Holiday Reads

The flawed protagonist at the heart of Ways of Seeing: Jim Ede and the Kettle’s Yard Artists (Jonathan Cape, rrp £30) was 62 when in 1956 he bought four clustered slum cottages in Cambridge and began to fill them with long-stored artworks by Henry Moore, Alfred Wallis, Constantin Brâncuși and more; with feathers, flints, a spiral of pebbles… This not-quite-gallery, partially open house was the culmination of a rich life. Almost destroyed by World War I, the young writer/curator would go on to hobnob with Bloomsberries and Bauhäuslers, usher TE Lawrence round the Tate and eat éclairs in Lady Ottoline Morrell’s garden. He had lived in India, Tangier and France and, in the USA, out of a suitcase for two years in a rented Buick.

Laura Freeman, chief critic of The Times, sensitively captures her subject’s passion for looking and his belief that ‘art lived’. Perhaps because Ede believed that ‘pictures are like people’, all the chapters are headed with an artwork or object from Kettle’s Yard: they’re springboards for telling stories, be it Winifred Nicholson’s watercolour Cyclamen and Primula, or the doorbell – a fishing-float cork on a rope – that undergraduates would pull in the hope of a personal guided tour, tea and marmalade and perhaps the loan of a Gaudier-Brzeska drawing till the end of term. This is biography as curation. We sense the owner’s obsessiveness, his repressed sexuality and tyrannical streak (one grandson says he could be ‘an absolute barnacle’). But, as the author puts it: ‘What is china without its cracks?’

What do sewage pipes, fungal networks and resistance movements have in common? Well, they are all gathered together in Underworlds: A Compelling Journey through Subterranean Realms, Real and Imagined (by Stephen Ellcock; Thames & Hudson, rrp £25). Dare, if you will, to follow Keats and ‘Descend where alleys bend/ Into the sparry hollows of the world’. For those of us who live above the earth, in the everyday, these out-of-reach zones speak of darkness and disorder and lead inexorably to the recesses of the unconscious mind. With pages that leap from a Piranesi prison to a Cyril Power linocut showing commuters plunging down an escalator, this book exhibits the author’s gifts as an image alchemist. In this mole’s tour of subterranean ecosystems, burial chambers and ghostly shipwrecks, what stands out are the brilliant visual juxtapositions. That might be Margate’s shell grotto facing an ancient Roman ossuary, or a 1504 German Easter carpet depicting Christ’s resurrection alongside Sickert’s painting of The Raising of Lazarus (1928–9).

In 1987 a janitor named Andrew Kromelow began, after hours, to arrange the stray tools in Frank Gehry’s furniture shop into a gridlike pattern. He called it ‘knolling’ after the hard, rectilinear forms of the eponymous furniture firm’s products – and soon after, one of the more ubiquitous aesthetics on Instagram was born. These days, the ‘flat lay’, shot from above, is less about 90º angles, more about pleasing sweeps of pattern, shape and colour, but still… I was reminded often of the phenomenon while leafing through Extraordinary Collections: French Interiors, Flea Markets, Ateliers (by Marin Montagut; Flammarion, rrp £35): the jolt of optical pleasure that comes from looking at serried ranks of copper jelly moulds, straw boaters or wooden coffee grinders – all members of a family, but with distinguishing features. The author, a collector and design retailer who has already introduced us to his favourite Paris shop, collects plaster casts and religious folk art, so knows full well the joy of sets. We are introduced to dealers of doorknobs and Provençal basketry, whisked around the Saint-Ouen flea market and left to steep in the writer Patrick Mauriès’s book-lined Wunderkammer flat in Paris. Lustrous with patina and passion, the layout features Montagut’s quirky watercolours, self-consciously retro Courier typewriter type and little dabs of paint in the margin. It’s like the storyboard of a Wes Anderson movie.

Coined in 1952 by English nurseryman Thomas Rochford as late as 1952, House Plants (by Mike Maunder; Reaktion, rrp £18) have been a ‘thing’ roughly since Sir Hugh Platt’s gardening manual Floraes Paradise of 1608. We learn how plants, mostly from the tropics and subtropics, have been introduced directly from their wild environment (for example, the Swiss-cheese plant), or after much careful modification over many decades by breeders. The moth orchid, for example, has gradually morphed from high-end luxury to supermarket commodity. Here we find wonderfully engaging stories about some of the most popular and ubiquitous specimens, such as the African violet, the readily disposed-of poinsettia (beloved of the Aztecs), the spider plant and Caladium (‘one of nature’s great horticultural Marmite tests’, due to its vividly coloured leaves).

In pithy and decidedly non-parochial prose, the author, executive director of the Cambridge Conservation Initiative, shows that all cultures love to foster a domestic biome: the South Sudanese grow Madagascar periwinkle in tins by their front doors; citizens of Barcelona show off prize pots of basil and mint on their balconies; while orange-flowered Clivia lilies from South Africa are big in Japan. Even those whose house plants are a ‘chlorotic embarrassment’ can take comfort from such hardy fellas as the Kentia palm, neglected mainstay of the South coast hotel conservatory, or what in the 19th century was nicknamed the ‘cast-iron plant’ for its ability to withstand industrial pollution. How else, after all, could the Victorians keep the aspidistra flying?

‘I mean, taking on board all that slavery and misogyny, what did the ancient Greeks really do for us?’ The water wheel? ‘OK, I’ll give you that.’ Democracy? ‘OK, apart from the water wheel and democracy…’ The Olympics? ‘C'mon, that goes without saying!’ What about libraries, medical advances based on inference and observation, history writing…? ‘Granted.’ Then there’s the catapult, early alarm clocks and vending machines, naturalistic art, mathematics, positive models for same-sex relations, the modern alphabet… ‘OK, OK, apart from the water wheel, democracy… [continues ad nauseam]’. But the legacy isn’t all positive. In the warm-hearted, compelling What the Greeks Did for Us (by Tony Spawforth; Yale, rrp £20), the presenter of BBC2’s Ancient Voices series also examines the burden of their past on the modern Hellenic nation; it also sees twisted echoes in the Nazis’ fixation on racial purity and alt-right groups who claim to be disciples of the ancient Spartans.

In 1975, performance artist Carolee Schneemann, naked, pulled from her vagina what looks like an umbilical cord but is, in fact, a long thin spiral of paper on which she’s written a poem rebelling against the need to meet with male critical approval. The patronising ‘structuralist filmmaker’ she skewers in the verse says ‘you are charming/ but don’t ask us/ to look at your films… the personal clutter/ the persistence of feelings/ the hand-touch sensibility/ the diaristic indulgence/ the painterly mess’.

Interior Scroll, surprise surprise, was decried as pornographic and censored. But it makes for a brilliant early emblem of Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art (Chatto & Windus, £25), in which Lauren Elkin tackles what it means when women artists refuse to be ‘small and silent’; when they dare to overspill the boundaries assigned them by patriarchal culture. And how the visceral disgust this can engender is as old as the Sphinx and Salome, Medusa and Kali. Investigating the work of such iconoclasts as Hannah Wilke, Eva Hesse and Kara Walker, and enlisting writers from Virginia Woolf to Audre Lorde, the author herself refuses to be constrained by conventional art history. Deploying the ‘slash’ as its organising principle (a punctuation mark that both fragments and conjoins), the book is a thrilling collage of long and short snippets in which piercing critiques of individual works and broad philosophising are interspersed with fragments of memoir.

As the architectural historian Nikolay Malinin wrote in 2018, the Dacha: The Soviet Country Cottage (by Anna Benn and Fyodor Savintsev; Fuel, rrp £26.95) is as much of a national phenomenon as the matrioshka, the samovar and vodka – it ‘cannot be translated into foreign languages’. The word itself derives from the Russian word ‘to give’, alluding to the tsar’s prerogative to gift prized subjects with a plot of land; indeed, the first dachas were opulent villas lining the 24-kilometre road from St Petersburg to Peterhof, where the eponymous emperor constructed his own Versailles in the early 1720s.

These days, the concept stretches to include little wooden huts on a basic allotment. For a people preoccupied by property, Russia has more second-home owners than any other country in the world, according to Anna Benn’s text, and in 2011 an astonishing 40 per cent of its food was produced on dacha land – a lifeline in tough times. Many of the more substantial 1930s examples of this ‘rapidly vanishing wooden world’ come from Kratovo, a village near Moscow beloved of creative types, where the photographer grew up (Savintsev’s grandfather vacationed within spitting distance of the film director Eisenstein and the composer Prokofiev). The more humble and basic constructions come from Arkhangelsk, in the north, their small footprints mandated by the state, which donated parcels of land for horticultural production – hence the overhanging second floors and attics. As these wonderfully quirky photographs attest, despite increasing rules and regulations, dacha architecture incorporates an incredible range of self-expression and improvisation.

Strike, peck, pot, gill, tierce, boll, coomb, pipe, butt, tun, score. Such words, which conjure up a lost world of grain mills, wool merchants’ and breweries, are as evocative to modern ears as the names of wildflowers in a country that’s lost 97 per cent of its meadows. In these post-Enlightenment days, international standards and the dictatorship of the decimal point rule; a kilo of sugar weighs the same in Rio and Ruislip. In The Curious History of Weights and Measures (by Claire Cock-Starkey; Bodleian, rrp £14.99), however, a government select committee of 1862 heard that a ‘stone of flax at Belfast is not only 16¾lbs, but it is also 24½ lbs, so that it has two values in one town’. Such confusion was writ large and urgently needed righting. In the fifth century BCE, Protagoras observed that ‘man is the measure of all things’, and indeed everything from fingernails to forearms, palms to paces, were used across cultures and over centuries to gauge, say, journeys and sizes of ark. Grains of wheat and large stones have also been popular. But the enclosures of land and the need for accurate taxation on goods hastened the need for greater precision. Claire Cock-Starkey leads us entertainingly through the thickets of troy, avoirdupois and imperial systems. No-one seems to know why different-sized champagne bottles are named after biblical kings (‘Pass the Methusaleh! I’m gasping!’), but read this and you’ll find out the difference between a carat and a karat, why a baker’s dozen is 13, not 12, rolls or loaves, and how British shoe sizes, weirdly, are based on the old barleycorn.

At Richmond Riverside, a heron with a thousand-yard stare looks out past the camera while curious daytrippers wander past licking cornets. A canoeist at high tide paddles disconcertingly close to a Mr Whippy van and over double yellow lines seen dimly through the water. In the Isleworth sky, a rainbow’s arc crosses the rhyming forms of a banking jumbo jet and a soaring pigeon. For the past decade, in Hounslow, Richmond, Brentford and Twickenham, street photographer Josh Edgoose has been capturing the funny, surprising and occasionally rapturous ways nature, focused on the tidal Thames, encroaches on these densely populated boroughs of London – and vice versa. Warm in its rosy colour palette and empathic approach to people, Ten Miles West (Setanta, rrp £45) cleverly captures the alien worlds seen through the cracks in everyday life.

How in the early 20th century did a Jewish society belle triumph in the male-dominated world of decoration? It’s all laid out in Frances Elkins: Visionary American Designer (by Scott Powell; Rizzoli, rrp £50). First, she made frequent forays to visit her brother David Adler, later a celebrated Chicago architect, while he was learning his craft at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, Paris, between 1908 and 1911. The sophisticated tenor of European design was enlarging, and meetings with the designer Jean-Michel Frank and sculptor Alberto Giacometti proved seminal (she would later count Salvador Dalí and Coco Chanel among her friends).

In 1920, the purchase of Casa Amesti, a crumbling structure in Monterey, California, helped her business take off, surrounded as she was by wealthy acquaintances in the Pebble Beach area. As shown in an early colour photograph taken by Tony Duquette, all vivid blues and yellows, she successfully juxtaposed classical details – a British-bought pedimented overmantel, fluted door casings and a dentil cornice – with the thick-plastered walls and planked ceiling typical of the historic adobe. This confidence in blending styles and eras would prove to be her hallmark, and saw Billy Baldwin hail her as ‘the most creative designer we have ever had’. Though a behemoth of the Bay Area, she also designed a string of houses along the eastern seaboard, and by the 1930s she was Elsie de Wolfe’s sole rival in the USA.

For artist/curator André Heller (writing some 35 years ago), nothing had more impact on him than ‘the great enchantments of my childhood’. One signal event was a magical visit to the Rebernigg Circus while living in a grey, bombed-out Vienna, and clearly the memory planted a seed in this modern-day Jules Verne, one that culminated in Luna Luna: The Art Amusement Park (Phaidon, rrp £34.95). His fervent belief is that ‘art is not some secret society for a select few’. So in 1987, for ‘ridiculously low fees’ he managed to persuade 30 of the era’s most venerated artists to contribute rides, games and other fantastical attractions to a fairground in Hamburg.

Thus Sonia Delaunay designed a triumphal arch leading to the Territory of Surprises; Jean-Michel Basquiat created a Ferris wheel, with musical accompaniment supplied by Miles Davis; Rebecca Horn dreamed up a ‘Thermometer for Lovers’; the carousel came courtesy of Keith Haring. On and on the list of luminaries goes, from Joseph Beuys to Erté, George Baselitz to David Hockney, Jean Tinguely to Roy Lichtenstein. This carnival of a catalogue reprints the original text around a new layout of what are eye-boggling pictures. So why is it that such a happening is so little known about? Well, spiralling costs meant that instead of heading off on a round-the-world tour at the end of that summer, the installations had to be sold off, only to languish for decades in 44 shipping containers. But now, thanks to the intervention of rapper Drake and his Dream Crew, a version of the original show is about to go global. What a rollercoaster!

Given that the architect William Smalley can find a sort of psychic repose lost in music while dancing in a club, what count as Quiet Spaces (Thames & Hudson, rrp £50) in his book need a little parsing. Growing up in a 15th-century weaver’s house with crooked floors and doors to duck under, the tyro student was perhaps always going to regard Modernism as based on a false ‘assumption of rationality’ in design, failing ‘to acknowledge our vulnerability’, our need to be ‘held’ by the places we live. In four sections, headed Space, Silence, Shadows and Life, we explore the elusive concept through eight Smalley buildings – a slatted oak Oxfordshire farm, a rectory in Lewes and a mountain château in Haute-Savoie – and eight profound influences. These range from the grand scale and utter simplicity of Palladio’s 1550 Villa Saraceno to Barbara Hepworth’s sculpture garden in St Ives, a place of longing and belonging; from the secret doorways and soaring spaces of Casa Barragán in Mexico City to the Sri Lankan home of tropical Modernist Geoffrey Bawa. So what counts as ‘quiet’? It might be the logical flow of rooms and spaces, the softness of a sofa, the fall of light, a gentle imperfection of good materials. Continuity, authenticity, ‘rightness’? But in a volume of beautiful photographs (all original; no stock imagery here), it becomes, in the foreword writer Edmund de Waal’s words, ‘a lambent… meditation on time… a series of pauses in particular buildings’.

‘No-one has ever seen me draw a picture of a lady or gentleman, and I am proud of this.’ Born to a genteel, if penurious, mother and father, who churned out romantic potboilers and boys’ adventure stories respectively, Clare Leighton was ‘almost born into the inkwell’ and reared in a world of hard work. Allowed to attend Brighton art school, the student became captivated by wood engraving, ‘able to imitate the first day of Creation’ because every mark made by her tool printed white. When Eric Gill, among the greatest exponents of the medium, bought one of her early prints, The Malthouse (1923), this represented a kind of unofficial affirmation of her life’s course.

Paintings, glass and ceramics enter the story too, but Clare Leighton’s Rural Life (by Clare Leighton and David Leighton; Bodleian, rrp £30), draws wholly from some 850 engravings, spread across 13 books. What connects most of them is not the tasteful floral studies expected of a young woman, but a dogged devotion to toil – the scenes of threshing, haymaking, apple-picking, lambing and ploughing that make up The Farmer’s Year are exemplary, done in the 1930s, when, ironically, agricultural workers were leaving for the cities in droves. In 1945, she acquired American citizenship, settling first in Long Island, then Baltimore. She sold her work through print clubs and made her name as a pithy public speaker, with lines such as: ‘What matters is not what we do to our gardens, but what our gardens do to us.’

In 1868, some eight years before Philadelphia held the USA’s first world’s fair, a group of nobles in Japan overthrew the conservative shogunate to set up the Meiji restoration. Their aim was to modernise the nation and open it up to foreign trade – or else succumb to the West’s gunboat diplomacy. It’s in that context that government officials sent some 7,000 wooden crates filled with decorative arts objects to feature in the 1876 Centennial Exposition (celebrating 100 years since the American Declaration of Independence). But ironically, it was traditional crafts, rather than products of industrial manufacture, that wowed American audiences. Awash with the stultifyingly rich gravy of Victoriana, Yankees were eager for clean lines and simple elegance.

Three objects in Art of Japan: Highlights from the Philadelphia Museum of Art (by Felice Fischer and Kyoko Kinoshita; Yale, rrp £40) come down to us directly from the exhibition: two 14th-century guardian lions, part of a Temple Gate erected in the city’s Fairmount Park; a stunning inlaid red-lacquer cabinet, decorated with dragonflies and hydrangeas; a c1868 pair of vases, their deep cobalt underglaze supporting a riot of flowers. But the effects of this first encounter are incalculable, seen in the embrace of Buddhism by Boston intellectuals, a fashionable flood of kimonos, paper parasols and folding fans, plus Frank Lloyd Wright’s Prairie Houses. And Philadelphia, as its superb holdings testify, was the gateway.

From the 1920s onwards, Paul Revere Williams, California’s first certified African-American architect, was designing houses for Hollywood’s elite, among them Cary Grant, Lucille Ball and Frank Sinatra. Add to that high-profile commercial projects such as the Saks Fifth Avenue department store in Beverly Hills and the headquarters of MCA. Yet despite this impressive portfolio, he wrote in a memoir that he’d had to learn to sketch upside down so as not to cause offence to his white clients by sitting alongside them. Similarly, he would walk round building sites with his hands behind his back to ward off the need for awkward handshakes. Cut to a dignified letter of 1961, in which Ann Lowe, designer of Jackie Kennedy’s wedding gown, writes to the First Lady to complain she’d referred to her as an (unnamed) ‘colored woman dressmaker’ on some talk show, despite having had commissions from the Bouvier family for many years. Beyond recounting stories of prejudice and neglect, Now You See Me!: An Introduction to 100 Years of Black Design (by Charlene Prempeh; Prestel, rrp £24.99), examines architects, fashionistas and graphic artists of colour who have succeeded against the odds, be it Pritzker prize winner Diébédo Francis Kéré, cartoonist Jackie Ormes or the ever-stylish Dapper Dan.