English Graphic - Couverture rigide

Lubbock, Tom

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 0711233705 ISBN 13 : 9780711233706

Editeur : Frances Lincoln, 2012

Synopsis

English Graphic is a book of essays on the subject of illustration, with the focus entirely on English artists using graphic media; drawings, prints and watercolours. The pieces are largely drawn from Tom Lubbock’s weekly Great Works column for the Independent, with some longer pieces originally published as reviews or catalogue essays.

The historical span of the book is broad – from the Uffington White Horse to the Winchester Psalter Hellmouth to Harry Beck’s London Underground Map and beyond. The high point of English Graphic art in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century makes up the heart of the book, with Fuseli, Blake, Bewick and Palmer all the subject of extended essays.

The fifty or so images range from the visionary to the empirical, from folk art to caricature. Connecting and overlapping ideas on line and shape run through the book; maps, islands, clouds, swarms, wombs, skins, dots, contours and boundaries. Energetic, coherent and strange, English Graphic presents an electrical storm of ideas and illuminations provocatively argued by one of our most brilliant writers on art.

A propos du livre

À propos des auteurs

Tom Lubbock, critic and illustrator, was the chief art critic of the Independent from 1997 until his death in 2011. He wrote widely on art, books and radio and produced major catalogue essays on Goya, Thomas Bewick and Ian Hamilton Finlay. His illustrations, mainly done in collage, appeared every Saturday on the editorial page of the Independent between 1999 and 2004. His weekly Great Works column, from which these essays are taken, ran between 2005 and 2010. http://tomlubbock.com/

Jamie McKendrick was born in Liverpool in 1955. He taught at the University of Salerno in Italy and is the author of five collections of poetry: The Sirocco Room (1991); The Kiosk on the Brink (1993); The Marble Fly (1997), winner of the Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year) and a Poetry Book Society Choice;Ink Stone (2003), which was shortlisted for the 2003 T. S. Eliot Prize and the 2003 Whitbread Poetry Award; and Crocodiles & Obelisks (2007), shortlisted for the Forward Prize. A selection of his poems was published as Sky Nails (2000), and he is editor of 20th-Century Italian Poems (2004). His translations of the poetry of Valerio Magrelli were published by Faber in 2009, and awarded the Weidenfeld Translation prize for 2010.

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West Bromwich Sweep

There's nothing to beat seeing a man being beaten to a pulp. Before boxing-gloves were introduced by the Queensbury Rules of 1867, bare-knuckle fighting could cause extreme facial damage. And it is clear from images and written accounts that the mess was part of the fun. For instance, there's Thomas Rowlandson's Six Stages of Marring a Face (1792) - a cartoon-strip, depicting step-by-step the wreckage of a boxer's features. No opponent is shown. All attention is on the spectacle of progressive and bloody rearrangement.

William Hazlitt wrote a horrible little essay called The Fight (1822), in which he describes how he and other lovers of “The FANCY” take an excursion out of London to watch a big match between William Neate and The Gas-man (as he's nick-named). Hazlitt coos and twitters at the prospect, and then at the sight, of two fellows smashing each other to bits. He tosses in literary quotations and classical allusions. He thrills self-consciously at the crudely violent but yet magnificent manliness of it all. He relishes the chance to exercise his powers of description, as the Gas-man gets the worst of it.

The Gas-man aimed “a mortal blow at his adversary's neck.” But Neate “returned it with his left at full swing, planted a tremendous blow on his cheek-bone and eyebrow, and made a red ruin of that side of his face. The Gas-man went down… all one side of his face was perfect scarlet, and his right eye was closed in dingy blackness.” The fight continues. And “to see two men smashed to the ground, smeared with gore, stunned, senseless, the breath beaten out of their bodies; and then, before you recover from the shock, to see them rise up with new strength and courage… - this is the high and heroic state of man!”

But at last the Gas-man falls. “I never saw anything more terrific than his aspect just before he fell. All traces of life, of natural expression, were gone from him. His face was like a human skull, a death's head, spouting blood. The eyes were filled with blood, the nose streamed with blood, the mouth gaped blood. He was not like an actual man, but like a preternatural, spectral appearance, or like one of the figures in Dante's Inferno.” Blood, blood, blood, blood, Dante. It is not this great English writer's finest hour.

Sometimes one piece of work can repair, make up for, the damage done by another. And if there is a work that makes up for the frivolous sadism of The Fight, it's a picture by an anonymous English folk artist entitled West Bromwich Sweep. Hazlitt's writing is fixated on the spectacle of violence. The picture imagines what it feels like. Its overall technique is pretty rough. Its evocation of pain is overwhelming.

“WESTBROMWICH SWEEP As he appeared at george Holdens after his fight with fred higgit being waited on by Jem Parker through wose superior Generalship he won his Battle in 1 hour and 26 mineets on the 7 January 1850”, reads the semi-literate caption. This is a detail, and if you look in the original at the pictures hanging on the wall of the pub, either side of the strangely beautiful candle-holder, you can see how the Fancy was normally portrayed: the man posed, ready before the fight, dukes up, showing his brisket. But here we see the aftermath, the tending of wounds. And it's in the depiction of the boxer's head that this image shocks, and exceeds all expectation.

It's not the Sweep's heavy bruising and swelling as such that the picture stresses - it's his searing pain, extreme tenderness, sensory confusion and general pitifulness. His head is inflated, too big for his body (the other figures' heads are all in scale). Its sensations become larger than anyone else's in the room. It also becomes babylike, helpless. And the head-body joint is not properly articulated at the

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Frances Lincoln
• Date d'édition: 2012
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0711233705
• ISBN 13: 9780711233706
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 208
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible