Confessions of an iconophile
Philippe Jullian
100 Years of Dance Posters Walter Terry and Jack Rennert (Studio Vista £3.95) Arts Decoratifs 1925 F. Scarlett and M. Townley (Academy Editions £5.95) The Second Annual of European Editorial, Book, Advertising, Film Animation and Design Art edited by Edward Booth-Clibborn (European Illustration £12.50)
The late Roger Hinks used to like to describe himself as an iconophile. After having been a voracious reader throughout his life, he had reached a point when he infinitely preferred the illustrations to the text in a book and, a great admirer of Panowsky the founder of iconology, knew how to make these illustrations tell, The reproductions in art books have become so good in the past twenty years that they have been responsible for a considerable change in the study of art history, pending the day when they are supplanted in turn by, cassettes which one can slot into the television set, thereby _bringing the most distinguished critics and the most farflung museums into the sitting room. I don't feel that the three books I have been looking at will ever be quoted by the more intellectual of our art critics, but they do evoke — in the iconophile at least — dreams and memories of past worlds and, in the case of the third volume, an occasional gust of irritation. By far the most attractive of these three books is 100 Years of Dance Posters. Two Americans, Water Terry and Jack Rennert have assembled about a 'hundred posters, on the whole well reproduced (except for the Toulouse-Lautrecs), which covethe world of the dance from the spectacular faxyland ballets of the Second Empire down to the most highbrow creations of modern American or even Bulgarian choreographers. Page by page these posters evoke Slavonic folklore, Montmartre in its heyday, India filtered through Chicago, and propaganda ballets such as are concocted in China today, with comically sinister ballerinas on their points, dressed up as soldiers and brandishing guns.
There is the revelation of great artists like the strange Orazy, who designed the poster for Loie Fuller in a highly Japanese style for the 1900 Exhibition; or Schnackenberg, whose posters for the Berlin music-hall around 1920 reach a peak of gutter-elegance; or, more recently, the Pole Jan Lenica, whose Lac des Cygnes is ravishing. On the other hand, a great artist is not necessarily a good poster designer, and Bonnard's design for Diaghilev's ballet Josefslegende is a complete failure. Some of these posters bring back personal memories such as the Sakarofs, that Russian couple whom 1 saw at the close of their career tottering under the weight of costumes in the manner of Bakst. Another poster by Paul Colin reminds us that Serge Lifer was in his youth a great beauty. Unfortunately, my only recollections of him are
from interminable and pretentious ballets like Les Creatures de Promethee, for which a photograph served as poster: quite rightly the authors of this volume point out that photo graphs never made good posters, whence the decline of this particular art in our day„ Here one can also brood over the lives of forgotten dancers: Miss Violet Hope, who created the "Vampir Tony" in Berlin in 1910; Kitty Starling — "Deutsch-Amerikanische Excentric"; La Perlowa; and Gilda Gray, who made over four million dollars for Ziegfield in the early 'twenties (it was she who invented the Shimmy: "Shiver and shake like a bowlful of jelly on a frosty morning"). Gilda tray's posters by Gessmar, Mistinguet's favourite artist, and the one on the facing page by Van Dongen, must have looked superb on the palisades erected along the Seine while they were constructing the Exposition des Arts Decoratifs in 1925.
The book devoted to this exhibition by Frank Scarlett and Marjorie Townley is somewhat disappointing for the iconophile; not because it is lacking in pictures, but because these are more of documentary interest tban anything. They fail to convey any impression of the gaiety and elegance which were the hallmarks of this exhibition, far smaller in scale than that of 1900 with its vast palaces, weird attractions and teeming crowds. It is a great pity that the authors did not reproduce the series of watercolours featured in L'Illustration at the time; these gave an admirable idea of the gardens with their scattered pavilions, fountains and villas, while along the banks of the Seine riverboats were converted into restaurants and nightclubs. The authors who, in their youth, took part in the preparation of the British pavilion, have refreshed their memories by turning back to the Reports on the Present Position and Tendencies of the Industrial Arts as Indicated at the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts published by the Department of Overseas Trade. The tedium of this title pervades their book, which is more a list of pavilions and exhibits, leaving barely any room for general ideas or stylistic comparisons.
The decorative art of Germany, for all its great interest as a combination of Expressionism and a kind of neo-classicism, is quite ignored, even though a good deal of the Art Deco style was to be found already in the Darmstadt exhibition of 1910, devised by Olbrich; indeed the Vienna Secession building, erected in 1899 in Vienna, was already ewholly Art Deco with its dome of pierced metal, not to mention the Finnish Pavilion designed by Saarinen for the 1900 exhibition. Instead, the authors have allotted two pages to a "Pavillon de l'Esprit Nouveau" by Le Corbusier with murals by Leger which is of unutterable boredom compared with so many other ravishing buildings, many of which recaptured the spirit of the eighteenth century without a trace of pastiche.
Rightly the authors have stressed the important part played by the great stores of Paris. Each had its art department, each was itself a pavilion bringing the elegance of the great masters of haute couture within reach of a wider' (though still pretty well-to-do) public. At the root of this development was Paul Poiret who, ever since 1912, had combined his dress salons with promotion of the decorative arts and had commissioned designs for fabrics from Dufy and Dunoyer de Segonzac. He too had a boat on the Seine done up as a nightclub called "Amour, Daces et Orgues," which finally led to his ruin. The authors would have done better to reproduce some of his fabric designs, instead of the rather second-rate examples which fill the colour plates. They also give too much space to the rather dull British Pavilion and too little to those of Poland or Czechoslovakia, bursting with new ideas.
Finally, one is not given the least idea of the public which flocked to this exhibition, drawn by the tea-rooms in the gardens, the pavilions of jewellery, porcelain and glass. It was a setting for characters out of Giraudoux and Paul Morand. That the exhibition was aimed at an elite public becomes clear when one notes that amongst the most striking pavilions decorated by Lalique and Dunand, one was an embassy and the other "the dwelling of a rich art collector." Nevertheless, if this book is not as pleasing to look at, or even to read, as it might have been, it is still an excellent work of reference on what was probably the last original manifestation of modern French decorative art based on a tradition of quality.
If the iconophile feels slightly disappointed by the book on Art Deco, he will be even more so by the second Annual of European Editorial, Book, Advertising, Film Animation and Design Art, edited by Edward Booth-Clibborn. A first glance through it promises an embarras de richesses. A wide selection of the best illustrations done for books, magazines and, above all, for publicity media in the same spirit as that of Graphis; however, the Swiss publication remains far superior. Among these hundreds of plates one is delighted to find drawings by Ronald Searle, a master equal to Gillray and far superior to Cruickshank; here too is Nicholas Bayley, a charming designer of children's books in the tradition of Kate Greenaway. France is represented by Topor, whose work I never much liked, and Folon. whose great powers of invention are always poised between science fiction and everyday banality. I also liked the meticulous and sinister drawings of Janet Wooley, who makes one realise what a brief step it is from the detailed care of Surrealism to the exactitude cif Hyperrealism, even though the former takes some odd detail as its point of departure into the imaginary whereas the Hyperrealistist hardly ever rise above the rubbish-bins from which they draw their inspiration.
Two things emerge in this volume: first, that Surrealism, so long the dominant factor in advertising, is yielding place to Hyperrealism based on the use of photography; commercial artists are achieving a truthfulness beside which the illustrations in the Saturday Evening Post look like sweet dreams. Second, one is struck by the number of violent or macabre images. Artists are becoming increasingly obsessed by the theme of death when, since most of them work in advertising, they ought to be giving a more sympathetic image of life.
It is, then, to the first of these three books that one will return more readily, hoping at the same time that there will one day be a bound edition printed on better paper. Moreover, the most pleasant of them to look at is also the most interesting to read, since the notes on the artists and the dancers they were promoting are models of erudition in a sphere which all too rapidly fades into oblivion.
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