BOOKS & ARTS
resented by the very same tweed ‘big pants’,
with nothing but narrow ribbon braces, that
I’d had photographed on Rudi’s muse and
model, Peggy Claxton, for a spread in the
US magazine I art-edited in the early 1960s.
It was the first totally topless fashion photo
ever printed.
There was a hue and cry at its publication.
Many were shocked, but it wasn’t actually
considered vulgar. Maybe the vulgar can’t
be shocking, or the shocking vulgar. Vulgar
is a weak current, boring, even; the shock-
ing knocks your socks off. That is to a certain
extent demonstrated by the most outré out-
fits the exhibition leads up to. We’ve known
for years that they are rather marvellous,
but they seem new now only because, as no
customers ever seriously wore them, they
were forgotten by all but fashion geeks —
and were in any case created purely to get
the paparazzi photo-op that would push the
scent and sunglasses to the masses. Selling
scraps of dreams: perhaps that is vulgar. And
speaking of dreams, there’s not a mention
anywhere of Hollywood, where the clothes
of Adrian, Omar Kiam and Travis Banton
influenced not only European designers, but
also women (and hence ‘the vulgar’) world-
wide. If this exhibition had been done in
the Diana Vreeland/Met mode there would
have been some life to it, some eye-opening
fizz, rather than textbook familiarity.
But is anything vulgar anymore? There’s a
quote by the curator Adam Phillips inscribed
on one wall stating, ‘Vulgar is the common
tongue,’ and here he has a point. Vulgarity
has become the norm, even a sought-after
quality. No one these days says, ‘They’re/
that’s so vulgar.’ It would be far too un-PC.
Women smoking in the street was consid-
ered vulgar in my youth, now it’s about the
only place they can. Wearing too few clothes
in public isn’t vulgar, nor is swearing, nor jok-
ing about death or illness. Being overweight
is a ‘problem’, not vulgar, noisy children
are just ‘expressing themselves’. Architects’
ghastly new buildings go up without critical
comment; appearing in rubber and bondage
in public has taken the fun out of fetishism.
One simply shrugs at the rock-bottom level
of comedy on radio shows. Anna Wintour
puts the Kardashians on the cover of Vogue;
trillionaires’ mega-yachts are envied, flashy
lifestyles the fodder of tabloids; sportsmen
spraying champagne is considered amusing.
Restaurants with names like Sexy Fish get a
nod-nod wink-wink.
It would be a relief if something actual-
ly was vulgar. Personally, I think Bake Off
takes the vulgarity biscuit. I can’t explain
why. It just does. It’s something to do with
safeness, with appealing to the lowest com-
mon denominator. Maybe that’s the mes-
sage I missed in the show.
Exhibitions
Romantic modernMartin Gayford
Paul Nash
Tate Britain, until 5 MarchIn 1932 Paul Nash posed the question, is it
possible to ‘go modern’ and still ‘be Brit-
ish?’ — a conundrum that still perplexes
the national consciousness more than 80
years later. It is true that the artist him-
self answered that query with an emphatic
‘yes’. But, as the fine exhibition at Tate Brit-
ain makes clear, his modernism was deeply
traditional.
The truth is that Nash (1889–1946) was
what the author Alexandra Harris has
termed a ‘romantic modern’. In other words,
his art was a characteristic Anglo-Saxon
attempt to have things both ways. Equally
typically, he managed to do so — but only
some of the time.Nash’s early drawings and watercolours,
done in his early twenties, reveal his start-
ing point. Most are landscapes of his native
Buckinghamshire and, in one case, ‘Witten-
ham Clumps’ (1913), an Iron Age hill fort
near Didcot that continued to haunt Nash’s
imagination for the rest of his life. He was
instinctively attuned to the uncanny sense of
presence he found in such objects as erod-
ed stones and bits of gnarled wood; on the
other hand, Nash was hopeless with human
beings, who more or less disappear from his
art after the first few years.
In many ways, Nash might seem back-
ward-looking, preoccupied as he was with the
poetic and mystical overtones of places such
as Avebury stone circle. But his antiquarian-
ism did not prevent a romance with the artis-
tic cutting edge. In the late 1930s he came
across a corner of farmland littered with
fallen trees resembling dragons or dinosaurs,
which he dubbed ‘Monster Field’. This was
the subject of some remarkable photographs
and slightly anaemic watercolours (Nash was
distinctly hit-and-miss as a painter). MonsterIt would be a relief if something
actually was vulgarIMPERIAL WAR MUSEUM LONDON © TATEVisionary: ‘Battle of Germany’, 1944, by Paul Nash