New art galleries: Alicante in Spain, and three in France

Spain

Alicante is the capital of the Spanish Province of Alicante, in the south of the country near Valencia. The population of this Mediterranean port is about 340,000.

Like Holon in Israel, I suspect Alicante is a small city trying to market itself as a cultural centre. Two interesting sites have existed in the town for a long time. Firstly the Archaeological Museum, located in a renovated old Alicante hospital of San Juan de Dios. Exhibits include valuable finds from the Paleolithic era found in different sites in and around Alicante. Secondly Gravina Fine Arts Museum houses the art collection of the Alicante County Council, from the Middle Ages until 1900. The museum is located in a C17th building that was specifically converted for Gravina.

Alicante Museum of Contemporary Art, Spain.
See the modern extension to the right of the original 17th century building.

Now another important museum has opened. Alicante Museum of Contemporary Art is in the Old Quarter of town. It houses a major collection of C20th art, based largely on the works donated by Eusebio Sempere; his entire private collection of modern art! Here I am at a slight disadvantage since I was in Alicante for only a short time, don’t know much about Eusebio Sempere and I am much stronger academically on art painted before 1930.

From what I can find, Eusebio Sempere (1923-85) was born in Alicante and did his training in the visual arts locally, at the Academy of Fine Arts of San Carlos de Valencia. In 1948 he moved to Paris with a scholarship to continue his studies. There he established contact with avant-garde artist like Kandinsky, Mondrian, Picasso, Matisse and Klee. His favourite technique became the silkscreen, often using abstract and geometric elements. In 1960 he moved to Madrid. In 1964, Sempere had an exhibition in the Bertha Schaefer Gallery in New York.

Casa de La Asegurada (1685) is the oldest and most baroque civil building in Alicante. The building has had a long and varied history - it has previously been a granary and a business school, but since 1977 has been home to a contemporary art gallery which houses one of the most important C20th art collections existing in Spain today. Donated by local artist and sculptor, Eusebio Sempere, the art objects includes paintings, sculptures, mixed technique and lithographs by Spanish artists like Juan Gris, Joan Miró, Salvador Dalí and Pablo Picasso. The collection also includes non-Spanish artists like Alexander Calder, Marc Chagall and Wassily Kandinsky.

The museum was closed for major extension works and re-opened in 2011. Although the gallery walls are stark, this museum is worth visiting as it is located within Alicante's old architecture, opening onto the Plaza Santa María. And the museum is located next to the Santa Maria Basilica, a C14th gothic church built above an Islamic mosque. Most importantly the museum competes with Madrid, offering access to famous contemporary art works. And best of all, entry is free.

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Now to France.

Musee Bonnard, in Le Cannet, France 

Opened in June 2011, Musee Bonnard will be a treat for art history fans of Pierre Bonnard  (1867–1947). For the last 25 years of his life, Bonnard lived in the Cote d'Azur village of Le Cannet near Cannes, the perfect place for an artist who celebrated Mediterranean light. His sunlit rooms and gardens, filled with his wife Marthe and sundry relatives and friends, shined with intense colour. The opening exhibition starred 40 of his paintings, including Late Impressionist-Nabi landscapes and still-life paintings with textured surfaces.

Musee Lalique opened in July 2011. Immediately following the First World War, René Lalique (1860-1945) chose to build his factory in Wingen-sur-Moder, a village in northern Alsace. Today this is the only place where Lalique crystal is still produced, so it is sensible that a museum dedicated to his artwork, from small jewellery to large architectural looking objects, be located in Wingen.

Lalique art objects, Wingen-sur-Moder, France

Two-and-a-half hours southeast of Paris, in the part of Champagne that borders Burgundy, is a lovely little village where Pierre Auguste Renoir (1841-1919) and his family spent 30 years of their happiest summers. Since February 2011, art pilgrims and visitors to Essoyes have been able learn about the life of the family in Renoir's studio, Du Côté des Renoir, and enjoy the landscape from vantage points where the artist painted. Visitors can also pay homage at his grave site in the local cemetery.

Du Côté des Renoir, Essoyes, France



Ten Pound Poms: from Britain with love

Japan had bombed Darwin almost with impunity during World War 2. After the war ended, the Prime Minister Ben Chifley recognised that Australia needed a long-term strategy for defending the nation against any future invasion. He also recognised that the Australian labour force had suffered under the strains of total war and from massive death/injury rates to its young men. With only 7 million citizens, Australia needed to Populate Or Perish.

Skilled and fit workers were desperately needed. Orphaned children from Britain had been sent to the old British colonies for several decades, but how many orphans did Britain have? Desperate times called for vigorous measures.

Advertising poster, showing a well integrated British family settled into Australian life, Victoria Museum.

The Ten Pound Pom scheme was established i.e an assisted migration scheme that operated in Australia from 1946 onwards. Adult migrants were charged only ₤10 for their fare (a fraction of the true ticket cost) and children travelled for free. Priority was indeed given to British citizens, but workers and their families from all Commonwealth countries were welcome. Of the 400,000 people in Malta, for example, 140,000+ people left on an assisted passage scheme, 60% of them to Australia.

But while working class families were actively recruited, the screening was nonetheless intense. The father in each family needed to be in sound health, under the age of 45 years and ready to work. Every member of the family was given a physical health examination and some sort of intelligence test. People who might drain the health services in Australia were discouraged from applying.

400,000+ British citizens registered at Australia House in London for the project, in 1947 alone! Most were from ordinary, solid working families.

The programme worked very well for Australia, of course, but also for Britain. Seductive recruitment films were shown all over Britain, advertising a life of full employment and freestanding housing, a sunny climate and a sporty or beach-based lifestyle. Britain was still in the grip of bombed out cities, food and petrol rationing, and ex-servicemen looking for employment. And, I suspect, Britain was happy enough to have its working families sent out to the old colonies, to provide “breeding stock” for a vigorous British Commonwealth.

It also worked out very well for the shipping companies. Bunk accommodation on refitted troop ships was at first all that could be provided. Then shipping companies started to compete for the lucrative migrant trade and standards became quite classy.

Passengers welcomed off the SS Strathnaver. Daily Telegraph Sydney, March 1959.

How white was the programme? Australian politicians may have stopped talking about the White Australia Policy, but they still believed Britain had the best quality of citizen. So they looked to Britain (and then to northern European countries like Netherlands) for immigrants, believing that such people would more easily assimilated into the Australian community. Only when applications from British and Dutch migrant families dwindled (in the 1960s) did Australia gradually extend its assisted passage schemes to immigrants from other countries. By focusing on Italy, Greece and Yugoslavia, it was thus possible to maintain the very high levels of immigration enjoyed since the war.

Much of the early accommodation in Australia consisted of disused army camps-cum-hostels where migrant families could remain for up to a year. The goal was to give them training, to help them settle into the Australian community and to find well paid jobs. Fortunately the Nissan huts were gradually replaced with proper buildings and improved facilities.

If migrants returned home to Britain within two years of landing on Australian shores, they had to pay back the true costs of bringing their entire family out on the Ten Pound Pom Scheme. If they fulfilled their two years requirement in Australia, they were free to stay or go as they liked. An estimated quarter of the Ten Pound Poms left Australia within a few years of their arrival, either because they missed Britain and their families desperately, or because the migrant experience in Australia was tough eg the migrant hostels were fairly bleak or the work was too physical. Returnees were referred to as Boomerang Poms.

residential huts, Bathurst Migrant Camp, 1951. National Archives of Australia 

1969 was the peak year for the scheme with 80,000+ people sailing or, by that time, flying to Australia for ₤10. I didn’t realise this but one of the most famous Ten Pound Poms is Prime Minister Julia Gillard who migrated with her Welsh family in 1966. The Bee Gees migrated in the late 1950s from Manchester. Hugh Jackman’s parents and siblings were Ten Pound Poms in 1967.

I asked my in laws how they chose Australia as their forever home. It was easy, they said. They applied for visas to South Africa, Australia, Canada, USA and Argentina. Whichever nation responded first, they would accept. Just as well it was Australia. These impoverished Ten Pound Czechs worked hard from the day they arrived in 1952, providing their children with a lovely home, university education and professions. And me with a fine husband.

Ten Pound Poms: Australia's Invisible Migrants, written by Hammerton and Thomson, told the story of the million plus Britons who emigrated to Australia between 1946 and 1970s. To document migrant life histories, the authors drew on letters, diaries, personal photographs and hundreds of oral history interviews with former migrants, including those who settled permanently in Australia and those who eventually returned home to Britain. It was published by Manchester University Press in 2005.

Southern Cross immigration poster, Victoria Museum (date?)

I also like Adventure Before Dementia where the author published her mother's experiences, both en route to Australia and after the family arrived. The photos, diary entries and menus provide wonderful material for the family to relive and for other readers to examine.

Frank LLoyd Wright and Ennis House

Ennis House is an impressive home in Los Angeles, designed in 1923 by Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959) for Charles and Mabel Ennis, the owners of a men's clothing chain. Built in 1924, the first thing a viewer notices is that the property is spread over half an acre, along a ridge with awesome views of the Hollywood Hills.

The second thing to notice is the design. The structure is the largest of Wright's Los Angeles-based “textile block designs” i.e using thousands of interlocking, pre-cast and patterned concrete blocks. Concrete was still considered a new material for home construction in the 1920s, so Wright’s materials were certainly cutting edge. But more than that. The detail that immediately stands out is the relief ornamentation on its concrete blocks, inspired by the symmetrical reliefs of ancient Mayan temples.

Ennis House exterior, with amazing views

Wright built four houses with the textile block design – La Miniatura, Ennis House, Freeman House and Storer House. But I did not think it was attractive. Even Wright himself said “What about the concrete block? It was the cheapest and ugliest thing in the building world. It lived mostly in the architectural gutter as an imitation of rock-faced stone. Why not see what could be done with that gutter rat? Steel rods cast inside the joints of the blocks themselves and the whole brought into some broad, practical scheme of general treatment, why would it not be fit for a new phase of our modern architecture? It might be permanent, noble beautiful.”

Architectural Digest (October, 1979) agreed, saying: "The Ennis House is one of the first residences constructed from concrete block. Wright transforms cold industrial concrete to a warm decorative material used as a frame for interior features like windows and fireplaces as well as columns. His 16” modular blocks with intriguing geometric repeats invite tactile exploration. The art glass windows and doors, reminiscent of examples from the earlier prairie period, here achieve greater colour suddenly as they graduate in intensity from darker at the top to lighter at the bottom. The metal work based on Mayan imagery is not of Wright's design, and may have been included at Mr Ennis' request. Yet from the very large iron grill at the main entrance to such minute details as light switches and lock plates, there is a unity of conception and materials that complements the entire structure."

I wonder why the house was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, but built and supervised by his son, Lloyd Wright. And I wonder why the early, horizontal Prairie Style was not utilised here. Because California was substantially different, in climate or in taste, from Chicago? Was the Prairie Style too arts and craftsy, and too early C20th for the sophisticated 1920s? It seems that Wright felt typecast as the Prairie house architect so he used the Los Angeles era to broaden his architectural vision.

In any case Mr Ennis was a passionate scholar of Mayan art and architecture, even before he had discussions with the architect.

The house consisted of two buildings, the main house and a smaller staff flat, separated by a paved courtyard. Unlike the vertical orientation of the other three textile block houses, the Ennis House has a long horizontal loggia spine on the northern side connecting public and private rooms to the south.

living room, then steps up to the dining room

In 1940 the house was sold to a new family and then altered by Wright, adding a pool and some rooms. Augustus Brown, who owned the property from 1968 to 1980, was the last private owner of the Ennis house. To ensure its safe keeping, Brown created the Trust for Preservation of Cultural Heritage, now the Ennis House Foundation.

There had been structural problems with the Ennis House since the beginning; the concrete blocks had cracked and the lower sections of the walls had moved. The concrete was a combination of gravel, granite and sand from the site, mixed with water and then hand-cast in aluminium moulds to create the blocks. It took 10 days for each block to dry before it could be stacked into position.Perhaps using decom­posed granite from the site, to colour the textile blocks, introduced impurities to the concrete mix. And combined with Los Angeles’ specific air pollution problems, perhaps this had caused the concrete to moulder.

Nonetheless Wright firmly believed concrete held potential as a material for affordable housing.

More damage occurred due to the 1994 Northridge earthquake and the record rain in 2004-2005. The Ennis House Foundation was very worried about the millions of dollars it would take for the full restoration project.

In 2005 the house was added to the National Trust for Historic Preservation's list of the Most Endangered Historic Places. In 2006 a Federal Emergency Management Agency grant was issued and the restoration work went ahead. The house has since been declared a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument.

dining room

In June 2009 the Ennis House Foundation put the house on the market, with an asking price of USA $15 million. In July 2011, The Ennis House Foundation announced that the sale would ahead, but for only $4.5 million (£2.8 million), as long as the new owner agreed to allow public open days on 12 days of the year. He did.