22nd Jul 2011 9:30am-8:30pm
Sallis Benney Theatre
This important one-day symposium, drawing on a wide range of personal, professional and historical expertise in the field, coincides with the opening of the MacDonald Gill: Decorative Posters exhibition. This will provide an opportunity to share, promote and encourage research and scholarly activity about Max Gill and his work.
Book your place on the symposium
Visit the MacDonald Gill: Decorative Map Posters exhibition webpage
Further enquiries about the exhibition and the symposium should be addressed to:
Madeleine Meadows, m.j.meadows@brighton.ac.uk
9.00 Registration and tea/coffee
9.45 Andrew Johnston, Angela Johnston and Caroline Walker
Discovering MacDonald Gill
10.15 Dr Paul Rennie, Central St Martins
Gill and the changing nature of poster art in Britain
11.00 Break
11.15 Dr Clare A. P. Willsdon, University of Glasgow
MacDonald Gill and the British mural tradition
12.00 Professor Jonathan Woodham, University of Brighton
Max Gill’s large-scale decorative North Atlantic Map in the Queen Mary’s 1st Class Restaurant, 1936: design in a changing world
12.45 Lunch
13.45 Andrew Haslam, University of Brighton and Daniel Alexander, University of Portsmouth
Immortal alphabets, the work of Max Gill for the Imperial War Graves Commission
14.15 Professor Stephen Constantine, University of Lancaster
Max, maps and the Empire Marketing Board
15.00 Break
15.15 Elisabeth Burdon, Portland, Oregon, USA
MacDonald Gill’s Wonderground map of 1913 and its influence on twentieth century mapmaking
16.00 Plenary discussion
16.30 Close
17.30 Private view reception in the gallery. The exhibition will be opened formally by Peter Barber, Head of Cartographic and Topographic Materials at the British Library.
Book your place on the symposium
Discovering MacDonald Gill
Andrew Johnston, Angela Johnston and Caroline Walker
The Johnstons had always known of the existence of the Max Gill material in their house, but had been unsure of its extent or of what to do with it. With vague ideas of a modest exhibition, they showed the Atlantic Charter map original artwork to their friend, the celebrated illustrator John Lord. He was impressed and suggested consulting his former colleague Bruce Brown at the University of Brighton. Bruce shared John’s enthusiasm for Max Gill’s work and the idea of an exhibition re-discovering this largely forgotten artist began to take shape. At about the same time the Johnstons were contacted by Caroline Walker, Max’s great niece, who was researching a book on his life. As map after map from their collection was unrolled for Caroline to photograph, often revealing colours as fresh and vivid as the day they were printed, they were astonished by the quality of the work. Organising, documenting and photographing the material was not an easy task. The material was scattered throughout the Johnstons’ house and outbuildings, and uncovering it became something of a treasure hunt.
Finding out about the collection has also meant finding out about Priscilla and about Max. They had a tumultuous life and Priscilla’s diaries (which she always made clear she intended to be read) are fascinating. Priscilla in old age was a gentle dreamy and endlessly indulgent soul, rather deaf, with an engaging, whimsical sense of humour and the slightly abstracted air of someone who is listening to distant voices only she can hear. She was a great loss to her family. This exhibition is not just a retrospective of Max’s work but a record of his life and times and his life with Priscilla, who recorded it all in such minute detail. It is a uniquely personal exhibition.
Gill and the changing nature of poster art in Britain
Dr Paul Rennie, Central St Martins
MacDonald Gill's poster art and map designs are unusual for eschewing the formal considerations associated with modern design. Any accusation of historicism may be refuted by consideration of his various patrons, who number amongst the most progressive personalities and represent the most modern of organisations in Britain during the 1920s and 1930s.
MacDonald Gill will be identified with the pioneers, in Britain, of colour lithography as a form of dramatic visual communication. In addition, MacDonald Gill's work will be presented as providing, within this context, a unique combination of information, design and decoration. The work will also be presented within the context of industrial and economic modernisation in Britain and by reference to the personalities of design politics.
MacDonald Gill and the British mural tradition
Dr Clare A. P. Willsdon, University of Glasgow
Mural painting occupied a prominent place in Gill’s oeuvre. Given his practice as an architect, this is not surprising: murals are physically a part of rooms and buildings. However, Gill exploited their fusion of two and three dimensions in richly imaginative ways. His map murals, in tracing voyages or commemorating geographical discoveries, symbolically link ‘here’ with ‘there’ and ‘now’ with ‘then’, just as his ceiling painting at St. Andrews Church, Roker, is at once an emblem and an illusion of the Biblical ‘heavens’. This paper seeks deeper understanding of Gill’s mural practice by setting such works in the context of the ‘mural revival’ in Britain. Launched in the 1840s by the decoration of the new Palace of Westminster, this found widespread expression well into the 20th century in public buildings such as churches, town halls, and schools, as well as in private and commercial interiors.
The paper gives particular attention to Gill’s imaginative expansion of the Gothic Revival and Arts and Crafts ideal of unity – ‘art-architecture’ – which played an important part in the mural revival. His wind- and sun-dial murals unite time with space, whilst man and machine are symbiotically linked through the bold arcs and circles of his 1938 Glasgow Empire Exhibition murals. There is nonetheless an emphasis on the dignity of human labour in the Glasgow works which continues a tradition extending from Bell Scott’s Iron and Coal mural at Wallington Hall (1850s) to Brangwyn’s dock-workers, or the porters painted at the Bank of England by Gill’s cousin Colin. If MacDonald Gill’s Queen Mary mural famously celebrated ‘leisure’, his Glasgow decorations, framing doorways, made the viewer implicitly ‘step into’ their shipyard, coal-mine and factory scenes, inviting empathy with the working man. In this they anticipate Stanley Spencer’s Clydeside murals of the 1940s, and remind us that Gill was also part of a strong ‘social’ emphasis in the British mural tradition.
Max Gill’s large-scale decorative North Atlantic Map in the Queen Mary’s 1st Class Restaurant, 1936: design in a changing world
Professor Jonathan Woodham, University of Brighton
Gill’s imposing 29.9 map of the North Atlantic in the First Class dining room of the celebrated Cunard liner, the Queen Mary, was one of the ship’s largest and most visually striking artistic commissions. Gill was one of more than forty artists, designers, interior decorators and manufacturers in what was planned as an ‘all British’ ship. The role of American architect Benjamin Wistar Morris, placed in overall charge of the Queen Mary’s interior decoration, will be considered in relation to the artistic commissioning process as well as discussions about the nature of First Class dining on board ship.
In this paper Gill’s map will be examined in the context of British decorative arts and design of the interwar years. It is informed by study of a number of prime documentary materials, the most significant of which are the Cunard Archives in the Merseyside Maritime Museum, Liverpool, and in the University of Liverpool’s Special Collections & Archives in the Sydney Jones Library. The diaries of Priscilla Johnston, typographer Edward Johnston’s younger daughter and Max Gill’s second wife, also lend considerable personal insight to the Cunard First Class mural commission on which she worked with him as an assistant.
In Gill’s mural the visualizations of New York and London represented, contrastingly, a city of towering skyscrapers and progress and a city steeped in history and tradition, epitomized by such landmarks as St Paul’s and Big Ben. The two biplanes shown flying high above the Atlantic also deserve further attention in the light of Cunard’s growing concerns about the challenge emerging from the air. Other facets considered will include the role of Frank Pick, the Chairman of the Board of Trade’s Council for Art and Industry, in relation to design on the Queen Mary and his attempts to influence Sir Percy Bates, Chairman of Cunard-White Star, and contemporary design practice in Britain.
Immortal alphabets: Max Gill’s lettering for the Imperial War Graves Commission
Andrew Haslam, University of Brighton and Daniel Alexander, University of Portsmouth
The aim of this paper is to investigate how MacDonald Gill (1884 -1947) designed an inscriptional alphabet and accompanying Regimental Badge patterns, which were used to record the names of British and Empire dead and missing from the Great and Second World Wars. Max Gill’s alphabet designed for The Imperial War Graves Commission (later the CWWGC) records the names of over 1.7 million soldiers in 150 countries throughout the world. The paper will describe Max Gill’s work in designing the inscriptional alphabet and regimental badges as part of the design and administrative process between the loss of an individual soldier’s life on the battlefield and the preservation of the name in a cemetery. It will examine the process of documenting the position of the graves on the battlefields, how the names were ordered in indices, classified by location within the Cemetery Registers, verified by the next of kin with a ‘V’ Form, accessed by the public through cemetery maps using a system of plot and row coordinates and preserved through the design of Gill’s inscriptional lettering on headstones and memorials. It will examine the possible alternative forms of lettering proposed by Gill and how the lettering was drawn and reproduced both by hand, then pantograph machine and is reproduced today using computerised cutting.
Max, maps and the Empire Marketing Board
Professor Stephen Constantine, University of Lancaster
MacDonald Gill was a commercial artist, and accordingly was open to commissions from public bodies as well as from the private sector. The Empire Marketing Board was a British government organisation, established by Baldwin’s Conservative government in 1926 and eventually closed in 1933. Tariff reform and imperial preferences had been rejected by the electorate in 1923, and this taxpayer-funded organisation, nominally an offshoot of the Dominions Office, was devised as an alternative means of increasing intra-empire trade. It funded scientific research to tackle problems of production in the British Empire and to improve flows of market intelligence. However, it became best known for its efforts to persuade UK consumers to buy foodstuffs imported from the Empire instead of from foreign sources, using modern publicity and propaganda methods, including advertising posters on public billboards. Frank Pick, who had been responsible for London Underground’s publicity since 1908 (assistant managing director from 1921), became a member of the EMB’s Publicity Committee and directly involved in its public advertising activities as chair of the Poster Sub-Committee; and since Gill had previously designed map posters for the London Underground, Pick commissioned more work from him. Gill produced eight map designs for the EMB (plus some accompanying letterpress posters and the Board’s distinctive logo). Best known is his ‘Highways of Empire’ map, reproduced in an extraordinary range of sizes, in addition to illustrated maps of Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, as well as of the home countries of the UK. This illustrated talk, as well as tracing an important phase in Gill’s professional life, analyses the process by which ‘public art’ was commissioned, printed and displayed and its impact assessed.
MacDonald Gill’s Wonderground map of 1913 and its influence on twentieth-century mapmaking
Elisabeth Burdon
During his lifetime MacDonald Gill’s acclaim rested on artistic endeavours of amazing diversity; one area of particular celebrity involved the pictorial maps he designed for both governmental and private organisations. The first of these maps was commissioned in 1913 as a poster for use in the stations of the privately held Underground Electric Railways Company. The enthusiasm of the public for this poster was such that a smaller version, titled the Wonderground Map of London Town, was published for sale the following year.
On the occasion of Gill’s death in 1947 the Journal of the Royal Institute of British Architects referred to this Wonderground Map as “a cartographical masterpiece.” Its groundbreaking design, with emphasis on visual and verbal whimsy and bold primary colors, awakened a generation of cartographers to the imaginative possibilities of pictorial mapmaking. Elisabeth Burdon will discuss the distinctive features of this landmark map and the profound influence it had on twentieth century pictorial mapmaking worldwide.
Andrew Johnston
Max Gill was Andrew Johnston’s uncle, but they only overlapped by a matter of months. As a child, Andrew’s only knowledge of Max was through his aunt Priscilla, Max’s widow. Summer holidays were spent at her idyllic cottage, deep in the Sussex woods. In one small room, known as ‘Max’s studio’, a large and yellowing map was pinned to the wall – ‘The Time and Tide Map of the Atlantic Charter’. It included a detailed drawing of a man breaking up tanks and guns with a sledgehammer – an image guaranteed to appeal to any small boy. Priscilla would often talk fondly of Max and how funny and likeable he was but he remained a shadowy and insubstantial figure until very recently.
Angela Johnston
Angela Johnston knew Priscilla, Max Gill’s second wife, since 1968, having been introduced by her aunt Esther, a close friend of the Gills. Angela’s role in the exhibition has been partly defined by her previous career as a secretary and publisher’s editor. Her task was to organise and document the material for the show. In tackling this, she became increasingly fascinated by the personalities of Max and Priscilla, which have been brought to life through Priscilla’s diaries. These daily diaries were bequeathed to Andrew on Priscilla’s death in 1984, and became an invaluable source as a record not only of Max’s work but also of all the people he and Priscilla knew, loved and worked with.
Caroline Walker
Caroline Walker, an English teacher by profession, is the granddaughter of Evan Gill, one of MacDonald Gill’s younger brothers. Although she never met Max – she was born some years after his death - she had been fascinated by his maps since she was a child. Just over four years ago, curious to find out more about her mysterious great-uncle, she embarked on a quest for information, which has culminated in this exhibition. She is currently writing a biography of Max Gill and her research work, notes and photographs will eventually form part of a resource. This, it is hoped, will be available to future researchers.
Dr Paul Rennie
Dr Paul Rennie is Head of Context in Graphic Design at Central Saint Martins, London. He is widely acknowledged as an expert in the history of design, technology and communication. His most recent publications include works on the British Seaside, the Festival of Britain and the Posters of the GPO. He is the author of Modern British Posters, published by Black Dog Press.
Dr Clare A. P. Willsdon
Dr. Clare A.P. Willsdon is a Reader in History of Art, University of Glasgow, and the leading British authority on 19th/early 20th-century mural painting. Her pioneering book Mural Painting in Britain 1840-1940 (OUP, 2000) was awarded the 2002-3 international ‘Historians of British Art’ prize, and in 2008 she was appointed to the expert panel established by the House of Lords in connection with new murals for the Palace of Westminster. Other publications include chapters on murals in All Manner of Murals (ed. R. Gowing and R. Pender, 2007), and The Royal Exchange (ed. Ann Saunders, 1996); and on Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze in Image: Music: Text (ed. P. Binski and M. Pointon, 1996). She has given specialist historical advice on murals to organisations including the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Corporation of London, Skinners’ and Mercers’ Companies, and Centre international d’art mural (Saint-Savin, France).
Dr Willsdon is also an international authority on Impressionism and her book In the Gardens of Impressionism (Thames & Hudson, 2004) was nominated for the 2006 Sir Banister Fletcher ‘Best Book in the Arts’ and the 2005 National Library of Scotland/Saltire Society ‘Research Book of the Year’ awards. In 2010-11 she was Academic Adviser and co-curator for the major international exhibitions ‘Impressionist Gardens’ (National Gallery of Scotland), and ‘Jardines impresionistas’ (Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid). Contributor to the Gartenlust and Renoir exhibitions (Rome, 2008; Vienna 2007); numerous invited papers on murals/Impressionism (Comité international d’histoire de l’art congress; National Gallery, London; Fondation de l’Hermitage, Lausanne; and Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, etc).
Professor Jonathan Woodham
Jonathan Woodham is a Professor of Design History at the University of Brighton at which he is also the Director of the Centre for Research & Development in the Faculty of the Arts. He has lectured and published on many aspects of British design since the late 1970s, as well as wider aspects of design, including policies and politics. One of his most recent essays is entitled ‘Mrs Thatcher and Postmodern Design’ which is included in the catalogue for the Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970-1990 exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum which opens in September 2011. His most widely known books are the Oxford Dictionary of Modern Design (2005) and Twentieth Century Design (1997), published by Oxford University Press. The latter has been translated into Korean and Chinese and sales have approached 50,000 to date. He has also been invited to deliver keynotes at international conferences in 18 countries, and has been a member of, and panelist for, several research councils in Britain and overseas.
Andrew Haslam
Andrew Haslam graduated from the Royal College of Art in 1987. Since then he has run his own studio in London creating non-fiction science, history and geography books for children: 36 books in total published in 14 languages and sold in 22 countries. In 1994 he won the American Institute of Physics Award for Science Writing and in 1997 the Geographic Society Gold medal for most significant contribution to Geography. He has combined his studio work with teaching graphic design, typography and information design at leading UK colleges, including Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design (CSM), where he taught at both undergraduate and postgraduate level. In 1997 he became Head of Typography at the London College of Communication before returning to CSM in 2000 as Course Director for MA Communication Design. He recently moved to the University of Brighton as Academic Programme Leader for Visual Communication. He is co-author with Phil Baines of Type & Typography (2002) and Book Design (2006) and his new book Lettering: a manual of technical processes is due to be published by Laurence King in 2011. With Daniel Alexander of the University of Portsmouth, Andrew has visited over 180 craftspeople, designers and manufacturers. Part of this book featured a short section documenting the process of mechanized inscriptional lettering for the Commonwealth War Graves (CWWGC). From this initial research Andrew and Daniel gained seed funding to embark on documenting the CWWGC archives and the related cemeteries in Belgium and France.
Daniel Alexander
Daniel Alexander is a London based photographer and lecturer. He ran the photography pathway on the MA Communication Design course at Central Saint Martins, has been a visiting lecturer on the BA (Hons) Advertising and Editorial course at the University of Gloucestershire and since 2008 has been a Senior Lecturer in Photography at the University of Portsmouth where he is currently the BA (Hons) Photography Course Leader. Daniel worked as the photographer for the Lettering and Process research project funded by Central Saint Martins with designer and author Andrew Haslam. This investigated and documented the craft and design processes used to create over 100 different forms of lettering (to be published by Lawrence King in September 2011). Daniel is currently working with Andrew Haslam on a practice based research project ‘Designing the Commonwealth War Graves’, jointly funded by Portsmouth University, Central Saint Martins and the University of Brighton, exploring the representation of war and its aftermath, remembrance, and the representation of remembrance. The project will be completed in 2014 with an exhibition and book. For this, Daniel created a time-lapse film of the build of a new Commonwealth War Graves cemetery in Northern France, currently on show at the Imperial War museum. He is also currently working on 1DAY6CITIES, an international time-lapse project that is building a network of photographers and filmmakers in 6 cities around the globe who will collectively create a 24 hour document of 11.11.11. This explores contemporary methods of viewing and disseminating digital photography, and of creating online networks.
Professor Stephen Constantine
Stephen Constantine, Emeritus Professor of Modern British History at Lancaster University, is the author of Buy and Build: The Advertising Posters of the Empire Marketing Board (HMSO, 1986), and of three essays on the EMB, including ‘Bringing the Empire Alive: the Empire Marketing Board and Imperial Propaganda’, in John M. MacKenzie (ed.), Imperialism and Popular Culture (Manchester University Press,1986). These publications relate to his wider and continuing interest in the intimately related histories of Britain and of the British Empire in, especially, the 19th and 20th centuries. This theme he has explored, for example, in his The Making of British Colonial Development Policy 1914-1940 (Cass, 1984), in his edited collection Emigrants and Empire: British Settlement in the Dominions between the Wars (Manchester University Press, 1990), and in essays on child migration to the Empire. Recent publications include Community and Identity: The Making of Modern Gibraltar since 1704 (Manchester University Press, 2009) and, co-authored with Marjory Harper, Migration and Empire (Oxford University Press, 2010).
Elisabeth Burdon
Elisabeth Burdon was born in Singapore and raised in England and Australia. She received a BA (Hons) Asian Studies from the Australian National University in Canberra and subsequently a Diploma in the History of Art from the University of London; while living in London she worked in the Department of Oriental Antiquities at the British Museum. In 1980 she moved to the United States where she and her husband established an antiquarian book, print and map business in Portland, Oregon (oldimprints.com). For the past decade she has made a specialty of research into a rewarding and under-explored area of cartographic study, twentieth century pictorial maps and their makers. Her essay on MacDonald Gill’s 1913 Wonderground Map was published in the Spring 2009 Journal of the International Map Collectors’ Society. Her professional affiliations include membership in the International Antiquarian Map Sellers Association (IAMA) and the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America (ABAA).
Image: Max Gill, 'Tea Revives the World'
