hicklit
9th December 2004, 04:30 PM
The secondary school I went to was so bad it was like some sort of educational black hole: I left it actually knowing less than when I started. It was a cultural desert, a scholastic Romford.
So if, like me, you went to a similarly crap establishment you may, also like me, have spent some time in your early twenties desperately trying to catch up with the civilised world by attempting to teach yourself a bit about music, art etc etc.
Classical music was less of a problem because you could, of course, try the old ‘Listening To Records’ gambit. The world of music could, as it were, come to you. And fairly cheaply too. There was a label ‘Classics for Pleasure’ which did loads of good LPs of a wide variety of classical repertoire for, when I first started buying them (late 1970s/early 1980s), £1.49 a go.
To get of a bit of a grasp of classical buildings I read Nikolaus Pevsner’s ‘An Outline of European Architecture’ from which I learnt a lot. Including why, in Rome, (CONTRIVED GAG ALERT #1…CONTRIVED GAG ALERT #1…) there always seems to be repair work going on around the elaborate Bernini fountains and the like while more classical structures are ignored. Hence the expression ‘If it ain’t Baroque, don’t fix it’.
And, for twentieth century stuff, I read the same author’s ‘Pioneers of Modern Design’ which, of course, (CONTRIVED GAG ALERT #2…CONTRIVED GAG ALERT #2…) spawned the hit novelty song ‘Dada Wouldn’t Buy Me a Bauhaus’.
And for painting – and what Brian Sewell would call the ‘plarstic’ arts – I devoured the peerless E H Gombrich’s ‘The Story of Art’. This brilliant book was first published way back in 1950 and, thankfully, has continuously been in print, with suitable revisions and updatings, ever since. It is clearly-written, without being patronising, and beautifully illustrated, without being, in any way, ‘coffee table’. It was clearly a labour of love by a great teacher who wanted to enthuse the general reader and inspire the life-time of pleasure that can be gained from a love of the arts.
Gombrich was no stick-in-the-mud either, writing as generously about the modernists as he did about earlier greats. He actually died as recently as 2001 – when he was well into his nineties. A smart move as it turns out: he missed Brit Art.
So if, like me, you went to a similarly crap establishment you may, also like me, have spent some time in your early twenties desperately trying to catch up with the civilised world by attempting to teach yourself a bit about music, art etc etc.
Classical music was less of a problem because you could, of course, try the old ‘Listening To Records’ gambit. The world of music could, as it were, come to you. And fairly cheaply too. There was a label ‘Classics for Pleasure’ which did loads of good LPs of a wide variety of classical repertoire for, when I first started buying them (late 1970s/early 1980s), £1.49 a go.
To get of a bit of a grasp of classical buildings I read Nikolaus Pevsner’s ‘An Outline of European Architecture’ from which I learnt a lot. Including why, in Rome, (CONTRIVED GAG ALERT #1…CONTRIVED GAG ALERT #1…) there always seems to be repair work going on around the elaborate Bernini fountains and the like while more classical structures are ignored. Hence the expression ‘If it ain’t Baroque, don’t fix it’.
And, for twentieth century stuff, I read the same author’s ‘Pioneers of Modern Design’ which, of course, (CONTRIVED GAG ALERT #2…CONTRIVED GAG ALERT #2…) spawned the hit novelty song ‘Dada Wouldn’t Buy Me a Bauhaus’.
And for painting – and what Brian Sewell would call the ‘plarstic’ arts – I devoured the peerless E H Gombrich’s ‘The Story of Art’. This brilliant book was first published way back in 1950 and, thankfully, has continuously been in print, with suitable revisions and updatings, ever since. It is clearly-written, without being patronising, and beautifully illustrated, without being, in any way, ‘coffee table’. It was clearly a labour of love by a great teacher who wanted to enthuse the general reader and inspire the life-time of pleasure that can be gained from a love of the arts.
Gombrich was no stick-in-the-mud either, writing as generously about the modernists as he did about earlier greats. He actually died as recently as 2001 – when he was well into his nineties. A smart move as it turns out: he missed Brit Art.