Zeitguys and zeitgals by Bob Cotton c2015
going underground, counter-culture, cyberculture, eco-culture... a collage of views with many quotations...
In the Twentieth century, each decade seems to have produced men and women, boys and girls, who particularly expressed the spirit of their age in clothes, demeanour, attitude and intellectual and bodily, somatic and expression and in action. This picture essay explores some of these socio-cultural developments, stressing the role of the outsider, the rebel, - and the eccentric, the bohemian - and the counter-culture or 'underground' opposition to or extreme expression of the mainstream...
Herbert Marshall McLuhan: “I think of art, at its most significant, as a DEW line, a Distant Early Warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it,” (McLuhan: Understanding Media 1964 + McLuhan: DEWline playing cards 1969)
- .There are several historical strands of development/evolution that in various ways are distilled in the emergence of the counter-culture (or ‘underground’) in the Western World (mostly but not exclusively in UK and USA) over the period 1900-1970. These include:
the Fauves, Expressionist, Futurist and Cubist art factions, the impact of spiritual revolutionaries like Madame Blavaksky, Aleister Crowley, George Gurdjieff, Piotr Ouspensky, singular artists like Alfred Jarry, Georges Melies and Winsor McCay, the Dada, Surrealism, German cabaret lifestyles, Bauhaus student modes - Anita Berber, Marlene Deitrich, Claude Cahun, Tamara de Lempicka etc. And in the 1940s - the radical environmentalism in UK and USA - Ed Ricketts, John Stuart Collis, the American socialist artists of the the Thirties - Diego Rivera, Ed Ricketts, John Steinbeck, and many more recent ecologists up to and including James Lovelock, Fritjof Capra, Humberto Maturana, Lynn Margulis...
During the Sixties: the flowering of street fashion in Chelsea, South Ken, Notting Hill clustered around early Sixties Jumble Sales, early charity stores, military-surplus stores, street markets, Portobello Road, Kensington Market, Kings Road, Worlds End...
Emerging 'mod' fashions, named after central London 'Soho Modernists' photo c1963 - Street fashions like this became the zeit-guides for high-street fashionistas and haut couture designers from this period on. Mary Quant's Bazaar shops and Barbara Hulanicki's Biba store capitalised on street fashions..
Mary Quant: her second Bazaar shop in Kings Road...
Elsewhere it was Black Mountain College, the abstract expressionists in the USA, the French existentialists, Art Brut, Nouveau Realisme, Sexual experimentation - Cahun, Lempicka, etc Cab Calloway Jitterbug Jive dance innovations, Jazz lifestyles: Billie Holiday, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis post-War Surrealists Remedios Varo, Dora Maar, Leonor Fini, Leonora Carrington, Yves Tanguy etc...and then on the US West Coast, Chet Baker, Stan Getz, Dave Brubeck, Art Pepper, the Bay Area hipsters, City Lights Bookstore, Beat writers
Below - I've been collecting images relating to impressions and personifications of 'cool' - often pre-emptive of strands of our general culture, and some of the cultural early-warning artists and zeit-surfers - the 'ahead of their time' trend forecasters that we've been particularly lucky with in the West - its a picture-essay, so enjoy! 
1940s 1950s Sacha Chimkevitch painting Bebop Jazz https://www.etsy.com/listing/75461757/original-1940s-1950s-sacha-chimkevitch
Sax Blues https://www.rogallery.com/artists/sacha-chimkevitch/sax-blues/
Jazzband Polychrome
Quartet http://www.midcenturia.com/2011/05/sacha-chimkevitch-prints.html
1950s UK Angry Young Men -a bundle of post-war British writers including John Osborne, Kingsley Amis, Arnold Wesker, John Wain and Alan Sillitoe, whose Saturday Night and Sunday Morning focussed on the coming of age of a working-class youth played in this Karel Reisz film by Albert Finney:
Maya Deren - dancer, film-maker, choreographer, trance-film-maker
Harry Everett Smith, artist, musico-ethnographer, cultural anthropologist, occultist, film-maker, proto-hipster
Doncha just love it? The bubbling under of the cultural revolution that was to reach a full-flowering in the Sixties appeared in all kinds of ways: Here's the scifi series that introduced Ian Menzies Banks to the genre in 1954 (Banks - writing as Ian M. Banks - is the author of the techno-utopian, left-leaning Culture series in the 1990s).. Scifi was already in its post-war golden-age with writers as diverse as EE Doc Smith, Isaac Asimov, Kurt Vonnegut, Frederick Pohl, Ray Bradbury - and many more favourite classics - already inspiring my generation of early baby-boomers
post WW2 - impact ofWorld War 2, Atom Bomb, Holocaust etc where is mankind going post-war? CND Aldermaston Marches, Anti-Apartheid movement
French New Wave - Belmondo, Seberg in Godard's A Bout de Souffle 1960
Juliette Greco and Miles Davis in 1949 Two great musicians - both icons in their time - symbolising the racial integration obvious in Paris since Josephine Baker and her Revue Negre in the 1920s
- and Dudley Murphy’s experimental film Ballet Mecanique of 1924 - Murphy was to go on to direct the first black music film St Louis Blues the only known film of Bessie Smith, and Black and Tan - a short with Duke Ellington (1929), and The Emperor Jones, starring Paul Robson, as well as first experimental short: The Soul of the Cypress - starring Murphy’s then wife Chase Haringden….here he is (above) with his second wife, Katherine Hawley c1923.
"The "Soul of the Cypress", film from 1921, is one of the first experimental works on live musical synchronization, by the American director Dudley Murphy, for his emerging company "Visual Symphony Production Inc.", performed on the famous musical work of Claude Debussy (the other work was the "Danse Macabre", by Camile Saint-Saens). At first the adjusted synchronization was achieved by means of rheostats that accelerated or slowed down the projection speed, depending on the musical performance, although upon his subsequent arrival in France he soon came into contact with the inventor Charles Delacommune, and used his system of devices for "Synchronismes cinematiques", first with the "Ciné-pupitre", its best known device, which projected the scheme or the score on a desk at the same projection speed so that the conductor's baton or the performance of the performers would be synchronously adjusted. For his later collaboration in Léger's "Ballet mécanique", on the contrary, he renounces to the" ciné-pupitre" to use, or at least try to use, the rest of the machinery of the "Delacommune system" or "appareils Synchro-ciné " ( the company that manages it, including the subsequent distribution of the films), and that allowed, through its special electromechanical distributor, to connect directly with a player-piano and various noise apparatus (also patented by Delacommune) "automatically" with a projector, the stellar bet of the "Ballet Mécanique" with respect to cinematic synchronism and which, unfortunately, was never realized by the participants.
The dryad is Chance, Murphy's first wife, and interestingly, the images were shot by a professional cameraman, John Eyreman".
Dudley Murphy and Fernand Leger: “Ballet mécanique” (1924) with Kiki de Montparnasse
British R&B anti-communism eMart Luther King Selma March 1956 religious and spiritual hallucinogenic drug experimentation environmental awareness- issues like population, pollution, diminishing resources (etc) satire and humour poetry ethnography - alternative cultures music and musicology visual art anarchy political left-leaning
Zeit-Guys and Zeit-Gals
Ed van der Elsken: selfie c1953
van der Elsken: Vali Myers 1953
van der elsken: Nuit de Montparnasse - Election of Most Beautiful Artist Model 1953
Since at least the 19th century, almost each decade has thrown up its own zeitguys and zeitgals - iconic characters who epitomise the spirit of the age - who embody a spirit of the emerging avant garde or counter-culture. You could say that Dante Gabriel Rosetti embodied the spirit of the mid-century artist, that Julia Margaret Cameron and Virginia Oldoini, Countess Castiglione, in their very different ways, inhabited the spirit of inventive photography; that Jane Burden-Morris, Fanny Cornforth and Annie Miller represented the archetypal Pre-Raphaelite women; that Aubrey Beardsley and Jean Cocteau the emerging modernists of the fin de siecle; - and Alfred Jarry and Aleister Crowley, and Leah Hirsig the extremist avant-garde;
Aleister Crowley in 1890s https://www.pinterest.co.uk/pin/540713498996340071/ Some researchers (for instance Judith Noble: Visions of Enchantment 2014; Marina Warner:Stranger Magic: Charmed States & the Arabian Nights 2011) have asserted the importance of the occult and related areas (religious and spiritual practices, ethnography, shamanism, natural magic, folklore etc). Early exemplars of the subterranean or underground alternative culture - like Harry Everett Smith, Gerd Stern and Kenneth Anger include this territory in their research and creative practice), and it is mystics like Aleister Crawley and his Abbey of Thelema acolytes - like Leah Hirsig; and spiritual practitioners like Madame Blavatsky, Georges Gurdjieff and Piotr Ouspensky whose ideas and life-styles became important precedental influences on the evolution of the underground - especially in underground film, and in the work of Everett Smith, Maya Deren, Kenneth Anger - and the women of the Mexican and South American Surrealists - like Remedios Varo, Leonora Carrington, Xul Solar (the nom de plume of Oscar Agustín Alejandro Schulz Solari)…
Leah Hirsig (Alostrael - Crowley’s Scarlet Woman in 1919
Maria de los Remedios Alicia Rodriga Varo y Urangan (Remedios Varo) c1950
George Charles Beresord: Ottoline Morrell 1903
Ottoline Morrell by Philip Edward Morrell 1924
Ottoline Morrell epitomising the nascent Bloomsbury Group c1905; Lady Ottoline Morrell by Maurice Beck and Helen Macgregor
Marie Spartali Stillman - pre-Raphaelite painter photographed by Julia Margaret Cameron c1865
Camille Roselie Claudel sculptor and model for Auguste Rodin c1890
Wyndham Lewis by George Charles Beresford, 1913
Hints of the nascent counter culture began to emerge as early as the 19th century with artist-eccentrics like William Blake,Henri Fuselli, Countess Castiglione, Henry David Thoreau, Richard Dadd, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward William Godwin, Ellen Terry, Walt Whitman, Marie Spartali-Stillman, Joris Karl Huysmans,Richard Francis Burton, Aubrey Beardsley, Alfred Jarry, Vincent van Gogh, Jacob Riis, Napoleon Sarony, Henri de Toulouse Lautrec, Marianne North, Gustav Kimpt, Gertrude Kasebier, Peter Kropotkin, George Melies, Paul Cezanne, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Emilie Floge, Edward Gordon Craig, Isadora Duncan, Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, Giorgio de Chirico, Wyndham Lewis, Henri Matisse, Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, Guillaume Appollinaire, many more...
and in the 20th century it was new life-style innovators as well as artists - sometimes embodied in the same person - as Claude Cahun, Tamara de Lempicka, Anita Berber, Marlene Deitrich, Hugo Ball, Emmy Hennings, Hannah Hoch, Aleksandr Bogdanov, Coco Chanel, Otto Dix, Kurt Schwitters, James Joyce, Fernand Leger, Man Ray, Andre Breton, Berenice Abbott, Josephine Baker, Kiki de Montparnasse, Lee Miller, Lee Strassburg, Jackson Pollock- the Dadaists, the Surrealists - all contrived to invent modern (20th century) art and ahead of their time life-styles, setting the ground-work for the post- World War1 and 1920s cultural revolutions in society as a whole - jazz, blues, the Charleston, Flappers, Vamps, Jazz-Babies, etc. The extensive influence of the Surrealists especially, influencing advertising, film and other arts - made these the dominant influences on life-style until and through the Second World War, which brought American influences - in dance, in movies, in music, in art and popular media (magazines, clothes, cigarettes, movie-posters, films, adverts etc)
Tamara de Lempicka TAMARA DE LEMPICKA WITH A CIGARETTE, CIRCA 1931–32, PHOTOGRAPH BY CAMUZZI, COLLECTION ALAIN & MICH BLONDE
TAMARA DE LEMPICKA CIRCA 1932, PHOTOGRAPHED BY MADAME D’ORA (DORA KALLMUS). Though there were hints of an emerging Modernist 20th century lifestyle as early as the 19th century, by the 1920s the lifestyles that were to contribute to the 1960s revolution in youth culture were beginning to emerge in the real sexual and cultural extremes of society - perhaps especially in the homosexual and trans community, but also in the lifestyles of avant-garde art groups like the Dadaist and Futurists, the Russian revolutionary Constructivists, the Surrealists.. Perfect illustrations include Dora Marr, Leonora Fini, Eileen Agar and others of the Surrealists, the Berlin Nightclub scene (as recorded by Christopher Isherwood in Goodbye to Berlin (1939).
Leonora Fini Leonor Fini, Paris c. 1938 Anonymous, Courtesy of Leonor Fini Estate
1950’s: Teenagers at a Rock and Roll dance in the 1950’s https://lanntair.com/1950s-rock-and-roll-dancers/
Here the distinctive ‘fashion’ features are: tight, t-shirt tops or casual open-neck shirts, often with casual V-neck pullovers, double-pleated, high-waist trousers, plimsolls or casual lace-ups, full skirts for dancing - a mixed-race venue…
Dancing at the Flamingo Club on Wardour Street 1964 Jeremy Fletcher https://flashbak.com/club-americana-on-coventry-street-in-1955-43350/
"‘Fashion’ such as it was in the early 60’s was very interesting. There were dancers like these at the Flamingo - buttoned at the neck short-sleeve shirt, straight-cit pale chinos, brown or black leather loafers for him, mini-skirt and casual blouse for her, topped with shades worn indoors and that cloche hat too - note that both are also smoking, and dancing individually, not jiving…"
(https://www.atomretro.com/mod_clothing.cfm)
Georgie Fame, Flamingo Jazz Club, 33 Wardour Street, London photographed by Tony Frank, 1965
Not in stage clothes, the hip blues and jazz singer Georgie Fame here in demode casual crew-neck, coloured shirt and black jeans with black suede shoes, relaxing outside the Flamingo club, where all-nighter jazz and rhythm and blues gigs are a regular feature. Georgie Fame’s first top-ten hit was with the song Yeh Yeh! in 1964 - this was a hipster-composed song with ultra hip vernacular lyrics by Lambert and Hendricks and Ross - who composed and performed the delightfully apropos ‘Twisted’ - a song that vies with Blossom Dearie’s I’m Hip for the coolest hipster lyrics:
"I call my baby
And ask her what shall we do... I mention movies
But she don't seem to dig that
And then she asks me
Why don't I come to her flat... ..and have some supper
And let the evening pass by
By digging records
Beside a groovy hi-fi... I say Yeh, Yeh
That's what I say
I say Yeh, Yeh... And when she kisses
I feel the fire get hot
She never misses
She gives it all that she's got... We gotta do that!
We gotta do that!
We gotta do that!
We gotta do that! And there'll be no one else
Alive in all the world
'Cept you and me... Yeh! Yeh! Yeh! Yeh! Yeh!
Yeh! Yeh! Yeh! Yeh..."
Jpn Hendricks (lyrics) 
https://www.loc.gov/wiseguide/feb10/jazz.html Jazz fans in the late 1940s - famously multi-cultural, adopting the wearing of hats like Jazzmen…
The 2 i’s Coffee Bar in Old Compton Street
Gina Lollobrigida in 1953 at the 2is http://www.nickelinthemachine.com/2008/07/soho-and-the-2-is-coffee-bar/
‘teen-agers’ in Soho 1956 Note the demob utility suits - pleated trousers, the light full-length raincoats, the double-breasted suit. Within a decade the Soho Modernists had begun to have an effect on the same age-group - adopting some hipster trends - the jazzy pork-pie hats, the light-coloured chinos, the suede ‘Desert Boots’ - what’s new are the American Army-surplus Parkas - ideal outerwear for scooter-riding. There are more sharp suits - at least three or four in this group picture including the blonde girl on the right.
Image: Paul Townsend https://londonist.com/2016/07/where-to-be-mod-in-london
"Can the consumption of art itself become an art form? Young London followers of up-to-date jazz—the Modernists—answered yes, less in words than in the cultivation of discriminating personal style and (by some adepts) in graphic design far ahead of its time.These lectures look at the late-1950s emergence of the Modernist style among youthful connoisseurs of advanced American jazz and how it fostered a favourable climate for signature British artists of the 1960s—Robyn Denny, David Hockney, Pauline Boty, Bridget Riley, Bruce McLean, and Terry Atkinson, among them.(Thomas Crow: Modernist Faces: Hard Bop and Clean Design 2017)ces Paul Mellon lecture-:1999), were inaugurated in 1994 when Professor Francis Haskell delivered the first series at the Gallery in London. The model for the series was the Andrew W. Mellon lectures, established in 1949 in honour of Paul Mellon’s father, the founder of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. The lectures are biennial, given by a distinguished historian of British art.In 2017 the lectures will be delivered by Tom Crow, Rosalie Solow Professor at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. His teaching and research reaches from the later seventeenth century in Europe to the contemporary in both Europe and America.
Maya Deren by Jonas Mekas!https://twitter.com/mubi/status/1255461143214161920 Multi-talented bohemian artists like Maya Deren - dancer, film-maker, actor - and her photographer partner, Alexander Hammid, produce Meshes of the Afternoon - a famous avant-garde short movie, perhaps inspired by Bunuel’s Le Chien Andalou in some of its richly diverse references. Maya Deren, with her Russian blood and cultural heritage, stars in Meshes and wears ‘everyday’ clothes, presenting an image of the normal to counterpoint the dreamlike ‘trance’ episodes in the film. She could be making this in the mid-1950s or even mid-1960s - or later. She is inventing late 20th century lifestyles.
Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid
Maya Deren
Louise Bryant 1916 journalist - friend of John Reid Thirty years before Deren, the American Louise Bryant - a political activist, free thinker feminist and member of the literary set that included the socialist John Reed (10 Days that Shook the World 1919), and the Nobel Laureate Eugene O’Neill (A Long Day’s Journey into Night (1942); The Iceman Cometh 1946). Bryant was portrayed well by Diane Keaton in the Warren Beatty film Reds (1981). Bryant’s bohemian, free-thinking, avant-garde and left-leaning life-style seems ahead of her time in her modes, her attitudes to free-love and women’s suffrage.
Louise Bryant
Marguerite Duras author of screenplay Hiroshima Mon Amour (Alain Resnais 1959)
couple in Gaslight Cafe, Greenwich Village late 1940s
Weegee: Washington Square Park, NYC, 1955 With a nod to Buddy Holly’s heavy-rim glasses - and wearing slip-on loafers, v-neck loose sweater with T-shirt, pleated trousers, leather loafers, with his girl in fashionable tweed A-line coat, black dress or mini-skirt, tight top, tartan neck-scarf, fish-net spangled nylons, open-toe high-heels - note the tweed overcoats in back-ground…
Cab Calloway photographed by van Vechten c1930
Blanche Calloway c1930 Blanche Dorothea Jones Calloway (February 9, 1902 – December 16, 1978) was an American jazz singer, composer, and bandleader. She was the older sister of Cab Calloway and was a successful singer before her brother. With a music career that spanned over fifty years, Calloway was the first woman to lead an all-male orchestra[1] and performed alongside musicians such as Cozy Cole, Chick Webb, and her brother. Her performing style was described as flamboyant and a major influence on her brother's performance style.
Berenice Abbott in 1925
mid 1940s zoot dancing
So the zeit in the geist of hipsterism is melded from a number of sources, many of them created in the 1940s from the sub-cultures of black showbiz, modern jazz, the surrealists, the ‘beat’ underground - the lifestyles of the founders of ‘beatnik’ poetry and prose - the ‘bop-prosody’ of Kerouac’s The Subterraneans, the life and times of Jackson Pollock, the de Koonings and other Abstract Expressionists, the French existentialists, and post-war abstractionists like Yves Klein
Lee Krassner in her New York studio, c 1939: ‘She didn’t suffer fools.’ Photograph: Photograph by Maurice Berezov. Copyright A.E. Artworks, LLC.
Lee Krassner & Jackson Pollock 1949 With Jackson Pollock in Springs, London Island, 1949. Photograph: Wilfred Zogbaum. In the art community (the abstract expressionists as well as the Beat writers and poets), work clothes became 'fashionable'
Willem de Kooning in 1950; photograph by Rudy Burckhardt
Gerd Stern: NO OW NOW," the electronic mantra, reproduced from the exhibit "from USCO through Intermedia, 1962-1979" at Thorpe Intermedia Gallery, which opened on September 9, 1979, assembled by Michael Callahan, Gerd Stern, Zalman Stern, Lind Von Helwig (Sparkill, New York) http://writing.upenn.edu/wh/archival/events/2000/stern-gerd.php
“Gerd Stern is a poet and multi-media artist. His book, First Poems and Others, was published in 1952. A second volume, Afterimage appeared in 1965. During the early 1960s Stern started using cut-out words to create visual collages, and soon after that started making kinetic pieces using flashing lights, and electro-magnetic components to construct poem sculptures. These were first shown at New York's Alan Stone Gallery and in Stern's first one-person show at the San Francisco Museum of Art. The next phase of Stern's work included multi-channel word visuals and sounds cut out of the real world, titled "the Verbal American Landscape." Influenced by Marshall McLuhan's written work, Stern appeared and was associated with McLuhan for a number of years.” “Stern was one of the founders of "USCO," a group of artists, engineers and poets creating multi-media performances and environments which toured the U.S. museum and university venues during the sixties. Their work appeared at the Museum of Modern Art, Brandeis University, the University of California, the Walker Art Museum, the Riverside Museum and many others. USCO also designed one of the first multi-media discotheques, named "The World" (and featured on the cover of Life magazine).” The painters, engineers, poets and sculptors who formed USCO worked out of an old church in Garnerville, New York in the 1960s. Their work included images, sound, and technology executed by a community of participants, some living at the church, and others in various parts of the country and world. What they produced became the subject of a considerable body of journalism and critique. During the late sixties some members of USCO initiated the Lama Foundation in New Mexico. A number of others helped found the Intermedia Systems Corporation in Cambridge, Mass.
When the Thorpe Intermedia Gallery presented its exhibit "from USCO through Intermedia, 1962-1979" (1979), one of the pieces shown was "NO OW NOW," a contraction of an USCO mantra ("take the no out of now - then - take the ow out of now - then - take the then out of now - then -"). The work was an electro mechanical mantric device, with manual and automatic modes, utilizing the basic, Our Time Base Is Real USCO timing circuit. A limited editions of three pieces of NO OW NOW were on display, made of IBM surplus parts. Another piece of kinetic sculpture shown at the Thorpe Gallery in 1979 was "Monolog to Digital ("if you can't count don't blow"), a voice operated assemblage of first-generation solid-state counting modules, dated 1966.”
Instrumentation in BBC RadioPhonic Workshop c1963 https://soundgirls.org/delia-derbyshire-in-profile/
Delia Derbyshire: sight on the zeitgeist in the Radiophonic Workshop c 1959
Delia's near contemporary Suzanne Ciani. There's that 'cool' that stems from personality and from being at the very centre of the then burgeoning electronic music-making following Pierre Schaeffer, Edgar Varese, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Iannis Xenakis and others from the 1940s-1960s. Ciani worked out of her own studio, making her Voices of Packaged Souls album in 1970...
“Delia’s methods for composing are thought-provoking to me: she looked at music very mathematically and often assigned ideas to pitch and frequency with a meaning in mind, her starting point always being the Greek harmonic series. Being classically trained to a professional level pianist as a young woman meant that Delia’s music theory provided a solid knowledge of the rules in order to break them, her written notes highlighting this quirky combination with the use of graphic scores and colloquial musical and technical directions. She believed the way we perceive sound should have dominance over any theory or mathematical working. Delia herself cited childhood experiences as the earliest influences on her interest in electronic sounds, notably the ‘air raid’ and ‘all clear’ sirens she had become accustomed to hearing as a young girl during World War II that had piqued her interest in sound waves. I find it fascinating how such a combination of experiences can be a catalyst for such innovation and creation.” (https://soundgirls.org/delia-derbyshire-in-profile/
Yves Klein and Rose Raymond in Nice 1951
Bernadette Allain and Claude Pascal at the opening of the exhibition "Yves: paintings", 1955 Éditions Lacoste - Club des Solitaires, Paris, France © Photo : All rights reserved © Artwork : The Estate of Yves Klein c/o ADAGP, Paris
Portrait of Jean Tinguely and Yves Klein, November 1958
Impasse Ronsin, Paris, France © Photo : Martha Rocher © Artwork : The Estate of Yves Klein c/o ADAGP, Paris
Realization of an Anthropometry in Yves Klein's studio (ANT 15), 1960 © Photo : Harry Shunk and Janos Kender J.Paul Getty Trust. The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles. (2014.R.20). Anthropometry meant body-prints created by Klein using a model covered in paint - often the Klein Blue that he invented...
Shirley Maclaine in The Apartment (Billy Wilder 1960) an epitome of bohemian chic in the early 60s “That’s the Way it crumbles, Kookywise” I first saw this at the Royal College of Art film society c1967...Wilder became a favourite director - able to condense complex social and psychological contexts into concise narrative films. Here Shirley MacLaine somehow epitomises the wise-cracking, stylish New Yorker that Jack Lemmon falls for...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ygMPxPaotzA&t=511s
The filmic ballet from An American in Paris (1951) by Gene Kelly, featuring Leslie Caron, marvellous fifties hand-painted backdrops and optical-effects - compare it to Fred Astaire and Audrey Hepburn in Funny Face (1957) - a spoof of French hipsters and existentialism...
How Zeit can you get? 1951 cropped ‘garcon-style’ hair vied with long-hair even in the same woman - Leslie Caron, in this case. These boyish haircuts (top) became a characteristic early Sixties style - a decade after the very cool Leslie Caron...
formalised a decade later (1964) by VidaL SASOON - here on Mary Quant)
And epitomised by underground film-maker and revolutionary art-entrepreneur Barbara Rubin in the early 1960s…
“June 11. Albert Hall, London. Poets of the World/Poets of our Time reading of Beat poets, led by Allen Ginsberg. Flower given to the audience (courtesy of the leftovers from the flower market at Covent Garden the night before) by face-painted women, and there is dope smoke, anti-Vietnam statements, folk music at the end. 7,000 people, who would become London’s underground constituency. Tom McGrath reviewed it in Peace News: ‘Even if the poetry reading had turned out to be a giant bore, the audience itself would have been an event’.” https://impactoffestivals.wordpress.com/timeline-of-festival-culture/1960-1969/ This was wonderful - arriving at the Albert Hall on July 11th, there were hipsters giving away flowers on the steps outside - we gradually realised that these were people like us - thousands of them!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhUI1fKJRzA
Barbara Rubin and the Exploding NY Underground - this documentary gives you some idea of her importance...
Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, Barbara Rubin, Bob Dylan, and Daniel Kramer, backstage at McCarter Theater, in Princeton, New Jersey, September 1964 Photograph c. Daniel Kramer
Allen Ginsberg and Barbara Rubin together at the Albert Monument, outside the Royal Albert Hall, London, May 1965, on the occasion of the First International Poetry Incarnation
Allen Ginsberg and Barbara Rubin, June 3 1965, in London at Barry Miles apartment, on the occasion of Allen’s 39th birthday. Photograph by John (“Hoppy”) Hopkins https://allenginsberg.org/2014/03/barbara-rubin-1945-1980/
Barbara Rubin - doyenne of the American Underground, with Barry Miles behind the International Poetry Incarnation at the Albert Hall 1965, Film-maker (Christmas on Earth - nee Cocks and Cunts 1963). Rubin worked with Jonas Mekas on the NY Film-Makers Cooperative, and played a seminal role in the emerging American Counter Culture. “An agitator and a mystic whose friends and associates included Bob Dylan, Andy Warhol, and Allen Ginsberg, Rubin made scenes the way other people made movies—although she did make those as well. Notably, there was her sensational, genitally confrontational Christmas on Earth (1963–1965), shot while she was still in her teens. This bleached black-and-white, trippy tangle of naked bodies, with men posing like Greek statues, women painted to suggest paleolithic fertility goddesses, and anonymous fingers probing bodily orifices in mega close-up, was mind-boggling then. It remains so today.” Barbara Rubin, Shameless Angel of Avant-Garde Cinema J. Hoberman https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/05/21/barbara-rubin-shameless-angel-of-avant-garde-cinema/ https://vimeo.com/ondemand/explodingnyunderground
Paul Feyerabend: Against Method 1975 Feyerabend lectured at UCBerkeley 1958-1989 as well as other prestigious universities. The essance of Against Method is that 'science' is practised in a wide variety of ways - not all of them conforming to the dominant mythology of a 'scientific method' like the one we learned at school. In fact Feyerabend was increasingly aware, not only of the role of chance and coincidence (of serendipity) in scientific discovery, but of the complexity and indeed the 'ecology of science methods'. In both these ways, Feyerabend was definitely a philosopher for his time - the Sixties and Seventies witnessed the finessing of modern ecological thinking - and its emergence as a mass movement, and as a central part of systems theory - the body of cybernetic investigation growing around the work of Norbert Weiner and
Robert Mapplethorpe: Patti Smith 1975
So from the Left Bank (read existential, modern jazz, abstract art, underground nee counter culture) cafe’s like Cocteau’s imagined Cafe des Poetes (in Orphee 1949) and the real-life Cafe des Flores and Café-du-Dome, from the 2is cafe in Soho, the Gaslight in Greenwich Village NYC, and all the nascent jazz clubs and cellar bars (the Flamingo, the Marquee and Ronnie Scotts in Soho) in the 1950s that celebrated mixed-race music like Blues and Jazz, mixed-race expressive dancing like the Jumping Jive, the Jitterbug Jive, the Lindy Hop, the Twist. Even on the Isle of Wight, these cellar clubs and early jazz clubs existed - there was the Cellar Club (Hole in the Wqll) and the Le Bar Cellier in Ryde, Hernando’s Hideaway in Shanklin, Julia’s in Ventnor - these just the ones I know about. Add to these all the pubs that had a Jazz Night or Folk Night once a week…
And maybe the most important catalyst - Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Bookstore - opened in 1953 - it was bookstores, cafes, black music clubs (clubs and venures featuring jazz, rock’n’roll, blues and folk/protest music) that generated or catalysed the ‘underground’ at first - it was given national eminence in large-scale festivals and gatherings - in the UK the CND Aldermaston Marches from 1958-1963 especially, the Beaulieu Jazz Festival (1956-1961); in the USA the Newport Jazz Festival (from 1954) - these national events attracted international media coverage and were sometimes captured for posterity (the film documentary Jazz on a Summers Day - shot at the 1959 Newport Jazz Festival, released in 1960).
Anita O’Day from Jazz on a Summer’s Day (1960) Scat singing Cool at Newport R.I.
OK, so all the various and often disparate strands were picked up in the late 1950s, early 1960s and began to create a picture - a montage in fact - of where we might be heading - and the fact that there was a ‘we’ at all. We just thought that there ‘might’ be people like us all over the world, but there was no way of checking - no social histories, no social media - too early for them - just these snippets and hints - the Beat paper-backs
Kerouac: On the Road - written in the early 1950s, published in 1959
Kerouac: The Subterraneans (1958) Kerouac identifies the ‘underground’ in his title it was these flimsy clues that we began to associate together to create a kind of promise that things were changing… These sociological indicators are part of the social-cultural-change patternings - called The shifting social zeitgeist - whereby social norms and values that predominate within the cultural capital in society evolve in over time.- used to gauge how a society may change. In the late 1950s and early 1960s - the indicators were manifest:
Marcel Camus: Black Orpheus 1959
Neal and Jack in 1952
Kenneth Anger Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome 1954
Kenneth Anger Inaugeration of the Pleasure Dome 1954
Roman Holiday (William Wyler 1953) ~
Jean Cocteau: Poets Cafe from Orphee 1950
Leslie Caron in An American in Paris (Minelli 1951)
Funny Face (1957) - Richard Avedon’s `think Pink' sequence
underground vs haut couture in Funny Face 1957
Hepburn in Roman Holiday?
Hepburn as a Beatnik/Hipster in Funny Face 1957
Juliette Greco image of la nouvelle vague
In the 1950s, the archetype (the glimpse of the emerging underground) was set for women by Juliette Greco, Leslie Caron, Audrey Hepburn, Francoise Sagan, then Joan Baez, Carolyn Hester, Francoise Hardy, Suze Rotollo, - all these iconic women flirted around the edge of one’s idea that things were changing - that a new style was emerging - a nouveau style, à la dernière mode - a hint of the revolution in culture that was bopping under the surface, in music trends, in life-style, in poetry and prose, theatre and fashion, in painting, illustration and graphics - the nouveau style was being addressed by all creative sectors. A few critics had insights on this cultural change as it was happening, perhaps especially those who inclined to futurism - Theodor Roszak, Gene Youngblood, John McHale, Lawrence Alloway, Marshall McLuhan,
For men, the zeitgeist archetype emerged in the late 1940s with Harry Everett Smith, Jack Kerouac, Willem de Kooning, Gerd Stern,Neal Cassady, the denizens of Jean Cocteau’s Cafe des Poetes (in Orphee 1949) and the early inventors of Rock’n’Roll and R&B
Hirsch: Harry Everett Smith with his Brain Drawings 1950
Terry Southern: Red Dirt Mariuana and Other Tastes 1967, Blue Movie (1970), Dr Strangelove (1963) and many more...
Harry Everett Smith and the prototype hipster Terry Southern is close behind:
TERRY SOUTHERN in Red Dirt Marijuana and Other Tastes: You’re Too Hip, Baby and on Sgt Pepper sleeve In a 1967 interview with writer Maggie Paley for The Paris Review, he declared: “The important thing is to keep in touch with the youth of whatever culture you’re in. When you lose them, you can forget it. When they’re no longer surprised or astonished or engaged by what you say, the ball game is over. If they find it repulsive, or outlandish, or disgusting, that’s all right, but if they just shrug it off, it’s time to retire.” Southern wrote the scripts for Barbarella and Easy Rider...
Barbarella arrived in America in the hip intellectual magazine Evergreen Review in 1964, and in the following issue, August-September 1964, Michael O’Donoghue and Frank Springer debuted their erotic fantasy female, Phoebe Zeit-Geist, taking inspiration from Terry Southern’s 1957 novel Candy (Southern is shown in this Dennis Hopper photo below, on the beach on a Sunday in Malibu in 1965, while hanging out with Robert Fraser at Fonda and Vadim’s house). Southern was a natural choice to go on to write the Barbarella screenplay. http://www.paulgravett.com/articles/article/jean_claude_forests_barbarella
http://www.paulgravett.com/articles/article/jean_claude_forests_barbarella which inspired Frank Springer to create Phoebe Zeitgeist
"The Adventures of Phoebe Zeit-Geist" was an American comics series, written by Michael O'Donoghue and drawn by Frank Springer.
Doncha just love it
Adventures of Phoebe Zeitgeist “From January 1965, it was serialized in the magazine Evergreen Review, and later published in book form as a Grove Press hardcover in 1968 and trade paperback in 1969. It was reissued as a trade paperback in 1986. (Ken Pierce Books, ISBN 0-912277-34-3, ISBN 978-0-912277-34-9). The comic detailed the adventures of debutante Phoebe Zeit-Geist as she was variously kidnapped and rescued by a series of bizarre characters, such as Nazis, Chinese foot fetishists, and lesbian assassins.” https://www.wikiwand.com/en/The_Adventures_of_Phoebe_Zeit-Geist
Juliette Greco Chante Ses Derniers Succès 1955 Juliette Greco was part of the enormous attraction and mystique of French new-wave culture as I discovered it in the early 1960s.
Jacques Brel c1955 Names like Georges Brassens and Jacques Brel filtered into my provincial English consciousness, but it was really the wonderful Charles Trenet (far from a counter-culture icon) who summed the romance of early 1950s French culture with songs like La Mer (1946) and the even earlier Boum! (1938) that resonated most. Greco however also epitomised French underground culture - the new wave characterised by Jean Cocteau's vision of counter-cultural youth in Le Cafe des Poetes in his Orphee (1950):
Jean Cocteau in the mythical (magically real) Cafe des Poetes in Orphee (1950). It is la vie Parisienne parodied in US movies like An American in Paris (1951) and Funny Face (1957) - a world of modern jazz, poets, philosophers, artists and cool hipsters like Juliette Greco…
Fred Turner traced the evolution in his 2006 book The shifting social zeitgeist - whereby social norms and values that predominate within the cultural capital in society evolve in over time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_change
nouveau zeitgeist esprit de l'époque Zeit-guys and zeit-gals
Marianne Faithful in 1963 Somehow, Marianne consciously or unconsciously and with the aid of Oldham and the Stones, developed a successful, sexually attractive image of herself as cool and hip, knowing, appraising… I saw her often in the Chelsea Arts Club some 30 years later - and she still had this allure…
Francoise Hardy 45rpm EP 1963
There was a fantastic mystique about young French girls - a compound of symbolism - sexual maturity, sophistication, fashionable, ‘existential’ - philosophically clever, cool - and they shopped for le style Anglais in Marks and Spencer - those black knitted V-necks!
‘original’ Beatles Dress c1964 - this was the kind of dress that made Carnaby Street famous - cheap clothes that symbolised the new fashions and provided the ‘it’s cool, it’s Carnaby St’ imprimature…Much later, in the 1990s, AMX Digital had a studio in Carnaby Street - and the street hadn’t changed, though the ‘fashions’ had…
Paul Weller
Serge Gainsborough and Jane Birkin 1969
Paul Weller, Pete Townshend c1965
Culture Change, transformation, remodel, reorganise, convert, revolution, transition, evolution, reorganise Artists as Cultural Distant Early Warning Detectors “Canadian media guru Marshall McLuhan offered a different metaphor with a similar point. “I think of art, at its most significant, as a DEW line, a Distant Early Warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it,” he wrote in the sixties. McLuhan was as much an oracle as a scholar, and it wasn’t until fairly recently that his more cryptic utterances began to make sense. A highly creative writer who refused to observe the protocols of academic writing, the University of Toronto prof was on the DEW line himself.”
“The DEW Line was a real thing. Stretching 3,000 miles across Arctic Canada at approximately the 69th parallel sat a chain of 63 integrated radar and communication stations. Completed in 1957 during the height of the Cold War, the DEW Line was intended to provide advance warning of imminent air attacks on Canada and the United States. While McLuhan’s views were often very academic, he certainly had a sense of humor.”
https://mcluhangalaxy.wordpress.com/2016/11/21/artists-as-distant-early-warning-systems/
Going Underground evolution of the Counter Culture
Flaunting the Future Zeit Agents Inspirations of the Counter Culture
Photographer: Michael Ward Julie Christie in Birmingham 1963 Julue Christie 1963 As early as 1963, Christie has crystallised the 60’s image, with her black PVC raincoat consciously echoing the mini-skirt revolution of that year. The mini-skirt - which seemed to appear on the street almost as soon as its haut couture variants - was omni-present among the young and hip as early as 1963. I remember my first day at Art College that autumn and the prepomderance of girls already wearing hemlines over the knee - sometimes (its Art College after all), well above the knee. You could be ‘in fashion’ or a la mode easily: simply cutting down and re-hemming your dress or skirts. As a boy, I’d re-modelled an army-surplus donkey jacket by removing the collar and hemming it with leatherette strip to make a collarless ‘Beatles Jacket’.
(Left to right: Mary Quant wearing crochet dress, photograph by Shahrokh Hatami, 1964, Ernestine Carter Archive. Display board for Mary Quant's Ginger Group, about 1963, Mary Quant Archive) https://www.vam.ac.uk/articles/the-miniskirt-myth?gclid=EAIaIQobChMI-qfd_4eZ8QIVhehRCh1sjQANEAAYASAAEgJkzvD_BwE
Going Underground evolution of the Counter Culture This picture-essay traces the roots of the underground - the socio-cultural revolution that birthed the Counter Culture from the mid 1960s on. The accelerating changes in culture emerged in avant-garde work, in the lifestyle innovations of artists and other creatives (designers, photographers, street fashionistas, film-makers, pop-music artists, etc), first emerged publicly in the radical art movements of Dada (Cabaret Voltaire) and Surrealism (the lifestyles of Breton, Dali, Tanguy etc and perhaps especially Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo, Dorothea Tanning), though in the UK the influence of the Bloomsbury Group and British eccentric bohemianism has had a lasting impact - especially on the fashions invented, repurposed or nuanced by the Underground.
The causes of this Cultural Revolution mostly lie in the mid-1940s - World War 2, the Holocaust and the Bomb - followed by the soul-searching that followed - the search for meaning, the queries about Violence and Aggression led by sociologists and anthropologists - from John Hersey (Hiroshima 1946) and Robert Jungt (Brighter than a Thousand Suns 1956) to Hannah Arendt (The Origins of Totalitarianism 1951) and Konrad Lorenz (On Aggression 1963), and the first major political action groups like CND (from 1957), and the Anti-Apartheid movement (1959) followed in the late 60’s and after by
British eccentricity is the inspiration for Viv Stanshall’s album and feature film Sir Henry at Rawlinson’s End (1980), as well as Bruce Robinson’s cult film Withnail and I (1987) - and of course for the multimedia performances of Vivian Stanshall’s Bonzo Dog Doo-dah Band(from 1962)and C.P. Lee’s Alberto y Lost Trios Paranoias (from 1973). So bohemianism, eccentricity, Edwardian (Teddy Boys), the lifestyle and clothing of motor cycle gangs, the impact of the Soho Modernists (or ‘Mods’), the inspirational Beats and their beatnik fashion-followers, the French existentialists - personified perhaps by Juliette Greco, Francoise Sagan, Francoise Hardy; the Angry Young Men of British literature, the hipsters echoing and inventing Blues and Modern Jazz musician lifestyles and fashions, the impact of the French Left-Bank or Nouvelle Vague (New Wave) film-makers and the ‘stars’ they created (Jean-Paul Belmondo, Anna Karina, Anouk Aimee,Jeanne Moreau, Jean-Pierre Léaud etc), British fashion photographers (like Brian Duffy and David Bailey) and the models they used (Jean Shrimpton, Twiggy), and older photographers like Richard Avedon, Ida Kar, Ilse Bing, Lee Miller, - all with their distinctive personal lifestyles, perhaps epitomised by Ed van der Elsken, who successfully mapped in celluloid and silver nitrate the underground as he encountered and lived it in 1955.
For me, born in 1945 and just 15 in 1960, the Underground materialised during 1958-1963, as I saw it in the coffee bars and folk and jazz clubs on the Isle of Wight, explored with girlfriends and older - to me cult - figures like Karl Spencer, who ran a jazzband (the Dixieland Kings as I remember) and Chris Dunstan who played in the band - a devastatingly handsome tall and thin man who radiated ‘cool’ and played the clarinet. Spencer was witty; charming and owned a Triumph TR1 Roadster, which with its boot buggy seat opened could seat six of us - he had a house on Ham Common in Richmond. I remember them gigging at Le Bar Cellier, under The Royal York in Ryde - a venue that sent aspirational shivers through me. The coffee bar was the Caribou in Cross Street, Ryde - with its Gaggia Expresso Machine, juke box and ice-cold cokes served with a twist of lemon, cool Italian barristas just beginning to unsew the outer seams in their jeans to affect slight bell-bottoms. I was at the Caribou on Friday, November 22nd 1963 - just got back from Art College - and felt the deadly pall as the news of Kennedy’s assassination filtered through on the radio and everyone went quiet.
There were various folk and jazz ‘clubs’ on the Island, mostly pubs who once a week had folk or jazz evenings, and the memorable Hernando’s Hideaway in Shanklin - in many ways an archetypal venue, redolent of it’s jazz-fan heritage…
The other big influence for me was Art - the works being produced in the dominant art movements as I was growing up in the late 1950s - from America - the omnipresence of Abstract Expressionism, but also the falling star of social realism - the kind of art practised by Ben Shahn and illustrated in the Penguin Modern Artists series - the large-format, landscape oriented paperbacks - published only between 1945-1947 but for me, much-treasured ‘finds’ in second-hand book stores. They were dominated by British Art - between the wars and WW2 - and featured individual monographs on Edward Bawden, Georges Braque, Edward Burra, Duncan Grant, Ivon Hitchens, Frances Hodgkins, Edward Hopper, David Jones, Paul Klee, Henry Moore, Paul Nash, Ben Nicholson, William Nicholson, Victor Pasmore, John Piper, Ben Shahn, Matthew Smith, Stanley Spencer and Graham Sutherland. Which gives a rather skewed view - no surrealists, none of the American abstract painters, none of the anti-Nazi dadaists, no Picasso! However, as a nascent bibliophile, I loved them.
What you need when you’re just beginning to explore a subject as I was discovering ‘modern art’ (1959-1963) is first of all an overview of the territory. There was none that I could find. I was advised to look at Ernst Gombrich’s Story of Art (1950), and Herbert Read’s recently published A Concise History of Modern Painting (1959) - and these helped to fill out a general picture. It wasn’t until I went to the Tate exhibition Painting & Sculpture of a Decade, 54-64 - and bought the catalogue, that I caught up with stuff that really grabbed me: Fahlstrom, Jean Tinguely, Paolozzi, Hamilton - even though the exhibition was dominated by abstraction and expressionism. It was actually going to art school in September 1963 that helped solve the problem: the library - the art magazines, discovering Architectural Design, Studio International, Art International, Art Forum (from 1962), even Art and Artists (which was published from 1966). These magazines, and New Scientist, and Scientific American became regular reading. Leonardo - the magazine focussing on art and technology - wasn’t published until 1968, when I was at Hornsey College of Art.
Lee Miller: Nusch, Paul Eluard, Roland Penrose, Man Ray, Ady Fidelin. 1937 The Surrealists, more than their DADA predecessors, provided an avant-garde piquancy in their life-styles. Lee Miller’s photograph disclosed a rather embarrassed-looking Roland Penrose (her future husband), averting his gaze from a playful frolics of Paul Eluard and his wife Nusch - note that only the women are topless…
Eileen Agar - the British surrealist at the time of the First Surrealist Exhibition in London 1938.
These blurry photographs of 39-year-old Agar dancing in her wildly unconventional transparent muslin ensemble illustrate that the women attached to the surrealist movement - celebrated their new sexual freedom in a much more overt way than their sexually rather conservative male colleagues. It was artists like Agar, Leonora Fini, Leonora Carrington, Dorothea Tanning, Lee Miller and their contemporaries - who were creatively inventing an alternative modus operandi, that would, over the next few decades, become a model for the emerging counter-culture.
Agar was a prolific and talented painter. As early as 1930 (in Three Symbols) she is using oil-painting as a compositing medium, allowing her to arrange ideas expressed as symbols, fragmentary images, personal reminiscences, images of modern technology,- and to mix them in a confident, painterly manner, ensuring the overall painting serves as a coherent image expressing her intentions. And look at her 1934 Autobiography of an Embryo: a much more complex overall image, this time integrating physiological images: The Tate Art and Artists website describes the basic construction of her painting: “The horizontal painting is divided into four sections with a decorative border running along the top and bottom of the canvas. The composition is reminiscent of the arrangement of a classical wall painting, with winged putti on top of the dividing columns. A Greco-Roman influence is also evident in the abstract shapes and patterns. Draped figures, which recall antiques statues, and the geometric patterns similarly echo the decoration on ancient Greek vessels. Such an array of symbols evokes a cultural heritage. In the second section the head of a African woman resembles African sculptures and a head seen in profile refers to Italian Renaissance portraiture. More specifically, the squat figure who appears twice in the first two sections, represents Ubu, a character in the French play of 1896 by Alfred Jarry. These quotations are combined with modern elements, such as the brick wall in the second section and the graffitti-like head on the far right.” https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/agar-the-autobiography-of-an-embryo-t05024
The Tate continues its analysis of Autobiography of an Embryo:”Organic and biological forms run through the composition. Agar may have taken her lead from the Czech painter Franticek Foltyn, who taught her in Paris, and who incorporated similar motifs into his work. Shells and winged forms are combined with plant-like structures, and circular shapes suggest fossils, cells or embryonic forms. Agar apparently kept a fish tank in the 1930s and was intrigued by the aquariums at the zoos in London and Naples. In her autobiography (pp. 84-5) she noted that when living in Paris she had frequently visited the Jardin des Plantes, where she became fascinated by 'the bones of that protobird, the Archaeopteryx'. This may relate to the winged structure in the third segment. She added, 'I was enthralled by fossils, their muted colour and embedded beauty. They reach us as signals in time, isolated objects which take on the importance of a problem resolved at some moment far back beyond the mists of human memory. I learnt about the secrets of animal structure and from there my thoughts led easily to the problem of human structure' (quoted in Illustrated Catalogue of Acquisitions 1986-88, p.240). This connection was made more concrete when Agar discovered that 'human foetuses have gills for about 12 weeks because in the evolution of our species we went though an amphibian stage' (quoted in Illustrated Catalogue of Acquisitions 1986-88, p.240). Agar saw the increasing interest in the unconscious in European art as establishing 'the dominance of a feminine type of imagination over the classical and more masculine order.' She continued, 'Apart from rampant and hysterical militarism, there is no male element left in Europe for the intellectual and rational conception of life has given way to a more miraculous creative interpretation, and artistic and imaginative life is under the sway of womb-magic' (quoted in Illustrated Catalogue of Acquisitions 1986-88, p.239).”
This insight - the intimation of primordial feminine consciousness - was examined a decade later by the poet Robert Graves in his The White Goddess (1948) and is an insight shared by many of the female surrealist artists…
These 1930s paintings hint at the thinking behind the Jungian paintings of Jackson Pollock in the mid 1940s - that painting and the visualisation of archetypal subconscious imagery has a psycho-therapeutic effect on the practitioner.
Verrechia’s in Guildhall Square 14 October 1959 Portsmouth, like other coastal towns, saw Italian ice cream makers appearing by the late 1800s. Initially there was some local hostility with regular fines being imposed for obstruction. However, attitudes had softened by the inter war period enabling Augusto Verrecchia to open his popular coffee house and ice cream café by the railway bridge near Guildhall Square. In the post WWII period, this café was much loved by the students of the nearby Municipal College as the individual booths were ideal for courting.