I have previously written about, and supported, Bella Gonshorovitz’s project to make hospital gowns for the Royal Brompton Hospital, which has now taken off in spite of all the difficulties which government regulations have put in its way Attached is a short film of her talking about the project.
I have been reading a new book, Circles and Squares, about the Hampstead art world in the 1930s, which demonstrates very clearly the social, as well as artistic, interconnectedness of the avant garde art world, with Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson living in Mall Studios, Herbert and Loulou Read nearly next door, and Henry and Irina Moore in Parkhill Road nearby. There are good descriptions, for example, of the supper club organised at the Isokon building when Raymond Postgate organised a Jamaican menu and Marcel Breuer rang Jack Pritchard up in the middle of the night because his pee had turned blue. It makes the 1930s art world feel small-scale, localised and attractively amateurish.
This is my last post on the topic of architectural photography at the Warburg Institute, having now got hold of a copy of Michael Berkowitz’s excellent and authoritative book on Jews and Photography in Britain, which has a whole chapter on ‘Photographic Practice at the Warburg Institute, 1933-1948’. The key figure, as I had half realised, was Helmut Gernsheim, who is much better known as a historian and collector of photography than he is as a photographer himself. But after training as a photographer in Munich, he left Germany for London where he worked first for the National Gallery – I suspect for Helmut Ruhemann, who was already doing freelance work there as a conservator. Then, after a period of internment, first sharing the same tent as Pevsner at Huyton, then in Australia (Ernst Kitzinger was in the same camp) where he lectured on the history of photography, he was recruited by Rudolf Wittkower to take photographs of English seventeenth-century monuments, including wonderful, very atmospheric photographs of St. Paul’s. But he fell out with the Warburg, as he was to fall out with most people with whom he had professional dealings, presumably because of his excessive desire to be credited for his work, which in many ways he deserved to be, but was obviously against the traditions of studious anonymity in architectural photography. He was the first person to lobby for the establishment of a photographic museum in Britain, which might have been based at Osterley, under the auspices of the V&A. But Leigh Ashton seems to have taken a dislike to him – a great loss to the history of photography in this country because Gernsheim’s collection went instead to Austin, Texas.
You may think that I’ve forgotten about the Bell Foundry during lockdown, but I haven’t. It’s just been hard to raise money for it when we didn’t know quite when the Appeal was going to be heard and what form it would take. We now do. It will open on Tuesday 6th. October at 10am. Please write it in your diaries because it’s important that as many people as possible appear to impress the Inspector of the strength of public feeling.
Now we need to raise the money to fight the appeal. We’ve been hoping to get five people to give £25,000 each. Two so far. If there is anyone else out there who can help, please let me know or you can give anonymously on the Re-form website or to:-
Account name: Re-form Heritage
Sort Code: 60-49-05
Account number: 32067062
Since over the last few weeks, I, like everyone else, have spent much more time looking at museum collections online, I was very interested to read Andy Ellis’s analysis as to what works people have been actually looking at. Much of it is unsurprising. Lowry comes out on top. A picture of the naked Sappho is very popular. An image of the creepiest object in a Scottish museum comes third. But what seems obvious is surely a bit surprising: old-fashioned, nineteenth-century art is still much more popular, if this survey is anything to go by, than art of the last thirty years, including Thomas Lawrence’s absurd picture of Satan, which spent most of its life rolled up in store.
I like these articles which are completely straightforward, non-technical, written in such a way that even I, who have hitherto had zero interest in medical matters, can easily understand. Here is one on masks.
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/04/dont-wear-mask-yourself/610336/
Of all the short clips of music which seem to be a feature of lockdown, this is definitely the most bizarre and oddly moving, of a blind elephant being played Beethoven on an upright piano in Thailand:-
As is the way of these things, I’ve got more interested in the influence of the Warburg in the Second World War and in photography. It has become clear to me from an article in The Yearbook of the Research Centre for German and Austrian Exile Studies, which fortunately is available online, that one of the reasons Fritz Saxl was so keen on photographic exhibitions was because, having served as an officer in the First World War, he was then employed by the army to organise morale-building photographic exhibitions to tour what was left of Austria, so retained an interest in this form of adult education. And the quality of the Warburg’s photographs of the tombs in Westminster Abbey was so high, as taken by Helmut Gernsheim (but unattributed), that Kenneth Clark gave his set to the Queen, who used them in turn to encourage the young Princess Elizabeth in an interest in art, Clark writing to Saxl in July 1943 that ‘I have given away the original set of photographs of the bronze effigies in Westminster Abbey to the queen. She is enchanted with them, and they are being used in the history lessons of Princess Elizabeth’. Interesting – at least, it is to me.
My post about the exhibition on Women Refugee Photographers at the Four Corners Gallery has apparently encouraged several people to look the exhibition up online. It has also prompted me, rather belatedly, to find out a bit more about the exhibitions apparently organised by the Warburg Institute during the war and Heidi Heimann’s role in taking photographs for them.
The best known was the one on ‘English Art and the Mediterranean’ which was, I think, shown at the National Gallery and round the country before appearing in published form in 1948. Two photographers are thanked in the printed volume. One is Otto Fein, who was on the staff of the Warburg and was involved with Walter Gernsheim in photographing drawings and manuscripts. The other is Walter’s brother, Helmut (Mr. H. Gernsheim), who had trained at the Bavarian State School of Photography, came to London in 1937, and worked freelance before being interned in Australia and returning to work for the National Buildings Record. No mention of Adelheid Heimann.
What I didn’t know is that this was just one in a much wider programme of travelling exhibitions, including one on Greek and Roman Art which opened in January 1939 at the Warburg and then travelled to the Courtauld, Tonbridge School and Eton. In 1940, there was an exhibition on Indian Art which travelled round the country and, in 1943, an exhibition on ‘Portrait and Character’. Not only Gernsheim, but both Wittkower and Otto Fein were involved in working for the National Buildings Record documenting major London buildings, including 10, Downing Street, Westminster Abbey, and Chiswick House. But little mention that I can find of Heidi Heimann until she joined the staff of the Photographic Collection part-time in 1955, storing her shoes in the cupboard reserved for uncatalogued photographs.
For my foreign readers, I should perhaps clarify the UK’s current policy, which is obvious as I look out of the window. Get the workers back to work, whatever the risks of a second wave of re-infection. Meanwhile, encourage all those who can to stay at home for as long as possible, home working to avoid the risk of disease. I can see the logic of it, but I can’t say that I applaud it.
| Charles | Saumarez | Smith | 
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