High Cross House, Dartington

After many failed attempts in the past (not open at the weekend) we finally managed to take a trip to visit High Cross House on the Dartington Hall Estate, a short(ish) riverside walk from Totnes Railway Station, to introduce Betsy (aged 5 weeks) to the delights of Modernism.

Built between 1931 and 1932 to strict International Modernist criteria by New York based architect Williams Lescaze, High Cross House was to house the Headmaster (William Burnlee Curry) of Dartington Hall's progressive new school (he had previously been Headmaster at Oak Lane County Day School, Philadelphia, the building that had made Lescaze's reputation in the US). Originally designed to be constructed of reinforced concrete, this proved beyond the local builders (Stavertons), and it was eventually built of brick cavity walls with steel beams for cantilevers and wide spans. Like Kettle's Yard, the interior is a "lived in" space where you can sit in a classic Wassily (Model B3) chair, and admire a fine selection of artwork by, amongst others, Ben and Winifred Nicholson, Cecil Collins, and David Jones.

Sources

Cherry, Bridget and Nikolaus Pevsner (1989). The Buildings of England, Devon. Second Edition. Penguin. pp. 316-317.

High Cross House information leaflet. Dartington Hall Estate.

The marmalade megaliths

What do Seville and Avebury have in common? Marmalade of course. Alexander Keiller, heir to a great marmalade fortune (as in Keillor's marmalade of Dundee), is the reason why the West Kennet Avenue series of stones at Avebury are now standing. Introduced to archeaology by his second wife, Keillor excavated and re-erected the West Kennet Avenue in the late 1930s, buying up land in and around the village.
Paul Nash, another 'discoverer' of the stones in the 1930's, was less impressed by Keillor's re-erection, claiming that it had robbed the site of its presence and power. Another critic derided it as "megalithic landscape gardening". When Nash found the site:
"the great stones were in their wild state, so to speak. Some were half covered by the grass, others stood up in cornfields or were entangled and overgrown in the copses, some were buried under the turf. But they were wonderful and disquieting, and as I saw them then, I shall always remember them. Very soon afterwards the big work of reinstating the Circles and Avenues began, so that to a great extent that primal magic of the stones’ appearance was lost." Paul Nash, (1951) Fertile Image, London, p.11
Revisiting the site in 1938, Nash reiterates his stance:
"Avebury may rise again under the tireless hand of Mr. Keiller, but it will be an archaeological monument, as dead as a mammoth skeleton in the Natural History Museum. When I stumbled over the sarsens in the shaggy autumn grass and saw the unexpected megaliths reared up among the corn stooks, Avebury was still alive." Paul Nash, ‘Landscape of the Megaliths’, Art and Education, March 1939, p.8.

Maximum Meaning, Minimum Means

Coming soon to the Royal Albert Memorial Museum in Exeter is what promises to be a top notch exhibition of the graphic work of the great Abram Games, brought to you by the Design Museum.
Born Abram Gamse in 1914 in Whitechapel Games was a largely self taught designer. He rose to prominence as a freelance designer in the late 'thirties, and after designing a poster for the Royal Armoured Corp in 1941 (illustrated) was appointed the official war poster designer (1942-6). Not all of his over 100 designes were approved of by the establishment, and Games' socialist sympathies can be seen in some (infuriating Churchill in the process).
Games' design philosophy was "maximum meaning, minimum means".
Source
Allan Livingston and Isabella Livingston, 'Games, Abrams (1914-1996)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004.
Design Museum, London.

Keith Vaughan

Since visiting the excellent retrospective at the Victoria Art Gallery in Bath back in February, the life and work of Keith Vaughan has increasingly intrigued me. Caught between the death of the neo-romantic movement and the birth of Pop Art (he was friends with John Minton, and later David Hockney, amongst others); tortured by loneliness and his homosexuality, Vaughan cuts a tragic figure, committing suicide in 1977. Heavily influenced by Sutherland and later de Stael, Vaughan slowly moved away from his early neo-romantic style to the more abstract, yet he could never free himself from the human (mostly male) figure. Deeply atmospheric, usually solitary, and always vulnerable, it is hard not to see Vaughan's figures as self portraits.

However, Vaughan was never the archetypal 'struggling artist', at least financially. Largely self-taught, and always wracked with self-doubt, his work sold well, teaching at the Slade and in the US. However, it is Vaughan's personal life, illustrated through his published journals, that show his inner struggle with both his art and his sexuality.

"During the day, after the normal clerical and domestic chores, I go through the movements of painting, but without much zest or conviction. My mind easily wanders to other things (usually sexual). This distresses me less than it did."

The Journals of Keith Vaughan, 1967-1977

After an operation left him impotent in 1975, the final straw came with the death of his mother in 1976. They had not enjoyed a good relationship, and Vaughan's response to the news was "relief that a useless life has ceased". However, when Vaughan read the letter that accompanied her will, where she wrote "Goodbye darling - you have been the greatest joy to me ", he broke down, feeling "absolutely no desire to be alive".

Sources:

Keith Vaughan: figure and abstract. Victoria Art Gallery, Bath. 2007

Malcolm Yorke, (2001), The Spirit of Place: nine neo-romantic artists and their times. Taurus.