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

Dubuffet: Waging a War Against Cultural Conditioning

Jean Dubuffet - 'Landscape with Argus' 1955

‘Millions of possibilities of expression exist outside the accepted cultural avenues.’
Jean Dubuffet

I recently visited an excellent exhibition of the work of French painter Jean Dubuffet. (‘Brutal Beauty’ is at the Barbican, London until 22 August.)

Dubuffet was a singularly independent thinker. He rebelled against established artistic norms. He celebrated art created by people not considered artists. He worked with materials, processes and concepts that expanded our understanding of what art could be. He created new worlds of beauty and meaning. He was an outsider.

'Without bread we die of hunger, but without art we die of boredom.’

Let us consider what Dubuffet teaches us about the creative mindset.

1. Reject ‘Cultural Conditioning’

Dubuffet was born in Le Havre in 1901 to a family of wine merchants. In 1918 he moved to Paris to study painting at the Académie Julian. After just six months he packed it all in, finding the formal training too restrictive and conservative. 

Henceforth Dubuffet spent a lifetime kicking against what he regarded as ‘cultural conditioning.’

'Our culture is like a garment that does not fit us, or in any case no longer fits us. This culture is like a dead language that no longer has anything in common with the language of the street. It is increasingly alien to our lives.’

Dubuffet travelled to Italy and Brazil, pursued his own studies in music, poetry, and languages. And when he returned to France in 1925, he established himself as a vintner in Paris. Over the next twenty years, he rarely picked up a paintbrush. 

2. Seek Creativity ‘in its Pure and Elementary State’

Since the 1920s Dubuffet had been interested in art created by psychiatric patients, prisoners and children. He admired the honesty, directness and vitality that he saw in such work, and applauded the fact that it didn’t adhere to any tradition or movement. He coined the term Art Brut (‘raw art’) for work produced by non-professionals outside aesthetic norms. And in 1948 he co-founded the Compagnie de l’Art Brut, which collected more than 1,200 pieces by over 100 artists for its ‘museum without walls.’

Art Brut embraced a diverse set of styles and themes. At the Barbican exhibition you can see Madge Gill’s elegant pen and ink designs of fashionable women; Auguste Forestier’s characterful carved wooden beast; and Laura Pigeon’s mournful blue abstracts. There are dense graphic patterns, architectural constructions, psychedelic creatures and a collage map of France.

‘It is my belief that only in this Art Brut can we find the natural and normal processes of artistic creation in their pure and elementary state.’

3. ‘Plug into the Present’

Inspired by the sights of war-ravaged Paris, Dubuffet took up painting again in 1942. He made lithographic prints that looked like defaced walls. Over formal text from French and German newspapers, he scrawled graffiti suggestive of secret Resistance messages.

‘The key is under the shutter.’
‘I’ve been thinking of you.’ 

Dubuffet was determined that his art should respond to the real world, not to any artistic fashion or convention.

‘I aim for an art that is directly plugged into our current life.’

Jean Dubuffet - Wall with Inscriptions, April 1945

4. Embrace the Editorial Power of Memory

In the late ‘40s Dubuffet developed his own primitive style of portraiture. Having spent hours staring at a sitter, he withdrew to his studio and painted entirely from recollection, creating what he called ‘a likeness burst in memory’. His work was cartoonish, childlike and raw, focusing on a few distinguishing features, rather than seeking to capture a detailed resemblance. 

'In portraits you need a lot of general, very little of specific.’

5. Employ Unorthodox Materials

Dubuffet liked to work with unconventional materials. He mixed thick oil paint with sand and cement, pebbles and plaster, string and straw, glass and gravel. He applied razor blades and sandpaper to the paste, scratching and slashing it to give it texture. 

'Mud, rubbish and dirt are man's companions all his life. Shouldn't they be precious to him, and isn't one doing man's service to remind him of their beauty?'

Dubuffet also experimented with ‘assemblage’, creating collages with found materials; with butterfly wings or remnants of previous paintings. He made figures from steel wool, charcoal, vines and lava stone; from the debris of a burnt-out car.

'Art should be born from the materials.’

6. Explore the Landscape of the Mind

Between 1947 and 1949 Dubuffet travelled to Algeria for inspiration. He learned Arabic and lived with Bedouin communities in the desert. On his return to Paris, with the aid of his sketchbooks, he sought to capture the spirit of the places he had visited.

'Art addresses itself to the mind, and not to the eyes.’

Dubuffet’s landscapes were brimful of mysterious patterns, shapes and contours, the horizon relegated to a thin distant strip at the top of the canvas. He believed that these paintings could articulate interior as well as exterior truths.

‘I have been concerned to represent, not the objective world, but what it becomes in our thoughts.’

Jean Dubuffet - ‘Landscape in Metamorphosis’

7. Think Micro Macro

In 1957, prompted by his time in Vence, Dubuffet embarked on his ‘Texturology’ paintings. He adopted a technique used by Tyrolean stonemasons, which involved shaking a branch loaded with paint over fresh plaster in order to soften its colour. The tiny spattered dots in subtle shades of cream, brown and grey suggested both the delicate beauty of a microscopic world and the infinite allure of the cosmos.

‘Teeming matter, alive and sparkling, could represent a piece of ground … but also evoke all kinds of indeterminate texture, and even galaxies and nebulae.’

Jean Dubuffet - 'The Exemplary Life of the Soil (Texturology LXIII)’, 1958

8. 'Start All Over Again from the Beginning’

In 1961 Dubuffet returned to Paris and realised that he needed a fresh start.

‘I live locked up in my studio doing - guess what? - paintings in the spirit and manner of those I was making in 1943. I have decided to start all over again from the beginning.’ 

Dubuffet set about capturing the vibrant spirit of what he called the ‘Paris Circus’: the posters, traffic, restaurants and bars – an urban realm of chaotic, colourful energy.

‘I want my street to be crazy, my broad avenues, shops and buildings to join in a crazy dance.’

9. Find Inspiration in the Unconscious

In 1963 Dubuffet was inspired to take another new direction by some doodles he made during a telephone call. In his ‘L’Hourloupe’ series he created his own highly stylized graphic world of fluid shapes, coloured in with blue and red stripes; of twisting and turning jigsaw figures, full of vim and vigour.

'It is the unreal that enchants me now.’

Next Dubuffet breathed life into this doodle-universe by inventing a one-hour spectacle, ‘Coucou Bazar.’ He choreographed ‘theatrical props’ -  some static, some powered by motors - with live dancers, dramatic lighting and a musical accompaniment  - which he stipulated should be ‘brutally loud with abrupt interruptions of silence.’

Jean Dubuffet - ’Skedaddle'

10. Let the Imagination Bleed into the Everyday

’The things we dearly love, which form the basis of our being, we generally never look at.'

In the late ‘70s Dubuffet returned to assemblage. For his ‘Theatres of Memory’ series he created enormous collages with layered fragments of old paintings. Crude cartoon characters jostle with bold abstract shapes and colours. Trees and masks are enmeshed with fierce monochrome patterns. 

When they were exhibited in New York in 1979, these works inspired a new generation of artists, including Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat. 

Dubuffet said he was concerned with how our imagination bleeds into our impressions of the everyday world. 

'What interests me about thought is not the moment when it crystallises into formal ideas, but its earlier stages.’

Dubuffet died from emphysema in 1985. He was 83. He had endeavoured to return art to untutored primitivism. Constantly reinventing his process and style, he sought relentlessly to explore interior and exterior truths; to blur the boundaries between the psychological and the real, the micro and the macro.  And in so doing he created magical worlds of beauty and vitality. 

'For me, insanity is super sanity. The normal is psychotic. Normal means lack of imagination, lack of creativity.’

Above all, Dubuffet raged against tradition and taste, custom and convention: what others decree as ‘normal’. Creativity should not follow any prescribed path or respect any established practice. It should be an unshackled expression of self. 

’There is only one way of being normal, and a hundred million ways of not being normal.’

'Express yourself.
Express yourself.
You don't ever need help from nobody else.
All you got to do now,
Express yourself.
Whatever you do,
Do it good.
Whatever you do, do, do, 
Do it good, all right.
It's not what you look like
When you're doin', what you're doin’.
It's what you're doin', when you're doin'
What you look like you're doin’.
Express yourself.
Express yourself.’

Charles Wright and the Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band, 'Express Yourself’ (C Wright)

No. 326

Basquiat Watching Telly: You Need Input If You’re Going To Create Output

The artist in 1983 at his studio on Crosby Street.Roland Hagenberg

‘I don't think about art when I'm working. I try to think about life.’
Jean-Michel Basquiat

In 1967 a seven-year-old Brooklyn kid was playing stickball in the street when he was hit by a car. Confined to hospital to recover from his injuries, his mother gave him a copy of the textbook ‘Gray’s Anatomy’ to amuse him.

Years later when Jean-Michel Basquiat was an artist, the imagery that he had absorbed from that book repeatedly made its way onto his canvases - as skulls, spines and skeletons; as cross-sections, labels and anatomical diagrams. Basquiat had a special skill for translating his personal experiences into his work.

‘I never went to an art school. I failed at the art courses I did take at school. I just looked at a lot of things, and that’s where I think I learned about art.’

Basquiat, whose parents were Haitian and Puerto Rican, grew up with an instinctive love of art. As a child his mother took him to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and as a teenager he regularly visited galleries with his mates.

Leonardo da Vinci’s Greatest Hits, 1982

After leaving school at 17, Basquiat joined the vibrant post-punk creative scene that congregated around the run-down streets of lower Manhattan. With a friend he began spraying surreal, witty, provocative graffiti-poetry, under the SAMO© tag, all over SoHo and the Lower East Side. With another friend he created collage-based post cards and sold them on the street for a dollar or two. (His customers included his hero Andy Warhol.) He formed a band named Gray after the book that had made such an impression on him as a kid. He DJed at clubs and parties; acted in an art-house movie; hung out with members of the burgeoning hip-hop scene. And when eventually he turned to painting, he sold his first picture to the musician Debbie Harry.

Basquiat was an artistic autodidact. He saw no boundaries between media and he thrived within a networked creative community.

Basquiat was also a sponge for knowledge, inspiration and stimulus. His paintings are filled with references to his love of music (from bebop to hip hop); to his passion for sport (Sugar Ray Robinson, Floyd Patterson, Joe Louis); to the art history books he read (Da Vinci, Titian, Manet, Picasso, Duchamp); to his interest in the African American experience. All these elements are mixed in with the planes, automobiles and skyscrapers of his native city; with birds, masks and demons; with crowns, hats and halos; with icons of popular culture; with the enigmatic political poetry that he had first expressed in his graffiti.

‘I’m usually in front of the television. I have to have some source material around me to work off.’

There’s some fascinating film footage of Basquiat in 1985 sketching and making notes in front of the telly. He was clearly processing the material from one medium directly onto another; allowing himself to respond freely and intuitively, loosely and spontaneously. Across his work there are references to the cartoons, sci-fi shows and movies he had been watching – to Popeye and Felix the Cat; to ‘Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea’ and ‘Apocalypse Now.’

‘It’s sort of on automatic most of the time.’

Untitled 1982

Basquiat was special. He synthesized low and high culture; words, images and symbols; personal memories and public knowledge; the present and the past. He orchestrated his responses to the world, channeled and filtered them into one compelling, magical brew. And he seems to have captured something about what it is to live in these super-fast, over-choiced, hyper-connected, ethically-conflicted times.

Sadly in 1988 Basquiat died from a heroin overdose. He was 27.

So often the marketing and communications business is insular, introverted, isolated. For inspiration we consider adjacent markets, sectors, campaigns and brands; we examine our competitors and Cannes winners, popular ads and award books. But we rarely look beyond our own orbit.

Basquiat teaches us some simple lessons: that true creativity knows no boundaries; that it thrives within a Bohemian culture; that it needs constant stimulus, provocation and experience to sustain it; that if we want to make interesting work, we should seek catalysts from beyond our immediate environment.

You need input if you’re going to create output.

‘Basquiat: Boom for Real’ is at the Barbican in London until 28 January 2018.

No. 164

NOTES FROM THE HINTERLAND 5

‘Words Without Thoughts Never To Heaven Go’

Bernardo: ‘Who’s there?’
Francisco: ‘Nay, answer me: stand and unfold yourself.’
Hamlet, I i.

Some have argued that the opening lines of Hamlet are entirely appropriate: this night-time exchange between two guards on the walls of the castle at Elsinore immediately establishes a sense of doubt about identity, a theme that sustains us through the play.

In a bold break with tradition, the director of the Hamlet currently being staged at The Barbican in London chose instead to start her production with the famous ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy. Too bold for some, and it was announced last week that the experiment would be discontinued.

Should one side with the purists and demand respect for genius and tradition? Or should one applaud brave endeavour, even when it doesn’t succeed?

I found that, the longer I was in business, the more I had to guard against instinctive conservatism. ‘We’ve tried that before. It didn’t work.’ Age and experience can at once enhance one’s judgement and diminish one’s appetite for change.

I saw the Barbican Hamlet in preview. Benedict Cumberbatch has a strong, charismatic take on the troubled Prince; the sets are magnificent; and the production has many good ideas.

When you revisit great works, different scenes leap out at you. This time I was struck by the passage in which Hamlet’s uncle, the villainous Claudius, who has murdered Hamlet’s father and married his widow, tries to pray for forgiveness. At length Claudius concedes that, since he is still in possession of ‘my crown, mine own ambition and my queen,’ he cannot hope for absolution. His prayers are empty without genuine remorse.

‘My words fly up, my thoughts remain below:
Words without thoughts never to heaven go.’
Hamlet III, iii

Creative businesses are sadly cursed by hollow words and empty promises. We all too publicly worship at the altar of creativity without properly demonstrating our faith in day-to-day behaviour. Talk is cheap. And our belief is sorely tested when the god Mammon steps into the meeting room. Perhaps we should, like Claudius, appreciate that ‘words without thoughts never to heaven go.’

Scepticism Is Healthy for Business Too

Trouble in Paradise is a sophisticated screwball comedy from 1932, directed by Ernst Lubitsch. A romance between two upmarket con artists is tested when one of them falls for a society heiress, their next intended victim.

The film is fast paced, knowing and wry. And so beautifully written. The society heiress, Madame Colet, rejects a suitor’s advances thus:

‘You see, Francois, marriage is a beautiful mistake which two people make together. But with you, Francois, it would be a mistake.’

It’s reassuring to discover that scepticism about advertising and business was alive and well in the ‘30s. Madame Colet has inherited a perfume business and her brand is advertised thus:

‘Remember, it doesn’t matter what you say. It doesn’t matter how you look. It’s how you smell.’

In another scene Giron, the Chairman of the Board of Colet et Cie, confronts our hero Gaston, now acting as Madame Colet’s advisor:
Giron:  ‘Speaking for the Board of Directors as well as for myself, if you insist in times like these in cutting the fees of the Board of Directors, then we resign.’
Gaston:  ‘Speaking for Madame Colet as well as for myself, resign.’
Giron:  'Very well…We’ll think it over...’

I understand that in this month’s Alphabet announcement there was a nod to the HBO comedy Silicon Valley (The Guardian, 11 Aug 2015). There’s a great tradition of comic writing about commercial culture. The Office reflected business life as it is, not as we would want it to be. Nathan Barley shone a light on Shoreditch lunacy, with extraordinary prescience and what now looks like understatement. And the recently departed comic genius, David Nobbs, gave us Reggie Perrin, the middle management mid-life crisis that is sadly all too familiar.

Scepticism is healthy. It calls business to account. It shows that the public is alert to our shortcomings.
Better to be mocked than to be ignored.

Can Commerce Integrate Art and Science?

The Festival of the Opening of the Vintage at Macon by JMW Turner shows ordinary folk dancing in a beautiful bucolic scene. A few years ago research was published indicating that Turner’s depiction of the sun in this painting was based on the latest scientific thinking of his day. (The Guardian, 13 November 2011)

It transpires that Turner, whilst studying art at the Royal Academy, also attended science debates at the Royal Society, which was housed in the same building. And in particular it is suggested that Turner attended the lectures of the astronomer William Herschel, who had been examining the surface of the sun.

As an artist Turner was comfortable with, and actively interested in, science. The scientist Michael Faraday was a good friend and he knew mathematicians, palaeontologists and chemists. Science inspired him. His commitment to observe nature first hand is captured in the myth that he lashed himself to a mast during a storm, just so that he could understand the conditions; an experience that supposedly prompted my favourite Turner painting, Snow Storm - Steam Boat Off A Harbour’s Mouth. 

I regret to say that, when I grew up, art and science were taught as polar opposites. We imagined that scientists had different shaped brains and we rarely socialised with them. This dualism extended even to our TV viewing: the scientists watched The Body in Question; we arts scholars watched Brideshead Revisited (the show that launched a thousand fops)…

It’s compelling to note that many of today’s more interesting movies, dance and theatre productions concern themselves with science. The Theory of Everything had us trying to keep up with Stephen Hawking; the great Wayne McGregor creates dance inspired by neuroscience; Nick Payne’s recent Royal Court hit, Constellations, looked at a human relationship in the context of quantum multiverse theory.

Though I’ve barely a scientific sinew in my body, I believe that the future of marketing and communications will occur at the intersection between art and science. It’s logical. It's inspiring.

No. 44