the real thing essays on making in the modern world

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The real thing: essays on making in the modern world

Tanya harrod.

978-0-907259-50-3

sewn & flapped paperback

210 x 125 mm

41 b&w + 35 colour illustrations

Over thirty years, Tanya Harrod has written on craft for newspapers, magazines, and journals. As these essays show, there are no boundaries in her vision: art is considered in the light of craft, and craft in the light of art; design is present too – developing and sometimes separating from craft and art. In part these essays document the development of these shifts, looking always at the particular, vivid embodiment. The real thing is a surprising and substantial contribution to the literature of ‘making’.

Visiting A cabinet of wonders The language of things The power of making The real thing The Omega project Arts & Crafts Picturesque pleasures Crafts Lives at the British Library Planes of reality Undercover Surrealism Middle English Fired with passion What is folk art? Beauty and foolishness Sculpture / furniture Ian Hamilton Finlay in Luton Carpet sweepers, old mangles Visiting Detroit Memory-work Cold War craft Sculpture in the home Down among the gamers Three-dimensional scribble syndrome Why don’t we hate Etsy? A secret history of clay Bernard Leach as an artist and designer Heroes with feats of clay Ceramics in Italy Why shouldn’t a pot be as beautiful as a painting? Talking to Reginald Reynolds Amponsah Where to see Mingei in Japan Orientalizing in Korea The flourish of wood and iron Robert Marsden The power of puppets Cool knitting The fine art of icing The writing on the wall How to get money Our past remade in China Makonde and David Mutasa Brian Clarke, glass artist The artist in residence

Reading Unpacking my library Writing The crafts in Britain in the 20th century The apprentice Making art work Lurking anxiety and a sense of loss Concrete and curlicues Revivals! Folk nationalism The corrosion of character Craft without politics Philip K. Dick’s ‘The variable man’ Distributism Let’s save the world A larger moose is better Proustian mail order Tech-tinkering from Newcastle to Nairobi Rapid prototyping: the right tool for our time? Craft conviviality The future is handmade Theatres of memory Quarrymen’s vernacular Object lessons Homesickness Why biography?

People William Morris in our time T. J. Cobden-Sanderson and the meaning of life Picasso’s ceramics Eric Gill, workman Le Corbusier, craft lover Gordon Russell, English modernist Alexander Calder and his circus Lucie Rie and reticence Isamu Noguchi and his search for roots Peggy Angus and flat pattern Barbara Hepworth and the missing biography Eva Zeisel’s search for beauty: an obituary Sam Haile, a life unfinished Marianne Straub, industrial artist Constance Howard, the embroiderer with green hair Robin and Lucienne Day Ruth Duckworth, émigré Ralph Beyer, direct and uncompromising Ann Stokes, artists’ potter Tadek Beutlich, weaver: an obituary Peter Collingwood, weaving for walls Norman Potter, dissenter: an obituary Eileen Lewenstein and a sense of duty Patrick Reyntiens, data reprocessor Gordon Baldwin and games of chance The still lives of Gwyn Hanssen Pigott: an obituary Sam Herman and free glass Gillian Lowndes’s strange transformations Carol McNicoll, slip-caster Svend Bayer and the aesthetics of denial Ron Arad: reinventing the wheel Philip Eglin, memory-traces Robin Wood, traditional radical

Two essays ‘For love and not for money’: reviving ‘peasant art’ in Britain 1880–1930 ‘Visionary rather than practical’: craft, art, and material efficiency

Tanya Harrod’s subjects range from the sculpture of Barbara Hepworth to the poetic objects-in-landscape of Ian Hamilton Finlay, from the science fiction of Philip K. Dick to the theories of Richard Sennett, from Welsh quarry slates to the fine art of icing cakes, from the ceramics of Pablo Picasso to the still lives of Gwyn Hanssen Pigott. The essays are grouped into three parts: reviews of exhibitions and events (‘Visiting’), reflections on themes and phenomena (‘Reading’), warm and historically informed portraits of makers (‘People’). Two longer essays are appended, previously published in hard-to-access publications.

When there is a clear understanding of a desired cumulative effect, a single critic’s selected essays and reviews can have real impact, offering a kind of archaeological incision through strata of time, place and activity. This compliation of design historian Tanya Harrod’s writings spans 30 years, several continents and many approaches to the essential ‘making’ of her subtitle – those areas of ‘facture’ that, as she points out, have rarely detained writers on design and architecture. …

Fluidity not rigidity, open-mindedness rather than prescription, are the qualities Harrod celebrates in these pieces, and she returns to them in one of two lengthy essays that conclude the collection. Published in that most eminent journal, the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, in 2013, it contains the essential question that Harrod poses throughout these writings: ‘How can we be modern yet be true to ourselves?’. Gillian Darley, Icon , no. 145, July 2015

Harrod’s inquisitiveness about the processes, people and politics behind craft and making couldn’t feel more contemporary; the fact that so many of the essays aren’t exactly that highlights Harrod as a writer of rare certainty, who has engaged deeply with an area often over-looked by art and design critics alike across the past three decades. Thom Swann, Grafik , April 2015

Pocket sized, this thoughtfully produced paperback reprises 30 years of essays by one of the most intelligent design historians writing today. Its scope and breadth is encyclopaedic, liminal and lateral, ranging from William Morris, the Bloomsburys and Henry Moore to Grayson Perry. Posing questions on the way such as ‘Why don’t we hate Etsy?’ and ‘What is Folk Art?’ the author teaches us to think and see beyond our learned conventions and boundaries. Ruth Guilding, ‘Best art and design books from 2015’, Evening Standard , 24 December 2015

It stands as a great work on its own and should be essential reading for all craftspeople to better understand the complexities of what it means to make things in the 21st century … Robin Wood

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THE REAL THING: ESSAYS ON MAKING IN THE MODERN WORLD by Tanya Harrod

Hyphen Press, 2015 First edition, 358 pp., 5" X 8 1/4" Softcover

Very good +

Over thirty years, Tanya Harrod has written on craft for newspapers, magazines, and journals. As these essays show, there are no boundaries in her vision: art is considered in the light of craft, and craft in the light of art; design is present too – developing and sometimes separating from craft and art. In part these essays document the development of these shifts, looking always at the particular, vivid embodiment.  The real thing  is a surprising and substantial contribution to the literature of ‘making’.

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The Real Thing: Essays on Making in the Modern World Paperback – 22 January 2015

• Print length 352 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Hyphen Press
• Publication date 22 January 2015
• Dimensions 12.6 x 2.7 x 20.8 cm
• ISBN-10 0907259502
• ISBN-13 978-0907259503
• See all details

Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Hyphen Press (22 January 2015)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 352 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0907259502
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0907259503
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 12.6 x 2.7 x 20.8 cm

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The Real Thing: Essays on Making in the Modern World Paperback – 22 January 2015

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• Print length 352 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Hyphen Press
• Publication date 22 January 2015
• Dimensions 12.6 x 2.7 x 20.8 cm
• ISBN-10 0907259502
• ISBN-13 978-0907259503
• See all details

Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Hyphen Press (22 January 2015)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 352 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0907259502
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0907259503
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 522 g
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 12.6 x 2.7 x 20.8 cm

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Real Thing: Essays on Making in the Modern World Paperback – 22 Jan. 2015

• Print length 352 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Hyphen Press
• Publication date 22 Jan. 2015
• Dimensions 12.6 x 2.7 x 20.8 cm
• ISBN-10 0907259502
• ISBN-13 978-0907259503
• See all details

Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Hyphen Press (22 Jan. 2015)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 352 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0907259502
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0907259503
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 12.6 x 2.7 x 20.8 cm
• 15,190 in Commercial Graphic Design

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Princeton University Library Catalog

The real thing : essays on making in the modern world / tanya harrod..

• Art, Modern — 20th century — History [Browse]
• Handicraft — History — 20th century [Browse]
• Design — History — 20th century [Browse]
• 9780907259503
• 60001988263

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The real thing; essays on making in the modern world.

Book Description Paperback. Condition: Good+. Color Photos; 8vo 8" - 9" tall; 358 pages; 2015 Hyphen Press. Stout trade size paperback in color pictorial french flap covers. Soundly bound and clean. Spine moderately shelf cocked from prior reading; covers lightly rubbed over flap fold edges. A handful of page with a line or two highlighted. G++. Seller Inventory # 53315

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Tanya Harrod : The Real Thing essays on making in the modern world

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Book Description Paperback. Condition: Very Good. Real Thing This book is in very good condition and will be shipped within 24 hours of ordering. The cover may have some limited signs of wear but the pages are clean, intact and the spine remains undamaged. This book has clearly been well maintained and looked after thus far. Money back guarantee if you are not satisfied. See all our books here, order more than 1 book and get discounted shipping. . Seller Inventory # 7719-9780907259503

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Book Description Soft cover. Condition: Good. Message to former owners signed by Tanya (assumed to be the author but not guaranteed) otherwise the pages are bright, unmarked and virtually like new. Minor wear at the ends of the spine but no reading creases. 5mm repaired tear at the base of the spine. Short soft crease at the lower corner of the front cover otherwise the covers have just light handling/shelf wear. Mailed the same or next working day in a cardboard book box. Signed by Author(s). Seller Inventory # 465.15

The Real Thing: Essays on Making in the Modern World book by Tanya Harrod

Book Description Softcover. Condition: Very Good. Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice book in great condition. Pages in excellent unused condition. No notes or highlighting. See images. Fantastic book. About the book >.>.> Coming out of Sheffield station, it is impossible to miss the cliff-like fa?ade of the Park Hill housing estate. It was intended as a post-war social condens- er, a city within a city, and is now in danger of demolition. Heading for the centre over the ring-road and away from this bold tribute to Le Corbusier, the traveller arrives at the Graves Art Gallery, filled with harmless paintings, the fruits of a mail-order fortune amassed by Alderman Graves. His was a hand- some gift but an unremarkable one. The really startling collection, the Rus- kin Gallery, is just around the corner. John Ruskin's collection for Sheffield was never actually given to the city and still belongs to his Guild of St George. As a realistic project the Guild must be counted a failure. Probably Ruskin never quite believed he could found an ideal society anywhere in Britain, but nineteenth-century Sheffield, with its craft traditions, slums, smoke and inequalities must have seemed the place to start. But if the Guild's value wa. Seller Inventory # Batch-FM359-VG-8627

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The Real Thing: Essays on Making in the Modern World Paperback – 22 January 2015

• Print length 352 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Hyphen Press
• Publication date 22 January 2015
• Dimensions 12.6 x 2.7 x 20.8 cm
• ISBN-10 0907259502
• ISBN-13 978-0907259503
• See all details

Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Hyphen Press (22 January 2015)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 352 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0907259502
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0907259503
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 12.6 x 2.7 x 20.8 cm

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The real thing, Tanya Harrod, essays on making (and Peggy Angus).

Tanya Harrod published  ‘The Real Thing, essays on making in the modern world,’ this week. Its essays are about art, craft and design, and the shifts and spaces in between them.These are subjects she has been thinking and writing about for 30 years. In this book you can read about the taxonomy of the rubbish dump, Barbara Hepworth’s missing archives, Eric Gill, Folk nationalism and reviving ‘peasant art’ in Britain, and on page 86, ‘Why don’t we hate Etsy ?’

Cutting a dash as a research student at Oxford.

She grew up in this Modern Movement house in Surrey, and still describes herself as a Modernist.

The house which she shares with her husband Henry Harrod  in west London is a palimpsest, containing the belongings and decorative finishes from three generations. Henry’s  paternal grandmother Frances Forbes Robertson made her home here in the 1930s, the portraits that she painted hang together in the staircase and hall. Next came her son the economist Sir Henry Roy Forbes Harrod and his energetic and strong minded wife Wilhelmina Cresswell (always known as Billa), aesthete and historian who was briefly engaged to the poet John Betjeman, complied the Shell Guide to Norfolk for him, founded the Norfolk Churches Trust and made her last home in the Old Rectory, Holt, in that interesting county. She died in 2005. Tanya’s things are C19th Arundel prints and twentieth century paintings and ceramics, almost all of them by artists and makers about whom she has written. On the Biedermier tallboy is a  ceramic Madonna and Child by contemporary artist-craftsman Philip Eglin, of whom Tanya writes in The Real Thing, ‘Studying my Madonna and Child reminds me of how learned good artists invariably are.’

The overmantle picture is by the St.Ives School modernist Terry Frost.

‘Beasties’ Wallpaper by Peggy Angus (1904-1983), designer, teacher and painter, of whom Tanya wrote this obituary when she died in 1993. The painted plate is by Philip Eglin. (You can buy Angus’s papers once again now, from Anne Dubbs at the wonderful Blithfield and Company .)

The oil painting on the left is by Tanya’s mother Maria Sax, who painted her own mother on horseback galloping away from her two small, distraught children.

Large jars by Richard Batterham, Dorset artist-potter who trained at Leach’s studio and follows the tradition of Michael Cardew and William Staite Murray. In her essay, ‘ Heroes with Feats of Clay, ‘ Tanya discusses the vexed question of why avant-garde sculptural ceramics haven’t achieved the same high status as abstract sculpture : ‘There may be yet another sticking point for many people. Western art, despite the hiccup of abstraction, is firmly rooted in literature and narrative. Most pots have no easily understood narrative content. They are, as Herbert Read was aware, marvellous examples of pure form. This self-contained remoteness …has come to seem problematic. There is a famous story about a student talking to the eminent designer David Pye. The student said that ceramics did not excite him at all. ‘Did it ever occur to you,’ asked Pye, ‘that their function might be to calm you down?’

A Zimmerlinde , a large leaved Austrian Linden or Lime tree cultivated as an indoor plant. Lucian Freud had one of these, it appears in his ‘ Large Interior, Paddington ‘ 1968-9, and several of his drawings.

‘Billa’s table.’ Her country house was anatomised and photographed for Alvilde Lees-Milne’s book,’The Englishwoman’s House’ in 1984.

Small ornaments that she arranged on its hardstone top . ‘We all liked her table so much, so we decided to recreate it.’

Tanya’s first subject was John Ruskin and the Arundel Society, the fons et origo of all her writings since on the arts and the crafts. Ruskin’s  ‘cabinet of wonders’  combing visual art, natural history collections and manuscripts made for his ideal society  The Guild of St. George , is still on show at the Ruskin Gallery in Sheffield .  Some of the nineteenth century prints of Italian Renaissance paintings published by the Society and collected by her as a postgraduate student hang in the hall, against crimson ‘Suns’ wallpaper designed by Peggy Angus and hand printed using lino-cut blocks and household emulsion in her Camden Town studio.Tanya’s essays on ‘Peggy Angus and flat pattern’ and ‘William Morris in our time,’ are published in her new book, The Real Thing.

Hanging higher up the stairs beneath Tanya’s ancestors, are portraits of the young Roy Harrod painted by his adoring mother,  some of them returned again to London from the Old Rectory in Holt.

The best bedroom with Omega-ish walls hand painted by Joao Penalva.

A painting by Stella Cardew, first wife to the composer Cornelius Cardew. Tanya’s biography of his potter father Michael, is ‘ The Last Sane Man, ‘ published in 2013. A. S. Byatt described her as ‘the perfect biographer for such a complex and gifted man,’ you can read her review here .

Spare bedroom with Billa Harrod’s Victorian shell flowers under a dome.

Peggy Angus’s original hand-blocked bathroom wallpaper ,made in her Camden Town studio. As Tanya has written,

‘The beauty of her handblock papers has been recognised above all by artists; partly because unlike most wallpapers they form the ideal background to paintings. Over the years Angus invented an extraordinary range of patterns. Many were abstract but others convey a vivid pastoral mood, making subtle use of oak leaves, heraldic dogs and birds, grapes and vines, corn stooks, stylised suns and winds. They seem rooted in the natural world and in the visual arts of the British Isles, from Celtic pattern to heraldry to the art of bargees and gypsies.’

Sailor’s tokens and shell souvenirs collected by Billa Harrod hang above the bath.They represent the kind of popular ‘folk’ or ‘people’s’ art beloved of the artist Barbara Jones , of whom I wrote in an earlier post.

Posters advertising Sir Roy Harrod’s lecture tour in Japan.

The same ‘TWIST’ pattern in a yellow colourway, printed by Blithfield and Co.

The kitchen overmantle. Drawing by their little granddaughter, a bird plate made by Seth Cardew at Wenfordbridge Pottery and assorted ceramics amassed by earlier generations of Harrods.

‘The Future is Handmade : the crafts in the new millennium,’ poster advertising Tanya’s lecture in Krakow.

Large bowl by Michael Cardew, two small apprentice pieces made by Tanya at the Wenfordbridge Pottery under the tuition of Seth Cardew , and her masterpiece biography of  his father Michael Cardew, which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.

Father and daughter. The Crafts in Britain in the 20th Century , her outstanding magnum opus published by Yale in 1999, and its beautiful offspring, The Real Thing now a 5 star read on Amazon. Its essays were written from the 1980s on, charting the period in which we changed from being a nation of producers to become a nation of consumers, as the centres of mass production moved to the far side of the world and the internet created a new virtual world of ‘infinite images.’

Tanya possesses the visual objectivity and academic rigor of the architectural scholar Nicholas Pevsner, but this is overlaid with a sensibility and humanity that makes her writing so much more nuanced, rewarding and pleasurable to read. All images (3 portrait photographs and Blithfield’s TWIST excepted) c.bibleofbritishtaste.

never fails to excite me ,wonderful.

This is such a beautiful house. I love the history. I am going to try to get some of Tanya’s books to read over here in the USA. Your blog is such a gem. I look forward to every post. Thank you.

Such a wonderful post! I love the ornaments dotted around Tanya’s home, especially those delightful shell pictures.

It is delightful to see the details of a life enchanted by meaningful things and by sharing the ideas that come with them in the world. I have had the pleasure to meet Tanya several times in Canada and once in Britain. In the final photograph she is resting her arm on a ‘sujuni’ cushion from Bihar, India from Sujuni Mahila Jeevan (Stitching Women’s Lives). All “things’ are connected in circles.

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