KLINGENDER'S WORK ON INDUSTRY, MAN AND ART

'Art and the Industrial Revolu tlon'. By Francis D. Klingender. Edited and revised by Arthur Elton. Paladin. Price 75p.

Although the editor (and in fact co-author) of this tails, that Francis Kling. ender was 'a dedicated Marxist', he does not directly refer to the fact that he was one of those young intellectuals who, in the 1920s and 1930s, was attracted into the Nor does he say that, finally repelled by Stalinism, with its return to the drab representational art of the Victorian period and its idealized portraits of Stalip, he left the Party and abandoned active politics alLO gether, immersing himself, as he does tell us, in 'a study of the significance of animal forms in art'. This was a refuge from the political contradictions he had been unable to resolve.

On his death in the summer of 1955, the Daily Worker' accorded him an obituary in élogious terms: an honour rarely accorded to a former Party member. It did not explain why he had left the Party. A year or so later the flight of the intellectuals, including some friends of Klingender, took place following the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the Hungarian Revolution.

Klingender was undoubtedly a person of extraordinary talent and enthusiasm for his work and this book is his finest memorial. It arose out of an exhibition which he had arranged for the Amalgamated Engineering Union in 1945 on the theme The Engineer in British Life'.

Klingender studied aspects of the Industrial Revolution which had been neglected hitherto both by the economic historian and by the art historian. He showed how technology created a new environment for man in work and in living and by doing so affected art forms. He tried to make a Marxist analysis of the work produced by indusITT WILL HELP!

There's been a strike by over seas telegraphists in Santiag for the past few weeks. N Charging retorts at the Breckton gasworks, , 1878. An illustration from book by Klingender. trial designers, architects and civil engineers as well as by poets, novelists and painters.

He showed how the impressive changes in the landscape brought about by advancing industrial capitalism influenced the artists of the time. He unearthed from obscurity some of those responsible for popular prints and engravings and showed how science influenced the technique of reproduction.

The editor, Arthur Elton, has considerably expanded sections of the book and incorporated research of his own following up hints or suggestions which Klingender official telex messages can be sent in or out of the country. Well, almost. There is one way to get a cable to President Salvador Allende-the commercial ITT lines are still being worked.

BREACH OF...

A court in the central Asian republic of Tadjikistan has sent a man to jail who paid £4,000 for a bride who disappeared during the lengthy Moslem wedding celebrations.

The money was handed over to the girl's father on presentation of an itemized bill: two sheep for her face, four sacks of flour for her hair and so on.

The man, Nazri Sobirov, complained to the local prosecutor's office when the girl's father refused to refund the money. Both were subsequently jailed for offences against Soviet aw.

Practices of this kind had made. This makes it difficult for the reader to know whether the original author or the editor is responsible for the conclusions.

The black-and-white plates which illustrate this paperback edition, while none too well produced, give some idea of these contemporary works whose subjects were mines, forges, bridges, viaducts, tunnels and railways-the technical triumphs of the day.

Klingender certainly wanted to separate the achievements of the scientist or the artist from the capitalist integument in which he was obliged to work. He also wanted to still widespread in Moslem areas of the Soviet Union nearly 56 years after the October Revolution.

DRAG VICAR The trendy vicar at Oldham Parish Church will give the Whitehouse brigade something to think about.

There is an annual service at the church for the Oldham Repertory Theatre.

On previous years the guests have included Andrew Cruikshank of 'Dr Finlay's Casebook', Peter Adamson of 'Coronation Street' and Jessie Matthews, once 'Mrs Dale' of diary fame.

But this year the Rev James Bentley has invited Danny La Rue, the temale impersonator.

He will perform in a musical evening which has been written by the vicar himself. Whether he will appear in drag is not yet known. show how the more sensitive realized that the machinery which they had helped to develop became a weapon in the hands of employers to discipline and exploit the working class.

He quotes at length trom Karl Marx's toast 'The People's Paper', edited by the Chartist leader Edward Jones, which shows the contradiction between the achievements of industry and science and 'the symptoms of decay, far surpassing the horrors recorded of the latter times of the Roman empire' Marx's message of hope was 'That to work well the new-tangled forces of society, they only want to be mastered by new-fangled men—and such are the working men. They are as much the invention of modern times as machinery itself ..

The tragedy of Francis Klingender, as of many of his contemporaries who came to Marxism in the 1930s, was that they wanted to join up with the working class, the newfangled men, and became ensnared by Stalinism. Finally it repelled Klingender.

In the last years of his life Klingender was loath to speak about his political position, but it is probable that his break with the Communist Party came mainly through his disappointment with Soviet artistic development and similar questions rather than principled opposition Stalinist policies in the British labour movement.

The passage in the book which described the 'cashbox aesthetics' of the Victorian bourgeoisie provides some sort of clue.

'Accustomed to the common level of the market-place they [the triumphant capitalists] often lacked all appreciation of qualities that did not immediately suggest costliness. Minutely detailed copies of commonplace objects, either very large or very small (for both required enormous abour, banal sentiment, and heavy gold frames, amply satisfied the normal taste of the new rich, and their older landed partners in the ruling class often followed their example in this as in most other things' The Soviet bureaucracy, after stifling the experimental art of the early years of the Revolution, imposed a • rigid conformism on art and artists according to the same pretenus standards as those of the 19th century bourgeoisie.

Klingender's respect for artistic values and his desire for a revolutionary. art eventually brought him into conflict with this Philistinism displayed in official Soviet art.

The appearance of this book in a cheap edition should be welcomed. It will help to make the work of an outstanding art critic and historian available to a wider audience.

It may stimulate Marxists working in this field to carry forward the study of the relationship between art and technology and the artist and capitalist society which Klingender had so excellently begun.