All posts tagged Fleet Street

The Big City @ the Guildhall Art Gallery

What’s the largest painting you know? What’s the biggest picture you can think of? Monet’s huge water lilies? Mark Rothko’s Seagram murals at Tate Modern? Juan Miro’s huge canvases of biomorphic shapes? These canvases are so big that if you ever find yourself sitting on an exhibition bench in front of a trio of them, as I have done with Monet and Miro, you realise entire field of vision is filled with them. It is an immersive experience. You are in Miroworld or Monetland.

Is size important? When it comes to art? Does a big painting really do a lot more than a medium-sized one? What, exactly? At what size does a big painting become an immersive one? Have psychologists or art colleges done research into viewers’ psychological and aesthetic responses to size? Is there a recognised point at which a painting goes from ‘big’ to ‘massive’ or is it subjective i.e according to the viewer’s physical size and visual range?

Do artists, collectors or galleries categorise paintings by size? Have there been fashions for huge canvases? Or historical periods particularly associated with them? Are there particular artists famous for their monster canvases? Is there a record for the biggest painting ever made? By who? Why?

These are some of the questions raised by ‘The Big City’, an exhibition at the little known but well-worth-a-visit Guildhall Art Gallery, a hop, skip and a jump from Bank tube station.

The gallery is owned by the Corporation of London, which possesses some 4,500 works of art. Fifty or so of these are on display in the gallery’s permanent exhibition, itself packed with gems, and then the gallery runs rotating exhibitions of selections of the others, alongside exhibitions of new, original art works.

The Big City

This exhibition is titled ‘The Big City’. It is housed in three rooms, respectively small, medium and large. The small room, the third one you come to, houses a display which comes first in terms of chronology:

Sir James Thornhill

Sir James Thornhill (1676 to 1734) was the premier exponent of the Italian Baroque style in Britain in the early 1700s. Much of this took the form of site-specific allegorical murals for public or grand buildings. He supervised large painting schemes in the dome of St Paul’s, in the hall of Blenheim Palace, at Chatsworth House.

In the early 1720s Thornhill was commissioned to create an Allegory of London for the ceiling of the council chamber at the Guildhall where the Lord Mayor and aldermen held their meetings. He used the established style of Baroque allegory to create a central image of London, represented by a topless woman, being advised by the goddess of wisdom, Pallas Athena, and women symbolising Peace and Plenty. It features putti or podgy winged toddlers who often flit around Baroque paintings. Here they are depicted at the bottom right among images of: the City insignia, the sword bearer’s fur cap, a pearl sword and the City mace.

Allegory of London by Sir James Thornhill (1725) © Guildhall Art Gallery, City of London

This oval painting was fixed in the middle of the ceiling and was accompanied by four smaller pieces, one in each corner of the ceiling, depicting flying cherubs or putti representing the four cardinal virtues: Temperance, Prudence, Fortitude and Justice.

We know what the whole design looked like because there’s a painting of the room by John Philipps Emslie showing how it looked in 1886. The story is that the centrepiece and four smaller parts were dismantled and stored during the Second World War. The building was damaged in the Blitz and the original decorative scheme destroyed but these individual pieces were saved, along with some preparatory sketches by Thornhill. All of this is on display here.

It would be easy to say the figures ‘looked down’ on the City officials meeting below but a glance at the image shows they’re not looking down at all, they are tied up in their own conversations in their own world.

The piece’s content, size and position are obviously connected with values – moral and social values. The size not so much of the individual elements, but the way they were arranged over the entire roof, were designed to act as a constant reminder to the officials below, of the longevity and depth of the values associated with the City and its officials and business. This is what we stand for: commerce and prosperity, bringing justice and peace.

So the images aren’t instructive, they are aspirational. It wasn’t a case of the gods looking down but of ordinary mortals looking up and, whenever they did, being reminded of the traditions and values they were meant to be aspiring to. (Also, a point often not made about Baroque painting – they’re quite playful.)

Prudence from The Allegory of London by Sir James Thornhill (1725) © Guildhall Art Gallery, City of London

Grand occasions

Before you get to the Thornhill room you walk through the medium-sized first room in the show. This has a completely different look and feel. It contains nine big paintings of ceremonies associated with the City of London from the late Victorian period through to the 1960s. They depict lots of old white men wearing formal clothes, gowns and regalia, chains of office, wigs and so on.

The paintings depict different types of event which the curators usefully itemise: civic, royal, state, ceremonial, funeral.

They are big, and their size is more obviously connected to notions of power than the relatively benign Thornhill. By power I don’t mean images of solders or Big Brother looming threateningly, not direct power. But the soft power implicit in grand occasions which serve to bolster and underpin ideas of hierarchy. The pictures are big because the event was big.

Take ‘Queen Victoria at St. Paul’s Cathedral on Diamond Jubilee Day 22 June 1897’ by Andrew Carrick Gow, completed in 1899. The painting was commissioned to capture the magnificence and the magnificence is exemplified in the extraordinary scene of the packed steps of St Paul’s. Not just packed but, as you look closer, you realise arranged in a highly structured way, as was the event, to include representatives of the army, the Church, politicians and academics, arranged in groups and hierarchies. The crème de la crème, the top figures in all the important fields of state.

Queen Victoria at St. Paul’s Cathedral on Diamond Jubilee Day 22 June 1897 by Andrew Carrick Gow (1899) © Guildhall Art Gallery, City of London Corporation

The curators point out that a massive royal state occasion like this transformed the centre of London into a stage, a set on which the thousands of figures here, and lining the route of the royal procession to the cathedral, were arranged – and which the painter then has to capture as best he can. Put this way I sympathise with the scale of the challenge the artist faced. He had to be in complete control of the old values of structured composition and extremely detailed naturalism.

There’s another super-simple way to categorise the paintings on display here, which is: inside or outside. The Gow is a good example of outdoor magnificence; ‘The Coronation Luncheon to Her Majesty Elizabeth II in the Guildhall, London, 12 June 1953’ by Terence Cuneo is a good example of magnificence in an indoors setting.

The Coronation Luncheon to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II in the Guildhall, London, 12 June 1953 by Terence Cuneo. © Guildhall Art Gallery, City of London Corporation. Image © Terence Cuneo

Once again the size of the painting is an attempt to match the scale of the actual event and, as you can see here, the size of the actual banqueting hall which is, as it is intended to be, awesome. And, leaving aside the ostensible splendour of the occasion, it’s hard not to be awed by the photographic realism of Cuneo’s painting. There’s a ‘Where’s Wally’ element to looking closely at the hundred or more individual guests, how they’re sitting, what they’re going (eating, talking, turning to their neighbour and so on).

(It might be worth pointing out that the word ‘magnificence’, like so many English words used to describe this kind of thing, has a Latin root, and so carries with it the connotation of learning and cultural capital which Latinate words always bestow. It derives from magnus meaning big or great [the Roman general Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus is translated into English as Pompey the Great] and facere meaning ‘to make or do’. So at its root ‘magnificence’ means ‘to make big’. At its origin, it is about size. During 2,000 years of evolution through medieval Latin, French and into English it has come to mean ‘splendour, nobility and grandeur’, themselves all Latinate words.)

Terence Cuneo OBE (1907 to 1996) was a prolific English painter noted for his scenes of railways, horses and military actions. He was the official artist for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953 and the Queen’s favourite portraitist. Including ceremonial occasions he painted her no fewer than 17 times. He’s represented by two works here, the coronation lunch (above) and:

Frank O. Salisbury (1874 to 1962) was an English artist who specialised in portraits, large canvases of historical and ceremonial events, stained glass and book illustration. In his heyday he made a fortune on both sides of the Atlantic and was known as ‘Britain’s Painter Laureate’. He painted over 800 portraits (!) and painted Churchill more times than any other artist.

What you’ll have realised by now is that most of these works are, by modern standards, barely what we’d call art at all. Sure they’re well composed, efficiently worked paintings, but they are in a style that was old fashioned by 1900 and completely moribund by the 1960s.

In this respect, despite their size and detail and polish, they epitomise the opposite of what was intended; rather than impressing with awe and magnificence they tend, to the modern viewer, to emphasise how remote and out of touch these figures of power were with the wider world of the 40s, 50s and 60s.

You could argue that the grand old panelled rooms in which they suited old boys had their gala dinners protected and insulated them from a world moving beyond their grasp and even their understanding.

Churchill, who features in two of the paintings here (one alive, one dead) fought the Second World War to preserve the empire. Fifteen short years later he lived to see it being dismantled and the influx of immigrants from the former colonies who would bring new voices and new perspectives to Britain. None of that historic change is even hinted at in these old-fashioned depictions of old-fashioned institutions carrying out their time-honoured ceremonies.

There are some older paintings on the same type of subject. These, as it were, have permission to be dated, or are easier to take ‘straight’ because they are in styles appropriate to their day.

In this latter painting, apparently Paton, a noted painter of maritime scenes and naval occasions, did the composition and painted the main scene while Wheatley, famous for a series of paintings called ‘The Cries of London‘, did the figures in the foreground.

Contemporary art

The third and biggest room contains the biggest variety of paintings and the biggest single works. Size is not the only factor for their inclusion here, since each of the paintings also has a specific setting or story and these to some extent represent different aspects of life in the city.

I counted 18 paintings in this big room. I won’t list them all but will select some highlights and themes.

Ken Howard’s ‘Cheapside 10.10 am. 10 February 1970‘ is big and sludgy. It shows the north side of Cheapside looking west on the kind of cold overcast February morning typical of London. This reproduction softens the impact of the paint which Howard has laid on in thick dollops, makes it look a much cleaner, slicker object than it is in real life. A reproduction also brings out instantly what is less obvious in the flesh, which is the fact that it’s a painting about a mirror, namely the way St Mary le Bow church on the left is reflected in a shop window on the right.

Howard is quoted as saying that urban landscapes give more scope for an artist interested in shape, tone and colour than the countryside. This is exemplified in the next work, which is a splendid depiction of Fleet Street in the 1930s.

Fleet Street, London, 1930s by unknown artist © Guildhall Art Gallery, City of London

There’s quite a backstory to this painting. It was commissioned by Viscount Rothermere, owner of the Evening Standard and Daily Mail, to depict the hustle and bustle of Fleet Street, then centre of Britain’s newspaper industry. But the artist intended to include portraits of real Fleet Street luminaries down at the bottom right, and one of the first to be completed was a portrait of Rothermere’s rival press baron, Lord Beaverbrook, owner of the Express group. At which point Rothermere took the painting from the artist, which explains why, if you look closely, you realise it is unfinished, many of those figures without faces and some little more than ghosts. Which in its own way, makes the image quite haunting.

What is finished is the central vista along the ‘Street of Shame’ and, in particular, the gleaming Art Deco glass and steel building on the left. This was the newly opened Daily Express building (1932) which features, thinly disguised, in Evelyn Waugh’s great satire on the 1930s newspaper industry, Scoop.

What does size have to do with it? Well, at 2.13 metres tall this is a big painting, but clearly the scale doesn’t aim to do the same as the Thornhill (embody inspiring moral values) or the civic paintings we saw earlier (impress the viewer with rank and hierarchy).

I suggest its implicit aim is to do with modernism whose fundamental driver is excitement about life in the modern city, in this instance the new technologies and new designs and new architecture represented by Art Deco. It is an image of hustle and bustle and energy. Since it was commissioned by a multi-millionaire media baron I suppose you could also say it represents a capitalist’s, a plutocrat’s view of the city, full of folk hustling and bustling to make him money for him, his class, society at large. It is a celebration of the system.

This enjoyable work was succeeded by a sequence of paintings which I didn’t like at all, in fact actively disliked.

1. Walk by Oliver Bevan (1995) is certainly big (2.29m high, 2.13 m wide). It is a depiction of the pedestrian crossing in front of the Barbican tube station. Apparently Bevan specialises in the depiction of ‘non-personal urban spaces’. Actually, the tiny reproduction I’ve linked to makes it look a lot better than it does in real life. Confronting the 2 metre high thing in real life makes you all too aware of the crudity of the painting and the unsatisfying randomness of the arrangement of the people. I know people mill about randomly all the time but this has been carefully arranged to look gauche and clumsy.

I’m guessing the intention of doing such a humdrum scene on such a large scale is somehow democratic, to say that size isn’t limited to the high and mighty but that any moment in our everyday lives is worthy of record and depiction, can be made ‘monumental’ in scale and implication.

Maybe. But in this instance the size of the piece did the exact opposite of almost all the earlier works, which was impress me with its graceless lack of design and poor finish. Its size worked against it.

2. Jock McFadyen is represented by a work called Roman (1993). McFadyen depicts scenes around his flat and studio in Bethnal Green. This murky painting is of a block of flats in Roman Road nearby. It’s horrible. Again, the tiny online reproduction intensifies and clarifies the image. In reality it’s 2 metres square and an offence to the eye. Everything possible has been done to make it feel shitty. The left vertical of the flats is wonky, which is upsetting. The flats themselves are depicted with wobbly lines which completely fail to capture the hard geometric shape of such blocks which is their only redeeming feature. The human figure on a balcony is poorly drawn. The red VW in the street is appallingly badly drawn. And the decision to paint railings across the bottom spoils the entire composition even more and made me turn away quickly. I actively like scenes of urban devastation, graffiti and whatnot. But this just felt shoddy and amateurish.

3. Worse is to come. Flyover St Peter’s (1995) by Paul Butler is a whacking 2.74 metres wide and a big donkey turd of a painting. Regular readers of my blog know I actively like pictures or sculptures to be textured or incorporate detritus like dirt, wood, glass or whatever (see Hepher, below); but that I fiercely dislike the paintings of Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossof with their inch-deep sludges of filthy puddle-coloured oils.

They seem to me to do dirt on the entire idea of painting. They deny clarity, structure, composition, delicacy, skill, light, everything which makes painting worthwhile. The Ken Howard painting, earlier on in this room, was well on the way to achieving Auerbach levels of sludge, but Butler goes full throttle and annihilates the human spirit in a disgusting refuse tip of stricken oil spillage. Again, the reproduction you’re looking at flattens and clarifies the image so that it almost becomes appealing. In the flesh it’s like someone has spent a year blowing their nose and menstruating on a canvas to produce a thick layer of rotting mucus and menses. Yuk.

(All three of these works, plus a few others nearby, are, in their different ways, poor. This in itself is quite interesting. Most exhibitions you pay to go to in London represent the best of the best – tip-top Surrealist works at the Design Museum or Cezanne’s greatest hits at Tate Modern. You don’t often get to see a collection of art works that are average or plain bad, and it was interesting to dwell on what made all these works so sub-standard or actively objectionable.)

Anyway, this little set of poor works contrast dramatically with the series of paintings on the opposite wall, which are much cleaner, airier panoramas of London. Indeed, the canvas of London as seen from the top of the Shell Centre by David Thomas (1968) is the widest painting in the show, at a whopping 4.88 metres.

London from the top of the Shell Centre by David Thomas (1968) © Guildhall Art Gallery, City of London Corporation. Image © David Thomas

But it’s not this that impresses; it’s the lightness and the clarity of the image, which was like walking out of a dark room (Bevan, McFadyen, Butler) into the light and clarity of a lovely spring day. The painting feels wonderfully lucid, with all the buildings lining the Thames in central London depicted with thrilling geometric accuracy, almost like an architect’s conspectus come to life.

For people who like a bit of gossip or social history with their art, the label tells us that the picture shows at the centre bottom the Royal Festival Hall – the most enduring legacy of the 1951 Festival of Britain – to its right the daring Hayward Gallery which had just opened, and to the right of Waterloo Bridge a brown open space which had just been cleared to make way for construction of the new National Theatre.

What size does here is introduce the notion of the panorama, a particular genre of art which has reappeared in urban centres over the centuries. It embodies the pleasure of being up at a viewing platform looking over a city we mostly only get to see from ground level. The same kick which has people queuing up to buy tickets to the (disappointing) London Eye.

It begins a little series of urban panoramas which include a view over Clerkenwell by Michael Bach. The thrill or bite in something like this has to come from the architectural accuracy of the depiction. Bach, like Thomas’s, is very accurate and it’s big (2 metres wide) but…something (for me) is lacking.

Possibly that something is demonstrated in a much older work, the classic ‘Heart of Empire’ by Niels Moeller Lund. Though born in Denmark (hence the name) Lund grew up in Newcastle-upon-Tyne before moving to Paris to study painting. He is best known for his impressionistic paintings of England, particularly London and the North-East and ‘The Heart Of The Empire’ is his best-known painting.

The Heart of the Empire by Niels Moeller Lund (1904) © Guildhall Art Gallery, City of London Corporation

The view is taken from the roof of the roof of the Royal Exchange looking west across London. There are several obvious points to be made: I suppose the most obvious one is that panoramas over cities taken from up high, like this, give the viewer a sense of freedom, as if we can fly, as if we are gods flying above the mob and the crowd, freed from the cramped dictates of the busy streets, the traffic, the jostling with strangers, flying free. There’s a kind of psychological release.

Second and allied with it is some kind of sense of power. I don’t mean direct power like we’ve been elected president, I mean a kind of psychological empowerment, a sense of somehow owning what we survey. We know we don’t but it feels like it. This is my city with all its awesome hustle and bustle, its millions of lives, its buying and selling and wealth and poverty.

Why, then, do I get that feeling about this painting but not when looking at the view from the Shell building or over Clerkenwell? It’s something to do with the composition and, especially, the style. Lund’s work is described as ‘impressionist’ though it’s nowhere near as hazy as the classic French impressionists.

What he achieves is a soft focus, gauzy effect. The light isn’t champagne-clear as in Thomas’s bright somewhat clinical treatment; it creates a softening, blurring effect. This is evidenced in numerous ways, for example the buildings shimmer and face into the distance.

And after looking at it for a while I noticed the smoke issuing from chimneys across the vista and especially in the foreground. These may or may not be contributing to the blurry hazy effect, but they epitomise another aspect of the painting which is that it is anecdotal. What I mean is there are things going on in the painting. To be precise, note the flight of white birds (presumably pigeons) in front of the neo-classical Mansion House in the lower left. Once you’ve seen them your eye is drawn past them to the blurry throng of horses and carts and red omnibuses below.

The life of the city is dramatised. Because I happen to have watched the Robert Downey movie recently, it makes me think of Sherlock Holmes and a million details of late Victorian London life. When I look at the Thomas painting I get absolutely no sense whatever of the life of London 1968, there don’t appear to be any people in it at all.

So these are preliminary suggestions about how the same type of painting – the big urban panorama – can have dramatically different impact on the viewer depending on the sense of composition and painterly style.

David Hepher

I’ve left the best thing about the exhibition till last. The main room in the exhibition space is a kind of atrium in the sense that the ceiling has been removed to create a hole which lets you see into the floor above. Or, conversely, the floor above requires a modern glass railing to stop people falling down into the floor below, a railing which allows them to look down into the room below and view the artworks from above.

Anyway the point is that this removed ceiling has allowed the curators to place here a big wooden block supporting the three biggest paintings in the exhibition, three fabulous and very big paintings depicting modern brutalist blocks of flats by artist David Hepher.

Born in 1935, over the past 40 years Hepher has established a reputation for painting inner city estates of the 1960s and 70s. The three works here are 3 metres high. They’ve been attached to a wooden display stand to create an enormous triptych which dominates the room and is the biggest and most convincing thing in the exhibition. It’s worth making the journey to the gallery just to see this.

Gordon House East Face; Gordon House Nocturne; Gordon House West by David Hepher (2013) © Guildhall Art Gallery, City of London Corporation. Image © David Hepher

I loved these works for half a dozen reasons. For a start this it the real London, the appalling 70s tower blocks which millions of Londoners are forced to live in every day and which enables London’s intense population density: one seventh of the UK’s population lives in London, the most populous city in Europe, which has a population density of 145,000 per square mile, and it feels like it.

Secondly, tower blocks, like much modern architecture, is a fantastic subject for composition, because it comes ready-made with grids, squares, geometric shapes, which can either be dealt with in an arty modernist style (for example, photographs of their many motifs from unexpected angles as in lots of 20s and 30s photography) or dealt with straight-on, as here. They are just thrilling artefacts – or thrilling to those of us who like lines, symmetries, geometric regularities and angles.

Thirdly, there’s a fabulously dystopian vibe to them. You don’t need to be familiar with J.G. Ballard’s depictions of urban collapse and psychic displacement (Crash, Concrete Island and High Rise‘) to see, realise and feel concrete tower blocks as powerful symbols of social collapse and anomie. You don’t need to know much about the Grenfell Tower disaster to learn that tower blocks have become the cheap, under-maintained dumping ground for the poor, immigrants and the powerless.

They’re real world equivalents of the tower atop Mount Doom in Lord of the Rings, real world sentinels of poverty and deprivation. The broken lifts and urine-stained stairwells and broken pavements littered with dog turds and broken glass, the whole ensemble liberally decorated with impenetrable graffiti create an overwhelming sense of a society which has given up on itself.

The people who designed, built and shunted the poor into these cheap, shoddy death traps are obviously war criminals but in a special kind of war, a kind of below-the-radar class war which has been going on for decades and has become increasingly mixed up with institutional racism and the war on refugees to produce a toxic, and at Grenfell fatal, brew.

In their betrayal of the art, design and architectural utopianism of the 50s, 60s and 70s, in their magical transformation into symbols of social apartheid, exemplifying the scapegoating of the poorest in society, tower blocks like this are absolutely central to the urban experience in cities all around the western world.

The logistics of their size meant they had to be placed in the centre of the atrium, but the positioning also has a deeply symbolic meaning: all the other images, swish modernism of the 1930s, of flyovers and pedestrian crossings, of slick aerial panoramas, are all spokes rotating round the axle of these monster images.

To zero in on the works, another crucial and thrilling aspect of them is that they aren’t just paintings. Hepher has incorporated all the tricks of modern painting to make them rough textured objects. They aren’t flat paintings, they use wood and PVA to give texture to the surface. The graffiti symbols have genuinely been spraypainted over the images. He has dripped green slime down the front of the images to represent the unstoppable decay, concrete cancer and dilapidation which turned out to be a central aspect of these buildings. And most importantly of all he’s used actual concrete to produce rough-hewn, raw grey sections to either side of the central images. I couldn’t resist touching it, as cold and unyielding, as thrillingly alien as the raw concrete in the National Theatre or Barbican centre, as cold as the touch of the devil.

These three huge paintings strike me as classics of their type, of their subject matter and style. On the wall nearby is the Lund ‘Heart of Empire’ painting which I also really liked for its depth and evocative power. It seemed to me they form two ends of a spectrum: London traditional and London modern, London as romantic fantasy and as brutal reality, bourgeois London and chav London, the sublimely uplifting and the sordidly degraded, flying and falling.

I felt a kind of electrical energy crackling between the two completely different imaginative spaces they inhabit which was utterly thrilling. I found it hard to leave. I kept walking back into the room, walking round the stand, viewing these great looming canvases from different angles, drawn back to their thrilling, angry, visionary dystopian energy.

Related links

Other Guildhall Art Gallery reviews

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by Simon on February 22, 2023  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on February 22, 2023

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Unreasonable Behaviour by Don McCullin (2015)

‘I needed to be at home. I needed the peace of my own country, England. Yet when I go home and sleep in my own bed, I soon become restless. I am not shaped for a house. I grew up in harsh surroundings. I have slept under tables in battles for days on end. There is something about this that unfits you for sleeping in beds for the rest of your life. My wars, the way I’ve lived, is like an uncurable disease. It is like the promise of a tremendous high and the certainty of a bad dream. It is something I both fear and love, but it’s something I can’t do without.’
(Unreasonable Behaviour, page 226)

Don McCullin is one of the most famous war photographers of the 20th century. He first published his autobiography (co-written with Lewis Chester) in 1990. This is the new, updated edition, published in 2015, as McCullin turned 80.

Having just read Dispatches, the stoned, stream-of-consciousness prose poetry of Michael Herr’s classic account of his time covering Vietnam War, the detached, lucid prose of this book initially seemed a bit flat. But it perfectly suits the laconic, understated attitude McCullin brings to the varied and intense subject matter – whether it’s massacres in Africa or meeting the Beatles or the unlikely friendship he once struck up with Earl Montgomery.

Trips to war zones are covered in a few pages, insights dealt with in one or two pithy sentences. The battle of Khe Sanh in Vietnam takes up 60 pages of Herr’s book but gets just two paragraphs here – but it feels enough. There’s little fat, very little to come between you and the many highlights of McCullin’s extraordinarily long and colourful life. Which makes this a hugely enjoyable and absorbing book.

(By his own account McCullin suffers from severe dyslexia – as a result he didn’t passed any exams, has never liked reading and so, presumably, a great deal of credit for shaping this consistently spare, flat but very focused prose must go to the book’s co-author, Lewis Chester.)

Here’s an example, almost at random, of the book’s clipped, spare prose which is, nonetheless, gripping because it focuses so precisely on the relevant information and detail of the extreme events it describes. It’s January 1968 and McCullin is in Vietnam covering the Tet Offensive.

Under a heavy overcast sky, I joined the convoy of the Fifth Marine Commando as it started rolling up to Hue. It ploughed through heavy mud and rain, past houses collapsed and pitted by artillery, and columns of fleeing refugees. It was very cold. (p.116)

The narrative moves fast from one carefully selected high point to the next, focusing in on moments of insight and awareness. Cameos of war. Snapshots in time. Photos in prose.

Beginnings

Born into a working class household in Finsbury Park, North London, McCullin left school at 15 without any qualifications before doing his National Service, which included postings to: Suez, Kenya during the Mau Mau uprising, and Cyprus during the Enosis conflict. It was, as he puts it, ‘an extended Cook’s tour of the end of Empire.’ (p.45) His dad was ill, his mother struggled to manage three small kids, they lived in real squalor and poverty, and he grew up with a rough bunch of post-war lads, lots of fights outside north London dancehalls in the Teddy Boy 1950s.

But, as he explains, it was photographs of the local gang – the Guv’nors – at the time a local murder had hit the deadlines, that first got him noticed, that got him introduced to Fleet Street picture editors and – voom! – his career took off. Within a few pages he has begun to be given photo assignments, and then starts winning photography prizes, which bring better assignments, more pay, more freedom.

Wars

He makes it clear that he did plenty of other jobs – photo reportage at a nudists camp, countryside gigs, snapping the Beatles and so on – but it was the conflict zones which really attracted him.

  • Berlin 1961 as the Wall was going up – East German soldiers looking back, West Berlin, Germany, August 1961
  • Cyprus 1964 – photographs of a Turkish village where Greek terrorists had murdered inhabitants. He makes the interesting point that Mediterranean people want a public display of grief and so encouraged him to take photos.
  • Congo 1964 – a Boy’s Own account of how he smuggled himself into a team of mercenaries who flew into the chaos after the assassination of Patrick Lumumba, encountering CIA agents and then accompanying the mercenaries on a ‘mission’ to rescue 50 or so nuns and missionaries who had been kidnapped by brutal black militias, known as the Simbas, who raped and dismembered some of the nuns. He sees a lot of young black men being lined up alongside the river to be beaten, tortured and executed by the local warlord.
  • Vietnam 1965 – There was something specially glamorous about Vietnam and it attracted a huge number of correspondents and photographers: he namechecks Larry Burrows and Sean Flynn, the latter a big presence in Michael Herr’s classic account Dispatches, both of whom were eventually reported missing presumed dead. Vietnam was ‘black humour and farce’ and ‘waste on a mega scale’ (p.95)
  • Bihar, India during the famine of 1965 – he contrasts the monstrous amount of food and all other resources being wasted by the Yanks in Vietnam, with the absolute poverty and starvation in India.
  • Israel in the Six Day War – where he accompanied the first platoon into Arab Jerusalem, soldiers being potted by snipers to the right and left, before the city was captured and he snapped singing soldiers kissing the Wailing Wall.
  • Vietnam – the Battle for Hue, 1968. He was there for eleven days and it comes over as one of the most intense experiences from a life full of intense experiences. He is appalled at the waste. Hue, produced two of his most famous images:
  • Biafra – McCullin went back three years in a row and was initially supportive of the Biafrans, who had seceded from Nigeria because they were scared of their increasing bad treatment by the Nigerian state. But the Nigerian government (secretly supported by the British government) fought to defeat the Biafran army and reincorporate the province into the country. (It’s interesting to compare McCullin’s account with the long chapter about the same war in Frederick Forsyth’s autobiography, The Outsider.)
  • Cambodia 1970, where McCullin was wounded by mortar shrapnel from the Khmer Rouge.
  • Jordan 1970 where fighting broke out in the capital Amman between Jordanian troops and Palestinians.
  • With legendary travel writer Norman Lewis in Brazil, McCullin absorbed Lewis’s dislike of American Christian missionaries who appeared to use highly coercive tactics to round up native tribes and force them into their re-education compounds.
  • East Pakistan 1971 for the immense suffering caused by the breakaway of East Pakistan, eventually to be reborn as Bangladesh.
  • Belfast 1971 where he is blinded by CS gas and finds it uncomfortable being caught between the three sides, Catholic, Protestant and Army, and how he missed Bloody Sunday (30 January 1972).
  • Uganda – where he is imprisoned along with other journos in Idi Amin’s notorious Makindye prison and really thinks, for a bad few hours, that he’s going to be tortured and executed.
  • Vietnam summer 1972 – By this time, with its government negotiating for American withdrawal, the wider public had lost a lot of interest in the war. The number of Americans in country had hugely decreased since 1968, and the peace negotiations were well under way and yet – McCullin discovered that he fighting was more intense and destructive than ever.
  • Cambodia summer 1972 – fear of falling into the hands of the Khmer Rouge.
  • Israel 1973 the Yom Kippur War in which Sunday Times reporter and friend Nick Tomalin is killed.
  • The new editor of the Sunday Times magazine, Hunter Davies, is more interested in domestic stories. Among 18 months of domestic features, Don does one on Hadrian’s Wall. And a piece about racist hoodlums in Marseilles with Bruce Chatwin.
  • He hooks up again with the older travel writer Norman Lewis, who is a kind of father figure to him, to report on the plight of native tribes in South America being rounded and up and forcibly converted by American missionaries.
  • Spring 1975 – back to Cambodia for the final weeks before the Khmer Rouge take Phnom Penh. It is in transit in Saigon that McCullin learns his name is on a government blacklist and he is prevented from entering Vietnam and locked up by police in the airport until he can blag a seat on the flight organised by Daily Mail editor David English taking Vietnamese war orphans to England.
  • Beirut 1975 – McCullin had visited Beirut in the 1960s when it was a safe playground for the international rich, but in 1975 long-simmering resentments burst into a complex, violent and bitter civil war. At great risk McCullin photographs a massacre carried out by the right-wing Christian Falange militia.
  • 1975 – among the Palestinian Liberation organisation, McCullin meets Yasser Arafat and other leaders, and gives his take on the Arab-Israeli struggle, bringing out the terrorist tactics of the Jewish side – the well-known Irgun and Stern gang – and Jewish massacres of Palestinians back in the founding year of 1948.
  • 1977 – West Germany, to report on old Nazis, Hitler’s bodyguard, unrepentant SS killers.
  • Iran autumn 1978 to cover a huge earthquake.
  • Iran 1979 after the Islamic Revolution.
  • Spring 1980 with the mujahedeen in Afghanistan.
  • Spring 1982 – El Salvador. Covering a firefight in a remote town between soldiers and left-wing guerrillas he falls off a roof, breaking his arm in five places. He makes it to a hospital, is looked after by colleagues and flown back to England, but the long-term injury interferes with his ability to hold a camera. Worse, it crystallises the strains in his marriage. In a few dispassionate pages he describes leaving his wife of twenty years and children, and moving in with the new love of his life, Laraine Ashton, founder of the model agency IMG.
  • 1982 the Lebanon – to cover the Israeli invasion.
  • 1983 Equatorial Guinea ‘the nastiest place on earth’.
  • 1980s A lengthy trip to see Indonesia’s most primitive tribes, in places like Irian Jiwa and the Mentawai Islands, with photographer Mark Shand (who wrote it up in a book titled Skulduggery).

Personal life

At this point in the early 1980s a lot of things went wrong for McCullin. His marriage broke down. His injuries took nearly two years to properly heal. The British authorities prevented him going with the Task Force to the Falklands War, which could have been the climax of his war career and obviously still rankles 35 years later.

And then Andrew Neil, the new editor of the Sunday Times, itself recently bought by the brash media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, turned its back on the gritty reportage of the 1960s and 70s to concentrate more on style and celebrity. As a friend summed it up to McCullin:

‘No more starving Third World babies; more successful businessmen around their weekend barbecues.’ (p.275)

The book describes the meeting with Neil in which he was manoeuvred into resigning. He was still not recovered from his injuries and now he had no job and no future.

And then came the bombshell that his first wife, the woman he left for Laraine, was dying of a brain tumour. Like everything else, this is described pithily and swiftly, but there’s no mistaking the pain it caused. The year or more it took his first wife to die of a brain tumour was traumatic and the emotional reaction and the tortured guilt he felt at having abandoned her, put a tremendous strain on his new relationship with Laraine. In the end he broke up with Laraine: she returned to her London base.

Thus, distraught at the death of Christine, McCullin found himself alone in the big house in Somerset which he’d been doing up with Laraine, with no regular job and isolated from his journo buddies. It’s out of this intense period of unhappiness and introspection that come his numerous bleak and beautiful photographs of the Somerset countryside. These were eventually gathered into a book and John Fowles, in the introduction, notes how ominously they reflect the scars of war. Maybe, McCullin muses but – now he has shared this autobiographical background – we readers are now able to see all kinds of emotions in them. Certainly he preferred winter when the trees are skeletons and the ruts and lanes are full of icy water – all under threatening black clouds.

As he turned fifty McCullin’s life concentrated more and more on mooching about in the countryside. He takes up with a model, Loretta Scott and describes their mild adventures for precisely one page (p.298). Then has a fling with Marilyn Bridges, a Bunny Girl turned impressive nature photographer. McCullin is awarded the CBE in 1993. He married Marilyn and they travel to Botswana, Bali, India and Cambodia but could never agree whether to base themselves in Somerset or in her home town of New York. There were fierce arguments and a lot of plate smashing. By 2000 he was divorced and single again.

India is his favourite country to photograph. He assembled his shots of it into a book titled India.

He had been supporting himself since he was kicked off the Sunday Times with jobs from other newspapers but mainly by doing adverts, commercial work. Lucrative but soulless. On the one hand he prided himself on being a completely reformed war junkie, on the other his soul secretly, deep down, hankered for conflict and disaster.

  • 2001 So it was a boon when he was invited to travel to Zambia, Botswana and South Africa to chronicle the devastating blight of AIDS on already impoverished people.
  • 2003 back to the same countries to check progress.
  • 2004 Ethiopia with his new wife, Catherine Fairweather (married 7 December 2002).

The Africa trips resulted in another book, Don McCullin in Africa. He tells us that in total he has authored 26 books of photography – quite an output.

  • In 2003 his old friend Charles Glass invited McCullin to accompany him back to Iraq, via their familiar contacts among the Kurds. In fact they accompany the party of Ahmad Chalabi, the smooth-talking exile who had persuaded the Americans that Saddam was running programmes to make Weapons of Mass Destruction. But both journalist and photographer are kept completely isolated among the Chalabi entourage, flown to an isolated airport miles away from any action. McCullin reflects sadly that the American military had learned the lessons of Vietnam and now kept the Press completely under control and authorised. No room for cowboys winging it and roaming the battlefields at will as per Tim Page or Michael Herr in their heyday.

Another book, In England, brought together work from assignments around the country between 1958 and 2007, generally reflecting McCullin’s sympathy with the underdog, the poor, the derelict, and he is happy that it – along with the books on Africa, India and the Somerset landscape, have come to outsell the war books. He wants to be remembered as a photographer not a ‘war photographer’. In fact the final pages describe the assignment which gave him more pleasure than anything in his life, a three-year-labour of love to visit ancient Roman sites around the Mediterranean, titled Southern Frontiers: A Journey Across The Roman Empire.

He has a stroke, from which he recovers with the help of a quadruple heart bypass – but then – aged 77 – he is persuaded to go off for one last war adventure, travelling with his friend Richard Beeston, Foreign Editor for The Times, and under the guidance of Anthony Lloyd, the paper’s Chief Foreign Correspondent, to Aleppo, in Syria, to cover the collapse of the so-called Arab Spring into a very unpleasant civil war, to experience for one last time ‘that amazing sustained burst of adrenalin at the beginning, followed later by the tremendous whoosh of relief that comes with the completion of any dangerous undertaking’ (p.334).

Photography

Equipment is fun to play with but it’s the eye that counts. (p.340)

There’s some mention of his early cameras at the start, and a vivid description of the difficulties of getting a light reading, let alone changing film, under fire in Vietnam – but on the whole very little about the art of framing and composing a photo. The book is much more about people, stories and anecdotes. And considering the photos are the rationale for his fame and achievement, there are comparatively few examples in the book – I counted 47. And they’re printed on the same matt paper as the text i.e. not gloss reproductions on special paper.

All suggesting it’s probably best to buy the photos separately in large format, coffee-table editions.

Learnings

War is exciting and glamorous. Compelling. McCullin candidly states that many people found the Vietnam war ‘addictive’ (p.92), echoing the fairly obvious analyses of Michael Herr and Tim Page.

And he briefly remarks the need to find out whether he ‘measures up’ – like so many men, he obviously sees it as a test of his manhood: how will he react when the shooting starts? Although he reports himself as feeling panic and fear quite regularly, the evidence suggests that he was phenomenally brave to go the places he went, and to stay there through tremendous danger.

The point or purpose

The psychological cost of being a war photographer

But the clear-eyed and clipped accounts of each conflict refer fairly often to the psychological cost of seeing so much trauma so close up. He reflects on the damage it must do but, that said, the text doesn’t really reflect any lasting damage. From his appallingly deprived childhood onwards, there’s always been the understated implication of his strength and bullishness. Quite regularly he refers to troubles with police, scuffles with passport officers, answering back to armed militias, standing up to bullies and generally not backing away from a fight. He’s tough and doesn’t really open up about his feelings. He is most overt about being upset to the point of despair, not about anything he witnessed but about the cruel death of his first wife to cancer, which leaves him utterly bereft for a long period.

The morality of war photography

Apart from the personal cost, though, there’s also the nagging doubt that he is profiting, quite literally, from other people’s unspeakable suffering and pain. Is he a parasite, exploiting their misery? He and other war photographers justified their activities as bringing the ‘reality’ of war to the attention of a) a complacent public ignorantly preparing to tuck into their Sunday lunch b) those in authority who had the power to change it, to end it, to stop the killing.

In this vein he writes of the famine victims in Bihar:

No heroics are possible when you are photographing people who are starving. All I could do was to try and give the people caught up in this terrible disaster as much dignity as possible. There is a problem inside yourself, a sense of your own powerlessness, but it doesn’t do to let it take hold, when your job is to stir the conscience of others who can help. (p.95)

And he also gets very fired up about the plight of AIDS victims in Africa.

But well before the end of the book, he also expresses doubts whether any photo he took made any difference to any of the conflicts he covered. Re. the AIDS in Africa work, he comments:

I had a notion that this was an area in which my photographs might have a positively beneficial effect, by raising consciousness and awareness. This was not something that could be said about my war pictures, which demonstrably had not impaired the popularity of warfare. (p.304)

The latter clause reminding me of the poet W.H. Auden, who wrote a lot of socially conscious poetry throughout the 1930s, but ended up in the 1950s candidly admitting that, as he put it, no poem or play or essay he wrote ever saved a single Jew. There are limits to what even the most powerful art can achieve.

When he went to Africa in the early 2000s to chronicle the impact of AIDS McCullin really wanted these horrific pictures to have an impact, ‘to be an assault on people’s consciences’ (p.308). But I’ve been seeing photos and reports of starving Africans all my adult life. I’m afraid that, in a roundabout way, McCullin, by contributing to the tidal wave of imagery we are all now permanently surrounded with, may have contributed to creating precisely the indifference and apathy he claims to be trying to puncture.

Is war photography art?

McCullin was given a retrospective exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in the 1980s (he has subsequently had numerous exhibitions, at Tate, the Imperial War Museum, all the top galleries). He describes his pride at the time in being chosen by the V&A, and it is an accolade indeed – but does rather confirm the sense that, precisely insofar as the photos are changed and transmuted into ‘works of art’, hung on walls and discussed by slick connoisseurs, so they lose their power to upset and disturb, the purpose he ostensibly created them for, and enter the strangely frozen world of art discourse.

I had drafted this thought before I came upon McCullin’s own reflection on photography-as-art on the penultimate page of this long and fascinating book.

One of the things that does disturb me is that some documentary photography is now being presented as art. Although I am hugely honoured to have been one of the first photographers to have their work bought and exhibited by the Tate Gallery, I feel ambiguous about my photographs being treated as art. I really can’t talk of the people in my war photographs as art. They are real. They are not arranging themselves for the purposes of display. They are people whose suffering I have inhaled and that I’ve felt bound to record. But it’s the record of the witness that’s important, not the artistic impression. I have been greatly influenced by art, it’s true, but I don’t see this kind of photograph itself as being art. (p.341)

From the horse’s mouth, a definitive statement of the problem and his (very authoritative) opinion about it.

Photography in the age of digital cameras and the internet

Then again, maybe the photographer doesn’t have any say over how his or her art is, ultimately, consumed and defined.

Superficially, yes, the first few McCullin photos you see are shocking, vivid and raw depictions of terror, grief and shock – but the cumulative effect of looking at hundreds of them is rather to dull the senses – exactly as thousands of newspaper, radio, TV and internet reports, photos and videos have worked to dull and numb all of us from the atrocity which is always taking place somewhere in the world (war in Syria, famine in Somalia). It’s hard not to end up putting aside the ’emotional’ content and evaluating them purely in formal terms of composition and lighting, colour and shade, the ‘drama’ or emotional content of the pose.

History

If the photos didn’t really change the course of any of the wars he reported on, and nowadays are covered in the reassuring patina of ‘art’, to be savoured via expensive coffee table books and in classy art galleries – there is one claim which remains solid. His work will remain tremendously important as history.

Taken together, McCullin’s photographs amount to a documentary history of most of the significant conflicts of the last 40 years of the twentieth century. And this autobiography plays an important role in creating a continuous narrative and context to underpin them, providing short but very useful, focused background explanations to most of the conflicts which the photographs depict.

Early on in his story, McCullin remarks that his National Service was a kind of Cook’s Tour of the end of the British Empire. In a way the rest of his career has been a continuation of that initial itinerary, as he ended up visiting some 120 countries to record for posterity how peoples all around the world lived, fought and died during his and our troubled times.

‘I was, what I always hoped to be, an independent witness.’ (p.116)

Credit

Unreasonable Behaviour (revised edition) by Don McCullin was published by Jonathan Cape in 2015. All references and quotes are to the 2015 hardback edition.

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by Simon on March 3, 2017  •  Permalink
Posted in Autobiography, History, Photography, Vietnam War, War
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Posted by Simon on March 3, 2017

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2017/03/03/unreasonable-behaviour-don-mccullin/

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