"SYMBOLS FOR '51"
THE ROYAL FESTIVAL HALL, SKYLON AND SCULPTURES ON THE SOUTH BANK FOR THE FESTIVAL OF BRITAIN written in 1996 by Robert Burstow, the University of Derby. Additional notes in italics by M.D. Packer.
Plans for commemorating the Millennium have stimulated interest in the last great national celebration, the 1951 Festival of Britain. Concurrently, proposals for the future of the South Bank may remind us of the context in which the Royal Festival Hall was built, surrounded by the art and architecture of the Festival's South Bank Exhibition. This seems an auspicious moment, therefore, to re-examine aspects of the Festival's art and architecture. As the only permanent building erected on the South Bank in 1951, the Royal Festival Hall adapted the pioneering architectural experiments of the European Modern Movement to create 'a new sort of democratic cultural centre.' Similarly, the technological daring of the Skylon (reincarnations of which have been proposed in several Millennium schemes), signalled the prospect of a brave new world. Of the sculptures and murals placed amid the temporary Festival buildings on the South Bank, most adopted modernist idioms and several explicity symbolised the hope and vitality of a new age. This exhibition presents drawings, photographs and models to document the design and building of the Royal Festival Hall and the Skylon, and brings together for the first time almost all of the surving sculptures. Other sculptures are represented through preparatory maquettes, drawings or photographs. A sense of how these sculptures and the Skylon related to the architecture of the South Bank Exhibition is given by contemporary photographs. The Royal Festival Hall provides an appropriate setting for their reunion, adjacent to their original site and within a kindred modernist space.
Planned in 1947, in the austerity years of the Attlee Labour government, the Festival of Britain promised to provide a cultural counterpart to the social benefiets of the Welfare State. Directed by Gerald Barry, editor of the left-wing broadsheet "The News Chronicle", and guided through Parliament by Herbert Morrison, Deputy Prime Minister and former leader of the London County Council, the Festival was conceived with the same egalitarian principles as Labour's far-reaching programme of social and economic reform. Official exhibitions, concerts and other cultural events took place in London, Belfast, Glasgow (plus Cardiff, Edinburgh?) and elsewhere in the regions, but the main exhibition on the South Bank formed the centrepiece. Though criticised for being overly paternalistic, the exhibition was, nevertheless, extremely popular, receiving eight and a half million visitors. Despite the Festival's patriotic sentiments, opposition was voiced by right-wing newspapers and politicians who feared a celebration of recent socialist achievements.
Under the leadership of the architect Hugh Casson, the Festival Design Group conceived the exhibition theme - "Britain's contribution to civilisation, past, present and future" - and oversaw the transformation of the decayed 27 acre South Bank site into an 'informal complex of interlocking neighbourhoods', rather than the customary grandiose design of the major exhibition grounds. Members of the Design Group and the team it selected to design the site, the exhibition bulidings and their interior displays, were distinguished by their role in the pre-war avantgarde, which had coalesced around the Architectural Association (AA) and the Modern Architectural Research Group. (MARS?) Following the precepts of Modern Movement Architects, they were united by a belief that technical and formal modernisation would create social progress and equality. For five months in the summer of 1951, the South Bank site boasted the most extensive enclave of uncompromisingly modernist buildings ever erected in Britain.
The Royal Festival Hall, which dominated the South Bank, was Britain's first post-war public building. Proposals for a cultural centre on this site dated from Abercrombie's wartime plans for London but only became feasible in 1948 with the selection of that site for the Festival Exhibition. Following the brave agreement of the Chief Architect of the London County Council (LCC), Robert Matthews, that this project could be realised in just three years, which was only slightly exceeded. Matthews appointed (Dr.?) Leslie Martin, co-editor of the 1937 pro-Constructivist review "Circle" to lead the design, and Peter Moro, an emigre modernist architect to take charge of the detail design development. The brief required a 3,000 seat auditorium, a restaurant, bars, rehearsal rooms and space for ancillary services. (The design incorporated a smaller second auditorium and gallery to be added at a later date, but which were subsequently abandoned.) Martin's 'egg-in-the-box' design solution was to raise up the auditorium, thereby insulating it from the sound of nearby trains, creating additional foyer and circulation space within a tightly defined building footprint, and opening up vistas of the river through the flowing internal spaces. Externally, the elevated barrel-vaulted auditorium is clearly expressed above the taut curving and tapering superstructure. The concept avoided hierarchical conventions, replacing the grand facade and axial front-entry of the Beaux- Arts architecture with four equally interesting elevations and a choice of entrances on different sides and levels; moreover Martin aimed to deliver the same quality of sound to every seat in the hall. Despite some later insenstive modifications, the building retains its essential character and recent refurbishments have begun to retrieve its distinctive internal spatial qualities.
It is, perhaps, the Skylon which survives in the popular imagination as the Festival's most memorable feature.(or is it now the Dome of Discovery?) It was chosen from 157 schemes entered in open competition for a 'Vertical Feature', a staple of international exhibitions grounds. Submited by the fledging architectural practice of (Michael &) Philip Powell and Hidalgo Moya, both recent graduates of the AA, Powell recalls that it was the brain-child of Moya. The steel frame of his space-age Eiffel Tower reached nearly 300 feet into the sky, clad in louvered aluminium panels to minimise wind-resistance, and seemed to float 40 feet above the ground. Its elongated zeppelin-like shape may have derived from Moya's initials plans for huge helium-filled navigable balloons or airships floating above the South Bank. The engineer, Felix Samuely, Moya's former AA Structures tutor refined his simple, but ingenious, idea of supporting the main feature almost invisibly in a cradle of pre-stressed steel cables and splayed pylons (the cables were tensioned by inclining the pylons with built-in hydraulic jacks). Its name came later, also from a competition, an evocative neologism invoking pylons, sky and the still novel material of nylon. (or was it derived from "The Trylon" at 1939-40 New York World's Fair?) Reflecting sunlight by day and illuminated internally by night, the Skylon served not only as a landmark for Festival visitors, but as a beacon of technological and by implication, social potentialities.
The Design Group's modernist aesthetic favoured the integration of painting and sculpture into architecture; a celebrated precedent for such a collaboration was Sert's Spanish Pavillion at the 1937 World Fair. The desire for art to fulfil a more public role outside the gallery was also demonstrated by two of the better known official Festival exhibitions: the Arts Council's touring exhibition of sixty large paintings, which it was hoped would be purchased by a new type of corporate patron, and the LCC's second Battersea Park international 'Open Air Sculpture' exhibition. Accordingly, over fifty murals and thirty sculptures were placed in and around the South Bank buildings, making it the most extensive display of modern contemporary British art in the Festival. With the exception of commissions from the Arts Council and the LCC, commissions were funded from the main Festival budget, officially implemented by the Design Group and the architects concerned. However, in practice, the sculptures seem to have been commissioned, or sometimes purchased or loaned, in a more ad hoc manner, probably as a consequence of the enforced haste. Both established and little known sculptors participated from Jacob Epstein, then seventy, to the young Geoffrey Clarke and Eduardo Paolozzi in their mid-twenties. The selection demonstrated the extent to which emigres, especially from Central Europe, continued to enrich 'British' sculpture, and the selectors' lack of chauvinism.
The sculptures were of two main types, either thematic - where related to a particular pavilion - or more often, 'decorative' - where placed in restaurants or bars, or outdoors, and where the sculptors' brief was far more relaxed. While the tradional subject of the human figure predominated, the theme of some works, most notably Jacob Epstein's "Youth Advancing", encapsulated the Festival's optimistic spirit. While the recipients of Arts Council commissions, like Epstein, were able to carve or cast their large sculptures in expensive enduring materials, most used cheaper and less permanent ones, like plaster, plastic wood and most commonly, concrete. In contrast to Battersea, where some leading academicians were represented, all of the South Bank sculptors had rejected the academic tradition to some degree, even those like Siegfried Charoux, Karin Jonzen and Karl Vogel who had trained in European academies. Nevertheless, a considerable diversitry of styles was in evidence, from Jonzen's informal Naturalism or Peter Peri's Realism, to the many different guises of modernism typical of the period: for example, the Primitivism of Frank Dobson, Heinz Henghes and Anna Mahler, the moderate Expressionism of Georg Ehrlich and Daphne Hardy, the Surrealism of Reg Butler, F E McWilliam and (Henry) Moore, and the Constructivism of (Barbara) Hepworth's rotating sculpture. Having two commissions, Hepworth produced works in two contrasting idioms. The heroic and gendered figuration of her other Festival sculpture, "Contrapuntal Forms" suggests the extent to which artists, even prominent abstractionists, made concessions to the spirit of this occasion. However, to the modernists, there was also debate as to what constituted a socially progressive style.
Within days of the election of (Sir Winston) Churchill's Conservative government in the autumn of 1951, the South Bank Exhibition was demolished, despite hopes that it would remain for another season. As an honorary academician whose views on art were well known, Churchill's dislike of its political origins can only have been compounded by his dislike of modernism. However even Casson had reservations over the success of the works of art, feeling that the beauty of many of the industrial exhibits may have overshadowed them. Unsurprisingly, it was the decorative modernist art - not forced to comply with themes or compete with other exhibits - which appeared to best advantage and integrated most successfully into architecture. Indeed, buildings such as the Regatta Restaurant provided a model for the future use of modernist art in the schools and housing estates which proliferated in the following decade. Though the Skylon had been scrapped (apart from the tip of its weather vane?) and most of the larger sculptures destroyed, many requests for the remaining works were made to the Arts Council which arranged their disposal. Some of them found homes in galleries and museums or, occasionally in outdoor sites such as Harlow New Town. The LCC's wish that at least three sculptures should remain in situ on the South Bank has been partly met with the return of another Festival sculpture, Dobson's "London Pride", in 1987. The art and architecture created for the South Bank in 1951 offered the most compelling expression of the optimism of the period which Millennium schemes will do well to match.
"The Sisters" (by John Matthews) is missing & "Sunbathers" (by Laszlo Peter Peri) is missing
"Grace":John Matthews (destroyed Brighton 1972);"Youth Advancing":Jacob Epstein (Manchester Art Gallery)
CLICK HERE FOR A LINK TO SOME B. & W. PICTURES OF SOUTH BANK EXHIBITION SCULPTURES.
MY LETTER TO "THE GUARDIAN" WAS PRINTED ON 31.8.00
From Mr. Martin D. Packer, the Festival of Britain Society.
Sir, In less than eight months the fiftieth anniversary of the Festival of Britain will be celebrated. A number of the sculptures which were displayed at London's South Bank exhibition in 1951 are still not accounted for, despite efforts made in 1996 for the Symbols for '51 exhibition held at the Royal Festival Hall. The missing six sculptures include:*Lynn Chadwick's "Tower Mobile", Geoffrey Clarke's "Icarus", Mitzi Solomon Cunliffe's "Root Bodied Forth", Anna Mahler's "Woman with Pitcher" (also known as "Sitting"), John Matthews' "The Sisters" and Laszio Peter Peri's "Sunbathers", illustrated above. Their present locations are as yet unknown.
* Rumoured to be in the Barbara Hepworth Collection at St. Ives? (to be confirmed).
While other notable works such as **"The Skylon" by Powell and Moya, Lynn Chadwick's "Stabile", ***Siegfried Charoux's "The Islanders", Keith Godwin's "Neptune", Richard Huws' "Water Mobile", F. E. McWilliams' "The Four Seasons", John Matthews' "Grace", Eduardo Paolozzi's "Sculptural Water Fountain" and Karl Vogel's "The Industries, Heavy, light, Electricity" were destroyed - perhaps this appeal for the present locations of the six 'missing' sculptures, might enable all six to be re-united in 2001?
** see below:
***Rumoured to have been 'lost' by "British Railways en route to the Isle of Bute! (to be confirmed) see below :
Readers might like to know that the surviving sculptures from 1951 are currently held by Kenwood (English Heritage), the University of East Anglia's Robert and Lisa Sainsbury Collection, the Hayward Gallery, Letchworth Museum & Art Gallery, Manchester City Art Galleries, Camden School for Girls, Harlow Art Trust, Walker Art Gallery, Buckinghamshire County Council, Moore Danowski Trust, and in a private collection. While a bronze cast of Frank Dobson's "London Pride (Leisure)" is permanently sited on the Riverwalk, South Bank. Any information on the current whereabouts of the six 'missing' sculptures would be much appreciated.
Yours faithfully,
MARTIN D. PACKER
(Member of the Festival of Britain Society)