shadow sites photography archaeology and the british landscape 1927-1951 may 2007

[...]... culture of the country where he spent most of his life.⁵⁹ As the example of Brandt reminds us, the enchantments of the British landscape and its monuments were not the sole preserve of native artists and writers It was the German-born Pevsner who began comprehensively to document the architecture and monuments of the British Isles soon after he arrived in England in 1930, and who sought to define the Englishness... The Nest of the Wild Stones’, 42 ⁵⁷ See TGA 7050 ⁵⁸ B Brandt, The English at Home (London, 1936) and Literary Britain (London, 1951) 18 Introduction In a very real sense homelessness played an important part in the lives of both of these artists: Nash and his wife moved around incessantly throughout the 1930s and 1940s, and the German-born Brandt was never quite ‘at home’ in the exotic landscape and. .. Yet some of these accounts over-stress the formal appeal of ancient objects—like Stonehenge, or Avebury—without acknowledging that it was equally the fact of their longevity and their presence in the landscape that endeared them to Neo-Romantics like Nash and Piper, and possibly even to the more committed modernists Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson Other accounts ascribe the appeal of such sites to... Neo-Romanticism from the confines of a narrowly defined history of art, Mellor convincingly expanded the term to include a wide range of media: the photography of Bill Brandt and Edwin Smith, the poetry of Dylan Thomas and those associated with the ‘New Apocalypse’ school, the films of Powell and Pressburger (also known as the Archers’), and publications like the Shell Guides to Britain According to Mellor, British. .. (their linear style—according to Pevsner and others—so typically English) could function as a powerful symbol of spiritual survival in the landscape a survival underlined by the lilies standing in vases on the altar It is the context of the making and the viewing of this photograph which confers ‘Neo-Romantic’ status, as much as its identity as an image Thus the word ‘imagination’ in the title of the. .. walking among the monoliths at Avebury, suggesting his wish to translate the geometry and atmosphere of this environment into his art.⁴⁷ Nash was not, of course, the only Neo-Romantic topophil—far from it Particular places were increasingly significant in the work of Piper, Craxton, Cecil Collins, and Sutherland, as they were in the films of Powell and Pressburger, and the photography of Bill Brandt and Edwin... primitive objects honoured by continental modernists like Picasso and Brancusi—or even the equivalents of the works of Picasso himself.⁵² The absorption of these and other objects—in the national landscape flattered the Romantic imagination, as if continental modernism had only just invented the forms which had inhabited the British landscape for centuries ⁴⁸ P Nash, ‘Swanage, or Seaside Surrealism’,... obsessed, in the 1930s and 1940s, with images of a nurturing landscape, ideas of home, and the shelters of church, cottage, or castle Throughout the 1930s, Paul Nash was working with images of ‘nests’ and ‘lairs’ When Mortimer Wheeler excavated Maiden Castle in the mid 1930s, and uncovered skeletons buried underneath the turf, Nash photographed them, titling the images Nest of the Skeletons and The Defenders... Jennings, Michael Powell, and ¹ J Betjeman, Slick but not Streamlined (Garden City, NY, 1947), 11 ² Ibid 14 ³ T S Eliot, ‘Little Gidding’, The Complete Poems and Plays of T S Eliot (London, 1969), 197 2 Introduction Emeric Pressburger found in pockets of the British landscape curious and moody survivals of the past All of these brands of topophilia involved the trawling of the British landscape for traces... 205–18; J Taylor, A Dream of England: Landscape, Photography and the Tourist’s Imagination (Manchester, 1994), 50 ff Introduction 5 historic sites, monuments, and entire cultures in an archive or album long after they had been destroyed or built over in reality.¹⁵ Those who see and picture the landscape archaeologically might be alarmed by the rate of change, and they too might seek out pockets of .