Arts Society Henley

THE Arts Society Henley held its annual meeting at Henley Rugby Club in November.

The meeting was followed by a talk by Barry Venning called “With a little help from their friends: the Beatles and their artists”.

Barry took us on a journey through the Sixties in music and images, following the Beatles from the Hamburg Reeperbahn in 1960 to Abbey Road in 1969.

The band were always fascinated by the visual arts and Stuart Sutcliffe, the “fifth Beatle”, was a prodigiously talented painter.

Paul McCartney also took up painting while Ringo Starr had great visual sense. He took his camera everywhere and some of his best photos are of a professional standard.

The Beatles learned very early on that artists and designers could help promote their image and their music and they changed the way album covers looked and felt.

Their personal image too was important — adopting the “dark look” fashionable in Hamburg to the more TV-friendly look encouraged later by Brian Epstein.

Their rise to global fame was aided and recorded by an impressive roster of photographers, including Astrid Kirchherr, Bob Freeman, Robert Whitaker, Angus McBean and Linda McCartney.

The innovative covers for releases such as Rubber Soul (Freeman), Revolver (Klaus Voormann), the White Album (Richard Hamilton) and Sgt. Pepper (Peter Blake and Jann Haworth) turned album design into an art form in its own right.

McBean shot the photo for the first Beatles album, Please Please Me, in 1962, a view taken within the EMI building with the band looking down a staircase.

Freeman took the photograph for their second album, With the Beatles, in 1963, creating a moody “Kafkaesque feeling”.

The photo was taken in a dimly lit corridor in the Palace Court Hotel in Bournemouth.

Freeman was then contracted to produce the cover for A Hard Day’s Night in 1964. This is based on numerous compact photographs with the band members pulling faces and then organised to look like a reel of film.

Help, which was released in 1965 to coincide with the release of their second film, was designed by Freeman with the Beatles dressed in their winter clothes and adopting semaphore poses.

The actual semaphore reads not “HELP” but “NUJV” as “HELP” didn’t look aesthetically pleasing in semaphore pose.

Their second 1965 album, Rubber Soul, represented a change in musical direction. This was reflected in the cover, showing distorted faces — a look accidentally achieved when Freeman was projecting the photo on to an LP-sized piece of cardboard which fell backwards slightly, elongating the projected image.

Thereafter the Beatles parted ways with Freeman while Klaus Voormann (who produced the Bee Gees’ first album cover) became their next photographer.

By now the Beatles were “the biggest band on the planet”.

Revolver, in 1966, the title chosen to indicate an LP revolving on a turntable and not a gun, introduced illustrations, possibly influenced by drawings of Audrey Beardsley, interspersed with photos of the band in various poses. The cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, released in 1967, was designed by Haworth, Blake, Robert Frazer and Michael Cooper and reflected a move towards flower power. Dressed in uniforms, the Beatles are surrounded by no less than three sportsmen, one prime minister and seven comedians, among many other famous faces including Karl Marx, Bob Dylan and Aldous Huxley. When Mae West was asked for her photo to be included, she famously replied: “What would I be doing in a lonely hearts club?”

It was rumoured that EMI set aside £1million to deal with potential lawsuits for using unauthorised photos.

What looks to modern eyes as an easy photocollage was the result of lifesize cut-outs projected against a background with the Beatles posing in front of them.

The White Album in 1968 stands in sharp contrast to Sgt. Pepper, with its plain white background and embossed lettering.

The initial copies were all individually numbered, mimicking editions of limited artwork. Photographs of the band are on the inside only.

In 1969 we saw the by now most famous pedestrian crossing in the world on the cover of Abbey Road, named after the street where the EMI studios were located. It is the only Grade II listed crossing in the world.

The idea came from McCartney with photography by Iain McMillan. Several takes resulted in the Beatles walking across in perfect unison. Spot the unintended person in the background, an American tourist who happened to be in the area.

Barry Venning is an art historian whose interests and teachings range from the art of late medieval Europe to global contemporary art. He is a published author with an ongoing research interest in post-colonial art and British visual satire.

In the afternoon, John Benjamin gave the president’s welcome talk on Carl Fabergé.

Born in 1836, Peter Carl Fabergé was the son of a jeweller in St Petersburg.

The Fabergé family were originally French Huguenots, who were expelled from France in 1685.

Carl showed great promise as an artist and jeweller and, given his precocious talent, was sent on a European grand tour, both to learn about art and jewellery and about business.

On his return to St Petersburg, at the age of 24, he took over the family jewellers and developed many exquisite pieces, including the famous eggs for the Russian royal family.

The first “Imperial Egg”, given in 1885 as an Easter gift by Czar Alexander III to his wife, created a tradition which made the Fabergé name legendary.

Just 50 imperial Easter eggs were created. The business greatly expanded under the patronage of the Russian royal family and through their connections with the royal houses of Europe.

Fabergé established shops throughout what is now Russia and Ukraine and had one shop overseas (in London), partly thanks to the patronage of the British royal family.

In 1918, the Fabergé business was nationalised by the Bolsheviks and Fabergé escaped. He lived the rest of his life in European hotels, dying in Lausanne in 1920. His children re-established the company in Paris after the revolution and it is still extant.

The provenance of Fabergé items is confused by many copies but the extremely high quality of the originals means that fakes can almost always be detected. The market remains very strong, although at present is limited by sanctions on Russia.

The Arts Society Henley has more than 520 members and meets at Henley Rugby Club on the third Thursday of the month. For more information, call Monnik Vleugels on 07505 778405 or visit
henley.theartssociety.org

Monnik Vleugels