Byron’s Decoupage Screen: Reflecting on Celebrity, High Art and Low Culture

Decoupage Screen, Front and Reverse

'What is the end of fame? 'tis but to fill
A certain portion of uncertain paper:
Some liken it to climbing up a hill,
Whose summit, like all hills, is lost in vapour;
For this men write, speak, preach, and heroes kill,
And bards burn what they call their "midnight taper,"
To have, when the original is dust,
A name, a wretched picture, and worse bust.’
Lord Byron, ‘Don Juan’

At a recent visit to the National Portrait Gallery in London, I came across a large folding decoupage screen once owned by Lord Byron.

Decoupage is the art of decorating an object by gluing onto it coloured paper cut-outs from prints or magazines; and then finishing it with a special paint or varnish. Practiced by craftsmen in Italy and France during the eighteenth century, decoupage had become a fashionable hobby by Byron’s time.

This six-foot high, four-panelled screen was created around 1814 by Henry Angelo, Byron’s fencing coach. It could have been used to block out drafts or afford some privacy. Or perhaps it was simply intended for the poet’s amusement. 

The screen is covered on one side with notable characters from English theatrical history: portraits of Shakespeare, Sarah Siddons and Edmund Kean; scenes from plays and representations of monuments. 

On the other side we find bare-knuckle boxers in action poses – long forgotten figures like Jack Broughton and James Figg; Tom Cribb and Tom Molineaux, the formerly enslaved American fighter. These pictures are surrounded by biographies and accounts of bouts cut from the pages of Pierce Egan’s Boxiana or Sketches of Ancient and Modern Pugilism.

'The best of prophets of the future is the past.'
Lord Byron, Journal 1821 

It’s a rather beautiful object in its own right. Busy, bustling, bursting with life. An early nineteenth century version of Pop Art; a scrap-book of contemporary enthusiasms. It’s also a fascinating historical document. It demonstrates that the gifted poet did not just have his head in the clouds. He had a passion for sport and the dramatic arts; for popular culture and celebrity. He was a fan.

'But words are things, and a small drop of ink,
Falling, like dew, upon a thought produces
That which makes thousands, perhaps millions think.'
Lord Byron, ‘Don Juan’

Detail of painting: George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron, in Albanian costume, painted by Thomas Phillips in 1813

We think of celebrity as a phenomenon of the modern era. But the public have been obsessing about famous people for centuries: athletes were lauded in archaic Greek poetry; actors kept the company of political leaders in Pericles’ Athens; gladiators were feted in ancient Rome; emperors had their profiles stamped on coins that travelled to every corner of their domain.

The cult of celebrity runs deep. We imagine we know these special individuals, that we have insight into their thoughts and feelings. We admire their looks and talents; their taste and wit. We aspire to their glamorous lifestyle. We love and envy them.

The phenomenon has, of course, been magnified by successive revolutions in media: from the printing press to radio and cinema; from television to social networks. In Byron’s time awareness of famous people was circulated through the booming platforms of periodicals and prints. Each innovation fuels the public’s appetite to know a little more, to get a little closer.

'Oh, talk not to me of a name great in story;
The days of our youth are the days of our glory;
And the myrtle and ivy of sweet two-and-twenty
Are worth all your laurels, though ever so plenty.’
Lord Byron, Stanzas Written on the Road Between Florence and Pisa

In the world of advertising, celebrities have long been recognised as vehicles for conferring recognition and positive associations. Although consumers know that money has changed hands, there’s still a sense that their hero has endorsed this brand; that they genuinely like and use it. A form of cognitive dissonance, I suppose.

I confess that when I worked in the industry I tended to avoid celebrity campaigns. For me they entailed borrowed interest, taking a conceptual short-cut. And of course they often came at a high price and with reputational risk. But there’s no denying their effectiveness when brand and spokesperson act in synergy. People adore celebrity.

'All who joy would win must share it. Happiness was born a Twin.'
Lord Byron, ‘Don Juan'

Detail from Screen

I was particularly taken with the fact that Byron was a fan of both high art and low culture: theatre and boxing. As an adolescent I was concerned that my admiration of Homer and Handel; Goya and Graham Greene might be undermined by my devotion to sixties soul music and the Likely Lads. But then – prompted by Melvyn Bragg and the South Bank Show – I came to appreciate that different moods have different cultural modes; that any individual has multiple facets to their personality. 

It’s only human to seek out both the spiritual and the everyday, the sacred and the profane. We should just follow our passions.

'There are four questions of value in life, Don Octavio. What is sacred? Of what is the spirit made? What is worth living for and what is worth dying for? The answer to each is the same. Only love.'
Lord Byron, ‘Don Juan’

'Who killed Davey Moore?
Why an' what's the reason for?
"Not us", said the angry crowd
Whose screams filled the arena loud.
"It's too bad he died that night,
But we just like to see a fight
We didn't mean for him to meet his death,
We just meant to see some sweat.
There ain't nothing wrong in that.
It wasn't us that made him fall.
No, you can't blame us at all.”'

Bob Dylan, 'Who Killed Davey Moore?'

No. 466

‘Trying to Trap the Fact’: The Distorted Truth of Francis Bacon

Head VI

‘We are all animals if you care to think about it. It’s just that some people are more aware of the fact than others.’
Francis Bacon

I recently visited an excellent exhibition of the work of Francis Bacon. (‘Man and Beast’ is at the Royal Academy, London until 17 April.)

It was an unsettling experience.

Bacon painted crucified carcases, snarling Furies, beast-people caught in cuboid cages; dogs, chimpanzees and owls trapped and snared, howling and baying; bullfights, bestial heads and screaming Popes; writhing, twisting, tormented lovers; butchered meat, muscle and sinew, blood and bone. 

‘We are meat, we are potential carcases.’

Bacon’s work was all physical pain and mental anguish; violence and voyeurism. He wanted to convey to us that the veneer of civilisation is thin and fragile; that we are driven by carnal impulses; that we are essentially beasts. He revealed the animal within, caught between rage and fear, in tortured isolation. His aim, he said, was to ‘unlock the valves of feeling and return the onlooker to life more violently.’

Sometimes the horror in his paintings is brought home by the presence of the everyday: of flowers, umbrellas and hats; of chaises longues and tubular steel furniture. (Bacon spent a brief period in the late 1920s as an interior designer.) This is the banality of evil.

‘Most people live a kind of veiled life and tend to disguise what they are, what they want, what they really feel.’

Fragment of a Cucifixion

Bacon’s fascination with man’s animal nature and his dark vision of life were perhaps shaped by his upbringing in County Kildare, Ireland. Born in 1909, he was the son of a retired army officer who trained horses, had a violent temper and a taste for field sports. The young Bacon suffered from chronic asthma, a condition that was triggered and amplified by contact with animals. 

‘The whole horror of life, of one thing living off another.’

No doubt Bacon was also influenced by the slaughter of World War I; by the debauchery he saw in the clubs, bars and brothels of Berlin and Paris between the wars; by his time spent as an ARP warden during the Blitz, recovering bodies from London bomb sites; by consciousness of the Holocaust and the atom bomb; by his trips to the bush in southern Africa; by his adventures in the dark alleys of Soho.

‘I have looked at books of wild animals… because those images excite me and every so often one of them may come up to me and suggest some way to use the human body.’

Bacon was also inspired by his diverse interests. He was an enthusiast for art history, admiring Michelangelo, Velazquez, Rembrandt and Goya. He treasured Eadweard Muybridge’s pioneering studies of animal motion. He read anatomical texts and medical manuals, magazines of wildlife photography and books on big game hunting and bullfighting. He had a passion for Egyptology and classical literature.

‘Reading translations of Aeschylus opens up the valves of sensation for me.’

Study of a Dog 1952

Bacon channelled all this stimulus into his work. For example, his repeated representations of a primal scream were informed by Poussin’s ‘Massacre of the Innocents’ and the terror-stricken shriek of the nursemaid in Eisenstein’s ‘Battleship Potemkin.’

‘I did hope one day to make the best painting of the human cry.’

I was particularly struck by the lateral leaps Bacon took from inspiration to execution. A 17th century Velasquez painting of Pope Innocent X, in all his pomp and power, becomes an expression of existential pain and panic. A barn owl in flight becomes a crucified figure. A diving pelican becomes a Fury. Two wrestlers become two lovers. 

There is a lesson for us all here. We should not expect inspiration to be literal and logical. Rather it catches us off guard, from out of left field. It creeps up on us where and when we least expect it. We often talk about creative leaps. Strategists must leap too.

At first Bacon’s work seems all contorted, twisted and warped. But then we realise that with all this distortion he is seeking to capture a brutal truth about sensation. What he is saying is crystal clear.

‘I think the very great artists were not trying to express themselves. They were trying to trap the fact.’

'I never thought that this day would ever come
When your words and your touch just struck me numb.
Oh and it's plain to see that it's dead.
The thing swims in blood and it's cold stoney dead.
It's so hard not to feel ashamed
Of the loving, living games we play
Each day.
The hardest walk you could ever take
Is the walk you take from A to B to C.’

The Jesus and Mary Chain, 'The Hardest Walk’ (J & W Reid)

No. 360

When No One Is Watching: The Generous Strategist

Goya, Fight with Cudgels

One evening some years ago I was returning home on the bus after playing football at Paddington Rec. It had been a satisfying game overall: John’s jinky runs down the wing; Dylan’s early goal and late tackles; Tim’s frustration with lost pace and youth.

I had the whole team’s kit in a big blue holdall with a view to washing it for the next match. (In my later years I found I could contribute more off the pitch than on it.) I alighted at the Angel and crossed the main road onto Camden Passage.

Suddenly there was a woman’s scream from down the street, and a young man came sprinting towards me.

I’d say I’m generally pretty slow to assess situations, but in this instance I had my wits about me. I could see a shiny leather object flapping at the man’s side as he accelerated towards me. He had evidently stolen a handbag from the woman still shouting in the distance.

The thief looked fit, fast and strong. Now he was very close. I froze to the spot. What to do?

With a rush of blood to the head I took my big blue holdall and drove it straight into his midriff. It was like a training manoeuvre I’d rehearsed in rugby practice when I was a kid.

We both flew dramatically to the floor. Somewhat startled and out of breath, the thief stared me straight in the eye. Then, without a word, he was up and off, into the cold dark night, leaving a small red clutch bag on the pavement behind him.

I rose to my feet, dusted myself down and returned the bag to the victim. She was too upset to be grateful.

I looked to left and right.

Alas. No admiring bystanders. No congratulatory applause. No security cameras recording my feat for posterity. I wouldn’t be appearing in tomorrow’s Evening Standard.

A melancholy thought struck me. I’m not a particularly brave person. This would probably be one of the rare occasions when I’d have something to be proud of. But my heroism had gone unseen, unrecorded, unremarked.

So often in life our best moments pass without comment. Our best jokes go unheard; our sharpest looks go unnoticed; our most romantic gestures go unwitnessed. It’s the difference I guess between the real world and the movies.

Although nowadays we are more than ever concerned with validation, affirmation and endorsement, we most of us learn at an early age that we can’t live life for an audience - because an audience is not always around when we need it.

Indeed some would say that the best measure of a person’s character is his or her unobserved behaviour.

'Integrity is doing the right thing, even when no one is watching.'
CS Lewis

‘Quality means doing it right when no one is looking.’
Henry Ford

There’s an important lesson for the world of work here. Whilst careers cannot progress without recognition, we shouldn’t pursue recognition as a means of progressing.

We’re none of us impressed by the colleague who performs with an eye on the top dog; who is endlessly agreeing with the big cheeses, echoing their opinions, applauding their successes; who sends self-aggrandizing, celebratory emails ‘cc my boss.’

The great John Bartle felt strongly that planners should contribute ideas without claiming authorship; that there was more chance of collective success if individuals were not striving for acknowledgement; that the best strategists were generous at heart.

‘Success has many parents, failure is an orphan - be happy to let others take the credit and success is more likely.’
John Bartle

I’m sure he was right. In my own experience, the moment we have a dispute over input, the output suffers; the moment we seek ownership of an idea, we reduce its chances of being realized; the moment we demand personal credit, we diminish esprit de corps.

There have been times over the years when the planning discipline, individually and collectively, has been desperate to assert the value of its contribution; yearning to be recognized as first among equals. I’ve always taken this as a sign of weakness, not strength. It’s certainly unattractive.

Ultimately the generous strategist will get noticed. Not for individual authorship perhaps; but for serial contribution to collective success; for ongoing participation in a winning team.

There was nothing else for it. I hoisted the big blue holdall onto my back and made my way wearily home – time to have my tea, watch some telly and wash the sweaty kit. Unseen, unnoticed, unobserved.

No. 177

NOTES FROM THE HINTERLAND 12

‘Still Learning’: Goya and the Key To a Long Career

I recently attended the splendid exhibition of Goya portraits at The National Gallery in London.

I had previously considered Francisco de Goya y Lucientes a painter of martial horrors and grim nightmares. He was clearly deeply moved by the cruelty on all sides in the Peninsular War. And, following an illness in his mid-40s, for much of his life he was profoundly deaf, a condition which no doubt precipitated dark thoughts.

But Goya’s portraits are light, fresh and vivacious. He characterises Spanish nobles and royalty as warm and approachable; academics, soldiers and clergy as thoughtful and affable. Their humanity reaches out to us across the centuries. Some scholars attribute the vibrancy of Goya’s work to the fact that he added the final highlights to his pictures at night. In his Self Portrait before an Easel you can see how he had adapted his hat to carry candles.

Goya may not have been quite the tortured artist of my imagination. He died at the ripe old age of 82 in an era when the average life expectancy in Spain was 40. And he was painting right up until the end. What was the key to his long, productive career?

Well, firstly Goya must have been graced with supreme skills in client management. He survived turbulent times as the Spanish court underwent one regime change after another: from the Inquisition to the Enlightenment to the return of reactionary conservatism; from Spanish Kings to English generals to Napoleon’s puppet rulers. After the departure from Madrid of the imposed French monarch, a number of Goya’s paintings were denounced as ‘obscene’ by the reinstated Inquisition and the artist was obliged to go through a ‘purification’ process to clear him of collaboration. But somehow Goya clung on his position at court. It made me think of the summersaults an Agency undertakes to retain business through the merry-go-round of CEOs and Marketing Directors.

Goya’s recipe for career longevity certainly includes perseverance and principle. A few years before his death, the artist’s finances were in a terrible mess. Yet he stubbornly refused to reissue his most successful series, Caprichos, in order to generate funds. He wrote to a Spanish friend, ’I’ve no more sight. No hand, no pen, nor inkwell. I lack everything – all I’ve got left is will.’

However, perhaps the critical determinant of Goya’s long and successful career was his appetite for new skills and new forms of expression.

Goya only started painting portraits at the age of 37. Before then he had been making a successful living as a religious artist and tapestry designer. He was a master of etching, but late in his career he embarked afresh on a series of miniatures in ivory and he taught himself the new techniques of lithography (drawing directly onto limestone).

Towards the end of his life Goya created a rather moving black crayon etching of an old man with a long grey beard hobbling along on two walking sticks. It carries the inscription ‘I am still learning’ (‘Aun aprendo’).

It was around this time that a friend wrote of Goya, ‘He is deaf, old, awkward and weak…But so happy and anxious to see the world.’

If We Want To Raise the Bar, Do We Have To Lower the Tone?

‘There is an inherent conflict between that which is highly viewable and that which is highly illuminating.’

William F Buckley

I commend to you the recent documentary film Best of Enemies. It tells the story of the 1968 televised political debates between two ‘public intellectuals’ at the height of their powers, William F Buckley and Gore Vidal. Buckley was the hero of modern conservatism; Vidal was a leading novelist and liberal critic.

The ABC television network, coming a distant third in the ratings war behind NBC and CBS and working with a constrained budget, commissioned the debates to liven up its coverage of the 1968 Republican and Democratic conventions. (‘The Unconventional Convention Coverage.’) Buckley and Vidal were invited to consider the issues raised by the day in conference and the broader political context. ABC got more than they bargained for. Intellectual blows were landed, insults flew and ratings soared.

The debates demonstrated that the public had an appetite for intelligent discourse, but only if it was delivered with the added sauce of confrontation and conflict. The coverage ushered in the combative approach to politics that has cursed American television news discussion ever since.

 ‘Argument is sugar and the rest of us are flies.’

​Richard Wald, Former ABC News Senior VP

It would be easy to concede that the public have always had a taste for strife. But we should beware of confusing long-held convention with timeless truths.

I suspect the American audience of the late ‘60s was responding to an era of polite media consensus. They wanted change. Is not the reverse true in the modern world? Are we not fatigued with artificial altercations and bar room bickering?

Could there possibly be a growing appetite for serious, intelligent debate without the staged spats and squabbles?

Beauty Beyond Reach

‘We’re not ugly people.’
Carol

The magnificent movie Carol conjures up romance in the New York of 1952.

It’s a beautiful world of bulbous cars, wide shouldered overcoats and streamlined dresses; of fur coats, clutch bags and cat eye sunglasses; of bright reds, coral and taupe; of dry martinis in the Oak Room and endless cigarettes.

It is a world of inordinate beauty, but one where the ultimate beauty, true love, is elusive. It is seen through car windscreens, obscured by crowded rooms; it is just out of reach, observed from a distance; it is mediated by convention and bigotry.

In marketing we’re endlessly endeavouring to make our brands more accessible and attainable. But there’s a special romance, a special beauty, about that which we can’t attain; that which is just out of reach.

‘Too far away from you and all your charms.
Just out of reach of my two empty arms.’

 Just Out of Reach (Of My Two Empty Arms)/ V Stewart/Performed by Solomon Burke

No. 59