• Source: Fontana Modern Masters

The Fontana Modern Masters was a series of pocket guides on writers, philosophers, and other thinkers and theorists who shaped the intellectual landscape of the twentieth century. The first five titles were published on 12 January 1970 by Fontana Books, the paperback imprint of William Collins & Co, and the series editor was Frank Kermode, who was Professor of Modern English Literature at University College London. The books were very popular with students, who "bought them by the handful", according to Kermode, and they were instantly recognisable by their eye-catching covers, which featured brightly coloured abstract art and sans-serif typography.




Art as book covers



The Fontana Modern Masters occupy a unique place in publishing history – not for their contents but their covers, which draw on the following developments in twentieth-century art and literature:

Twentieth-century geometric abstraction, colour-field painting and hard-edge painting.
Op Art, and in particular the work of Victor Vasarely.
The English beatnik Brion Gysin's cut-up technique as popularized by William Burroughs.
The cover concept was the brainchild of Fontana's art director John Constable, who had been experimenting with a cover treatment based on cut-ups of The Mud Bath, a key work of British geometric abstraction by the painter David Bomberg. However, a visit to the Grabowski Gallery in London introduced Constable to the work of Oliver Bevan, a graduate of the Royal College of Art in 1964, whose optical and geometric paintings were influenced by Vasarely's Op Art. On seeing Bevan's work, Constable commissioned him to create the covers for the first ten Fontana Modern Masters, which Bevan painted as rectilinear arrangements of tesselating blocks. Each cover was thus a piece of abstract art, but as an incentive for readers to buy all ten books the covers could be arranged to create a larger, composite artwork. The "set of ten" books appeared in 1970–71 but overran when Joyce was published with the same cover as Guevara:

Camus by Conor Cruise O'Brien, 1970
Chomsky by John Lyons, 1970
Fanon by David Caute, 1970
Guevara by Andrew Sinclair, 1970
Lévi-Strauss by Edmund Leach, 1970
Lukács by George Lichtheim, 1970
Marcuse by Alasdair MacIntyre, 1970
McLuhan by Jonathan Miller, 1971
Orwell by Raymond Williams, 1971
Wittgenstein by David Pears, 1971
Joyce by John Gross, 1971
A second "set of ten" featuring a new Bevan cut-up was published in 1971–73 but the inclusion of Joyce in the first "set of ten" left this second set one book short:

Freud by Richard Wollheim, 1971
Reich by Charles Rycroft, 1971
Yeats by Denis Donoghue, 1971
Gandhi by George Woodcock, 1972
Lenin by Robert Conquest, 1972
Mailer by Richard Poirier, 1972
Russell by A J Ayer, 1972
Jung by Anthony Storr, 1973
Lawrence by Frank Kermode, 1973
A third "set of ten" featuring Bevan's kinetic Pyramid painting began to appear in 1973–74 but Constable left before the set was complete and his replacement, Mike Dempsey, scrapped the set-of-ten incentive after eight books:

Beckett by A Alvarez, 1973
Einstein by Jeremy Bernstein, 1973
Laing by Edgar Z. Friedenberg, 1973
Popper by Bryan Magee, 1973
Kafka by Erich Heller, 1974
Le Corbusier by Stephen Gardiner, 1974
Proust by Roger Shattuck, 1974
Weber by Donald G MacRae, 1974
Dempsey switched the covers to a white background and commissioned a new artist James Lowe, whose cover art for the next eight books in 1975-76 was based on triangles:

Eliot by Stephen Spender, 1975
Marx by David McLellan, 1975
Pound by Donald Davie, 1975
Sartre by Arthur C Danto, 1975
Artaud by Martin Esslin, 1976
Keynes by D. E. Moggridge, 1976
Saussure by Jonathan Culler, 1976
Schoenberg by Charles Rosen, 1976
Nine more books appeared in 1977–79 with cover art by James Lowe based on squares:

Engels by David McLellan, 1977
Gramsci by James Joll, 1977
Durkheim by Anthony Giddens, 1978
Heidegger by George Steiner, 1978
Nietzsche by J P Stern, 1978
Trotsky by Irving Howe, 1978
Klein by Hanna Segal, 1979
Pavlov by Jeffrey A Gray, 1979
Piaget by Margaret A Boden, 1979
Dempsey left Fontana Books in 1979 but continued to oversee the Modern Masters series until a new art director, Patrick Mortimer, was appointed in 1980. Four more books followed under Mortimer with cover art by James Lowe based on circles:

Evans-Pritchard by Mary Douglas, 1980
Darwin by Wilma George, 1982
Barthes by Jonathan Culler, 1983
Adorno by Martin Jay, 1984
The cover concept was dropped after this and a new design was used that featured a portrait of the Modern Master as a line drawing or later a tinted photograph, and mixed serif and sans-serif typefaces, upright and italic fonts, block capitals, lowercase letters and faux handwriting. The design was used for reprints and six new titles:

Foucault by J. G. Merquior, 1985
Derrida by Christopher Norris, 1987
Winnicott by Adam Phillips, 1988
Lacan by Malcolm Bowie, 1991
Arendt by David Watson, 1992
Berlin by John Gray, 1995




Book covers as art


Fontana's use of art as book covers went full circle in 2003-05 when the British conceptual artist Jamie Shovlin "reproduced" the covers of the forty-eight Fontana Modern Masters from Camus to Barthes as a series of flawed paintings (the titles are missing and the colours have run) in watercolour and ink on paper, each measuring 28 x 19 cm. However, Shovlin also noticed ten forthcoming titles listed on the books' front endpapers which, for reasons unknown, had not been published:

Dostoyevsky by Harold Rosenberg
Fuller by Allan Temko
Jakobson by Thomas A Sebeok
Kipling by Lionel Trilling
Mann by Lionel Trilling
Merleau-Ponty by Hubert Dreyfus
Needham by George Steiner
Sherrington by Jonathan Miller
Steinberg by John Hollander
Winnicott by Masud Khan (this was published with a different author, as listed in the previous section)
Shovlin then set out to paint these "lost" titles and thus "complete" the series. To do this he devised a "Fontana Colour Chart" based on the covers of the published books, and a scoring system that – like his paintings – was deliberately flawed. Given these flaws, and those in Fontana's original series, the absence of any modern masters from the visual arts is notable, since Matisse was one of four "forthcoming titles" that Shovlin had apparently overlooked:

Benjamin by Samuel Weber
Erikson by Robert Lifton
Ho by David Halberstam
Matisse by David Sylvester
Benjamin and Matisse have since been included in a new series of seventeen large Fontana Modern Masters that Shovlin painted in 2011-12. These use a similar scoring system to his watercolours of 2003–05 and a new "Acrylic Variations Colour Wheel". The paintings are acrylic on canvas and each measures 210 x 130 cm:

Arendt by David Watson (Variation 1)
Benjamin by Samuel Weber (Variation 3)
Berlin by John Gray (Variation 1)
Derrida by Christopher Norris (Variation 3)
Dostoyevsky by Harold Rosenberg (Variation 1)
Foucault by J. G. Merquior (Variation 1B)
Fuller by Allan Temko (Variation 3)
Jakobson by Krystyna Pomorska (Variation 2)
Kipling by Lionel Trilling (Variation 2)
Lacan by Malcolm Bowie (Variation 1)
Mann by Lionel Trilling (Variation 1A)
Matisse by David Sylvester (Variation 1A)
Merleau-Ponty by H. P. Dreyfus (Variation 1)
Needham by George Steiner (Variation 3A)
Sherrington by Jonathan Miller (Variation 3)
Steinberg by John Hollander (Variation 3B)
Winnicott by Adam Phillips (Variation 3)




See also


Foucault - one of the books in the series
Past Masters




References






External links


Fontana Modern Masters or books, art, and books as art: a cover story

Kata Kunci Pencarian:

• Frank Kermode
• Anthony Giddens
• Musik rok
• Alasdair MacIntyre
• Kejatuhan Soeharto
• Apologetika Kristen
• Sejarah kimia
• Vatikan
• Roma
• Primetime Creative Arts Emmy Awards ke-71
• Fontana Modern Masters
• Frank Kermode
• David McLellan (political scientist)
• William Collins, Sons
• Jonathan Culler
• Answer to Job
• Al Alvarez
• Christopher Norris (critic)
• Post-structuralism
• Very Short Introductions