And the adventure begins again….

That’s right folks…it’s July and I’m off to England again.  This time I am going to the Tate Gallery archives in London to read up on William Coldstream, a painter who participated in Mass Observation during 1938.  Coldstream was also a filmmaker for the GPO (working under John Grierson) and founding member of the Euston Road School of Painting and Drawing.

Here’s a little intro:

William Coldstream was born in Belford, Northumberland on 28 February 1908 and grew up in north London.  He attended the Slade School to train as a painter from 1926 through 1929.  Yet by the mid-1930s, after experiencing some success as a professional artist, Coldstream abandoned painting in order to pursue a career in film.   Although excited to engage the possibilities of this new medium, Coldstream’s decision was equally inspired by a weighty sense of disillusion.  He was a committed realist, yet one who inhabited a culture that increasingly valued abstraction over naturalistic representation.  Non-figurative aesthetics were anathema to Coldstream’s belief that painting must be always comprehensible to the “ordinary person.”  For him, the principal duty of art was to inform and to educate; to somehow better the life of the average individual.  This was not possible, however, when the artists of his time appeared to be deliberately widening the gap between the viewer and the work of art through their espousal of what he perceived as an essentially impenetrable formalism.

Coldstream thus attempted to regain his sense of social purpose by joining John Grierson’s documentary film unit at the General Post Office.  From 1934 to 1937, Coldstream directed three films –The King’s Stamp (1934), a celebration of the King’s Jubilee postage stamp of that year; Fairy of the Phone (1936), which instructed viewers on proper telephone usage; and finally, with Stuart Legg, Coldstream directed Roadways (1937), a film that ostensibly advertised the Post Office’s speedy mail deliveries by road, but by and large was an exposition of the history of commercial trucking in Britain.  Yet after three years and countless clashes with Grierson’s formidable personality, Coldstream left the unit, having confirmed his true vocation as a painter.   Newly inspired, he formed – with fellow painters Graham Bell, Victor Pasmore, and Claude Rogers – the School of Painting and Drawing, a very small, private institution in London’s Euston Road.  Thereafter, it was affectionately known as the Euston Road School.

While teaching at the school, Coldstream accepted an invitation from Tom Harrisson to join Mass Observation.  The painter’s initial objective in joining the project was to use the organization and its human resources as a means to re-establish a link between the artist and society.  Although he stayed only four weeks in “Worktown” (aka Bolton), public response to his work created during this period seemingly demonstrated the validity of his argument.  It was his representation of Bolton (along with his friend Graham Bell’s, the other realist summoned by Harrisson) – conceived in brown, grey and black tones, depicting a dreary community – with which viewers identified most.