Visual Culture

Tom Harrisson’s ongoing desire to highlight the importance of working-class opinion led to his creation of a project that went beyond Mass-Observation’s usual purview – into the realm of fine art.  Harrisson hired four painters – two realists, one impressionist, and one surrealist  – to come north from London to Bolton.  He instructed each of them to paint a picture of the town.  With the help of his observers, he then showed the images throughout the city with the purpose of soliciting residents’ opinions.  Response to the paintings was mixed.  Most dismissed the impressionist rendering as a “complete washout, like a church without a soul,” while the surrealist work generally inspired a humorous response from its audience.[1] The two realist images, however, struck an exceptionally emotional chord.   Blackened streets and smoking chimneys, as if almost too lifelike, elicited a mournful, sometimes haunting reaction:  “There’s something about it I don’t like,” and old woman cried, “We’re dead, we are!  Our people are dead!”[2]

William Coldstream, "On the Map" (1937)

One of the realist artists summoned by Harrisson was William Coldstream.[3] His initial objective in joining the Mass-Observation project was to use this organization, and its human resources, as a means to re-establish a link between the artist and society.  Through the early 1930s he had become disillusioned, a consequence of his belief that artists and art institutions had increasingly (and deliberately) imposed a distance between the “average individual” and their understanding of the work of art.   This phenomenon was particularly prevalent, he believed, amongst abstract artists, whose work was virtually impenetrable to the “ordinary person” and therefore in direct conflict with what Coldstream saw as the real purpose of art:  human enlightenment.   He thus accepted Harrisson’s invitation in an effort to amend this situation.  Although he stayed only four weeks, public response to his painting, many like the old woman’s reaction cited above, seemingly demonstrated the validity of his argument.  It was his representation of Bolton (along with his friend Graham Bell’s, the other realist) – conceived in brown, grey and black tones, depicting a dreary community – with which viewers identified most.

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[1] Tom Harrisson, “What they Think in ‘Worktown’,” The Listener, 25 August, 1938: 398.

[2] Harrisson, “What they Think in ‘Worktown’,” 399.

[3] The others were Julian Trevelyan (surrealist), Michael Wykham (post-impressionist) and Graham Bell (realist).