TREES IN ART2

Pastoral with a Horse Chestnut
Tree (1830-31] by Samuel Palmer

A Study, In March by
 John William Inchbold. 1855

'Silent Witnesses: Trees in British Art, 1760-1870' by Christiana Payne [Sansom and Company 2017] was produced to coincide with the Woodland Trust's initiative 'Charter for Trees, Woods and People'  - signed up to by 70 tree organisations - and launched at Lincoln Castle on the 800th anniversary of the 1217 Charter of the Forest

At Binsey, Near Oxford by George Price Boyce. 1862

Fir Trees at Hampstead by John Constable.
1820

The Cypresses at the Villa d'Este
by Samuel Palmer. 1836

In her introduction to this well-written and beautifully illustrated study of tree art in Britain (1760-1870), Christiana Payne sets out what she calls 'the artistic response to the beauty and usefulness of the tree in Britain' in the context of the boom of landscape painting during this period and the passionate interest in trees - aroused in not only artists and writers but also in naturalists, landscape gardeners and rich land owners.

This was  partly because trees in Britain were relatively scarce and there were few native species - an estimated 30 broadleaf  and five evergreen - owing to the fact that it was cut off from continental Europe during the Ice Ages.

There was also a shortage of timber within the country from the 16thC onwards and, by the 17thC, Britain was one of the least wooded countries in Europe with less than 5% of its area planted with trees.[Currently 13% of the total land area in the UK.] This situation inspired  John Eveleyn to write Sylva (first published in 1664) - one of the most influential texts on forestry ever published - to encourage tree planting.

However it did have more ancient woodland and signature ancient trees, relative to the percentage of total woodland, than any other European country and these were considered rare and special. Trees in hedges were more plentiful in the 18thC than before or since and most villages at that time would have a central tree next to a village green and an alehouse.

Demand for timber was increasing due to the needs of the navy. Payne reports that  building a 74-gun ship would require 2,000 well-grown oak trees with elms for the keel. An 1812 estimate was that, in order to maintain the Royal Navy at its then current levels, 100,000 acres of trees would be required.

The Royal forests covered 115,000 acres of which only 60-70,000 had the rich, well-drained soil necessary for growing oaks.  Between 1760 and 1835, private landlords planted and estimated 20 million trees and, by 1887, the amount of woodland in private hands covered 2.5 million acres.

The start of the industrial revolution in the late 18thC created a further demand for wood to make charcoal, pit props for the mines, many domestic items and to provide fuel for cooking and heating. There was massive market also for oak bark which was used to tan leather. In 1810, at its height, the industry required 500,000 tonnes of oak per year.

 As landscape design shifted towards the Picturesque, collections of exotic trees in arboretums became popular. The number of varities of shrubs and trees coming into Britain steadily increased as its Empire expanded,  from 89 new varieties in the 16thC to 699 in the first 30 years of the 19thC. The horse chestnut arrived sometime in the 17thC, the Lombardy Poplar in 1758. Orchard apple trees came from central Asia.

The notable landscape artists of several generations primarily painted oak, ash, elm and beech. Most were working mainly for patrons with landed estates. Many paintings - the most well-known being Gainsborough's 1746 painting of 'Mr and Mrs Andrews' in front of an ancient oak - featured family portraits.

There were a considerable number of drawing manuals catering for what Payne desribes as a 'massive explosion of interest in the drawing of trees'. Constable and Samuel Palmer were outstanding tree lovers but the lesser known artist Paul Sandby was, says Payne, one of the first to take interest in individual species and the growth pattern of trees. Drawings aside, an outpouring of water colours, etchings, engravings and lithographs of trees were produced. Mostly they were isolated tree portraits. Constable avoided any instruction manuals when producing his graphite sketches and viewed trees in a landscape paintings as being like actors in a history painting.

With the arrival of the Pre-Raphaelites in the period 1840-70, Payne tells us that tension between the general and the particular in the painting or drawing trees became a major issue. Certainly Holman Hunt and the two Millais brothers were into the minutae and did careful studies of timber and foliage.

Silent Witnesses provides the detailed evidence of the importance of trees in British landscape painting. Its a valuable work that adds new perspectives to previous studies of the period.

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'Under the Greenwood: Picturing British Trees From Constable to Kurt Jackson' was the book of an exhibition staged at the St Barbe Museum, Lymington in 2013. This review of the show by Andrew Lambirth in The Spectator gives a flavour of the event. The book itself is out of print and rare copies are expensive.

Such was the impact of the show and the spirit of camaraderie engendered in a truly diverse group of artists that they took on a more permanent identity. The Arborealists is the name of this loose association of artists, including such luminaries as David Inshaw, who have come together for exhibitions in galleries across the south.

The Generalist has managed to locate a rare copy of  The Arborealists: The Art of the Tree book by Angela Summerfield. More details to come.

Both titles are published by Sansom & Company.

PUNK IN PRINT / DONALD TRUMP:DRESSED LIKE A WOMAN / BOOKFORUM

Sometimes real life takes over. After a two-month break, THE GENERALIST is back in action. When I finally did manage to shake of the effects of one or maybe two seasonal bugs, I visited the 'Magazine Brighton' shop in Trafalgar Street where I purchased these three titles that demonstrate that print is still a powerful medium.

Jamie Read's cover for the  'Anarchy in the UK' a promotional
zine published by Malcolm McClaren's company Gitterbest. The
front cover features Soo Catwoman, a London punk icon.

'Oh So Pretty: Punk in Print 1976-1980' is a book stuffed with fantastic punk print memorabilia collected by Toby Mott, a punk anarchist who, then and later, amassed a huge collection of concert and promotional posters, flyers, fanzines, music papers and pop magazines, a selection of which appears in this book.

Mott writes a great compressed biopic of his life being an anarchist punk in London in that period, Rick Poynter writes 'Graphic Anarchy in the UK', an interesting essay about the design and style of these ephemeral pieces of print.

The entire rest of the book is a brilliant whambam headbut of these powerful scraps, run full-page size, arranged chronologically with minimum captions, printed on the right kind of cheap litho paper. Its a WOW. Phaidon first published this book in 2016. I got the last copy in the shop, Its damaged cover not only makes it distinctive but it also earnt me a discount.

'Punk was a moment of social and cultural insubordination when the established ways of forming a band, writing a song, dressing in the street, or laying out a page or a flyer were thrown aside. The crucial thing was to participate, to make your own scene and not meekly accept what the market decided you should consume. Now that the X-Factorised music business is more controlling and deterministic than ever, punk's core message is even more urgent. An authentic living culture should have DIY entwined in its DNA. Toby Mott's collection is raw, messy and seething with life. It's both an arresting document of what happened and an incitement to seize the moment, reject the obvious choices, find some like-minded collaborators and construct something challenging and new.' - Rick Poynter

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'Dressed Like A Woman' was published as a limited edition newspaper of 5,000 copies. The Dutch artist Jet Nitkamp used pastels on newsprint to produce a series of subversive images that disturb and resonate on many levels. Here is a shortened version of the editorial that explains the project and the artist's intentions.

In her project 'Dress Like A Woman', Jet Nijkamp expresses her worries about the misogynist attitude of president Donald Trump of the United States and his government, not just because of its consequences for women in the US, but also because it could encourage misogynist developments elsewhere in the world. 

Soon after his inauguration Trump decided to cut governmental support for planned parenthood and abortion. Dutch minister Ploumen reacted instantly and founded She Decides to help fill the financial gap. Artists in Amsterdam wanted to contribute and sold their work for the benefit of this fund at the Nasty Women Exhibition in Amsterdam. 

On this occasion Jet Nijkamp created a series of pastel drawings on photographs of Donald Trump in newspapers, in which she reacted against the White House decree that all women working there should 'dress like a woman'. She asked herself how Trump would look in a dress? How would he look as a woman of his age and with his figure? 

With pastel Jet Nijkamp drew women's clothing on newspaper photographs of Trump. She gave him a skirt, high heels, blouses with rushes, a swimsuit, a tutu and so on. She didn't change his age nor his figure, she just put him women's clothes on. Would he respect himself as a woman? 

Now, after a year of adapting photographs from 20 different local and international newspapers and presenting them at different Nasty Women Exhibitions (Amsterdam, Mexico, London), it is time to conclude the project with a publication of all the drawings made until now. Thanks to publisher Tien-stuks, specialized in art publications, it was possible to publish this once-only newspaper (naturally) on January l0th 2018, exactly a year after Trumps inauguration as the 45th president of the United States of America.

All the images in the paper can be viewed on the indy 100.com site and at www.boredpanda.com 
You can buy some of the original pages on the artist's website: www.jetnijkamp.nl/

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 Have taken to picking up 'Bookforum', a bi-monthly broadsheet magazine published out of New York because it makes a nice complement to 'The London Review of Books' and is usually packed with a wide-ranging agenda of book reviews and features that tickle my curiosity needle. Its well-designed with interesting visuals, printed on a good but not too gloss paper. Last issue I read about the late punky cult writer Kathy Acker; this issue about Denis Johnson, the US novelist and poet - both of whom I interviewed. Tapes and transcript yet to be edited and made more widely available.

Fascinating is the review of 'Blue Dreams: The Science and the story of the drugs that changed out minds'. This includes chlorpromazine, lithium and antidepressants, as well as later trends, notably psychedelics and drugs designed to enhance or erase memories. It should not astonish you to learn that some of these medications have unintended consequences [the Greek word pharmakon means both "remedy" and "poison".

The investigation into the CIA and America's secret wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan (2000-2016) by Steve Coll is carefully dissected by reviewer Andrew Meier, a journalist with experience of Afghanistan. America set out with the extraordinarily ambitious aim of  stabilizing war-shattered Afghanistan. Coll believes that his story reveals "a humbling case study in the limits of American power". Meir writes: 'Afghanistan remains in  tumult. The US once operated 715 bases in the country. Now the number is twelve.Yet the CIA's "longest war" has done little to heal the country. The population has swelled from twenty million in 20000 to more than thirty-four million, even as the coutry remains one of the world's poorest.

A book by Patrick Sharkey entitled 'Uneasy Peace, reveals that in America, for nearly 30 years, rates of violent crime have been at record lows. This phenomena, identified and named by criminologist Franklin Zimring as the "Great American Crime Decline" is 'a dramatic and sustained decrease in murders and assaults that began in the 1990s, after three straight decades of record highs.'

Blondie and Hannah in a still from 'Unmade Beds. See
the trailer here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UL6T5GwfgQc

On a lighter level the notebooks compiled by the artist Duncan Hannah in the 1970s, have been published under the title 'Twentieth-Century Boy' [Knopf] with some shortening and tweaking. 

Hannah at that time was, writes Howard Hampton, 'a resplendently androgynous figure on the CBGB scene, as well as a born bon vivant and a straight sex object who wouldn't give his gay patrons a tumble.' 

He was also, 'in the right light, a ringer for teen idol David Cassidy and an Under the Volcano-class alkie..' Hannah was enamoured with the band Television and the world they inhabited. Here, says HH, 'Hannah found the likes of Warhol and Bowie and Hockney to be like well-padded bumper cars to bounce off amid the mad scramble.' 

Hannah claims to have introduced Nico to Eno. He records: 'A sortie to see Roxy Music wends its way to a boho's-who party at Larry Rivers loft, and thence by limo (with Warhol, Bowie and Bryan Ferry) to a club where a "diesel-dyke" bouncer throws his shit-faced ass into the street. "The famous gutter that I've heard so much about. I made it". 

I like the fact that Hannah recalls that at CBGB one night he found clone Ramones on stage while the real band played pool at the back. He hooks up with the Ziggy Stardust adventure in London where he sees Mick Jagger dancing in the aisle at one gig. His lovelife is like the speeded up scenes in Clockwork Orange. Sounds like a must-have read, a grand companion to Richard Hell's 'I Dreamed I Was A Very Clean Tramp'.