ART BEYOND THE GALLERY IN EARLY 20TH CENTURY ENGLAND by Richard CorkReview by: Donna E. RheinArt Documentation: Journal of the Art Libraries Society of North America, Vol. 4, No. 4(Winter 1985), p. 184Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Art Libraries Society of NorthAmericaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27947527 .

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184 Art Documentation, Winter 1985

If modern architecture was reaching its summit in the late twenties in France, Germany, the Netherlands, and the Soviet

Union, it did not exert influence in England until the mid-thirties.

This, coupled with the insular nature of the American architec tural press, may account for the relatively few British architects awarded recognition here. Most names seem to lie in the shad ows of Alison and Peter Smithson, James Stirling, Sir Denys Lasdun, and Richard Rogers. The three volumes discussed here are essentially catalogs of the work of three active and award

winning architectural firms in England, whose work is rarely dis cussed in the American architectural community. They docu ment and illustrate the work of these firms, whose designers embraced different aspects of modern architecture at different times, regionalizing what are commonly referred to as the inter national style, brutalism, and hi-tech design.

The volume on the firm begun by Sir Richard Sheppard and Geoffrey Robson contains brief entries for eighty-two buildings. The editor, Stephen Hitchins, has not identified individual archi tects of each project. The entries are arranged within seven

chapters, each limited to a building type: commercial, medical and research, education, community, housing, planning, and art and landscape. Each includes several medium-quality black-and white photographs and either a site plan, floor plans, elevations, or a perspective rendering. For each building the main objectives, central programmatic requirements, choice of materials, and structural system are usually stated. "Commentaries," by Alastair Best, Charles McKean, Peter Murray, Dennis Sharp, and

Deyan Sudjic, appear at mysterious intervals throughout the book. These essays answer a number of questions about the firm's approaches to materials, detailing, form, and structure. At the end of the volume there is a chronology of buildings from 1942 - 1983 and a list of awards won by the firm. Arup Associates is constructed in a similar fashion, except

that one author, Michael Brawne, a practicing architect himself, wrote all the essays, which analyze and trace the sources of forty-three buildings. Twelve mediocre color plates follow the introduction, and black-and-white photographs comprise most of the other illustrations. They are unnumbered, however, and Brawne's references to specific features of the designs are diffi cult to locate in the graphic portion of the volume. The book concludes with a well-assembled chapter on details and a chro

nology of built and unbuilt designs from 1953 through 1983. Howell Killick Partridge & Amis includes competition entries

for this firm, which is probably best known for its Roehampton Lane Housing, designed for the London City Council. Sherban Cantacuzino's introductory essay is substantial, insightful, and articulate. Small black-and-white photographs, interior perspec tives, plans, and details share pages with the buildings they illus trate. Eight poorly printed color photographs are arbitrarily bound toward the middle of the essay.

Cantacuzino's essay is followed by a complete list of buildings and projects from 1951 through 1980. The remainder of the book consists of brief descriptions of forty-two of the firm's "more

important commissions" (publisher's note). The illustrations,

although small, contain a considerable amount of detail and infor mation. In addition to photographs, they include varieties of plans, axonometric views, sectional perspectives, and elevations.

Ultimately, the first two volumes probably resemble more closely elaborate promotional literature than useful criticism. Nevertheless, all three would be important sources for libraries in schools of architecture and in graduate schools of architectural history. They follow the work of three firms, which all provide sound responses to functional and technical requirements, sen

sitivity to site and materials, and ability to extrude an image of corporate or institutional stability.

Paul Glassman The Art Institute of Chicago

ART BEYOND THE GALLERY IN EARLY 20TH CENTURY ENG LAND / Richard Cork.?New Haven, Ct. : Yale University Press, 1985.-ISBN 0-300-03236-6 : $65.00.

Richard Cork has written an important book on English art of the twentieth century, always a tentative subject for art histo rians. He has also presented broader considerations for all art of

this century made "outside the dealer and museum ghetto/' as he calls the system which defines so much of art in our society. Cork's first extensive work in art history provided definition and appreciation of Britain's main attempt at modernism, the Vorticist movement of 1913-1915. His second major study expands on events primarily from the same period which have often been alluded to only in passing. Cork gives new insight into artists who dared to place talents usually reserved for the gallery in the arena of the minor arts of architectural decoration, interior

design and even whole environments. Sometimes they sacrificed more than money and honor for the opportunity to design in a large format or to participate in projects which challenged their artistic sensibilities in ways impossible to explore within the more established mechanisms for recognition and reward.

The first chapter deals with the tragic story of Jacob Epstein's sculpture for Charles Holden's British Medical Association Head quarters, built in 1908 on the Strand in London. The works were mutilated a generation later, after the building changed hands. The second chapter presents the eccentric art patron Frida Strindberg (known as Madame Strindberg) and the interiors for her 1912 Cabaret Theatre Club, specifically those supervised by Spencer Gore for the main area called the Cave of the Golden Calf. The subject of the next chapter, The Omega Workshops' interiors, is the only one discussed by Cork which has been thoroughly documented elsewhere, though not from the point of view of a significant social phenomenon. The fourth chapter shows Wyndham Lewis's attempts through the Rebel Art Centre of 1913- 15 to apply the radical vorticist sense of space to inte riors as an extension of his painting philosophy and as an alter native to the Omega "look." The Restaurant de la Tour Eiffel, subject of chapter five, was the special province of Rudolph Stulik, who ran it from 1908 until 1937 with great generosity towards artists. In the final chapter, Cork discusses another Charles Holden building, the Underground Railway Offices of 1929, for which he again asked Jacob Epstein, with Eric Gill, F. Rabinovitch, Eric Aumonier and the young Henry Moore, to create sculptural details.

In his introduction, Cork points out that "innovative art which seemed offensive on the walls of galleries could become more acceptable when transposed to alternative settings." As he looks at these various projects, Cork draws out of the discussion debates familiar to the art scene today. The difficulties of finding alternative spaces for artists who want to try a different approach, or a broader, larger scale, are made obvious, as is the

difficulty of finding acceptance for the right to do anything differ ent. The inspired individual patron, willing to trust the artist, is pitted against collective taste and the pressures of society to direct the choice of art in public places.

Cork always writes with clarity and sympathy for his subject, providing pithy statements and quotes from the artists and their contemporaries to support his comments. One can fault the vol ume in only two fairly insignificant ways. His illustrations for this book (as with his first, Vorticism and Abstract Art in the First

Machine Age) are a pleasant blend of the familiar and the unknown but they are frequently not placed near the relevant text nor in sequence with it. The book is also too large to hold on one's lap, a fact more noticable, hence more irritating because the

text, unlike many art texts, is so readable that it ought to be enjoyed in comfort. Cork gives us a notable study of interesting personalities from this period of British art, and he promises to continue the discussion into the mid-twentieth century in a future volume.

Donna E. Rhein Dallas Museum of Art

JAPANESE TREASURES JAPANESE WOODBLOCK PRINTS : A CATALOGUE OF THE MARY A. AINSWORTH COLLECTION / Roger S. Keyes. Oberlin, Ohio : Allen Memorial Art Museum, 1984.-269 p. : ill.? ISBN 0-942946-01-4 ; LC 82-061869 : $50.00.

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