something to them. They explain why it’s important. And they thereby learn the fundamentals of communicating to a larger group.

So often in the world of work we present arguments in intricate detail and arcane language. So often we confuse and complicate.

We would do well to remember that one of the most effective forms of communication is also one of the most straightforward: a simple visual reference that illustrates a clear, comprehensible theme. Look at this. Look at that. Show and tell!

'He who laughs at himself never runs out of things to laugh at.’
Epictetus

It’s a good many years since I studied ancient history at university. Reflecting now on the demise of the Roman Republic, it’s reassuring to think that at least today we don’t have their problems…

'These are the hands that can't help reaching for you
If you're anywhere inside.
And these are the lips that can't help calling your name
In the middle of the night.
Oh, and here is the man who needs to know where you stand.
Don't you know I've done all I can, so decide.
Oh, show and tell.
It's just a game I play, when I want to say
I love you.’
Al Wilson, 'Show And Tell’ (J Fuller)

No. 404

The Textile Sculptures of Magdalena Abakanowicz: ‘We Find Out About Ourselves Only When We Take Risks’

Magdalena Abakanowicz, 1960s, photo artist’s archive

'Art does not solve problems, but makes us aware of their existence. It opens our eyes to see and our brain to imagine.'
Magdalena Abakanowicz

I recently attended an excellent exhibition of the work of Polish artist Magdalena Abakanowicz. (Tate Modern, London until 21 May 2023)

In the 1960s and ‘70s Abakanowicz took tapestries from the wall into three-dimensional space. She made sculptures that were organic, soft and fibrous. And she employed traditional craft skills in the service of high art. Her huge haunting textiles bring to mind vibrant plant life and mysterious foliage; rippling garments and pulsing body parts. These are enchanted environments.

Abakanowicz teaches us that, in whatever field we’re working, we can always rewrite the rules.

'It is easy to follow, but it is uninteresting to do easy things. We find out about ourselves only when we take risks, when we challenge and question.'

Magdalena Abakanowicz, Abakan.
Photo credit D. Cummings-Palmer

Abakanowicz was born in 1930 into an aristocratic family in rural central Poland. Her early years were overshadowed by the Polish-Soviet War, by Nazi occupation and then by Communist rule. She studied at the Academy of Plastic Arts in Warsaw and began her career painting large biomorphic designs on fabric. But her real interest was in weaving.

‘I am interested in constructing an environment from my forms. 
I am interested in the scale of tensions that arises between various shapes which I place in space. 
I am interested in the feeling when confronted by the woven object. 
I am interested in the motion and waving of the woven surfaces.
I am interested in every tangle of thread and rope and every possibility of transformation. 
I am interested in the path of a single thread.
I am not interested in the practical usefulness of my work.’

Abakanowicz was naturally independent minded. From the outset her tapestries dispensed with preparatory designs or templates (‘cartoons’). Rather she improvised on the loom, creating colourful, fluid, abstract shapes, switching between materials with remarkable dexterity - from sisal to wool to horsehair. 

Magdalena Abakanowicz, Abakan.
Photo credit D. Cummings-Palmer

In the mid-1960s she discarded the rectangular format of traditional tapestry. Instead she hung curved fabric forms freely in space. The burnt umber sculptures she created at this time suggest cocoons, shells and insects; a beguiling journey into the forests of her childhood.  

‘Strange powers dwelled in the woods and lakes that belonged to my parents. Apparitions and inexplicable forces had their laws and their spaces.’

Abakanowicz went further still. She took to arranging her fabric sculptures - or what an art critic dubbed ‘Abakans’ - in specially lit clusters, so that they cast compelling shadows and could be in dialogue with each other. She sought to create immersive ‘situations’ or ‘environments’, places to explore and hide.

‘The Abakans were my escape from categories in art. They could not be classified. Larger than me, they were safe like the hollow trunk of the old willow I could enter as a child in search of hidden secrets.’

Abakanowicz employed industrially woven cloth, rope, hemp, burlap, flax and found material. Sometimes her work seems like tall trees or vines; sometimes like strange boulders or pods; sometimes like huge heads or interior organs. You can walk among them, as if through a magical forest or a mysterious alien landscape. There is a sense of comforting softness; of germination and budding; of brooding silence.

Magdalena Abakanowicz, Abakan.
Photo credit D. Cummings-Palmer

‘I see fibre as the basic element constructing the organic world on our planet. It is from fibre that all living organisms are built, the tissue of plants, leaves and ourselves… our nerves, our genetic code, the canals of our veins, our muscles… We are fibrous structures.’

In the 1970s, ‘80s and ‘90s Abakanowicz went on to create humanoid sculptures and outdoor installations, working with metal, wood, stone and clay. All the while she continued to explore humanity’s relationship with nature. She passed away in 2017 at the age of 86.

So often in life and business we are boxed in by convention and tradition. We feel obliged to follow the crowd along the beaten path.

Abakanowicz, the weaver of sculptures, teaches us to deny hierarchies; to transgress rules; to see opportunity everywhere.

‘I like neither rules nor instructions, these enemies of the imagination. I make use of the technique of weaving by adapting it to my own ideas.’

'So tonight, gotta leave that nine to five upon the shelf,
And just enjoy yourself.
Groove. 
Let the madness in the music get to you.
Life ain't so bad at all,
If you live it off the wall.
Life ain't so bad at all.
Live your life off the wall.'
Michael Jackson, ‘Off the Wall’ (R Temperton)

No 403

‘Sunset Boulevard’: Beware the Corrosive Effects of Cynicism, Delusion and Deceit

'You're Norma Desmond. You used to be in silent pictures. You used to be big.'
'I am big. It's the pictures that got small.’

‘Sunset Boulevard,’ Billy Wilder’s classic 1950 movie, holds a mirror up to Hollywood – its cruelty, greed and narcissism. It raises questions about the human cost of the creative industries’ relentless drive for progress and profit.

The film stars William Holden as Joe Gillis, a struggling screenwriter who has been worn down by one too many disappointments.

'Audiences don't know somebody sits down and writes a picture. They think the actors make it up as they go along.’

Gillis is cynical and bitter, short of money and considering packing it all in.

'I'd always heard you had some talent.'
'That was last year. This year I'm trying to earn a living.’

While endeavouring to evade his creditors, Gillis stumbles into the mansion of Norma Desmond, a former silent-film star, now long forgotten. The house is all faded grandeur: heavy ornate furnishings, a bed ‘like a gilded rowboat’, an unused tennis court and pool, an organ that whistles in the wind. Everywhere there are portraits of the star in her dazzling youth.

'The whole place seemed to have been stricken with a kind of creeping paralysis... out of beat with the rest of the world... crumbling apart in slow motion.’

Desmond is a sad, delusional figure. She refuses to accept that the arrival of cinematic sound represented an advance; and that her career is long since over.

'There once was a time in this business when I had the eyes of the whole world! But that wasn't good enough for them, oh no! They had to have the ears of the whole world too. So they opened their big mouths and out came talk. Talk! Talk!’

Desmond’s stiff, taciturn butler Max maintains that she is still a legend beloved by the public. And he forges her fan mail to sustain the deceit.

'You don't yell at a sleepwalker. He may fall and break his neck.’

Learning that Gillis is a writer, Desmond hires him to edit a script she has drafted for her planned return to the screen. Though Gillis thinks the work is execrable, he is happy to take the money. 

'What it needs is maybe a little more dialogue.'
'What for? I can say anything I want with my eyes.’

Gillis moves into the mansion, and, accepting clothes and gifts from the besotted actress, he gradually becomes her paid companion. At night they watch old movies together on her private screen – all of them starring the youthful Norma Desmond.

We realise the melancholy runs deep. Desmond has tried to commit suicide on a number of occasions, and so the locks in the house have been removed. Max is in fact Desmond’s former director and first husband, and he remains pathetically devoted to her. 

Ultimately Gillis’ cynicism, Desmond’s denial and Max’s deceit hold the three central characters in a vortex of self-destruction - one from which they cannot escape.

'No one ever leaves a star.'

Director Wilder introduces further resonances through his casting. He gives the role of Desmond to Gloria Swanson who was herself a major silent star in the ‘20s. Max is played by Erich von Stroheim - a famously fastidious director in the silent era, who shot Swanson a number of times. Indeed in 1929 von Stroheim was fired by Swanson from one of her productions, an incident that ended his directing career. And the ‘waxworks’ that visit Desmond’s house to play bridge in the evenings are genuine silent film actors, including the illustrious comedian Buster Keaton.

'We didn't need dialogue. We had faces.'

‘Sunset Boulevard’ is a story of lives blighted by ambition, success and failure; of the relentless drive of progress; of an industry that devours talent, spits it out and moves on. The film has some lessons for anyone working in a creative business. 

'There's nothing tragic about being 50, not unless you try to be 25.' 

Beware the corrosive effects of cynicism - the misanthropy that deprives Gillis of his intuition and flair. With every new setback the bitterness increases, and the chances of making it next time diminish.

Beware denial of change; yearning for past success and former glory. Where Desmond rages against sound, today’s former heroes resent the advances of performance marketing, data analytics, behavioural science and in-housing.

‘Poor devil - still waving proudly to a parade which had long since passed her by.’

And finally, beware the petty deceptions: the everyday falsehoods that sustain the illusion that everything is fine, when it patently isn’t. Don’t, like Max, confirm the biases and prejudices that are holding back advancement. Don’t bury your head in the sand.  

‘Sunset Boulevard’ ends where it began – with tragedy. Desmond descends her grand staircase. She pauses, and then steps towards the cameras, addressing the attendant press and the audience beyond.

'You see, this is my life. It always will be. Nothing else! Just us, and the cameras, and those wonderful people out there in the dark... All right, Mr. DeMille, I'm ready for my close-up.’

'Are we really happy here
With this lonely game we play?
Looking for words to say.
Searching, but not finding understanding anywhere.
We're lost in a masquerade.’

The Carpenters, ‘This Masquerade’ (L Russell)

No. 402

The Sentimental Wedding Gift: ‘Listening Is Not the Same as Waiting to Speak’

Douglas Volk ‘After the Reception’ 1887
Museum: Minneapolis Institute of Art

‘Actually Jane, you could give me a bit of advice. I’m going to my first wedding as an adult really. And I was wondering what to buy as a gift. How do I go about it?’

I looked over my shoulder and saw a neatly dressed young man in his early twenties quizzing a slightly older woman. They were sat together on the 19 bus a few rows behind me.

‘Well, it’s quite straightforward really, Josh. You just have to imagine the lives of the couple getting married – what they do and like and need and so on – and then you think of something that would be really useful to them.’

‘Right. OK. That’s good. Thanks… I do have an idea, Jane. Do you mind if I try it out on you?’

Jane gave Josh an attentive smile as he explained his proposal.

‘The thing is, the bride – Emily - and I were at school together. We were really close friends. Actually we went out with each other for a while. And then I went to Uni before her and we lost touch for a bit. But then she came to the same Uni as me. And every week we used to visit each other. She’d come to mine or I’d go to hers. And one time she gave me this lovely red bobble scarf. And I used to wear it all around town and whenever we met. It was our thing, I guess.’

I’m not too sure what a bobble scarf is. I imagine decorative woollen balls are involved in the manner of a bobble hat… Thankfully the number 19 was crawling along at a slow pace and I could learn more.

‘Anyway, I was thinking that I could buy Emily a lovely new red bobble scarf, and every time she wears it, it’ll remind her of me and us and then. Don’t you think that would make a really nice wedding gift, Jane?’

Jane gave Josh a cautionary look.

‘I think the wedding gift should be about the couple, Josh. Not just about the bride.’

‘Right, OK’, said Josh, a little crestfallen. He would have to give this a little more thought.

I was quite taken with Josh and Jane’s conversation. 

I imagine that Josh had been somewhat smitten with Emily. He could neither envisage her new life without him, nor hear Jane’s advice about appropriate wedding gifts. He was stuck in his own world of melancholy memory.

'Most of the successful people I've known are the ones who do more listening than talking.'
Bernard Baruch (American financier and statesman)

We talk about listening and empathy a lot nowadays. It’s a truism to say that these are critical contemporary life skills, essential means of navigating a world of complex interactions and nuanced relationships. But how often do we actually listen to each other?  And how often do we properly endeavour to understand and share the feelings of others? Most of us, most of the time, regard the world through the prism of our own experiences and interests. Despite our best intentions, we are trapped.

Listening and empathy require us to set aside our own goals and perspectives. They demand effort, attention and imagination. They are skills to be nurtured and nourished. But ultimately they deliver untold rewards.

'Yet, taught by time, my heart has learned to glow for other’s good, and melt at other’s woe.’ 
Homer, ’The Odyssey’ (XVIII)

After reflecting in silence for a short while, Josh looked up enthusiastically.

‘I know, I’ve got it! I can buy them both a red bobble scarf!’

'Why can't you be
The way I want you to be?
Why can't you see you've got to change
To love me?
It'll never happen again.
It'll never happen again.'
Lady Blackbird, 'It'll Never Happen Again’ (T Hardin)

No. 401

Painters Painting: A Treasure Trove of Creative Approaches and Techniques from the New York School of Artists

I recently watched 'Painters Painting', a 1972 documentary by Emile De Antonio about the New York School of artists working in the city after 1940.

There is no narration, and the film doesn’t actually feature any painters painting. Rather it is comprised of the leading artists of the day (and a handful of dealers, collectors and critics) talking about their work. 

We meet Willem de Kooning with thick-rimmed spectacles, zip up jacket and Dutch accent. There’s Barnett Newman in a bow tie, somewhat breathless. Here’s Frank Stella sitting on the floor in his sneakers, and Robert Rauschenberg on top of a stepladder, addressing us in a soft Texan drawl. Helen Frankenthaler wears a smart cream skirt-suit and sits by the radiator. Jasper Johns prefers a round table, a drink and a cigarette. Andy Warhol positions himself opposite a large mirror and offers evasion and aphorism.

‘Everybody’s influenced by everybody.’

Abstract Expressionism was the first specifically American art movement, and it put New York at the center of the Western art world. After it came Pop Art and Color Field painting, and more besides. The documentary provides a fascinating insight into how some revolutionary creative minds worked, and a real treasure trove of innovative approaches and techniques.

Let’s consider some of the lessons to be learned.

1. Follow the Light

Willem De Kooning grew up in Rotterdam, but in 1926, at the age of 22, he travelled to the United States as a stowaway. He explains how the New World appealed to artists in contrast to the tradition-bound life he left behind.

‘I felt a certain depression over there. I felt caught… The American movies always being the paramount movies, it seemed to be a very light place… They seemed to be very light and bright and happy. I always felt I would come to America, even when I was a boy.’

Helen Frankenthaler, Mountains and Sea, 1952, oil and charcoal on unsized, unprimed canvas, 219.4 x 297.8 cm
National Gallery of Art, Washington.

2. Take a Revolutionary Position

The painters that gathered in New York around this time reacted against the conservative art establishment in Europe. Barnett Newman explains.

‘There was no question that my work… took a revolutionary position you might say, against the bourgeois notion of what a painting is as an object – aside from what it is as a statement. Because in the end you can’t even contain it in the ordinary bourgeois home.’

In time Abstract Expressionism, with its bold, spontaneous articulation of an individual’s feelings, became the dominant movement. Painters began to measure themselves against its leading lights, rather than against artistic tradition. 

‘Both Pollack and Hofmann established American painting as a real thing for me. I didn’t have to go all the way back and worry again about where I stood in relation to Matisse and Picasso. I could worry about where I stood in relation to Hofmann and Pollack.’
Barnett Newman

3. Think Big 

The New York School was often characterised by the scale of its paintings. 

‘The scale of America is different. Most American painters work in what were once small factories, whereas most European artists work in either apartments or studios that were designed in terms of easel painting. There’s no doubt too that there’s a different experience in a large picture. But I think it was more to do with a heroic impulse as compared with the intimacy of French painting.’
Robert Motherwell

As the focus shifted from the easel to the mural, paint was applied, not by carefully controlled brush strokes and tiny movements of the wrist; but rather by big expansive gestures of the arm.

‘I did not want a small gesture, standing at the easel with a sable brush. And having looked at cubism, which can be very detailed and minute and fine and have that essence of the easel and the sable brush, I literally wanted to break free, put it on the floor, throw the paint around.’
Helen Frankenthaler

Barnett Newman Vir Heroicus Sublimis 1950-51

4. Celebrate the Process

With such a radically different approach to creating work, there was a good deal of thought given to the process itself. 

‘I was more interested in the making aspect of Abstract Expressionism than I was in the subject matter. And I mean by that the fact that the artists were handling the materials in a physical way, the fact that they were making paintings.’
Kenneth Noland

Robert Rauschenberg, whose much celebrated Combines incorporated found everyday objects, became fascinated by the properties of his discoveries.

‘You begin with the possibilities of the material and then you let them do what they can do. So the artist is really a bystander while he’s working.’

5. Find a Subject

Inevitably the film is filled with argument and counter-argument. Helen Frankenthaler, the painter of fluid, organic and colourful abstracts, was not interested in displaying her process.

‘A picture that is beautiful, or comes off, or works, looks as if it all was made in one stroke, at once. I myself don’t like to see the trail of a brush stroke, the drip of paint. To me that’s part of a sentiment, or clueing in, that has nothing to do with how a picture hits you.’

Similarly Newman contends that the subject is more important than the process. 

‘I felt the issue in those years was: ‘What can a painter do?’ And the problem of the subject became very clear to me as the crucial thing in painting. Not the plasticity, not the look, not the surface, none of these things meant that much. The issue for me – and I think it existed for all the fellows, for Pollack and for Gottlieb: What we gonna paint?’

Robert Rauschenberg, Canyon, 1959

6. Seek the Universal

So what should that subject be?

For Newman it had to be universal. His paintings appear to be purely abstract, but he gave them titles that hint at big spiritual themes: life and death, and a world living in the shadow of the Holocaust. 

‘I hope that my work can be seen and understood on a universal basis - that is that the language is of nature, that it doesn’t have the necessity of its American labels.’

7. Look Somewhere Else

For Rauschenberg the key to finding a subject is raising your eyes from the narrow confines of art and examining the world around you.

‘I wasn’t interested in attaining a precious state of isolation. I was interested in what was around me. Art doesn’t come out of art, and you don’t work with one foot in the art book, and no painter has ever really been able to help another. I had no interest in being better or worse than any other artist… My paintings are invitations to look somewhere else.’

Rosy-Fingered Dawn at Louse Point, 1963
oil on canvas, Collection Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam

8. Decide What You Refuse to Do

Robert Motherwell, one of the youngest of the New York School, was noted for his black forms on white backgrounds and for his literary and political themes. He suggests that the first step in creation is determining what you’re rejecting or refusing to do.

‘In some ways it’s easier to say what I’m doing by saying what I’m refusing to do. If I look at one of the Open series now, I see that I refused to have it glossy rather than matt; there are no shadows; there’s very little representation; the space is ambivalent in that the line is clearly drawn on a flat surface.’

9. Make Immediate Impact

Newman’s paintings often featured thin vertical lines, or ‘zips’ as he called them - flashes of light at once uniting and dividing the image. He encourages us to work spontaneously and instinctively, to disregard detail.

‘Your first reaction when you meet a person for the first time is immediate. And it’s a total reaction in which the entire personality of a person and your own personality make contact. And to my mind that’s almost a metaphysical event. If you have to start examining the eyelashes and all that sort of thing, it becomes a cosmetic situation in which you remove yourself from the experience.’

Kenneth Noland, who painted circles, chevrons and stripes in bright, bold colours, often described himself as ‘a one-shot painter.’ He rejected preparatory drawing and sketching as part of the redundant Western tradition.

‘If you were in touch with what you were doing, you only had to do it one time.’

Jasper Johns, Flag, 1954-55
(dated on reverse 1954)

10. Push and Pull at Reality

Frankenthaler reflects on the liberating power of art to transform reality.

‘For me learning cubism was the greatest freedom.’

She strikes the white wall at her side as she speaks.

‘That’s flat, but I can make it – if I do it right - play around. So that, because of a color and a shape, things go back miles and come forward yards. Hoffman called this ‘push and pull’.’

11. Act on Your Dreams

In 1954, frustrated with the grand individual expression at the heart of Abstract Expressionism, Jasper Johns burned all his previous work and started introducing symbols, text and numbers into his paintings - so integrating the impersonal with the personal, the representational with the abstract. 

Johns’ new period began with ‘Flag,’ which was prompted by a dream.

‘One night I dreamed I painted a large American flag. And the next morning I got up and I went out and I bought the materials to begin it.’

12. Mean What You Do (and Don’t Mean What Others Do)

Johns makes a compelling case for artistic individuality and integrity.

‘The idea did come to me that I should have to mean what I did. Then accompanying that was that there was no reason to mean what other people do. And so if I could tell that I was doing what someone else was doing, then I would try not to do it.’

Robert Motherwell, Elegy to the Spanish Republic, 108
1965-67

13. Go That Further Step

Over time Abstract Expressionism became the new establishment, and a new generation rebelled against it. Frank Stella complained that its big expansive gestures ‘got lost on the corners.’ Regarding the picture as an object in its own right, rather than as a representation of something, he painted flat cool colourful geometric patterns.

‘[Abstract Expressionism] got to be more of an illustration of energy than an establishment of real pictorial energy. I didn’t want that. I wanted to be able to have some of the virtues of Abstract Expressionism, but still have them under a kind of control. But not control for its own sake, a kind of conceptual painterly control that I thought would make even stronger pictures.’ 

The New York School continued to evolve. Jules Olitski spray-painted large canvases to create dematerialised fields of colour. His process involved taking an idea beyond its natural conclusion.

‘It’s also the taking the chance to play and to wreck, to destroy. I find it very exciting and irresistible to try to go that further step and see what will happen. You get the thought in your head: ‘If over this I put this, or I change this in that way’, spray some more varnish on it, spray a whole pool of glop over it, or over part of it, or any number of things that you can do. What will happen? What will it look like?’

14. Find Human Scale

Finally we return to Newman and the issue of the size of a painting. He suggests that really it’s the scale of the idea that matters.

‘In the end size doesn’t count. Whether the easel painting is small or big is not the issue. Size doesn’t count. It’s scale that counts. And the only way you can achieve human scale is by the content.’

So. A free flowing collection of insights and observations about the creative process. Free flowing, because that’s the way the film is structured, and because that was the spirit of the New York School.

I hope nonetheless that you find something encouraging in here as you embark on 2023.

Happy New Year!

'Everyone has a destiny, so do I.
I got no time to waste.
I'm the star in my life, you see.
Yes, it's me and only meant for me.
Gonna get myself together, enjoy my life forever.
Not thinking of you, because you made me blue.
Shame on you, because my love was true, it was true.
Gonna get, gonna get over you, over you.
Tomorrow I know I'll get over you.’

France Joli, 'Gonna Get Over You’ (W E Anderson)

No. 400

The Passionate Activism of Käthe Kollwitz: ‘I Was Put In This World To Change It’

 Käthe Kollwitz, Head of a Child in its Mother’s Hands

'I have never been able to carry out any work coolly. On the contrary it is done, so to speak, with my own blood.’
Käthe Kollwitz

I recently attended a fine exhibition of female German artists from the early decades of the twentieth century. (‘Making Modernism’ is at the Royal Academy, London until 12 February.)

I was particularly taken with the work of Käthe Kollwitz, a committed socialist who preferred print to painting because it was a more accessible, democratic medium. Kollwitz presented us with aching images of humanity, frail and fragile, raw and vulnerable. She portrayed struggle, hardship, tragedy and grief. She believed that art could illuminate suffering, and ultimately change the world.

‘I felt that I have no right to withdraw from the responsibility of being an advocate. It is my duty to voice the sufferings of men.’

Käthe Schmidt was born in Königsberg, Prussia in 1867. Her father, a house builder, was a radical Social Democrat and her mother came from a family of strict Lutherans.

‘Middle-class people held no appeal for me at all. Bourgeois life on the whole seemed to me pedantic.'

Educated at the School for Women Artists in Berlin, in 1891 she married Karl Kollwitz, a doctor tending to the poor in that city, and they had two children together. In the family apartment she created etchings, lithographs and drawings of working people and sailors; of destitute weavers and revolutionary peasants.

‘Sorrow isn’t confined to social misery. All my work hides within it life itself, and it is life that I contend through my work.’

Käthe Kollwitz,Woman with Dead Child, 1903.
Etching on paper. 42.4 x 48.6 cm. © Käthe Kollwitz Museum Köln.

Kollwitz was haunted by mortality: the early passing of her younger brother when she was a child; the near death of her elder son from diphtheria; and then the loss of her younger son in the First World War. She had initially supported his wish to enlist and would forever regret it. Afterwards she became an ardent and outspoken pacifist.

'I have received a commission to make a poster against war. That is a task that makes me happy. Some may say a thousand times that this is not pure art.... But as long as I can work, I want to be effective with my art.’

Kollwitz’s trauma is ever-present in her art. A skeletal figure grasps at a mother from behind, as a desperate infant reaches up to her in vain. Death touches a young boy as he sleeps. A woman cradles her deceased child on her knees, her eyes closed in grief.

‘As an artist I have the right to extract the emotional content out of everything, to let things work upon me and then give them outward form.’

There is a strong sense in Kollwitz’s work of the preciousness of life. She focuses, close-up, on tender gestures, on rare moments of intimacy.

A mother presses her baby to her face. Another holds the head of her sleeping child between gentle hands. Two lovers embrace in desperate passion. A couple nestle against each other in silence. This intimacy extends to Kollwitz’s excursion into sculpture. A woman, head bowed, balances her infant on her shoulder, as if to say: this is all that matters.

'Look at life with the eyes of a child.’

Käthe Kollwitz,Self-portrait, 1889.
Pen, brush and ink on drawing carton. 31.2 x 24.2 cm. © Käthe Kollwitz Museum Köln.

There is tenderness too in Kollwitz’s self-portraits. At 22 - with short hair, plain clothes and a sturdy hand gripping a lapel - she seems ready to take on the world. At 67 she looks worn out, her brow lined, her lips pursed, her eyes dark with disappointment.

'No longer diverted by other emotions, I work the way a cow grazes.’

Kollwitz had reason to look depressed in the later image. The previous year, 1933, the Nazi government had forced her to resign from her position as professor at the Prussian Academy of Arts. Her work was removed from museums and she was banned from exhibiting.

'I do not want to die... until I have faithfully made the most of my talent and cultivated the seed that was placed in me until the last small twig has grown.’

Käthe Kollwitz, German, Woodcut, 1929

In 1936 Kollwitz was visited by the Gestapo, and threatened with arrest and deportation to a concentration camp. Protected by her international reputation, she survived. In 1943 her house was bombed, and many drawings and prints were lost. She died in Moritzburg, near Dresden, just 16 days before the end of the war.

'One day, a new ideal will arise, and there will be an end to all wars. I die convinced of this. It will need much hard work, but it will be achieved… The important thing, until that happens, is to hold one's banner high and to struggle… Without struggle there is no life.’

The silent intensity of Kollwitz’s work may seem a million miles away from the world of commercial communication. Ours is a field of big bold statements, grand themes and trivial messages. But perhaps we should recognize the power of human intimacy: the quiet word, the gentle touch, the sensitive gesture. And like Kollwitz we should be fuelled by a willingness to struggle and an appetite for change.

‘I was put in this world to change it.’

Time for a festive break.
Have a restful Christmas. 
Next post will be on Thursday 5 January 2023.
See you on the other side, I hope.

'My dear acquaintance, it's so good to know you,
For strength of your hand
That is loving and giving.
And a happy new year,
With love overflowing,
With joy in our hearts,
For the blessed new year.
Raise your glass and we'll have a cheer
For us all who are gathered here.
And a happy new year to all that is living
To all that is gentle, kind, and forgiving.
Raise your glass and we'll have a cheer.
My dear acquaintance, a happy new year.’

Regina Spektor. 'My Dear Acquaintance (A Happy New Year)’ (P Horner / Peggy Lee)

No. 400

Living in a Lorem Ipsum World: Sometimes We Need to Talk Less and Say More

Bust of Marcus Tullius Cicero

'The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.'
Hans Hofmann

When I first entered advertising, I was quite taken with the employment in typesetting of ‘lorem ipsum’: dummy text that acted as a placeholder in layouts until the proper copy was written.

'Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat….’

In developing press ads we would establish the headline, image and art direction first, and leave the precise copy for a later date.

‘Just ‘lorem ipsum’ it for now.’

‘Lorem ipsum’ has been in use in the printing world since the 1500s. Nowadays you’ll see it in web-build and digital publishing. It is often referred to as Latin gibberish. But in fact the standard text derives, albeit in corrupted form, from a treatise on ethics by the ancient Roman lawyer, politician and writer Marcus Tullius Cicero.

‘Lorem ipsum’ starts mid-way through a sentence:

‘Neque porro quisquam est, qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit, sed quia non numquam eius modi tempora incidunt ut labore et dolore magnam aliquam quaerat voluptatem.’

These lines have been translated as follows:

‘Nor again is there anyone who loves or pursues or desires to obtain pain of itself, because it is pain, but because occasionally circumstances occur in which toil and pain can procure him some great pleasure.’

This passage suggests that first century BC writers could be as prolix as their twenty-first century equivalents. Cicero should perhaps have limited himself to a simpler sentiment:‘No pain, no gain.’

'Writing is 1 percent inspiration, and 99 percent elimination.’
Louise Brooks

I spent nearly all of my time in advertising at BBH, an agency whose creative output was led by an art director. As a result it had a very particular relationship with words. We liked a precise, provocative headline; an insightful, memorable endline. But we were consistently cautious around long copy. Many’s the time I sat in a script review with co-founder John Hegarty when he would approve the overall idea, but ask for the dialogue to be stripped back, or erased completely.

‘I’m not sure we really need all those words, do we?’

Sometimes nowadays it feels like we live in a ‘lorem ipsum’ world. Everywhere we look - in business meetings and in the media; amongst clients and colleagues, politicians, and journalists - there seems an incredible capacity for producing dummy text. People trot out cliches and platitudes, sound-bites and slogans. They just drone on - without hesitation or deviation, but with a good deal of repetition - until they are interrupted or muted. They’re ‘talking loud and saying nothing.'

'Be sincere, Be brief, Be seated.'
Franklin Delano Roosevelt

The ability to speak continuously with confidence is a talent of sorts. But, over the course of my working life, I found that the colleagues who had the most impact on meetings, and whose careers advanced with the greatest velocity, were those who restricted themselves to fewer and better statements; more concise and memorable observations; more thoughtful and provocative ripostes.

Perhaps we should all learn to talk less and say more.

'Don't tell me
How to do my thing,
When you can't, 
Can't do your own.
You're like a dull knife,
Just ain't cutting.
You're just talking loud
And saying nothing.’

James Brown, 'Talkin' Loud and Sayin’ Nothing’ (B Byrd / J Brown)

No. 399

The Mediocre Pioneer: You Don’t Need to Be First, But You Do Need To Be Fast

Still from Lights of New York

‘This is a story of Main Street and Broadway – a story that might have been torn out of last night’s newspaper.’
Opening titles, 'Lights of New York'

Warner Brothers’ 1927 movie 'The Jazz Singer' is celebrated as the first feature-length film with sound. It presents six songs performed by Al Jolson and contains two minutes' worth of synchronized talking. Famously Jolson’s first spoken words are: 

'Wait a minute, wait a minute, you ain't heard nothin’ yet.'

However, the rest of the dialogue in 'The Jazz Singer' is conveyed through the caption cards that were standard in the silent era. 

The first truly all-talking feature film is a lesser known work. 

'Lights of New York,' a crime drama directed by Bryan Foy was released by Warner Brothers the year after ‘The Jazz Singer.’ It was originally intended as a low budget, two-reel short. Foy had no experience with features. But while the studio heads were out of the country for the European premiere of ‘The Jazz Singer’, he filled out the plot and shot four reels more than promised. His costs went from the allocated $12,000 to $23,000.

Warners had been planning to make the first all-talkie a prestige picture and they ordered Foy to cut the film back to its originally agreed length. But the money had been spent and, after a couple of positive private screenings, the studio determined to give 'Lights of New York' a nationwide release in its full 57-minute duration.

‘This 9 o’clock town is getting on my nerves.’

A small-town innocent is duped by bootleggers into borrowing money and setting up a barbershop in New York. He soon realises that his business is merely a front for a speakeasy - The Night Hawk, a club ‘where anything can happen and usually does.’ To make matters worse, our hero’s sweetheart, who works as a performer at the club, has caught the eye of its crooked boss. A consignment of liquor is stolen, a cop is murdered, a lover is jilted, the good guy is framed. There is a gripping climax.

‘Lights of New York’ is an entertaining enough yarn and an interesting piece of social history. It immerses us in Prohibition era America and is rich with authentic city slang.

‘You know I’m not a squealer, don’t you? I’ve always been on the up-and-up.’

‘This guys got a streak of yellow a yard wide.’

‘I want you guys to make him disappear. Take him for a ride.’

Despite these charms, the new sound technology imposed considerable constraints on the production. Actors cluster round a microphone strategically placed in the telephone on a desk. They huddle near a lampshade, squat around a hat stand, congregate next to a vase of flowers. It’s all a little awkward.

Most contemporary critics were unimpressed. While The New York Times recognised the film's significance as ‘the alpha of what may develop as the new language of the screen,’ other reviewers were scathing.

‘In a year from now everyone concerned will run for the river before looking at it again.’
Variety
‘It would have been better silent, and much better unseen.’
The New Yorker  

And yet the brickbats did not deter audiences, who were simply thrilled by the novelty of sound. The movie grossed $1.2 million at the box-office and by the end of 1929 Hollywood was exclusively producing sound films. The silent era was over.

What are we to learn from ‘Lights of New York’? It’s not a great movie and it’s rarely watched nowadays. As US golfer Walter Hagen once famously observed: 

‘No one remembers who came in second.’

Nonetheless, the film plays an important part in the history of cinema and it was incredibly profitable in its day. 

Foy demonstrated that in times of change you’ve got to sidestep bureaucracy, recognise that there’s only a brief window of opportunity and seize the day. When an industry is reinventing itself, actions speak louder than words. You don’t need to be first, but you do need to be fast. 

Sometimes timing trumps quality. And sometimes it’s smart to be a mediocre pioneer.

‘You want me to hide all my feelings.
And you want me to stop loving you.
But I’m a woman filled with pride.
I’ve been hurt deep inside.
I find it’s easier to say than do.’

Bettye Lavette, ‘Easier to Say (Than Do)’ (BB Cunningham and G McEwen)

No. 398

Helen Saunders, Forgotten Pioneer: Don’t Let Anyone Paint Over Your Contribution

Helen Saunders (1885-1963), Vorticist composition (Black and Khaki) c 1915 Drawing . The Courtauld, London. © Estate of Helen Saunders.

‘I don’t really paint ‘in order to keep well’, but rather try to keep well ‘in order to paint.’’
Helen Saunders

I recently attended an exhibition of the work of Helen Saunders. (The Courtauld, London, until 29 January 2023)

Saunders was one of the pioneers of abstract art in Britain, a founding member of the radical Vorticist movement. She painted images that celebrated the modern world with vibrant colours, harsh lines and jagged edges. Yet the show is a small affair, as so very little of her work survives. This is a melancholy tale of talent unrecognised and unrewarded.

Saunders was born in Ealing in 1865, the daughter of a solicitor, and she studied at a number of London art schools. Her early work took a post-Impressionist approach – simplifying, abstracting, flattening – rather beautiful depictions of a friend’s face in profile, a mother and child, a solitary tree.

Helen Saunders. Portrait of a woman, c1913. Drawing. The Courtauld, London (Samuel Courtauld Trust). © Estate of Helen Saunders.

Saunders became friends with the artist Wyndham Lewis, who in 1914 established Vorticism, a modernist movement that exalted the dynamism of urban life and the machine age. She signed its manifesto in the first issue of BLAST magazine, deliberately misspelling her surname to avoid embarrassing her conservative family. She contributed two drawings and a poem to the second issue the following year and participated in two Vorticist exhibitions, in London and New York.

Saunders’ work of this period displayed the dynamic geometry, bold lines and bright colours typical of Vorticism. A long-limbed figure is fired from the barrel of a gun. A giant frees himself from his bonds, sending little people scampering in all directions. A nude woman with a mask-like face lies in a hammock, completely distraught. There’s a mysterious figure with an ovoid head, claw fingers and an orange halo. There’s an electric evocation of jazz music. There are energetic abstract designs, fizzing with life. 

During the First World War Saunders worked in the government censor’s office. She also acted as Lewis’ unpaid secretary while he was away on active service - renting out his rooms, typing his manuscripts, mounting drawings that he sent home from the front.

Helen Saunders. Copyright The Estate of Helen Saunders. © Estate of Helen Saunders.

After the war Lewis turned his back on the ‘bleak and empty geometrics ‘of Vorticism. And at the same time he turned his back on Saunders. She was deeply hurt. What’s more, the brutal conflict had dented her own enthusiasm for modernity. And so she decided to move on in her art, adopting a more realist style.

Saunders withdrew from the male dominated creative scene to paint still lifes, landscapes and portraits. Frustrated when galleries rejected her work, she exhibited only sporadically.

‘I am still a solitary by nature... What I fear more than anything else is the monotonous stampede of other people’s thoughts through my mind when my own thoughts are too tired and dissipated to give battle to the invaders.’

Helen Saunders’s Hammock (around 1913-14). The Courtauld, London (Samuel Courtauld Trust); © Estate of Helen Saunders

In 1940 much of Saunders’ work was destroyed when her flat in Holborn was bombed in the Blitz. And in the years that followed her contribution to the birth of abstract art in Britain was gradually marginalised, not least because Lewis claimed all the credit. 

‘Vorticism, in fact, was what I, personally, did, and said, at a certain period.’
Wyndham Lewis in 1956

Perhaps Saunders was also a victim of her own modesty.

‘I feel myself that I have had some of the best luck in the world and some perhaps of the worst! But NO – other people have had far worse misfortunes.’

On New Year’s Day 1963 the 77 year old Saunders died of accidental coal gas poisoning in her top floor flat in Holborn. It had been a very cold night.

If you pop upstairs from the Saunders exhibition, you can see ‘Praxitella’, a 1921 portrait by Wyndham Lewis of his partner of the time, film critic Iris Barry.

Praxitella by Wyndham Lewis,

For some years scholars have suspected that this portrait was painted over another work. It has an uneven texture and traces of red appear through cracks in the surface. It’s not unusual for artists to re-use a canvas - perhaps they are dissatisfied with a previous painting, or they’re just being economical with materials.

When recently Courtauld students Rebecca Chipkin and Helen Kohn applied X-ray technology to ‘Praxitella,’ they found an abstract composition lying underneath. But this was not a Lewis work. Rather it matched a Saunders painting from 1915, ‘Atlantic City.’ This piece had been reproduced in black and white in BLAST, but had long since been thought lost.

The X-ray of Lewis’ Praxitella beside a reproduction of Saunders’ Atlantic City © the Courtauld / Estate of Helen Saunders

The Courtauld has used technology to create a partial colour reconstruction of ‘Atlantic City.’  We are presented with a fragmented modern metropolis, a collision of boardwalks, coastlines and hotel buildings, in bright greens, reds and yellows. It really is quite striking. And also profoundly sad.

Why did Lewis paint over Saunders’ work? He wasn’t short of money at the time. Was it arrogance, jealousy or just plain spite? We can only guess.

We may recognise something of this injustice in the world of commerce. 

In our field credit tends to be apportioned at awards ceremonies, in case studies and in corporate folklore. Heroes are identified, critical moments are located and a narrative is composed. In the course of this process, it’s not unusual for there to be a subtle rewriting of history, a change of emphasis, an adjustment of the cast list. And sometimes success is attributed to an individual ‘genius’, rather than to the broader team.

We may feel that we’re not bothered by this; that there’s no point arguing about the past; that we should keep our eyes on the future. We may wish to keep our own counsel. But it is a responsibility of leadership to ensure that credit is distributed, not to the loudest voices and the sharpest elbows, but according to merit and fact. We should never allow anyone’s contribution to be painted over.

'All I've ever wanted was an honest life,
To be the person that I really am inside.
All I've ever needed was a little time to grow,
A little time to understand all the things that I know,
So I can listen to you lovingly instead of getting up to go.
Some people take a little more time to grow.
Right when you have it all figured out,
Life comes to throw you another doubt.
But my head's up high, and I ain't got nothing but time,
To work at living an honest life.’
Courtney Marie Andrews, 'Honest Life'

No. 397

‘As Simple As Possible, But Not Simpler': What I Learned from My Minimalist Muesli

'Complexity means distracted effort. Simplicity means focused effort.’
Edward de Bono

There was a curious chapter in my childhood when I decided to make my own muesli. 

It was the late 1970s. And I recall associating the cereal with all things healthy, natural and European. Sort of Abba, Heidi and Ski Sunday combined in a breakfast bowl.

I set about enhancing a base of oats with some sultanas and raisins I had located in the larder. And then I added some peanuts I bought from Ken’s the Newsagent. Once bathed in a generous dash of red-top milk, my muesli slipped down extremely well.

And yet, after I’d got through the first batch, it occurred to me that preparing the cereal had been quite a bothersome business. All that mess, measurement and surfaces that needed wiping down. (I confess I’ve always been a little lazy in the kitchen.) I wondered if I could achieve the same level of satisfaction by withdrawing an ingredient or two. And so I made the second batch without sultanas. And the third without peanuts. 

Still my muesli was pretty tasty. I congratulated myself on a job well done. With minimum fuss.

It was only when, a few weeks later, my Mum ran out of dried fruit supplies, that my Minimalist Muesli failed to deliver.

‘You’re just eating cold porridge, Jim,’ she observed one morning as she rushed past me on the way to work.

She was right. Somewhere along the road of reduction my Minimalist Muesli had stopped being muesli at all.

'Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.’
Albert Einstein

In business we often crave simplicity. It is perhaps worth reminding ourselves why we value it so highly. And why we must take care when pursuing it.

The world seems to be getting ever more convoluted and confused. So many partners and platforms; data and decisions; routes to market and radical futures. This complexity reduces comprehension and retards action. We risk being swamped in information, fatigued by change, paralysed by choice.

'There is a point of complexity beyond which a business is no longer manageable.’
Peter Drucker

The reason we pine for simplicity at work is that it reduces friction and increases efficiency. It makes things easier to understand, execute and communicate. Properly articulated, simplicity unifies and inspires. It gets us marching in the same direction, to the same drumbeat.

'That’s been one of my mantras - focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex. You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.’
Steve Jobs

We should celebrate and reward people who can reduce and distil; condense and concentrate; clarify and crystalise. These are precious skills in an ever more fragmented world. Because simplicity is the great accelerator.

We just need to be mindful that there is a point at which simple turns to simplistic. I guess that’s the point at which my Minimalist Muesli recipe became cold porridge.

'Simple and true,
I just don't know
What I'm gonna do without you.
Simple and plain,
And I just don't know
How I would ever say it any other way.
Simple and true,
I still love you.’

Sara Bareilles, ’Simple and True'

No. 396