While Crow’s book starts with the cut and color of suits (khaki was best), it soon moves to the composition and context of canvases: The first chapter examines an early movable “Pop” mural by Robyn Denny, Great, Big Wide, Biggest, 1955, a kind of abstracted hoarding full of deconstructed Pepsi logos and hip buzzwords melding into one another that graced the wall of the Austin Reed men’s shop on Regent Street. In his tailored suits and skinny ties, Davis played “the enemy beautifully,” and though his British acolytes were almost all white, albeit lower-class, they imagined their simulation of him more in the spirit of identification and solidarity than appropriation.
Miles Davis was an important icon, and one that the mods aspired to emulate.
Photo: Mark and Colleen Hayward.Ĭrow makes his argument by sketching the figure of the mod, short for modernist, a typically male aficionado of bebop and hard bop who turned himself out in impeccable fashions apparently pilfered from the closets of the upper classes. The Beatles posing with Robyn Denny’s Great, Big, Wide, Biggest, 1963, Austin Reed, London, 1963. If, in that volume, Crow wanted to locate modern art in culture, and thus save it from what he perceived to be aloof, ivory-tower theoretical activity, in his new book, Crow does himself one better by insisting that modern art (at least in London in the late 1950s to early ’60s) not only belonged to the wider culture but was itself possessed by the spirit of the mod-in other words, that a not-so-common culture (or at least a meticulously self-fashioned one) is constitutive of modern art as it was then being imagined. (In the years since, he has returned again to French art in the wake of revolution.) Modern Art in the Common Culture (1996), a collection of essays dedicated to topics ranging from Warhol’s social import to the “unwritten histories of conceptual art,” pitted itself against the rise of visual studies, which Crow considered too visual and too horizontal in its reach: To properly understand an artwork, one had to understand its discursive formation, he claimed. In his first book, Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris (1985), he chronicled the emergence of the Salon and an attendant world of criticism, but soon after, he established himself as a key critic of postwar American and European art. By aligning this figure with the period’s artmaking, Crow forges a new canon, reimagining the art of the time-which, when considered at all, is generally called Pop-as walking a similarly tricky but ultimately beatific, indeed mythic, path.Ĭrow is an ambidextrous scholar who enjoys jumping back and forth between time periods. To make his case, Crow recovers the figure of the mod, a particular kind of English enthusiast for a particular kind of foreign product-Italian scooters, American haircuts, Black music-whom both social art history and cultural studies have maligned as a naively aspirational, self-deceiving rude boy, and claims it as a keen change agent able, against all odds, to cut a narrow (and stylish) path through the ever-closing ranks of postwar culture.
Indeed, Crow’s street-level method-we are treated to a litany of place names, hairstyles, and vivid descriptions of magazines-is part and parcel of his complaint: If art is to be meaningful, Crow seems to insist, it needs to be woven into the fabric of life just as a boutique storefront lodges itself on a city street to square it just so is the job of art history.
THOMAS CROW’S NEW VOLUME, The Hidden Mod in Modern Art: London, 1957–1969, is a meticulous account of the imbrications between artmaking and stylemaking in postwar London, flanked by a jeremiad against what its author perceives as received ideas in contemporary art history. The Hidden Mod in Modern Art: London, 1957–1969, by Thomas Crow.
Pauline Boty posing with her painting Celia Birtwell Surrounded by her Heroes, 1963, London, October 29, 1963.