18 May 2012

ARTIST PARTNERS: A GRAPHIC DESIGN ALBUM FROM THE 1950s

Editorial illustration by Bruce Roberts





















These illustrations come from a lavish album produced by the Artist Partners agency in about 1959. Their designers did some famous work, including Reg Mount's poster for The Ladykillers, Saul Bass's poster for Hitchcock's Vertigo,  Brian Saunders' poster for Oh! What a Lovely War, John Holmes's cover for The Female Eunuch and Patrick Tilley's poster DRINKA PINTA MILKA DAY.

10 May 2012

SEASIDE SURREALISM



The European surrealists liked to alarm. A woman walked through the 1936 International Surrealism Exhibition in London wearing a mask of roses, carrying in one hand a model leg filled with roses and in the other a raw pork chop. The Surrealist Manifesto for a Free Revolutionary Art was co-authored by Trotsky.

The sensation stirred up by the 1936 exhibition died down and British surrealism was tamed. It was married to romanticism. Paul Nash called it "seaside surrealism" because he found a "strange fascination, like all things which combine beauty, ugliness and the power to disquiet" in the seaside resort of Swanage.

4 May 2012

FIVE DECADES OF HARROW CERAMICS

Contemporary Applied Arts
Photo by Ceramic Review
Last Thursday I went to the private view of "Tradition and Innovation: Five Decades of Harrow Ceramics" at Contemporary Applied Arts in London.  It runs until 9th June.

There was a certain poignancy about the exhibition, because the Harrow Ceramics course is ending this summer.  It is widely regarded as one of the best ceramics courses in the country, and the decision by the University of Westminster to close it because they consider it too expensive was met with howls of outrage when it was announced.