Shadow Sites

Photography, Archaeology, and the British Landscape, 1927-1955

Bibliographic Data

ID9804297
AuthorsPeter Mandler (0000-0003-0619-171X, Canisius College, corresponding author)
Year2008
Volume123
Issue503
Pages1084-1085
Publication date2008-08-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueThe English Historical Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0013-8266 • E-ISSN: 1477-4534
PublisherOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/ehr/cen216
OpenAlexW2003239780
LanguageEN
Citations received9

In the 1980s, when there was much historiographical discussion of ‘rural nostalgia’ in modern British culture, art historians played their part by excavating a ‘Neo-Romantic’ current in British art from the 1930s to the 1950s. Lumping together a loose collection of artists and critics—among them Paul Nash, Geoffrey Grigson, John Piper, the artists and writers behind John Betjeman's Shell Guides, the artists employed in Kenneth Clark's war-artists scheme and the contemporaneous ‘Recording Britain’ project—this ‘Neo-Romantic’ current blended modernist and historical tendencies in a ‘registry office marriage of [Samuel] Palmer and Picasso’, peaking during wartime and petering out only gradually in the 1950s, with Basil Spence's Coventry Cathedral marking something of an endpoint. In Shadow Sites, Kitty Hauser picks up and greatly extends and deepens this ‘Neo-Romantic’ theme. First of all, she specifies with more clarity and conceptual sophistication what was distinctive about the Neo-Romantic sensibility. She defines it as a ‘way of seeing’, focused on the English landscape, in which a dizzyingly layered array of multiple pasts is seen simultaneously with (sometimes literally framed by) modernity. This way of seeing the past in the present distinguishes, in her view, the ‘counter-modern’ Neo-Romantic sensibility from more explicitly anti-modern preservationist or nostalgic viewpoints (it may also represent the stylistic prestige of modernism to any avant-garde of the time, even one that might wish to look backward). Second, she suggests that the development of the photographic art enhanced the practical as well as aesthetic appeal of Neo-Romanticism by providing a medium that was particularly good at recording—even revealing—hitherto hidden details, or traces, of the past. The most intense application of this capacity came in the 1920s with the advent of aerial photography, and the discovery of new views of the past revealed uniquely in ‘shadow sites’, ‘soil marks’ and ‘crop sites’ visible only from above. Consequently, third, she demonstrates the infusion of the Neo-Romantic sensibility into the more aesthetic end of the archaeological profession, particularly through the agency of Osbert Guy Stanhope Crawford, Archaeology Officer of the Ordnance Survey, founder of the journal Antiquity in 1927, and a kind of hidden patron of Neo-Romanticism (and, not incidentally, also the subject of Hauser's next book). For Hauser, Antiquity was such a quintessential Neo-Romantic product that she is nearly inclined to rebadge the sensibility as itself ‘archaeological’, using the palimpsest of the past to give roots to the anomic modern subject

Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · Art history · Historicism · Historiography · Literature · Modernism (music · Modernity · Painting · PICASSO · Romance · Sensibility · Shadow (psychology · Theme (computing · Archaeological Research and Protection · History · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration · Philosophy · Photography and Visual Culture

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