London’s New Scene by Lisa Tickner review – seven events that smashed the art world
In Lisa Tickner’s exploration of seven key events in the art world between 1962 and 1968 we are drawn into experiences that smashed through the old ways of doing things – in the gallery, on TV, in films – with confident flair, irony and cool wit. It is no surprise that London in the 1960s began to be regarded as one of the leading capitals of art in the western world.
In 1952 a magazine photograph of Zsa Zsa Gabor taken in the Tate Gallery, showing her posing with one leg thrown up and resting on a waist-high plinth, had nearly lost John Rothenstein his directorship. The fashion photo on the front cover of this book suggests that, by 1964, things had changed – the playful shot of a leaping model, aided by two students, was taken by Elsbeth Juda in the Whitechapel Art Gallery’s Rauschenberg exhibition. The latest in urban art and fashion were now in alliance.
Tickner’s choice of subjects draws on a wonderful cast of characters. The chapter on the 1962 BBC documentary Pop Goes the Easel, for example, brings in Huw Wheldon, editor and chief presenter of Monitor, the fortnightly arts programme, who commissioned a film on four pop artists: Peter Blake, Derek Boshier, Pauline Boty and Peter Phillips. While researching it, Ken Russell, as he afterwards admitted, “got infected with this new spirit” and wanted to get rid of “this old documentary heritage”. Monitor audiences found themselves plunged into a noisy fairground walkabout , memorable for Boty’sperformance of the twist.
The opening of the Kasmin Gallery in 1963 was another landmark event. John Kasmin’s flair is demonstrated, not least in his signing up David Hockney while he was still a student. The gallery owner also refused to have a shop window and instead created a tunnel down one side of the building so that visitors entered the high-ceilinged space from the far end.
Hugely enjoyable are the chapters on Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 film Blow-Up and on Private View, a book published in 1965 offering, in Tickner’s words, “a visual ethnography of the British art world”. The latter combined the talents of art director Bryan Robertson, Hollywood actor John Russell and photographer Lord Snowdon, and was based on the assumption that London had become the centre of gravity for the entire art world.
• London’s New Scene: Art and Culture in the 1960s is published by Yale (RRP £35).
