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and fantasy’ (p.17). The war drawings have if short, chapters. These build up to show been covered in two publications and nu- how such ideas were interconnected. My Dear BB . . . : The Letters of merous exhibitions and catalogues of war With another of these ideas – the solid- Bernard Berenson and Kenneth Clarke, artists, but Alan Powers provides an intelli- ification of Impressionism – Boccioni reveals 1925–1959. Edited and annotated by Robert gent summary of Ardizzone’s war. some of Futurism’s internal dissonance. In the Cumming. 538 pp. incl. 50 b. & w. ills. Ardizzone’s commercial work, execut- chapter titled ‘Why We’re Not Impression- (Yale University Press, London and New ed under the name Diz, is covered in one ists’ Boccioni carefully defines what the York, 2015), £25. ISBN 978–0–300–20737–8. chapter. Although he was deprecatory about Italian movement takes and discards from its this work, it pushed him to find solutions French predecessors. Indeed, based on sim- Re viewed by ROBERT B. SIMON to new problems and directed him to alter ultaneity of line and colour, Boccioni’s book his style, albeit modestly. He illustrated invokes numerous antecedents, even pro- IN SEPTEMBER 1925 the twenty-two-year- company posters, film posters, Christmas ducing art-historical diagrams of Futurism’s old Kenneth Clark was brought to dine cards, advertisements and menu covers. His distant and recent predecessors. at I Tatti by Janet Ross, then the doyenne magazine commissions included covers for It is the time after, not before, the fabled of Anglo-Florentine society and the first Punch and Radio Times. His work for John Futurist tabula rasa of 1909 that marks out of dozens of luminaries from the cultural, Harvey & Sons of Bristol and other wine this book. Unlike the manifestos written be- political and social worlds that populate merchants was sometimes paid in bottles, fore a Futurist work of art was made, Futurist these letters. By the following day Bernard not cash. The most peculiar commission Painting Sculpture was written during the most Berenson had invited Clark, then a third- was the production of murals for a passenger fervent period of Boccioni’s career, and thus year history undergraduate at Trinity liner; these panels were removed when the provides an insight into the evolution of his College, Oxford, to become his assistant for ship was decommissioned and still exist in theory and practice. As Maria Elena Versari’s a proposed new edition of his Drawings of the P&O Collection. detailed introduction explains, Boccioni had the Florentine Painters. The immediate affin- The author concentrates on the artist’s completed a first, much shorter draft of the ity of the two would be explored, deepened work and comments on Ardizzone the man book by 1st December 1912, the end of the and questioned over the nearly thirty-five only when doing so informs our under- year in which the Futurists opened their no- years treated in these letters, which read less standing of the art. The book reproduces torious first group exhibition in Paris, and as art-historical dialogue than the corres- initial drafts, colour work and master copies then took up sculpture. He continued to pondence of passionate – if at times con- to demonstrate the processes involved. Final write throughout 1913, the year he launched flicted – lovers. printed pages show the layouts of text and his one-man sculpture show in Paris, includ- We can only speculate at what sparked image that Ardizzone supervised. The qual- ing numerous articles for the new Futurist their lifelong friendship. Certainly their ity of the reproductions is fittingly high. A review Lacerba (some of which became part approach to looking at paintings, rooted as chronology, endnotes, bibliography and of the book), which led to spats with fellow it was in experience and sensuous response, index make this a comprehensive source for Futurists and Parisian contemporaries alike. must have been critical. In one of the earliest those interested in a prominent figure in Through comparison of the published letters Clark confesses that he ‘spent hours British book illustration. text with the 1912 and 1913 manuscripts at the N.G. looking at Titians & Bellinis & in the Getty Research Institute’s Boccioni feeling some of them for the first time’. That papers, Versari traces the artist’s developing letter was written to Mary Berenson, whose ideas. Most noticeably, his increasing use of correspondence with Clark, as well as that the word ‘plastic’, particularly in conjunc- between Berenson’s companion Nicky Futurist Painting Sculpture (Plastic tion with ‘states of mind’, coincides with Mariano and Clark’s wife, Jane, is wisely Dynamism). By Umberto Boccioni. his shift from symbolism to the analysis of included in this volume. Edited by Maria Elena Versari, translated form. Versari’s introduction also substantial- Among the most telling parts of the cor- by Maria Elena Versari and Richard Shane ly refines our understanding of Boccioni’s respondence are those that involve Clark’s Agin. 304 pp. incl. 51 col. + 13 b. & w. ills. philosophical, scientific and political matrix. museum career and Berenson’s concern that (Getty Publications, Los Angeles, 2016), Through recontextualising his ideas, she administrative, social and political obliga- $49. ISBN 978–1–60606–475–7. convincingly argues that the intertwining tions would divert Clark from the lofty am- of avant-garde art and politics could be the bitions and goals that they shared. Clark’s Reviewed by ROSALIND McKEVER book’s fil rouge. professional success was rapid: from his The book had a political function. This appointment to the Selection Committee ENGLISH TRANSLATIONS OF Futurist rhetoric edition, like the original, includes Futurist for the Italian Exhibition of 1930 (which may no longer be a rarity, but this edition manifestos, exhibition lists of works and il- Berenson opposed), to being appointed of Umberto Boccioni’s 1914 book is a very lustrations (many in colour) by Boccioni and Keeper at the Ashmolean Museum the fol- welcome addition, providing a more nu- others, to make it a major reference work on lowing year, and Director of the National anced account of Futurist art and theory Futurist art. The 1914 original was a success- Gallery in 1933. Berenson cautions against from the pen of the movement’s most prom- ful ambassador. Not only did its illustrations petty connoisseurship (‘Let others decide inent artist.1 From its staccato title onwards, inspire collectors such as Eric Estorick, but which tenth rate drawing is by Pulcio di Boccioni’s analyses of Futurism’s prede- within a decade of its publication, it had been Ceaccio and which other is by Ciaccio di cessors, contemporaries and audiences, and referenced by Kazimir Malevich, Richard Pulcio’) and the potential pitfalls of a ca- impassioned defences of the movement, echo Huelsenbeck and Vasily Kandinsky. This reer at Oxford: ‘You certainly would be in the manifestos. The language is bombastic English edition should aid Futurist art’s ever- clover to be in such a toy-shop for grown- and the content weighted towards repudi- improving reputation among historians of ups’, but ‘the post will fix you down in the ating Futurism’s enemies. Yet in writing a the international avant-gardes. world of collectors, curators, dons’ and you

seventeen-chapter book, about forty times 1 would become ‘embogged in a pudding. It longer than a manifesto, Boccioni could The classic edition of Futurist Manifestos, edited by is perhaps the finest pudding in the world, Umbro Apollonio (London 1973), has been superseded luxuriate in the time and space he had syn- by L. Rainey, C. Poggi and L. Wittman, ed.: Futurism: but pudding all the same’. thesised in his art and writing. Ideas such as An Anthology, New Haven and London 2009. The latter Clark writes almost apologetically that ‘force-lines’, ‘dynamic complementarism’ contains Boccioni’s article ‘The Plastic Foundations his National Gallery ‘appointment is only and the interpenetration of planes, previous- of Futurist Sculpture and Painting’, which became a for five years, after which I can retire & ly confined to a paragraph, are given whole, chapter in the book under review. lead a reasonable life, having worked the

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poison out of my system’, while Berenson genuine bond that held the two together and developments in style and technique that is more encouraging about both the public that Clark described after a visit to I Tatti just were made in England and America since the and private benefits: ‘The N.G. will be a before the outbreak of the War: ‘There was beginning of the century [. . .] and to give school in which you can be headmaster and a flow of reason and learning combined with their country a new conscience and spiritual first pupil all at the same time’. However, a genial warmth which made me feel I was perspective?’ (p.1). Simpson’s book provides twelve years later, when Clark resigned his living in a golden age of culture, a sunset of a culturally multifarious and exhilarating post, Berenson writes, ‘I congratulate you. culture no doubt, but none the less beautiful answer. You will now be able to devote yourself to for that. I loved every minute of it’. As with Lehmann’s field of literature, so tasks more worthy of your gifts and I look In this volume their correspondence is with painting, book design and forward to the results’. reproduced in full, which inevitably means illustration, music and theatre. The stellar The playful wit that the two enjoyed is that there are repetitive topics of lesser inter- figure in the last category was , present from the first, as when Clark ‘attrib- est to the contemporary reader – the medical famed internationally for her crime novels utes’ his new-born son Alan: ‘it seemed to travails of spouses, requests for photographs, but more celebrated by literati me abnormally ugly, but people with more digests of visitors and social occasions. But for her Shakepearean productions involving experience assure me that it’s beautiful. the cast of characters that pass through the talented student actors. Marsh herself had School of Baldovinetti, anyway, and very lives of these two men is remarkable and it is originally trained as a painter, and was an close to the one in the André picture’. And one of the excellent qualities of this volume early member of ‘The Group’, a secessionist while art and architecture are discussed with that they are identified and studied in the movement of progressive young Christchurch great reverence, many art historians are not: capsule biographies that the editor, Robert artists that, in 1927, aimed to counteract the ‘Bald-ass’, ‘Crowe & Cock’, and ‘St. Roger da Cumming, has appended to the letters. This ‘promiscuous profusion’ of the dominant Fry’ all appear, although Berenson reserves dramatis personae, together with the exten- Canterbury Society of Arts (CSA) annual ex- a special place for the ‘Germano.phonies of sive annotations and chapter introductions, hibition by installing their own works in less Central Europe’, chief among them Erwin provide the necessary referents and contexts cramped conditions. Simpson rightly stresses Panofsky, to whose ‘icononsenses’ Berenson to the letters, which allow this volume to that the relationship between the two organ- remained forever antagonistic. Clark is more serve not only as a record of the friendship isations was ‘fraternal rather than adversarial’ amusing, as when he writes of the retiring of these two giants but as a cultural chronicle (p.79). The Group’s half-century lifespan Keeper in Oxford, Charles Bell, ‘So his great of an era. probably owed more to its very moderation life’s work of preventing people seeing the and eclectism than to any dogmatic commit- drawings in the Ashmolean may be ruined’; ment to Modernism. or of Ellis Waterhouse, ‘I think he is really Central figures in The Group – and indeed our white hope and may replace [W.G.] in New Zealand art – between the 1930s and Constable (passed to another sphere) as our the 1950s include , Rata Lovell- one non dago Kunsthistorike’; or of Herbert Bloomsbury South: The Arts in Smith, , , Cook, ‘there can be few people left in Europe Christchurch, 1933–1953. By Peter , , Bill Sutton and who retain such an interest in the names of Simpson. 354 pp. incl. 395 col. + b. & w. ills. the young Colin McCahon: an impressive bad Italian painters’. (University of Auckland Press, Auckland, roll-call, all of whom worked for much of the Berenson, like Cook, was one of the 2016), $NZ69.99. ISBN 978–86940–848–0. period in Christchurch. Yet if there is a hero founders of this Magazine, about which he of ‘Bloomsbury South’, it is and Clark were intermittently critical. In Reviewed by MARK STOCKER (1912–86), typographer, illustrator, designer, 1934 Berenson asked ‘Will most of its articles draughtsman, painter, Morris dancer, bohe- on Italian painting be written by brainless ‘THEY’RE A LOVELY PEOPLE , the New mian and conscientious objector. With the pedants or utter humbugs?’, and in 1948 he Zealanders, so hospitable and so charming. poet and publisher Denis Glover he founded decried ‘the snobbish kind of stuffy rubbish But for God’s sake don’t talk to them about the Caxton Press, whose productions were about due & tre cento unprofessionals’ that art!’1 Far from indicting her compatriots’ of sufficient skill, wit and formal elegance to it published. Clark wrote that year ‘that philistinism as is commonly supposed, when earn the imprimatur of the doyen of British under our friend Ben [Nicolson] the poor Frances Hodgkins wrote this in the mid- typography, Stanley Morison. As well as the old Burlington has reached a “new low”, and 1930s, she instead revealed how out of touch poetry of Glover and Allen Curnow, the ought to close down’. But his opinion clearly she had become as a long-term expatriate. Caxton Press published New Zealand’s most tempered, and it was in the September 1960 While Christchurch beween 1933 and 1953 significant periodical of the arts and creative issue that Clark’s commemorative address (the parameters of this volume) was not quite writing, Landfall (1947–), itself a memorial to on Berenson was published, reprinted as an Paris in the 1900s or New York in the 1950s, its founder, editor and bank-roller, also poet, appendix to the volume under review. the ‘Garden City’ punched far above its cul- critic and patron, . Both Berenson and Clark are superb tural weight compared to almost any other Simpson’s title, ‘Bloomsbury South’, is not writers and there are memorable passages similarly sized centre in the Anglophone far-fetched. While ‘nothing could replicate throughout: on art, on each other’s writings, world.2 Peter Simpson’s excellently written Bloomsbury exactly’, as Simpson argues, on people met, places visited and political and produced book presents a convincing there were nonetheless striking parallels events, although the Second World War case for this, without resorting to boosterism with the artistic networks that flourished in leaves a crucial lacuna of over five years in or indeed ‘colonial strut’, the antipode of ‘co- Christchurch a generation after Bloomsbury the correspondence. Through it all there lonial cringe’ and its attendant deference to North: ‘Both scenes were marked by the is an intimacy and honesty which seems to the Mother Country. presence of a group of talented individuals of have reached its emotional height in an ex- In 1955 the British author and publisher varying sexual orientation, all closely linked traordinary letter of 1937 in which Berenson John Lehmann asked ‘Why was it then that by friendship and similarities of aesthetic asks Clark for ‘affection with perfect con- out of the hundreds of towns and universities and intellectual outlook’ (p.3). The crea- fidence, perfect ease. Without timidity or in the English-speaking lands [. . .] only one tive epicentre was 97 Cambridge Terrace, holding back of any sort. What I crave for should [. . .] act as a focus of creative litera- Christchurch, where Angus, Bensemann and is a brotherly comradeship’. That appears to ture of more than local significance; that it Lawrence Baigent – editor, accomplished have been imperfectly achieved, as is evident should be in Christchurch, New Zealand, pianist, pacifist and later academic – all lived from some of the comments each made pri- that a group of young writers had appeared in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Baigent vately, but such are rare and secondary to the who were eager to assimilate the pioneer and Bensemann were lovers before the

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