| Books By Peter Lord |
Peter Lord |
| Collector and Historian , Visual Culture of Wales , September 7, 2025 |
Books reviewed below:1st December 2023 “The Art of Music” “The Art of Music is a dense text, filled with painstakingly collected evidence: on harpists, song publishers, eisteddfod-goers and gentry enthusiasts, lyricists and composers, postcard artists and popular printmakers, most of them known now only to specialists. As such it is an exercise in recovery of cultural memory. “Parthian Books, most energetic and eclectic among the publishers of Wales, continues its strand of publishing books of weight on the visual culture of Wales. “The Art of Music” follows in the path of “the Tradition” (2016) and “Looking Out” (2020). “The place of Peter Lord at the heart of Wales' cultural self-understanding goes back a quarter century. For this book two questing spirits join in an exploration of synergistic scholarship. Rhian Davies, a graduate of Aberystwyth, Oxford and Bangor Universities, is best known publicly for her programming of the Gregynog music festivals. Her career in music research, publication and documentary has been extensive. Covid-19 robbed the authors of visits to concert hall or gallery. This book was made over the months of lockdown.” * * * * 14th December 2020 “Looking Out” “Peter Lord, a practising artist before pre-eminent art historian, learned early on that public art was a combustible area. He was winner of a public commission. A part of it comprised a mosaic which entailed his working on hands and knees. For a while a citizen of Whitland would stand near to the artist's hands and offer his daily suggestion of “why don't you f*** off where you came from?” “With “Looking Out”, a collection of six weighty essays, Peter Lord continues the thesis that has been his historiographical achievement. Wales has a visual tradition. Lord has his long-standing opponents, curators, critics and cultural appointees who have combined in the past to declare that Wales is a land of voice and word. In Lord's perspective culture, the story that a national community shapes to tell itself, is lacking. “Looking Out” adds new chapters to his significant recharting of the historical record. We learn that Evan Williams was more than a prolific creator of portraits and landscapes. He wrote four essays on aesthetics and the history of art; his was the first attempt ever made to present the subject in depth in the Welsh language. Lord analyses the predicament of that age, how to reconcile the superiority of faith with the artistic accomplishment of classical Greece.” * * * * 11th March 2016 “The Tradition” "Lord presents the thesis that has been his historiographical achievement. Wales has a “visual tradition. In the opposing ring is a collection of curators and Arts Council grandees who have combined in the past to declare Wales the land of the voice. Look for a visual tradition and there is none. “Yet tradition, in Lord's telling, is a story that culture devises to relate to itself. Hence the paradox of a movable history that shifts as the zeitgeist amends it. The notion that Wales was unable to sustain an ecology of painters and patrons is “a historical nonsense.” A tradition becomes itself in the telling. “This theory of a movable and made tradition Lord locates in an essay of 1918 written by Van Wyck Brooks. The USA also for long held a cultural self-image of neo-colonial inferiority. Brooks called his essay “On Creating a Usable Past.” “The naming of things is the birth of consciousness. Without names we cannot think.” “Lord's talk is thick with naming. He is light on theory. Lord firmly states his vocation as art historian rather than art critic. He gives precedence to the art work as a physical object made under the conditions of a particular time and place. He shows a slide of a modest thatched cottage. The location is Llanidloes in the early nineteenth century. It was the place where two artists locked in debate over their interpretations of a piece of writing by John Calvin. This was not a culture on the margin. “A few square feet of paper or canvas with marks upon them are not a detached exercise in form and tone. The results have been achieved with time and effort, each one both belonging to and adding to culture. Every picture has its own biography. Perception of an artwork in isolation is selection but so too the narrative that links them all is equally an act of preference and selection. The visual record, in the telling of the official curatoriat, presents a Wales that has no imprint of industrial strife or depression. This official record of the art of Wales does not reflect the historical experience of the bulk of its people. “Apparently neither the coal strike of 1926-27 nor the great Depression of the 1930s had left any visual impact.” “According to this official Arts Council version of Welsh art history the most important feature of the inter-war years were Ernst, Picasso and Matisse on the abstractions of Ceri Richard.” In this version of history Ben Nicholson gives advice to David Jones and gets in. Evan Walters and Archie Griffiths are out. * * * * 4th July 2013 “Relationship with Pictures” “We grow up in belief and we grow old in belief.’ Peter Lord opens his subtly titled autobiography with these words. ‘Somewhere, in the middle’ he continues ‘sometimes, facts press upon us. But, in the end, only belief is real.’ Lord’s book is all at once memoir, artistic exploration, the evolution of a unique and crucial critical intelligence for Wales, and the forming of a life’s mission. “Lord’s final destination is far from his beginnings in both location and sensibility. The childhood that begins in 1950 is one where Empire, even in its unfolding, is the prism through which the world is perceived. The streets in home city Exeter bear the names of Ladysmith, Pretoria and Buller. William Lord is a survivor of the Somme and has been in Haifa, Baghdad, Canakkale at the time of the 1922 crisis.” |
Reviewed by: Adam Somerset |
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