The Omnibus

So I succeeded in waking up on the right side of my bed this morning. The sun is shining with an intense brightness so that all of Cambridge is a reflective surface. I cycled in to town, gliding down quiet roads without tourists and went to Sainsburys hungry. I splurged and then typically couldn't fit my gluttonous load in to my bike basket. It didn't matter though, because the sun was shining and this meant that I was able to walk home. This expanded preface means that today is a good day.

Anyway today I am trying to complete my dissertation draft. I am currently writing about Omnibuses as I stare out of my tall window through the great bare tree on to all the impetuous traffic.

On the Omnibus, 1880, Maurice Delondre

I did a quick google search in an attempt to find a painting which would capture Woolf and Dismorr's exciting sense of the freedom of the Omnibus. Delondre's painting of polite Victoriana is exactly the opposite of what I was looking for but it does give an illuminating glimpse in to that 'unmannerly throbbing vehicle' which Dismorr eventually escapes from. Woolf's omnibuses are 'garish caravans, glistening with red and yellow varnish' which 'swooped, settled, were off' and Dismorr's is a floating 'luminous balloon' 'all lit from within' by advertisements. True motifs of modernity which capture the excite of movement and its ultimate freedom. The closest I can get to representing this visually is Dismorr's The Engine, which I imagine pulsating at the heart of these Victorian ghosts:

Apologies for my recent blogging silence...

Jessie Dismorr- Rhythm

I thought some people might appreciate an update on my search for the artist and writer Jessie Dismorr. When I posted in January the only glimpse in to Dismorr's history and her potential corpus of work was an article written by a journalist called Mark Archer about his own difficult search for traces of Jessie. Thanks to a combination of social media and their respective powers, but largely thanks to Reddish, I succeeded in tracking down a PHD thesis which catalogues all of Dismorr's work, traces her genealogy and darts across various archives to map out her life. My favourite discovery has been that the Vorticist artist,whose work in Blast! is based on the bold, violent, abstract lines of machines, began by drawing Romantic female nudes. So here are some startling surprises stolen from an online version of the modernist magazine, Rhythm.

In Rhythm Dismorr was publishing alongside figures such as Pablo Picasso, Katherine Mansfield and a circle of artists connected to the Russian Ballet. This certainly gives her a stronger independent context than historians of Wyndham Lewis might suggest. The bold lines remain but they have an organic solidity. I imagine them as pseudo-pre-raphaelite or Alfons Mucha style stained glass panels. All that romanticism and folly which the Vorticists condemn is a lyrical statement here. An exploration of Dismorr's contexts reveals just how nuanced her approach to various modernist manifestos might be. Now I know I can write my dissertation on her.

Rock Drill

I think I have already mentioned the Royal Academy's Wild Thing; it was an exhibition which profoundly changed my perceptions and it continually creeps in to my thinking in intangible ways. Looming 7 feet above me, half-man, half-robot and straddling his drill, it is Epstein's Rock Drill which haunts me when I consider women and the machine-age at the turn of the century.

Surrounded by studies in the exhibition, it was impossible to escape the phallic implications of the drill. Plunging in to the ground with an excessive energetic enthusiasm I did not stand long in its shadow. What an aggressive attack on womanhood it seemed. When Jessie Dismorr describes her 'arrogant spiked tresses', 'the new machinery that wields the chains of muscles fitted beneath/ my close coat of skin.' I can't help feeling that she is considering herself in relation to this intimidating masculine machinery.

The Rock Drill returns us to primitivism, it is totemic and archetypal masculinity. Incorporating actual machinery Epstein's sculpture warns of the advent of a new age where even humanity and that most human of actions, sex, has become automatised. But for the man there is an exciting rush of power that comes with it. Whereas as a woman I retreat from the sculpture, to the back of the room where I can't hear the clamour of the drilling any longer.

In my research I am learning new things about Richard Cork, the curator of the exhibition who has also written about Vorticism, there is a glimmer of a suggestion of his misogyny, of his exclusion of Dismorr and Saunders from his discussions. It only sharpens the light thrown on Rock Drill; its use as the exhibition poster, book front and back cover, its centrality to the thinking and overall impression of the exhibition.

Le Corbusier's City of Tomorrow

Walking the city has somehow wandered in to the realms of town planning in my second dissertation. In 1924 Le Corbusier published The City of Tomorrow, an architectural polemic against the modern city and proposing a new Contemporary city. I love Le Corbusier's book because of its scrapbook quality; architectural plans are combined with photographs, aerial views of towns and sketches.

‘A TOWN is a tool.
Towns no longer fulfil this function. They are ineffectual; they use up our bodies, they thwart our souls. The lack of order to be found everywhere in them offends us; their degradation wounds our self-esteem and humiliates our sense of dignity. They are not worthy of the age; they are no longer worthy of us.’

As the world was changing; with war, industry, and traffic, architects and town planners believed that the city needed changing too.

New York :Congestion, a damning condemnation.

Hausmann's restructuring of Paris meant that it was the ideal space for new plans and aesthetic debates. Corbusier wants the city to combine green space with functional, efficient networks of labour.

But Corbusier's city appears to me to be just another kind of a machine, with skyscrapers that 'thwart our souls' and our green spaces by looming above them. The women in my dissertation walk the city, map human emotion upon it and react against such drastic destruction and restructuring. After all isn't human emotion more like the labyrinthine palimpsest of London than the open boulevards of Paris?

Leonora Carrington- Labyrinth

Jessie Dismorr- Vorticist Streets

At the end of last year, blindly searching through obscure art and literature magazines in the University Library, I made a discovery. Jessie Dismorr. I absorbed every contribution she made to Wyndham Lewis's Vorticist magazine, Blast!, and decided that I wanted to write about women walking in London and that I wanted to write about Dismorr. She brought me the revelation of my dissertation. Six months later and I am still clinging to Jessie but I have found nothing more of her than my first fruitless trip to the library had to offer.

Vorticism was a British avant-garde movement which was formed in 1914. It's manifesto stated that 'The New Vortex plunges to the heart of the present! We produce a new living abstraction!' and it aimed to 'blast' contemporary art by revolutionising it. Interested in the aesthetic of machines Vorticist paintings were about bold lines, striking contrast and powerful abstract shapes. (In June of this year the Tate will open an exhibition of Vorticist work!)

Contribution to Blast! The Engine

A largely neglected Vorticist artist, Dismorr was one of the 'little lapdogs who wanted to be Lewis's slaves and do everything for him' (Kate Lechmere), there was only one other Lapdog, Helen Saunders. There were only two female Vorticists; as a woman Dismorr's contributions and notoriety are limited. There are a few details which keep repeating in my searches; one is that she once stripped naked in the middle of Oxford Street. This makes me love her a lot.

But it is Dismorr's experience of London which really interests me. In a small vignette called June Night she writes of a bus journey with a man called Rodengo who is 'too conspicuous for daylight'. Dismorr escapes the 'unmannerly throbbing vehicle' of the bus to 'take refuge in mews and by-ways'. Her experience of this sudden night-time freedom in the streets is exciting and surreal;

'I wander in the precincts stately urban houses. Moonlight carves them in purity. The presence of these great and rectangular personalities is a medicine. They are the children of collossal restraint, they are the last words of prose. (Poetics your day is over!) In admiring them I have put myself on the side of all the severities. I seek the profoundest teaching of the inanimate. I feel the emotion of related shapes. Oh, discipline of ordered pilasters and porticoes.'

Abstract Composition, 1915

I know that she made contributions to Blast! magazine, and to Axis and Rhythm magazine. I also know that I am not the only person interested in her, but I can count the others on my hand. The first is a man named Quentin Stevenson who is writing a biography of her (which has not yet emerged). The second, Catherine Heathcock who wrote an unpublished PHD thesis on her and has the holy grail, the catalogue of all her work, (my supervisor wants me to write my own catalogue but as an undergraduate I am floundering). And finally, a journalist named Mark Archer, who is the only reason I know about any of these other people because he has made his own desperate pilgrimage for knowledge about Dismorr and has covered all of the tracks that I must now cover. My only problem is that I don't know any magical tricks for finding the email addresses of biographers, former PHD students at unidentified universities and journalists at the FT. So in part this is a kind of appeal, for help!

Here is a brilliant article, and the most information you will find written about Dismorr on the entire internet.

Nadja

Last night, having succeeded in finishing my dissertation plan, I felt too tired to work but too guilty not to (this is how Cambridge trains you to be!). The situation was resolved as I curled up in bed with a book that had only arrived in the post that day, Breton's surrealist text, Nadja. I stayed up and finished it. Breton's novel is the story of an encounter with a woman, who calls herself Nadja, and their subsequent rendevous in bars and walks across Paris.

Nadja is an illustrated novel; containing photographs of locations along the walks, the facades of bars they go to, objects found at flea markets, important surrealist works which Breton and Nadja discuss including Chirico's paintings and the drawings which Nadja herself makes for Breton. These drawings are the most exciting part, and these are the images I have included in this post. Nadja imagines herself as a mermaid with her back to the viewer, she draws strange symbols like a tribal mask which can't be explained and Breton describes them with his affection for her. Why can't all novels be illustrated? It turns it into this beautiful thing, this book object.

In terms of my dissertation, Breton's pursuit of the woman in the street is something the women I am reading are reacting against. I should condemn his fanciful affair with a woman whom we are later told ends up in an institution. Breton without sympathy or nostalgia wavers all responsibility for pushing her over the brink. But in a way its surrealism has captivated me, I think its romantic.

'Beauty is like a train that ceaselessly roars out of the Gare de Lyon and which I know will never leave, which has not left. It consists of jolts and shocks, many of which do not have much importance, but which we know are destined to produce one Shock, which does. [...] Beauty, neither static nor dynamic. The human heart, beautiful as a seismograph. [...] Beauty will be CONVULSIVE or not be at all'

Streetwalking the Metropolis

I am attempting to give my second dissertation, and all of the reading and notes that have been haphazardly collected over an extended period, a direction. The dissertation is about Women walking and writing about walking in London between the World Wars, there might be a little surrealism involved, some chorography and a lot of feminist discussion. Beyond that I can offer little else by way of explanation.

Walking the streets of Barcelona, thinking, daydreaming, creating stories and then returning to look in detail at the city itself, I began to experience my dissertation. To walk in the city is to feel at one moment utterly alive, a part of an energy and movement beyond us, and then at the next moment to feel overwhelmed, lost in the dark and foolish for wandering aimlessly. I understand both these emotions from my walkings in Barcelona. I love walking the city and this time I decided to document it, writing and photographing as I weaved my way through the metropolis. I am not the first to do this, but am tying myself to a tradition.

Lee Miller in Blitzed London

The city overwhelms us with a superflux of sensory data; sounds of cars and people, signs, posters, architecture, rubbish, the lives of other people, windows in to other worlds, lights and shadows. Lee Miller was associated with the surrealist movement in Paris, working with the artist Man Ray, but she came in to her own independence as a photographer and war correspondent for Vogue magazine. Her incidental photographs of blitzed London, of sculptures and pianos amongst the rubble have a bleak beauty which communicates the power and the desolation of a city destroyed and its accidental surrealism.

Berenice Abbott in New York

In 1929 Berenice Abbott closed her studio in Paris and came to New York City, a city she recognised as having exciting potential for her photography. She spent six years documenting the city, a city that was beginning to change, to be destroyed and regenerated.

'Abbott's project was primarily a sociological study imbedded within modernist aesthetic practices. She sought to create a broadly inclusive collection of photographs that together suggest a vital interaction between three aspects of urban life: the diverse people of the city; the places they live, work and play; and their daily activities. It was intended to empower people by making them realize that their environment was a consequence of their collective behavior (and vice versa).'

Brassai in Paris

Hungarian artist, Brassai, spent his evenings in night-time wanderings of the city of Paris and began to document it. Brassai captured the feel and atmosphere of the city at night; going in to bars and back alleys, as well as focussing on the beauty of fog and light in the dark streets.

These photographers have left behind them documents of their own personal impression, as well as capturing some inherent element of the city itself. We might look at these photographs and see things which we recognise, but perhaps the perspective and the essence of the vision is something beyond us; a thing which only Miller, Abbott and Brassai feel as intensely as the photograph suggests.

So here are a few of my own attempts to document my time in the sloping labyrinth of Barcelona. For me the city was filled with light and it was the ways in which buildings and spaces manipulated light which interested me.

So much of Barcelona is buildings climbing parallel up steep hills, occasionally there are street escalators to help you out. The escalator focusses perspective and reflects the light of the setting sun.

I like this street photo because of the angle which curves inwards and the lingering Christmas decorations which seemed so incongruous with the bright January sun.

Strolling through parks in the dazed shadows of trees, this menage of women captures the living sense of the city.

Now I just have to decide what all of this means and how women use their mappings of the city.

Virago Green Spines

The Cambridge University Library are offering a £500 prize for a collection of books put together by a student. With £500 as temptation and motivation I thought I might have a try. As the collection will not be judged on size or monetary value perhaps I have a fair chance. Many years ago I joined a website called ReaditSwapit, and one of the books which came rushing through my letterbox on a whim was Elizabeth Taylor's Angel. The book fascinated me; the feel of its binding in my hand, it's green spine, the silhouette of an apple at its top and then the Portrait of Madame Lacroix by Giovanni Boldini which acted as its cover illustration. A little research only increased my fascination. What I had stumbled upon was a feminist printing press established in 1973 by Carmen Callil to publish the work of forgotten or overlooked women writers from the literary canon and to promote the writings of new and emerging women. Virago has been an obsession ever since.

Part of my fairly modest collection.

I felt sure I was the first to have made this discovery and began a treasure hunt in local charity shops, second hand bookshops in Cornwall and London and internet swapping communities. I was under the impression that they were difficult to find (they were in Harlow!) and that I must be the only woman on earth who actually wanted them. Since moving to Cambridge I have found that I can no longer buy eeach one that I find as the Virago press was genuinely prolific, (Heffers even reprints the originals to add to its stock). I have to be a little more selective in my search now that I am a student.

A picture of a larger and more impressive collection, stolen from Fleur Fisher

For the University Library prize my collection requires a coherence and an intellectual strain of thought to support it. My collection is of the early originals, published in the 80's with portraits of women for their covers. My interest is both literary and artistic; the cover paints a portrait of the central character just as the books themselves are studies of the female voice which leads them, these novels are word- portraits.

Cover: 'The Bather' Kees van Dongen

'I wanted to live at the centre of a focus of pleasantness, and harmony, and things coming right. And instead I was tossing about in a whirlpool of useless passion and frenzy.' The Thinking Reed

Cover: 'Portrait of Ira P' Tamara de Lempicka

' "Hardly anyone is dancing," said Charlotte to the unknown man beside her, "yet whenever I put out my hand, I touch someone," But the stranger seemed not to have heard her.' Strangers

Tamara de Lempicka was an amazing painter during the 20's and 30's who had her own distinctive and feminine approach to Cubism. Working in Paris she was associated with Pablo Picasso, Jean Cocteau and Andre Gide. The portrait used for the cover of Strangers is a powerful portrait in red and white, between innocence and passion.

Cover: 'Catherine Carrington' Carrington

'I am forward-looking girl and don't stay where I am, "Left right, Be bright," as I said in my poem. That's on days when I am one big bounce, and have to go careful then not to be a nuisance. But later I get back to my own philosophical outlook that keeps us all kissable.' Novel on Yellow Paper

I just finished reading Stevie Smith's Novel on Yellow Paper for my London dissertation and I love her loose writing style. It is like a 'stream of consciousness' but with an innocence and enthusiasm to it that is completely independent of the fluidity of writers such as Virginia Woolf.

I won't pin all my hopes on that book collecting prize, but I think I have a story and a chance, so wish me luck.

Jean Rhys at her melancholy best

I might suggest that these beautiful covers may lure you in to a false sense of literary security, but if you fail to miss the dark heavy eyes of these cover women then you are naive enough that no luring is needed. The beginning of reading for my second dissertation has been a melancholy, if beautiful, affair. These women face us alone on these covers, but not because they are independent. But because men have destroyed them and the only consolation left is solitude.

After Leaving Mr Mackenzie is introduced by an illustration by Faith Jaques, who was most famously an illustrator of picture books. Here her pen and ink portrait captures Julia's abject nature, her sense of shame and despair as life has beaten her down. Quartet is presented by a photograph by Sue Wilks. Marya stares at us coldly from the bleak desolation of the French sea. She asks us how things have ended this way? But she is completely distanced from us, beyond our care or hope. If I had judged the books by their covers I would have been unsurprised by the torpid misery of the narratives of these women. Unfortunately the excitement of finding Jean Rhys in the Amnesty bookshop made me careless and uncritical.