Victoria Walsh

Reordering and Redistributing the Visual: The expanded ‘field’ of pattern-making in Parallel of Life and Art and Hammer Prints’

In August 1954, the artist–photographer Nigel Henderson and the sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi set-up Hammer Prints Ltd to sell and promote their designs for wallpapers, curtains and ceramics. Marginalised by art history as a category of applied arts, Hammer Prints was, however, inextricably tied into the ideas and experimental cross-media work of both artists at this time. This article resituates the ethos and designs of Hammer Prints within the wider aesthetic concerns and strategies of the Independent Group which the two artists were engaged with and, in particular, to the reordering of the visual first proposed by the artists in collaboration with the architects Alison and Peter Smithson in the seminal exhibition Parallel of Life and Art (Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1953), the year before Hammer Prints was established. As the article argues, a more complex account of Hammer Prints exists once it is reconnected to both artists’ interest in gestalt principles of perception, contemporary theorisations of ‘pattern’, and ontological questions of art posed by Malraux’s idea of the ‘imaginary museum’ and Duchamp’s idea of the ‘portable museum’. It concludes by locating the designs of Hammer Prints within the new field of communication theory developed by Gregory Bateson.

‘… to give the sensation without the boredom of conveyance’: Francis Bacon and the Aesthetic of Ambiguity

Considerable attention has been paid to Bacons relationship with Surrealism and a historical tradition of grand masters, and indeed Bacons own citation in interviews of such painters as Rembrandt, Velázquez, Van Gogh and Picasso is well documented. What is perhaps less well recognized is the tradition of Romantic art and thought of the late nineteenth century with which Bacons contemporaries identified him, and in particular the legacy in England that manifested itself in a practice of painting associated with J.A.M. Whistler and a canon of literature that was deeply rooted in the writings of Baudelaire, from the ‘Fleshly School of Poetry’ represented by Algernon Swinburne, and the later writings of Walter Pater, through to the poetry of T.S. Eliot and W.B. Yeats. At the heart of this nexus of practice and thought lay a well-trodden Anglicized argument about the differences between the concepts of analysis and synthesis in art, primarily understood as the difference between an aesthetic of narrative and realism and an aesthetic of ambiguity and sensation. In retrieving the context in which the legacy of British aestheticism and international symbolism had come to frame ideas of an aesthetic of ambiguity this article will aim to suggest the extent to which Bacon was alive to a Romantic tradition of thought – and image – through the writings of Baudelaire and Nietzsche, particularly as they were repopulated and remediated by Eliot in his critical prose and poetry. Furthermore, Eliots formulation of artistic practice in relation to the technical prerequisite of an ‘objective correlative’ and his concept of the role of an intertextual tradition is also considered in relation to Bacons own offerings on the construction and reception of his works.