Latest news with #Hatherley
The Guardian
30-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Alienation Effect by Owen Hatherley review
The Englishness of English Art sounds like something a parish-pump little Englander might like to bang on about, but it is in fact the title of an arresting study by the German Jewish émigré Nikolaus Pevsner. 'Neither English-born nor English-bred,' as he put it in his foreword, he nevertheless pinned down with startling precision the qualities that characterised English art and architecture: a rather twee preference for cuteness and compromise, for frills and fripperies. This shouldn't surprise us. Newcomers are typically better placed than natives when it comes to deciphering unwritten social codes. Unencumbered by textbook propaganda and excessive knowledge, the stranger's-eye view very often has the merit of freshness, even originality. Bertolt Brecht dubbed this the Verfremdungseffekt, or alienation effect, from which Owen Hatherley takes his title. The Alienation Effect is a collective biography of the central Europeans who washed up on British shores between the wars. In the decades that followed, Hatherley argues, they exerted a colossal influence on British cultural life. Sometimes the influence manifested itself transparently, as when Thatcher whipped out a copy of Hayek's The Constitution of Liberty from her handbag and said to her party colleagues: 'This is what we believe!' At others, it hid in plain sight, as in the iconic moquette used for London Transport, designed by the Czech Jacqueline Groag, or in films such as Get Carter, where brutalist Newcastle deserves joint billing with Michael Caine; it is through the Viennese lens of the cinematographer Wolfgang Suschitzky that we see this unforgiving landscape. They didn't exactly get a warm welcome. Nearly a third of the 100,000 refugees from fascism were interned on the Isle of Man as 'enemy aliens' in 1940. Many more of these supposed Nazis were briefly deported to Australia and Canada, where they surprised their wardens with kosher food requests. So why, then, did they elect to stay in England? It was a peaceable, conservative society that had 'somehow sat out the 20th century', Hatherley says. It appealed to the likes of Arthur Koestler. Here was a land 'bored by ideologies, sceptical about utopias … enamoured of its leisurely muddle, incurious about the future, devoted to its past'. Even British communism was a tame affair; Communist Party of Great Britain meetings 'were like tea parties in the vicarage'. As a fairly recent migrant, it's a picture I instantly recognise: a land that sets great store by ancient universities, members' clubs and quaint cathedrals – a land where even a Crosland-like Corbyn was presented as Stalin reincarnate. Such migration, the Marxist historian Perry Anderson argued, paradoxically made Britain more parochial, not less. The Hayeks and Koestlers, Namiers and Poppers, did not so much challenge as vindicate insular received wisdoms. Hatherley, who describes himself as a 'sentimental English socialist', offers a gentle critique here. Where Anderson focused on the intelligentsia, Hatherley looks instead at architecture, publishing and film, where radicals dominated the landscape. His conclusion is that the net effect of central European migration was 'largely positive'. The adverb there does some heavy lifting since many figures come in for rough treatment as exhibits of the wrong kind of migrant. The Hamburg-born photojournalist Bill Brandt, for instance, is condemned to Hatherley's sixth circle of hell for his 'extreme Anglophilia': 'One can make out a sickly sexuality, a class-climbing obsession with upper-class women in some of the more ornate nudes.' The popular art historian Ernst Gombrich, meanwhile, stands accused of neglecting social history for the reassuring empiricism of 'Oxbridge English culture'. Hatherley's heroes are the Jewish architects Berthold Lubetkin and Ernő Goldfinger, both unabashed Marxist modernists, the latter of whom was famously turned into a gold-loving Bond villain. Perhaps John le Carré was on the money when he said that there was 'something neo-fascistic' about Ian Fleming's taciturn spy. The radicalism of the émigrés, Hatherley convincingly shows, has been concealed by the manipulations of national memory. Take Pevsner. These days he's remembered solely as a stone-fancier and building-cataloguer rather than a tireless champion of the pioneers of modern design. What's more, he didn't uncritically suck up to the Anglos. There's a touch of Teutonic energy, the spirit of the art historian Aby Warburg, in the grand, 48-volume series he edited, the Pelican History of Art. Warburg's credo was Kulturwissenschaft, a scientific approach to cultural studies that turned on connections and juxtapositions. Hatherley is a worthy heir to that tradition, and he has a canny eye for lineages. His potted genealogies are dazzling performances in concision, effortlessly gliding from the new brutalism of his home patch of Camberwell, London, through the works of art historian Rudolf Wittkower to the 15th-century Renaissance humanist Leon Battista Alberti – all in a single page. To be sure, Hatherley might tell you more than you might care to know about every inch of Hampstead. But these perambulations still yield some lively vignettes. We meet the artist Marie-Louise von Motesiczky, doyenne of the north London enclave, who painted a voluptuous naked woman on a small boat crossing the Channel to escape Hitler. Solemn critics took the precious piece of cargo she is clutching in the painting to be a Torah scroll – before she revealed that it was in fact a large Austrian wurst. The Alienation Effect: How Central European Émigrés Transformed the British Twentieth Century by Owen Hatherley is published by Allen Lane (£35). To support the Guardian, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
The Guardian
25-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Alienation Effect by Owen Hatherley review – how immigrants reshaped postwar Britain
In the early 1940s, the publisher Collins launched a series of books called Britain in Pictures – 'bright, slim volumes', as Owen Hatherley calls them, on such quintessential national subjects as cricket, inns, 'English clocks' and 'British explorers', written by the likes of John Betjeman, Edith Sitwell and George Orwell. It's hard to imagine a more patriotic project ('a paroxysm of island backslapping', Hatherley says) except that, 'at every level except for the texts', this was 'an entirely central European endeavour'. Its mostly female staff of designers, editors, typographers and publishers was made up of recent refugees from countries that had succumbed to fascism, many of whom had to be released from internment on the Isle of Man in order to work on the books. Adprint, the company that produced and packaged Britain in Pictures, was the creation of the Viennese-born publishers Wolfgang Foges and Walter Neurath. The latter, with his wife Eva, would go on to found Thames & Hudson. This is one of many examples described in The Alienation Effect where Britain's cultural furniture was rearranged and redesigned by women and men, often under-credited and under-recognised, who had fled here in the 1930s and 40s. Some, like migrants today, landed on the coast of Kent in flimsy craft. Between them they shaped film, art, architecture, planning, publishing, broadcasting, children's literature and photography. We owe to this diaspora (in whole or in part) the Royal Festival Hall, Penguin Books and The Tiger Who Came to Tea. Hatherley also highlights less famous and metropolitan glories such as the murals in Newport civic centre – the 'Sistine Chapel of municipal socialism' – created by the Frankfurt-born Hans Feibusch and his artistic partner Phyllis Bray. Most (not all) were from the political left and the artistic avant garde, and Hatherley's aim is both to explore their trajectories and to honour and mourn the postwar attempts at building a more fair and enlightened society in which they played a significant part. There is also a simple point, relevant to the present, about the contribution that feared and despised migrants can make to their host country. New arrivals – fleeing persecution because they were Jewish, or on account of their politics, or both – reacted in various ways. Many, while grateful for their refuge, were dismayed by the bad weather, overcooked food, cultural conservatism and lifeless streets of 1930s Britain, the 'identical little houses built quickly out of dirt', as one put it. Nor was their welcome warm. Graham Greene attacked, in the Spectator, the numbers of migrants in the film industry. The Daily Mail railed against the 'outrage' of how 'stateless Jews from Germany are pouring in from every port of this country'. A brigadier from Eastbourne suggested they be forced to wear identifying armbands. Calls to lock up 'dangerous aliens' led to their internment in sometimes atrocious conditions. Some, like the architects Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer, responded by moving on quite quickly to the greater opportunities of the United States. Others embraced British culture and became its eloquent champions: the Dresden academic Nikolaus Pevsner, for example, would lovingly catalogue architectural treasures in his county-by-county Buildings of England series and write a book celebrating The Englishness of English Art. The cinematographer Walter Lassally, who came on the Kindertransport, would eventually move from gritty portrayals of working-class life such as A Taste of Honey to filming the imperial-age nostalgia of Merchant Ivory films in the 1980s. Some tried to keep alive their social and artistic radicalism and re-grow it on sometimes unpromising British soil. It is these types that Hatherley likes best. The artist Naum Gabo is, he says, 'the sort of modernist I find easiest to like – futuristic, unsentimental, abstract, pure, uncompromised, a real link from the October revolution and Weimar Berlin to London (and St Ives)'. He also admires the photographer Edith Tudor-Hart, born Suschitzky, who combined her documentation of Welsh coalmines and London slums with work for the communist-aligned National Unemployed Workers' Movement and (it is believed) the KGB's forerunner the NKVD. He makes space to write about Bertolt Brecht, even though the Marxist playwright never settled in Britain, and borrows from him the book's title. Perhaps the most emblematic of these European-made British icons was Picture Post, a magazine that the Hungarian leftwing journalist Stefan Lorant, previously imprisoned by the Gestapo, helped to found. Here, powerful photographs by the likes of the Hamburg-born Bill Brandt documented contrasts of privilege and poverty, or else portrayed ordinary people living their lives. They shot Eton, Oxford, northern back streets, village fetes, seaside frolics and funfairs, and helped create a climate of opinion that contributed to Labour's landslide election victory in 1945. Now they are familiar images of the good old days with which Nigel Farage might feel comfortable. Possibly you already had some knowledge of the works of these migrants, but The Alienation Effect reveals their sheer breadth and depth. Hatherley, whose background is in writing about architecture, moves with confidence through the fields of film, typography and art. The book is thick with information, sometimes resembling the gazetteers or guides he has previously written. It's an occasionally chewy read, but it's more often acute, informative, passionate and witty, a sometimes moving tribute to achievement in the face of diversity, and an essential antidote to crude theories of national identity. The Alienation Effect by Owen Hatherley is published by Allen Lane (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at Delivery charges may apply
Telegraph
16-03-2025
- Politics
- Telegraph
The European émigrés who changed British art forever
In 1968 the Marxist historian Perry Anderson published a seminal essay entitled 'Components of a National Culture', analysing how Germanic intellectuals working in fields such as philosophy, economics, art history and psychoanalysis had fled the Fascistic persecutions of the 1930s to find asylum on the tolerant shores of Britain. Their traumatising experience, the essay argued, led them to reject all totalitarian or centralising systems and become resolute champions of our liberal, empirical, free-market traditions. Writing in Anderson's wake, Owen Hatherley has developed this thesis in his book The Alienation Effect, identifying a more radical, leftist tradition of such Central European émigrés, many of them Jewish, who made revolutionary contributions to all branches of our visual arts – from photography, film and book design, to architecture and town planning. Grumbles about the weather aside, they were grateful for the shelter – as Walter Gropius wrote, 'people's humaneness here is so attractive… and I am treated with a respect I cannot help liking.' Hatherley, an architectural critic who describes himself as 'a sentimental English socialist', is at his strongest on the subject of housing, and his exploration of this territory constitutes a complementary pendant to Gavin Stamp's equally stimulating study, Interwar: British Architecture 1919-39, published last year. Hatherley is a loving guide to council estates such as Berthold Lubetkin's Spa Green and Ernő Goldfinger's notoriously Brutalist Trellick Tower, illuminating the path by which innovations made in post-Habsburg 'Red Vienna' and the Berlin of the Weimar Republic ended up domesticated in residential blocks in Willesden and Hackney. The British intelligentsia – temperamentally Francophile, parochially conservative and anti-Semitic in tendency – was largely sceptical of the aesthetic merits of glass and concrete, but the sheer force of the émigrés' ideas proved irresistible as they occupied influential professorial posts and threw up urbanists with compelling visions for post-war inner-city reconstruction such as Ruth Glass and Konrad Smigielski. Hatherley also makes the point that the roots of the functionalist 'modernismus' or 'international style' that has been so commonly derided here since its first appearance in the late 1920s were, ironically, actually thoroughly English in being inspired by the Crystal Palace, the Arts and Crafts and Garden City movements – a relationship that emerged most piquantly in rural Dartington Hall, engagingly described by Hatherley as 'a sort of very approximate English analogue to the Bauhaus'. Many of these émigrés, including Sigmund Freud and the art historian EH Gombrich, homed in on an enclave around north-west London focused on Finchley Road ('Finchleystrasse') and Hampstead, but they weren't confined by it. There was also intense interest in documenting what Hatherley calls 'the strangeness of England', as demonstrated in different ways by Bill Brandt's eerie photographs for Picture Post and Nikolaus Pevsner's epic survey The Buildings of England. Josef Herman painted the mining communities of South Wales; Oskar Kokoschka and Naum Gabo spent time in the wilds of Cornwall; the dadaïste Kurt Schwitters penetrated the Lake District. Most of the major actors and directors in the European film industry succumbed directly to the sun-kissed big-bucks allure of Hollywood, but a fair amount of its refugee talent stopped here, notably Michael Powell's Hungarian collaborator Emeric Pressburger, the animator Lotte Reiniger and designers Hein Heckroth of The Red Shoes and Ken Adam of the James Bond franchise. Less fêted but no less influential were the book designers Jan Tschichold and Hans Schmoller who brought the graphic principles used by the German paperback imprint Albatross to bear on the covers of Penguin Books. Phaidon and Thames and Hudson, both the brainchildren of émigrés, were trailblazing publishing houses that brought 'the world of art' to the widest audiences at affordable prices and in colour. Impassioned and erudite, Hatherley writes with panache and never becomes flat-footedly ideological. If his book has a fault, it is that an excess of enthusiasm and content makes it at times exhaustingly indigestible – a welter of names and examples that come too thick and fast. No matter: in drawing attention to a hugely important yet neglected phenomenon that has shaped our culture for better and worse, this is a genuinely important study that deserves to win prizes. The publishers, alas, have been stingy with illustrations – but the internet can readily fill in the gaps.
