#05.02.2019 (John Berger, 1973)

Now I have been forced to place myself historically. In a period of revolutionary expectation, I saw a work of art which had survived as evidence of the past’s despair; in a period which has to be endured, I see the same work miraculously offering a narrow pass across despair.

#11.02.2020 (W.R. Lethaby)

“Coventry could become before long a collective work of art. This observation was made by Mr. R. Gardner-Medwin, an authority on civic design, when he gave a lecture this week at the Coventry of To-morrow Exhibition…”

– Coventry Herald, 11 May 1940

PDF: Coventry of Tomorrow | Press

#10.02.2020 (W.R. Lethaby)

PJ-M: I must confess that my enthusiasm for Lethaby only developed after I had left the [Liverpool School of Architecture], and I had, in fact, been working as a young architect for two or three years. To some extent, Lethaby demands some maturity, he was not just another teacher. But I think he was a wise man, and of course he understood brilliantly the link between the builders, the architects, the people, and the nature of the building required. A humanist of the finest kind. 

PDF: Percy Johnson-Marshall | W.R. Lethaby

PDF: Percy Johnson Marshall Collection

#09.02.2020 (W.R. Lethaby, 1923)

17 [16] / Work is a sacred thing and I have wished above all to stir the instinct for making and doing. Work is the great reality, beauty is the great aim. Full satisfaction is only to be found in the common beauty of common things of the common life.

18 [17] / Art is intelligence, interest and skill manifested in all we make and do and I believe that something of great value to everybody may be suggested by the idea of art. All right and reasonable work is a compound of body and soul. If work is without art it is mere toil, drudgery and slavery; skill, the sense of service and pride in the doing, will fill it with a new spirit. Art is drudgery made divine. We have to make beauty out of all that we do.

48 [47] / Making things opens out minds.

PDF: Lethaby | Home and Country Arts 1923

#08.02.2020 (W.R. Lethaby, 1923)

PDF: W.R. Lethaby | Coventry Corporation Bill

#02.02.2020 (W.R. Lethaby, 1913)

“We cannot go back”—true; and it is as true that we cannot stay where we are.

PDF: Lethaby | WELL-DOING 2020

#10.01.2020 (Perriand & Leger | FLV, Paris)

Though unstatic, they call for contemplation. Mute, they speak from the wall.

– Peter de Francia: ‘Léger’s ‘The Great Parade’, Cassell, 1969

#24.11.2019 (EJ, Design for an Alphabet)

#15.10.2019 (Plan général de l’Exposition, 1937 | L’Illustration)

#09.09.2019 (W.R. Lethaby | Colin Ward)

#01.09.2019 (W.R. Lethaby)

PDF:Colin Ward | Lethaby

#24.08.2019 (John Ruskin, ‘workman’)

The third kind of ornament, the Renaissance, is that in which the inferior detail becomes principal, the executor of every minor portion being required to exhibit skill and possess knowledge as great as that which is possessed by the master of the design; and in the endeavour to endow him with this skill and knowledge, his own original power is overwhelmed, and the whole building becomes a wearisome exhibition of well-educated imbecility.

– John Ruskin: ‘The Nature of Gothic’, 1853

#18.08.2019 (W.R. Lethaby, notes)

PDF: W.R. Lethaby | “and all players of games”

#16.08.2019 (W.R. Lethaby, text)

Link: W.R. Lethaby and All Saints’ Church Brockhampton | Tinsmiths

#27.07.2019 (W.R. Lethaby, 1920)

imbecile play-acting…destroys rational growth | efficiency…in place of this trivial, sketchy picturesque

– W.R. Lethaby: ‘Housing and Furnishing’, 1920

#27.07.2019 (W.R. Lethaby to Harry Peach, 1921)

“…art equals work: worthy art equal worthy work, high quality art equals high quality work.”

#21.07.2019 (W.R. Lethaby, 1913)

#12.07.2019 (X | Dylan Thomas, 1944)

In the cauldron

Of his

Kiss

In

The spin

Of the sun

#12.07.2019 (Braxton Hicks | Dylan Thomas, 1944)

#11.07.2019 (W.R. Lethaby, 1891)

…the Architecture which is the synthesis of the fine arts, the commune of all the crafts.

#05.07.2019 (May 1940)

#27.06.2019 (France 1937 SG#669 Paris Int. Exhibition #D93109)

LINK: Paris Exhibition Opened (1937)

#21.06.2019 (Vernieling en Wederopbouw, Oostende)

PDF: Vernieling en Wederopbouw 1944-1958

#15.06.2019 (Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, 1989)

PDF: The Architects’ Journal | Cader Idris

#15.06.2019 (Léger, 1954)

#15.06.2019 (Apollinaire, 1914/1918)

PDF: Apollinaire | Berlin, 2018

PDF: Reading Apollinaire

#08.06.2019 (Gill, 1929)

PDF: Gill | Art-nonsense, 1929

PDF: factibilium | agibilium

#30.05.2019 (Lethaby Article)

PDF: W. R. Lethaby & All Saints’ Church, Brockhampton | 30.05.2019

#28.05.2019 (Lethaby, 1921)

We have to refound art on community service as the well-doing of what needs doing.

– W. R. Lethaby: ‘The Town Itself / A Garden City is a Town’, 1921

PDF: Lethaby | A Garden City is a Town, 1921 x3

#27.05.2019 (Unwin, 1909)

Professor Lethaby has well said, “Art is the well-doing of what needs doing.” We have in a certain niggardly way done what needed doing, but much that we have done has lacked the insight of imagination and the generosity of treatment which would have constituted the work well done; and it is from this well-doing that beauty springs.

– Raymond Unwin: ‘Town Planning In Practice’, 1909

Sixth of a set of 6 sketch books by Charles Paget Wade. Donated by Richard Lupinacci, a resident of St. Kitts. . . . The book is landscape format, covered in brown textile, with insect damage. Bookworm holes throughout. [NT/object/1342704.6] 

Wavy road verges, hollyhocks and topiary, tea-cosy cottages, black cumuli of elm, white cumuli of cloud . . . were all good for a laugh in left-wing circles, within which it was plain that the Empire and the landscape that had been created simultaneously in the eighteenth century were going to disintegrate simultaneously in the twentieth.

– Viscount Esher: ‘A Broken Wave: the Rebuilding of England, 1940-1980’, Allen Lane, 1981

PDF: Esher | Lethaby

#26.05.2019 (Esher, 1981)

History nevertheless shows that political disasters do not tarnish a period’s cultural image. . . . Writing in 1938 [during “the years of Leon Blum’s short-lived Popular Front, the only intellectually respectable response to the terror ahead”], R. H. Wilenski recorded the ages of the leading figures in the Ecole de Paris: ‘Bonnard and Vuillard are seventy-one, Matisse is sixty-nine, Rouault is sixty-seven, Vlaminck is sixty-three, Dufy, Picabia and Friesz are fifty-nine, Derain is fifty-eight. Picasso and Leger are fifty-seven, Braque is fifty-six, Utrillo, Metzinger and Severini are fifty-five, Segonzac is fifty-four, Ozenfant is fifty-two, Chagall is fifty-one. Chirico is fifty, Ernst is forty seven, Lurqat is forty-six, Miro is forty-five, Masson is forty-three. Tchelitchew is forty and Dali is thirty-four.’ Such  a constellation would not be seen again in our time. But the artists and philosophers, the designers and decorators, the whole ‘intellectual’ resistance to fascism, turned out to have no roots in French society, which was deeply cynical and defeatist.

– Viscount Esher: ‘A Broken Wave: the Rebuilding of England, 1940-1980’, Allen Lane, 1981

#24.05.2019 (Lethaby | Brockhampton, 1902)

#22.05.2019 (Edward Johnston, 1906/1946)

Generally / Regarding / Endeavouring / The commercial prospects of the student of Writing & Illuminating – or, indeed, of any Art or Craft – are somewhat problematical, depending largely on his efficiency & opportunities. / Although the demand for good work is at present limited…

could not be ‘spared’.

1

Nothing p247

#20.05.2019

PDF: Dates & Connections v20.05.2019

#18.05.2019 (Lethaby, 1913)

PDF: Lethaby | Coventry

PDF: Lethaby | Life & Work summary

#05.05.2019 

PDF: Book Obituaries #1

#05.05.2019 (Esher | Lethaby)

PDF: Esher | Lethaby, 1981

#01.05.2019 (Lethaby | Esher)

#01.05.2019 (La Femme en Blue, 1914)

PDF: Leger | La Femme en Bleu 1914 & Study

#23.04.2019 (ars bene videndi / the art of the skilled gaze)

Proper ornamentation may be defined as a language addressed to the eye; it is pleasant thought expressed in the speech of the tool.

…the eye would become so accustomed to good proportion in these simple and obvious things that it would insist on a similar gratification in more complex and difficult matters.

– Edward Johnston: ‘Writing & Illuminating & Lettering’, 1906 (1946)

#21.04.2019 (A. K. Coomaraswamy | A Figure of Speech, or a Figure of Thought?, 1946 (1972)

It has sometimes been asked whether the “artist” can survive under modern conditions. In the sense in which the word is used by those who ask the question, one does not see how he can or why he should survive. For, just as the modern artist is neither a useful or significant, but only an ornamental member of society, so the modern workman is nothing but a useful member and is neither significant nor ornamental. It is certain we shall have to go on working, but not so certain that we could not live, and handsomely, without the exhibitionists of our studios, galleries, and playing fields. We cannot do without art, because art is the knowledge of how things ought to be made, art is the principle of manufacture (recta ratio factibilium), and while an artless play may be innocent, an artless manufacture is merely brutish labor and a sin against the wholesomeness of human nature; we can do without “fine” artists, whose art does not “apply” to anything, and whose organized manufacture of art in studios is the inverse of the laborer’s artless manufacture in factories; and we ought to be able to do without the base mechanics “whose souls are bowed and mutilated by their vulgar occupations even as their bodies are marred by their mechanical arts.”

…it would seem to be a mockery to speak of a society as “free” where it is only the makers of useless things who are supposedly free.

PDF: Coomaraswamy | A Figure of Speech/Thought

#20.04.2019 (W.R. Lethaby)

Labour, work, art really make up what should be one body of human service, but ‘fine art’ has been trained to turn round and revile the rest for not being ‘aesthetic’ – whatever that may be.

PDF: Lethaby | Obituary 1931

PDF: Lethaby | Notes 1984

#07.04.2019 (W.R. Lethaby, 1892)

Old architecture lived because it had a purpose. Modern architecture, to be real, must not be a mere envelope without contents.

PDF: Lethaby | Art 1892

#04.02.2019 (CIAM)

94. Private interests should be subordinated to the interests of the community.

– IV International Congress for Modern Architecture | Charter of Athens, 1933

PDF: W. R. Lethaby | Beauty?

#03.02.2019 (Charlotte Perriand)

“And it turned out the walls of my studio were also the walls of his.”

#02.02.2019

Et ma blanche colombe qui chante jour et nuit.

[Refrain]

… qu’il fait bon, fait bon, fait bon,

… qu’il fait bon dormir.

PDF: Nine Points on Mon­u­men­tal­ity, 1943

#01.02.2019 (Le Corbusier 1958)

PDF: Brussels World’s Fair (Philips Pavilion)

#31.01.2019

PDF: Deutscher Werkbund

#31.01.2019

PDF: Peter de Francia 1973 | Mandarins and Luddites

#28.01.2019