Studio Lives: Architect, Art and Artist in 20th-Century Britain

Name: Studio Lives: Architect, Art and Artist in 20th-Century Britain
Author: Louise Campbell
ISBN: 1848223137

by Louise Campbell

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Again, a beautifully written book. The book very much looks at the ways in which architects and artists collaborate to create these special spaces or sites. I crave for some of the examples that James Hall didn’t include, but here they are in Studio Lives, artists like Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson , or Clive Bell . She also talks about writers, such as Virginia Woolf, not just visual artists. That’s an important point as well. It takes us to the recognition that often the distinctions between different art forms – music, the visual arts, literature – aren’t drawn by the practitioners. Even Whitten illustrates this in his writing, that we somehow pigeonhole everything so conveniently that afterwards we only get a single story, when the reality is much more varied and much more interesting. These books really, for me, tell the bigger picture. That bigger picture concerns architecture as well. There are various academic research projects underway connected to art schools in the UK that have closed down. I was lucky enough to study at Birmingham Art School, which was a very traditional Victorian art school in central UK. I also did my first training at Bournville College of Art and Design, which was this beautiful building in a Quaker Village established by George Cadbury, and very important in the history of the development of art schools and the link to the Arts and Crafts Movement in the UK., Then I went on to one of my early teaching jobs at Horsham in Sussex. I’d had a personal journey that had taken me into some of these art schools. I witnessed the brutalist Central Library in Birmingham being demolished because whilst celebrated by architects , many were anti-brutalist architecture; I was sad to see the place where I’d done most of my learning about art history topple. Architecture seemed to be a very big part of my life as student and in my lived experience. “We’re in the artist’s environment and we’re learning about them as an individual, their times, the society in which they work.” Studio Lives talks with an empathy about the architectural practitioners and the artists of the 19th century. There’s an undercurrent here about how does the artist want to be perceived? How do they want to be seen? And architecture can set the stage for answering that question. There’s a wonderful passage in the book where she talks about Nicholson painting Hepworth’s piano. Only he paints the piano white. It’s no longer a piano! An artistic gesture, to be sure, but not an artwork, as it was never exhibited as a sculpture. I love reading about these studio antics, the things that happen in the studio that illuminate the life and work of the artist. In Paris you can see a mock-up of Constantin Brancusi’s studio , a setting that is almost like a theatre stage, with the artist as protagonist in his own drama. Or take Francis Bacon’s studio , which was basically lifted up piece by piece and transported from London to Dublin and recreated to its last detail.

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Debbie Hillyerd

"Again, a beautifully written book. The book very much looks at the ways in which architects and artists collaborate to create these special spaces or sites. I crave for some of the examples that James Hall didn’t include, but here they are in Studio Lives, artists like Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson , or Clive Bell . She also talks about writers, such as Virginia Woolf, not just visual artists. That’s an important point as well. It takes us to the recognition that often the distinctions between different art forms – music, the visual arts, literature – aren’t drawn by the practitioners. Even Whitten illustrates this in his writing, that we somehow pigeonhole everything so conveniently that afterwards we only get a single story, when the reality is much more varied and much more interesting. These books really, for me, tell the bigger picture. That bigger picture concerns architecture as well. There are various academic research projects underway connected to art schools in the UK that have closed down. I was lucky enough to study at Birmingham Art School, which was a very traditional Victorian art school in central UK. I also did my first training at Bournville College of Art and Design, which was this beautiful building in a Quaker Village established by George Cadbury, and very important in the history of the development of art schools and the link to the Arts and Crafts Movement in the UK., Then I went on to one of my early teaching jobs at Horsham in Sussex. I’d had a personal journey that had taken me into some of these art schools. I witnessed the brutalist Central Library in Birmingham being demolished because whilst celebrated by architects , many were anti-brutalist architecture; I was sad to see the place where I’d done most of my learning about art history topple. Architecture seemed to be a very big part of my life as student and in my lived experience. “We’re in the artist’s environment and we’re learning about them as an individual, their times, the society in which they work.” Studio Lives talks with an empathy about the architectural practitioners and the artists of the 19th century. There’s an undercurrent here about how does the artist want to be perceived? How do they want to be seen? And architecture can set the stage for answering that question. There’s a wonderful passage in the book where she talks about Nicholson painting Hepworth’s piano. Only he paints the piano white. It’s no longer a piano! An artistic gesture, to be sure, but not an artwork, as it was never exhibited as a sculpture. I love reading about these studio antics, the things that happen in the studio that illuminate the life and work of the artist. In Paris you can see a mock-up of Constantin Brancusi’s studio , a setting that is almost like a theatre stage, with the artist as protagonist in his own drama. Or take Francis Bacon’s studio , which was basically lifted up piece by piece and transported from London to Dublin and recreated to its last detail."

Artist Studios · fivebooks.com