although they were all living through what was certainly a tumultuous decade, beginning with a world-wide economic depression, the cause of steep rises in unemployment and poverty and consequent political agitation in many countries. In international politics the gradual emasculation of the power, prestige and influence of the League of Nations was seen in its repeated failure to prevent or mitigate the aggression of the rising Fascist powers, by Japan in Manchuria and China, Italy in Abysinnia, Germany in re-occupying the Rheinland, then marching into Austria, the Sudetenland and, finally, into all of Czech Bohemia and Moravia, and – what perhaps aroused the artistic community to its most vehement protest – the failure of democratic powers to take any meaningful action against Fascist and Nazi intervention in the three yearlong Spanish Civil War whose outbreak had coincided, ironically, with the Nazis’ showcase Olympic Games in Berlin. With one exception (for Schwitters’ collages) absent, too, are any reminiscences in <strong>Vaughan</strong>’s Journal of significant exhibitions of contemporary art in that decade that he might have seen, and to which, with hindsight, art historians tend to attribute undue impact. Among the many art galleries in London during the interwar years, historians often single out the likes of the Leicester, Mayor, London, Reid & Lefèvre, Zwemmer and New Burlington galleries, but in terms of impact, perhaps only the scandal aroused by the International Surrealist Exhibition at this last in 1936 might have made an impression with the broader public. Nor does <strong>Vaughan</strong> make any mention in his Journal of the ‘rising stars’ of British modernism such as Moore, Nicholson, Hepworth, Piper and painters of the more engagé Euston Road School - or even to Sutherland, whose sensibility and style <strong>Vaughan</strong> is known to have admired. Nor are the emerging new theories and interpretations that accompanied the developments in photography during those interwar mentioned in <strong>Vaughan</strong>’s journal. Only a vague recollection by his colleagues attests to his interest in foreign films – and by extension, presumably photography too – from France, Russia and Germany. In the service of propaganda for the new state, Russian artists turned photographers such as El Lissitzky and Rodchenko had incorporated innovative typography, abstract geometry, disorientating viewpoints and collage techniques. In Germany two complementary strains ran in parallel: on the one hand the documentary, unsentimental style of ‘Neue Sachlichkeit’ – in photography, termed ‘Neue Optik’ - and seen for example in August Sanders’ ambition to document the German nation in hundreds of portrait studies; and, on the other, experimentation with photographic techniques, such as in Christian Schad’s ‘schadographies’, Moholy-Nagy’s ‘photograms’ and the photocollaged work of Herbert Bayer. We cannot now know with certainty which photographic exhibitions <strong>Vaughan</strong> visited, or which publications he read. Given his interest in photography, he is unlikely to have overlooked The Studio magazine’s photographic annual entitled ‘Modern Photography’ launched in 1931, which ran until 1943. Each annual’s section of more than 60 photographs was prefaced by one essay on aesthetic and stylistic developments in photography, and another on technical developments in cameras, shooting film, darkroom printing, and so on. Quaintly for us today, every detail of the camera, lens aperture and shutter speed, and paper used, were listed in the index for almost all the images. Colour photography also began to appear in the 1936–37 annual. From the very first, the focus of the ‘Modern Photography’ annual was international; contemporary French, German, Hungarian and Japanese photographers dominated, with some British and American, but only one or two unremarkable Soviet Russians. Experimental Dick with drape [PL5] photographic print on Agfa Brovira paper 30.2 x 25 cm 38
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