{"id":517,"date":"2020-09-26T14:00:08","date_gmt":"2020-09-26T14:00:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/paullevy.com\/index.php\/2020\/09\/26\/all-dressed-up-and-raring-to-go\/"},"modified":"2020-09-26T14:00:08","modified_gmt":"2020-09-26T14:00:08","slug":"all-dressed-up-and-raring-to-go","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/paullevy.com\/index.php\/2020\/09\/26\/all-dressed-up-and-raring-to-go\/","title":{"rendered":"All Dressed Up and Raring to Go"},"content":{"rendered":"

As the late Howard Hodgkin once said to me, \u201cEverything we remember about the Sixties actually happened in the Seventies.\u201d I know what he meant: fashion news had to trickle down to us, at the same time that our post-student grant incomes had to increase enough to make it possible for us to participate in the London art scene. It was only well after we were students that we could afford to buy our shirts at Deborah & Clare, our patchwork suede shoes from Elliott\u2019s, and have our suits made at Blades, let alone buy a print or two from our artist friends.<\/p>\n

Or, as John Lennon put it more cuttingly in 1970, \u201cNothing happened except that we all dressed up\u201d. Hodgkin, though he had his first London solo show at Tooth\u2019s in 1962, and was with the dealer Kasmin in the late Sixties, features in this massive book only in a single list and a solitary note. To declare my interest, he painted me twice \u2014 in the Seventies.<\/p>\n

\"\"London\u2019s New Scene: Art and Culture in the 1960s By Lisa Tickner Yale University Press, \u00a335<\/strong><\/p>\n

Lisa Tickner\u2019s goal is to show the reader what it felt like to be a part of London\u2019s rollicking art world and art scene in the extended long decade; and instead of a sequential history, she highlights one cultural event for each year from 1962 to 1968.<\/p>\n

From Ken Russell\u2019s 1962 film Pop Goes the Easel<\/em>, made for the BBC arts programme Monitor<\/em>, to the 1968 \u201cart school revolution\u201d at Hornsey, Tickner piles on the details of clothes, cars, food, dance, drugs and music that (providing you are not too young or too old) make you feel you were part of it all.<\/p>\n

Russell\u2019s goal was not to make a documentary about Pop Art \u201cbut a Pop art film [his own lower-

\ncase \u2018a\u2019]\u201d about a cohort of young artists from the Royal College of Art, and what it was that grabbed them about popular culture and the mass media. Russell\u2019s four chosen artists were (Sir) Peter Blake (then 29, the son of an electrician, and more or less leader of the pack); Peter Philips, 22, a carpenter\u2019s son; Pauline Boty, 24, the middle-class daughter of an accountant; and Derek Boshier, 24, the only overtly political, CND-belonging member of the group. As Blake\u2019s knighthood reminds us, though Boty died terribly young in 1966, Boshier and Philips did not join him in becoming household names. Whereas Blake will be forever associated with his Sergeant Pepper <\/em>Beatles cover, the other three, though accomplished, collected-by-museums painters, did not produce any household icons.<\/p>\n

\"\"Pauline Boty photographed in 1963 by Jorge Lewinski, her With Love to Jean-Paul Belmondo, 1962, in the background<\/p>\n

Lest we forget what they were all about, however, it helps to remember the attitude of Richard Hamilton and his 1956 work, Just what is it that makes today\u2019s homes so different, so appealing?<\/em><\/p>\n

As Michelangelo Antonioni noticed (in another of Tickner\u2019s episodes, detailing the making of his 1966 movie Blow-Up<\/em>), all Pop Art was intended to be seen as ironic.<\/p>\n

The Kasmin Gallery, Tickner\u2019s next subject, opened in 1963, was reached via a sort of tunnel at 118 New Bond Street, and was not a white cube so much as a \u201cheroic\u201d space in which he could show contemporary six-footers in an even light. Kasmin \u2014 nobody ever called him John, not even his business partner, Sheridan, fifth Marquess of Dufferin and Ava \u2014 went straight into big-time dealing following a colourful apprenticeship with Victor Musgrave and a year running the Marlborough New London Gallery.<\/p>\n

He was among the first to show the American artists championed by critic Clement Greenberg \u2014 Kenneth Noland, Morris Louis, Helen Frankenthaler, Frank Stella, Jules Olitski and Larry Poons; he offered David Hockney a contract while he was still a student, and showed John Latham, Richard Smith, Bernard Cohen, Anthony Caro and Hodgkin, before closing the Bond Street gallery in 1972. Kasmin\u2019s openings were splendid affairs, with a Rolling Stone here, a Beatle there, a gay crowd, and always plenty of aristocrats holding price lists.<\/p>\n

\"\"Richard Smith, Kasmin and David Hockney in 1965<\/p>\n

Another culture hero, Bryan Robertson, was responsible for a Peter Stuyvesant tobacco company-funded series of New Generation exhibitions at the Whitechapel Gallery from 1964-68, as he was for the Gulbenkian-sponsored Painting and Sculpture of a Decade:\u201954-\u201964<\/em> at the Tate. Tickner is clever at noticing the (not then apparent) close ties of the art world to the tobacco industry.<\/p>\n

She gives due credit, too, to journalism, and particularly the role of the Sunday Times<\/em> and its later colour-supplement spawn in shaping not only the London art scene but the careers of Mark Boxer and Lord Snowdon, who photographed Kenneth Armitage, Reg Butler and Lynn Chadwick, as well as Henry Moore, Victor Passmore and John Piper for his 1964 Private View<\/em> volume. No account of the Sixties can exclude Time<\/em> magazine\u2019s \u201cSwinging London\u201d issue of 15 April 1966, and Geoffrey Dickinson\u2019s cover is reproduced here in the context of the new celebrity achieved by the era\u2019s fashion photographers, brought out so forcefully in Blow-Up<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Basil Spence\u2019s British pavilion at Expo \u201967, Montreal, was more about mini-skirts than trends in British sculpture\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

For her section on 1967, Tickner makes a delicate point about the relationship of art and commerce, noting the rise of London\u2019s dollar-earning tourist industry, but also the exporting of British pop music, fashion, art and design. In Private View<\/em>, the critic John Russell answered his own rhetorical question of what made this possible, by replying \u201cSotheby\u2019s and the aeroplane\u201d.<\/p>\n

British Fortnight, Neiman-Marcus, Dallas, 9-21 October 1967 was a Texas-sized take on the commercial value of Swinging London. In my own memory of it, though, Basil Spence\u2019s British pavilion at Expo \u201967, Montreal, was more about mini-skirts than trends in British painting and sculpture.<\/p>\n

Finally we come to the last chapter, 1968 and \u201cArt School Revolution: The Hornsey Affair.\u201d Some of its consequences prompt a smile: Barry Flanagan showed you could make sculpture from a few sandbags and some old rope, and Gilbert and George gilded their faces to show that sculpture could live and breathe, enough to make Praxiteles jealous. But this was also when London (and most university towns) developed a counter-culture.<\/p>\n

This d\u00e9nouement is dealt with as deftly and carefully as the art history in the 100 pages of notes, each a mini-essay in its own right. It has to be said, though, that this brilliant, ambitious volume is physically difficult to read, designed in an ungracious font, with mean margins that make it awkward to scan to the end of the line without tiring the eye.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As the late Howard Hodgkin once said to me, \u201cEverything we remember about the Sixties actually happened in the Seventies.\u201d I know what he meant: fashion news had to trickle down to us, at the same time that our post-student grant incomes had to increase enough to make it possible for us to participate in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-517","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paSOZf-8l","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/paullevy.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/517","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/paullevy.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/paullevy.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paullevy.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paullevy.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=517"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/paullevy.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/517\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":523,"href":"https:\/\/paullevy.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/517\/revisions\/523"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/paullevy.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=517"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paullevy.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=517"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paullevy.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=517"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}