In 1951, the artist and writer Barbara Jones (1912–78) organised an exhibition called Black Eyes and Lemonade at the Whitechapel Gallery celebrating the popular arts of toys, festivities, souvenirs and advertising, to reveal to a largely unsuspecting public the richness of vernacular art in Britain. The original exhibition was evidently an Aladdin’s cave of objects, from decorated pub mirrors to ships’ figureheads, horse brasses, corn dollies and needle packets. Jones crossed the boundaries of folk art, mingling the handmade with the machine-made, and the traditional with the contemporary and ephemeral.
She wrote a book about the subject, published the same year and called The Unsophisticated Arts. This has just been beautifully republished by Little Toller Books (£30, hardback), with lots more visual material, a foreword by Peter Blake and an introduction by the art director and set designer Simon Costin, who is also the founder and director of the Museum of British Folklore. In the preface to her book, Jones states that it is about ‘the things that people make for themselves or that are manufactured in their taste’. Not a bad definition of popular art.
The current exhibition at the Whitechapel is a small archive display in what was the old Whitechapel Public Library when I lived in the area, and which has now been subsumed into the Gallery. The display consists of five flat cabinets around the walls of a small room, one counter display case and two more flat cabinets in the middle of the room. There are a number of works and photographs hung on the walls and a few free-standing objects. Chief among these is an Airedale Fireplace, a dog-shaped design in biscuit-coloured ceramic tiles, which featured in the original 1951 exhibition. It’s in a poorer state today, if you compare it with photos of its former splendour, having lost a number of tiles along its back and at the tip of its tail, but it still has panache, and reminds me of the Scottie dog electric bar fire that Craigie Aitchison used to have on his south London hearth.
Above it hangs a metal and enamel sculpture from c.1835, of a moustached and decorated acrobat or clown balancing on a ball. To the left is an oil painting of two heavily tattooed ladies, reminding us that this lamentable fashion is not simply a recent fad. In fact, in The Unsophisticated Arts, Jones remarks that tattooing — although originating among sailors — became widely popular by the end of the 19th century. ‘Women as well as men would pop in on Saturday night when the pubs closed to choose a new half-crown’s worth.’ Proof positive of the evils of drink?
Also here is one of Jones’s own prints, a bright lithograph entitled ‘The Fairground’, and a number of intriguing installation photographs of the original Black Eyes exhibition that rather puts this meagre display to shame, and accounts for its tremendous popularity at the time. Peter Blake talks about the inspiration of that show for him (‘I have no doubt that discovering Barbara Jones was one of the more important things that happened to me, and helped form the way I work’), and I remember the surrealist Eileen Agar talking enthusiastically about it. The exhibition and the book clearly touched a wide range of artists as well as the general public, for together they performed a crucial cultural function: validating popular art, long before Pop Art was heard of.
This display does not attempt to recreate the incredibly rich, even cluttered, experience of Black Eyes and Lemonade, but it does offer a taste of what it was like. Inevitably this whets the appetite and makes one long for a full rerun or 2013 version of the show — a grand cabinet of curiosities that would cover the entire history of popular art in Britain (or as much as possible). Instead we have to make do with this one-room show, the book and our own imaginations. However, the display does contain a number of items from Barbara Jones’s own collection, including the head of a funfair horse, a small openwork dog made from folded cigarette packets, paper flowers and birds, decorated tins and tin toys, and a brown-paper carrier bag from E. Drury & Sons, Doncaster’s Popular Butchers, with a vignette of cattle on the front, printed in dark blue.
On the wall are immortelles in wire and beads, memorial decorations for children’s graves, and a sales display of fireworks and crackers. There are flat cabinets of documentary material — press cuttings, photos and letters — and another containing mostly paper items from Jones’s collection: record labels, puppets, beer labels, cigarette packets, doilies (or dessert papers, as we should perhaps call them), miniature flags, and a marvellous advert for ‘Rid-A-Rat’, the poison that will free you from vermin. In one frame of the advert, Miss Rat, in a long veil, is admiring herself in a looking-glass, but in another frame her prospective husband lies dead with a tube of poison beside him. The legend reads: ‘The Wedding Will Not Take Place — He’s Eaten Rid-A-Rat’. Pretty good value at 6d a tube.
There are other exhibitions concurrently at the Whitechapel, most of which I can’t in all conscience recommend, but upstairs in the main gallery there’s an excellent display of plant photographs from the first two decades of the 20th century by Karl Blossfeldt (1865–1932). Here are portraits of elderberry shoots and witch hazel, and the humble sow thistle, as you might not usually see them. The plant names alone are poetry: cat’s-ear sage, heliotrope, scorpionweed, caper spurge, stonebreaker, larkspur, cut-leaf teasel, pasque flower, and the forms are beautiful and extraordinary. Blossfeldt operated at the intersection between Art Nouveau and Modernism, between romance and usefulness. As he wrote: ‘The plant may be described as an architectural structure, shaped and designed ornamentally and objectively.’ Particularly poignant are the unrolling fern fronds, so like bishops’ croziers.
Finally, let me remind you of David Inshaw’s exhibition of new paintings at the Fine Art Society (148 New Bond Street, W1, until 9 May), previewed in these pages at the beginning of March. Featuring landscapes from Dorset and Wiltshire, figure and animal paintings, and a splendid series of tree portraits, it is a wonderful show, containing some of Inshaw’s best pictures. The Tate has loaned his early masterpiece, ‘The Badminton Game’ (1972–3), which would be generous of them if it were ever on display. This enormously popular image is rarely shown — why was it not included, for instance, in the current Tate Britain display Looking at the View? — so it’s a treat to be able to study such a superb example of Inshaw’s early work at close quarters. Not to be missed.
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