Louise Campbell, Studio Lives. Architect, Art And

Format de citation Walker, Lynne: Rezension über: Louise Campbell, Studio Lives. Architect, Art and Artist in 20th-Century Britain, London, 209, in: Reviews in History, 2020, March, DOI: 10.14296/RiH/2014/2379, heruntergeladen über recensio.net First published: https://reviews.history.ac.uk/review/2379 copyright Cet article peut être téléchargé et/ou imprimé à des fins privées. Toute autre reproduction ou représentation, intégrale ou substantielle de son contenu, doit faire l'objet d'une autorisation (§§ 44a-63a UrhG / German Copyright Act). The Romantic image of the starving artist painting in a threadbare garret and refusing to bend his talent to please a Philistine public could not be further from the artists and their studios considered in Louise Campbell’s Studio Lives. Although the imagination of artists (and public) was often haunted by Bohemianism, even the archetype Bohemian Augustus John, who famously rejected the studio in favour of a caravan and the open road, commissioned two architect-designed studio dwellings, one modelled on Rembrandt’s house in Amsterdam and the other, a stylish modernist studio in the garden of his newly modernised country house. Built between the late 19th century and Second World War in Britain (or more precisely England), artists’ studios, studio houses and studio flats, featured here, were sites of the production of art for sale on the commercial market, as well as places created for personal expression and accommodation in town and country. Funded by either the sale of work or by inheritance, studios acted as signifiers of artistic and professional identity that both represented and promoted economic success and social position. Throughout the 20th century architects were perceived as over- controlling often thought to have behaved with little regard to clients’ needs or concerns. ‘No flowers but my flowers’, the Scottish architect, Charles Rennie Mackintosh barked to a hapless person who had placed an unauthorized bouquet in the architect’s work. However, Campbell makes the argument that artists’ visions—and egos—were more than a match for architects when it came to the design of studio dwellings. As Alice T. Friedman found in Women and the Making of the Modern House, the idea of the architect as sole creative force in the design can be challenged and remodelled through a reassessment of the interplay of architect and client, showing a more interactive, positive relationship than habitually credited. Looking at the early 20th century, Campbell provides evidence of an even greater role and closer collaboration for artist-clients in the creation of their homes and studios working with architects who were, perhaps surprisingly, open to their ideas and opinions. Moreover, artists, such as Roger Fry and Dora Gordine, who designed their own studio houses, obviated the need to compromise or negotiate and demonstrated that the architect could be confidently dispensed with for the provision of workplace and accommodation. Synthesising the best recent publications in the field, the text of Studio Lives is richly detailed and amimated by the author’s own archival research. To guide the reader, a firm structure is given—and needed— with chapters and sub-headings organised chronologically and thematically in four overarching sections which mark shifts in the concept of the studio: ‘Legacies’ (c.1875-1910), ‘The Studio as Home’ (c.1910-1920), ‘After the Victorians’ (1920s), ‘On Display: Domesticity, Masquerade, Modernism’ (1930s). Linking ‘art and where it is made’ (p.7), the studios of ten artists and three artist-couples set up broader discussions about inhabitants’ ideas, working practices and their relationships with fellow artists and architects. Intended for specialists and general audience alike, each section of the book, which draws on social history as well as the history of art and architecture, is prefaced by a short informative introduction to frame the narrative and provide helpful background information before considering individual case studies, which range widely, but focus on one key studio, or in the case of G.F. Watts, an estate devoted to making art. The rituals of display and access by the visiting public to ‘show studios’ in the Victorian period are understood as the starting point for artists’ control over their own exhibitions and sales, useful for cultivating clients and spreading their reputations. G.F. Watts was central to the Victorian Studio Tradition—Campbell’s ‘Legacies’—with its rituals of display and access by the visiting public to the artists’ studios, a fundamental development earlier depicted in Giles Walkely’s Artists’ Houses in London 1764-1914. With Ernest George as architect, G.F. Watts and his wife, Mary Watts, an artist-craftswoman, built Limnerselease, a studio- house, which became the centre of a sprawling complex of art workplaces for creating painting, sculpture and the decorative arts which included a large gallery that became a lasting memorial dedicated to his work. Pursuing rural and decorative crafts and influenced by philanthropic motives, Mary Watts organised and trained local villagers who learned gesso and terra cotta work which were executed in a mortuary chapel under her direction and later developed as a pottery to provide employment. Limnerslease became a place of pilgrimage for sitters, visitors and journalists. G.F. Watts—Il Signor, as he was reverentially called— benefited from the new technologies of photography, which Campbell emphasises, to record his work, make it available for reproduction in the press and reinforce his image as England’s most admired artist. The illustrated press featured vivid portrayals of the lives of artists and other new celebrities ‘at home’ from the 1880s. Henry James observed that this was the ‘age of interviewing’ in which the public was more concerned with the artist or writer than their work. Campbell usefully extends the fashioning of artists and their lives for public consumption in newspapers, magazines and art journals to popular ‘art novels’ and short stories, which often blurred studio fact and studio fiction. The eclectic blend of fact and fiction, myth and history, narrative and personality in the art novel should not, however, lead to its underestimation. Popular fiction established Paris as the home of young artists and shaped artistic aspirations for generations. Campbell observes that the proliferation of Paris-based novels in English, such as George du Maurier’s massively popular Trilby (1893) and Tarr (1916/18) by Wyndam Lewis, indicated ‘a faltering cultural confidence among British writers’ (p.33). But artists too would have felt this impulse and were drawn to French art and practices not least idea of the studio as a vital material and metaphoric place. ‘The Studio as Home’, especially a family home, is most aptly represented by the studio and workshop of Henry Payne, who brought the workshop-studio together with domesticity as a key element in his wholistic approach to life, work and family based on the principles of the Arts and Crafts Movement. After a busy and productive life teaching at the Birmingham School of Art, Payne, a painter, designer and maker of decorative arts, moved to the Cotswolds with idea of setting up an artistic community, acquiring more workspace and creating a comfortable house for himself, his wife and children in rural surroundings. A Cotswold neighbour, the Arts and Crafts architect and designer Sidney Barnsley, collaborated with him easily and with a light touch to convert an unmodernised medieval manor house into a functioning home and workplace with a garden, which is thought to have been laid out by Henry’s partner, Edith Payne, and Barnsley. The remote and countrified surroundings did however not remove Payne from national civic work, most notably, the project of the Liberal government of 1906 for a series of historical mural paintings in the Palace of Westminster. The Liberals wanted to represent the development of modern political structures and were advised by the historian, G.M. Trevelyan, who called for paintings that evoked ‘living, many-coloured and romantic history’, which, he asserted, ‘could bring the past alive for ordinary people’ (p.50). For his contribution, Payne was asked to represent the ‘The Origin of the Parties’. Choosing to paint from literature rather than history, his ‘Plucking the Red and White Roses in the Old Temple Gardens’ from Shakespeare’s Henry the VI, Part I. shows in vivid Pre-Raphaelite detail Richard Plantagenet and the Earl of Somerset taking up their opposing symbols. Illustrated in full colour in Studio Lives, the finer points of historical accuracy were of less importance than dramatic effect and rich decoration, while the garden setting depicts the artist’s studio-home where the mural was painted. Other national and artistic identities were depicted and advanced through studio building by both sculptors and painters in the inter-war period. The sculptor, Dora Gordine, an émigré to England from Latvia (then part of the Russian Empire) via Berlin, Paris and Singapore designed a studio-house on the edge of Richmond Park, ‘Building for Art’ in Campbell’s phrase. She made a place for herself in the British art world by combining an architectural debt to the spatiality and materials of Sir John Soane with an unabashed manipulation of her ‘Russianness’, which was overtly opposed —artistically and politically—to the Soviet regime and its revolutionary art of Constructivism. Instead of non- representational Soviet art, Gordine’s sculpture was figurative and individualistic. Made in studios on the ground and first floors and displayed in the first-floor gallery, her tinted bronzes were viewed through a sequence of dramatically lit spaces. Of almost equal importance for self-fashioning a cosmopolitan and politically correct image was the décor of Dorich House itself, its furniture, rugs and ceramics, which signalled the occupants’ allegiance to the art of south- east Asia —and to the imperial cultures of Britain and Russia.

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