Very English Art

Whitsuntide in the Country

One of the great gifts of living here was discovering British art from the early 20th century to which we had never paid much attention. Art history courses so heavily emphasise French or American art and artists that it's a shock to discover the English and the Scots were busy painting too.

One of our favourite genres has become the poster after falling in love with the London Transport posters that are common and eye-catching illustrations. Searching Time Out for staycation ideas, Bob came upon a gallery exhibit of posters at a small publishing house which has just published's a book by Paul Rennie, a leading dealer in 20th century posters and other commercial products designed by some of the important poster artists. (We bought some things from him in his marvelous shop in Bloomsbury when he was still in London.)

We headed off to Kings Cross and to Black Dog's Gallery Space where about 50 posters were on display from very early 20th century work into the 1960s. The book's cover, above, is BEA to Britain by Kenneth Rowntree from 1950. Wikipedia tells me BEA was British European Airways, the domestic counterpart to BOAC, British Overseas Airway Corporation. The two merged in the 1970s to form British Airways. The poster has the favourite icons of Britain: white cliffs, cricket, fox-hunting, thatched cottages, and tall steeples.

The poster at the top of the post is by our favourite poster artist Edward McKnight Kauffer, an American who lived and worked in London from the end of the First World War until he returned to the States at the start of the Second World War. He did hundreds of posters for London Transport and for Shell Oil, the two most important sponsors of posters during the interwar years. There were several McKnight Kauffers in the show today, but that was not one of them.

We walked the few blocks to Exmouth Market in Clerkenwell for lunch from a street vender — an excellent felafel and hummus wrap with pickled turnip dyed a strange shrimp pink colour with beet juice. Then we visited the Islington Museum — today's Borough is Islington — which opened only a few years ago. The Heritage Lottery Funding Agency has been encouraging the establishment of local history museums in every borough with generous grants, I gather, since every borough seems to have one that is recently opened or redesigned. Susan said Islington was a dog's dinner — badly done — and I can't disagree with her, but once I accepted the hodge-podge of exhibits, I decided to just enjoy what they had tried to achieve. Islington has a tremendous history of important radical causes: Mary Wollstonecraft's pioneering feminism, Marxism, pacifism and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), gay rights, and Tony Blair! Yes sadly, Tony's picture adorns the last panel on radical Islington, because New Labour was born in Islington when Tony and Gordon ,over dinner at the Granita Restaurant (defunct), agreed on a strategy to win the 1997 election.

The special exhibit was the borough's collection of the things Walter Sickert (the artist who was NOT Jack the Ripper, Patricia Cornwell) left behind when he died — painted studies, drawings, letters, family pictures and paintings (his father, uncle, brother, wife number 3, and father-in-law were all painters). Sickert lived in Islington at various times in his long life, but I never quite figured out why Islington had this archive.

There we go, another day, another borough. And now the weekend is ahead for more adventure.