James Holland, 20th Century Artist

Teaching in the Blitz

Soon after the heaving bombing of London, the Blitz, commenced I was offered the post of art master at a south east London grammar school.  The very successful headmaster had been killed in a raid, and the incumbent art master had wisely decided to move his young family to a less vulnerable area.  I was glad enough of the job, and I already knew something of the excellent reputation of this school.  Built on low and swampy ground on the borders of London and Kent, the school was strategically placed to get all the air raid alerts – and most of the raids – for the two areas.  My academic responsibilities consisted, during the early weeks, of escorting groups of boys to the sodden covered trenches in the school grounds the record number of such excursions in one school day being nine.  The boys seemed to be the least affected by the incessant day and night raids, and when they showed one snapshots of heaps of brick and slate and said with some pride “that’s our house sir”, it was difficult to know if commiseration or congratulations were expected.

Camping in a Hampstead flat, the early morning winter journey, often before the All Clear had sounded after a night of raids, could involve finding a way through streets deep in rubble and broken glass, with police, heavy rescue squads, firemen and bomb disposal crews still at work.  Nor was the evening return any more pleasurable, the warning sirens wailing before home was reached.  As daylight raids gave way to the nightly Blitz it was possible to concern myself more with my teaching activities.

My predecessor, an enthusiastic and eventually well-recognised art teacher, had set very ambitious standards throughout the school, backed by the unfortunate headmaster.  The staff included a group of bright young Cambridge graduates and the upper school reflected their lively and uninhibited influence, though the jejune frankness of the Sixth Form was hardly appreciated by some of the older masters, and I found it difficult to return the appropriate reply to the bulldog pipe-smoking sixth former who insisted “personally I can’t bear to look at anything earlier than Picasso.”

As the prolonged night blitz on London tapered off, life became more controlled at the school, only fire-watching duties making their demand when with the agreeable handicraft master I spent several nights a week on Parker Knoll cushions arranged on a study floor, sleeping more sweetly than I can remember having slept before or since.  The older schoolmasters then, if not today, were expected to acquire or cultivate a degree of mild eccentricity, and we were not without a few of these.  One had taken to heart the official plan to grow more food, and beside sowing the playing fields with buckwheat, had built a catwalk from his first floor flat to a neighbouring flat roof, down which his two or three hens teetered every morning until it was time to install them in the portable pen constructed on the carrier of his cycle, through the bars of which they peered as he rode down the High Street on his way to school.  It was the same master who woke us from our fire-watching slumbers at midnight to satisfy his urge to cycle at top speed down the considerable length of the lino-covered corridor that extended from end to end of the extensive school buildings.

Teaching art and design at this secondary level I found both challenging and rewarding, particularly if by making an unexpected approach I could persuade boys to look with newly opened eyes at what went on around them.  Is it a national failing that we don’t want to see the world in which we exist?  In trains running through the most romantic and beautiful scenery, in planes flying over the Alps or over an enchanting coastline it is apparently a sign of ill-breeding or naïveté to look out of the window.  Instead the worldly-wise and blasé traveller throws himself into his seat, opens his executive type briefcase, and is buried in business papers or a paperback until the end of the journey.  Give him a coffee table book of coloured photographs of mountains or sea and he is engrossed by it.  It seems that we have little confidence in our capacity to see our world for ourselves, and need to be told what to look at and when.  We depend on the news reel, the printed page and television to package the visible world for us and label as ‘fit for human consumption’.

As some sort of routine re-established itself and we re-adjusted to new circumstances, I found more and more demands for work reaching me from various sources.  A weekly cartoon for TRIBUNE, then under the editorship of Aneurin Bevan was one commitment, which involved a phone discussion to decide on a subject and how it might be treated, then producing the artwork for despatch by an early train.  The cartoons produced under these conditions were topical enough, but hardly marked a milestone in political cartooning, though occasionally a more than usually apt idea might spark some response from the readership.  The Ministry of Information was also commissioning with increasing frequency ideas and artwork for its Exhibitions and Displays Division, and eventually it made more sense to join that Division than to try to cope with its requests while engaged in full time teaching.

 

Hallowe'en

Each year I mean to load up this picture on Hallowe'en and each year I fail.  Sorry this is a day late, but I would like to share this charming whimsey from one of Holland's sketch books as my take on the 31 October.

The church is loosely based on St Peters in the Woods (the true parish church of Pembury) while spiders and snakes were supplied by Holland's vivid imagination.  The skull also comes from his imagination, but also from life classes and anatomy when he was a student.  He also whittled a very pretty small skull out of wood from a holly tree that he felled in the garden.

Happy Hallowe'en for 2014 perhaps!

 

Dad's Army

During the Second World War, Holland worked for the Ministry of Information but his family lived outside London in rural Hampshire.  Holland joined the local Home Guard, and being an educated type, was the Sergeant.  I have always assumed that, vagaries of living arrangements aside, Sergeant Wilson in Dad's Army was very much in the mould of Holland, who was not at all a military type.

Naturally the sketch book was never very far away, and there are images below of his brothers in arms.  He told me that some of his colleagues were very good shots, often because they supplemented their income with a bit of poaching, while others would turn up with garden and farming implements rather than guns, because that was all they had to hand.

Anyway, here are some sketches.

A nice find on eBay!

While cruising on eBay recently, my husband spotted a James Holland lithograph for sale.  He entered the fray and we were very pleased when he got the winning bid in and we were able to take ownership.

The lithograph dates from 1938 (although someone has written 1930 on it, where it is signed James Holland, you can also make out '38 which runs into the black print) and is very much from his social realism period.  It is also very much in the style (although darker and busier) of the cartoons in the 1936 James Fitton Boswell Holland Desk Diary they produced with the Martin Lawrence press, containing drawings from Left Review. 

The image (badly reproduced below) shows teams of fishwives working in the open air to fill barrels with herring or similar, and from other pictures we have around, seems to be set at Lowestoft.

Thinking about traffic jams

An imminent visit to London brings on all sorts of worries about transport and traffic jams, while the world wonders how London will cope with all the extra visitors for the Jubilee and the Olympic Games.  However this cartoon by Holland with an estimated date of the 1930s shows that such issues are just a normal part of life's rich tapestry.

Holland's cartoon horses tended to have huge hips and resigned faces.

 

le Mas Gouge

It was in 1969 that Holland first visited le Mas Gouge in the Gard department of France.  His friends, the architect Joe Chamberlain and Christoph Bonn and Joe's wife Jean had bought a semi-ruined fortified farmhouse in the South of France and kept saying to Holland that he must visit it.  That year he said he might, and while the initial stop on the family holiday to France was in Normandy, the weather was so foul that as a family we decided that heading south seemed like a good idea.

After a dodgy stop at the Pont de Menard on the way down, we arrived at what became our idea of paradise - why did we even spend a weekend in Normandy before making the acquaintance of our spiritual home?

The instructions that came with the house and the trousseau of keys were impressive.  Much was written about the electrics, but as the Mas was not then and still has not been connected to the mains, electricity was via a generator that refused to work for us.  However the place was well equipped with gas lights, a gas cooker, a gas fridge and candles, all serving to make it that much more special.

We visited many times after that - we were there when Elvis died for example, but have not been back since Jean died in 1997.  If you google Mas Gouge, you turn up some images that other artists have been inspired to make of the Mas, but I think the following images are better (well I would) and give a hint of the magic of a very special place.

[Mas Gouge with vines, oil on board, 1970, in a private collection]

[Approaching the Mas, ink sketch]

[Mas Gouge through the great gates, watercolour sketch]

[Mas Gouge, la maison d'entree, ink sketch]

[Mas Gouge, in the courtyard, ink and monochrome wash sketch]

[Mas Gouge from within the vines, ink and watercolour sketch]

 

Student life in the 20s and 30s

This piece was written by Holland as one of a series of sections in a planned autobiography that never quite happened.  Here he reminisces about his life as a student in London.

STUDENT LIFE

In converting the Royal College into what was essentially a School of Painting, or certainly Fine Art, Rothenstein was diverting it from the original intention that it should be primarily a centre of design education, though he was perhaps not the first nor the only master to exert such pressure.  I have frequently quoted his warning to recalcitrant fine art students - “If you can’t do better than this, you will find yourself in the Design School” - and indeed a few students did from time to time find themselves so transferred, though whether this was to their eventual disadvantage was far from certain.  “Illustration” was his damning indictment of much painting, “Magazine illustration” the ultimate and unforgivable condemnation.  It was not done for the painting student to be concerned about his post-College future.  Something would turn up, a patron, a part-time teaching job, a successful exhibition.  Re-reading the memoirs of some of the outstanding writers who were at Oxford or Cambridge during the Twenties, Cyril Connolly, Anthony Powell, Evelyn Waugh, I have been aware that in our rather less hallowed environment, much the same moods and values prevailed.  Perhaps we had no Sligger Urquart, unless Rothenstein’s own manipulations qualified him for that role, no Hypocrites Club, though several of the senior students were able to frequent the Chelsea Arts Club.  But the euphoria, and the refusal to look to the morrow we seem to have had in common - though ours was not so exclusively a masculine society.

 

So powerful was this euphoria, it seems that many graduates found it unduly difficult to adjust to a less favoured way of life, while a few found it impossible to leave their cloisters, and were pointed out to visitors as mild eccentrics, who having come up, could never bring themselves to go down, and continued to haunt the scenes of their undergraduate days.

 

While none of my contemporaries would have wished to haunt for long the graceless buildings which housed the College, the influence of the College, both its teaching and its student life, has also been persistent, and for many years it was reasonably possible to detect the former RCA student among the practitioners and lecturers one encountered.  A guilty twinge can still assail the College-trained painter who reaches for a pigment not admitted to the recognised College palette - at least for my generation.

 

Ours was not an exclusively masculine society, and in numbers the women students were not far behind the men, possibly equalling them, though their distribution between the various Schools was less even, with, as might be expected, some concentration in Textiles and craft based design studies.  They came (and still do) from a wider spectrum of social backgrounds than did the men.  Bedales, Cheltenham and Roedean contributed their quota, while the public schoolboy was not so often encountered among the men.  Perhaps the restricted range of professional careers open to even the brightest girls at that time kept Art and Design in the possible list, while fewer public school boys would be encouraged to pursue a course that could lead to the penury of the vie de boheme.

 

The girls I remember in the fashions of the period, which were certainly “artistic”, and with renewed interest in the Twenties and Thirties can be seen from time to time in the fashion pages.  Loose, Liberty-style smocks, hand-woven and calf-length skirts, sandals and long skeins of hand painted wooden beads made up a refined peasant ensemble, while hair was plaited and wound into headphones, which almost certainly derived from the earlier Russian ballets rather than the spread of radio, and which, on sturdy red-cheeked Slavonic maidens could be entrancing, but was rather less so on the slimmer British girls.  For the more worldly, bobbed and shingled hair, the boyish chest and the brief skirt of the period was de rigeur.

 

As a co-educational college, we enjoyed a much more relaxed relationship between the sexes than did the universities at this time.  I do not remember that this lead to a great many problems.  A few of the most senior students, probably ex-servicemen, were married, but open living in sin or co-habitation was almost unknown.  On the other hand, as would be expected, many students paired off at various points in their college days, and how intimate these affairs might become was recognised as being their own business.  On my visits as a lecturer and assessor to students in Polytechnics and colleges I know how frequently they are not only married but are frequently parents before they are halfway through their courses - though the sequence is not invariable - with all the consequent responsibilities.

 

I have tried to suggest something of the nature of student life no doubt seen through the rosy mists of Time.  This came not only from the life of the College and Common Room, but from the town itself in the Twenties.  Certainly it was a more varied environment and offered a wider choice of interests and entertainment than in the decaying centre of recent years.  Cinemas from the fleapits of Fulham to the gorgeous palaces of Leicester Square theaters, from variety at Waltham Green Empire to the Russian ballet at the Lyceum or Coliseum, Tchekov at the Q Theatre, Cochran Revues at the London Pavilion, and the long-running Beggars Opera at the Hammersmith Lyric.  Nor were these pleasures beyond the pockets of most students if they were prepared to queue for a short while for gallery or pit.

 

We were most impressed and delighted by the Diagheleff Russian Ballet seasons, with many great post-Nijinsky stars.  The programmes were generously compiled.  In one evening we might get a recent favourite, perhaps the Three Cornered Hat, followed by an innovation, sometimes a first performance, Reynard, Les Noces, le Pas d’Acier, and concluding with a well-established and Russian tailpiece such as the Polotsvian dances from Prince Igor.  Another Russian arrival was the Chauve Souris cabaret company under Nikita Balieff, which delighted the eye with its many brilliant numbers and the ear with the compeer’s manhandling of the English tongue.

 

Diagheleff and Balieff came from the East, from the West came the Negro Blackbirds company, making a comparable impact on the London scene.  The delightful Florence Mills headed the caste.  Never had dancing, such gusto and abandon been seen on-stage or to judge from the stories circulating at the time, off-stage, since the all black company was taken up in a big way by London society, then in its most party throwing mood.

 

In a quite different tradition, Nigel Playfair’s stylized version of the Beggars’ Opera at the Hammersmith Lyric repaid many visits.  Sets and costumes had been designed by Claud Lovat Fraser, and the ballad score arranged for a small group of period instruments, mostly played by several elderly ladies and related members of the same family, who were alleged to knit assiduously between numbers and during the very long run could have completed many garments.  This version was a charming charade, artificial and entertaining as a pantomime.  The stylized pannier dresses had their influence on contemporary fashion, Polly Peachum and Lucy Locket becoming popular pottery figures, and many a telephone was coyly concealed under the ladies ample pannier skirts.

 

Yet another tradition, the Celtic Twilight, was represented by Rutland Boughton’s opera The Immortal Hour, which also had its effect on the modes and style of the period.  These were the outstanding and well established shows; many others had only little less impact.

 

The later Shaw plays were making their first appearances at various theatres, the Astaires were in musical comedy, Tom Walls and Ralph Lynn were in the Aldwych farces, Chaliapine appeared in a Russian Opera season, Tchekov was to be seen by going to Kew, and all were accessible to the student, however modest his purse.  For the musical there were excellent Saturday Chamber concerts in the V&A Museum and the new Chenil Galleries, adjoining Chelsea Town Hall sent to the College free tickets to similar concerts conducted by a rising young conductor, Barbirolli.  The Proms at Queens Hall, under Sir Henry Woods’s baton, did not require the promenader to queue for hours or days, nor were they regarded as a jolly undergraduate rag.  Happy days when, outside the College, the impecunious student had a wide choice of Lyons, ABC and Express tea shops for a cheap meal, with the fish and chip saloons of Fulham and Chelsea or the coffee stall on every other corner to provide the late snack.

 

The usual tipple was “half and half” or mild and bitter, often drawn from the wood.  When in funds, one might be able to afford a Friday night lager, the cheapest drink available - at the Cafe Royal, to sit at its marble top tables, on the red plush banquettes and watch the notable and the notorious at other tables, Arnold Bennett, James Agate, Constant Lambert, Augustus John.  After ten or eleven o’clock it was legally necessary to eat, or at least purchase the Cafe’s uninviting ham sandwiches, however reluctantly, if drinking were to continue.

 

This then is a glimpse of the town in which the students of the Twenties and Thirties found themselves, altogether an easier, busier, more crowded place, with a bustling night life in the streets not only of the West End, but also of the inner suburbs.  The weekly climax was Saturday night, with the theatres, cinemas and dance halls crowded and seldom a table to be had at the Lyons Corner Houses in the Strand, Coventry Street and Oxford Street.  Street entertainers abounded, notably a team of “spoon bashers” with barrel organ support, alleged to have appeared on stage in Petrouchka, a troupe of sand dancers, and the crippled woman singer of Indian love lyrics who so impressed Anthony Powell that she recurs in the Dance to the Music of Time sequence of novels.

 

Amsterdam, 1954

In 1954, Holland and his wife, Jackie, travelled to Amsterdam to visit their friends Royston and Marie Cooper, who were spending time there.  The resulting sketches and paintings provide more evidence of Holland's love of ships and ports.

This study of a crane is a case in point, as is the following image of boats in port.

There are a number of sketches of Ijmuiden including this one.

While this image shows Dutch men in what we might now think of as traditional costume.

The countryside outside the city and port was less captivating however, and in the sketch book, Holland only included this image.

Finally, among the sketches of local scenes, there is also a stolen moment, showing Royston Cooper.

Images of Normandy

Today we have another article from our Australian correspondant, looking at Holland's love affair with Normandy.

As has been acknowledged many times in this series of articles, my father was an ardent Francophile, a trait that he engendered in his family. In the early 1960s we holidayed at Ann Duveen's beautiful house, Capricorn(e?), just outside St Paul de Vence. However, the austerity years of the mid 1960s, when Sterling was devalued and a limit of 50 Pounds per person for overseas consumption was introduced, meant that the South of France became an impossibility. The Hollands, augmented by my aunt Kay, therefore chose to visit Normandy. Based a few kilometers outside Dieppe in the tiny village of Ste Marguerite sur Mer, then celebrating the 25th anniversary of the "Dieppe Landings" of August 1942, Holland proceeded to explore the rugged coastline of Vasterival whilst my sister and I yearned for the long sandy beach of Veules-Les-Roses. 

 

 
Vasterival, Normandy

 
Dieppe

 
Duclair Ferry

This visit renewed Holland's interest in Northern France, and subsequent years found him touring Normandy to places such as Domfront and Duclair, where he painted several scenes involving the charming ferry that crosses the Seine there. He also returned to Brittany and painted several characteristic views of St Malo and the surrounding countryside. To my immense pleasure on one of these subsequent trips, I was able to show him a place that he had never previously visited, the ruined Abbey of Jumieges. This former Benedictine Abbey, home to one of the chroniclers of The Norman Conquest, became one of Holland's favourite stops on any visit to Normandy and was the subject of many sketches and paintings.

 
Jumieges Abbey

 

 
Jumieges Church

 

 

 

Jumieges village

 

Reflections on the Paris Expo

Along with a number of colleagues from the Artists International Association, Holland was involved in the design and installation of the Peace Pavilion at the Paris Expo of 1937.  Key members were there including Holland, Boswell, Pearl Binder, Misha Black to name a few.  I wish I could remember the slightly scurrilous stories told to me by Boswell's widow and others of what went on outside the hard work of installing a pavilion!  The following piece was written by Holland in late 1986 or early 1987, reflecting on the Expo, contrasting it with other major events and failing to disguise Holland's love of Paris as he remembered it.  I do recall being driven by my mother through central Paris to get to and from the Gare du Lyons, and my father being mortified at the changes to road junctions, rights of way and one way streets in the period between 1937 and 1974!

There are photographs of Holland working on the Peace Pavilion which will accompany this article, when I can find them.

Paris Expo 1937

1987 will be the 50^thanniversary of the Paris World Expo, probably the most elegant and ingenious exhibition since the Great Exhibition of 1851, and unlikely in the present world, ever to be matched and never exceeded for style and creativity.  It fell between the Spanish Civil War and the outbreak of World War II, yet nearly all the belligerent powers participated; the Popular Front government in France fostered it.  Paris was the cultural centre of the world and Paris, not France, was the presiding influence.  Unlike the Festival of Britain in 1951, its manifestations were not widely scattered through the country; it was not the Festival of France.  Regions such as Brittany, Auvergne, Provence installed their own pavilions displaying local cultures and offering regional dishes, but these did not appear to be linked organisationally.  This was Paris playing host to the world, and in spite of tensions and feuds very near ignition point, the world came to the party.

Expo 37 introduced an entirely new attitude to the international exhibition.  From 1851, when the schedule of such events was drawn up for the next century, the pattern and format had been much the same (though curiously the progenitor Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851 had been exceptional and untypical).  The British Empire Exhibition of 1924, better known as Wembley, was the near-perfect specimen.  A large area of relatively undeveloped land but within easy reach of a capital or major provincial city was selected and cleared.  A central concourse was laid down to lead to a dominating central structure or arena where major spectacles could be presented.  Symmetrically arranged on either side of the concourse would be the great pavilions or palaces of Industry, the Arts, Agriculture, Science.  Beyond these the guest participants would erect their characteristic pavilions in the forms of pagodas, chateaux, temples, as appropriate.  Restaurants and cafés would cater for the visitors while lighter entertainment would be focused on a Fairway, where concessions of every type would be leased to the world’s showmen and souvenirs, mostly knick-knackery would be on sale.  The visitor took away a total impression of imperial stability, unlimited natural resources and the wonders of modern science.

Why and how Paris Expo aimed at and achieved such a different character is probably complex, linked with the Popular Front in France and the increasing threat to the growth of European civilisation from Central and Eastern Europe.  It is probable that France had been long scheduled to host a world scale exhibition in 1937 – the point is not critical.  More interesting is how Paris broke the pompous Imperial formula.

The first and perhaps the most important difference was that the Expo was not conceived as an entity, sited peripherally and self-contained.  Instead the City of Paris, already with generous open spaces, became the site, integrating existing features with newly projected structures.

The exhibition aligned itself on two axes, a main concourse from the Trocadero site (Chaillot?) down to the river and then ascending by the Champs de Mars to the Eiffel Tower, an incomparable ready-made vertical feature.  The major nations built their pretentious pavilions on either side; halfway down, surmounting a perpendicular tower apparently of dark pottery, a Nazi eagle, wings outstretched, glowered at the Soviet Pavilion.  This had a plinth of metallic grey on which a gigantic Soviet youth and maiden together thrust a hammer and a sickle toward the German fowl.  Those as the most blatant examples of old fashioned jingoism were unique and as such probably stimulated more ribaldry than awe.

The other axis was the river itself, its long curves in contrast to the Challiot-Eiffel axis.  Here less nationalistic pavilions sheltered between the trees, threw balconies over the riverside, and where there were erected a number of light towers of glass and masts which carried the Festival mood up to the eastern bounds of the city.

The exhibition literally was interwoven with the streets, the buildings and the river itself.  What had largely gone was the imperial gesture – the pompous massive palace of this or that.  Lightness, elegance and charm replaced the grand manner.  I cannot begin to tell you what an exhilarating, breath-taking town Paris was in 1937, with interplay of art and design on every hand.  It was, in fact, the swansong of the European culture of the inter-war years.

Youtube link.