Peter Campbell and the Art of Book Design

For over ten years Peter Campbell reviewed art exhibitions for the London Review of Books. His writing was one of the main reasons I began subscribing to the magazine. He died in 2011. Last month, the LRB published a wonderful new essay by him - “In the Print Shop.” It contains a footnote: “Peter Campbell began writing this piece in 2010. It was left unpublished at the time of his death the following year.”

Campbell’s essay celebrates the craft of printing. It begins with an extraordinary description of his experience working in a New Zealand print shop. Here’s an excerpt:

It was noisy in Harry H. Tombs Ltd, the New Zealand print shop where I served a small part of an apprenticeship that would have made me a compositor. I worked upstairs in the composing room where the rhythm was set by the Linotype machines: the tap of the keyboard, the rustle of the matrices sliding from the magazine into their place in the line, followed, when the line was full, by a heavy thump as the spaces were wedged home. There were clanks and bangs as the line of matrices was offered up to the mould and the molten type-metal that glistened in the crucible behind was injected. The hot, bright line of newly cast type joined others in the tray with a metallic slither. Meanwhile, we hand-compositors stood at our frames and quietly clicked type into our composing sticks for the odd heading or display line, or dissed it, dropping used type back into the case with a louder click. We assembled the metal lines of type (called slugs) and titles and any other elements of the printed page, and grouped them together with other pages for printing, creating what was known as a forme. From time to time there would be a thump as one of us heaved a forme (four, eight or sixteen pages of type weigh a lot) up onto the stone – the metal table on which they were put together. The pages of the forme were wedged into a metal frame, the chase, where they were held firm by quoins (wedges). A hoist creaked as the finished formes were lowered to the ground-floor press room.

The piece goes on to discuss Linotype and Monotype printing, the design of typeface, and the beauty of letterpress printing:

Letterpress has its own aesthetic. A raised surface – type and blocks – is inked. When it is pressed against a sheet of paper, the raised surface digs into it. It was the tactile quality of the object as much as the detail of the image that distinguished the private press books made around the end of the 19th century from the smooth, commercially printed pages of the books they wanted to improve on. Handmade paper and an even, black impression make the page a three-dimensional object, not a two-dimensional image. 

Campbell’s absorbing essay kindled my own thoughts on book design. My idea of the ideal book is the harmonious marriage of text and picture, elegant serif font, vivid color, wide margins, and texture, texture, texture! Such a book is T. J. Clark’s gorgeous If These Apples Should Fall (2022), published by Hudson & Thames. Such a book is Geoff Dyer’s ravishing The Street Philosophy of Garry Winogrand (2018), published by the University of Texas Press. Yes, these are my models. If my house was burning down, these are the books I’d grab.  

June 3, 2024 Issue

Notes on this week's issue:

1. Jackson Arn, in his absorbing “The Perfectionist,” writes,

Nearly as revelatory is the show’s collection of Brancusi’s photographs, many documenting his work, though what they reveal is still an open question. His friend Man Ray scorned them. Peter Campbell, the longtime art critic for the London Review of Books, thought them more enduring works than the sculptures themselves.

Brancusi a photographer? I didn’t know that. Arn’s reference to Campbell sent me looking for his article. I found it in the July 20, 1995 London Review of Books. It’s titled “Inconstancy.” Campbell calls Brancusi’s photos of his studio “considerable works of art.” He says that Man Ray was “dismissive of the quality of the pictures but Brancusi was, in fact, a much better photographer, not only of his work, but of himself, than his friend was.” 

What? Brancusi better than Man Ray? I don’t think so. The Centre Pompidou website, where the Brancusi retrospective (the subject of Arn’s review) is on display, shows only two Brancusi photos, neither of them all that remarkable, certainly not in the league of Man Ray’s great “La Révolution Surréaliste” (1930). Or am I missing something? This subject merits further study. 

2. Alex Ross has done it again. He’s seduced me with another of his exquisite music descriptions. In his “Thoroughly Modern,” a review of a recent Yuja Wang recital at Disney Hall, in Los Angeles, he writes,

After intermission came Chopin’s four Ballades—if not the highest summit in the piano repertory, then one of its hairier ascents. Mastering the exuberantly moody First Ballade is one of the age-old tests of conservatory training: on YouTube, you can find Wang giving an excellent, if somewhat studied, performance of it at her Curtis Institute graduation recital. The other three Ballades move beyond the familiar welter of Romantic emotion into zones of volatility and violence. The Second Ballade—which may or may not have been inspired by an Adam Mickiewicz poem about Polish maidens fleeing from Russian soldiers—begins with a pastoral siciliano in F major. Wang lingered over the passage with unaffected tenderness, giving just a twinge of emphasis to its bittersweet chromaticism. It trails off with a series of A’s that, in Wang’s hands, rang like a distant bell in a valley—the prelude to a brutal A-minor assault.

That “Wang lingered over the passage with unaffected tenderness, giving just a twinge of emphasis to its bittersweet chromaticism” is superb. But Ross is just getting started. His description of Wang’s rendition of Chopin’s Fourth Ballade is inspired:

The Fourth Ballade stages a climactic collision of extremes. It begins with seven bucolic bars in C major, which turn out to be a prelude to a mournful F minor. At the end of the initial passage comes a solitary, exposed C: Wang rendered it with a sudden coldness, signalling the transition to the minor. Such nuances of articulation are essential to persuasive Chopin playing. The oasis of C major returns just before the coda, this time reduced to five pianissimo chords. Wang struck the first of these with a dry, plain tone; then her touch softened, so that the chords subsided into a somnolent haze. After a split-second pause, the coda exploded with concussive force. These events didn’t feel plotted in advance: Wang seemed lost in the music, in the best way.

Wow! I’m not a classical music fan. But Ross has a way of melting my resistance. After reading his superb review, I spent the evening blissfully watching YouTube videos of Wang performances. She’s absolutely mesmerizing! I think I'm falling in love with her. 

Top Ten Exhibition Reviews: #7 Peter Campbell's "At Tate Modern"

Mark Rothko, Red on Maroon (1959), section four of the Seagram mural

Sometimes a single line impinges my consciousness, imprinting itself in my memory. Example: “It is as if the picture was a radiator the heat of which drives you back.” I read that and became an instant Peter Campbell fan. It’s from his wonderful “At Tate Modern” (London Review of Books, October 23, 2008; included in his 2009 collection At…), a review of Tate Modern’s Rothko: The Late Series. The picture referred to is unidentified. Campbell described it as a “single canvas” filling most of one of the long walls. Is it Rothko’s rich “Red on Maroon” (1959)? Even a digital reproduction of that beauty radiates heat. Actually, Campbell’s evocative description could apply to almost any of Rothko’s deep red-on-maroon or red-on-red-on-red or black-on-purple-on-black murals, in which, as Campbell noted, “glazes, underpainting, overpainting, and the contrast between matt and gloss surfaces all have a part to play.”

Peter Campbell (April 16, 1937 - October 25, 2011)

This is my tribute to Peter Campbell, who died October 25, 2011. Campbell worked for the London Review of Books from its inception, in 1979, as designer, illustrator, and art reviewer. He was a brilliant contemplator of art. As Mary-Kay Wilmers says, in her tribute to Campbell (“Diary,” London Review of Books, November 17, 2011), his pieces about exhibitions “take you with him into the gallery.” His art writing was, for me, a great source of pleasure. His connection with The New Yorker is non-existent, but I often read him in conjunction with pieces I’d read in the magazine. See, for example, my posts “Norman Rockwell: Campbell v. Schjeldahl v. Updike” (February 7, 2011) and “Werner Herzog’s ‘Cave of Forgotten Dreams’: 3 Reviews” (June 9, 2011). The origin of my interest in his writing traces back to his review of a Joan Eardley exhibition that appeared in the December 13, 2007, LRB, titled “At the National Gallery of Scotland.” I have a clipping of it here in front of me as I write this. It’s filled with my underlinings. I love descriptions of art. The Eardley piece contains several beauties, including this inspired line: “de Kooning in America made pictures in which the bones of an unseen landscape seem to direct the reading of a field of abstract marks.” How fine that “bones of an unseen landscape”! The clinching review – the one that made me a devoted follower of his LRB columns – is the one he did on the Tate Modern exhibition “Rothko: The Late Series” (“At Tate Modern,” London Review of Books, October 23, 2008). I have that clipping here in front of me, as well. Looking at one of Rothko’s great red-on-maroon Seagram murals, he says, “It is as if the picture was a radiator the heat of which drives you back.” Campbell also had an appreciative eye for items of material culture (e.g., the “bicornual” basket from the rain forests of north-eastern Queensland, which he noted in his piece “At the British Museum,” London Review of Books, June 16, 2011, as follows: “Its sculptural curves are emphasized by the way the strands of cane from which it is made follow swelling contours. It is a wonderful, evolved design”). In 2009, At …, a rich collection of Campbell’s art writings was published. I count it among my favorite books.

"Rooms with a View: The Open Window in the 19th Century"

Even though it’s been over two months since I read Peter Schjeldahl’s stimulating piece on the Met’s “Rooms with a View: The Open Window in the 19th Century” (“Inside Story,” The New Yorker, May 2, 2011), I find myself still grappling with what he meant by “otherizing” (“It needs only a sense of external reality that is not other to the self but, rather, otherizing”). I see Sanford Schwartz, in his excellent review of the same show (“Looking into the Beyond,” The New York Review of Books, June 9, 2011), agrees with Sabine Rewald’s interpretation of the “open window” pictures. He says, “Sabine Rewald writes that the open window, as Friedrich and some of her other artists saw it, is about ‘yearning’ and ‘unfulfilled longing,’ and surely this is right.” You’ll recall that Schjeldahl held that “the notion of longing reduces the complexity of Friedrich.” Both Schwartz and Schjeldahl hazard other constructions, as well. For example, Schwartz says, “As his window drawings make clear, Friedrich’s deepest subject was not the force and pageant of nature but our response to it – how we literally approach the world from outside ourselves – and it took him years to find a way to express this most fully.” It’s fascinating to read the thoughts of these two great critics as they attempt to tease out the meaning of Friedrich’s window views. Both seem to reach for psychological explanations. But I wonder if the meaning isn’t right there on the surface, in the precision of the drawings, in the depiction of light coming in the windows.

Postscript: Since posting the above, I’ve read Peter Campbell’s excellent “Am I intruding?” (London Review of Books, November 3, 2011), a review of Sabine Rewald’s Rooms with a View: The Open Window in the 19th Century. Regarding Friedrich’s window pictures, Campbell notes “Friedrich’s cool insistence that you enter his anonymous space and find its unspecified meaning for yourself.” He says, “It isn’t the painting itself but the stage it offers the imagination that is effective.” He talks about “Friedrichian poetics” – the poetry of solitude, of “feelings about being alone in a bare room.” He says, “The exercise Friedrich’s window pictures offer the imagination comes more often with poetry. Most obviously, in the last lines of Larkin’s ‘High Windows’” (“And immediately / Rather than words comes the thought of high windows: / The sun-comprehending glass, / And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows / Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless”).

Werner Herzog's "Cave of Forgotten Dreams": 3 Reviews

Behold the gorgeous use of “ripple” – one of the English language’s great tactile words - in two recent reviews of Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams. Julian Bell, in his “Werner Herzog and the World’s Oldest Paintings” (NYR Blog, May 4, 2011) says:

But finally we surrender to the flow of their art, immersed at length in the interplay of torchlight, rippling cave flanks, scorings, charcoalings and red ochre.

That “rippling cave flanks” is superb. The whole sentence is sublime – one of the best sentences that I’ve read in a long time. Amazingly, Anthony Lane, in his “In The Dark” (The New Yorker, May 2, 2011), comes close to topping it. He says:

Above all, we return to the animals, which are sketched with gusto not on flat surfaces but on constant bumps and curves. The effect – perhaps, the original intention, under flickering flame light – is to ripple them into the illusion of perpetual motion.

Lane’s use of “ripple” as a verb is inspired. I need to see this film! A third review – Peter Campbell’s “In The Cave” (London Review of Books, April 28, 2011) provides the clinching description:

Herzog leads you to a place you will never visit and the sense inside the cave that the 3D image produces makes it all the more tantalizing. You want to get your own torch and walk where the film-makers walked.

I’m certainly tantalized. I can hardly wait to feast my eyes on Herzog's film.

Credit: The above artwork is titled "The Panel of the Lions, Chauvet Cave"; it's used to illustrate Julian Bell's "Werner Herzog and the World's Oldest Paintings" (NYR Daily, May 4, 2011).

Norman Rockwell: Campbell v. Schjeldahl v. Updike

It’s interesting to see how three first-rate critical minds channel Norman Rockwell. Recently, London Review of Book’s art critic, Peter Campbell, reviewed Dulwich Picture Gallery’s exhibition of Rockwell’s works, saying that, “The artwork is pukka oil painting” ("At Dulwich Picture Gallery," London Review of Books, January 20, 2011). I confess when I read that, I didn't know what "pukka" meant. I'm still not sure. At first glance, I thought Campbell was saying that Rockwell’s pictures made him ill. I recalled Peter Schjeldahl saying something similar a number of years ago in a New Yorker review of a Rockwell retrospective. Schjeldahl said, “The absolute absence of mystery in his art makes me sick” (“Fanfares for the Common Man,” The New Yorker, November 22, 1999; included in Schjeldahl’s great 2008 collection Let’s See). But I see in the dictionary that “pukka,” though it looks and sounds ugly, is actually an adjective of praise, meaning either “genuine” or (informal) “excellent.” So what's Campbell saying? I interpret his statement to mean that Rockwell’s artwork is high quality oil painting. The problem with this interpretation is that it conflicts with what he later says in his review: “He was a terrific phenomenon, not a terrific painter.” When Campbell says this, he’s responding to a remark made by Schjeldahl (“Rockwell is terrific. It’s become too tedious to pretend he isn’t”) that is quoted in the Dulwich exhibition catalogue. I take it that when Campbell says that Rockwell is a terrific phenomenon, he’s referring to Rockwell’s ability to paint the telling image. Campbell says, “The end to which Rockwell worked was the telling image, not the precious artefact.” But, when Campbell looks at some of Rockwell’s images, he finds, “hopeful platitudes,” “winsome notions,” “a folksy version of the American dream.” In perhaps the finest sentence in his piece, Campbell says about Rockwell’s comic images, “The gestures and expressions, like those in silent movies, caricature real frowns and smiles – over-salt and over-sweet.” I detect ambivalence at the heart of Campbell’s review. He likes Rockwell’s painting technique, but he's not crazy about his subject matter.

Peter Schjeldahl, in the aforementioned New Yorker review, says something similar, only his reaction to some of Rockwell’s images is much more intense. For example, in regard to Rockwell’s Girl at Mirror (1954), he asks, “Why, oh why, must she have a goddam movie magazine on her lap?” He answers: “O.K. I know. Rockwell’s principled sense of narrative cogency demanded that every visible action have a visible cause. But the effect is suffocating.”

But Schjeldahl also says, “Rockwell painted well.” He describes Rockwell’s technique as follows:

His surprisingly large, dense, and sumptuous canvases seem excessive to the requirements of designs for magazine covers. He mastered a sort of hurry-up chiaroscuro, starting with a transfer drawing that was derived from many preliminary sketches, photographs, and oil sketches, and then working out tones in a warm grayish-purple, Mars violet. Then he would apply varnish, so as not to disturb the painting’s underlayer while he revised the scumbled lights and shadows to construct images that are at once photographically vivid in their details and painterly over all.

Schjeldahl’s opinion is that “Rockwell is some kind of great artist.” This, too, seems a shade ambivalent; but when you consider the illness and suffocation that Schjeldal says he feels when he looks at Rockwells, it’s also downright generous. Is there a way of appreciating Rockwell’s art that doesn’t mix negative with positive?

Let’s seek a third opinion. John Updike, in a review called “Tote That Quill” (The New Yorker, August 14, 1978; collected in Updike’s superb Hugging the Shore, 1983), says this about Rockwell:

One must turn to America’s Great Illustrators to see how he evolved from a young imitator of J. C. Leyendecker, even to the showily parallel brushstrokes (Post cover, 1919), into a hyper-realist whose barbershop interior (Post cover, 1950) yields nothing in skill and reflective interplay to a Richard Estes. It differs from an Estes in the coziness of the details Rockwell has chosen to illuminate, and in its central cozy implication that at the back of every small-town barbershop lurks a bunch of music-loving old men; but the barber chair, the reflected light on the stovepipe, the crack in the corner of the big window the viewer is looking through – this is amazing painting.

Updike liked that picture of the barbershop interior (it’s Shuffleton’s Barber Shop, 1950) so much that, in a piece titled “Acts of Seeing” (included in his great collection More Matter, 1999), he described it again, savoring every detail:

The boots and rubbers, for instance, in front of the stove, with its red-hot coals, and, in the diagonally opposite corner, the ghostly row of old shaving mugs in the top cells of the obsolete cabinet, between the ceiling fixture of frosted glass and the little gooseneck lamp. One’s eye, traveling around the edge of the painting, encounters a whisk broom, an Indian-shuttered window frame, a porcelain basin, a rack of comic books, two knobbed chairs, a mullion with parched putty, a carved crack in the corner of a window pane, a spindleback settee, shelves holding old magazines, a gun, fishing tackle, and all along the top, the gilt appliqué letters spelling BARBER. The eye naturally swoops through the front window to the luminous, man-crammed rectangle of the back room, skimming through the shadows of the closed shop, past the listening cat, the magnificent old barber chair, the hairy broom, the little cracked mirror, the wartime poster of a torn flag, into the bright chaste chamber where music is made. The most brilliant passages of painting, perhaps, depict the standing violinist, all but dissolved in light, and the reflections on the foreshortened piece of stove pipe leading into the wall. But the illustration is saturated in every corner with an avid particularizing that allows us to forgive the cuteness of the cat and the stagey quaintness of the whole, the idealization of small-town life.

If you believe, as I most certainly do, that art is in the detail, you will likely find that Updike’s extraordinary description of Rockwell’s Shuffleton’s Barber Shop clinches the case for Rockwell’s greatness. After you read a passage like that, concern about the meaning of “pukka oil painting” seems irrelevant.

Credit: The above illustration is Norman Rockwell's Charwomen in Theatre - Study (1946).