This is a post about the American industrial designer, Raymond Loewy. It’s also about locomotives and streamlining, and about book design and art-direction.
The pictures in this post are taken from Loewy’s book on locomotive design, published in 1937. Not surprisingly, Loewy uses the book to promote his own idea of what successful design would be when applied to railway engines. It’s called “streamlining.” Guess what, he does it best!
The centre-fold image is this fantastic shot of Loewy’s design for the Pennsylvania Railroad from 1936. There’s another photograph of him posing on the front of the engine…
The book was published by The Studio and was part of a series of books, collected under the title, The New Vision. The other titles in the series were by the famous architect Le Corbusier and also by W Watson Baker. Le Corbusier wrote about Aircraft design and Watson Baker about the World beneath the Microscope.
Ostensibly, these books are about science and technology and the idea of progress through design. They are also books about photography and about how the new camera technology and film stock would allow us to see the world in new and exciting ways.
You can think of the themes of these books as exploring the visual language of speed, height and scale…That’s all very 1930s. So, the books are about the visual language of progress.
Because it’s the 1930s, the implicit message is of a new type of mechanical image making and mass-production. This is what Walter Benjamin was trying to promote in his essays on image production and politics.
You can see that, even at the end of the 1930s, art-direction was though of in terms of black and white photography. Using images to tell a story was quite new in book publishing. Loewy’s book is like a slide presentation by Alexey Brodovitch. Nowadays, this is what we do on powerpoint; except not as well.
This is a post about Steve Reich, trains and the music of slaughter. The post carries on from my recent post about American trains (Sheeler) and about my previous post about music and trains (Pacific 231). We begin with Steve Reich.
The engineering of steam railways gave the experience of train travel a distinctive and musical rhythm. This was based on the sound of the engine, the clickity-clack of the wheels on the rails and the visual punctuation of the telegraph wires along the track.
Nowadays, nearly all this has disappeared. The trains power along in an undifferentiated roar; the tracks are welded and the train slides along them; the telegraph has gone. Anyway, back in the 20c, it was natural for composers to respond to the industrial beat of machinery and rhythm of speed.
The sounds of trains were especially attractive to the East Coast minimalist composer, Steve Reich. In 1988, Reich created a three section piece called Different Trains. You can find out about the piece here, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Different_Trains
Reich used sampled loops of spoken voices and superimposed those onto his distinctive, and percussive, repetitions. Some of the voices recorded by Reich are station announcers. Other voices speak about their recollections of the journeys and announce different trains and their destinations. The music also includes whistle sounds and mechanical noises.
The three sections of the piece contrast the luxury rail service, between NYC and Chicago, of pre-war America with the European rail services that provided the machinery of despotic deportation towards the Nazi death camps.
A number of writers and film makers have explored the connection between railways and brutality. Nowhere was this more evident that in Europe during the 1940s when millions were transported towards their death. The Nazi administration of the Holocaust was a simple recasting of the railway and stock systems designed, at the end of the 19C, to supply the Chicago slaughterhouses.
Lars von Trier made a film, Europa (1991) that deals with this theme of industrialised slaughter. You can find out about the film, here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lars_von_Trier
The working conditions of the Chicago slaughterhouses were notoriously harsh. At the end of the 19C, American intellectuals and the political elite began to express an anxiety that these conditions would provide ideal conditions for the emergence of a radicalised American working class. Upton Sinclair described the exploitation, degradation and misery associated with these material conditions in The Jungle (1906). You can find out more about this book, here, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upton_Sinclair#The_Jungle
One of the great mysteries of American politics is the stubborn refusal of the American working class to become radicalised and to demand a different politics from Washington. The story of the American Labour movement was told in Warren Beatty’s film, Reds (1981).
If you’re interested in the historical development of this integrated industrial system of transportation, administration and slaughter, you should read Daniel Pick’s book, War Machine (1993).
The development of the refrigerated freight car in the 19C was at least as important as that of the luxury Pullman car. You can find out a bit more about this technical exploit, here, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refrigerator_car
If you think that we have advanced beyond all this. Think again. It’s just that this system has moved beyond the usual experience of supermarket shopping and so on. In fact, the concentrations of resources required by the scale of supermarkets has made the system even more brutal. You can read about how the contemporary iteration of this system has been developed in Canada inIan MacLachlan’s Kill and Chill (2001).
You can listen to the music and watch a film, here http://vimeo.com/4226079
Supplemental, Tuesday 9th August 2011
The Guardian has included an editorial in today’s paper about Reich’s Train’s. It’s ahead of tomorrow’s Prom at the Albert Hall.
This is a post about art and trains and about an American artist called Charles Sheeler.
Charles Sheeler was an artist and photographer who worked in the 1930s. He embraced the industrial landscape of North America as a legitimate and, in its own way, beautiful expression of the machine age modernism of industrial capitalism. Not surprisingly, trains and tracks feature in Sheeler’s work.
Sheeler is usually associated with the “precisionist” school of painting. This was a form of painting that combined the formal conceits of cubism with observational realism.
Sheeler was also part of a wider American cultural project. This was to position North America as the end-point of the global cultural phenomenon of Modernism. This project, conceptualised by Alfred Barr, of NYCs MoMa, was an attempt to connect Moscow, Berlin, Paris and New York in a single coherent trajectory of progress and innovation. That’s quite a train ride.
Barr’s project established the terms by which America was able to leverage the scale and critical mass of its productive energy to project soft “cultural” power across the globe. The choice of explicitly “American” themes was, accordingly, an expression of cultural maturity and independence from the old world (Europe).
A note about the train… The 1930s marked the apogee of steam locomotion in the USA. The engines were distinguished by a combination of size, engineering, performance and styling. The engineering development of the engines allowed them to haul great loads at speed and over the great distances of the American continent.
The engine was a 4-6-4 Hudson (or Baltic) type locomotive made for the New York Central Railway. The numbers refer to the wheel arrangements of the engine. These engines were superseded, after WW2, by diesel traction.
The “streamlined” styling of Modernist America applied itself to everything from architecture and engineering to consumer products. The main figures associated with form of industrial design were Raymond Loewy, Henry Dreyfuss and Norman Bel Geddes.
You can infer all of this (scale, styling and performance) in Sheeler’s painting from the details of the picture. The driving wheels, for example, are of a new design that replaces the traditional spokes with a disc.
As it happens, the wheel details are taken from the engine styling by Henry Dreyfuss for The 20th Century Limited . This service provided the rail passenger service between New York and Chicago. The streamlined styling provided for this train was an expression of the speed and comfort of the service.
The train service to Chicago was crucial in connecting the two most important business centres in the USA. Furthermore, Chicago marked the beginning of the rail network into the mid-west and beyond.
The train service was used in Alfred Hitchcock’s film, North by Northwest. I’ve posted before about Hitchcock and trains…
Here are some great poster images of the engine and train.
This is a post about a small book about big engines. There are thousands of books about railways; but most of them aren’t as nicely designed as this.
Patrick Stirling’s Locomotives, by LTC Holt, was published by Hamish Hamilton in 1964 and designed by Higginbottom and Oubridge (Who they? If you know, let me know please). I know a bit about the history of illustrated books in britain and the developemnt of art-direction in magazines and books. I know the illustrated books of Hugh Evelyn from the early 1960s, but these books by Hamish Hamilton are new to me.
The square format of the book is a big clue. As is the use of a photographic image enlarged so as to become slightly degraded. This book looks like it comes form the early 1970s. In fact, it’s from the first pre-commercial period of pop art in England.
You can see bits of Peter Blake, The Sunday Times Magazine and Sargent Pepper in all this.
The Stirling locos were designed, built and developed for the Great Northern Railway towards the end of the 19C. They were distinguished by the large diameter driving wheel. In their time, they were the biggest and quickest machines known to man.
There are a number of other titles in this series of books. Well worth looking out for.
This is a painting by the British artist William Coldstream. It shows St Pancras Station, London, from 1937.
Coldstream is an interesting artist for a number of reasons…
He was a founder and member of the Euston Road School in London. This was a group of artists who worked in a new realist style at the end of the 1930s. They were based in and around the Euston Road and Fitzrovia – Historically and geographically the Euston group are between Camden Town and the School of London.
You can see form the style of the painting that it is all very carefully observed. There’s a note in this diary entry about the original photograph used by Coldstream
http://archiveadventure.wordpress.com/
Actually, it’s so carefully observed that is can seem all a bit tentative. There’s a sort of anxiety in the painting which comes from a repression of feeling. It’s odd because the muddiness is also a characteristic of the later, expressive, paintings of the School of London. The paintings don’t look the same, but they are each equivocal in their way.
After WW2, this kind of approach to painting moves to the Slade School and to Camberwell.
I’m also interested in Coldstream because he was part of the GPO Film Unit. This group was an important part of cinema history in Britain and made a huge contribution to the development of the documentary film movement.
Peculiarly, the surrealist movement and cinema history are closely linked in Britain. For various reasons, the Jungian idea of “collective unconscious” was important in Britain during the 1930s. (I guess it was to do with an anxiety about the scope of emerging popular-front politics in Britain and around Europe).
Mass Observation was an anthropological group established to map the collective unconscious and to get a handle on the identity issues of the mass of the population in Britain. MO used literary and cinema forms to record the subjective reality of British national identity and the temper of society. This task was given even greater urgency during WW2.
I’ll be coming back to the GPO Film Unit because they made on of my favourite films, “Night Mail.” This is a film about the Travelling Post Office (TPO) and combines music, verse and film in the documentary form. You’ll see that, in this film at least, travelling and trains are the same.
Anyway, Coldstream was part of this conjunction of art, film and surrealism in the 1930s.
Later, Coldstream was influential in the development of art education and its integration to the systems of the University.
This is a post about JMW Turner, probably Britain’s greatest artist (of the 19C anyway), and trains.
This is a picture that was painted at Maidenhead, where IK Brunel’s Great Western Railway crosses the Thames. The picture was exhibited at the RA in 1844. You can see the painting in the National Gallery, London.
The painting is an important precursor of impressionism. The sensations and feelings of speed, and machinery, and light, are what Turner is interested in.
These themes would be explored by the 20C avant-garde.
I’ll let the picture do the talking…
Later, I’ll be posting about other artists, paintings and trains.
This is a post about model trains and a trip to Margate.
We were driving over to Broadstairs on the Kent coast to have a cup of tea with Graham Ward at his Festival Cafe. On the way, we stopped off at the old Hornby factory which has become a visitor attraction.
Before I describe what we saw, here’s a bit of history…
Hornby was named after Frank Hornby, of Liverpool, who invented the engineering and building toy Meccano. It was a small step from there to tin-plate model railways. Hornby models were pioneers of the conveniently room-sized HO-OO scale. These models could be built into an impressive lay-out within the space and resources of middle-class families. By the 1950s and 1960s Hornby was the market leader.
Nowadays, they have a massive factory in China and build models for a whole host of international companies. These companies each produce a range of models that is appropriate for sale in their own country. The model train market is nothing if not chauvinistic.
Actually, that’s part of the model scene that I think is really interesting. When you see big layouts, they are a kind of utopia. Hornby now have a range of buildings, to scale, that can be used to fill up the centre of the lay-out and to add detail. When you look at the range of buildings available, it becomes obvious that there is something weird going on. All the buildings are relatively modest structures – terrace houses and workshops and so on. The favoured architectural style is definitely utilitarian; nothing too modern or too fancy here.
The towns build up to appear busy with lots of shops and workshops. There’s a lot of metal bashing going on. In fact, this is a scene that has more or less disappeared from Britain.
If you were to visit a big model engineering show with international exhibits, you would notice that each type and nationality of railway model has a corresponding form of utopia. Each one made-up in fantastic detail.
I remember that, at the end of the 1960s, BBC TV Blue Peter had a railway lay-out. It took me ages to figure out that the model included practically one-of-everything in the Hornby catalogue. Considering that, back then, it was impossible to buy anything else; it was product placement on a grand and unabashed scale. It was all a bit odd because, elsewhere, the BBC were busy removing trademarks and so on.
I’m especially interested in the trees… there’s a whole subset of model makers there.
This is a post about the English illustrator, Edward Bawden, and the poster for the Ealing film comedy, The Titfield Thunderbolt (1953). It’s also a post about films (culture) and politics in Britain after WW2. As you can see from the poster, the railway engine looms large in the story…so, it’s also a post about trains.
You can watch the whole film on the internet…
Edward Bawden
Edward Bawden was an English artist and illustrator working in the middle part of the 20C. He attended the Royal College of Art where he was taught by Paul Nash and became friends with Eric Ravilious.
Bawden was an artist who was happy to work across different fields. His style of illustration was derived from his interest in lino-cutting and often features elements of Victorian typography and folk-art. The link to the comic and nonsense drawings of Edward Lear is evident. It was natural, in the circumstances, that Bawden should produce book illustrations, posters and advertising material throughout his career.
Ealing
Ealing has a special place in the history of British cinema with an association dating back to the earliest days of cinema in Britain. Will Baker established a studio in Ealing at the beginning of the twentieth century. By 1912 the studio was possibly the largest in Europe and certainly the largest in Britain.
Will Baker had begun making films on a Lumiere hand-cranked camera at the end of the 1890s. His first efforts were of the Mitchell and Kenyon topical kind. These films required a minimum of post-production and were therefore economical. At Ealing, Baker’s productions became more ambitious and the studio developed large glazed stages to accommodate the theatrical and historical epics produced before 1920.
The early history of the commercial exploitation of cinema is fascinating. The technology of cinema was developed, more-or-less simultaneously, in France, Britain and America. Business people whose skills were in theatrical presentation, distribution and production succeeded the early pioneers.
In the 1920s there were large industrially organised film production facilities in France, Germany, Britain and the USA. The story of how Hollywood came to global dominance combines commercial ruthlessness, political expediency and ineffective policy-making decisions.
Michael Balcon became Head of Production at Ealing Studios in 1938. The glory-days of the studio date from 1943 through to 1959, when the studios closed.
Films and Comedies
The term Ealing is usually synonymous with a distinctively English form of light-hearted comedy satire. The force of these films comes from them being simple exaggerated extensions, in the tradition of Dean Swift, of everyday realities.
Goodness knows, the circumstances of war, austerity and reconstruction provided plenty of scope for satire. This was especially the case in relation to the extension of state powers in the guise of progress and welfare provision. This extension was often presented as well intentioned but muddled, and as always unlikely to deliver the benefit as planned. Usually, the muddle is resolved by appeal to common sense. Nowadays some of this survives in the concept of the nanny state.
There are probably about six really well known Ealing comedies: Passport to Pimlico (1949), Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), The Lavender Hill Mob (1951), The Man in the White Suit (1951), The Titfield Thunderbolt (1953) and The Ladykillers (1955).
The comedies were not the only films made at Ealing. There are social-realist and police investigation films. But, with one or two exception, it’s the comedies that are remembered.
Titfield Thunderbolt
The story of The Thunderbolt is straightforward. An underused rural branch line is threatened with closure. Railway administrators and unscrupulous bus operators collude in a progressive rationalisation of transport so as to kill off the railway.
The local people are outraged by this plan and gather forces to make their case. In the great tradition of Ealing, the ancient forces of land and church combine. Usually, the local community meet at the local pub. In The Thunderbolt, the forces gather in the restaurant and buffet car!
Ealing Posters
The posters for these Ealing films are remarkable. The posters were produced, from 1943 onwards, under the direction of S John Woods who reported directly to Michael Balcon. Woods had trained as an artist and graphic designer. He assembled a stable of artists and designers to make posters for the studio’s films. The process was made possible by Woods extensive list of friends and contacts and his ability to match artist and theme.
Some of the artists recruited by St John Woods include John Piper, Edward Bawden, Barnet Freedman, John Minton, Mervyn Peake, Edward Ardizzone, James Boswell and James Fitton.
The Ealing film posters are remarkable on two points. Firstly and against all the odds, they are recognisable works of art by artists whose work extends beyond the usual concerns of graphic design, cinema and fine art. Secondly, they embrace and give expression to the political dimension of satire and social-realism in relation to post-WW2 reconstruction and the prevailing ethos of relentless progress.
The Thunderbolt story was played out across the country through the rationalisation of the railway network in the 1960s.
This is a shameless plug for my appearance on BBC Breakfast TV; speaking about Magritte and advertising. There’s a big Magritte show at Tate Liverpool over the summer.
The steam engine emerging from the fireplace is just the sort of juxtaposition of ideas that Magritte, a Surrealist, is famous for. It’s a bit odd, but charming and fun. Everyone can understand the association between the fire, the smoke and steam of the engine and the fireplace. The architect, Le Corbusier, called houses machines for living. So, it was obvious for Magritte to connect the family hearth to mechanical engineering. The metaphor is delightful and surprising.
The Surrealist movement used art to investigate the unconscious. Freud’s investigations of dreams and desire offered a starting point to delve into the unconscious. The unconscious can be a pretty dark place.
When the advertising industry began to promote products by association to desire, rather than need, they turned to Magritte. Co-incidentally, at an early stage in his career, Magritte had worked for an agency and produced a few poster designs.
The use of psychoanalytical ideas in advertising was pioneered by Edward Bernays in America. The emergence of a consumer based economy driven by credit and desire is the background for the TV series Mad Men.
In England, the Surrealist movement expressed itself most clearly through film. After WW2, when the BBC began to develop TV seriously, it was natural for them to recruit from the ranks of Surrealist film-makers, animators and puppeteers. Many of these characters found a home in the nascent world of childrens’ television.
The impact of surrealist images on young minds cannot be overstated.
All the stuff that happened in the 1960s was made possible, in part at least, by this ground work.
This is a post about the American industrial designer, Raymond Loewy. It’s also about locomotives and streamlining, and about book design and art-direction.
