All posts tagged 1997

Rivera by Andrea Kettenmann (1997)

The German art publishers Taschen recently repackaged their Basic Art range into a standardised, large, hardback format, retailing at £10. Each volume in the series focuses on one famous painter or art movement.

The attraction of Taschen editions is that the text is factual, accurate and sensible, and the books have lots of good quality colour reproductions. Even if you don’t bother to read the text, you will be able to skim though plenty of paintings, alongside photos where relevant, of the artist or movement being discussed. The text of this one was written (as usual) in Germany, back in 1997, then translated into English.

Rivera’s life story is brilliantly told in the imaginative, sardonic and whimsical Dreaming With His Eyes Open: A Life of Diego Rivera by journalist Patrick Marnham, published in 1998, so not much in the text surprised me, although, being much shorter, it had the effect of making the sequence of government buildings which Rivera created murals for a lot clearer, and it also explained the last decade or so of Rivera’s life (he died in 1957) a bit better.

What I wanted was a record of Rivera’s paintings. I’ve read and seen a lot about the murals, but they generally overshadow his easel paintings. I wanted to see more of the latter.

Rivera was immensely gifted, started drawing early (the earliest work here is a very good goat’s head, drawn when he was 9) and enrolled at the Academy of San Carlos in Mexico when he was just ten, quickly hoovering his way through late academic styles. He went to Spain in 1907, aged 21, and studied Velasquez and El Greco. And then onto Paris in 1910, where he quickly discovered the avant-garde and was an early adopter of cubism.

For the first 20 years of his life, he was an omnivore, a chameleon, and I am impressed by the ability,and variety, of these early works.

French impressionism

The House on the Bridge by Diego Rivera (1909)

Psychological realism

Head of a Breton Woman by Diego Rivera (1910)

Cubism

Adopting the cubist style wasn’t just a fad. From 1913 to 1917 Rivera painted solely in the cubist style, completing some 200 works, took part in impassioned debates about various types of cubism, was friends with Picasso and Juan Gris. When he exhibited some of the works in Madrid in 1915, they were the first cubist paintings ever seen in Spain.

Zapatista Landscape by Diego Rivera (1915)

Futurism

Futurism is different from cubism because whereas the latter started out as a new way of seeing very passive objects – landscapes, but particularly Parisian still lifes, wine bottles and newspapers on café tables – Futurism uses a similar visual language of dissociated angles and fractured planes, but in order to depict movement. Also, if this makes sense, its angular shapes are often more rounded, a bit more sensuous (it was, after all, an Italian movement).

Woman at a Well by Diego Rivera (1913)

Russian modernism

Rivera experimented with a brighter, more highly coloured, more nakedly geometric types of modernism, a style that reminds me of Malevich. Maybe influenced by conversations with Russians in Paris, including Voloshin and Ilya Ehrenburg. And the fact that Rivera’s mistress, Angelina Beloff, was Russian. This is her suckling their baby.

Motherhood by Diego Rivera (1916)

Mural style

In 1917 Rivera definitively broke with cubism. He studied Cézanne, and the earlier Impressionists. Deprived of the sense of belonging to a communal avant-garde he was at a loss, stylistically.

Toying with returning to Mexico after 13 years in Europe, in 1920 Rivera gained funding to go on a long tour of the frescos of Italy.

In 1921 he finally arrived back in Mexico, and was one of several leading artists taken by the new Minister of Education and Culture, José Vasconcelos, on a tour of pre-Columbian ruins, studying the carvings of men and gods.

At last Rivera felt he had come ‘home’. The Italian frescos, but especially the pre-Colombian art, and the encouragement of the left wing populist minister all crystallised his new approach. He would completely reject all the stylistic avant-gardes of Europe, and melding everything he had learned into a new simple and accessible art for the public. He wanted to:

‘reproduce the pure basic images of my land. I wanted my painting to reflect the social life of Mexico as I saw it, and through my vision of the truth to show the masses the outline of the future.’

The Mexican revolutionary government wanted to commission public murals to educate a largely illiterate population. Rivera received a commission to create murals depicting Mexican art and culture and history and festivals at the Mexico City Ministry of Education, and thus began his long career as a public muralist, and as one of the leaders of what was soon a Mexican school of mural painting.

Mural of exploitation of Mexico by Spanish conquistadors in the Palacio Nacional, Mexico City by Diego Rivera

Part of the mural titled Exploitation of Mexico by Spanish conquistadors, in the Palacio Nacional, Mexico City by Diego Rivera

But he was surprisingly badly paid ($2 per day) and so had to continue selling sketches, drawings and paintings to tourists and collectors. Often they were sketches or trials for individual subjects which would then appear in murals.

Bather of Tehuantepec is well known because it marks such a radical break with the immense sophistication of his earlier work. It is highly stylised but not so as to make it almost unreadable (as in cubism). The opposite. It is stylised to make it simple, ‘naive’, peasant, and accessible. Note the child-like simplicity, the primal colours. And the child-like use of space, the plants at the bottom simply giving structure and space to the bending body. It points to the mural style which incorporate elements not for any ‘realism’ but subordinated to narrative and message. Here the message is the primal simplicity, the utter lack of pretension, of the Mexican Indian washing.

Bather of Tehuantepec by Diego Rivera (1923)

Lilies

Rivera liked flowers. Calla lilies are, in a way, highly schematic plants. Big, tall and simple, with simple bold flowerheads, Rivera featured them in a whole series of paintings. This picture uses an immensely sophisticated grasp of perspective, colour and volume to create a strikingly ‘simple’ picture.

Flower Day by Diego Rivera (1925)

After looking at it for a while I noticed the compact, squarely arranged feet of the peasants at the bottom of the picture. Showing the way Rivera’s interest in cubes and angles and blocs of paint, was transmuted into the semi-cartoon simplification of the mural style.

Mexican realism

Rivera was expelled from the Mexican Communist Party after a difficult trip to the Soviet Union in 1927. In the early 1930s he went to America and painted murals in San Francisco, Detroit and New York, but these commissions came to a grinding halt when he fell out with the Rockefellers in New York after painting the face of Lenin into a mural in the new RCA skyscraper in 1933. He was fired and the mural was pulled down.

Back in Mexico in the 1930s, Rivera found government commissions hard to come by and developed a profitable sideline in a kind of Mexican peasant realism. He painted hundreds of pictures of Mexican-Indian children, sometimes with their mothers – selling them by the sackful to sentimental American tourists. They kept the wolf from the door while he tried to get more mural commission but… it’s hard to like most of them.

Modesta and Inesita by Diego Rivera (1939)

Surrealism

I know from the Marnham book that André Breton, godfather of the Surrealists, came to stay with Rivera and Frida in 1938. I didn’t know that Rivera made an excursion into the Surrealist style and exhibited works in a major 1940 exhibition of Surrealist art.

The Hands of Dr Moore by Diego Rivera (1940)

Society portraits

Right to the end he made important and striking murals, such as the striking Water, The Origin of Life of 1951, an extraordinary design for the curved floor and walls of a new waterworks for Mexico City.

But at the same time – the late 1940s and into the 1950s – Rivera also produced commissions, usually portraits, for rich people, especially society women, which are surprisingly at odds with his commitment to the violent rhetoric of the Stalinist Communist Party.

Portrait of Natasha Gelman by Diego Rivera (1943)

Obviously, the striking calla lilies a) echo the slender elegant shape of the svelte millionaire’s wife b) echo their use in quite a few earlier paintings. But there’s no getting round the contradiction between this kind of rich society portrait and the intense engagement with the poor, with landless Indians, with the conquered Aztecs, of so many of his murals.

Having slowly trawled through his entire career, I admire the murals, and am often snagged and attracted by this or that detail in the immense teeming panoramas he created – the Where’s Wally pleasure of detecting all the narratives tucked away in a panoramic work like the Exploitation of Mexico, above.

But, given a choice, it’s the early cubo-futurist, or futuro-cubist works, which give me the purest visual pleasure.

Portrait of Adolfo Best Maugard (1913) by Diego Rivera

Related reviews about Diego, Frida and Mexico

Frida Kahlo: Making Her Self Up @ the Victoria and Albert Museum (September 2018)

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by Simon on November 29, 2018 • Permalink

Posted in Art, Biography, Books

Posted by Simon on November 29, 2018

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Killing Floor by Lee Child (1997)

‘He seemed like a capable guy to me. Tell the truth, you remind me of him. You seem like a capable guy to me, too.’
(Hubble to Reacher, page 112)

After reading the 20th Jack Reacher novel I went back to the first novel in the series to see how it all started. Violently, is the answer.

I was arrested in Eno’s diner.

is the opening sentence which commences Jack Reacher’s first adventure and inaugurates the series of 22 bestselling crime thrillers in which he features.

Margrave Reacher asks the driver of a Greyhound bus to stop at the little town of Margrave, in Georgia, purely on a whim because he’d had a postcard from his brother Joe, saying the famous blues singer Blind Blake lived or played here.

Arrested But instead of moseying about town and talking music with the locals, he finds himself locked up and interrogated by the (Harvard-educated and fairly reasonable, and black) homicide detective Farley. Why? Because a body has been found at the warehouses Reacher must have walked past on the way into town. The corpse had been shot in the head twice, his face blown off, and then the body frenziedly kicked so that every bone in his body had been smashed.

Hubble Reacher is fingerprinted and photographed by the good-looking, relaxed woman police officer Roscoe. Then questioned by detective Farley. During this process, it emerges that the name of a local businessman was scribbled on a piece of paper scrunched up in the dead man’s shoe, one Paul Hubble. When he is brought in for questioning, to everyone’s amazement he enthusiastically confesses to doing the murder himself, even though there is all kinds of evidence that he didn’t, such as that he was at a party where loads of witnesses saw him.

Farley Over the course of questioning, the relationship between Farley and Reacher softens and becomes a sort of collaboration, because Reacher was himself a Military Policeman in the U.S. Army for 14 years and has carried out lots of investigations himself. He is able to provide a stone cold alibi – he was 400 miles away on the Greyhound at the time of the murder – and begins to help a sceptical Farley think through the various oddities and possibilities of the case.

Prison Despite starting to think Reacher is not guilty, Farley sends both him and Hubble to the local prison for the weekend, where he is meant to be held in the transient, custody cells. However, the head of the prison accidentally on purpose has them put in the main, long-term prison area.

Attacks Here not one but two violent attacks are made on Hubble and Reacher. The first is led by the enormous, terrifying head of the black gang in the prison. The leader is intimidating feeble rich guy Hubble into kneeling and giving him a blow job when Reacher, with a sigh, realises he has to intervene in order to maintain respect and kudos. So Reacher confronts and then nuts the man, smashing most of his face.

Strangling Later, in the showers, the pair are attacked by a posse of white Aryan supremacists. One tries to strangle him but Reacher breaks his fingers before gouging out one of his eyes, while kicking in the larynx of another one, at which point the black gang arrive to attack the Aryans and a general prison riot ensues, during which Reacher and Hubble are evacuated back to the holding cells where they should have been all along.

Capable man So far so violent. But also, so far, so incredibly capable of six-foot-five Reacher, ex-U.S. Military Police and a man with a lifetime’s experience of winning super-violent brawls. Taking down the hardest black guy in the prison. And then three of the hardest whites. Wow.

Hubble talks Saving Hubble’s life gives Reacher power over Hubble who proceeds to talk, or at least to admit that there is something big, really big, going on in Margrave. It involves about ten people and Hubble admits he plays a key part. But ‘they’ have threatened that if he talks, to anyone, they will nail him to the wall of his house, cut off his balls and make his wife eat them, and then perform unspeakable acts on his two little children. Hence Hubble’s catatonic fear. This is why, as soon as Farley told him about the murdered man with his name and number in his shoe, Hubble confessed in such a hurry. He (mistakenly) thought he would be safe in prison. Er, no.

The investigator Hubble admits that the Big Scam and the frighteners ‘they’ were putting on him had prompted him to hire an investigator, anonymously, to help him find a way out. When Farley told him about the corpse at the warehouse, Hubble realised it was the investigator who the gang must have murdered. And so Hubble panicked, because of the threat to his family.

Reacher realises it wasn’t a mistake that he and Hubble were put in the permanent part of the prison rather than the milder and safer custody cells. Someone fixed it up with the prison supervisor, who then tipped off the Aryan Supremacists in particular, to kill him. Why? What has he done to anyone?

Released Reacher is finally released because his alibi, that he only got off the Greyhound bus eight hours after the murder was committed, pans out, with eye witness testimony from the bus driver and other passengers. By this time Reacher has struck up an edgy relationship with the black detective, Farley. Called in for a debrief Reacher shares his thoughts on what is really going on.

Joe Reacher So Reacher is in the police office when the identification of the fingerprints of the faceless body in the warehouse arrive. Reacher’s life – and the whole book – takes a big lurch when he learns that the dead man is… his brother, his only kin in the world (both parents being dead), Joe his older brother that he used to stick by through thick and thin throughout their long, peripatetic childhood, as sons of a U.S. soldier, continually moving from one military base to another around the world.

His whole life they had looked out for each other and now… Joe is dead. That’s right, dead.

And to a man like Reacher (a six-foot-five inch, ex-Military Policeman with a taste for clear, logical thinking and the capacity for seriously hurting anyone who gets in his way) this can only mean one thing.

Finding the guys who did it, and taking his revenge. Looking out for Joe one last time. A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do (or, more precisely, a man’s gotta kill who a man’s gotta kill).

The rest of the novel follows the intricate sequence of clues and discoveries by which Reacher, now working closely with detective Farley, and with the sexy Police Officer Roscoe, protect Hubble and his family from ‘them’, and realise that ‘they’ have representatives within the police force who are shadowing and reporting on all their discoveries.

The revelation of the big scam is nicely paced. There are plenty of surprises and unexpected shocks. The violence gets extreme, particularly when the corrupt, fat, old head of the police department gets the Hubble treatment i.e. gets nailed to the wall, his balls cut off, his wife forced to eat them, yuk.

Justified revenge Reacher identifies the glaring, threatening son of the old man who ‘owns’ half the town as the psychopath who carried out these gruesome acts and – in a tense scene – disposes of him and his three accomplices when they arrive at the (now empty) Hubble family home, to murder them.

Instead Reacher is waiting for them and takes them out, one by one, in a display of unstoppable physical supremacy reminiscent of other male heroes played by the likes of Clint Eastwood or Bruce Willis or Jason Bourne.

Factual information

As so often with thrillers, at the book’s core is a whole load of factual information which is interesting in its own right.

Counterfeiting The Big Scam turns out to be an enormous money counterfeiting operation, which explains Reacher’s brother’s involvement. Joe had risen to be the head of the FBI’s anti-counterfeiting unit, as we learn when Reacher visits some of the counterfeiting experts he worked with.

Through their mouths we learn a lot about the history of counterfeiting. We learn that the academics worked as young men during World War Two on a plan to bankrupt the Nazi economy by dropping billions of fake Deutschmarks into Germany.

There is then quite a lengthy explanation of how U.S. currency is designed and manufactured.

Assuming it’s true, this all makes for very interesting reading.

The unexpected plot twists, reversals and betrayals continue virtually up to the last page. It is a very impressive updating of the basic thriller genre for our times (well, the 1990s) and you can see why Reacher, with his size, physical competence, military experience and calm logical thinking made, and continues to make, such an impression on fans of the genre.

Broken sentences

The twentieth novel was told in short punchy sentences by a third-person narrator. This, the first book in the series, is told in short, punchy sentences in the first person.

In fact the nature of the narrator is irrelevant: first person or third person, everyone in Reacherworld thinks and speaks the same way, laconic, to the point, logical, tough.

‘They killed him,’ she said. Just a simple statement. ‘Like they killed Joe. I think I know how you must be feeling.’
I nodded.
‘They’ll pay for it,’ I said. ‘For both of them.’
‘You bet your ass,’ she said. (p.346)

More noticeable in this one than in number 20 is Child’s habit of breaking up what could be one long-ish sentence describing people performing consecutive actions, into a sequence of short sentences, each one describing just one specific action, with the subject of each verb carried over by implication.

He stood still for a moment then took out the key and unlocked them. Clipped them back on his belt. Looked at me. (p.18)

I used the john and rinsed my face in the sink. Pulled myself up into the bed. Took off my shoes. Left them on the foot of the bed. (p.79)

We drove for miles. Found the right terminal. Missed a lane change and passed the short-term parking. Came around again and lined up to the barrier. (p.312)

There are hundreds of examples, some extending for five or six consecutive pronoun-less clauses, each of which has been turned into a short, snappy, freestanding sentence.

He took out the tape machine. Dragged out the cords. Positioned the microphone between us. Tested it with his fingernail. Rolled the tape back. Ready. (p.38)

There are plenty of three-word-long sentences. Some two. Or one. All working to the same end, conveying a no-nonsense, tough guy, to the point, no fat on the bone, macho mindset.

Finlay and I hitched ourselves into the barber chairs. Put our feet up on the chrome rests. Started reading. (p.326)

The tone says, ‘Of course he’s been interviewed before. Held in police custody. Put in handcuffs. Locked in a cell. He’s a Real Man. Had plenty of fights. Outstared plenty of cops. Toughed out many a gaol cell. All par for the course. Meat and drink.’

Analysis

But Reacher is not just a fighting machine. He is a computer. He analyses and assesses. Repeatedly Reacher tells us that his military training and, specifically his long years of work in the Military Police, have taught him to process information, to work through it methodically. Many of the breakthroughs come from anomalies planted earlier in the narrative, little things someone said or did which, on reflection, Reacher realises stand out, don’t make sense, are clues.

Evaluate. Long experience had taught me to evaluate and assess. When the unexpected gets dumped on you, don’t waste time. Don’t figure out how or why it happened. Don’t recriminate. Don’t figure out whose fault it is. Don’t work out how to avoid the same mistake next time. All of that you can do later. If you survive. First of all you evaluate. Analyse the situation. Identify the downside. Assess the upside. Plan accordingly. Do all that and you give yourself a better chance of getting through to the other stuff later. (p.83)

The novel is larded with little homilies like this, advice on how to handle situations. Reacher says much of it stems from his military training, so I wonder how much of it is derived from the no doubt numerous and copious handbooks for soldiers and the military police which Child must have used in his research. How much from police training. How much Child has made up.

This habit of sharing his life wisdom with us is a leading characteristic of the books. In Tripwire we learn that Reacher’s mentor, Leon Garber, had various rules for living, which Reacher usefully quotes as he applies them to the perilous situations he finds himself. Similarly, One Shot has a great scene where Reacher tackles five rednecks in a bar and shares with us Reacher’s Nine Rules for Bar Fights.

It comes as in surprise to learn that 21 years after this first book, and 22 novels into the series, Child has written enough text like this – life advice, how to think through problems, how to survive confrontations – that it has been cut and pasted into a stand-alone book, Reacher’s Rules: Life Lessons From Jack Reacher, which was published in 2012.

Reacher’s Rules: Life Lessons From Jack Reacher on Amazon

And all the characters are like this. They all spend a lot of time whirring and clicking like computers. They all have their own agendas (make money, run a crime outfit, assassinate anyone who gets in the way, or solve crimes, find the suspect, collect evidence etc). Everyone has projects and agendas and, in Reacherworld, you can watch them processing every new development into their thinking and adjusting their plans accordingly.

He was thinking hard… I had never seen someone think so visibly. His mouth was working soundlessly and he was fiddling with his fingers. Like he was checking off positives and negatives. Weighing things up. I watched him. I saw him make his decision. He turned and looked over at me. (p.92)

There are regular spurts of violence – fights, brawls, taking down armed men – and each novel includes at least one scene of really gruesome, sadistic bloodshed. And it’s this which, inevitably, readers often remember. Not least because of the cold-blooded efficiency with which Reacher – once provoked – kills the bad guys.

He dropped the shotgun. It thudded into the carpet. I pulled him backward and turned him and ran him out through the door. Into the downpour. Dug my fingers deeper into his eyes. Hauled his head back. Cut his throat. You don’t do it with one elegant swipe. Not like in the movies. No knife is sharp enough for that. There’s all sorts of tough gristle in the human throat. You have to saw back and forth with a lot of strength. Takes a while. But it works. It works well. By the time you’ve sawed back to the bone, the guy is dead. This guy was no exception. His blood hosed out and mixed with the rain. He sagged against my grip. Two down. (p.407)

But even the violence is highly thought about and planned. The fight scenes are notable for the care Child takes to explain how Reacher assesses every situation, estimates the angles, uses all his training to calculate how to win.

I was trained by experts. Guys who traced their own training back to World War Two, Korea, Vietnam. People who had survived things I had only read about in books. They taught me methods, details, skills. Most of all they taught me attitude. They taught me that inhibitions would kill me. Hit early, hit hard. Kill with the first blow. Get your retaliation in first. Cheat. The gentlemen who behaved decently weren’t there to train anybody. They were already dead. (p.85)

In summary, the majority of the text is made up of people planning, thinking and assessing. The books are a lot more about ratiocination and thinking through problems – combat situations, strategic planning, problem analysis, plan-making – than you might expect.

I looked all over the place. Looked at where Teale was sitting, looked at the office inner door, checked Kliner’s line of fire, guessed where Roscoe and Charlie might end up. I calculated angles and estimated distances. I came up with one definite conclusion. (p.503)

Reacher girls

Of course there’s a girl, by which I mean young woman, who fancies Reacher from the get-go and on page 163 of this 523-page-long novel they finally have the wild passionate sex the reader has seen on the cards for some time. Tear each other’s clothes off. She rides him till they collapse in a sweaty heap, spent and sated. Shower then do it all over again, etc. Championship sex.

If James Bond has ‘Bond girls’ then Jack Reacher appears to have ‘Reacher girls’, and every bit as improbable.

This one, Officer Roscoe, is part of the Margrave Police Department. When Reacher is first brought in, she gets him a cup of coffee. She is friendly. She leans her breasts against the desk when she takes his fingerprints, with a dazzling smile on her face. She is there to collect Reacher when he gets out of prison after his eventful few days inside. She drives him to Hubble’s house to interview him, though Hubble has gone missing. When Reacher is there at the police department when the news comes through the fax that the dead man is his brother, Roscoe holds his hand.

And then back to her place for wild sex.

Roscoe put on the clothes she’d brought from her place in the morning. Jeans, shirt, jacket. Looked wonderful. Very feminine, but very tough. She had a lot of spirit. (p.284)

I’m sure we have all met woman police officers just like Officer Roscoe.

Reviews of other Jack Reacher novels

George Grosz: The Berlin Years by Ralph Jentsch (1997)

This big heavy paperback is the glossy catalogue to a comprehensive exhibition of Grosz’s work which was held in the Peggy Guggenheim Collection back in 1997. The long and detailed text was written by Ralph Jentsch, who is ‘managing director of the Grosz Estate, author of a number of catalogues and books on George Grosz, and a well-known expert in German Expressionism.’

It is a massive compendium of works by Grosz in all media – cartoons, caricatures, book illustrations, oil paintings, watercolours, sketches, drawings, collages and so on, not just from his mature years but starting with his earliest surviving sketches of cowboys and Indians and the heroes of boys’ own adventure stories which he loved as a lad.

There’s also plenty of evocative black-and-white photos of Grosz during the first 40 years of his life (1893 to 1933), featuring lots of semi-private shots of him messing about in his studio or playing the banjo – and also photos which give context to the story, from a typical German pub interior of the 1890s of the sort his father ran, to street scenes in Berlin, where he made the first half of his career.

In total there are 410 numbered works and photos in the main text, plus an additional 67 b&w photos in the 16-page potted biography at the end. It’s a visual feast, as they say, giving you a real sense of the visual universe he inhabited and the one he created.

(This book is the first volume of a two-volume and two-exhibition project – this one covers the Berlin years, the second one covers his time in exile in America, 1933-1959. Later, they were combined into one portmanteau book, link below.)

I’ve summarised Grosz’s life story in my review of his autobiography, A Small Yes and a Big No, no need to do it again. Instead, I’ll just mention half a dozen or so themes, issues or ideas which arise from a careful reading of this big book.

Transition from soft to hard lines

The first thirty or so pages include still life sketches Grosz did in conventional pencil or charcoal using multiple lines and hatching to create light and shade. These go alongside a consciously different style he developed for commercial caricatures, still very formal and multi-lined with an Art Nouveau feel. He had a different style again for the pictures he was hoping to use to start a career as a book designer.

Among the multitude of early sketches there are pub scenes, brawls in the street, and some gruesome (imaginary) murders. The point is – they’re all done in a much scribbled over, blurry, multi-line style.

What’s fascinating is to see how, during the war, he quickly and decisively changed his style to one of spare, scratchy single lines. Stylistically, it’s the decisive move: before – smudgy, obscure, feverishly drawn and overdrawn figures; after – scratchy, one-line figures, buildings, objects.

Evening in Motzstraße (1918)

It’s fascinating to read his own account of how and why the change came about.

In order to attain a style that reproduced the hardness and insensitivity of my subjects, I studied the most direct expressions of art: I copied the folkloristic drawings in the urinals; they seemed to me the expression and most immediate rendering of strong emotions. I was also stimulated by the unequivocalness of children’s drawings. So I gradually reached my knife-hard style that I needed to draw what I saw. (Art in Danger, 1925)

I wonder if any other major artists, anywhere, ever, has credited their style as being derived from the drawings in public lavatories?

This is just one revealing quote from the many which Jentsch gives us from Grosz’s own autobiography, from the prefaces to the books, to the justificatory notes he prepared for each of his court cases, and to the countless letters he wrote to all his friends. We learn that Grosz wrote a vast correspondence to all his friends and acquaintances, kept copies of it all (which survive) and expected long and detailed replies in return – or else the friends were liable to get a none-too-polite reminder.

Grosz is a really fluent and enjoyable prose writer – his descriptions of holidays on the Baltic or the threatening atmosphere of Depression Berlin are a joy to read in their own right.

America

Jentsch’s quotes very liberally from Grosz’s autobiography (it is, after all, extremely jocular and readable) in bringing out Grosz’s obsession with America and its pop culture. As a boy he devoured James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking novels, as well as the pulp westerns of Karl May, the detective hero Nick Carter, and loved everything American.

Having just read John Willett’s two books about Weimar art and culture, I can see that Grosz’s enthusiasm was part of a much broader cultural trend: the Germans loved American culture. Not only was there jazz which took everyone by storm, but the radio and gramophone were American inventions and everyone round the world fell in love with Charlie Chaplin’s silent comedies.

Later, for the avant-garde designers and architects which Willett’s book describes, America remained the beacon of all things modern, particularly the staggering efficiency of its industry and design. Henry Ford’s many books were bestsellers in Germany, as were the innovations of Frederick Winslow Taylor’s time and motion and efficiency studies.

I always think the most incongruous fan of America in this milieu was the Marxist playwright Brecht, who wrote loads of poems about a fantasy America, devoted a play to Chicago gangsters, as well as setting a number of plays and oratorios there, such as his oratorio about Lindbergh’s famous solo flight across the Atlantic. American jazz, cars, fashions and technology all stood for the exciting and new, liberated from the dead hand of Old Europe and its defunct empires.

Towards the end of his Weimar career (and in the depths of the Great Depression) Grosz’s attitude towards America (like Brecht’s) had become a good deal more satirical and critical. Now he sees all mankind as blindly greedily chasing after the consumer capitalism which America has perfected and exported to the world. But although the attitude has hardened – it’s still America which is at the centre of his thoughts.

Dreams, romantically dispensed and advertised a thousand times over: comfortable living, bath-tub, sports, utility car, and at best a weekend with cocktails and beauty queen. America has shown the way, we’re following after – due to war somewhat behind – in our naturally slow way. Even in Marxist Russia, America is the model and ardently desired goal. The goal is: rational exploitation of all raw material sources so as to procure comfort for the little man on the basis of mass machine production. (quoted page 135)

Just one year later – 1933 – Grosz was himself in America, beginning the long struggle to make a new career, which is described in his autobiography and in the second of these two volumes.

Alas, several of Grosz’s biggest most colourful fantasias on American themes (from the end of the Great War and featuring cowboys with six-shooters, wizened old trappers, gold miners and saloon whores) were confiscated by the Nazis and have never been found, so we only know them from old photos.

Misanthropy

Boy, Grosz hated people, he always hated people, he really hated people. Jentsch’s book clarifies that Grosz never saw action during the Great War, he had a nervous breakdown before he reached the front and ended up back in Berlin making sketches, caricatures and paintings which expressed his virulent hatred for people, for men, and for Germany in particular, for the state which had committed its young men to this suicidal folly and which had wanted to force him into the meat grinder.

It was a combination of loathing Germany and obsessing about America which made him change his name from the original Georg Groβ to the Anglicised George Grosz (just as his close friend and collaborator Helmut Herzfeld changed his name to the Anglicised John Heartfield).

Grosz’s misanthropy makes a mockery of his so-called communist beliefs. He joined the German communist party the day it was set up in November 1918 and played a role in the 1918 Berlin revolution, signing a revolutionary declaration published by a collective of revolutionary artists. But after his trip to the USSR in 1922 (where he actually met Lenin), Grosz quickly lost any political faith and lapsed into a universal contempt for mankind.

Hatred for humanity drips from the hundreds and hundreds of drawings from this era, and from the watercolours in particular, which show a relentless parade of corrupt and ugly old men, apparently surrounded by grim, half-naked prostitutes.

Before sunrise (1922)

As Grosz wrote to his friend J. B. Neuman:

My drawings will naturally stay true – they are fireproof. They will later be seen as Goya’s work [is]. They are not documents of the class struggle, but eternally living documents of human stupidity and brutality.

Red

In 1916 to 1918 Grosz went through a red phase, lots of paintings done almost entirely in shades of blazing red. The house is on fire, the city is going up in flames. It didn’t last too long, but while it did it was very, very red.

Metropolis (1917)

A painting like this displays a raft of his characteristics. The knife-hard outline styling of all the figures is well established. Humans are caricatures with hardly any attempt at naturalistic shading or modelling. Perspective has been thrown away in preference for a crazy vortex of planes which gives the sense of a crashing chaos of urban architecture. Women are more often than not half or completely naked, with a little pubic bush in sight just to ram home the point. Corruption, sex, seediness. Everywhere.

Nudes

Grosz did a surprising number of nude studies, almost all of them unflattering or verging on the grotesque.

More surprisingly, he did a large amount of pornographic sketches and drawings, pornographic in the sense that they show men and women very explicitly and enthusiastically engaging in sexual practices, his misanthropy coming over loud and clear in the fat ugliness of everyone involved.

But there’s also something haunted about portraying men and women again and again at the feverish, pleasure-filled but somehow empty, tragic and futile copulations which obsess humanity, and to what end.

The obsessive reworking of the same theme (he liked women bending over and displaying their big wobbly buttocks) give the sense of a man questing, searching, trying to find the answer to the reason – why? Why are we animals? Why do we behave like farmyard beasts? What is behind this absurd farce?

The sex drawings cross over with a set of disturbing sketches and paintings of a cartoon character called ‘John the slayer of women’, who was much in his thoughts in 1917 and 1918. He claimed the set was inspired by a notorious murder of the time – or was it just a misogynist way to let off steam and vent the huge amount of anger he had permanently burning inside?

John, The Lady Killer (1918)

Dada and collage

Grosz was a central figure in the Berlin branch of Dada which got going about 1918. He formed a close working partnership with the Herzfeld brothers who set up a publishing house for avant-garde work – the Malik-Verlag – where Grosz was able to publish a series of ‘albums’ of lithographs throughout the 1920s (nearly all of which were confiscated and banned by the authorities).

He collaborated with Helmut Herzfeld aka John Heartfield in the invention and development of photo-montage i.e. cutting out objective pictorial elements like photos or text or headlines from newspapers or magazines and pasting them into grotesque and satirical combinations.

A victim of society: Remember Uncle August, the Unfortunate Inventor (1919)

Grosz considered the painting below as one of his most important, and it had pride of place at the Dada exhibition in June 1920.

You can see the way any idea of perspective has been completely abandoned in the name of a potentially endless collage of objects, images and planes. The collage element of newspaper cuttings and magazine images is made particularly obvious on the table. There is the characteristically bitter satire of the so-called ‘pillars’ of the establishment at the bottom. And there is a naked woman with boobs and the characteristic hint of pubic hair to the left of the main figure.

Apart from anything else, there’s a ‘Where’s Wally’ pleasure to be had in deciphering all the visual elements in these, the most cluttered works of his career.

Germany: A Winter’s Tale (1918)

Watercolours

Grosz had a number of styles – or a number of ways of deploying his basic vision. Thus the book juxtaposes the intense oil paintings (above) with the just as savage watercolours, but the latter have a very different feel. Watercolour makes the images lighter and Grosz has a very stylish way of letting the colour leach and bleed around the central subjects, something not possible in oils.

Waltz dream (1918)

The nipples and bush of a scantily-clad woman/prostitute are probably the most prominent visual element, but what I like is the variety and inventiveness of the colours and the way they are arranged in patches or facets. Surprisingly decorative, isn’t it?

De Chirico vistas and mannequins

In 1919 and 1920 Grosz experimented with a series of works which combined receding vistas of perfect multi-story buildings, as developed by the Italian painter Giorgio de Chirico, with the photo-montage technique he’d been developing with Heartfield.

The result is uncanny, weird and grotesque objects made out of material cut from newspapers and magazines. The final, unsettling element is the omission of faces from the human figures, their heads instead the blank ovals of the shop-window mannequins of the day.

Republican Automatons (1920)

In a completely different style from the raging, red fractured cityscapes, here Grosz presents man as a faceless robot, a characterless shop-window dummy in a soulless landscape of factories and houses, a heartless automaton made up of interchangeable parts (as Jentsch puts it, on page 122).

To ram the message home Grosz stopped signing these automaton paintings and had a stamp made which said GEORGE GROSZ CONSTRUIERT, emphasising their machine-like quality.

Portfolios and collections

Drawing can be an effective weapon against the brutal Middle Ages and stupidity of man of our time, provided that the hand is trained and the will is clear.

As early as 1916 Grosz had a plan for a vast three-volume collection of drawings to be titled The Ugliness of the Germans. In the event he managed to get published the First George Grosz Portfolio and The Little George Grosz Portfolio in small editions. As you can imagine, original copies of these are worth a fortune today.

One of the great virtues of Jentsch’s book is that it includes nearly all the drawings from all his major collections, including the later ones which caused such a scandal – Gott mit uns (1920), In the shade (1921), The Brigands (1922), Ecce Homo (1923), The Mirror of the Bourgeoisie (1925) The New Face of the Ruling Class (1930).

This allows you to see what all the fuss was about and judge for yourself. It also lets you see each of the series in the context of the others, building up a cumulative effect.

Jentsch goes into detail about each of the trials, giving dates and places where Grosz and his publishers were arraigned and their punishments on each occasion (fines and confiscations). He devotes quite a few pages to a chronology of one of the longest court cases in the history of the Weimar Republic, the prosecution of Grosz and his publisher Herzfeld for some of the illustrations created for a stage adaptation of the classic novel, The Good Soldier Svejk, which started in 1928 and went through four separate trials on into 1932.

Grosz really was a thorn in the side of respectable society and it’s worth buying the book for the portfolios alone, which in their spare directness brutally convey seething his seething anger at man’s inhumanity to man.

‘Lions and leopards feed their young’ from The Brigands (1922)

Grosz was lucky, very lucky to happen to be offered a job in New York in 1932, and to persuade his wife and children to join him early in 1933, just two weeks before Hitler came to power.

He’d been taking the mickey out of Hitler for over ten years. On the day of Hitler’s accession SA troops broke into both Grosz’s flat and Berlin studio. If he’d been there he would have been taken off for interrogation, torture, prison and probable death. Lucky man.

Siegfried Hitler by George Grosz (1922)

And he was right when he compared himself to Goya. To later ages, to our age, his drawings and paintings are comparable with Goya’s, as ‘eternally living documents of human stupidity and brutality’.

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by Simon on January 30, 2018 • Permalink

Posted in Art, Biography, Books, European History, Exhibition, Great War, History, Politics, War

Posted by Simon on January 30, 2018

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Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond (1997)

We can rephrase the question about the world’s inequalities as follows: why did human development proceed at such different rates on different continents? (p.16)

The 1990s saw an explosion of popular science books and Guns, Germs and Steel was one of the classics. It won the Pulitzer Prize, sold over a million copies, was universally praised for its skilful interweaving of a wide range of specialisms – biogeography, archaeology, anthropology, molecular genetics, linguistics and more – to answer an apparently ‘simple’ question.

In his introduction Diamond calls it ‘Yali’s Question’, after a New Guinea native he knows (Diamond has spent a lifetime studying the birds of New Guinea) and who once asked him: ‘Why did you white people develop so much “cargo” and bring it to New Guinea and we black people have so little “cargo” of our own?’ where ‘cargo’ stands for the full panoply of marvellous inventions the white man brought with him.

The jokey sub-title of the book is ‘A short history of everybody for the last 13,000 years’ and that summarises Diamond’s approach – which is to find the answer to Yali’s question way back before the beginning of cities, writing or agriculture were dreamed of. Not in the rise of Europe or mercantilism or sailing ships or science or gunpowder, not in writing or the birth of agriculture does Diamond seek the answer, but goes right back before all this to the end of the last Ice Age (13,000 years ago).

For this is when the human populations, scattered around the continents of the earth, all started in roughly the same state of development – as hunter-gatherer societies. Starting from this point Diamond brings together everything we know from the full range of historical and archaeological disciplines to try and clarify why some of these groups did invent all those things – agriculture, cities, writing, metal tools – while others only got as far as non-literate farming, and others remained stone-age hunter-gatherers. With the result that everyone knows, which is that from around 1500 AD the winners, the advanced nations, spread right around the world and conquered or even exterminated the latter, the losers, the undeveloped – resulting in the ongoing global inequalities we are all familiar with today. Why?

Answers

It’s a long, fact-packed and detailed book but the answers are easy to summarise, in fact Diamond does so in the introduction:

History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among people’s environments, not because of differences among peoples themselves. (p.25)

And on page 87 there is a diagram showing the full implications of this simple proposition.

Schematic overview of the chains of causation leading up to proximate factors (guns, horses, disease) enabling some peoples to conquer other peoples.

Schematic overview of the chains of causation leading to the proximate factors (guns, horses, disease) which enabled some peoples to conquer other peoples.

1. The East-West axis of Eurasia.

This vast stretch of continuous territory enjoys broadly the same climate and the same length of days. This meant that when farming (the domestication of plants and animals) was developed in one place ( Mesopotamia) it was able to spread over vast distances east and west with no significant barriers to its diffusion. Unlike in the Americas or Africa, which have a broadly north-south axis, and are littered with barriers (the Mexico desert, the Congo rainforest) which made it harder for innovations and even people to spread. And Australia completely cut off from all these developments. Thus pottery and iron smelting reached Sub-Saharan Africa’s Sahel region about 4,000 years ago but pottery only reached Africa’s southern tip about AD 1, and metallurgy hadn’t reached it at all by the time the European invaders came in 1500.

2. Plants and animals

Eurasia also happened to have a wider range of both plants and animals than the other continents. Diamond has a long chapter about the benefits of the Old World crops – wheat, oats, barley and so on – and their bigger yields, their higher protein content, compared to New World corn or African yams as staple crops.

Eurasia also has a larger number of domesticable animals. He lists the 14 ‘big’ (over 100 lbs in weight) mammals which were domesticated before the 20th century, divided into the Big Five (sheep, goats, cow, pig, horse) and the Minor Nine (Arabian camel, Bactrian camel, llama, donkey, reindeer, water buffalo, yak, Bali cattle, mithan). Of the total 14, no fewer than 13 had ancestors in Eurasia i.e. were domesticated here, while only one was available in south America (the ancestor of the llama and alpaca) and none existed in North America, Australia or sub-Saharan Africa.

3. Stratified society

Once you’ve grasped these two fundamental advantages of Eurasia, the rest begins to cascade like an avalanche. Domesticating plants and animals leads, for the first time in human history, to food surpluses, and of types of food which can be stored over the winter or during hard times (grain, salted meat). For the first time human beings can be supported by this surplus who don’t themselves directly hunt or gather food. Hence the creation of a class of rulers who control the surplus of the community, along with other non-food-producers: a soldier class which fights wars, a priestly class which blesses those wars, and a bureaucracy which enacts the ruler’s wishes and manages everyone else.

4. Technology

Once you have people specialising in particular activities – groups and guilds and unions of people all doing the same kind of thing – you will get increasing competition between them, leading to all sorts of technical inventions and improvements, and to the eventual creation of ‘science’ – the technique of speculating, testing, experimenting and speculating again, all creating a virtuous circle of technological progress.

Diamond explains the notion of autocatalysis, a process which speeds up at a rate which increases with time because the process catalyses or facilitates itself. Thus Western invaders were not one or two or three developments ahead of the native peoples they encountered, but ahead in thousands and thousands of ways which the invaded couldn’t even comprehend. The Western arrivals were beneficiaries of an exponential curve of discovery, invention and technology.

Diamond uses the incident of Pizarro’s massacre of the Incas and capture of their emperor, Atahualpa, at Cajamarca on 16 November 1532 to enumerate the advantages the Spanish conquistadors had over the native Amerindians:

Horses Non-existent in Central and South America, horses were the central military technology of Eurasia from about 4,000 BC to the First World War, and had the same impact on the Mesoamericans as tanks against infantry.
Ocean-going ships Unheard of among the Mesoamericans, the West had developed ships over thousands of years because of…
Writing Diamond highlights the way the Incas didn’t know what to expect. Their scouts had said the tiny force of Spaniards (about 160 men) were disorganised and badly armed. Atahualpa expected to overawe them with his army of 80,000. He had no knowledge of travellers from across the sea, no knowledge of horses or armour or guns or steel swords, no knowledge that the Spaniards had come to conquer and plunder. Whereas the Spanish were the heirs of 3,000 years of writing, of records of history, of the rise and fall of empires, countless treatises on the art of war, maps of the sea and knowledge of winds written by previous sailors which helped them get to Inca territory, and written records of Cortes’s conquest of the Aztecs to model themselves on. The contest was not only one-sided in terms of technology and weapons, but in terms of knowledge.
Guns, steel, swords The Spanish had them to fight against the Aztec and Inca stone-headed clubs and woven armour with devastating results.
Epidemic diseases And lurking behind all these factors, was the Big One, the thing which killed more native peoples than all white men’s guns and swords and cannon put together: the Old World diseases they brought with them and which devastated native peoples completely unprepared for them in what Alfred Crosby named ‘virgin soil epidemics’. Eurasians had lived for millennia among the livestock who are vectors for diseases – chickens, pigs and rats – and been decimated by wave after wave of smallpox, plague and the rest until the survivors had built up sturdy resistance. Non-Eurasians had no defences and no medicines, and so died in their hundreds of thousands. In the centuries to come far more native peoples died of the scourge of smallpox than any other cause. And – an important point – the diseases spread faster than the conquerors. All it took was one contact on a beach and a native to return to his tribe which itself sent out foraging parties or raiders or traders and the Old World diseases could travel like wildfire inland. With the result that the conquerors often encountered cultures and societies which were already fatally weakened by disease before they even arrived. Thus, apart from the horses and steel swords, the Spanish had the simple advantage that smallpox had already ravaged the Inca empire, killing the emperor Huayna Capac and his son, and sparking a civil war between the successor Huáscar and his half-brother Atahualpa.
Domesticated animals and disease One is the spawning ground for the other: ‘The major killers of humanity throughout our recent history – smallpox, flu, tuberculosis, malaria, plague, measles, and cholera – are infectious diseases that evolved from diseases of animals.’ (p.197) I didn’t realise that measles, tuberculosis and smallpox are all derived from illnesses of cattle.

There is a sub-explanation related to Eurasian success in domesticating animals and (unintentionally) creating epidemic diseases from them, namely:

The overkill theory

Cro-Magnon man arrived in Australia about 40,000 years ago. At more or less the same time Australia’s megafauna of giant animals (a giant flightless bird, giant lizard, giant kangaroos, a marsupial leopard, etc) went extinct. Coincidence? Not according to the overkill theory which speculates that the early human settlers hunted these large animals to extinction. And the theory can be extended to other regions where the first arrival of humans seems to have coincided with the mass extinction of the largest (tastiest) animals. For example, Siberia, settled roughly 20,000 years ago at about which time the native woolly mammoth and woolly rhino went extinct. Or the arrival of humans in North America around 12,000 years ago which coincided with the mass extinction of the large native fauna, elephants, horses, camels, giant ground sloths. The overkill theory is important because it helps explain why the native peoples of these places were at such a disadvantage compared to the Eurasians.

Thus the native peoples of these lands themselves wiped out the native larger animals which a) they might have been able to domesticate b) had they done so, close proximity to them would have given rise to infectious diseases which, over time, would have toughened their immune systems, maybe better preparing them for the arrival of Eurasian diseases, diseases which might, in turn, have devastated the Eurasian invaders. But no domesticable large animals = no diseases = defeat.

All this has been laid out in principle in the first 100 pages or so: Diamond then turns to examine each of these factors in greater detail, devoting the lion’s share to the development of agriculture (100 pages) which emerges overwhelmingly as The Main Reason for the West’s ascendency, before moving on to germs (20), writing (24), technology (26) and stratified society (28).

The final section of the book (‘Around the World in Five Chapters’) looks in closer detail at how the West’s advantages impacted – when we invaded them – on Australia and New Guinea, China, Polynesia, the Americas, and Africa.

Summary

Guns, Germs and Steel is an incredibly comprehensive, all-encompassing vision of global history which, from both its sheer scope and its novel biological perspective, not only sheds striking new light on all Western history, but achieves Diamond’s aim of placing the histories of all the other peoples of the world on the same footing, as equal inhabitants of the earth.

Countering prejudices

For Diamond is impeccably politically correct, not from ideology but from wide experience. He has worked in the Tropics and made many friends there, especially in his specialist area, New Guinea. He knows for a fact that many of the ‘natives’ are smarter than the white colonials. His entire approach sets out to undermine the possibility of racism by proving that the eventual ‘triumph’ of European societies was nothing to do with innate or genetic superiority: it was entirely driven by these external accidents of geography and biology.

Fascinating facts

The appeal of these kind of popular science blockbusters is the countless peripheral facts and stories and insights they contain. This book is packed with them. Ones which caught my eye included:

If we say the line of human evolution parted from the apes about 5 million years ago, then the last 3,000 years since the invention of writing i.e when we have written records of (a very small number) of our activities, represents just 0.01% of human history. We are fond of poring over this record and writing countless analyses of fragments of it – Diamond’s point is that all the really important stuff, all the events which determined the broad pattern of human history, happened well before writing was conceived.
Writing arose in only three centres – the Fertile Crescent, Mexico and China. All other writing derives from one of these sources. (p.236)
The notion of the alphabet – individual signs (letters) standing for distinct sounds (phonemes) arose only once in human history, among speakers of Semitic languages in the area from Syria to the Sinai (p.226).
Most biomass (living biological matter) on land is in the form of wood and leaves, most of which we cannot digest. (p.88)
New Guinea has by far the biggest concentration of languages in the world, with 1,000 of the total 6,000, divided into dozens of language families. Nearly half of them are spoken by groups of 500 people or less. (p.306)
‘Australia is by far the driest, smallest, flattest, most infertile, climatically most unpredictable, and biologically most impoverished continent.’ (p.296)

Terrible epidemics

The Indian population of Hispaniola when Columbus arrived in 1492 was around 8 million; by 1535, mostly due to European disease, it was 0.
Measles reached Fiji via a Fijian chief returning from Australia in 1875 and killed a quarter of the population. Syphilis, gonorrhea, tuberculosis and influenza arrived at Hawaii with Captain Cook in 1779, followed by a typhoid epidemic in 1804 and numerous minor outbreaks, reducing Hawaii’s original population from around half a million to 84,000 in 1853, the year smallpox arrived and killed 10,000 of the survivors. (p.214)
Smallpox arrived in Mexico via one infected slave from Cuba in 1520. The resulting epidemic killed almost half of the Aztecs, including the Emperor Cuitláhuac. By 1618 Mexico’s initial population of about 20 million had fallen to 1.6 million.
North American Indians are now thought to have numbered about 20 million when Columbus landed. Two centuries later (c.1692) they numbered about 1 million.

TV series

The book was made into a TV series by Public Service Broadcasting in the USA.

Credit

Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond was published by Jonathan Cape in 1997. All quotes and references are to the 1998 Vintage paperback edition.

Reviews of other science books

Chemistry

The Periodic Kingdom: A Journey Into the Land of the Chemical Elements by Peter Atkins (1995)

Cosmology

The Environment

Genetics and life

Human evolution

Maths

Particle physics

Atomic by Jim Baggott (2009)

Psychology

Blog posts about Empire

The Music’s All That Matters: A History of Progressive Rock by Paul Stump (1997)

Stump’s thesis is that Pr0gressive or Prog Rock – think Yes, Genesis, Pink Floyd, King Crimson, Emerson, Lake and Palmer – has been unjustly vilified and eclipsed from ‘histories’ of rock and pop and needs to be reinterpreted and restored. This book was written in 1996 and a lot has happened by way of rehabilitating old rock bands in the past 17 years. I see from a quick surf of Amazon that there are in fact plenty of books on the subject, and plenty of these bands’ LPs are being rereleased, or rerereleased in remastered format or in expensive box sets etc. In fact, quite a few of these bands are still recording albums and touring!

Whatever you think of it, Prog certainly has a place in the social and musical history of the UK. This book sets out to shed light on both and more. First, what characterises Prog? In fact what does Prog mean?

Progressive

It meant Progress. It meant that sometime around 1967 the pop song was unzipped: the model of the pop chart, the album of pop hits and the concert where the performer performed his or her pop hits, was blown wide apart. Young pop musicians in many countries began experimenting musically – incorporating elements of modern jazz or classical music; lyrically – exploring the use of modern poetry, avant garde textual experiments etc; sizewise – recording ever longer songs or recording ever longer improvisations and jams; product-wise – forming small, fugitive record labels, marketing and distributing records themselves; performance-wise – bypassing the old club circuit to perform to halls full of drunk students and warehouses full of stoned hippies.

The assumption was that all of this experimentation, on every level, was moving forward. New forms, new multimedia, new sounds, new instruments, new combinations, new ways of thinking about songs or tracks or jams or sounds – it was felt all this was leading forward, onwards and upwards towards some great new musical synthesis.

“Progressive rock was the soundtrack to the counter-cultural upheavals of the late 1960s, and the period’s gallant pipedream of thoroughgoing societal and cultural transformation.”

The jam and the solo were about extensive self-expression and the accompanying hippy movement was about finding yourself, dropping out of the rat race, returning to the country, finding deeper meaning and spirituality etc

So the musical experimentation went hand in hand with personal, psychological, social and political experimentation. The music was the soundtrack to a social and cultural movement. Arguably, the social movement reached a dead end around the time the music did – sometime in 1974/75 depending on where you were sitting.

Characteristics of progressive rock:

Traditional rock music instruments – drums, bass, guitar, singer, generally with an organ or early synthesiser thrown in; onto this base might be added any number of new instruments, sounds and colours…
but stripped of blues structures or inflections. Surprising given that they started out in blues bands, but there are no blues structures or licks in Genesis or Yes. It’s very white music.
Blues were replaced by jazz or classical influences – either the organised chaos of Free Jazz (The Soft Machine), or the adaptation of classical to Rock rhythms (Emerson, Lake and Palmer) or just the use of actual symphony orchestras (Moody Blues and then everyone else)
Long numbers, sometimes very long numbers, often spreading out to become ‘concept albums’ on a single theme or story. Classic concept albums include:
- The Mothers of Invention’s Freak Out! (1966)
- The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds (1966)
- The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967)
- The Who’s The Who Sell Out (1967)
- The Moody Blues’ Days of Future Passed (1967)
- Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s Tarkus (1971)
- Jethro Tull’s Thick as a Brick (1972)
- Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon (1973)
- Yes’ Tales from Topographic Oceans (1973)
- Genesis’ The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway (1974)
- Wish You Were Here (1975)
- Animals (1977)
- The Wall (1979)
… and characterised, especially live, by long jams and long individual solos
Pretentious subject matter – think Yes’s incomprehensible hippy fantasies, Peter Gabriel’s art school stories, ELP’s shocking bombast, Dark Side of the Moon ‘tackling’ the themes of Life and Death
Drugs like marijuana and LSD were widely used and encouraged the creation and consumpton of a particular type of music – one that was long, repetitive, developing changes and variations over repetitive structures
Spiritual. The drugs also encouraged both the bands and their fans to believe that the creation and consumption of this long, freeform experimental music was akin to a religious experience. The hippy movement set great store by the idea of self-expression and personal liberation, to be achieved through sex, drugs and great rock music. Fans and musicians alike hankered ” after a rock-derived Sublime which forms the core of Progressive rock music.”
English. It’s very English. With quite a lot of well-educated public schoolboy English men, led by Genesis almost all from Charterhouse (one year boarding fee £32,000)
White – not a black face in sight. Stump quotes various performers saying it wasn’t overt racism, but many of these bands wanted to incorporate Western classical forms which had zero black input or performers.
Male – after all consumers of Prog and Rock tended to be (often university-educated) young white men – while consumers of chart pop music tended to be more downmarket young women, apparently.
Snobbery. Prog’s overwhelmingly white, often college-educated, male fans tended to look down on all other forms of rock and pop as junk, as not ‘serious’, ‘demanding’, difficult’, as too commercial, as having ‘sold out’ to The Man etc. This trope of an exclusive cohort of male initiates can be found across virtually all societies in all times. I revisited the Tate Britain exhibition of the PreRaphaelites this morning, another gang of young English men determined to reject the mass-market art and the exploitative industrial society of their time in order to create an Art which was more ‘demanding’, more ‘true’ etc. And who, of course, ended up being the Grand Old Men which a younger generation was to rebel against…

Stump’s book starts with jazz and the longhair Bohemian scene of the early and mid 1960s. You had to really tuned in to have heard let alone understood the New Thing, the free jazz being played by everyone’s hero John Coltrane and – further out into abstract music – Ornette Coleman, Archie Shepp, Pharoah Sanders etc. These guys had taken jazz improvisation into wild new places, as a listen to Coltrane’s ‘Ascension’ makes clear.

John Coltrane

There’s a recognisable band – drums, bass, trumpet, saxaphone – and a structure of sorts – ensemble playing and solos alternating. But everything after that – the ‘tune’, the ‘melody’, even the rhythm, seem undetermined, in flux, leading to a raucous listening experience unlike anything else that had probably ever happened. This track is 40 minutes long and has to be listened all the way through to get the full disorientating affect.

‘Ascension’ by John Coltrane on YouTube

Improvisation and soloing had been a part of country and blues for the whole century – but the New Thing took it to new heights of virtuosity and aural demandingness. What’s impressive at this distance is how close behind the most advanced rock acts were. Ascension was recorded in 1965 and released in 1966 by which time a young Pink Floyd and Jimi Hendrix and Grateful Dead were, in their different ways, ready to do similar things – long soloing improvisations frequently bordering on chaos.

King Crimson

You can hear some lovely electric band chaos at the end of the title track of ‘In The Court of the Crimson King’. Stump dates the start of Prog to this album, released in October 1969. King Crimson – brainchild of guitar virtuoso Robert Fripp – shot to fame when they supported the Rolling Stones at their free concert in Hyde Park in July 1969, in front of 500,000 people.The contrast between the delicately orchestrated whimsy of most of the track and the superloud distorted guitar of the choruses, the pretentiousness of the lyrics and then the pure chaos noise at the end, is pure Prog.

‘In The Court of the Crimson King’ on YouTube

Crimson’s first four albums contain traditional songs of hippy tweeness, about knights and ladies etc which burst into episodes of heavy guitar rock. The latter three albums become more musically uncompromising, with freer improvisation, delivering a more intense aural experience. After ‘Red’ in 1974 Fripp dissolved the group, believing he’d reached the end of the road. Though they reformed three years later, and continued releasing albums through the 80s, 90s and 00s, they never recaptured the Zeitgeist, the sense of surfing the wave and shaping its direction, which they had in the early 70s. They were Prog Rock without the confident sense of exciting Progress which you can sense in the exuberance of the early albums. Prog without the Progress.

In the Court of the Crimson King (1969)
In the Wake of Poseidon (1970)
Lizard (1970)
Islands (1971)
Larks’ Tongues in Aspic (1973)
Starless and Bible Black (1974)
Red (1974)

KC maintained a formidable commitment to aural experiment and difficulty. But most of the other famous Prog bands came from pop or blues backgrounds and were saturated in conventional harmonics and songwriting traditions. Very few of them could begin in apparent chaos and carry on for 40 minutes as the Coltrane track does. Most gave some kind of nod to the structures and cliches of pop. The most hidebound, traditional and, uncoincidentally, by far the most successful, is…

Pink Floyd

Although Pink Floyd’s ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ (1973) is probably the most famous ‘concept album’ of all time, Floyd themselves stand a little to the side of Prog. Most Proggers tried to be musically more adventurous and sophisticated than Floyd’s fairly basic tunes and harmonics. Most of us can play Floyd’s simple 3 or 4 chord structures on piano or guitar. What they pioneered was sophisticated use of studio technology at a time when the technology was changing at breakneck speed. The songs are passe and use childishly simple changes of dynamics (first soft – then loud – then soft again), but the way they are extended and segued using sound affects, and the band’s skills in the studio, meant they pioneered techniques and technology which created new possibilities for their epigones.

‘Us and Them’ by Pink Floyd on YouTube

The Piper at the Gates of Dawn (1967)
A Saucerful of Secrets (1968)
Soundtrack from the Film More (1969)
Ummagumma (studio and live, 1969)
Atom Heart Mother (1970)
Meddle (1971)
Obscured by Clouds (1972)
The Dark Side of the Moon (1973)
Wish You Were Here (1975)

Many of the longer tracks are improvisations around a simple modal pulse played by Roger Waters’ bass, generally an octave of E or D, for example the famous ‘Careful With That Axe, Eugene’ (1968). Child’s play compared to anything by Yes, Genesis or Crimson.

‘Careful With That Axe, Eugene’ performed live by Pink Floyd on YouTube

Emerson, Lake and Palmer

Greg Lake played bass and sang on the first King Crimson album (1969) but then left a band he thought had no future to form a ‘supergroup’ with Keith Emerson, the manically extrovert organist from The Nice and Carl Palmer, the hyperactive drummer from Atomic Rooster. Emerson, Lake and Palmer (ELP) was born and quickly released a sequence of albums which became a byword for pompousness, pretentiousness and bombast. Long, long tracks with heavy thumping rhythms, dominated by Emerson’s demented Hammond organ and Moog synthesiser, lyrics about the end of the world, or heavyhanded adaptations of popular classics (Fanfare for the Common Man, Pictures at an Exhibition, Jerusalem). They became one of the most successful acts in the world, pioneered stadium rock and earned a fortune.

Emerson Lake & Palmer (1970)
Tarkus (1971)
Pictures at an Exhibition (1971)
Trilogy (1972)
Brain Salad Surgery (1973)

The track ‘Tarkus’ from their concept album of the same name illustrates what was so so wrong with this band.

‘Tarkus’ by Emerson, Lake and Palmer on YouTube

Genesis Maybe Genesis are better known than Floyd to the general public because of the crossover pop hits they had when fronted by Phil Collins in the 1980s and 90s. But purist fans hark back to the earliest years, 1969-74, when the band was fronted by Peter Gabriel who also wrote many of the songs:

From Genesis to Revelation (1969)
Trespass (1970)
Nursery Cryme (1971)
Foxtrot (1972)
Selling England by the Pound (1973)
The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway (1974)

Genesis’s music has almost no blues or soul or rock and roll techniques in it at all. Of course it has a rock layout – drums, bass, guitar, keyboards, singer – but the music is extraordinarily inventive without resorting to anything people thought of as blues cliches. Genesis are often thought of as a very English band. Stump seeks to explain: partly it’s the subject matter: Peter Gabriel’s songs, which dominate the early albums, convey a kind of essence of English 6th form/art college whimsy – songs about a magical music box, the giant hogweed as invader England, a song about a Rachman-type rackrent landlord (‘The Knife’), or the thrilling song based on Arthur C Clarke’s very English sci-fi classic ‘Childhood’s End’ (1973).

‘Watcher of the Skies’ by Genesis on YouTube

I knew that the band had met at the elite public school, Charterhouse. Stump adds the fact that Charterhouse has a famous musical department and choir. All the band were soaked in the English choir and hymnal tradition. This explains their musical style with its tendency for the guitar and keyboard to elaborate chords with arpeggios and fugue structures, giving a stately, classical air to even quite raucous passages.

Yes

The personnel of these bands were often very fluid. (Floyd again stands out as an exception for the group’s stability; after Dave Gilmour joined in 1968 they stayed with the same 4 musicians up to their Live 8 reunion in 2005). King Crimson, on the other hand, changed personnel and sound with every record, something which hampered them developing a steady following. Yes had a fairly stable memberhood formed round the core of singer Jon Anderson and bassist Chris Squire (although their drummer, Bill Bruford, who had joined Yes in June 1968, left in the summer of 1972 to join King Crimson.)

Yes are as famous for their album covers by the artist Roger Dean as for their music, like this cover for the 1971 album ‘Fragile’.

Their early albums are striking for the long tracks very carefully arranged from numerous small fragments which are seamlessly joined, for the sound of Jon Anderson’s falsetto vocals and the driving bass of Chris Squire, for Chris Howe’s prodigious virtuosity on acoustic and electric guitar. and for the hippy incomprehensibility of the lyrics.

Yes (1969)
Time and a Word (1970)
The Yes Album (1971)
Fragile (1971)
Close to the Edge (1972)
Tales from Topographic Oceans (1973)
Relayer (1974)

‘Siberian Khatru’ by Yes on YouTube

The End of Prog There were three ends:

1. Punk

The first punk singles were released in Summer 1976 and suddenly a younger generation of performers and punters realised you didn’t have to be a virtuoso like Robert Fripp or Rick Wakefield or Chris Howe to get on stage and perform a song which spoke to you and your hearers’ lives and emotions. Also songs didn’t have to be half an hour long with extended solos, and be all about the end of the world or knights and fairies or Starship Troopers. They could be short and punchy and about nicking cars, finding a job, about the boring, drunk, sometimes violent urban scene which most English people actually inhabit. Culturally, Punk Rock destroyed the imaginative worldview which underpinned Prog. It was like the Emperor’s new Clothes: once one person pointed out the emperor was naked, the whole artifice with its pomp, its pretentions and its sacred cows, came crashing down.

On the street, vast numbers of young people wanted other sorts of music, whether it was soul, disco, heavy metal, ska, two-tone, reggae, the chilled-out Californian sounds of the Eagles or James Taylor – and then suddenly the completely new worldview of Punk burst onto the scene. Punk wasn’t just a music but an aesthetic. It made the gritty street scenes, the urban decay of developed countries, it made poverty, aggression, loutish thuggish je m’en foutisme, cool and stylish. The editor of punk fanzine Sniffin Glue famously threw any single which lasted more than 3 minutes out the window.

2. Death of progressive politics

Progressive politics collapsed. Whether it was hard politics of post 68 revolutionaries or the soft utopianism of the hippies, both were strangled by the economic collapse of the early 70s. After the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Arab countries quadrupled the price of oil plunging the developed world into a depression which lasted nearly a decade. Radical politics and hippy druggy alternative lifestyles dragged on, but without the confidence with which they’d begun back in the booming 1960s. In one sense Punk was just being honest about the crappy urban world of unemployment and street fighting which it saw out the window. The bands became multimillionaire tax exiles phoning in their solos from Switzerland and arguing about royalties. Whatever idealism they had at the start had vanished by the mid-70s.

3. Out of steam

Stump’s book suggests that Prog was running out of steam before well Punk exploded.

Peter Gabriel left Genesis in June 1975, exhausted by writing most of the big ‘concept’ album ‘The Lamb lies Down on Broadway’, and a long American tour. Robert Fripp dissolved King Crimson in September 1974, exhausted and disillusioned by the ‘rock’ world. Pink Floyd‘s multimillion smash album ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ (1973) was followed by the less-popular ‘Wish You Were Here’ (1975) which is a sour meditation on the band’s embittered alienation from their fans and the exploitative music business. There’s a big gap between Yes‘s ‘Relayer’ (1974) and its successor, ‘Going for the One’ (1977), as if they’d run out of inspiration. In 1974 Emerson, Lake and Palmer, at one stage vying with Led Zeppelin as biggest grossing rock band in the world, released ‘Brain Salad Surgery’ (1973), toured it in 1974, then took a sabbatical. It turned into a 3 year break and when they returned with Works I in 1977 the world had moved on and they were never to recapture their success. The Incredible String Band, the influential experimental folk band which had issued hugely successful albums since their 1967 debut, broke up in 1974. In summer 1975 Gong, maybe the archetypal hippy band, lost founder member Daevid Allen and two other core members.

On the broader Rock scene, John Lennon, a Master presence who helped oversee the transition of pop from Royal Variety entertainment to experimental Rock, retired from music in October 1975 after the birth of his son, Sean, and after delivering diminishing returns with his solo career. And a real Giant of 20th century music, Miles Davis, also retired in the summer of 1975, exhausted from decades of substance abuse. If you listen to his musical progress in the early 70s it’s hard to avoid the conclusion he had painted himself into a corner with increasingly rackety electronic jazz. In his last concerts he stopped playing trumpet altogether and leant his elbows on an electric organ, glaring at the audience.

Bit of a sweeping conclusion, but it is suggestive that somehow the explosion of creativity which began sometime in the 1960s, around 1966/67 – which saw widespread experiments in musical form and structure, in instrumentation, in crossing over genres, the transformation of recording technology, the transformation of venues from sweaty clubs to vast American stadiums – these enormous changes in the creation, marketing, selling, performance and consumption of the new genre of Rock Music, had taken place and been consolidated. The experimental phase was over. A new phase of stadium rock, an established genre with its own expectations, populated by transAtlantic rock gods, was well in place by about 1973. The open-ended experimental progressiveness these bands had pioneered had ground to a halt.

4. Or… did Prog die?

The thing that strikes me most about reading this book and revisiting these old bands is – they still exist! To my surprise, they either reformed later in the 70s or 80s or just continued writing and recording music. What else could they do? In the 80s, swept aside by Punk, new Wave, then the New Romantics not to mention hiphop and World Music, they must have seemed a forlorn hope and I imagine sales collapsed. But they persisted, and recorded and toured through the 90s and into the 00s. The invention of the CD must have been a boon for musicians who liked making album-long tracks of music – and better digital quality must have helped people understand the subtleties of composition and instrumentation which had been muffled on vinyl. But then the advent of the internet must have also been a lease of life – allowing as it did the establishment of worldwide communities of fans, the publication of concert footage or rare tracks – the creation, in other words, of a whole new online audience.

Now there are annual Prog awards, festivals, magazines, and newer young Prog bands, and from all sorts of disparate countries. Back in 1980, who on earth would have imagined that Yes, Genesis, King Crimson, the various bits of Pink Floyd, would still be recording and touring over 40 years after most of them were formed.

Big caveat

I’ve only discussed the most famous Prog bands, the ones I’m (over)familiar with. Stump’s book is extremely useful for listing and describing and analysing music by a host of other bands of the period, including:

The Moody Blues
The Strawbs
The Incredible String Band
The Nice
Soft Machine
Caravan
Gong
Gentle Giant
Henry Cow
Renaissance
Van de Graaf Generator
Tangerine Dream

2 Comments

by Simon on January 20, 2013 • Permalink

Posted in Books

Tagged 1997, Music, Paul Stump, Progressive rock, Rock music, The Music's All That Matters: A History of Progressive Rock

Posted by Simon on January 20, 2013

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2013/01/20/the-musics-all-that-matters-a-history-of-progressive-rock-paul-stump/

The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century by John Brewer (1997)

It was in the 18th century that the notion of the arts or high art separated from lower, mechanical activities & trade. Poetry, music, painting, sculpture, all dated back to antiquity – but the idea of linking them all into a new category, a separate field of investigation, as done by philosophical pioneers by Kant or Burke, was an 18th century innovation.

The word ‘aesthetics’ was coined in the 1750s – a new area of philosophical study.

The figure of the connoisseur (French) appears, supported by the concept of ‘taste’ and ‘good taste’, separate from the king & aristocracy, the previous sole guardians of taste.

Similarly, the figure of the impresario (Italian) – the middleman, the artistic manager, art dealers, printers & engravers, a Europe-wide network of people feeding the growing demand for ‘art’ from a newly affluent middle class.

David Hume & Adam Smith associated the civilising arts with the influence of commerce in bringing together remote people in a common cause. 18th century polite society was urban – a thing of coffee shops and salons and exchanges and assembly rooms and dining clubs and reading societies – where a wide range of people could meet and debate – no longer with courts.

Critics & sociologists, by defining polite, commercial, refined & tasteful society, also created their opposite, the vulgar, peasant cultures of, for example, the Scottish Highlands – or the backward savage cultures of America & Tahiti. Only later in the century did intellectuals begin to hanker after the folk traditions, stories, poems, legends, songs which had allegedly been expunged by the spread of civilisation – the origins, for example, of the taste for ‘the Celtic’, as explained in the British Museum exhibition Celts: Art and Identity – which also became a component of the Romantic Movement.

The King and Court

After the Civil War no monarch had the money or could get it off Parliament to realise the kind of extravagant building plans executed on the Continent by, for example Louis XVI (Versailles). Charles II couldn’t afford Christopher Wren’s grand plans to rebuild Whitehall, James II didn’t have the time, William III was sour & anti-social, preferring his palaces in Holland, though he grubbed the money to pay for Wren to refurbish Hampton Court. The Georges were foreign and so didn’t want to waste money on English palaces.

First half of the 18th century: The Kit-Kat Club (1696-1720) symbolises the move from Court – royal patronage & libertinage – to the ideals of a civilised society of polite gentlemen, as described in the new Tatler and Spectator magazines. Members; Addison, Steele et al.

Second half of 18th century: Dr Johnson’s Literary Club (1764-94): Johnson, Garrick, Reynolds, Burke.

Polite society

Politeness as a cure for the severe stresses left by the Civil War: politeness more important than ideology or creed: politeness ensuring tolerance & peace. As promoted in the hugely influential Spectator and Tatler.

Books & Boots

All posts tagged 1997

Rivera by Andrea Kettenmann (1997)

French impressionism

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Mural style

Lilies

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Killing Floor by Lee Child (1997)

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Reacher girls

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George Grosz: The Berlin Years by Ralph Jentsch (1997)

Transition from soft to hard lines

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Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond (1997)

Answers

1. The East-West axis of Eurasia.

2. Plants and animals

3. Stratified society

4. Technology

The overkill theory

Summary

Countering prejudices

Fascinating facts

Terrible epidemics

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Credit

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The Music’s All That Matters: A History of Progressive Rock by Paul Stump (1997)

Progressive

John Coltrane

King Crimson

Pink Floyd

Emerson, Lake and Palmer

Yes

1. Punk

2. Death of progressive politics

3. Out of steam

4. Or… did Prog die?

Big caveat

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