Sorolla’s ‘Sunshine on a Brush’: Can You Convey Happiness?

Joaquin Sorolla, Sewing the Sail (1896)

I recently attended a fine exhibition of the work of Spanish painter Joaquin Sorolla (The National Gallery, London, until 7 July).

Born in Valencia in 1863, Sorolla was orphaned at two. Raised by an aunt, who got him work as an assistant to a local photographer, he studied art in his hometown, and then in Madrid, Rome and Paris. He married the photographer’s daughter, Clotilde, and together they had three children.

Sorolla created portraits of his family, and of the great and the good. He addressed social concerns: the exploitation of workers, the effects of disease, the plight of a mother who had killed her child. He painted Spanish landscapes - the mountains of the Sierra Nevada, the Alcazar in winter, Burgos Cathedral in the snow. He was commissioned to capture the rich variety of regional Spanish dress.

Joaquín Sorolla, Mother, 1895–1900

But Sorolla is best remembered for his paintings of sunlight and sea, of people at work and play around the beaches of Valencia and nearby Javea. The French critic Henri Rochefort observed: 'I do not know any brush that contains as much sun.' 

Sorolla liked to work outside. He set up his easel behind the protection of large parasols and windbreaks. By necessity he painted quickly, with confident sweeping brushstrokes. His style was free, spontaneous, natural. His art was colourful, vibrant, joyous.

A woman swathed from head to toe in fashionable linen adjusts her camera on a Biarritz beach. Toddlers paddle in the afternoon heat. A mother shields her son from the bright sunlight with a towel. A couple of boys strain to keep a boat under control, their image reflected in the dappled blue water. Three children sprint across the orange sand, beaming with glee. A lady holds her daughter’s hand as she steps carefully across the rocks. Four women take a siesta in the shaded grass. A skipping girl in a blue-striped dress casts a shadow by the pond in the garden. A mother tenderly regards her sleeping baby as they lie together in a big white bed.

I left the exhibition buoyed up by the sheer vitality of it all. I also reflected on the fact that we in the marketing and communications industry are in the business of selling happiness in one way or another. And yet sometimes we struggle to convey it with any naturalness or authenticity. Indeed we often resort to familiar clichés and tired stereotypes.

Sorolla teaches us that happiness can be captured in a simple gesture: a backward glance, a tilt of the head, a youthful leap. Happiness is a hand held on a park bench, a shimmering reflection in the summer heat. It is a neat white bonnet, a casually dropped parasol, red ribbons in a child’s hair. It is a brief moment in time, a fleeting memory, an echo.

Joaquín Sorolla, Walk On The Beach, 1909

As James Joyce once remarked:

‘In the particular is contained the universal.’ 

Success came easily to Sorolla. He was exhibited across Europe, in the United States, and as far away as Buenos Aires. He enjoyed commissions, honours and extensive travel. By 1900 he was considered the most famous of all living Spanish artists.

You can visit Sorolla’s rather splendid house in Madrid. It combines a well-lit, high-roofed studio space, with plush rooms for meeting clients, comfortable living quarters and a peaceful shaded garden. Clotilde is a constant presence, looking out at us with elegance and authority from portraits and family beach scenes. Theirs was a long and happy marriage. When travelling, Sorolla would write to her every day – often sending flowers inside the letters.

'All my love is focused on you. Despite my great love for our children, you are more, much more than them for so many reasons that there is no need to mention. You are my body, my life, my mind, my perpetual ideal.'

Sorolla’s general cheerfulness is at odds with what we have come to expect from the tortured artist. Perhaps someone who is supremely happy is better qualified to convey contentment. A lesson for us all.

In 1920 Sorolla suffered a stroke while painting in the garden. He died three years later. Soon after, his work fell out of fashion. His relaxed luminous naturalism was at odds with the more anxious, cerebral output of the avant-garde. It’s good to welcome him back to the bright sunshine.

'You're mine, you're mine, you're
Walking on sunshine.
I got to tell you that you're doing fine,
Walking on sunshine.’
Rockers Revenge, ‘Walking on Sunshine’ (E Grant)

No. 235

‘Maximum Meaning, Minimum Means’: Abram Games and the Craft of Poster Design

'I wind the spring and the public, in looking at the poster, will have that spring released in its mind.' 
Abram Games

I recently visited a fascinating exhibition of the wartime work of graphic designer Abram Games. (‘The Art of Persuasion: Wartime Posters by Abram Games’, The National Army Museum in Chelsea, until 24 November 2019)

Abraham Gamse’s 1925 Lower 3A report was not very encouraging. He was 11 years old and had recently enrolled at Hackney Downs School. 

‘Work much too careless and untidy; lazy and indifferent.’

The report also mentioned that his drawing skills were weak. This seems a little harsh as Gamse went on to become one of the finest graphic designers of the twentieth century.

Estate of Abram Games

Gamse was born in Whitechapel in 1914, the son of a Jewish photographer and seamstress. His father anglicised the family name to Games in 1926. The young Games learned how to use an airbrush in his father’s photography studio. Having studied briefly at Saint Martin's School of Art, he worked for a while at a commercial design firm and attended night classes in life drawing. Soon he had established himself as a freelance poster artist. 

At the start of World War Two, Games was conscripted into the British Army, and in 1941 he was transferred to the Public Relations Department of the War Office. 

‘There is no propaganda. I conceived them as instructional and training posters. It was a job that had to be done, like cleaning the floors and keeping your rifle clean.’

Many of Games’ wartime posters addressed necessary but prosaic tasks. They warned of the safety risks relating to indiscretion and live ammunition (‘Talk kills.’ ‘Damp ruins ammunition.’). They prompted servicemen to ventilate their quarters, brush their teeth and keep their feet clean. They recruited women for the Auxiliary Territorial Service and troops for the Airborne Divisions. And they urged the public to economise, contribute money, give blood, grow their own food and knit socks for jungle fighters.

Games’ posters also sought to encourage and inspire British troops: this was a war worth fighting and there were better times ahead; clean modern schools, hospitals and housing would rise up from the rubble; you could sign on for an army education scheme to prepare for a return to civvy street. Towards the end of the war Games designed some compelling posters seeking aid for displaced Jews.

Working in a protective smock that his mother had made for him, Games combined strong silhouettes, geometric shapes, stylised illustration and photographic images. He had been inspired by the Surrealist movement, and he magically turned a ship’s hull into a shovel, a mosquito into a death mask, the Houses of Parliament into a hand poised over a ballot paper (‘Serve as a soldier, vote as a citizen.’). A master of the airbrush, he tended to use just four bold colours. He reduced verbal messaging to a minimum, integrating succinct, authoritative type with his eye-catching imagery. 

‘I am not an artist, I am a graphic thinker.’

Games’ posters elegantly illustrated cause and effect, before and after, risk and reward. Sometimes they simply celebrated an aspiration or stated the raw facts. Often they used humour. He was clearly passionate about his chosen medium and his work provided a master class in poster communication. 

‘They are after all but printed paper, transient and impermanent. But if they convey to you the message I have been asked to transmit, they may succeed in living a while longer in your minds, and surely that is the job of the poster. If they do that then I shall be deeply satisfied.’

Games recognised that the craft of poster design is all about sacrifice and reduction, concentration and precision. It requires that you compress, condense and clarify. He would first produce an image in thumbnail to test whether his idea could communicate at distance. His motto was ‘Maximum Meaning, Minimum Means.’

‘To get it down to its simplicity, so that it talked from 50 yards, that was the difficulty.’

Games also understood that successful poster communication requires imagination as much as distillation.

‘An idea has to be implanted in the audience, but it has to be implanted imaginatively, in such a way as to fire the interest and kindle a response to new thinking.’

Critically, he believed that you need to earn people’s immediate attention and enduring recollection. Great posters must involve the viewer.

‘I want to involve the mind as well as the eye of the viewer in my work. I want them to think, because what they are seeing is intriguing. Once you can get them to look at it, that’s fine, they are co-operating and the design is doing its job.’

Having served as an infantry private, Games was keen to bring colour and vibrancy to the barrack room’s creosote-covered brown wooden walls. As a committed socialist, he believed that posters had a civic function. 

‘The hoarding is ‘the art gallery of the man in the street.’ Posters should be selected like pictures in a gallery.’

After the war Games worked for commercial clients like Shell, the FT, Guinness, British Airways and London Transport. As well as posters, he designed stamps, book jackets and logos, including the emblem for the 1951 Festival of Britain. He died in 1996. 

It seems to me that Games’ principles are as relevant today as they ever were. He teaches us to think hard about the mechanics of the medium we’re employing; to be clear and concise, so that the message can be understood at distance and at speed; and to be insightful and imaginative, so that viewers are inclined to digest and retain that message.

Most of all I was struck by Games’ social conscience. So often nowadays communication pollutes the environment. He demonstrates that it can enrich it.

No. 234

The Enchanted Brand: What Can Magic Teach Marketing?

German magician Jacoby-Harms in an 1866 photograph by FA Dahlstrom using double exposure to create the illusion of objects floating in the air

‘Magic is the only honest profession. A magician promises to deceive you and he does.’
Karl Germain, Magician (1878-1959)

I recently attended an excellent exhibition about the psychology of magic (’Smoke and Mirrors’ at the Wellcome Collection, London, until 15 September), and read a fine accompanying book (‘The Spectacle of Illusion’ by Matthew L Tompkins).

Spiritualism gripped nineteenth and early twentieth century society. Celebrated mesmerists could manipulate magnetic life forces. Hypnotists could put people in a trance. Mediums could make the dead speak. Ghostly presences would rap out messages via dedicated wands. They would speak through spirit trumpets, write on slates, ring bells and play musical instruments. They made furniture float, supernatural limbs appear and ectoplasm ooze from random orifices.

The public fascination with the paranormal was enhanced by the ubiquity of disease and the escalating numbers of casualties created by modern warfare. Many attended séances in the hope of making contact with departed loved ones. Ouija boards became a popular parlour activity.

Spiritualism also spread to the new technology of photography. Deceased relatives appeared as ghostly presences on photographic slides. Mysterious body parts were observed alongside sitters. Phantoms could be seen haunting medieval churches and stately homes.

Commercial magicians, alert to the phenomenon, adopted and adapted the techniques of spiritualism and created hugely successful stage acts. Posters proclaimed that Mrs Daffodil Downey would perform public séances at the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly; Harry Keller would make Princess Karnac levitate; and the automaton Psycho would play whist with audience members.

Inevitably scientists were keen to establish whether spiritualists were genuine, and in 1882 the Society for Psychical Research was set up specifically to examine the area. They constructed dedicated laboratories, designed special apparatus and organised complex experiments.

Often results were inconclusive, and expert opinion was divided. Some respected figures remained convinced of spiritualism’s authenticity.

‘The author has seen numerous photographs of the ectoplasmic flow from ’Margery’ [the medium Mina Crandon] and has no hesitation in saying that it is genuine.’
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, 1926

The problem for the more sceptical scientists was that their measurements and machines were often outwitted by the spiritualists’ tricks and techniques.

‘While scientists are trained in gathering evidence based on empirical observations, they are not necessarily trained in deception.’
Matthew L Tompkins, ‘The Spectacle of Illusion’

Consequently the scientists turned to commercial magicians for help. Magicians could draw on their knowledge of conjuring tricks and illusions to test the claims of the mediums and debunk the fraudulent. In one celebrated incident magician Harry Houdini prevented the medium Mina Crandon from collecting a reward by exposing her deceptions. It was an early success for interdisciplinary research.

‘[Spiritualism’s] worst evil has been the fostering of the unscientific spirit, the attempting to seek truth through the emotions rather than through the intellect.’
George Beard, Neurologist, 1879

What are we to make of the spiritualist phenomenon?

Well, it may all seem like distant history. But despite the advances of science since the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there remain huge gaps in most people’s understanding of the physical world; and like our forefathers we tend to fill these gaps with assumptions and suppositions. We may insist that we are rational beings. But we are prone to believe what we feel, what we want, what we hope. And our senses are still not as reliable as we might imagine.

As marketers and communicators we should be ever mindful of the emotional component of decision-making. Indeed we should embrace the potential of the Enchanted Brand: a brand that beguiles, bewitches, charms and inspires; that is comfortable filling the space between the real and the imaginary.

We should also, like the sceptical scientists before us, learn to enlist expert witnesses from other disciplines to illuminate a category we do not fully understand.

There’s a compelling section of the exhibition that explains how the most important skill a magician has to learn is misdirection: drawing attention to one thing so that we are unaware of something else.

‘This idea of the hand being faster than the eye is completely wrong…Speed has nothing to do with it. It’s all attention control.’
Professor Ron Rensink, University of British Columbia, 2009

In a demonstration of ‘misdirection of perception’ (set up by psychologists from Goldsmiths, University of London), we watch a conjuror perform a trick with the trace from an eye tracker superimposed on the film. We see that the viewer’s gaze consistently fixes on the spot the magician wants, rather than the area where the deception is taking place. In a second demonstration, we see a conjuror employing ‘misdirection of memory’: we are encouraged to remember one card in a hand, and in so doing we fail to remember the others. Another demonstration illustrates ‘misdirection of reasoning’: we project from repeated similar experiences that that same experience will happen again, and therefore we imagine events that in fact never occur.

Of course, in the marketing and communications industry we would not subscribe to misdirection as a technique. We are, on the contrary, seeking to reveal truth and enhance it. However, in order to achieve enhanced truth, we often have to focus consumers’ minds. Indeed a strong brand actively endeavours to direct attention, reasoning and memory. It channels attention towards its greatest virtues; it establishes a narrative about its past that supports and sustains those virtues; it creates expectations of the future that become self-fulfilling. There are strong parallels between the disciplines.

There is one compelling theme that runs throughout the exhibition. Consistently we discover that believers are more open to suggestion than sceptics. They are more eager to please, more keen to have their convictions confirmed.

‘As a magician, I was able to see two things very clearly: a) how people can be fooled, and b) how they fooled themselves…The second is far more important.’
James Randi, Magician, 2007

Whilst not seeking to fool consumers, surely a primary responsibility of marketing is to build belief: to create a positive predisposition towards a brand such that claims are more favourably received and criticisms are more immediately rejected. Positive predisposition creates the context for a successful sale.

In a 1944 performance ‘the Amazing Dunninger, the Greatest Mental Marvel of the Age’ began with an announcement:

’I cannot invade against opposition. You must want me to get into your thoughts before I can. Do you want me in there?’

'If you believe in magic, come along with me.
We'll dance until morning 'til there's just you and me.
And maybe, if the music is right,
I'll meet you tomorrow, sort of late at night.
And we'll go dancing, baby, then you'll see,
How the magic's in the music and the music's in me.'

The Lovin’ Spoonful, 'Do You Believe in Magic' (John Sebastian)

No. 233

Strindberg and the Zero-Sum Game: Are Life and Love Played Out on a Balance Sheet?

Portrait of Strindberg by Edvard Munch, 1892

‘They sense someone watching them – a creditor has come to call, the spectre of their guilt.’
Gustaf, ‘Creditors’

I recently saw a fine production of August Strindberg’s 1889 play ‘Creditors.’ (Jermyn Street Theatre, London, until 1 June)

Young artist Adolf is deeply in love with his new wife, successful novelist Tekla. Adolf is introverted, impressionable, prone to paranoia and illness. Tekla is confident, free-spirited and outgoing.

‘I don’t ‘know’ anything. I simply feel.’

While Tekla is away on a trip, Adolf meets a suave stranger who, Iago-like, pours poison into his ears: Is Tekla too flighty? Can she really be trusted? Did she exploit Adolf’s patronage to start her career?

‘You do know what this is – cannibalism! Savages eat their enemies to assimilate their virtues! This woman’s eaten your courage, your knowledge, your soul.’

Adolf is easily convinced.

‘A man’s love is all about giving, a woman’s love is all about taking! And I’ve given and given and given.’

When Tekla returns, inevitably she and Adolf have a row. He pursues the thought that somehow she owes him for her success.

‘I was desperate to remind you of your debt to me. I became the kind of vile creditor you want to keep far away from.’

Then Tekla’s first husband, Gustaf, arrives on the scene. On encountering Tekla, he suggests their relationship may not be quite over.

‘You’re still mine. There’s a marriage debt.’

Throughout ‘Creditors’ Strindberg explores the idea that romantic attachment is a matter of winners and losers, creditors and debtors; an engagement played out on a balance sheet. He implies that love is a zero-sum game: a relationship where each partner's gain or loss is exactly balanced by the losses or gains of the other partner.

Is this sincerely held cynicism on Strindberg’s part? Is it just a vehicle for his misogyny? Or is it a provocation to make us think?

Certainly the central theme of ‘Creditors’ can strike audiences as somewhat perverse. Of course, relationships entail a good deal of compromise and concession, of give-and-take and trade-offs. But surely love is a matter of mutual benefit, common goals and shared growth. Surely love is beyond accountancy.

And yet we often approach other areas of life as if they are a zero-sum game.

Many people regard business as an enterprise in which the total gains and losses of the participants will always add up to zero. Markets are fought over as if the sales success for one brand inevitably entails an equal and opposite decline for another. Negotiations are conducted as if one party can only prosper at the expense of the other. Careers are plotted as if colleagues are rivals in a contest.

Of course, commerce revolves around competition. And there are indeed winners and losers. But it’s not really that simple.

In business as in love, playing the zero-sum game is counterproductive. It precludes partnership and team-work, collaboration and alliance, deals and bargains. It denies the opportunity for innovation and change, for premiumisation and category growth. It turns participants in on themselves; makes them secretive and suspicious, self-seeking and aggressive.

Success in the modern world is more often achieved by seeking mutual gain, not mutual destruction. And progressive businesses increasingly concern themselves with value creation and interdependence, with finding solutions where all parties can profit. 1+ 1 can equal 3.

So don’t pursue zero-sum thinking, in life, love or business. It’s a trap.

I suspect Strindberg would not agree. Things don’t end well for Tekla and Adolf. And Gustaf rejoices at their pain.

‘Your creditors get you in the end… Innocent in the eyes of the Lord maybe, but accountable to men and women.’

'I've played all my cards
And that's what you've done too.
Nothing more to say.
No more ace to play.

The winner takes it all.
The loser has to fall.
It's simple and it's plain.
Why should I complain?’

Abba, ‘The Winner Takes It All’  (B Ulvaeus, B Andersson)

No. 232

‘A Craving for Crystallisation’: Themes Suggested by Edvard Munch

Edvard Munch, The Scream, detail of lithograph, 1895.

‘I shall no longer paint interiors, people reading and women knitting. They will be people who are alive, who breathe and feel, suffer and love.’
Edvard Munch

I recently attended an excellent exhibition of the prints of Edvard Munch. (British Museum, London, until 21 July)

Munch was a troubled genius. Born in 1863, he grew up in Kristiania (modern day Oslo), a city that like many others at that time had been shaken by industrialisation, political upheaval, poverty and disease. His father was a medical officer, severe, pious and dogmatic. His mother died of TB when he was 5 and his sister died of the same illness when he was 13. Another sister was taken to an asylum. He was himself a sickly child and he worried throughout his life that he had inherited his family’s mental health issues. As a young man he fell in with Bohemians and nihilists. He took to drinking and brawling, and became an alcoholic. He couldn’t sleep. He thought about death all the time and contemplated suicide. 

'The angels of fear, sorrow, and death stood by my side from the day I was born.'

Munch channelled all this stress and anxiety into his art. A self-portrait has skeleton arms. A mother despairs over a sick child. A crowd walks towards us with blank, empty faces. A melancholy man cradles his head in his hands. A woman stands alone on a shoreline with her back to us. A naked couple kiss by an open window. An anxious figure puts its hands to its ears and screams.

‘There was blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city - my friends walked on, and I stood there trembling with anxiety - and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature.'

We may find it hard to identify with Munch as an individual – he just seems too tortured, confused and self-pitying. But he certainly captured something of the modern condition: isolation and angst; feeling alone in the crowd; struggling for identity and belonging, for a sense of meaning and purpose; worrying about love and death. 

Young Woman on the Beach, 1896 by Edvard Munch

Munch also teaches a number of lessons for people working in the creative industry. From the outset he was an artist with ambition. He was not afraid to cast aside the conventions of the category and set himself lofty objectives.

‘We want more than a mere photograph of nature. We do not want to paint pretty pictures to be hung on drawing-room walls. We want to create art, or at least lay the foundations of an art, that gives something to humanity. An art that arrests and engages. An art created of one’s innermost heart.’

Such was Munch’s conviction, that he was untroubled by setbacks. When in 1892 his first one-man exhibition in Berlin closed after one week, he regarded the critical outrage as a badge of pride, a confirmation of his radicalism.

'Never have I had such an amusing time - it's incredible that something as innocent as painting should have created such a stir.'

In his art if not in life Munch was admirably resilient. He recognised that his difference represented his greatest creative asset.

'My art is rooted in a single reflection: why am I not as others are?’

A vampire feasts on her prey. Image courtesy The Savings Bank Foundation DNB

Munch also embraced conflict and ambiguity. He wanted to express raw feeling and emotional truth in his work, and he was drawn to articulate his own intense paranoia and uncertainty.

This is particularly evident in his troubled encounters with women. For Munch women were frail and innocent, sinister and threatening. He desired them and he feared them. He was possessive and jealous, in awe and in doubt. 

No surprise perhaps that Munch’s relationships tended to be tempestuous and short-lived. Flame-haired Tulla Larsen was so besotted that she followed him round Europe. But he couldn’t face marriage. When they separated he shot himself in the hand and cut their joint-portrait in half.

A woman’s long hair wraps itself around her lover. Is it an embrace or an entrapment? A woman puts her arms around a man’s shoulders, his head bowed. Is she consoling him or preying on him? 

'My afflictions belong to me and my art - they have become one with me. Without illness and anxiety, I would have been a rudderless ship. My art is really a voluntary confession and an attempt to explain to myself my relationship with life.’

We can also learn from Munch something about the power of the repeated image. He returned again and again to the same themes: the melancholy loner, the jealous lover, the femme fatale, the sick child, the haunting moonlight, the enchanted forest, the existential scream.

He explored these themes in paintings, lithographs and woodcuts; in etchings, drypoints and mezzotints. He experimented with bold colour washes; with heavy outlines, sharp contrasts and simplified forms; by cutting the print block into jigsaw pieces and reassembling them.

With every new articulation of a subject Munch brought a fresh perspective, and the images gained resonance through repetition.

'The point is that one sees things at different moments with different eyes.’

Munch sold more than 30,000 prints in his lifetime. They gave him access to a broad public, made him famous, financed a comfortable later life and enabled him to keep hold of many of his paintings - which he loved so much that he called them his ‘children’. 

So, although it’s hard to identify with Munch the individual, his art echoes with profoundly modern themes; and he teaches people in creative professions some powerful lessons: hold lofty ambitions for your craft; be resilient in the face of criticism; channel your emotional conflicts into your work; celebrate your difference; and embrace the power of repetition.

‘Art is the opposite of nature… Art is the human craving for crystallization. Nature is the infinite realm from which art takes its nourishment.’ 

Munch spent a good deal of his life travelling around Europe. But for his last 27 years he lived, comfortable and alone, on his estate outside Oslo. Despite all his paranoia, hypochondria and melancholy, he reached the ripe old age of 80. He died in 1944 confident in his own immortality.

'From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them and that is eternity.’

'Oh, it's not easy to resist temptation,
Walking around looking like a figment of somebody else's imagination.
Taking ev'ry word she says just like an open invitation,
But the power of persuasion is no match for anticipation.

Like a finger running down a seam,
From a whisper to a scream.
So I whisper and I scream,
But don't get me wrong.
Please don't leave me waitin' too long,
Waitin' too long.’

Elvis Costello, 'From a Whisper to a Scream'

No. 231

Three Sisters: Dreams of Progress

The Wyndham Sisters by John Singer Sargent 1899

'It seems to me that everything is going to change little by little, that change is already under way, before our eyes. In two or three hundred years, perhaps in a thousand years, no matter how long, there will be a new, happy life. Of course, we will not be there any more, but that's why we live, work, suffer. We are creating that life - it's the only goal of our existence, and if you like, of our happiness.’ 
Vershinin, ‘Three Sisters’

I recently saw a fine production of Anton Chekhov’s ‘Three Sisters.’ (The Almeida Theatre, London, until 1 June) 

The Prozorov sisters live with their useless brother in a provincial town. Their parents have passed away and they feel isolated, lonely, cut adrift.

'For us, three sisters, life has not been beautiful - it chokes us, like weeds.' 

Older sister Olga is a spinster working long hours as a teacher. Middle sister Masha married young and is now dissatisfied with her husband Chebutykin:

Chebutykin: ‘I’m happy, happy, happy.’
Masha: ‘I’m bored, bored, bored.’

Irina, the youngest of the three, worries that love has passed her by:

'I've never been in love. I've dreamt of it day and night, but my heart is like a fine piano no one can play because the key is lost.’

The Prozorovs long for a return to Moscow where they grew up - for its culture and sophistication, its lively conversation about music, literature and language. Moscow represents everything they have loved and lost, everything they hope for in the future. As brother Andrey puts it:

'In Moscow you can sit in an enormous restaurant where you don’t know anybody and where nobody knows you, and yet you don’t feel that you’re a stranger. Here you know everybody and everybody knows you, and you’re a stranger... a lonely stranger.'

No one does very much in ‘Three Sisters.’ What action there is tends to happen off-stage. The characters spend most of the time gossiping, musing, philosophizing, taking another trip to the samovar. They are nostalgic, bored and wistful. They discuss the importance of work without doing very much of it. In particular they meditate on the meaning of life. What’s it all about? Why are we here? Why do we persevere when our daily existence seems so full of struggles and hardship? 

One of the houseguests, the nobleman Tuzenbakh, sees little sign of any progress or improvement in the human condition:

‘Life will remain the same as ever, not only after two or three centuries, but in a million years. Life does not change, it remains constant, following its own laws, which do not concern us, or which, at any rate, we will never discover. Migrant birds, cranes for example, fly and fly, and whatever thoughts, high or low, enter their heads, they will still fly on without knowing why or where to.’

Masha isn’t satisfied with this analysis:

Masha: 'Isn’t there some meaning?’
Tuzenbakh: 'Meaning? … Look out there, it’s snowing. What’s the meaning of that?’ 

Lieutenant-Colonel Vershinin, who has recently arrived in town as the local battery commander, offers a different perspective. He suggests that, despite its many challenges and disappointments, step by imperceptible step, society is moving forward, making advances. He illustrates this conviction by considering the plight of the three sisters:

'It goes without saying that you are not going to overcome the mass of ignorance around you. Little by little, as you advance in life, you will be obliged to yield and be swallowed up in the crowd of a hundred thousand human beings. Life will stifle you. But you will all the same not have disappeared without having made an impact. After you there will be perhaps only six women like you, then twelve, and so on, until finally you will become the majority. In two or three hundred years life on earth will be unimaginably beautiful, amazing, astonishing.’ 

Masha, who yearns to believe in something, gradually falls for the charms of the battery commander:

Cover of first edition, published 1901

’First I thought he was strange, then I was sorry for him…then I fell in love with him.’

I found myself sympathising with the arguments of both Tuzenbakh and Vershinin. Like Tuzenbakh I accept that the human condition is timeless and we must take solace in the small things just to get us through the day: in modest kindnesses and friendly gestures, in the comedy of circumstance and the charms of nature. But like Vershinin I still believe that, in the long run, with industry and collective effort, society can move forward.

Sometimes it’s hard to believe in progress. At work we are confronted with contracting opportunities and intractable problems: increasing hours, decreasing job security, automation, discrimination, stress and procurement. 

More broadly in the world today we are beset by political turmoil, economic inequality, rampant populism, escalating terrorism, technology’s dark shadow and environmental decay. Everywhere we look we see difficulty and defeat, thwarted hope and disappointed ambition. Sometimes it seems that our best years are behind us. 

And yet, like Vershinin, I think it’s important to retain an optimistic view. We can pull through if we keep our heads to the sky. Confronted with impediments and reverses, Dr Martin Luther King and President Obama were inclined to quote the nineteenth century abolitionist preacher Theodore Parker:

'The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.’ 

Sadly things do not work out well for the Prozorov sisters. Before the play is over there is tragedy, frustration, compromise. And it doesn’t seem like they will make it to Moscow any time soon. Vershinin reflects mournfully on life’s challenges and disappointments:

'I often think, what if one were to begin life over again, but consciously? What if one life, the life already lived, were only a rough sketch so to speak, and the second were the fair copy?’

'Don't give up and don't give in,
Although it seems you never win.
You will always pass the test,
As long as you keep your head to the sky.
You can win as long as you keep your head to the sky.
Be optimistic.’

Sounds of Blackness, ‘Optimistic' (G Hines / J Harris / T Lewis)

No. 230

A Trip to the Moon: Move Fast and Make Things

Georges Melies’ ‘A Trip to the Moon,’(‘Le Voyage dans la Lune’) is celebrated as the first true science-fiction film. Released in 1902, it presented cinema as a medium for fantasy, when hitherto it had been a vehicle for social realism. ‘A Trip to the Moon’ was only 14 minutes long, but this was revolutionary in an era when two minutes was an ordinary running time.  

Melies himself plays a professor who convinces his fellow scientists to join him on an expedition to the moon. They travel in a cannon-propelled capsule, explore the moon's surface, escape from an underground group of lunar locals (Selenites), and return to Paris with a captive in triumph. 

Melies had a background in theatre and magic, and ‘A Trip to the Moon’ boasts impressive stage sets, bizarre costumes, amusing pratfalls and dramatic explosions. He gives us a mushroom-filled grotto, lunar snow and engagingly insect-like aliens. He employs innovative cinematic techniques like superimposition, substitution-splice editing, pseudo-tracking shots and dissolves. We see the earth from the moon, and the stars come alive. We visit the Palace of the Selenites and watch the space capsule crash land into the sea. It’s a glorious flight of fancy. 

But there’s also something troubling about ‘A Trip to the Moon’. Although it’s cheerful and comic in tone, one can’t help noticing the destructive impact that our heroic scientists have in the course of their adventures.

In one iconic scene the moon is represented as a face, and the space capsule lands painfully in its right eye. When they disembark at their destination, the explorers take to slaying the fragile locals and go on to kill their king. And at the end of the film the humans parade their captive Selenite in a somewhat colonial fashion.

So despite the fact that ‘A Trip to the Moon’ is a light-hearted entertainment, it does suggest some serious questions.

Why do explorers and pioneers consistently seem so wilful in their destruction of the new environments and societies that they discover? Why are they always out to conquer and tame, exploit and gain, shackle and own?

These questions could be posed to the world of business too. 

Why is it that innovators and entrepreneurs seem so set on destroying everything that has gone before them? Why do we celebrate disruption as a prerequisite of progress? Why indeed do we applaud Mark Zuckerberg’s famous mantra: ‘move fast and break things’?

The Facebook founder was probably right about the imperative of speed in our accelerated world. But surely in an era of finite resources and fragile ecosystems, devastation and profligacy should not be culturally or commercially acceptable.

As creative professionals our focus should not be on destroying or dismantling; on eradicating the past or eliminating the competition. Rather we should turn our skills to preserving, reducing and replacing; to facilitating, enabling and enhancing; to solving, inspiring, and making. We should regard creative destruction, not as a code of behaviour, but as an oxymoron.

It seems obvious to me that creative industries should primarily concentrate on creating value – for businesses, institutions, consumers and society - and on doing so without damaging cultures, communities and the climate in the process. 

Perhaps our motto should more reasonably be: ‘Move fast and make things.’

'In starlit nights I saw you. 
So cruelly you kissed me, 
Your lips a magic world, 
Your sky all hung with jewels. 
The killing moon 
Will come too soon.

Fate 
Up against your will. 
Through the thick and thin, 
He will wait until 
You give yourself to him.'

Echo and the Bunnymen, ‘The Killing Moon’  (I McCulloch / L Pattinson / P De Freitas / W Sergeant)

No. 229

A Cravat Too Far: Complacency Is Not a Uniform Condition

Jean Beraud ‘A Ball’

Some time in the early ‘90s I was invited to a rather smart wedding at St James’s Palace. As it was a formal affair, there was a requirement for morning suit, which I’d never worn before. Eager to fit in, I made my way nervously to the nearest Moss Bros, where an expert assistant of few words but reassuring manner guided me through the process of hiring my outfit. 

Step by step he found me an elegant black morning coat, a dashing pair of grey striped trousers, a buff silk waistcoat. He advised me on how to manage my top hat on the day. It was really quite simple and straightforward. I looked at myself in the mirror and thought: if I comb my hair, I could possibly pass muster as an authentic English gentleman. I began to feel very much on top of things. 

And then the assistant posed a question:

‘We just have one last decision to make. Will sir be wearing a tie or a cravat?’

‘Well, I don’t know. What will everyone else be wearing?’

‘It’s purely a matter of personal preference, sir.’

I hesitated for a moment. I had no experience to draw on here – no recollections of formal weddings from my childhood, no memories of days out at Ascot. However, having grown up in the ‘80s, I had been an admirer of Spandau Ballet and Duran Duran, of the cavalier style of the New Romantic movement. And so my natural inclination was towards something a little more theatrical.

‘I’ll take the cravat,’ I said with conviction.

And so one sunny Saturday morning I marched jauntily down Pall Mall to St James’s Palace in full morning dress, my outfit flamboyantly finished off with a red silk, paisley-patterned cravat. I was going to enjoy my brief excursion into the world of the aristocracy. 

The moment I arrived at the wedding venue, I stopped and surveyed the scene. To my horror I realised that every one of the other male guests was sporting a rather understated grey necktie. Of course! They all appeared so natural and appropriate, so casual and at ease. I, on the other hand, looked like an extra from an ‘80s pop video. I was mortified.

Reflecting back on what had gone wrong, I realised that my time at Moss Bros had been marked by increasing confidence. I became less alert at the end of the process than I had been at the beginning. My guard had slipped.

There’s a lesson here, I think, that commonly applies in the world of business.

We all know that we should be concerned about complacency; that we need to be ever vigilant, wary and watchful. But complacency is not a uniform condition. It has peaks and troughs. It seeks us out when we least expect it. It finds us when we’re most confident and self-assured.

Just at the last moment, we get careless and cocky. Our concentration slips, attention dips. And we make that critical error.

So as you reach the end of your pitch or project - as you approach the finish line - stay alert to slapdash slip-ups. Sustain an eye for detail. Always remember to dot the ts and cross the is.

'Man, you gotta take heed.
'Cause that same thing might happen to you someday
Everybody makes a mistake sometimes.
I know, because I've made mine.'

Otis Redding, 'Everybody Makes A Mistake' (E Floyd / A Isbell)

No. 228

Relative Values: Considering Collective Good in the Workplace

David Hare, 1979. Loveridge/Evening Standard/Getty Images

‘You think attitudes are all to do with whim. You understand nothing. Attitudes are all to do with character.’
Nrovka, ‘The Bay at Nice.’

I recently saw a compelling revival of David Hare’s 1986 play ‘The Bay at Nice.’ (The Menier Chocolate Factory, London, until 4 May.)

We are in Leningrad in 1956, and Valentina Nrovka, a Russian artist, has been invited to the Hermitage to offer her opinion on the authenticity of a Matisse painting. 

Nrovka has had a fascinating life. She spent her youth living freely among the expatriate artists in Paris. She was taught painting by Matisse and had a daughter by a soldier who was just passing through. Then in 1921 she returned home to post-revolutionary Russia out of a sense of duty, of responsibility to the greater good. She now cuts a somewhat melancholy figure, disappointed by the flawed realities of the Soviet state.

‘Everyone here lives in the future. Or in the past. No one wants the present.’

Nrovka’s daughter Sophia meets her at the museum to seek help in arranging a divorce - a complex and expensive business within the Russian system. Nrovka, however, is sceptical of the durability of her daughter’s love for her new man, Linitsky.

‘We all have a dream of something else. For you it’s Linitsky. Linitsky’s your escape. How will it be when he becomes your reality? When he’s not your escape? When he’s your life?’

Nrovka is also more broadly critical of Sophia’s romantic talk of free will, rights and liberty. 

‘’I must be myself, I must do what I want…’ I have heard these words before. On boulevards. In cafes. I used to hear them in Paris. I associate them with zinc tables and the gushing of beer. Everyone talking about their entitlements. ‘I must be allowed to realize myself.’ For me it had a different name. I never called it principle. I called it selfishness.’

Whilst Nrovka is negatively predisposed to her daughter’s divorce proposals, she is happy to discuss the principles of painting that she learned from Matisse.

‘Each colour depends on what is placed next to it. One tone is just a colour. Two tones are a chord, which is life….No line exists on its own. Only with its relation to another do you create volume.’

We realise that Nrovka has applied Matisse’s artistic beliefs to her own life: she relinquished her individual freedom in pursuit of collective good; she chose belonging over independence; she found comfort in the context of shared homeland, culture and community.

Hare’s play resonated with me because Nrovka’s core arguments seem so unfashionable today. In the modern era we concentrate so much on self-help, self-improvement and self-actualisation; on individuality, autonomy and free will. We want to achieve our own particular goals, to realise our personal potential, to be the best that we can be. We all aspire to be a star performer, a hero or a headline act. We’d all like to play a leading role in our own movies. 

We talk less often nowadays about the rewards of shared success and collective accomplishment; about the benefits of belonging and participating; about team, comradeship, unity and kinship. 

And yet there are compensations to be found in mutuality and togetherness at work. There are consolations in subordinating the self to the collective. Indeed you could argue that in this age of interdependence it is only in the context of the group that we can ever attain individual contentment.

When investors seek to determine an asset’s worth, they don’t just look at its intrinsic value. They also take into account the value of similar assets, thereby establishing ‘relative value’. Maybe we should apply both intrinsic and relative perspectives to our own careers.

Reflecting further on Matisse’s creative practice, Nrovka observes that the great artist worked incredibly hard, finding inspiration in everything around him. When he was tired and needed to relax, he would put his palette down and go to the mountains.

‘You can’t paint a mountain. The scale is all wrong.’

'Here's my chance to dance my way
Out of my constrictions.
Givin' you more of what you're funkin’ for,
Feet don't fail me now.
Do you promise to funk, the whole funk,
Nothin' but the funk?
One nation under a groove,
Gettin' down just for the funk of it.
One nation and we're on the move,
Nothin' can stop us now.’

Funkadelic, 'One Nation Under a Groove' (G Clinton / G Shider / W Morrison / E Krause / F Harrison / T Kendrick / C Branch / O Johnson)

No. 227

The Room Where It Happens: Diversity Demands Good Governance

'I’m past patiently waitin’.
I’m passionately smashin’ every expectation. 
Every action’s an act of creation! 
I’m laughin’ in the face of casualties and sorrow. 
For the first time, I’m thinkin’ past tomorrow.'

‘My Shot’, Lin-Manuel Miranda 

Some time ago I saw Lin-Manuel Miranda’s hip-hop musical, ‘Hamilton’.

It tells the story of Alexander Hamilton, one of America’s founding fathers and the man on the 10 dollar bill. He was ‘a bastard, orphan, son of a whore and a Scotsman’ who left the Caribbean to become George Washington’s right-hand man and the first Secretary of the Treasury.

‘Hamilton’ delivers a joyous, articulate mix of old school rap, hip hop and R&B. There’s strong characterisation, razor-sharp choreography, lusty singing, propulsive beats and a rotating stage. 

'I’m just like my country. I’m young, scrappy and hungry, and I’m not throwing away my shot.'

I was particularly struck by the way that rap’s brisk tempo and fluid construction lend themselves so well to a complex narrative. I can’t imagine a more traditional musical format so comfortably conveying, for example, the secret deal in which Washington DC is accepted as the nation’s capital in exchange for federal control over the debts accrued by the separate states.

Miranda has described ‘Hamilton’ as 'the story of America then told by America now.' The London audience when I attended enjoyed the subversion of the independence narrative being related by an ethnically diverse cast. We cheered the villainous King George III as one of our own. And we applauded when Hamilton triumphantly declared: ‘Immigrants! We get the job done!’

One of the key songs in ‘Hamilton’, ‘The Room Where It Happens’, reflects on the fact that so many of the critical debates and decisions in history take place behind closed doors.

'We want our leaders to save the day,
But we don't get a say in what they trade away.
We dream of a brand new start,
But we dream in the dark for the most part,
Dark as a tomb where it happens.
I've got to be in
The room where it happens,
I've got to be in the room where it happens.’

'The Room Where It Happens’, Lin-Manuel Miranda 

We may be familiar with this sentiment in the world of business. So often strategies, policies and practice are worked out in camera, in secret, in private; in corridors, over a beer, behind glass walls.

This seems particularly true of smaller and privately owned companies that have grown organically – where founders and leaders have informal, instinctive networks, ways of working and getting things done.

US Senator Elizabeth Warren has observed that non-participation in decision-making presents risks for the excluded.

'If you don't have a seat at the table, you're probably on the menu.’

Although you’ll hear Agencies talk a good deal nowadays about the imperative of diversity, you’ll not hear them talk too often about good governance. And yet fair and transparent governance is the means by which you can ensure that a diverse workforce creates diverse decision-making. It’s your insurance against group-think and double-talk. It’s the means by which you earn true colleague engagement. There’s no vocation without representation.

A mature business gives proper thought to the composition of its committees and corporate bodies; to participation on boards, excos, platforms and working groups; to the processes by which decisions are made. This is not just about fairness. It’s about effectiveness.

If you do nothing about this, you may find that people will take matters into their own hands.

Shirley Chisholm - photo Irving Penn, Vogue, 1969

In 1968 Brooklyn-born Shirley Chisholm was elected the first black woman in Congress. In 1972, campaigning under the slogan ‘Unbought and Unbossed’, she became the first woman and the first African American to run for the Presidential nomination of a major party. Surrounded throughout her career by colleagues who were overwhelmingly white and male, she passed on the following advice:

‘If you wait for a man to give you a seat, you’ll never have one. If they don’t give you a seat at the table, bring in a folding chair.’ 

No. 226