NEWSLETTER

WELCOME

Welcome to the second edition of our occasional newsletter. We hope you find it both informative and entertaining. Do enter our competition. There is an attractive prize. Congratulations to Howard Lakin of San Francisco who won the competition in our last newsletter. We would really like to hear from you. Comments, corrections and suggestions are all welcome. Please contact us at customer@chancellorsart.com
Warm regards

Amy Taylor

Peter Taylor

To be an artist is to believe in life
Henry Moore

SOME OF OUR NEW ACQUISITIONS

Chiho Aoshima	Patrick Caulfield	Richard Hamilton	Blek le Rat

Works of art “should be as carefully plotted as the perfect crime”
Edgar Degas

THE INDEPENDENT GROUP: CRUCIBLE OF POP ART IN ENGLAND

The Independent Group was formed in 1952 to hold informal private seminars and public exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. Founding members were truly multidisciplinary and included Richard Hamilton (at the time teaching industrial design), Eduardo Paolozzi (lecturing in textile design), William Turnbull (sculptor), Alison and Peter Smithson (architects), the furniture designer Colin Wilson and the art critics Reyner Banham and Tony de Renzo.

The following year, they were joined by band leader Frank Cordell and his painter wife Magda, graphic designer John McHale and art critic Lawrence Alloway.

The themes and topics they explored were as diverse as their backgrounds and included helicopter design, the mass media and municipal culture, car body design, machine aesthetics, cybernetics, information theory, comics, “trashy” literature, science fiction, cinema, pop music, fashion, consumer goods, folk culture, advertising and the theories of Marshall McLuhan.

At their first meeting, Paolozzi delivered an influential presentation entitled “Bunk”-a kind of projected collage using images mostly drawn form American magazines and comics. Paolozzi had been collecting such material for several years. Other important shows were “Parallel of Life and Art”, directed by Paolozzi, the Smithsons and Henderson in 1953, “Man Machine and Motion”, directed by Richard Hamilton in 1955 and “This is Tomorrow” in 1956 a group effort by artists, designers and architects.

Essentially, the Independent Group claimed that various cultural expressions were of roughly equivalent value. There was no hierarchical pyramid of high and low art, rather a continuum of cultural practices. As Lawrence Alloway put it:

“We felt none of the dislike of commercial culture standard among most intellectuals, but accepted it as a fact, discussed it in detail, and consumed it enthusiastically. One result of our discussions was to take Pop culture out of the realm of “escapism”, “sheer entertainment, “relaxation” and to treat it with the seriousness of art”. (Pop Art, Thames and Hudson, 1966.)

This egalitarian view countered the elitist and traditional notion of civilisation and the academic status of modernism.In practise, the Pop Art that emerged from these ideas often drew on images from American popular culture and commerce. For people living in England at this time of considerable austerity, the brash, bold, colourful and unrestrained products, comics, adverts and magazines were particularly fascinating.

Although the Independent Group more or less dissolved after the “This is Tomorrow” exhibition, its ideas were fundamental to the development of Pop Art in England and to the emergence of a new generation of Pop Artists, most of whom studied at the Royal College of Art (where both Paolozzi and Hamilton held short term teaching jobs). This new generation included Peter Blake, Patrick Caulfield, David Hockney, Allen Jones, R.B. Kitaj, Derek Boshier and Peter Phillips.

Nowhere does one get to know an artist better than in his prints
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

COMPETITION

Below are anagrams of the names of some of the artists we stock. The first correct answers submitted to the website wins a £20 gift voucher:

1. Noel Joist
2. Romeo Nehry
3. Lena Jolsen
4. Dawn Chicklyn
5. Tiger A Welch

YOU COULDN'T MAKE IT UP!

The Victorian Journal “Penny Magazine” recommended great works of art as guides to conduct. Leonardo’s “The Last Supper” was said to exemplify “seemly behaviour in trying circumstances”.

Oskar Kokoschka, the playwright, poet and great expressionist painter, had a passionate and turbulent relationship with Alma Mahler, widow of the composer. After she married Walter Gropius, Kokoshka, as a consolation, had a life sized doll made to resemble her in every detail. He lived with the doll as if it were a living companion. He is said to have hired a maid to dress and care for “her” and to have taken it for carriage rides and to the opera. In 1919, the doll was beheaded at a wild party in his atelier.

Sir John Soane, the architect, was the subject of a number of severely critical articles that appeared in the Champion newsletter during September 1815. These, it transpired, were written by his son, George. Soane believed they had helped cause the early death of his wife and cut George out of his will, bequeathing him only the framed newspaper articles.

[SUBSCRIPTIONS]