Bill Brandt

Abstract

""The camera," said Orson Welles, "is a medium via which messages reach us from another world." It was the camera and the circumstances of the Second World War that first brought together Henry Moore (1898-1986) and Bill Brandt (1904-1983). During the Blitz, both artists produced images depicting civilians sheltering in the London Underground. These "shelter pictures" were circulated to millions via popular magazines and today rank as iconic works of their time. This book begins with these wartime works and examines the artists' intersecting paths in the postwar period. Key themes include war, industry, and the coal mine; landscape and Britain's great megalithic sites; found objects; and the human body. Special photographic reproduction captures the materiality of the print as a three-dimensional object rather than a flat, disembodied image on the page"--

Contents

Sculpture, photography and the printed page / Martina Droth and Paul Messier -- Photography in four dimensions / Paul Messier and Martina Droth -- Perspectives of a strange country / Martina Droth -- Catalogue / introduction essays by Martina Droth -- Portraits -- Britain at war -- Figures underground : Photojournalism in the 1940s and 1950s / Lynda Nead ; Henry Moore in the 1940s / Robert James Sutton ; Exhibiting art in wartime / Nicholas Robbins -- Afterlives of pictures : Photography at Marlborough Gallery / Audrey Sands -- Coal and Country : A strange country: Bill Brandt in Jarrow, 1937 / John Tagg -- Monoliths and landscapes : Sculpture and spatial environment / Alex Potts ; Henry Moore's and Bill Brandt's landscapes / Simon Wallis -- Perspectives of sculpture : Henry Moore and photography / Sebastiano Barassi -- The body refracted : Bill Brandt's haptic eye: perspective of nudes / Carol M. Armstrong ; Henry Moore's photo-collages / Eleanor Clayton.