Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice book in great condition. Pages in excellent condition. Images are beautiful bright and vivid. No notes or highlighting. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> In 1934 William Coldstream went to work at the GPO Film Unit. In Art in England 1938 he said: “The slump had made me aware of social problems and I became convinced that art ought to be directed to a wider public; whereas all ideas which I had learned to regard as artistically revolutionary ran in the opposite direction” Coldstream worked with W. H. Auden on the film Coal Face. Auden recalled the period in his poem ‘Letter to William Coldstream Esq! in Letters From Iceland 1937: “Very well then let’s start with perceiving Let me pretend that I’m the impersonal eye of the camera Sent out by God to shoot on location And we’ll look at the rushes together.” The experience of film-making changed Coldstream’s idea of painting. His work became monocular and flat. The camera became a template for objectivity and he used measurement to scrupulously check to concentrate rather than eliminate the subjectivity of his eye. When Coldstream returned to painting in 1936 he painted portraits of Auden and Christopher Isherwood in a style that owed much to Degas’ drawing and painting from photographs. In the early 1930s Auden and Isherwood lived in Berlin. The “impersonal eye of the camera” is echoed near the beginning of Isherwood’s book Goodbye to Berlin 1939: “I am a camera with its shutter open quite passive recording not thinking…” This phrase is often quoted as the film Cabaret was based on Goodbye to Berlin. Coldstream remained interested in film: he started a film department at the Slade and was Chairman of the British Film Institute in the 1960s. (LL)