These paints are not meant to come off says Josie and there are no solvents that will touch them
Posted in General on 21. Jul, 2010
“These paints are not meant to come off,” says Josie, “and there are no solvents that will touch them. The house is now Grade II listed (partly because it is an early example of steel-framed construction) but grant entitlements only allow for repair, not restoration.Removing all the interior paintwork was, says Josie, the easy bit. She chose the latter option, but 20 years later the laborious task of restoring David Reynard Robinson’s work of art is a long way short of completion. Josie’s biggest headache is in finding the funds to continue. The task of undoing the damage has tested tile restorers to their limits.Josie Adams (the curator of Scarborough Art Gallery and another co-founder of the Tile Society) bought Farrago in 1975.
She was initially attracted by the richly tiled stairwell and first floor hall – a kaleidoscope of gleaming, glazed and printed colour inset with moulded, patterned and floral panels. When she moved into the house, she had no idea there was more of the same lurking behind a mask of paint, wallpaper and polystyrene tiles.The glazed-brick and tiled exterior – which includes pictorial friezes set into the roof pediment, featuring a romantic castle against a rustic backdrop – was hidden behind white paintwork. Calling the house Farrago, Robinson used every surface, inside and out, to experiment with multi-coloured, multi-textured tiles of every available type. The fireplace and tiled surrounds had been taken out; many of the relief designs on the tiled interior walls had been hacked away to make a smoother surface for hanging wallpaper; large sections of the remaining work had been removed or vandalised.”When I discovered exactly what I’d taken on I was torn between smashing it up and doing it up,” says Josie. Since he died in 1913, his effusive ceramic memorial has been desecrated. Many of his gloriously tiled buildings in Hull have sadly been demolished, including his own offices in Freehold Street, but his piece de resistance – the curious house he built for his retirement in the coastal village of Hornsea, Yorkshire – survives. Maw & Co closed down in the 1960s and the international market is now dominated by Italian products.
In recent years, however, a smaller, crafts- led, British tile industry has benefited from the demand for reproduction Victorian and Edwardian tiles. The revival is likely to be boosted further by the centenary of William Morris’s death (tiles were one of his first products), as well as that of Frederick Leighton. A flurry of tile mania might encourage a few more owners of period homes to reclad their denuded porches with walls of glossy ceramics.Victorian aesthetes apart, there can have been few 19th-century homemakers more passionate about ceramic decoration than Hull builder David Reynard Robinson. The tile was durable and easy-clean, at a cost most could afford.The home-grown tile trade’s slow decline started in the 1930s depression. for the tile is always fresh and cool-looking in its bright design…” They might also have said that tiles can be used to turn a spacious hallway in residential Kensington into a glittering scene from the Arabian Nights.
For, in the same year, artist Frederick Leighton was putting the finishing touches to his Arab Hall – an awe-inspiring masterpiece of tile-encrusted home decoration, so richly seductive in its colour and complexity you could sit and gawp for hours. “TO WHAT use can tiles not be put?” asked The Pottery and Glass Trades Review in 1878. “Cornices, door-frames and windows are set with them; hearths are outlined with them and staircases decorated… It can only be a matter of time before we see the effects in the high street ( Pictures omitted). Young artists such as Jenny Saville put their pictures on album covers; Damien Hirst directs a pop video for Blur; young designer Hussein Chalayan presents catwalk shows that are as much to do with performance art as fashion; and a collection of haute couture designs was recently the subject of a show at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.Not since Elsa Schiaparelli commissioned Salvador Dali to design on fabric for her in the Thirties has art been so fashionable, or fashion so artful. For the main picture on page 48, Richard Clegg created a collage of fluorescent light-strips and salvage architecture – in front of which a mock glamour-girl wears Ozbek.The model on the left, meanwhile, wears Katharine Hamnett designs in front of a canvas by Peter Ashton Jones, in which “a silhouette of a man in a tailored coat seems to be stepping out of the picture…” And who should be stepping out of Ancona’s photograph? A model of fashion’s absurdity, holding a picture frame, wearing knickers over tights, like a modern-day designer Batman.The London fashion and art scenes are currently regarded as being at their highest creative peak since the Sixties; and now, as then, the two artforms are crossing into each other’s territory. “Fashion doesn’t make statements; it says nothing about what we are about,” he says.
“Fashion dates a picture like nothing else.” Manet had the same problem around the turn of the century, when his portraits depicting the fashions of the day were criticised by his contemporaries. The verdict of history has been less harsh.Like the other two artists whose work is shown here, Elliott and Hopcroft both work – along with Damien Hirst – from a decaying warehouse in Brixton All four seem to share Hirst’s creative joie de vivre. The problem for an artist now is being too fashionable; some themes can date a picture, so the artist has to reflect a broader range of ideas.”Richard Elliott, whose Elevator (right) explores one of the more mundane spaces of urban life – in contrast to Vivienne Westwood’s flamboyant trenchcoat in the foreground – agrees. “Fashion isn’t art, and to pretend that it is loses the point of fashion,” says Bella Freud, Lucian Freud’s daughter, whose provocative knitwear is shown (above) in front of a symbolic backdrop by the Tasmanian-born British artist, Helen Hopcroft.Helen Hopcroft plays down the difference. “Artists, like fashion des- igners, draw on universal themes like the end of the millennium. But few would have expected the marriage to seem quite so heaven-made. “For me, fashion is art, and art is fashion,” says Ancona.