Bill Condon's ‘The Fifth Estate’

Being no admirer of Julian Assange, I didn't rush to see Bill Condon's The Fifth Estate when it first came out but recently took the opportunity to do so at the Barn Cinema at Dartington. The film is a docudrama about the emergence of WikiLeaks from the time of Assange's partnering with the German IT expert Daniel Berg in 2007 up to the release of classified US information sourced from Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning in 2010 and their association ending. Assange's seeking asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in London in 2012 forms a postscript.

The film must have had a substantial budget because of the large cast, the number of extras, the CGI and the rapid changes of locale. No location seemed to be used more than twice, usually once, and the numerous sets ranged from Berlin squats to Air Force One (or maybe Two or Three), the action not staying in any of them for long. Benedict Cumberbatch turned in a convincing Assange, and, although the film is a male-dominated nerd and journo fest, it provided a couple of strong supporting roles for Alicia Vikander (Queen Caroline in Nikolaj Arcel's A Royal Affair) as Berg’s long-suffering girlfriend and Laura Linney as a senior level State Department staffer having to pick up the pieces after the Manning disclosures. Peter Capaldi, who is irrevocably the foul-mouthed spin doctor, Malcolm Tucker, from The Thick of It for UK TV audiences (the ones who will see this film anyway) until he becomes Dr Who, is cast as Alan Rusbridger, editor of the Guardian.

Unfortunately, in terms of allowing comparisons to be made, the real Rusbridger has been on UK TV recently defending his paper's role in handling the material removed from NSA by Edward Snowden. Snowden and the journalist Glen Greenwald have followed the model Assange pioneered with the initial release of the Manning material by cooperating with mainstream media outlets in the form of the Washington Post (vice the New York Times), the Guardian and Der Spiegel.

Snowden and Co have put material into the public domain of much higher classification than Manning was able to access. The US designation for this stuff is TS/SCI - Top Secret Sensitive Compartmented Information. Years ago such items might be confined to just a few documents, knowledge of whose existence, let alone accessibility, would be confined to select individuals. But now that kind of data is held on globalised IT systems and system administrators set access permissions for individual users. However, an old question arises: who administers the administrators?

When I last wrote about Snowden, on the basis of the information which had been released at that time (July), I affected what now seems too blasé a view. Earlier this month the Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament (ISC) took evidence from Sir Iain Lobban, Director, Government Communication Headquarters, Mr Andrew Parker, Director General, Security Service and Sir John Sawers, Chief, Secret Intelligence Service. (Interestingly the second and third of these men had studied science at university level, but not the first, whose responsibilities, one imagines, are the most technological). A transcript of their uncorrected evidence is available, and the impact of the Snowden release is discussed on pages 16 to 18. Sawers mentions Snowden specifically:

… What I can tell you is that the leaks from Snowden have been very damaging. They have put our operations at risk. It is clear that our adversaries are rubbing their hands with glee. Al-Qaeda is lapping it up ... and our own security has suffered as a consequence.

Further material appearing in Der Spiegel later in the month underlines his point.

In October, one of Lobban’s predecessors, Sir David Omand, had told The Times that the Snowden leaks “eclipse[s] the Cambridge spy ring as the most catastrophic loss suffered by British intelligence”.

“You have to distinguish between the original whistleblowing intent to get a debate going, which is a responsible thing to do, and the stealing of 58,000 top-secret British security documents and who knows how many American documents which is seriously, seriously damaging,” Sir David said. “The assumption the experts are working on is that all that information or almost all of it will now be in the hands of Moscow and Beijing. It’s the most catastrophic loss to British intelligence ever, much worse than Burgess and MacLean in the 1950s.”

Omand chose two names from what are often referred to as the Cambridge Five and didn’t mention Kim Philby, although it was these three who finished up as Russian house guests. Whether there was a Fifth Man, and who he was, has been the subject of speculation, the most-fingered suspect being John Cairncross. If so, he was in some ways the most Snowden-like having worked at Bletchley Park during World War 2. But in those days, although primitive computers were in use they certainly weren’t networked, and the only media he could remove was paperwork taken from only one “compartment”, in the form of one of the famous Bletchley Huts.

And who was the Fourth Man? Sir Anthony Blunt made his confession in 1964 in exchange for immunity from prosecution, though the truth (or some of it) would emerge in public in 1979. The Security Service interrogated Blunt because in 1963 an American, Michael Whitney Straight, had told the FBI that he had been a recruiter for Soviet intelligence at Cambridge in the 1930s. Straight was the son of Willard Straight and Dorothy Payne Whitney. Willard died in the Spanish flu epidemic after World War 1. Dorothy remarried and with her second husband, Leonard Elmhirst, came to SW England and in 1925 purchased Dartington Hall in Devon (SW England) where Michael Straight would finish his schooling. Which means this post ends geographically back where it started.


UPDATE 4 DECEMBER 

“The film must have had a substantial budget because of the large cast, the number of extras, the CGI and the rapid changes of locale.” 

But nonetheless it seems to have been the biggest cinematic turkey of 2013, according to Forbes’ Dorothy Pomerantz. The Fifth Estate has earned only $6 million at the box office globally on its $28 million budget, on top of which there will have been marketing costs of as much as $25 million. On average studios receive about 50% of the box office takings, so Dreamworks would be about $25 million down.

Mark Tobey at Thomas Williams

Leaving the George Grosz exhibition at Richard Nagy, I went into the Thomas Williams gallery in the same building to look at an exhibition of works by Mark Tobey (1890-1976). New York Abstract Expressionism, which dominated US painting from the mid-1940s through the 1960s, is not something which I’ve posted about (except, in passing, on Lichtenstein), or have much appreciation of. But the gallery’s catalogue, written by Thomas Williams and Hannah Tuck, proved to be extremely informative, pointing out that a poll of leading art critics in 1966:

… put Tobey as one of the six most important living artists, with Picasso, Miro, Ernst, Chagall and Bacon.

They describe Tobey’s contribution to Abstract Expressionism:

There is no doubt that when he returned to the U.S. at the end of the 1930s, Tobey was far ahead of his contemporaries. The ‘white writing’ that he had developed in England in 1935 was the first realisation of 'all-over' painting, which later became a central tenet of Abstract Expressionism, and whose most famous exemplar was Jackson Pollock. 

… lt was Tobey who provided for Pollock the final piece of artistic information that enabled him to complete his own journey towards ‘all-over’ Free Form or Abstract Expressionism. His paintings had none of Tobey's careful and quiet descent from calligraphy, and their execution was violent and brash by comparison. Pollock made the significant choice greatly to increase the scale of Tobey's images, so that they were no longer easel paintings - an entry requirement for avant-garde art in New York in the late 1940s. Nevertheless, the revolutionary core of Tobey's work, the dramatic break from artistic norms of figuration, perspective, space, form or even the composition of abstract shapes, and their replacement with paintings that had neither focal point nor boundary - that dazzling step into a territory that even Picasso and Matisse had not dared to enter - was Tobey's achievement and Tobey's gift to Pollock, de Kooning and others who followed in New York and elsewhere.

The exhibition includes an example of ‘white writing’, Untitled 1954 (above), and the pieces on show all seem to be from that period or later, but it was the account of his time in England in the 1930s which interested me, particularly given the nominal pre-occupation of this blog. During this period Tobey was based at Dartington Hall (Devon, SW England) having been invited by the Elmhirsts to join their arts centre:

Once at Dartington, he was given a splendid teaching studio in the gatehouse of the Hall and became acquainted with the other residents. These included Henry Moore, Cecil Collins, Bernard Leach, a pioneering ceramicist … 

… Tobey also made forays to London, a journey of considerable inconvenience, where he was introduced to two of the most advanced and considerable English artists at that time, Ben Nicholson and his lover, Barbara Hepworth. 

… ln 1934 three new and extraordinary pupils arrived at Dartington, Lucian, Clement and Stephan Freud, the grandsons of Sigmund Freud. For the next four years Tobey was thus able to engage with the early artistic development of Lucian. 

… As the decade came to a close at Dartington, Ben Nicholson introduced him to another expatriate refugee, Piet Mondrian. Mondrian had fled the turmoil in continental Europe in 1938 and moved into the house next door to his friend Nicholson in Hampstead, north London where they formed an extraordinary working relationship. But the friendship was hardly begun when, in the summer of 1938, Tobey made a trip to New York, and being unable to return to England as he had planned, was obliged to stay there. …

Mondrian left for the US in 1940. I posted here about the exhibition at the Courtauld last year on Nicholson and Mondrian in London, and exhibitions of Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth have been the subjects of several other posts. In none of these contexts has Tobey’s name come up, as far as I am aware*, so the Thomas Williams show, which continues until 2 November, will hopefully be a first step in raising awareness of Tobey’s significance in British art between the wars.

*Roger Berthoud’s The Life of Henry Moore makes no reference to Tobey. Its only reference to Dartington is in the context of Memorial Figure, the subject of a post here earlier this year.


UPDATE 27 FEBRUARY 2014

To my surprise, this post is still being read, so I thought it might be helpful to update it regarding Tobey’s time at Dartington, drawing on Michael Young’s The Elmhirsts of Dartington, published in 1996 by the Dartington Hall Trust. The most relevant passages are on pages 221 to 223. Young, who had been a pupil at the school, explains how Tobey was invited to Dartington in 1931 by Dorothy Elmhirst:

… Dorothy sent Mark an invitation without any specificity about what he was expected to do, and perhaps because it was so vague Mark accepted. He taught amateurs of all ages on the estate, including me. I remember sitting in his studio with other children from the school and adults from many different departments of the estate, looking very awkward, as though they had never held a brush in their hands before, but all intent on their drawing. Mark moved around continuously, making jokes and encouraging more by words than by demonstration. Everyone an artist - he at any rate believed it.

Young quotes a speech given by Tobey to a class in autumn 1931 and a description by the potter, Bernard Leach, of Tobey’s manner of teaching. Young also explains how:

Tobey discovered at Dartington the mode of painting - the 'white writing' - for which he later became world famous. It came upon him in the middle of one night in his studio above the entrance to the courtyard, with its skylight which opened on to the stars like an immensely wide-lens telescope. He was so excited he sent for his friends to come over, even at that hour. He began a long series of paintings made up of lines whitish in tone made up of brush strokes against a dark background. Leach arrived in Dartington from St Ives in Cornwall in 1932.

Young explains:

In the summer of 1932 [Leach] and Tobey left together, at the Elmhirsts’ expense, to spend a year in Japan with Japanese craftsmen. Tobey went to China as well. … The experience of Japan influenced both Leach and Tobey as artists and created a bond between them that lasted.

According to Young, the three Freud boys arrived at Dartington in 1933, Clement staying until 1936 (page 174). Young makes no mention of Henry Moore.

Henry Moore’s ‘Memorial Figure’ at Dartington Hall

I took the opportunity during a recent visit to Dartington Hall in Devon (SW England) to seek out Henry Moore’s Memorial Figure 1945/46 in the gardens. This is one of Moore’s major works, as described by his biographer, Roger Berthoud, in The Life of Henry Moore:

… Having drawn heavily on his positive, tender or Apollonian vein for his madonnas and family group studies, he now had every reason to give expression to the darker, tougher, and more Dionysiac side of his artistic character.  

Starting in autumn 1945, he was to work for the next year in parallel on two carvings which reflected both aspects of his nature. The 'tough' one was his fourth major elmwood reclining figure, the 'tender' one a stone memorial to Christopher Martin, a gentle friend who had died in 1944 of TB after ten years as head of the Arts Department at Dartington Hall in Devon. It was commissioned by Dorothy and Leonard Elmhirst, the New York heiress and Yorkshireman who had created at Dartington a community embracing light industry, agriculture, education and the arts, with a fourteenth-century manor house as its focal point. Henry's initial contact seems to have been through Kenneth Clark and Philip Hendy whom he had assisted in a Dartington-backed inquiry into the prospects for the arts in Britain.  

The fifty-six-inch-long Memorial Figure, as it was called, is perhaps the most serene and elegiac piece of Moore's entire career, perfectly balanced and harmonious from the unusually detailed head with its far-seeing gaze down through the rhythmically handled drapery and up to the sharply raised hill of the right knee. The position of the figure has something in common with the Leeds Reclining Figure of 1929, with its Chacmool parentage, but the mood could scarcely be more different. Seen in situ, the Dartington figure is the more poignant for the striking beauty of its surroundings, especially when viewed against the background of a giant Scots fir which frames the grassed and terraced tiltyard and the austerely handsome Hall. As George Wingfield Digby nicely observed, it ‘seems to lie in the womb of time with quiet assurance'. Thirty years have given the Hornton stone a patina of lichen growths, and there has been some erosion caused by rain dripping from the overhanging trees. Happily there are no scars from an incident in 1968 when someone drew in eyes and a cigarette.

The passage of another thirty years has made the patina more established and the erosion more marked. One day some difficult restoration may be thought necessary. The complementary ‘tough’ Reclining Figure 1945/46 is shown below. Purchased by Wendell Cherry in 1982, its present whereabouts seem to be a mystery. Cherry also owned the self-portrait Yo-Picasso 1901, currently in an exhibition at the Courtauld Gallery, London.















UPDATE 12 JUNE

I visited Dartington again recently in better weather with a better camera so this may be worth adding:

High Cross House, Dartington

Machines for living in:

Le Corbusier, Stuttgart 1927 and Lescaze 1932 (right)

In a post in June about the Bauhaus exhibition then running at London's Barbican Art Gallery, I mentioned that one of the first International Modern houses to be built in the UK was at Dartington in Devon (SW England). I’ve now had the opportunity to visit High Cross House which is the property of the Dartington Hall Trust, but, as the National Trust (NT) puts it: “… we are excited to be presenting it to the public under our management, working in partnership with the owners …”. The public reopening under NT auspices was in March 2012, and to quote the owners:

The National Trust will work with Dartington, owners of High Cross House, and others to build a community-led sustainable model of management and programming which will make High Cross House a local hub for contemporary arts and a new face for the National Trust.  

Following an initial period of showing the house as a “blank canvas”, there will be a rotating programme of exhibitions and installations by nationally recognised ‘names’ and emerging local artists. There will be simple organic catering on-site and an Art, Craft and Design led retail offer. 

Vaughan Lindsay, Dartington CEO, said: “We’re very excited by this new partnership with the National Trust. We hope the partnership will bring many new visitors to the estate to enjoy High Cross House, explore Dartington’s glorious grounds and gardens and find out more about our charitable programmes in the arts, social justice and sustainability”.

Philadelphia Savings Fund

Society Building (1929-32)

Leonard Knight Elmhirst (1893-1974) was the second husband of Dorothy Straight, née Whitney, (1887–1968) who had inherited her father’s fortune at the age of 17. In the 1920s the Elmhirsts took over the derelict Dartington Hall estate near Totnes in Devon as a vehicle for experiments in rural regeneration and in education. The latter would include the Dartington College of Arts (1961-2008) and the Dartington Hall School (1926-1987). In 1930 the Elmhirsts appointed William B. Curry as the School’s Headmaster. He had previously been head of the progressive Oak Lane Country Day School in Philadelphia. Oak Lane’s nursery had been designed by William Lescaze (1896-1969), a Swiss architect who had settled in the US after the First World War. This 1929 school building established Lescaze's reputation and he went on to design the first International Style skyscraper in the US (left). Curry persuaded the Elmhirsts to commission Lescaze, although based in New York, to design the Headmaster’s private accommodation, High Cross House, which was completed in 1932 and became one of the first Modernist buildings in Britain.

The 1989 description of High Cross House in Buildings of England Devon probably owes more to Bridget Cherry than Nikolaus Pevsner:

A stark geometric composition, the smooth rendered exterior concealing a structure of brick cavity walls with steel beams for cantilevers and wide spans (instead of the reinforced concrete originally specified, which was beyond the local builders). Long two-storey range to the road (originally painted grey-blue in contrast to the impractical white of the rest); entrance between garage and servants' wing and kitchen. Metal casement windows, mostly in horizontal bands. The main rooms project irregularly into the garden. Here the composition is more interesting: low SW study with rounded end and generous terrace on its flat roof serving the guest rooms over the garage; taller SE living room and adjoining dining room on a higher level.   

… The interior reflects the same aesthetic of abstract geometry: no mouldings - the smooth pressed steel doorcases were imported from America - the occasional curve, the play with different levels and with asymmetry, seen to good effect in the fireplaces with dark tiled surrounds, large marble lintels, and off-centre flues. The walls were originally painted in different tones (yellow and white in the hall, white and grey in the living room), not dead white throughout. ...

which contrasts with Pevsner’s much briefer comment in the earlier version, South Devon, published when High Cross House was only 20 years old:

… in 1933 [sic] the modern style arrived [at Dartington, buildings]… concrete plastered white, and as appropriate to Devon as they would be to California or the River Hudson, a symbol of enlightened internationalism, as it also directed the original staffing of the various departments of the Trust.

As well as the Headmaster’s House, Lescaze, together with Robert Hening, the Dartington Hall estate architect, designed a gymnasium, boarding houses, cottages and houses and the Estate Offices.

Visiting High Cross House today one comes away with the feeling that it would benefit from more curatorial input. Surprisingly the ‘retail offer’ does not extend to a Guide and although in one room visitors could tear off free descriptive sheets, the full set was not available except by photographing displayed copies. Contemporary (ie 2012) art from emerging local artists and craftspeople gives some life to what would otherwise be an empty building, as does the café, and generates some revenue presumably - I have commented here before about the maintenance problems posed by Modernist buildings (left)!  Admission is £7.20, by the way,  for non-NT members. But without too much effort or enormous cost, surely it would have been possible to recreate at least the Headmaster’s Study (below)? I can appreciate that despite the NT’s fascination with kitchens, in this case the latter’s restoration is probably impossible.
 

Is it that High Cross House, although located still in Dartington, is actually in a cultural no man’s land – the owners are happy to see the NT taking day-to-day charge, but the NT doesn’t want it to consume considerable resources by comparison with its other responsibilities?  Devon is a long way from London and Modernism (let alone Postmodernism) is a probably minority interest among the NT members who are Devonian residents or holidaymakers. The local NT’s Twitter output, NT English Riviera @NTRiviera, conveys the flavour. Perhaps Julian Fellowes could introduce the International Style and some Dartington location shooting into a future series of ITV's Downton Abbey, the current one now having reached the 1920s. There is a good precedent. In Evelyn Waugh's first novel, Decline and Fall, published in 1928, the socialite Margot Beste-Chetwynde wants to demolish her family house and commissions a young Modernist, Professor Silenus, to replace it with "Something clean and square." Modernism is no longer modern, after all.


High Cross House, Dartington, Devon, SW England, Sept 2012

UPDATE AUGUST 2015

Things have moved on since the post above was written three years ago.  The National Trust is no longer involved with High Cross House which remains the property of Dartington Hall Trust.  Downton Abbey finished its run without a flirtation with Modernism.  However there has recently been an opportunity to rent High Cross House through The Modern House estate agents.  They were looking for offers of £2500 per month and "...  potential tenants will need to make some alterations before moving in (a kitchen, for instance, will need to be installed)".  The informative brochure includes some archive images from Country Life: