Framing Modernism: Architecture and Photography in Italy 1926-65
Estorick Collection, until 21 June
Adrian Berg: Panoramic Watercolours
Friends Room, Royal Academy, until 11 June
Architecture exhibitions, as I’ve had occasion to note before, are not always the most visually exciting of events, principally because the experience of a building can only really be conveyed in front of it or inside it. Architectural models can be aesthetically pleasing quasi-sculptures, and plans or elevations can be beautiful drawings in their own right, but they are no substitute for the actual thing. The great stand-by in architectural exhibitions is the photograph, often a cunning shot of an interesting detail blown up to gigantic proportions to give a simulacrum of experiencing the building itself. In the case of the Estorick’s enjoyable new show, architecture and photography have been brought into absolute and uninterrupted conjunction in a display of more than 100 vintage photos from the RIBA library. These frame the development of Italian Modernist architecture in a fascinating way.
Photography has always been important to the practice and study of architecture, a powerful tool in the dissemination of ideas and an incomparable method of recording structures. The Modernist explosion in architecture created both unprecedented demand and opportunities for experiment. New styles of designing and building required equally inventive photography. Hence the emphasis on unusual angles and juxtapositions, fragments, shooting from above or below, or seeking out distortions and reflections; also a new interest in tectonics rather than just an easy concentration on façades. The way buildings were constructed, just as much as how they were presented, was fair game for photographers. The prevalence of dynamic girder and beam arrangements (in concrete and steel usually) and the increasing use of glass brought about a fruitful collaboration between architect and photographer. There was a sudden plenitude of subjects which offered scope for pictorial drama.
This exhibition is confined to the two ground-floor galleries at the Estorick. In the first, the visitor encounters striking imagery from the start, with a 1930 shot of the Foro Mussolini in Rome, priapic bollards to the fore and colossal statues of posing athletes in the distance. There’s a worm’s eye view of ‘Novocomum, Como’, all external wedges and curves, and a structural shot of the empty fish market in Milan. I particularly liked the spiral access ramp of the multi-storey car park in Venice, the wrap-around helter-skelter-like access stairs of the water tower at Colonia Marina Rosa Maltoni Mussolino, Calambrone, and the aerial view of piles of sand in the Florence Stadium.
Perhaps my favourite photo was a close-up of a diving platform at the Ugolino Golf Club swimming pool near Florence, a masterpiece of cropping and abstract design. The artist’s house and studio in Milan were, on the other hand, rather disappointing — with a flat-roofed bungalow-barrack look, despite some interesting light effects within. The exhibition’s second room is devoted to postwar designs and includes such appealing oddities as the sequence of giant Pirelli tyres lining the Milan-Turin autostrada. I also liked the stage-set or aquarium-like glass frontages of the Cinema Altino in Padua, with what looks like an incised classical ceiling, and the Milanese perfume and lingerie shops. And the empty reaches of the ticket hall at the Stazione Termini in Rome, which starred in Vittorio De Sica’s 1952 film of that name along with Montgomery Clift and Jennifer Jones. Even the ‘Workers’ Housing, Via Marittima, Naples’ looks impressively sculptural and intriguing. Altogether a stimulating and entertaining selection.
Adrian Berg (born 1929) is one of those artists who has consistently produced good work over a long career, but has never really been given the acclaim he deserves. He’s had a couple of museum shows (notably at the Serpentine in 1986 and the Barbican in 1993), but the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition has been his main shop window in recent years. The Academy now honours his 80th birthday with a show of his panoramic watercolours in the Friends Room (open to the public daily 4–6 p.m., Fridays till 10 p.m.), and very splendid they look too. They serve to remind us that a proper survey of Berg’s work as a painter in oils is long overdue.
Primarily a landscape painter, Berg is a powerful and inventive colourist, a superb pattern-maker and a tireless researcher into ‘natural’ appearances. He is particularly interested in man’s relationship with wildness, and has spent much time investigating the shapes imposed upon nature in parks and gardens. The watercolour show at the RA begins with a wall of long, impressive paintings, Lake District panoramas exploring the endless varieties of green and the less expected pinks in that lush landscape. A group of Kew Gardens drawings shows Berg on especially fine and detailed form, another of the Alhambra in Granada providing a more exotic counterpoint. They whet the appetite for a full retrospective.
Last chance to see a delightful exhibition at the Ikon in Birmingham (until 25 May), of vignettes by Thomas Bewick. These small wood engravings or ‘tale-pieces’ as he himself called them, were made for books and intended to illustrate ‘some truth or point some moral’. But they are far from platitudinous or hectoring, offering a piquant humour and directness of observation that is as fresh today as it ever was. If, like me, you are unable to get to see the actual exhibition, there is a sumptuous hard-back book accompanying it (£24.95) which reproduces more than 100 examples. It contains three essays, including one by Jenny Uglow, whose brilliant biography of Bewick appeared in 2006 and held me totally enthralled. Thomas Bewick (1753–1828) was a great naturalist but he was also exceptionally observant of his fellow Northumbrians, and couldn’t resist showing their lower natures. This is what Ruskin, otherwise a fervent admirer of Bewick, castigated as the ‘love of ugliness that is in the English soul’. But in giving expression to it, Bewick made the ornamental space-filler of the vignette into a Tyneside soap opera. Remarkable.
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