REVIVAL MEMORIES, IDENTITIES, UTOPIAS EDITED BY AY L A LE PINE MATT LODDER ROSALIND MCKEVER Revival. Memories, Identities, Utopias Edited by Ayla Lepine, Matt Lodder, and Rosalind McKever With contributions by: Deborah Cherry Whitney Davis John Harvey Alison Hokanson Martin Horácek Phil Jacks Michelle Jackson Ayla Lepine Matt Lodder Jonathan Mekinda Alan Powers Nathaniel Walker Alyson Wharton Series Editor: Alixe Bovey Courtauld Books Online is published by the Research Forum of The Courtauld Institute of Art Somerset House, Strand, London WC2R 0RN © 2015, The Courtauld Institute of Art, London. ISBN: 978-1-907485-04-6 Courtauld Books Online Advisory Board: Paul Binski (University of Cambridge) Thomas Crow (Institute of Fine Arts) Michael Ann Holly (Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute) Courtauld Books Online is a series of scholarly books published by The Courtauld Institute of Art. The series includes research publications that emerge from Courtauld Research Forum events and Courtauld projects involving an array of outstanding scholars from art history and conservation across the world. It is an open-access series, freely available to readers to read online and to download without charge. The series has been developed in the context of research priorities of The Courtauld which emphasise the extension of knowledge in the fields of art history and conservation, and the development of new patterns of explanation. For more information contact [email protected] All chapters of this book are available for download at courtauld.ac.uk/research/courtauld-books-online Every effort has been made to contact the copyright holders of images reproduced in this publication. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any way or form or my any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission in writing from the publisher. Designed by Jack Hartnell Cover Image: Henri De Braekeleer, The Man in the Chair, 1876 (detail). Oil on canvas, 79 x 63 cm, Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp. CONTENTS List of Illustrations 5 Notes on Contributors 9 Acknowledgements 11 Foreword: The Interval of Revival 12 WHITNEY DAVIS Introduction 17 AYLA LEPINE, MATT LODDER, ROSALIND MCKEVER I. MEMORIES ‘Nostalgia’, Matt Lodder 27 The Ghost Begins by Coming Back. Revenants And Returns 29 In Maud Sulter’s Photomontages DEBORAH CHERRY 1937 and Victorian Revivalism 45 ALAN POWERS The Retrieval of Revival: Recollecting and Revising 67 the Evan Roberts Wax Cylinder JOHN HARVEY The Problem of Expiration of Style 86 and the Historiography of Architecture MARTIN HORÁČEK II. IDENTITIES ‘Historicism’, Ayla Lepine 101 The New Old Style: Tradition, Archetype and Rhetoric 103 in Contemporary Western Tattooing MATT LODDER Longing for Past and Future: Cultural Identity and Central 120 European Revivalist Glassware Designs MICHELLE JACKSON Henri De Braekeleer and Belgium’s 135 Nineteenth-Century Revivalist Movement ALISON HOKANSON Armenian Architects and ‘Other’ Revivalism 150 ALYSON WHARTON III. UTOPIAS ‘Anachronism’, Rosalind McKever 169 Ferro-concrete and the Search for Style 171 in the ‘American Renaissance’ PHIL JACKS Echoes of Manhattan in Parliament Square: 188 Transatlantic Medievalism for the Twentieth Century AYLA LEPINE Modernism and Revivalism in Italian Architecture 205 and Design, 1935-1955 JONATHAN MEKINDA Babylon Electrified: Orientalist Hybridity as Futurism 222 in Victorian Utopian Architecture NATHANIEL WALKER Photograph Credits 239 45 CHAPTER 2 1937 AND THE VICTORIAN REVIVAL ALAN POWERS Shortly before the beginning of 1937, the centenary of Queen Victoria’s accession, two 2.1 The Drawing Room, events occurred that could not have been predicted. The destruction by fire of the Crys- 23A Bruton Street, tal Palace at Sydenham on the night of 30 November 1936, and the announcement of the Furnished for the Exhibition of Victorian abdication of King Edward VIII on 11 December. These made 1937 a significant year in Art, 1931. the longer arc of reassessing the meaning and value of the Victorian period, especially in respect of the symbolic role of its art, architecture and design. The combination of these events brought a renewed focus to the relationship between Modernism, as an artistic phe- nomenon of the twentieth century, and modernity, as the creation of the nineteenth, not only in respect of art and design, but across a wide range of social and cultural attitudes. The reassessment of the Victorian period is a multiple phenomenon. It is normal to suppose that the path to Modernism in England lay in rejecting everything the Victorians had stood for, apart from the work of a few exceptional individuals who were pioneers of ALAN POWERS | 1937 AND THE VICTORIAN REVIVAL 46 the new movement, yet even the process of trying to disengage from this powerful past involved some negotiation with it. In the essay ‘The Antimacassar Restored’, Alexandra Harris identifies the 1930s as a transitional period between rejection and the later more wholehearted embrace of everything Victorian. It effectively outlines the responses of dif- ferent generations and taste cultures—Bloomsbury, the Sitwells, and the former Oxford undergraduates of the 1920s, including Kenneth Clark, Evelyn Waugh and John Betjeman, whose affection for Victorian things and the culture that they evoked appears to have be- gun as a blague, before becoming the basis of a lifelong opposition towards Modernism and modern life.1 Taken as a whole, Victorian revival is a rich subject whose significance, while recognized, has tended to be seen as marginal.2 Harris and other writers have tended to emphasize the oppositional character of the revival and its location among a small elite of tastemakers. The significance of 1937 is, in part, that the events of the year showed how rapidly this private joke, albeit one frequently performed in the spotlight of media attention, became more deeply integrated in the definition of national identity through the crown and national institutions. As the architectural critic, P. Morton Shand, wrote in the TLS in 1951, after the phase of mockery had passed, ‘many who rushed in to mock returned to pray when it became evident that a second war was impending. Their numbers have been swelling ever since; they are now the majority’.3 Victorian revival had similar characteristics to earlier revivals of interest in historic styles, especially the successive phases in which Georgian art and architecture were reval- ued from the late nineteenth into the early twentieth centuries, with a dateline rolling for- ward in time, pushed by pioneering tastemakers and scholars, and an increasingly broad public following at a distance behind. As the speed of successive revivals of historic periods appeared to accelerate in the twentieth century, the phenomenon of revival itself became a subject of interest. This usually began with private collecting, followed by institutional collecting, scholarship, exhibitions and publications, completing entry into the historical canon. Partly owing to the length of the original Victorian period, this was a protracted process, extending into the 1960s and still arguably incomplete in some areas. As Harold Child wrote in The Times in 1922, ‘the elders jibe at the Georgians, the youngsters at the Victorians’, but this perception—based no doubt primarily on the repu- tation of Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians—was already becoming outdated.4 As Jules Lubbock has recognized, there was a first wave of revival of crinoline shapes in Parisian fashion at the end of the First World War, leading Walter Sickert, himself a figure bridg- ing between Victorian and Modern, to comment in 1923, ‘Of course we are all “crinoline” nowadays. But that is another question’.5 Already it was becoming possible to mock and at the same time genuinely admire at least some aspects of Victorian high art. In 1921, The Times commented on Max Beerbohm’s cartoons of the Pre-Raphaelites, ‘This interest of his makes him smile and us laugh; but it is also intense and admiring. In fact he himself is half a Pre-Raphaelite, with the Pre-Raphaelites for subject’.6 Beerbohm set the tone for much of the Victorian revaluation, for it seemed almost impossible not to treat the period ALAN POWERS | 1937 AND THE VICTORIAN REVIVAL 47 as a joke, while the more subtle commentators could proceed to suggest that some aspects of it might, in fact, be taken seriously, thus indicating that if accepted, this reversal would offer membership of an elite group. In ‘The Ottoman and the Whatnot’, an essay in the Atheneaum of 1919, collected in Vision and Design in 1920, Roger Fry provided an analysis of the cycle of recuperation.7 He was commenting on a new taste for early Victorian objects as a compensation for the rule of utility and good taste among the intelligentsia, including Fry’s associates in the Bloomsbury Group and predicted that the pattern would be rolled forward as the repulsion of living memory gave way to an imaginary reconstruction of the past. When Vision and Design was reissued as a Pelican book in 1937, this had been accomplished in relation to the early Victorian period, although the shift from early to later Victorian that Fry predicted had barely begun to take place, and was delayed for up to twenty years from that date. However, in the longer term, Fry’s prediction was accurate. He recognized that this early stage of Victorian revival was an appreciation of kitsch objects as ‘amusing’ evocations of a fantasy of history, harmless provided it did not take them seriously as art. For much of the interwar period, the cultural level of appreciation for Victorian things was concerned with minor and decorative art, and expressed in the relatively ephemeral productions of print- ing and illustration. So far as actual contemporary creativity was concerned, such as the example of Mr.