Reviews and News:
Simon Tolkien writes a book on the First World War drawing from his grandfather’s experiences.
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The Victorian influence on African-American writers.
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American cities have apparently reached “peak Millennial.”
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The visual artists who inspired Brahms.
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The art of medieval embroidery: “Despite the low profile of embroidery, one early example is justly famous: the Bayeux tapestry, which, as the excellent exhibition catalogue points out, is not in fact a tapestry at all but a piece of embroidery. That is, its eloquent images were not woven into the fabric but stitched onto it, some time soon after 1066. Embroidery skills continued to be developed by noble women, and by the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, English embroiderers were able to create wearable items that depicted minute details of faces, gestures or foliage and incorporated precious metals, jewels and pearls. A technique called underside couching was used to hold threads of silver and gold in place in a way that was nearly invisible on the surface.”
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Celebrating Milton Keynes: “Artists, poets and philosophers have not paid much attention to Milton Keynes …although comedians have. This urban experiment has been mocked by lazy satirists who find ambition derisory and concrete cows hilarious. Milton Keynes is 50 this year and it has an honourable place in the history of that ancient chimera, the Ideal City. It was conceived in a decade when the improving influence of the ‘white heat of technology’ could be cited without irony (or embarrassment). In those days, technology involved calorific value, not cold, invisible bytes. The name sounds like an ad-man’s invention. But until 23 January 1967, when the new city was designated, Milton Keynes was an old, quiet Buckinghamshire village near Bletchley, one of 15 that were absorbed into the whole. Its history involves utopias, the picturesque, Garden City idealism, a naive infatuation with America and a quaintly touching faith in the possibility of a tolerable future.”
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How geography made America great.
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Essay of the Day: In The Hudson Review, John Dixon Hunt revisits the life and work of English landscaper “Capability” Brown:
“Brown was certainly a prolific designer, and he seems to have worked just about everywhere in England, so part of the current attention is focused on exactly where he did work or where he simply advised and let his followers do the work. If Queen Elizabeth I is supposed to have slept everywhere, Brown has acquired his almost mythic stature as the landscape designer of the natural garden by establishing them all over the land. Research on establishing his oeuvre—exactly where and to what extent did he work on a given site—is a work still in process. And as we now, somewhat astonishingly, know that he had something of a following in Europe, Russia and the United States, his status as the preeminent English gardener has acquired a slightly different aura. So while we now are learning much more about ‘Capability’ Brown, we know (I think) less about how to explain his landscape gardening and how it figures, then and now, in our narrative of gardening.
It is strange that for all the admiration of Brown, he has never found his work adequately explained. It is tautologous to claim his works are ‘thoroughly Brownian’ or in a ‘Brownian character’ (one cannot define Brown by using the definition you wish to explain!); though that explanation maybe explains that we want to see him as different from others. He was not picturesque, though some have tried to see him as that by linking him to a prominent aesthetic of the late eighteenth century. That did not prevent artists from being able to depict his landscapes in ‘pictures’ that we much admire; in those images we are paradoxically vouchsafed a view of his best work in ways that he would himself not have recognized as picturesque. He was clearly not like his predecessor, William Kent, whatever Horace Walpole said about how much they performed in the same way. After Brown’s death, Humphry Repton, who deliberately wished to inherit his mantle, followed awhile in his best footsteps but soon afterwards found his own way with his clients; nor did Brown’s co-designers and those, whom David Brown and Tom Williamson call ‘his men,’ necessarily exhibit the same qualities that so marked his best work.
“Nor is it enough to say, as many do, that his designs were ‘natural,’ or ‘informal.’ These two, habitual claims don’t bear much scrutiny. He was always—though it shocks landscape historians to hear it—a formalist, as he appreciated the forms of the landscape materials he worked with and deployed them wonderfully. The explanation that he devised ‘natural’ landscapes does not address to what extent, why, and how they were ‘natural’—nature has always enjoyed many forms at any one time, and our understanding of them also shifts in different cultures; yet the word continues to be used as if it were self-evident. It is the kind of term that is used, even by landscape architects, as something that, of course, we understand and are able to adjudicate its meanings ourselves: it is like the woman, quoted in the New York Times, who said that she liked to walk her tortoise in Central Park because ‘when you live in the city you need to get into nature.'”
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Photo: River Hornad
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Poem: X. J. Kennedy, “At a Low Mass for Two Hot-rodders”
